I’ve Never Been Paid To Write. I’m Supposed To Be Okay With That.

My aunt is the executive director at the International Association of Structural Movers. Part of her job is finding writers for and editing the Structural Movers Magazine, which is published every month and is mostly made up of articles about recent moving projects and photos of massive buildings loaded up onto trucks. 

You know where this is going – as one of few writers in the family, she asked me to do an article as a freelance project and offered to pay me. This was the first time anyone had ever offered to pay me to write, so I obviously pursued the interview she asked me to conduct. The interviewee was not interested, and the article didn’t work out. When I told my aunt this, she sent a personal check in the mail for $100 “for the labor I put into the reporting,” as she put it. 

That is the closest I have ever come to being paid to write, despite having 15 published works under my belt and two more just waiting in the wings for approval. 

Like my peers in the Journalism, Advertising and Media Studies (JAMS) department at UWM, I’ve been writing for Media Milwaukee since 2019 in most of my classes. I am able to put that work on my resume, and use my clips to apply for jobs, but I can’t help but wonder: Isn’t the expectation of free content at least a little bit classist? 

I actually think it’s more than a little classist, but the solution may not be as cut-and-dry. 

Media Milwaukee is a not-for-profit, award-winning news site. I actually have a plaque coming in the mail commemorating my first-place win for best collegiate hard feature story, awarded by the Milwaukee Press Club. 

Because of this, it would be naive to think that the content published to Media Milwaukee doesn’t endow UWM with a certain amount of clout, which obviously attracts donors and the parents of prospective students like sharks to blood in the water. I suppose in that analogy, it’s my hard work that stands in for the blood in the water, but, in all honesty, that doesn’t feel untrue. 

I have written some great and very difficult things for Media Milwaukee, including several pieces on the disappearance and subsequent death of my fellow student in March of 2020, Sean Baek. I wrote that piece as a group with three or four other students in my Integrated Reporting class (JAMS 320). One of those students had to call Baek’s mother. I wrote the breaking news story that came later, after the Milwaukee Police found his body. 

This is just to say that we aren’t writing fluff pieces in our free time here – these are hard hitting, difficult and well-reporting pieces of work. 

During my sophomore year of college, when I began writing for Media Milwaukee, I was working at three jobs to support myself. Later, I got a higher paying position at Ian’s Pizza and was able to just work two jobs. I still work two jobs, on top of writing for Media Milwaukee in UWM’s only opinion writing class (JAMS 504), which is only offered during the summer, meaning I had to pay an extra $2,000 to enroll. 

Sound familiar? The rise of the unpaid internship draws parallels to this idea of working for free, with nothing but the hope that, when the time comes, all that work will manifest into a great job in writing. It’s no wonder the media world is so white washed – students of color can’t afford to work for free. It’s an unimaginable privilege to have the disposable income to afford to work for free, especially when you factor in a full time class schedule. 

With UWM marketing itself as the most diverse campus in the UW system, it’s really not a good look that they then don’t offer those students opportunities to be compensated for their labor. 

Granted, I pay UWM tuition to teach me to write, and that tuition pays my professors to train me and to run Media Milwaukee. So, in a way, I am actually paying them to instruct me to write for free, making it slightly different from an unpaid internship. But imagine if there were an option to be compensated for my work! I probably wouldn’t need two or three jobs to live in the city, at the very least. 

To be clear, I’m not talking about our instructors here – I think they are wonderful and do the best they can do with the resources they are given. I’m talking about the higher ups. The powers-that-be. The bigwigs, if you will. 

My point isn’t that I want to get paid for all my work for Media Milwaukee specifically, even though I do think it is unfair in some ways. However, there needs to be paid opportunities for journalism students, as well as training on how to get those opportunities for ourselves.

A good place to start would be to lead students towards pitching their ideas to other outlets that will pay for their labor on more sophisticated stories, or a class on freelance writing techniques. 

Another idea would be more funding for the journalism department, so we can enjoy more professors and more niche classes, or starting a paper that students could apply for and work at for a wage, as they have at Columbia College in Chicago. We do have The UWM Post, a student-run paper for which I proudly serve as News Editor beginning this year, but being student-run unfortunately means our work is unpaid. 

I don’t have all the answers, or even a perfect solution. All I know is that I am missing a critical link in my education – I have no idea how to get people to pay me to write. At least my resume is stacked, right?