With the Second Annual Writers Worth Day coming up on May 15th, I’m looking for ways to introduce a little reality into the heads of writers who think $1 an article is a great wage. I saw the other side of the spectrum over the weekend when I saw State of Play with Russell Crowe as the lead character, a reporter for the Washington Globe, out to report a case. The message was that this character could solve mysteries using his pen and detective-like skills, and that he worked in a stereotypical newsroom, full of excitement, tight deadlines, and full of witty, brilliant people.
It’s an image that’s as unreal as the one portrayed by CBS Early Show of the woman who can sit by her pool and write for $1 an article and be able to afford that pool. It’s also an image that’s propagated time and again, over and over, decade after decade. Imagine my disappointment when I walked into my first newsroom as a stringer. There wasn’t electricity in the air, people rushing about to meet deadlines, or even groups of reporters planning their next approach. It was a newsroom full of people who looked, well, bored. And no one was solving crime cases. No, they were listening to the police scanner and hoping something came up to write about that would sell newspapers.
But while that aspect of the movie put my cynical nature into overdrive, I was actually glad for the imbalanced portrayal. Maybe this overstatement of a reporter’s abilities and job duties is exactly what we need right now. Let’s face it – the image of us writers having value in the market has taken a serious pounding thanks to crap jobs generated by fools wanting to put up a website and monetize it and bigger fools who take the crap jobs at all. Maybe we need a little Hollywood glamour layered on thick to send the message that this is still a worthy, noble profession.
So Russell Crowe’s character isn’t making the paltry amounts of money that reporters generally make, and given his length of his tenure at that fictional paper, I find it difficult to believe his soul wouldn’t have been sucked out of him and he’d not really care to solve a crime, even one involving his friend. But isn’t it okay to let the world believe it, even for a few hours in a darkened theater?
Maybe we can start a major boo-hiss campaign from the blogging world to those who take poop pay for real work, making it even harder on the rest of us to earn a real living? (How’s that for bad sentence structure?) 🙂 Love your campaign. Will be posting on it before the big day.
Thanks, Angie. 🙂 It’s the goal – not to paint us as making oodles of money and solving murders, but as hard-working folk who should be paid fairly for our talents.
My “favorite” scene from State of Play was when Russell Crowe pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniels and had a snort with his colleague while they were already holding the front page for his story. That, and all of the people Watching Him Type as he put the finishing touches on the story.
Yes! Kirk, that’s the scene I had in mind when I wrote this! Who has TIME to sit around and watch “wonder boy” type?