From World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017) by Franklin Foer:

But reading through the papers [of Malcolm Cowley, literary editor of the New Republic during the worst of the Great Depression], I came to see that the sum Cowley paid was the disturbing revelation: $150 for a review. When I saw this figure in a letter, it gave me a stir. It was precisely the same amount the New Republic still paid for reviews of approximately the same length that we published on our Web site. I stared at the page. Eighty years of inflation . . . and stagnation. Writers are still paid precisely the same sum they received at the lowest moments in the economic history of the modern world.

Over my time as a journalist, I’ve seen the proprietors of journalistic outfits come to the conclusion that writers don’t really need to get paid very much. My career began at Slate, one of the first of the magazines created to live exclusively on the Internet. In those golden years, back in the midnineties, we paid one thousand dollars for each book review, and a few of our stars made even more than that. Today, Slate pays about three hundred dollars for a review.

We don’t need to rely on anecdote. There are studies to be examined. In 1981, the Authors Guild surveyed its members. It found that full-time writers made a median income of about $11,000 per year — if we adjusted that sum for inflation, it would now be about $35,000. That doesn’t sound like much at all, until we compare it with the Authors Guild’s 2009 findings, which uncovered a median income of $25,000. Sadly, the number rolls further down the deflationary spiral. In 2015, the median income dropped to $17,500. Over thirty-four years, writers took a 50 percent pay cut. The present salary lurks not much higher than the government’s official poverty line. Writing, a profession that once seemed fairly central to the project of Western civilization, is barely above water. The value of knowledge has been deflated and depressed, just as the tech companies intended.

From “The Lost Art of Not Pitching” by David Macfarlane, Canadian Notes & Queries 115, Spring 2026:

Two dollars and fifty cents (USD) per word was as high as I ever got (GQ) before the tide receded. And kept receding. The water’s out way past the lighthouse by now. It’s more a beach of stranded Substacks and gasping podcasts than an ocean. Magazine writing was a slightly odd career choice when there were lots of publications in the sea. (One dollar to one dollar and fifty cents was bout my average.) It would be downright eccentric now. I recently read (online, don’t ask me where, and who knows if it’s true) that seven cents a word is the going North American freelance rate.