It's nice to get a perspective from this guy, even if it did come off as less professional than I expected going into it. It's really too bad that The Atlantic pays so little for freelance work. If they're only willing to pay $100 for an original, reported story, how much time and effort can they really expect to go into submissions? I understand that standards in any field have to change over time, but in regard to journalism, it seems strange how standards have shifted for everyone involved; those involved in printing news, those writing it and those who study to be involved in it. I remember a professor I had, whose career was centered around magazine writing, told me that the people getting hired for magazine work and even newspaper work were guys with creative writing degrees rather than those with journalism degrees, since the creative writing people were willing to write in a style preferred by the readers. I didn't follow up to see how accurate that was, but it does seem like most readers are looking for entertainment with some facts rather than investigative pieces that might lead them into doing some digging of their own, despite complaints to the contrary.
There's a weird paradox that has emerged since most writing went online: people don't want to read long articles anymore, but long articles tend to rank the highest on search engines and race up the front pages of link sharing sites. In my own experience, I've found that publishing short articles frequently gets lots of natural "what's new?" traffic to the site, but the die-off rate for each article is steep. Visitors are coming to the site, not the articles, and they're looking for a quick fix. When I've written long (3000+ word) articles, they get the most traffic on the site over time, and continue to pull that traffic for years after they've been written. These are the ones which have accrued a degree of authority from search engines like Google, where the majority of ongoing hits come from, because other writers are more likely to link to them. So there are two business models for a site: zillions of short and punchy headlines with mostly fluff behind them, or fewer articles published on a slower schedule but that go deep into their subject. The former tend to be sites that pay little or nothing and promise "lots of exposure", while the latter can afford to pay more not just because the writer is expected to make a greater effort, but because those continue to make a steady trickle of money for years and years with no additional effort.
It's interesting that you write, "accrued a degree of authority." I would guess that most news sites that would commission a 3,000+ word article would pay someone enough to get a quality article, but in your experience have you come across articles where their accrued authority isn't merited? As in, they are now seen as credible because of their staying power on the internet rather than credibility based in fact? Anyway, your response is a very interesting one. It's also the only other one! Assuming you've read the Thayer article, how would you compare his experience to your own?
The "authority" in question is Google's Page Rank algorithm, so the merit of the article is ultimately judged by everyone who choses to link to it. Let's say, for example, that the article is woo but it excites a lot of bloggers who link to it and drive up their Page Rank. It might end up getting a lot of traffic over time, but it's hard to say if its new authority in the sense of search rankings is what we'd call authority in the sense of truth. My understanding of the assumption behind Page Rank and similar algorithms is that the authority is not merely how many sites link to it, but what keywords are associated with that rank. It might end up getting its long-term traffic from people who search for "nonsense gobbledygook" rather than "vaccine effectiveness" or whatever the author hoped. If the visitors who assume the article is an artifact of nonsense end up clicking ads, then the publisher might not care. As for my own experience, I'm a small-time player compared to Thayer, but every freelance writer has experienced someone from what seemed to be a promising client ask for content, only to offer "exposure" instead of money. While I was at first puzzled that Thayer would be so passionate when he chastised The Atlantic's editor, the rest of the correspondence--plus the article in the NK Times--made it clear: The Atlantic wasted his time. It took several email exchanges, plus a phone call and another email exchange, before they revealed that they weren't interested in paying. They weren't approaching a kid looking for his big shot, they were approaching a professional and seasoned journalist. It was like, to borrow characters from the story, asking Dennis Rodman to play Maddison Square Garden for "exposure" that would "further his career". If these kinds of offers come frequently enough, especially when the revelation of no pay doesn't come until after several emails and a phone call, it's not just annoying but disrespectful and insulting. And yes, as it becomes more frequent, it's also terrifying. The idea that some kinds of work are worth less than other kinds, even if it takes more effort, intelligence, impulse and creativity.
If it's because the Internet is immature then we'd expect conditions for writers to gradually improve, but I don't yet know if they will. Our last decade pushed the market value of writing down because of two factors: publishers can't convince web surfers to pay when one of the brilliances of the Internet is the very fact that you can explore content friction-free, and because millions of amateur writers are willing to write for free, and there are thousands of excellent mechanisms for filtering out the crap. The symptom is a result of supply and demand, not maturity. In fact, I think today's condition is a result of maturity. If you took away the need to pay for rent, food and utilities, then the above reasons are wonderful outcomes of an exciting leap. But the things that transform mankind for the better never come synchronously with all the other changes that make the transition comfortable or sustainable for all involved. Writers will have to cope with miserable jobs until somebody figures out how a better livelihood will work. It's not going to be AdSense, affiliate programs, "tip jars", Kindle Direct or Kickstarter, because these things haven't reliably paid for a writer to fly to North Korea and do proper journalism, so we will either adjust to a different quality of journalism or wait for a new kind of thingy and business model that either restores the status-quo or, stars-in-our-eyes dreaming, enables something even better. I think one of the ways that better content can be encouraged, and that writers can get the kind of financing that pays for better journalism, might come from search engines that improve their ability to identify quality writing. Google could put Huffington Post out of business while at the same time driving all HuffPost's current traffic to independent journalists who essentially write the same content, or improve upon it. They're coming closer to this as they tweak the algorithms for both "Google News" (to aggregate) and "Zeitgeist" (to identify what readers want to read).