Pay the Fucking Writer

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

When Chris Jones gets fired up about something, everyone hears about it. On Tuesday morning I woke up to a Jones rant about writers getting fucked over by big media companies unwilling to pay for content. Jones wanted everyone to read Nate Thayer's exchange with The Atlantic, who wanted to re-print one of Thayer's articles without compensation.

My initial reaction? Those slimy fuckers! (And I actually like The Atlantic and one of my high school classmates is an editor at Quartz).

My second reaction? At least they asked Thayer. In my line of work in the cutthroat gambling community, shit gets stolen all the time.

Users don't want to pay for content. Publishers don't want to pay writers. So who gets fucked? The writers. This is a shitty situation no matter how you look at it, especially from my perspective because I'm someone who generates content and can barely pay my bills doing so (I have to gamble on sports to supplement my income). Our Great Society doesn't give a shit about their artists and I get put down and told to apply to a job at McDonalds. Writers don't want a hand out, just an opportunity to get paid to earn a living like everyone else. Alas, those opportunities are disappearing everyday.

Otis pointed me in the direction of this epic rant by sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison about writer's trying to get paid...


The clip is from a documentary on Ellison called Dreams with Sharp Teeth. I highly recommend it (buy the DVD or stream it on Amazon). The film focuses more on Ellison as a writer and confrontational personality with dealing with publishers, Hollywood studios, fans, and fellow authors. Ellison penned several of the best episodes of Star Trek and The Outer Limits. Some of his stuff from TOL was so good that the screenwriters from Terminator lifted the idea from old Ellison scripts. Ellison sued Jim Cameron and they settled out of court.

In the last decade, I worked my way up the ladder in the slippery and cutthroat gambling world. I busted my ass in the poker media industry before I crashed into a glass ceiling. In a short time I went from a highly sought-after writer to someone who struggled to find work because my "rates were too high" as one yes-man in middle management told me, which is laughable because even my salary was peanuts so you can only imagine how low most poker writers get paid¹. I tested the murky waters in the sports betting world in the last couple of years and it's even more ruthless. Unfortunately, I can attest that both industries are highly unprofessional with little to none journalistic integrity and zero concern for moral hazard, which translates into a hostile environment for writers with rampant plagiarism and companies treating writers like disposable cattle.

A friend recently asked if I missed writing on Tao of Poker (still on indefinite hiatus). I told him I did not miss the migraines I'd get from dealing with shill sites who stole all my content without permission (and got paid doing so), and I certainly did not miss going on mega-monkey-tilt upon discovering one of my immoral colleagues stole shit right off the blog (who got paid doing so). Yeah, at one point the content theft from shill sites on Tao of Poker got so bad (even with countless cease and desist emails) that I was forced to get creative and use the theft to my advantage. If they weren't going to give me a byline, or links back to my site (or my affiliate code), well then I was going to embedded one into the RSS feed.

I could write an entire book about the dirty and ugly side of being a poker writer, but it would come off totally cranky and bitchy and whiny just like Ellison's rant. Being a poker reporter is a lot of thankless work and a ton of heartache. Being a writer is tough and frustrating and exhausting enough after toiling for years honing your craft and fighting back waves and waves and waves of self-doubt. Yet, then you have to enter the octagon and battle it out with thousands of other blood-thirty writers, may of whom will slit your throat and undercut you by a fucking penny just to get your job. And if that wasn't tough enough... then you have greedy companies unwilling to pay you a fair wage, and even if they do compensate you, good luck trying to get paid. Then as an added bonus, toss in content thieves circling like famished vultures, ready to lift anywhere from a sentence to the entire story without any attribution and then pass it off as their own work.

A couple of assclowns were notorious plagiarizers in the poker industry. They'd wait to see what my colleagues wrote and then rip it off. The laziest hacks never even bothered to put an effort in to disguise their pathetic plagiarism. Sadly, the poker media never policed itself which is why that deplorable behavior went unpunished. The community did not care, especially poker pros. The forums were filled with players going berserk about different cheating scandals, but they didn't give a shit about poker writers getting screwed. Companies never made their sticky-fingered hack reporters accountable for their actions. I can think of only a couple of instances when a content thief was terminated for their plagarism².

