There’s light at the end of the tunnel. (RambergMediaImages/Flickr Creative Commons)

The topic of paid and unpaid freelance writing continues to develop Thursday. While someone accused Nate Thayer of plagiarizing the North Korea piece he wrote that set this all off, Ann Friedman at the Columbia Journalism Review broke down her freelancing philosophy.

Friedman pays her bills with a number of freelancing gigs, including two columns, and has created a paradigm that allows her to do unpaid and low-pay work that may benefit her in other ways. She separates her approach to doing free/low-pay work into four categories: to establish experience; because she was writing it anyway; to raise her profile; and to be part of a project she loves.

Unpaid work, she says, is a great way for some writers to make headway. It can even lead to some happy accidents, as it did for her when she started publishing some “silly, hand-drawn charts” for free, and it led to her getting a job to draw for a monthly magazine.

And then there’s Paul Carr, arguing for a sort of return to the high-flying days of Big Journali$m, when (apparently) a reporter could expense the purchase of a Mustang on assignment. Read the comments on this one — not everyone agrees with him — but it’s quite a defense of the value of in-depth, well-reported, and expensive stories.

Back when The Atlantic had a lot more poetry in it! (The Atlantic Monthly/Wikimedia Commons)

On Monday freelancer Nate Thayer created a buzz when he made it known that The Atlantic had asked to republish his work without offering to pay him for it. Two days later, Alexis Madrigal, one of the magazine’s senior editors, offers a very long, very personal reply that also turns out to be a meditation on the state of the industry.

Madrigal opens with harrowing details about the depths of his early freelance days, where he was paid $12 for pieces and had to go to the ATM drunk to handle his credit card balance. But he also gives the publications’ side of the freelance story. According to him, it’s not the big publications’ fault that they can’t pay freelancers as much as they’d like to (ostensibly). The economic model for online publications has become equally pressurized.

Madrigal, a digital editor, says they have six options:

1. Write a lot of original pieces.
2. Take partner content.
3. Find people who are willing to write for a small amount of money.
4. Find people who are willing to write for no money.
5. Aggregate like a mug.
6. Rewrite press releases so they look like original content.

Madrigal says he sympathizes most with No. 1 and No. 5, but that digital journalism mores must be taken case by case, as everyone (except the high rollers) is making compromises to keep afloat. His parting shot offers little in the way of consolation:

“Anyway, the biz ain’t what it used to be, but then again, for most people, it never really was. And, to you Mr. Thayer, all I can say is I wish I had a better answer.”

In simpler times… (The Atlantic Monthly/Wikimedia Commons)

Journalist Nate Thayer generated some buzz Tuesday by publishing an exchange he had with an editor at The Atlantic. The editor reportedly wanted to run a version of a story about basketball and U.S.-North Korea relations, which Thayer had already written for NK News. Though Thayer has worked as a journalist for 25 years, the editor at The Atlantic claimed to have no money to pay him or any other freelancers. Instead, the editor touted The Atlantic’s large readership and professional exposure as an incentive.

Thayer declined, because he, like most of us, needs money to pay bills and take care of children. With a publication as large as The Atlantic claiming not to have money in the freelance budget, it would seem the life of a freelance journalist is becoming more and more tenuous and unpredictable.

Helps to not feel so small and alone as a freelancer at your computer. (Credit: kodomut/Flickr)

Jeff Koyen, a longtime journalist and programmer, has created a program for freelance journalists called Assignmint, which helps editors and freelancers manage all the managerial communication involved in the job, according to Pando Daily. The program provides a platform where freelancers can submit pitches and receive simple “yes” or “no” responses. Assignmint also organizes the freelancer’s deadlines and has a tool for transferring payment from the publication to the reporter once stories are done.

Assignmint may have to prove its worth to freelancers and editors alike. It’s not easy to make journalists shift their systems once they’ve become accustomed to email and other relatively recent modes of operation.

Assignmint is currently available in open bata and Koyen says it will remain in that form for another three months or so. Afterwards, he says, its aesthetics will be improved.