Open-ended assignments can be bad medicine
I got an assignment, the thirteenth, from one of my European editors one
day. He wanted me to do a global review story. He had a fetish for round the
world pieces and baby, did I get screwed.
“Geographically, I'd like the
environmental piece to be as global as possible and cover the full gambit of
environmental issues (noise, air, water, energy saving initiatives etc),” began his assignment note. Never-say-no freelancer
that I was, I agreed.
By
the time I was done, oh woe, I had burned up an embarrassing amount of time,
including tracking
down 20 people in far-flung places such as Helsinki, Auckland, Istanbul,
Changi, Sydney, Florida and Montreal.
I squashed my mountain of research
into the 1,900 words of space my editor had allocated and sent it off. Then I did
a what-the-hell-was-that analysis of the economics of the task. I concluded
that for the time spent, I could have done three regular articles and earned nearly
twice as much.
Note to self: No more global reviews.
I emailed him a brief assessment:
“My accountant [also called Carroll] will not allow me to accept any more
global assignments.” Apoplectic, he told me to stop whinging (so spelled and pronounced
win-jing in Brit-speak) and goddammit when he was a reporter on the High Street
he did what he was told and that I’d damn well take all his assignments or else
blah blah blah …
Did you know that High Street is
a metonym, an instance of metonymy?
That was in 2005. His next email, four years later, contained a
curiously worded offer to “toss some work my way.” “Sounds good to me,” I
replied, “but my accountant still forbids me from accepting global assignments.”
Whoops!
I amused myself with the rest of
my life and he pulled the wings off flies, I suppose, till late 2011 when, out
of the blue yonder, he fired over a new assignment. We lasted for two good
pieces before his charming editor bullpen pal poisoned our on-again, off-again
relationship … but that’s another sordid tale.
Sadly, overly demanding editors
still weren’t done with me.
Back up the writing machine to
2010. An editor I’d lunched with had
given me my first crack at his magazine. The assignment was the annual roundup
of the shipping industry in the US Midwest. With visions of more focused
assignments later on, I bravely agreed.
Accepting
an assignment is like flinging yourself out of a plane: it’s a one-way trip (I
can think of one exception in 20 years). Like a black whirlpool the project
sucked me down and almost drowned me. When I finally washed up on shore I toted
up the damage: I’d conducted nine interviews, contacted 11 other people for
information, visited endless websites, read too many documents and government statistics
and crawled down rubbish-filled dead-end alleys, all for a measly $600. The final
pointy boot to the goolies was that the editor was “70% satisfied” with my
article.
Note to self: No more mega-industry roundups.
The following year Captain Bligh returned with an offer to do another roundup.
Wiser man that I had become, I replied: “For last year’s heap of work you paid
me $600 … For a 1,500w article I normally do somewhere between two and four
interviews, with a focus that does not require anywhere the amount of
far-ranging research and out and out wild goose-chasing I did for you.
“Were I to sign up for another such
feature I would need to be paid at least $2,000, and more like $2,400, to be
even more truthful. So I must decline your offer. It simply costs me several
times more money in lost opportunities than I receive for doing the piece.
“Should you have more focused projects
you might like to offer to me, I would be happy to consider them.”
He never replied and I’ve not heard from him since.
Copyright
© Carroll McCormick 2013
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