By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

Really amazing magazine writers get $3 a word. Newer writers get paid a $1.

Ummmmm, not anymore.

You can try pointing fingers, but the reality is that now we have websites that will pay writers hardly-livable wages.

The publishing industry is going through an evolution and nobody has figured out what a good business model is. So their solution is to cut the freelance budget. And the lucky ones who do get paid, get paid less.

The perfect editor-to-writer relationship can be substituted through online content farms such as Seed.com and Demand Media, thanks to the ease of distributing online content. The relationship is more straightforward. It’s a quick give and take ordeal, rather than the long courtship involved in developing a trusted relationship with editors.

As magazines are dying, Demand Media is thriving.  The company is providing a new platform for content production. The company has at its disposal 7,000 freelance writers, editors, and video producers to create 4,500 stories a day. When writers get paid $15 for an original story, this works out to 3 cents a word. In magazine talk, the story would have brought in $500.

The stories get placed into places like eHow, filling in the gap of how-to do stuff information. And writers who write for LiveStrong.com, get paid a little bit more. If Demand Media begins to partners with old school media companies, the writers might get more bang for their words.

Kris Smith, the senior editor of this site, calls this the rise of the content class. Smith says:

The consumption of digital media is beginning to explode as the gadget and tech culture is now gaining a foothold with the public at large. Millions of always on, always connected devices are sold every month to happy customers that want sports scores, entertainment, news and to find the Chipotle nearest them. The content vacuum starts here.

The Content Class will fill this void.

This begs the question: Will we all be content producers in the future? Journalists, please stand up. I hope we can find a business model that supports quality reporting and good writing. The world will be a richer place if we can write these narratives that mean something, instead of wasting our time producing content to satisfy the number of clicks we use to measure a story by.

People need to invest in journalism: “There’s no such thing as a free story.”

Image: flickr/ Mark Berry – Photographer and Graphic Designer

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