On the writing life

This just in, from a straight-talking friend at Newsweek:

Because you are a smart grown up person I will give you the straight story.

I guess it depends on what you need. The upside is that it is never boring. It does have its pleasure. There is a big thrill from getting your name in print and even more, from seeing your ideas on the page. You get to talk to fun/dangerous, fascinating people. They tell you things and you cannot believe your ears. It can be a lot of adrenaline on deadline -- and sometimes in a good way.

The downsides are many. The profession is shrinking dramatically and there is a big drive toward celebrity and fluff news, which sells. Every year, there is a generation of new kids who will work for almost nothing who are willing to do that kind of so called journalism (basically, they don't know another way) so it is a hard profession in which to age gracefully since you pretty much get fired at 52, unless you are a boss.

If you want to do real work -- real issues, serious stuff, than you can freelance for the five serious magazines that use freelancers (Harpers, Salon, etc.) but they pay about $3000 a story that, if you are lucky, has absorbed every waking hour and required much travel and huge phone bills, all of which you will pay for, for the last six or eight months. You will become an obsessed maniac and you will make $18,000 and spend $8,000 on your phone bill. The NYT, big newsweeklies and big papers like LATimes, Miami Herald are unlikely to hire you unless you have 5 years at a smaller paper. (and that means 12 hour days, $55,000 a year.) If you are looking for steady income and health benefits, this is not a good field. Columbia J school is now a two year program and costs, I believe $50,000 a year. At the end of that, a solid third of the kids take jobs in PR. Another third go to unpaid or barely paid internships.

Discouraged yet? That said, if you have health benefits covered already and you are able to generate some kind of core income without too much effort, it is possible to do interesting work. I know plenty of people who work for a trade weekly or run their own small pr business who freelance more interesting stories and/or write non fiction books. You can also ghost or write with people. But you really can't do it for the money, since there isn't that much money to be had.

That's what I know. I hope it helps. If you really want it, you should for for it. But go for it with your eyes wide open.