Toiling in the Content Mines
It’s not that the young are better, smarter, funnier, or have the most interesting perspectives–it’s that they are the most easily exploitable, and that is the primary reason why they are the creators of most corporate entertainment marketed as “cool.”
My chance at being exploited by a commercial behemoth masquerading as punk came via a chance encounter with a writer for Thought Catalog (which I am astounded to inform you somehow, in spite of it all, still exists) who self-aggrandized himself into an editorial position at Vice, a publication I knew little about other than that it had made its name through lionization of drug use and casual misogyny. When he asked if I wanted to become a contributor, I leapt at the chance–I was a fucking loser otherwise, selling my body to medical studies for the money I needed to get wasted and pay the rent on my studio apartment.
And oh, was I grateful, penning my first piece without even knowing how much I’d be paid. My previous writing gig had entailed reviewing pornographic websites with names like “Creampie Holes,” “Ass Titans,” and “Lezbo [sic] Honeys” for two cents a word; the bar was low.
After writing the article, an ironic defense of Jay Leno in the waning days of his Tonight Show tenure, I was told its publication required driving to Burbank and taking a photo of myself in front of Leno’s soon-to-be-former place of employment. (“Header images drive a lot of views,” my oft-harried editor informed me. “Don't shy away from including your own image…it’s good for identification for the reader, plus it's good for your CAREER.”)
I sent the photo, and the article was added to the site’s CMS (short for Content Management System), where it sat untouched for a week. “This is going up today,” my editor eventually wrote, “but we have to check to make sure that Shane Smith, our CEO, isn't going to be on Fallon this week to promote the HBO show. If he is, we might have to lose the Fallon-centric hate.”
For this, I was paid $75.
The year was 2013; Vice had made $175 million in revenue the year prior. 20th Century Fox had just invested $70 million, which brought the brand’s valuation to $1.4 billion (and provided a reason why, when I attempted to include Rupert Murdoch in an article about horrific men in positions of power, the mention was cut). A year later, the brand was valued at $2.2 billion. That was the year Shane Smith told Forbes he was “worth more money than [he] could ever spend.”
Side Note: Cutting lines that might offend “friends of the brand” was de rigueur–along with being told to abstain from speaking ill of Murdoch, I was also prevented from describing Terry Richardson as a sex pest and mentioning the fact Mark Wahlberg blinded a Vietnamese man in a hate crime. An editor’s job was once put in jeopardy because he let something run that spoke ill of Taco Bell. Tré gonzo, no?
During this early period, my per-article rate varied from $50 to $150, depending on the amount of “reporting” necessary–regardless of if a piece required my actual, physical presence somewhere, most took days to write and multiple wounds of edits (I accidentally typed “wounds” instead of “rounds,” but maybe wounds is more applicable–it certainly felt like that at the time, probaby because I was always expected to turn copy around fucking yesterday, especially if a piece was topical. Most were, because perish the thought of writing something evergreen for a website that utilizes a “Content Management System”).
A brief glimmer of hope came when I was told the editor-in-chief loved my work–he wanted me to come on as a contracted freelancer, writing a set number of articles per week and getting paid something akin to a living wage. He, of course, left the company shortly after this proclamation, in a ball of flame which required his signing of a five year non-compete agreement which rendered him incapable of working in journalism for half a decade. (In the editor’s note for his new venture, he describes it as “An agreement unprecedented for a journalist and former editor-in-chief of a $5 billion media company – one that I signed on leaving VICE under the naïve fantasy my now-worthless equity would be enough to carry me far, far away from the ink-stained grubs of Manhattan editorial bullpens and their lecherous, roofie-administering bosses.”)
Side Note: After Tweeting (sorry, X-ing) a diatribe about my tenure at Vice yesterday, a broad I do not know who gives $8 a month to human blood diamond Elon Musk for Twitter Blue verification (sad!) replied, “You should be right pissed at your union. Demand your union dues back. They failed you.” To which I say: I was a freelancer, and thus not able to join the fucking union. Here’s a quarter, @ someone who cares.
