6 takeaways from this week's pay rate database

Hello friends! Let’s talk about rates (again).

If you didn’t catch Tuesday’s newsletter, I published our freshly updated rates database, with more than 500 recent submissions spanning everything from major international publications to niche blogs and trade pubs.

Today we’re gonna look at some trends and takeaways from all that. We talked a few weeks back about rates across the industry, and poring over the data in our latest update made a few things crystal clear.

But first, a major caveat to this whole piece: This analysis looks only at rates submitted to this particular database. It’s a broad range, but it is by no means comprehensive. Nothing below is meant to speak for the entire industry; it reflects only what people have submitted here. A different roundup may come to entirely different conclusions! I don’t think that’s likely, but it’s not necessarily unlikely, either. Lol helpful, I know. (You can help make it even better by submitting your rates here!) So while I’m pulling out a few trends that, from what I hear anecdotally, seem pretty characteristic of the industry writ large, take all of this with a grain of salt. As much as we all wish there were one database that lists every rate that every publication pays for every type of story, that’s just impossible.

With that out of the way ...

Take, for example, someone who this summer got $2/word for a 3,000-word investigative piece in The Marshall Project. By any comparative measure, that is objectively an excellent rate. Six thousand bucks for one story! Amazing! But that person noted in their entry that the reporting for that story took “way more than what I was paid, and this paid well.”