American Prospect Magazine

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 3:35pm on Monday, May 11th, 2009

In a strange story about how magazine writers are paid, the American Prospect wrote about Dan Baum and his twittering, on May 8, 2009:

"Dan Baum, a newspaper reporter turned New Yorker staff writer, is tweeting his 2007 firing from the magazine. In 140-character dispatches, Baum reveals that like all New Yorker writers, he was paid according to a simple dollars per word equation -- in Baum’s case, $90,000 annually for 30,000 words. The hitch? There were no employee benefits, and “the contract was year-to-year. … It’s just the way the New Yorker chooses to behave. It shows no loyalty to its writers, yet expects full fealty in return.”

Baum, author of a highly-regarded book about life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, goes on in his tweets to spill the beans on the internal workings of what many people consider the finest periodical published in the English language. The magazine, Baum claims, never sends rejection letters. Baum spent 17 years as a freelance writer before his first New Yorker article proposal was accepted. Reading his tweets, I felt compassion for a fellow magazine journalist, who is obviously heartbroken after being dumped by the magazine he loves."