The Weird Incentives of Word Count

Many freelancers get paid per hour, or per day. Some have standard rates for typical tasks. Journalism is rarely typical. And usually, we’re paid per word. I’ve had many friends whose first thought is how easy that must be to exploit. Often they remember a story about a writer like Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo padding their books with digressions to up their pay. Those stories probably didn’t happen, and these days, that method is even less likely to work. When I pitch a piece, the editor and I agree beforehand on a target word count. The only way I get paid more than expected is if the editor agrees that it makes sense. That said, there definitely are ways to exploit being paid by the word, if you wanted to. They’re just more subtle. The source of any such exploit is to notice that writing is not actually the hard part of journalism. Research is time-consuming: the more people you talk to, the longer it takes. Writing, once you’re used to it, can go quite quickly. So the length of…