I always wished we could have treated the poker media like old-time hockey, because if you stepped out of line and broke one of the gentleman's rules, then you were going to get your face smashed in by an enforcer. Hockey players policed themselves. Poker writers were too divided and demoralized and used to being treated like third-class citizens by the poker community as a whole, so they never had the will or courage to do anything about it.

I tried to be the enforcer and it worked. After all no one was going to do it for me. The last time someone tried to steal something from Tao of Poker, I threatened to break his arms (both arms and several fingers too). This bloated dough boy was one of the most notorious content thieves in poker who stole, lifted, borrowed, and ripped off from almost everyone and never got fired. Sure his reputation is ruined but he still gets paid to steal. Once word got out that I was going to make him cry like a little pussy for his crimes against the poker community, then the lazy shitstain stopped. It sucks that I had to go that brute route... but I had no other choice. If you stole from me or my friends, you were going to pay.

At the top of my shit list are the shady fuckers who ran High Roller magazine. They stiffed me out of a few grand. It's ironic, eh? A magazine called High Roller couldn't even pay its own bills. When I first got hired, they agreed to pay me above my rate which was remarkable and seemed too good to be true... because it was. They strung me along and other writers as well. I stopped writing for them when I realized they had no intentions of paying me. The magazine ran for a few more issues until the printer had enough when they finally got stiffed and that's the reason they stopped publication. That's how bad it got... they couldn't even pony up cash for the printer. Where the fuck did all that ad money go? Someone embezzled that shit, or snorted it, or gambled it away. After a while they stopped responding to my emails and the phones were shut down. I'll never see that cash and chalked it up as another bad beat story. It wasn't the first time I got stiffed by a potential client and it wouldn't be the last, but at least I'd be better prepared the next time. The lowlifes at High Roller magazine taught me to be cautious and suspicious about any potential client. That one looked like they were rolling in dough when in fact it was all smoke and mirrors.

I often get invites to write at different sites on a variety of topics ranging from Phish to poker to the Lakers to the financial meltdown... except these are non-paid invitations. It's one thing if these sites do not have ads or make any money (I often agree to help out non-profits), but it's a different fucking ballgame if those sites are raking in ad revenue and not paying for their content.

I've asked my friends to help contribute content for no compensation at Truckin and most recently on Ocelot Sports. In those instances, nether site was created to make money. Rather, both sites were birthed with the idea to showcase quality writing and create a micro-community of writers looking to hone their craft in fiction or travel stories (on Truckin') or sports writing/sports betting (on Ocelot).

Both Shamus and I can attest to the value of writing our own poker blogs for free and generating daily and original content, which allowed prospective clients to see what we can do. We both attracted prospective clients using our blogs as springboards or "live" resumes. That's our intent with Ocelot Sports. I recently started writing freelance content about sports and would like to get some more gigs. Hopefully, Ocelot will give us that opportunity.

It's one thing to be an unknown and willing to be exploited for no money just to make a name for yourself. It's a whole other ball game if you're a professional in your field and someone from a well-known media company wants you to work for nothing.

I saw it happen so many times in the poker world. It was bad enough folks were willing to give way stuff for free (not just writing, but photos, video appearances, and podcasts) to companies that had the ability to pay them but got away with not do so because no one ever called them out on it. But, it was even worse when amateurs undercut rates to stay in the game. A professional would never do such a thing, but these degenerate gamblers disguised as amateur writers were so desperate for any money that they didn't think twice about how lowballing colleagues hurts the industry in the long run.

Writing for pay is difficult enough because shady clients do everything to not pay you and the ones that do make it a pain in the ass to get paid. If that's not enough of a hassle to chase down deliquent clients, there's the unscrupulous colleagues and parasites who lazily wait around for you to do all the legwork and research and then they swoop in and steal your shit. Yeah, it's no wonder I get irked when I hear stories about big-time media companies refusing to pay writers for content. Even the ones who do get paid, are vastly underpaid.

I guess the only solace is that our dumbed-down society is growing more and more illiterate that in a decade or more, if I'm still around I might be one of the few people who can string together a sentence. Then again, reading longform will become an aging artform like the opera, while the majority of internet content will become one nonstop meme about cats.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. I was once replaced by two inexperienced reporters. It took two people to match my output. If you added up both of their salaries combined, they were paid less than half my salary.

2. One of my colleagues got fired on the spot for plagiarizing Wikipedia. That termination story got cut out of Lost Vegas.