If you're willing to buy a kidney, you're willing...

What would happen if the United States legalized the sale of human organs? Economists will note the seductive market logic: with regulation, proponents of legalization suggest the organ shortage will disappear, the market will arrive at a fair price for human tissue and new laws will regulate away criminal elements.

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that the U.S. would be able to create its own equitable system. What would happen in the rest of the world? Whether we like it or not, we live in the era of globalization, and if the U.S. legalizes the market for body parts, there is no reason to think that international economies won’t play a role in how a patient decides to procure transplant organs.

According to the National Foundation for Transplants, a kidney transplant costs about $260,000. In the illegal organ markets in India, Egypt and Pakistan, the same procedure rings in at just shy of $20,000 — certified organ included.

Immunosuppressant drugs have come so far that a broker can arrange a transplant in as little as 30 days. The only thing stopping the typical American transplant patient from going abroad and buying an organ is the difficulty of making contact with a broker and the threat of what might happen if they get caught.

In the real world, kidneys don’t have a fixed price. Instead, the market for human body parts is a lot like the one for used cars: They’re only worth what someone is willing to sell them for. In the age of cheap international travel, where state-of-the-art hospitals abut the most impoverished slums on earth, hundreds of thousands of people are available and willing to sell their flesh for pennies on the dollar. Some of these areas are so well known among organ traffickers and brokers that they’ve earned the name “kidneyvilles” for their plentiful supply of willing “donors.”

Between 2006 and 2010, I made India my home while researching the global trade in human body parts. India is notable in the organ trafficking world because of its advanced hospitals and plentiful supply of extreme poverty. In 2004, after a tsunami ripped across South Asia and slammed into the eastern coast of the country, hundreds of thousands of people wound up in refugee camps. These desperately poor people had few options for work or making a livelihood, a perfect opportunity for organ brokers. It was a buyer’s market, and everyone sold.

Typically, the brokers promised $2,000 per organ, but only delivered the advance, always finding one excuse or another not to pay the rest of the money. Even so, husbands sold their kidneys and then pressured their wives to sell theirs. The price for a kidney fell to as low as $600.

When I visited one camp called Ernavoor outside the bustling metropolis of Chennai, I met 80 women with foot long scars across their abdomens. These were not the equitable arrangements that proponents of organ markets advocate for. This was a symptom of extreme poverty. Of course, none of the people in that camp could ever expect to receive an organ should one of their own fail. The one rule with organ markets is that human tissue always moves up — and never down — the social hierarchy.

Still, that was an illegal market. What would happen if the trade were well regulated abroad? To answer this, it’s helpful to review what happened in the market for human surrogate babies. In the U.S., it is legal to pay a woman to carry a child, so long as the money is called “compensation” and not coercion. Even so, an American surrogate might cost as much as $100,000 in such arrangements.

Once the market was clearly defined in America, other countries, with looser definitions of human rights, fought for their share of the market. In 2002, India became the go-to destination for procuring a budget surrogate womb. To the surprise of no one, the Indian industry soon began to cut corners. Women were housed under lock and key in houses known to the press as “baby factories.” Because U.S. patient demanded to know the condition of their child during the entire course of the pregnancy, surrogates became virtual slaves under the doctor’s perpetual surveillance.

The factories multiplied and soon tens of thousands of international customers reasoned that if it was legal to hire a surrogate at home, why not save money abroad? In some cases, when a pregnancy didn’t go as planned and the doctor had to choose between the life of an unborn surrogate baby and the life of mother, the mother did not always survive. Late last year, India finally outlawed surrogacy tourism after non-stop incidents and official inquiries into the surrogates’ wellbeing. Now the commercial surrogacy boomseems to be moving to Cambodia where regulations are still loose.

Still, the rise of surrogacy scandals is a warning about what might happen if we legalize organ sales in America. Even if the trade appears to work at home, there is no way to ensure that American customers won’t look for better deals abroad. We cannot solve our own organ shortage by exploiting the poor and helpless people on the other side of the world.