By 2017, the company was valued at $5.7 billion. I asked my then-editor (the first had quickly burnt out and jumped ship) if I could have a raise, as my rate had sat stagnant at $400 for years. He told me $400 was on the "high end" for contributors who wrote the type of articles I did (as in, ones that didn’t require being in an active war zone). He said he could "maybe" increase my rate to $500, pending a glance at his budget. It didn’t happen.
Side Note: I have nothing but pleasant things to say about the editor in question, a smart, funny and grossly talented photographer who went out of his way to edit my pieces after I refused to work with the children who were assigned to me once the man who brought me left. I have no idea how he lasted as long as he did at the company; its turnover rate for editors was higher than that of the staff at a truck stop Arby’s. I once received a goodbye email from one that opened with the line, “The past year and a half here have been a whirlwind.”
I told a friend who had written similar, non-PTSD generating pieces for the website about my editor’s inability to raise my rate beyond $400. She replied, “Well…they were paying me $1000.” The brand’s seemingly arbitrary selection of compensation was nothing new. I had recently done a set on a VICELAND show; when I asked to be paid months later, the woman I emailed replied, “What were you offered to be in the show?” The answer was exponentially less than what others were offered to do the same amount of time.
Side Note: Saying I didn’t write PTSD generating pieces for the website is, actually, inaccurate. A throwaway article that was pitched to me about how the film Fight Club sucks, which they republished every few months, made it impossible for me to check my email without receiving an unsolicited message from a man informing me I was a fucking moron for years. A half decade after the publication of an innocuous article about how I liked jury duty, a man with the email address “law.of.groove@gmail.com” wrote to say, “Read your piece about jury duty and decided to drop you an email to tell you to suck the shit out of my asshole. Stupid fucking cunt. I hope you step on a fucking LEGO stupid bitch.”
Side Note to the Side Note: My articles would routinely be republished, and in multiple languages, at that–for this, I received no additional compensation. Much blood was milked from the stone that was a series of pieces in which I detailed the gravity of my drinking problem. When I pitched the idea of the brand helping me go to rehab and me writing about the experience, I was told by my editor, “the most I can offer is moral support.”
The site’s senior editor, who now writes and edits a regional food blog (his last post opens with the line, “Beer drinkers who are typically bummed by the lack of quality brews on flights now have another option on Alaska”), frequently wouldn’t understand the thesis statement of my articles and would ask me to to do additional, often impossible work after submitting them, like attempt to interview strangers I had overheard talking days before, or get “experts” in whatever field I was writing about to provide superfluous quotes. A piece that required me attending an influencer conference for two days was cut for being “too snarky.” For Vice.
When I wrote an article about being attacked in my teens by a man who later raped another woman, he insisted on my providing a police report to corroborate the story. (“It has nothing to do with not believing you, because we do!” I was told. “We try to fact-check all of our stories, personal or otherwise.” For that piece, which also required multiple phone calls and rounds of edits, I got $300. I guess I should be grateful; xoJane was only paying $50 to write about the worst fucking thing that had ever happened to you at the time.) A piece that required me going undercover as a pregnant woman (and getting an actual pregnant woman’s piss on my hands) at a Crisis Pregnancy Center was cut because I was told it didn’t differ enough from an 18-minute long documentary Vice News ran about the topic.
And so on, and so on. The more time passed, the more my frustration grew. The fact that I was actively alcoholic didn’t help, only feeding my persecution complex–there’s only so much micromanagement a mean drunk on food stamps can take. The more I pushed back, the more kill fees I racked up, the more my previous pieces were republished. My give a damn finally broke and I stopped writing for them when I was 34, the same year their operating losses had reached $200 million.
And now, the private equity firm that bought Vice post-bankruptcy is shutting down the website on which I toiled; it’s likely everything I wrote for them will be scrubbed from the internet. This doesn’t bother me much. It’s too perfect an end.