All work and little pay makes Jenn an angry girl.

Ed. note: This is my last whiny media-related post, I swear. Well, at least for a while anyway.

It ain’t easy freelancing. Those of you who are successful at it, I salute you, because honestly, I do not know how anyone can earnestly earn a living at it anymore, given the inconceivably crappy pay days I’ve come across as of late.* To wit, a recent smattering of compensation rates I’ve been unfortunate enough to actually click through to: $15 for 300 word articles, $20 for 300-500 word articles, $25 for 500+ words. Granted these are small articles, but it only gets more pathetic as the word counts get higher. I want to tell these people, are you effing kidding me?! And I rarely use exclamation points, so when I do you know I mean business.

And you know whom I blame for this rapidly descending pay rate? Bloggers. (Oh, the irony.) Those scores of wannabe writers who link to their blog posts as writing samples and will take any rate at the sake of having been published somewhere other than their self-fashioned web site. And you know what I want to say to these people? This “hobby” that you’ve taken up as a way to obtain some fulfillment that lacks in your career as a human resources manager—which likely pays you $80,000+ annually—is detracting from the fulfillment I’m striving for, namely, being able to, oh—I dunno—buy an apple every now and then.

The fact that I went to school for four years laboriously learning how to construct a lede, the time I spent debating the use of series versus Oxford commas, means nothing. Basically, I spent thousands of dollars learning a craft that you’ve managed to destroy with the advent of Blogger/Wordpress/Typepad et al.

God help me if Tumblr really takes off.

OK. Rant. Over.

*Chris, Gina, Ysolt, this post is in no way directed at any of you. Your regular use of my skillz helps me pay the billz, yo.