Explore these other perspectives from the Washington Post’s In Theory blog which, this week was talking about government compensation for organ donors. 

Sally Satel: Generosity won’t fix our shortage of organs for transplants

Francis Delmonico and Alexander Capron: Our body parts shouldn’t be for sale

Scott Sumner: The moral case for paying kidney donors

Benjamin Humphreys: Will lab-grown kidneys fix our transplant waiting lists?

Josh Morrison: It’s time to treat organ donors with the respect they deserve

TEDx-Boulder - Body, Mind and Spirit

TEDx-Boulder - Body, Mind and Spirit

God.

Bhagwan.

Allah,

Nirvana,

EnlightenmentIt doesn’t matter what you call it, but the pursuit of that divine force has inspired some of the world’s greatest civilizations, its most enduring architecture, foundational philosophies as well as the wars that have time and again sought to tear all that down. But can any of us mere mortals truly understand the hidden clockwork of the universe? If we assume that it exists at all, then the actual state of transcendence poses an interesting problem. What are people supposed to do with the rest of their time on earth once they’ve gained that ultimate knowledge? Revered gurus who teach that status and power are meaningless in the ultimate reality, nonetheless have to muck about in the mundane world. They gather followers, build institutions and dispense knowledge from lofty thrones. Is it hypocrisy when enlightenment simply reproduces familiar hierarchies? Another way to put it is how does a Buddha remain in the world, but not of it?

If you’ll allow me, I’d like to tell you about a girl I once knew who thought that she had grasped those eternal mysteries. Now, ten years later, I’m still grappling with the lessons she taught me about what it means to have a mind, a body. And a spirit.

In 2006, just as I was beginning my career as a journalist, I took a job as leader of an abroad program for American college students in India. The plan was to tour the holy sites along the Ganga river and up into the Himalayas. We started out at a Mosque in Delhi, traveled to the Holy city of Varanasii. And then on to Bodh Gaya, which is the spot where the Buddha is said to have reached enlightenment more than two millennia ago. We’d signed up for a seven day silent meditation retreat in the Tibetan tradition. For my student, Emily O’Conner, this was going to be the highlight of the journey. Emily was a whip-smart debutante from Charlottesville whose voice echoed just a whisper of a southern lilt. Back in America she excelled at yoga, but joined the program because she wanted a taste of something authentic.

Our instructor for the retreat was a swiss-german nun who wore the maroon robes of her order. We all promised that would keep a vow of silence for the duration of the retreat to let the lessons of the Dharma sink deeper into our minds. We threw ourselves into it. We learned about compassion, Mindfulness and the nature of enlightenment itself. We sat on our meditation cushions and learned that the world, as we know it, is an illusion. Cause and effect obeyed the laws of karma, not physics. Even something as seemingly permanent as death, was just a barrier to another life. In one particularly difficult meditation we visualized our own bodies as corpses in order to understand the inevitability of our own mortality.

For some Buddhists the goal is to enter into the state of Nirvana—which is a place where the world ceases to exist because the meditator has fully realized the nature of the universe.  However in Tibetan Buddhism the goal is a little different. A person on the verge of nirvana can decide to stay until and help every other sentient being in the universe—every slug, seahorse, human and extraterrestrial being and even mosquito is equally enlightened.  These beings are called Bodhisattvas.  A Christian might call them Angels.  Either way Enlightenment isn’t a quick process, the Buddha taught it could take tens of thousands of lifetimes to become something like the bodhisattva of Compassion Avalokiteshvara behind me. Yet Tibetan Buddhists vow to stay on the Bodhisattva path however many lifetimes it takes.

When the retreat ended we were perhaps a little more contemplative than when we had started.  I asked Emily about how she felt after it all and she smiled broadly and said it was the “most wonderful experience of her life”. This being the last night in Bodh Gaya most of the students just wanted to stay up late and talk they were kids on the final day of summer camp.  But Emily didn’t stay with the group, instead while the other students chatted in the temple, she spent the evening writing in her journal nearby.

