Why My Lifestyle Journalism Career is (Almost) Dead
I used to make good money. Now where do I go from here?
Age 25. I move from Montreal back home to Toronto. (In Montreal I’ve been “funderemployed” for three years. Montreal is a party city and the highlight of each week is drinking Sex On The Beach cocktails in my polyester working gal suits from Dynamite with my work friends. As it does in your 20s, weekends revolve around banger houseparties in shoddily furnished apartments and General Tao chicken. However, as an anglophone with basically no marketable skills, I’m chronically underemployed and working in tech support. Thus Having Fun but Underemployed=Funderemployed).
I break into the magazine world basically by begging via email for an unpaid internship at Style at Home magazine, a “shelter porn” publication. This internship is granted by its trusting and affable managing editor. Then, I become the mag’s (paid) fact-checker, then copy editor, and write a bit, starting with small blurbs and moving up to features. By age 28 I work at Style at Home as their Feature Writer. I write features, usually two or three plus a column for the magazine each month.
Back then, this work paid fairly well. For my “Shopping Etc.” column, where I wrote short blurbs on new or significant decor stores around Canada, I earned a flat fee of $700. I would research new stores here and there for a week, emailing and phoning owners, collecting images from them (sometimes) that would be high enough resolution to print — and I would spend about a workday, maybe 6 or 7 hours, writing the actual 600 word column. If your math is even halfway decent, you’ve realized this is more than a dollar a word.
I’m writing at other places too, like Chatelaine magazine and Canadian Living. Because I am a classy dame, my first breakout piece in Chatelaine is about how bedbugs have made a huge comeback. On average, I’m earning $1,000 per article and I’m writing at least three or four articles a month. Plus that column I told you about. Rent in Toronto then was $1,000 a month for a not-great but not-terrible apartment, split with my then-boyfriend now-husband. It was good coin, on average, $50,000 a year and I wasn’t even working full-time.
Around this time, Devil Wears Prada comes out with a sylphlike Anne Hathaway with lots of black eyeliner and curtain bangs and an inscrutably half-smiling Meryl Streep with terrible silver fox hair. I adjacently believe that I am serving smoking hot lifestyle-journo realness in an aspirational industry. This is our version of a tech bubble.
Shit really starts to go sideways when I become an online editor for a national magazine. I don’t know it yet, but it’s the beginning of the end. Age 29. I learn a bit of HTML but more importantly I have a very good handle on the kind of articles our audience can’t resist and I become the senior web editor at Canadian Living magazine. It’s a permanent, salaried job. The salary is $58,000 and the year is 2007.
(Another side-note: It’s vital, especially for women, to start talking openly with each other about how much you earn. Trust me.)
As a senior web editor, I assign stories, and I pay our writers a scrawny $300 for a 600-to-800 word article, give or take. Writers fight and fight for more money, a dollar a word, and we (I) retort with, “Well, I’m not going to torment you with a bunch of rewrites.” Or, “At the clip we’re going at, I’m not going to heavily edit your work and make you re-interview sources.” Or, “These articles are straightforward, require only one or maximum two interviews, and take less time to write. You’ll see.”
And some writers wrote, and some told me, diplomatically as Canadian writers typically do, to screw myself and the horse I rode in on.
A few years later, I’m in my early thirties and back to freelancing. I don’t copyedit or (perish the thought, perish the thought, perish the thought) fact-check anymore, partly because I hate doing this work and can afford to be picky and partly because, if I’m honest, I think it would be embarrassing to go back to these lowly roots, like a restaurant manager going back to bussing tables. Which is maybe stupid and snobby, but I am sometimes stupid and snobby so it’s still all ok.
Forward a few years more. I’m now in my mid-thirties. This is about six years ago (I’m writing this in 2019), and the work is drying up. Slowly, but perceptibly. At first I think it’s my lack of editor contacts in the industry. Many of the assigning editors I’ve known over the years have moved up or moved on (mostly moved on), have been laid off, or, like me, are freelancers and we’re all begging for the same alms.
Now I’m pitching and sometimes getting print assignments, but they are rarely over $700. My work at Style at Home has also long since withered as the masthead staff has almost entirely turned over, but I write for it from time to time. Whereas I would turn in about 1,200 words for $1,200, now I’m expected to pitch in extra info for free and the assignments are much shorter, averaging (for me) about $600.
At this magazine, like at so many others, I notice another trend that is starting to spell the end. The staff editors are tasked with writing feature stories regularly, and presumably they are not getting paid. When I was coming up in the magazine world, it wasn’t common for editors to write for their own magazine — they had a healthy budget to hire writers to do it. Feature writing is heavy work when you have another full-time job, there’s a reason it’s outsourced.
Elsewhere, I’m being asked to cram too much into too-short assignments by editors who either don’t have enough money for the lengthy piece they have in mind or believe that you’ll write more words than the assignment pays, extra work which they will not pay you for.
(Writers, you’ve seen these crazy assignment letters, yes? Interview five people in a 600 word article. Riiiiiight. Because you know what really makes a great and non-confusing reading experience? Reading a jumble of five-plus quotes from five different people plus their introductions in a super short article.)
A larger part of my income becomes short articles for the web at about $300 each (karma is a bitch). But I’m making less money overall. I take someone’s one-year maternity leave office contract followed by an office job on a microsite startup for Canadian Living called Canadian Moms.
I love my work wives but in my dark soul I despise most parenting content, especially if it’s chipper in nature. Still, I am fulfilled because I’m pretty good at what I do. Then I’m laid off the microsite. I do other work, I pivot, but I still love lifestyle journalism and consider myself a lifestyle journalist.
The full arrival of the smartphone however, means that no one reads print magazines (much) anymore when they have access to a tiny computer in the back pocket of their jeans.
So now I’m 42. I’ve been through some shit (husband’s cancer and life-threatening depression. My own life-threatening cancer). I still work in this industry, but I really am just clinging on to it like a piece of flotsam in murky waters. I’m on a masthead again, as a managing editor of my city’s tourism magazine. I’m not allowed to disclose my exact earnings per my contract, but I can tell you it’s in a range that’s under $20,000 and over $10,000, and it’s basically a seasonal job that requires a short burst of intensive work. On an hourly basis it’s probably the same money that I used to make, even though I’ve climbed a couple rungs up, in title anyway.
I love the work mostly (except for writing display copy, that’s a drag), but the industry has taken a toll on me. Layoffs are everywhere, each one more cutting and vicious than the last. Freelance and contract work are the new norm. Magazines shutter. If these publications were interred, I’d have many graves to visit.
Last month in a sad and ironic (for me) twist, Style at Home/Canadian Living (owned by the same parent company) “moves” to Montreal, to be created by the head office’s team instead of the team that has forever been based in Toronto. Other than posting something sponsored featuring Andie Macdowell (who is looking hella goals, I mean THAT HAIR, but I digress), I haven’t seen anything new go up on the website — a website that I used to lead. I don’t even know if they’ll publish a “book” this month (inside lingo for a magazine) and I guess I don’t really care.
Like so many others, with some shame I admit, I too have stopped reading print magazines unless they’re either gifted to me or I’m stuck in a doctor’s office. So where do I go from here? Do I cling on to the end, funderemployed once again? Do I double down? Do I change industries? The times were good, the money was good. Now it’s time to move on…
Maybe?
Read my related story on how to make more money as a freelancer, “The Starbucks Factor: Apply it to Every Freelance Job You Do.”
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