Travel Writer Ad or Joke?

Link to Travel Writers Wanted

Welcome to the fourth installment of the “Worst travel writing jobs” series. This doozy is so doozicable that I could write 500 words on the absurdity of the title alone, but it gets better.

Write 3000 unique articles on Travel, Entertainment, Beauty and Shopping topics

Only 3000? Because I was just thinking the other day that there aren’t nearly enough articles about travel, entertainment, beauty and shopping on the internet. And is it just me or could the divorce of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes benefit from a little delving?

Job Description

Write 3000 unique articles on Travel, Entertainment, Beauty and Shopping topics (IT, PORT, DUTCH LANGUAGES).

Just to clarify, you want 3000 articles on a wide variety of topics in three languages? Off the top of my head, I’d say this job will take a team of six highly skilled polyglots about 6.5 months to complete, assuming no one takes vacation or gets sick or sneaks off for a giant poo.

Each article must be different, between 250 and 3300 words each. No repetition in articles, no spinning, scraping or similar.

But ‘scrinning’ is cool, right? How about ‘spaping’?

All articles must be written in English. Each article must pass Copyscape Premium, be free of grammar and spelling errors. Example topics include the following, but more will be added along the fields mentioned.

Grammar and spelling errors be deal breakers, but incoherence along the fields mentioned is donkey?

Please PM a sample article on one of the above topics otherwise your bid will not be considered. Any articles submitted will have its copyright pass to me upon lodging your bid.

You’re claiming copyright of the sample article I submit on the outside chance you bestow this monster job on me?

OK, fine. Here’s my original, unique sample article that you now own:

“Experts say shopping for beauty while traveling is good entertainment. Studies have shown that entertaining shopping is good for beauty and travel, but too much entertaining beauty is travel shopping.”

Do I get the gig?

Forty-six days to write 3000 articles? That’s just over 65 articles per day. Good thing I have Mr. Spock, Commander Data and Rain Man chained to desks in my basement, or this job might seem unreasonable. Still, turnaround is a bit tight. I’ll feed them energy drinks every hour for luck.

Payment will be $1 per article – so $3000 for 3000 articles. Please only bid if you accept this pay rate.

OK, forget the energy drinks. I’ll just force feed them sugar water and expired peanuts.

Payment will be made for articles upon completion.

So, essentially you want 3000 articles written on spec? No one in the history of the written word has ever accepted those terms, but OK.

Also we need same amount of articles to be produced in the following languages
- Italian
- Dutch
- Portugues (Brazil)

Good call on getting those 3000 articles written in Dutch. That will like, what?, literally double the number of articles written in Dutch on the internet? Ka-ching!

Unpaid Writers Still Need to Feed Their Kids

Another Look at the Nate Thayer Story

I've written before about the outrageous proposal made to writer Nate Thayer by The Atlantic, which expected him to write for free. He politely told them to go fuck themselves. Writers, professional writers, make their living by charging reasonable fees for their work, and they never give away their work for free, for fame, for internet distribution.

People who make their living by writing for publication had good reason to follow the recent hoo-hah over publishers who think paying writers for their work is optional.

What happened was that The Atlantic magazine, a marquee name in the world of words, approached a well-established freelancer named Nate Thayer and asked him about "repurposing" work he'd done for an online site, NKNews.org. The Atlantic was interested in a 1,200-word rendering of a longer article of Thayer's pegged to ex-basketball star Dennis Rodman's bizarre visit to North Korea.

When Thayer asked about terms, the magazine indicated it wasn't proposing to actually pay him, at least not in cash money, but noted that its website reached 13 million readers per month, suggesting that exposure on that scale is worth a lot.

Thayer wasn't persuaded. He replied: "I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for-profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children."

Word of the affair zipped around the Internet, triggering a flood of comment. The Atlantic apologized "if we offended him" - the way institutions apologise without contrition - and in the aftermath, dozens of other journalists chipped in their own tales of the wretched treatment and soup-kitchen pay they get, even from flourishing websites.

It's not much consolation to point out that for the most part, they still get something,
unlike, say, professors. The latest indignity from publishers of academic journals, it seems, is to make writers pay them to have articles posted online. For junior-college faculty - who need not only to publish but to be cited by other scholars in order to qualify for advancement - the threat of being kept offline is like having their careers held for ransom. And incidentally, they get no money from print publication either. Not a dime.

Getting back to the Thayer affair, the arguments over rights and wrongs pivoted on fairness, on the demise of professionalism, on the benefits of a higher profile, on the long-term consequences of underpayment on the volume and quality of significant journalism.

But I want to drag another consideration into the foreground: If the publications aren't paying for the journalism they publish, who is? I mean, all labour incurs costs. Somewhere in our marvellous market system, those costs are being covered. Somebody's paying to feed Nate Thayer's kids, even if The Atlantic won't.

So we meet, once again, the insidious problem of hidden subsidy, one of the most perplexing ethical problems of journalism in the Internet age. True, undisclosed subsidy is a long-standing issue. It popped up in the op-ed pages of traditional newspapers. There, articles written by outsiders for little or no pay offered policy perspectives under the guise of expert analysis, when they actually were sponsored by clients and paymasters who were rarely identified (and often weren't even known).