At about three in the morning when the courtyard was engulfed in an inky black silence, she climbed onto the roof of the retreat center, wrapped a shawl around her face, and jumped. She died on impact. An hour later one of the students found her body and raised the alarm. I was outside in a few seconds and seeing her body on the ground sent me into a momentary delirium. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen. I couldn’t move at first and then it was only the realization that I was in charge that brought me back. As the director of the program it was my responsibility to find out why it had happened.  I looked for clues in her journal and got a peek into her mind as she was on retreat. In it she said that her meditations unlocked a profound understanding of the universe and given her a glimpse at how her countless previous lives had made her a vessel for enlightenment. The only thing limiting her from a full transformation into something greater than herself was her body. She was a Bodhisattva. And all she had to do was take the next step.

To me those words read like madness.

In the years that followed I visited Tibetan Lamas in Himalayan Hill stations and asked them if she might actually BE a Bodhisattva. None could give me an answer to that, though they commented that even the Dalai Lama —who many Tibetan Buddhists believe is as close to Enlightened as it gets—has never claimed to be anything more than a humble monk .  So I began to wonder if there were other stories that were similar to Emily’s. It turns out that India is littered with tales of people who go there and claim one sort of transcendence or another. Not all their stories turn out well.

I collected six journals from people who took their own lives after meditation retreats.  I discovered the names of Ryan Chambers and Jonathan Spollen, both of whom disappeared from the holy town of Rishikesh within a few years of each other. Both left their money and passports behind with along with cryptic notes about inner truth.  I found a mental hospital in New Delhi that admits almost 100 western travelers a year suffering from something called “India Syndrome”— where patients travel to India and come to believe the are earthly incarnations of Krishna or Shiva. Instead of enlightenment they end up restrained and sedated in state custody.Then I followed a story of two lovers who embarked on a three year silent retreat in the Arizona desert and whose quest for enlightenment ended in death.

All of their stories share a common theme. They all believed that they found a spiritual explanation that transcended the rational world. Whatever it was, Heaven, Nirvana, Moksha, was in their grasp and life as we know it was no longer the top priority. Knowledge was. And this, I believe, was their common mistake. It’s a similar logic that lets a group like ISIS wreak a murderous spree across Syria and Iraq. They have access to some sort of divine truth that makes consequences on this world unimportant. They only answer to God when they make a hell on earth.

The lesson I learned from all this is that divine knowledge alone is just not enough. We need to also be accountable to for our actions here on earth as well as for our own bodies.

Indeed, back in Bodh Gaya I was learning a lot more than I ever wanted to about bodies. You see, after death bodies have a life all of their own. there is a subtle line that separates a living person from a corpse, and when you cross it everything changes. Whether we acknowledge it or not the most intimate relationship we have in life is the one we have with our own bodies.  We dress them, feed them, take care of them and protect them from unwanted intrusions. In death we don’t have that control anymore. Over the next few days the responsibilities that Emily once had for her own body fell to me.   I would have to bring her body home. And, at 104 degrees I was battling against the inevitable forces that heat imposes on a body.

After three days of packing her in ice, at one point I found myself in the office of a Dr. Das at the medical college who was the last hurdle I would have to overcome before I could get clearance to put her on a plane. Dr. Das sighed over the paperwork and a lengthy police report he would have to prepare “It would have have been easier if she had not died at all.” [beat] Ok. But death is one of the inescapable facts of life. It’s not pretty. And there are only two things that a person can do in the face of it. We can ignore the inevitable and pretend it isn’t there, or ,we can acknowledge that the time that we DO have on earth is the most precious gift we will ever receive.

And this brings me back full circle to to the question I started out with. How does the Buddha be in the world but not of it? Perhaps he shouldn’t. I can never argue that Emily should have taken her life. But there is still a kernel of hope that I can salvage from the tragedy of it all.

