Writer Adam Weinstein published a scathing essay railing against people who accuse Generation Y of entitlement and unrealistic expectations. His profanity-laced essay has already counted more than 700,000 views on Gawker’s publishing platform.
Weinstein has written for Mother Jones, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and the Tallahassee Democrat, but his situation will be familiar to many writers: lack of job security and dwindling pay scales. Check it out:
I once listened to a professor, who is in his sixties, read us the first published piece he’d been paid for, in the late 1970s. A thousand words or so. The rate, he says, was something like two bucks a word. That’s four times what the Village Voice pays today, even for an award-winning investigative cover story. It’s geometrically greater than what most writers can earn today writing daily brilliance for nationally renowned publications online. And writing daily brilliance, which many of them do, is hard goddamned work. If I had a dollar for every older writer or editor who confided to me that “I don’t know how young writers do it today; I certainly couldn’t,” I could buy every property that publishes them. So no, we shan’t be doing as well as our parents, and no, we shan’t be shutting up about it.