The Evolving Ecosystem for Selling Journalism IP

A growing group of studios and agencies helps freelancers sell their stories to Hollywood.

A feature story these days isn’t just words on the page. The idea — the possibilities of the narrative, the characters, and the structure — might be more valuable than any per-word rate. Print magazines are just the beginning: think podcasts, films, streaming television, all created from the seed of an original article.

As publications have caught on to the value of ideas, propelled by the streaming wars’ demand for non-fiction content, they’ve become more aggressive in holding on to the ancillary rights to content produced by freelancers, as multiple writers whose work has been optioned told Study Hall. But freelancers have caught on, too, and it’s changed the way they approach contract negotiations and the reporting process itself.

“I came to realize the system to which I’d been conditioned wasn’t the complete picture,” said writer Ian Frisch, who recalls getting a crash course on the value of intellectual property, or IP, from his then-new literary agent in the fall of 2016. At that point, he had been freelancing full time for over a year, but had considered himself happy to get any paid work at all, and had signed contracts with little thought as to what came next. “So at that point I’m sitting here and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god, a magazine story isn’t just so I can have an article published.’ It’s almost a stepping stone.”

Frisch dove deep on the ins and outs of contract negotiations, intent on taking as much advantage as possible, and he intentionally pursued story ideas that would potentially translate well to the screen. “It completely changed how I started researching new ideas or reporting existing ideas, because I realized what they could become outside the paycheck I was getting from a publication,” he said. (Frisch just published a feature with New York Magazine that he aimed at creating good IP.)

It helps to have someone in your corner. Frisch has both a literary agent, Larry Weissman, and a film and television agent, Josie Freedman of ICM Partners. Weissman taught Frisch how to navigate contracts with publications. First, never sign a work-for-hire contract, which grants all rights to the hiring publication. Then, once a writer has ascertained they are not signing a work-for-hire (they are generally labeled as such), they should look for a clause concerning derivative works — if a publication retains the rights to create derivative works with the writer’s idea, it can sell the idea to a producer and leave the writer in the cold.

Freedman’s job, upon an article’s publication, is to then shop her client’s ideas to film and television studios. She said the increased demand for content across platforms has increasingly brought journalists into other mediums. “We represent a fair amount of journalists,” she said. “I have seen that grow for sure. In the movies and television, there’s a large demand for nonfiction material, and since podcasts have become so popular, journalists who might have been working under the radar before, you’re hearing about their material.”

There are certain kinds of stories considered more ripe for optioning. Epic Magazine (now owned by Vox Media), which publishes longform journalism its founders feel could be optioned for film or television and also makes branded content, specializes in “true stories about people who have gone through some dramatic experience,” as co-founder Joshua Davis told Study Hall. The storytelling needs to be “scene-driven.”

Freedman said she keeps an eye out for fringe narratives. “It’s best when [writers] find unique worlds, underbellies, things we haven’t seen before, stories not necessarily on the coast, middle America, everyday people,” she said. “That’s a lot of what buyers want to see.”

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Some writers, taking note of the rabid IP market and the increasingly aggressive contracts pushed by publications, are striking out on their own and attempting to forge writer-centric solutions to the precarity of their work. In 2017, David Wolman, a contributing editor at Outside and a contributor at Wired, launched Delve, a Portland-based “story studio” aimed at seamlessly moving story ideas from pitch to optioning and development. It’s a similar concept to Epic Magazine, but rather than publishing, Delve simply serves as a middleman, connecting writers to publications and, ideally, to agents and film studios.

The idea was born when Wolman heard a This American Life story on the radio and decided to reach out to the writer, Chris Higgins. The two met for coffee and discovered they’d had similarly frustrating experiences with the optioning process in the past, and saw the opportunity for a business that could help writers move navigate it. Higgins’ story, “I’ve Fallen in Love and I Can’t Get Up,” about a man with a debilitating medical condition triggered by intense feelings of love, became Delve’s first project. “Delve helped shepherd that purchase deal along, mainly by connecting me and the various producers in Hollywood, with our producer and our lawyer in the room to make sure the deal was fair to me,” Higgins wrote in an email. His story is now a film from Sony starring Martin Freeman called “Ode to Joy,” being released this month, and he is now managing editor at Delve.

Ultimately, Wolman said, the goal is to put more money on the writer’s pocket. “The economics of this job are hard enough,” he said. “We saw longform stories have this afterlife in Hollywood, [and] we saw this shouldn’t necessarily be something that’s only a shoot-the-moon situation for a writer. There’s a world in which writers could be making more money off of the work they did, and off of those derivative rights and derivative projects, building off of their original reporting.”

In a way, Delve functions as both an editor and agent for writers interested in keeping the rights to their work and navigating IP deals. A writer interested in working with the studio would send in a pitch, as they would to an editor, and if Delve is interested the writer would ink a contract with them tethering Delve to the story idea — the writer retains full rights to their story, but Delve has exclusive rights to negotiate film and television deals for a limited period of time. Delve would then help place the pitch at a publication, and if the publication bites, the studio would be involved in the negotiation of the contract — and Delve is committed to securing writer-friendly contracts, Wolman said. “Instead of the writer just standing up for herself, saying, ‘This isn’t ok with me and I’d like to push back,’ not only do they have us in their corner but they actually can’t even sign that contract because they signed with Delve,” he explained.

Just last month, Delve secured a partnership with management firm The Gotham Group for film and television representation, meaning it shops Delve projects to studios and production companies in an attempt to secure an IP deal for the writer.

The payoff for Delve, said Wolman, is relatively modest. If a story is optioned, Delve gets an agreed-upon percentage of that option, which varies on a case-by-case basis but would typically be an approximately 60/40 split in the writer’s favor, and that same split would also go for any earnings from a resulting production. Delve doesn’t take any of the initial pay from the publication (unlike a literary agent would with a book advance), and will often even fund the reporting costs up front (each deal is worked out on an individual basis with the writer).

“Most writers don’t have an agent for magazine length stuff, and I would argue they don’t really need one,” said Wolman, though he noted writers should have literary agents for optioning books. “We’re getting really good at servicing the writer. We’re servicing the editors who need the content desperately but their budgets are anemic, and presumably servicing the appetite for terrific nonfiction stories in Hollywood.” The overall goal is to facilitate more deals between writers and studios, which Wolman believes should be a more routine and expected part of life as a writer, a more thoroughly-integrated part of what it means to make a living in the industry.

But the first and biggest step is writers retaining rights to their stories, which publications may be loath to give away without a negotiating partner like Delve. Jeff Maysh, whose Daily Beast story about a McDonalds lottery scam artist was sold to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for $1 million, had previously told Study Hall he has found it increasingly difficult to negotiate contracts because publications want the rights. He still tries to write only for those who will give him all ancillary rights without a laborious back-and-forth.

“The number of those publications is getting smaller, and before long, I predict I will be forced to move to self-publishing,” he recently wrote in an email. “As many publications want to pay less and own more, I can see no solution in sight.”

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