I don’t believe that Emily was a Bodhisattva, in the sense of an all-powerful divine being on the cusp of some eternal realization. Instead I’ve set my sights on a lesser definition of that word that is a little more earth-bound. All we know for sure about the clockwork of the universe is that we are alive here and now. It doesn’t matter whether or not there is a heaven or a hell, or if we are really just inert matter whose spark of animation is only a quirk of chemistry and physics. Whether or not something awaits us on the other side of death’s threshold we have a duty to lives we’ve been given to their fullest potential. We have to find the lesson in every moment that teaches us what it means to be a little more human. To have a Body, a mind and a spirit.

And, in that sense, maybe we can can all bodhisattvas.

A Look Behind the Scenes at WordRates

Here’s some big news in the wide world of WordRates. In the last month or so there has been a ton of work going on behind the scenes figuring out how to best structure the project. Here’s a quick update: WordRates is now an LLC in Colorado. We’ve brought on the Rao Law Group to handle the legal side of things. The website is being put together by the Colorado-based design company Lime9web, in conjunction with Umar Ilyas of eJuicy Solutions in Islamabad.

We have a group of 9 mentors who have signed up to tackle PitchLab. Together they’ve published more than a dozen books and contribute to the top publications in America includingVanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Bloomberg-BusinessWeek, the New Yorker, Atlantic and Conde Nast Traveler.

We are still in the very early stages of design and managing the back end of the site. But here’s some very rough sketches of what the site will actually look like when you start to use it. I’ll start posting more refined designs as we get them ready

Here is roughly what you will see when you log onto wordrates.com:

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 Individual reviews of editors and magazines will lead to a page that is laid out like this: 

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And every member will have their own profile: 

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Our Collective Problem

For 40 years the business of translating one language to another was controlled by the AIIC, a group of professional freelance translators who worked for governments, the United Nations and every business you could imagine. They set fair rates for their services and standards for the quality of their work, but weren’t technically employed by the AIIC.  They were part of the gig economy and they made their livings as independent contractors.

In 1994 a group of businesses complained to the Federal Trade Commission arguing that freelance translators had no right to determine what fair pay was for themselves. They argued to the FTC that freelancers were independent businesses  and that setting a minimum standard for their labor was the the same as operating a cartel. In the dull legalese of the day the FTC ruled in their favor saying, “We find that respondents price-fixing practices and market allocation rules are per se unlawful agreements in restraint of trade and a violation of the FTC Act.” After that companies no longer had to be held back by the tyranny of paying a living wage to their skilled workers. Instead, translators were forced to slash their prices against one another in an all out race to the bottom.  The result was that today translators don’t make nearly what they once did.

No one predicted that self-employment would be the new employment standard for the millennium. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics the number of self-employed people has gone up by half since the ruling.  As millions of people join the “sharing economy” or have to freelance their way into a job, the rights of freelancers are more important now than they ever were.

Being self-employed has some major advantages–creative control, setting your own hours and being your own boss–but there are also a lot of disadvantages, too. We pay twice the social security taxes–the so-called “self-employment tax” means we pay the employers share as well as our own–and we have no protections for minimum earnings.  When you’re a freelancer your work is your commodity, and like all commodities, its value fluctuates with the market.

While there have been some brave attempts to organize freelancers since the FTC ruling. The Freelancer’s Union, whose founder Sarah Horowitz won a MacArthur Genius award,  the sheer numbers of independent workers under its banner to negotiate for slightly better deals on health care. However barring that one incremental victory, no one advocates for freelancers. And no union can legally bargain collectively on our behalf without running afoul of the Federal Trade Commission.