The arrangement opens vast areas of potential corruption. But now, with the continuing failure of online advertising and subscription payments to replace declining offline revenues, publishers have quietly installed invisible subsidy as a routine, and unacknowledged, element of their operations.

Those writers who are being denied a fair wage for their work - who's paying their rent? Someone is. They're making money from somewhere. And it's that money that gives them the wherewithal to produce the journalism they're not being paid enough for.

So which of their stories are thank-yous to previous clients, or concessions to existing ones, or auditions for work they hope to get in the future? Those are questions about ethics, but, more important, they are acknowledgements of the reality these freelancers are trying to negotiate.

And they're questions that force onto centre stage a fundamental problem that won't be set right until the people who are being served - that's you - start paying for what they get. The readers and viewers who benefit from the news and commentary they devour need to pick up the tab, instead of letting themselves be beguiled by the fiction that such work is "free", or is magically proffered by invisible benefactors with no agendas of their own.

There are bills that have to be paid. The reality is, one way or another we end up paying. We can pay with money, and some outlets are inviting people to do just that. The alternative is to pay through a continuing decline in the quality and trustworthiness of the content we get. That's the invisible cost we're all bearing right now.

How to be a Travel Writer in Five Easy Pieces

Robert Haru Fisher is a New York based travel writer and author of the guidebook pictured above, available at Amazon at London Off-Season And On : A Guide To Special Pleasures, Better Rater And Shorter Lines. He also wrote the Crown Insiders Guide to Japan, which is from his own publishing company. Fisher also contributes to the Frommer website and has, over the last few months, published a series of "so you wanna be a travel writer" articles with enough positive spin to keep the dreamers happy, and enough reality to discourage all but the most brave. It comes in five parts.

I haven't mentioned money yet, so will say only that you should have resources of your own, or a spouse/partner with a regular job, so someone can pay the bills. The travel writers who have good incomes are either on the staff of some publication and drawing a salary, or have honed the art of freelancing well, usually after many years of hard practice. Newspapers pay chicken feed (e.g. $75 for a column of print), magazines maybe $1 a word at best for writers without a famous following, websites little, and books smallish advances (if any, maybe $5,000) or flat fees not much more than that for a small book.

Part One

Part Two is a short history of travel writing, with a well deserved plug for Arthur Frommer, a man I have great admiration for and was once interviewed by on The Travel Channel.

"You have a dream job!" Half the people I meet for the first time tell me that, and I agree. It's heaven for me because I am intensely curious, always wanting to know what's around the next corner. When you travel, there's always a new next corner, a new surprise. It's no way to get rich, and it can be hell on family and other relationships because you seem never to be home, from their point of view, anyhow. You can't be a new parent, for instance, or taking care of an ailing family member. The most prolific travel writers are away at least a quarter of the time, I believe, sometimes half the time.

Part Two

Part Three tries to define what is travel writing.

Anyone can be a travel writer. You can write your blog, your memoir, your diary of a trip, and the only difference between you and, say, Pico Iyer, is that he writes more beautifully than almost anyone, and he may publish in Harper's and The New York Times while you are just broadcasting your thoughts on your own website, perhaps.

Part Three

Fisher in Part Four espouses the advantages of having a travel blog, and claims he is not trying to sell anything to anyone these days, including his travel writing seminars in Key West as advertised at the bottom of each of these posts.

(Full disclosure here: I don't have a site or a blog myself, as I am not trying to sell anything to anybody these days.)

If you are freelancing, you should also be working on a book, as having a book under your belt makes you an expert, ipso facto.

Part Four

Fisher in Part Five finishes with his analysis of the history of travel writing to reveal a few facts about the income side of the average travel writer. Finally.

"Get paid to travel" reads one headline. "How to Make a Six-Figure Income Traveling the World" is another. In the last few years, several websites have popped up urging you to learn how to become rich while writing about travel. For fees of several hundred dollars, they promise to teach you how to lead the good life.

It's a life I don't recognize as being anywhere near the reality of those led by many friends of mine who are freelance travel writers. To me, the freelancer is a knight errant, the leaderless samurai, a solo gun-slinger, and my hero much of the time.

My first advice to aspiring freelance writers is to marry rich, or otherwise obtain a partner who has, at least, a steady income. Markets are hard to break into, payment is often laughably cheap. One young writer for a major series of guidebooks approached me on a press trip a few years ago and asked me if I had worked for the series and what they paid. I mentioned some figures, and he said, "Good, I'm working for nothing right now, but they told me if I did a good job, they would pay me next time." The figures I mentioned then were a range from $75 for updating a small chapter of a book through a few thousand to revise the entire book up to about $15,000 for the original writing of a new, fairly small title (under 300 pages of print).

Your writing in a newspaper can pay as little as $75, in a magazine $250, though there are higher and lower figures, depending on the publication. When you are successful, you can command a figure of $1 a word or even higher, however. Traditional print outlets (general purpose newspapers) are down, but niche print publications (birding, ballooning, kayaking, etc.) are up. The Internet is fraught with possibilities, very few of them paying much, if anything, though. You may have to self-publish, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Moreover, one site has its sample author writing "In fact, my own editor is crying out for correspondents to report on destinations throughout the world ... and she's not the only editor seeking fresh talent. To be honest, I have to turn work down -- there simply aren't' enough hours in the day to take up all the writing commissions I'm offered." Not bloody likely, as many of my freelancer friends would say.

Part Five