Wonder why the writing in so many magazines seems so ... amateurish? Michael Harris in Medium has a well documented explanation. It's the pay rate, which has stagnated for fifty years and more.
Beyond the basic numbers, writers also told me about a grab bag of smaller frustrations and indignities that make the economics of their job problematic: checks that arrived on a geologic time scale while the landlord still charges monthly; publications squeezing out reprint, TV, and film rights; editors who assign and fix pay for pieces at word counts they know writers will likely exceed to meet the scope of the assignment.Harris's material is all American. Canadian experience is less documented but surely worse. The Periodical Writers of Canada changed its name to Professional Writers of Canada years ago, because hardly any of its members seriously working as writers worked for periodicals anymore,