All of this is to say: this is exactly why I’m attempting to change the way freelancer writers and journalists do business. Since it is illegal to actually negotiate as a group for better wages and contracts, the only real option that writers have to affect the market for their stories is to bargain individually, but on a massive scale. Wordrates & Pitchlab is not a union. But if it works the way I hope that it will, it will use the power of information sharing to make the market for words a little bit more fair. While we can’t set a minimum rate for our work, we can allow and agent to negotiate for higher rates on our behalf. It’s perfectly legal to turn down a contract if the publication wants to weaken your claim to copyright.  And, instead of competing against each other for lower and lower rates, we turn the scales on the industry to make publications compete against each other.

As of right now Wordrates is 62% of the way to is goal of $6500 and has 18 days to go.  We have 113 backers, which means 113 writers who are eager to fight for better pay, contribute market information and mentor each other to become better negotiators.  However, since Kickstarter is all-or-nothing funding it means that we need to actually reach the goal if we want to see it built.   So please share it on Facebook and Twitter and tell your friends in the media that if they want to see a living wage for writers, this might be the best way to achieve it.

Should Writers Dream of Being Middle Class?

I have the audacity to believe that writers should be able to make a middle class living. I began writing about the difficulties that writers have negotiating for the value of their work amidst increasingly hostile market conditions back in January. I asked “How much are words worth?” and since then I’ve received almost a hundred emails from writers around the country who are fed up with their inability to make a living off.

This in part explains why the first three days of the Kickstarter campaign to create a new platform for writers to share market information and pitch stories have been so amazing.  As of right now when I’m typing this blog post Wordrates and Pitch Lab is 29% funded!

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I’m incredibly grateful to the community of writers and journalists out there who see this as a worthwhile project, and your continuing efforts to get the word out about it.  Even so, there is still a lot of work left to do to get over the finish line. We just need $4,590 more so that I can hire a web designer to start banging out the code.  However, since Kickstarter is all-or-nothing funding, if I’m even one dollar short the campaign will fail and all the pledges will go unfulfilled.

So, If you haven’t pledged yet, please consider it. Even a modest donation of $25 will get you a six months of membership and access to editorial contact information and inside market data.  There are a lot of other cool rewards, too.  If you have already pledged there are other things you can do to help out. Fundraising campaigns like these live and die by social media so please keep tweeting and posting updates on Facebook.  Post about it on Reddit (r/writing might be a good place), Digg and get your local writers groups involved.

Share this link (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/767033302/wordrates-and-pitchlab-fixing-journalism-since-mid) and maybe one day the dream of writers making a middle class living will be one step closer to reality.

Help Kickstart Wordrates & Pitchlab

I am proud to announce that this morning I’m going to do more than just write about the problems in the publishing industry. I’m going to do something about them. I’m launching a Kickstarter campaign that I hope will shift the ways that writers think about and market their work. I’m only asking for enough money to design the website. Please share this widely and lets make some great journalism together.

Here’s a link to the project:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/767033302/wordrates-and-pitchlab-fixing-journalism-since-mid

For the Safety of Journalists

A few months ago the Dart Center for Trauma and Journalism gathered together some of the top media organizations in the world and hashed out principles for ethical conduct for freelancers and publications that operate in conflict zones. The guidelines are not legally binding, but they are an important first step in reforming the often-broken relationship between publications, journalists and the stories they both want to get into print. As I’ve written over the last year, bad contracts, kill fees and uncertain payments often push freelance writers to take additional risks in conflict zones that can either result in bad reporting, or sometimes even a journalist’s life.

The guidelines issue recommendations for medical training, protective gear, risk assessment as well as transparent payment policies, and credit. They also agree that publications should be responsible for ransom and evacuation of freelancers in the same way that they would be for their own employees. These guidelines are a huge step forward from the previous era where news organizations might simply disavow a freelance writer or photographer who got in trouble while on assignment.

So far there are 60 signatories to the document, but there are still a few notable exceptions that routinely have freelance writers operating in potentially dangerous areas. It’s time to urge The New York Times, National Public Radio, Conde Nast, Wenner Media, Atlantic Media, and American Public Media to stand up for the safety of the the people who put their lives in their name.

