Why the Hell Is Pay on Publication Still the Industry Standard?

Workers in other industries are horrified by the common media practice of paying writers 30+ days after publication. Allegra Hobbs investigates why the policy exists, and whether it might change.

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs

In December, I had one of those exchanges with friends in other industries that threw into stark relief the absurdity of my professional life as a freelance writer. In a WhatsApp chat with my friends from college, who work full-time jobs in media and nonprofit start-ups, I mentioned that I was eagerly awaiting payment on a story that I had pitched in March of last year and which had only recently been published.

My friends were shocked to hear that I hadn’t been paid before the piece’s publication. They’d followed my tortured journey through an intensive reporting process and multiple drafts that progressively ballooned in word count, and they’d assumed I’d been paid by the time the story was live. I explained that the delay was not due to incompetence or neglect; this was totally normal. It was the industry standard to send an invoice only upon publication, and then it could take a month or longer to receive payment.

I fired off a tweet about the exchange because I found it endearing, but also telling that a normal media business practice is appalling to those outside the industry. To my amazement, the tweet garnered over a thousand likes and a sympathetic chorus from other laborers in the gig economy. I’d struck a nerve. I reached out to some fellow freelance writers to ask about how the routine payment policy had impacted their livelihoods. I also wanted to understand why it continued to be the industry standard and why it was treated as immutable; and, perhaps most importantly, whether that could change.

“It doesn’t create a very livable situation if you’re constantly waiting for payments that aren’t even late,” freelance writer Sophie Haigney said. Like me, she had been paid in December for a story she began work on in March. The payment wasn’t late — in fact, the publication had paid her swiftly once she invoiced — but the editorial process had dragged on so that it took over half a year to see a penny for her months of labor.

“By the time you talk to an editor about a pitch — at which point sometimes you’ve done a significant amount of reporting — you could be working on a standard story for two or three months [altogether], then there may be more lead time, so another two or three months,” she said. “It’s very easy to get into situations where you get paid seven or eight months after starting work.”

These protracted timelines are often a necessary result of the editing process. Working through multiple drafts, with edits often requiring additional reporting, just takes time for a writer — and it takes time for an overextended editor juggling multiple projects to edit a 3,000-word draft.

Sometimes publication is held up by factors outside either party’s control. Freelance writer Gray Chapman told me about a recent experience in which a story that was otherwise ready to go in September wasn’t published until December due to a hold-up over the photography. “It’s frustrating to feel like you’re at the mercy of this whole other branch of a publication that you have nothing to do with,” said Chapman. “Ultimately, you held up your end of the work agreement, so there’s no reason you should be forced to sit around and wait for someone else to get their shit together so you can get paid.”

Even when the delay is due to understandable constraints, should that dictate when writers get paid for their work? Chapman doesn’t think so. “How quickly I get paid shouldn’t depend on how overworked someone is or how good they are at managing their time,” she said. “There are so many random reasons people are forced to wait to send their invoices. I just have a hard time thinking of other industries where that’s standard.”

In other industries, it is not uncommon to either require payment for a service upfront or to at least charge a deposit — a wedding planner will typically require a down payment, for instance, as will a landscaper, who will collect the rest of the agreed-upon rate immediately upon completion. Media workers are not even paid immediately upon completion; they invoice upon completion and then wait for the funds to come in.

I asked an editor and former freelance writer, who asked that their name be withheld, how they felt about the pay-on-publication model and whether they could see it changing. They consider it unlikely that we’ll ever arrive at an industry standard where writers are paid for projects upfront, but some equivalent of a down payment might be possible.

The editor clarified that they do a few things within their power to help alleviate their writer’s financial burden. For one, they said, if a piece is going through multiple rounds of edits and involves expenses, they make sure those expenses are paid right away. They also said that they’ve arranged for a writer to receive payment before a piece’s publication when the story was complete and was simply being held for scheduling reasons.

But could paying a writer upfront for their work ever become common practice? “I’m not sure I could institutionally see paying immediately ever working,” said the editor. The root of the problem, they explained, is that a piece is not truly considered finalized until it has been published — and giving the green light on payment for an unfinished project is an unwelcome proposition for most publications. Sometimes, they added, a writer files a first draft that does not fulfill the terms of the assignment, making it difficult to justify paying out the agreed-upon rate.

They acknowledge that there is a compromise: paying out the kill fee upfront. “I could envision a world where [the writer] could have half the fee when you get [the first draft],” said the editor. “Let’s say then you decide not to publish the piece — [the writer has] half the fee…there’s every reason in the world things can not run, so that sucks, but everyone should be paid for something that’s not running.”

It seems so obvious, but in order for an upfront kill fee to become commonplace, media companies would have to adopt a two-part payment schedule for editorial content. Finance departments would have to reconfigure their budgets — it is otherwise confusing to instruct them to pay someone in installments, the editor explained. But it can be done. “It’s doable and not really all that problematic,” said the editor. “You’d just have to rethink how the cash flow is going to be moving.”

What differentiates the media industry from others — and why the payment system is so uniquely fraught — is the subjective nature of the work and the ambiguity in determining when a project is done. Another editor I spoke to, who also asked that their name be withheld, cited this lack of clarity as the main obstacle to an upfront payment system. “I can imagine plenty of editors just don’t know when that magic point [of completion] is,” they said. “We don’t know when that elusive point is passed, at which we can be sure [the piece] is going to appear in the magazine and in shape.”

“For my own part, that objection in itself doesn’t seem insurmountable and doesn’t seem like it should be a dealbreaker,” they continued. They also found the proposition of an upfront kill fee to be a feasible middle ground.

What would it take for billing departments en masse to reconfigure cash flow? What would it take for contracts to be re-written to mandate an upfront kill fee? For one, managerial higher-ups would have to care enough to restructure how they do business. Paying writers would have to become a priority. We all know how reluctant publications are to part with funds that writers have earned — would they willingly pay out funds for work that has not yet been produced? I’m not sure, but I do know that it will never happen if we don’t apply public pressure.

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