NOW THAT WE’VE REACHED the topic of online charlatans, we could turn anywhere, but the easiest place to get started is with writing, because it’s a profession I’ve spent twenty years pursuing, and it’s poised to collapse.
In 2019, The New York Times published an article titled “Does it Pay to Be a Writer?,” which opened with the following paragraphs:
Writing has never been a lucrative career choice, but a recent study by the Authors Guild, a professional organization for book writers, shows that it may not even be a livable one anymore.
According to the survey results, the median pay for full-time writers was $20,300 in 2017, and that number decreased to $6,080 when part-time writers were considered. The latter figure reflects a 42 percent drop since 2009, when the median was $10,500. These findings are the result of an expansive 2018 study of more than 5,000 published book authors, across genres and including both traditional and self-published writers.
The article goes on to lament how, in addition to declining pay for writing books, the death throes of magazine and newspaper publishing have taken away many of the opportunities these writers had to supplement their income the way they had in previous decades.
Two years after that article was published, The New Yorker Union went on strike, demanding a base salary of $60,000 for its members, which Condé Nast agreed to meet by April 2023.
The New Yorker, regardless of your politics or ability to get through an article in less than a month, is one of the highest-quality magazines in the world. It’s also one of the few remaining organizations that makes a significant investment in reporting, fact-checking, and honoring a process that has earned it more than fifty-five National Magazine Awards and six Pulitzer Prizes.
But around the time the New Yorker Union completed its strike, several news sources reported the median cost of renting an apartment in Manhattan was $4,400 a month (or $52,800 a year).
Sure, the members of the New Yorker Union can find the least-expensive places to live in or near the city, but when you place the $60,000 base salary beside the $52,800 after-tax figure for median rent, you realize these staff members—who are able to satisfy the rigorous standards necessary to produce an award-winning magazine every week—were fighting to secure a salary that barely covers the cost of shelter.
More recently, Esquire magazine—where I worked both as a staffer and freelancer over a ten-year period—has published articles with titles such as “The Unbearable Cost of Becoming a Writer,” “Is My Writing a Hobby or a Career?,” and “Has It Ever Been Harder to Make a Living as an Author?”
The (Opposite) Message Is in the Medium
Now let’s scoot over to Medium and scan some headlines:
“Writing on These Two Platforms Was Enough to Bring in a Full-Time Income in Less Than 3 Months”
“How I make $5,000 Online Every Month—Even Though I’m Ordinary”
“The 10 Commandments of Building a $5,000 a Month Online Content Business”
“How to Write on the Web for a Living and Get Over $10,000 a Month”
Ah, Medium, the land where almost every blogger has cracked the code for making as much or more than staff members at The New Yorker and can’t wait to tell you how simple it is.
Here we have two conflicting stories from two different sources: the news, produced by people who can get fired for misleading readers, and a blog platform populated by random individuals who offer systems and hacks with no penalty beyond a low follower count.
After further investigation—clicking on the bios of these authors—I discovered that several of these well-heeled bloggers only have 10 followers, and many of them stopped posting years ago. Of those who have remained in the game, their archives consist almost entirely of articles with headlines like those above. Which is to say, what they call writing isn’t actually writing. It’s false promise in the form of how-to posts. It’s promotion.
Sure, the fact that people misrepresent themselves online for status and profit isn’t a jaw-dropping insight. Nor did I have to go to Medium to find these examples. Medium just happens to be the first place that comes to mind when I think of a virtual landfill of empty self-promotion.
But what makes this phenomenon interesting—at least to me—is how every social-media platform, and, to some extent, the entire internet, has devolved into a similar heap of false promise and infomercial babble.
It’s a clear example of both the divergence between practitioners and promoters, and how, as we approach a bust period, the disproportion accelerates as more people shift from one category to the other in an attempt to chase the pay.