Like many non-binding documents, only time will tell if they signatories are ready to make this more than an on-paper commitment, but something they will act on during a crisis.  I have hope that they will.

I’ll post the complete guidelines and signatories below. Please share them.

FOR JOURNALISTS ON DANGEROUS ASSIGNMENTS:

1. Before setting out on any assignment in a conflict zone or any dangerous environment, journalists should have basic skills to care for themselves or injured colleagues.

2. We encourage all journalists to complete a recognized news industry first aid course, to carry a suitable first-aid kit and continue their training to stay up-to-date on standards of care and safety both physical and psychological. Before undertaking an assignment in such zones, journalists should seek adequate medical insurance covering them in a conflict zone or area of infectious disease.

3. Journalists in active war zones should be aware of the need and importance of having protective ballistic clothing, including armored jackets and helmets. Journalists operating in a conflict zone or dangerous environment should endeavor to complete an industry-recognized hostile environment course.

4. Journalists should work with colleagues on the ground and with news organizations to complete a careful risk assessment before traveling to any hostile or dangerous environment and measure the journalistic value of an assignment against the risks.

5. On assignment, journalists should plan and prepare in detail how they will operate including identifying routes, transport, contacts and a communications strategy with daily check-in routines with a colleague in the region or their editor. Whenever practical, journalists should take appropriate precautions to secure mobile and Internet communications from intrusion and tracking.

6. Journalists should work closely with their news organizations, the organization that has commissioned them, or their colleagues in the industry if acting independently, to understand the risks of any specific assignment. In doing so, they should seek and take into account the safety information and travel advice of professional colleagues, local contacts, embassies and security personnel. And, likewise, they should share safety information with colleagues to help prevent them harm.

7. Journalists should leave next of kin details with news organizations, ensuring that these named contacts have clear instructions and action plans in the case of injury, kidnap or death in the field.

FOR NEWS ORGANIZATIONS MAKING ASSIGNMENTS IN DANGEROUS PLACES:

1. Editors and news organizations recognize that local journalists and freelancers, including photographers and videographers, play an increasingly vital role in international coverage, particularly on dangerous stories.

2. Editors and news organizations should show the same concern for the welfare of local journalists and freelancers that they do for staffers.

3. News organizations and editors should endeavor to treat journalists and freelancers they use on a regular basis in a similar manner to the way they treat staffers when it comes to issues of safety training, first aid and other safety equipment, and responsibility in the event of injury or kidnap.

4. Editors and news organizations should be aware of, and factor in, the additional costs of training, insurance and safety equipment in war zones.  They should clearly delineate before an assignment what a freelancer will be paid and what expenses will be covered.

5. Editors and news organizations should recognize the importance of prompt payment for freelancers. When setting assignments, news organizations should endeavor to provide agreed upon expenses in advance, or as soon as possible on completion of work, and pay for work done in as timely a manner as possible.

6. Editors and news organizations should ensure that all freelance journalists are given fair recognition in bylines and credits for the work they do both at the time the work is published or broadcast and if it is later submitted for awards, unless the news organization and the freelancer agree that crediting the journalist can compromise the safety of the freelancer and/or the freelancer’s family.

7. News organizations should not make an assignment with a freelancer in a conflict zone or dangerous environment unless the news organization is prepared to take the same responsibility for the freelancer’s wellbeing in the event of kidnap or injury as it would a staffer. News organizations have a moral responsibility to support journalists to whom they give assignments in dangerous areas, as long as the freelancer complies with the rules and instructions of the news organization.

In conclusion, we, the undersigned, encourage all staff and freelance journalists and the news organizations they work with to actively join in a shared commitment to safety and a new spirit of collegiality and concern.

SIGNATORY ORGANIZATIONS

Agence France Press

Al-Monitor

American Society of Journalists and Authors

Association of European Journalists (Bulgaria)

The Associated Press

Belarusian Association of Journalists

Blink

Bloomberg

British Broadcasting Corporation

Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma

Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (Mexico)

Committee to Protect Journalists

Danish Union of Journalists

Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Ena News Agency

European Federation of Journalists

Foreign Correspondents’ Club (Hong Kong)

Foro de Periodismo Argentino

Frontline Club

Frontline Freelance Register

The Frontliner (Albania)

Global Journalist Security

GlobalPost

The GroundTruth Project

Guardian News and Media Group

International Center for Journalists

International News Safety Institute

International Press Institute

International Women’s Media Foundation

James W. Foley Legacy Foundation

Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (Iraq)

Journalists in Danger (Kazakhstan)

Mashable

McClatchy DC

Miami Herald

National Press Club

National Press Photographers Association

National Union of Journalists-Philippines

NewsweekNOS News (Netherlands)

Online News Association

Overseas Press Club of America

Overseas Press Club Foundation

PBS FrontlinePress Emblem Campaign (Switzerland)

Public Radio International’s The World

Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues

Reporters Without Borders

Reuters

Rory Peck TrustSecurity First (UK)

Society of Professional Journalists

Storyhunter

Trauma Training for Journalists

Union of Journalists in Israel

USA TodayVideo News (Japan)

Words After War

Zuma Press

News organizations, journalist associations or advocacy groups interested in joining these guidelines should contact David Rohde, david.rohde@thomsonreuters.com.

– See more at: http://dartcenter.org/content/global-safety-principles-and-practices#sthash.vC9z1SrJ.dpuf

Why "Cult" is the Wrong Word

The early 1960s saw a flourishing of fringe religious groups that the press had no other word for than “cults”. It was a simpler time, and the word was meant to describe religious movements that didn’t easily fit into the established religions. The word encompassed hippies experimenting with alternative ideologies, Christian evangelicals, crystal energy healers, and back to the earth types who, might be a little odd, but basically harmless. It was hard to identify exactly what a cult was, except that there were millions of people searching for a personal connection with God. Then, in 1969 everything changed when followers of Charles Mason murdered Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of the director Roman Polanski. They coated the walls in her blood and inked the words “Helter Skelter” above the crime scene. Nine years later 800 followers of the People’s Temple killed a US congressman in Guyana and then took their own lives with cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.

After that bloody introduction the world took a new perspective on the word “cult”.  Cults weren’t harmless. They were dangerous.  They stole people from their families, brainwashed them with false ideologies and sometimes even took their lives. Today, the word brings to mind the Branch-Davidians in Waco, Texas and the exploitive practices of the Church of Scientology. There is a burgeoning field of anti-cult literature, support groups for former cult members and exit counselors whose main job is to bring people out of these groups and back to their families. It is clear that many of these groups prey on their members, take their money, and often leave them in dire straights with no one to turn to except for their charismatic leader.

When I began researching “A Death on Diamond Mountain,” it was the word on everyone’s lips. Ian Thorson’s family spent tens of thousands of dollars on exit counselors to get him out of what they called a “dangerous cult”.  The press called Michael Roach a cult leader dozens of times. One article, by the New York Times, even had some of Roach’s closest devotees using the word to describe their own practice. And yet, I have resisted calling Diamond Mountain a cult.  People have wanted to know why.

One review on NPR put it succinctly: “It’s hard to read Death on Diamond Mountain and not reach a definite verdict: Cult! But Carney lets this and other questions linger to the end.” Another written by Matthew Remski, a former Roach follower,  charges that I don’t go deep enough into anti-cult literature nor did I devote endless pages Roach’s own profound narcism.

But there is a reason that I don’t slap the “cult” label on Diamond Mountain. It would have just been too easy. Using the word would allow my readers to think of it as something wholly alien to their own religious experience. We all know that cults are inherently crazy, and once we hear the word we begin to distance ourselves from them. We become voyeurs, not participants in the story.  It’s a pejorative term that allows us to not see ourselves in the so-called “cult members.”

We forget that every great religion on earth started as a cult.  The beliefs of early Christianity were no less irrational or steeped in divine explanations that what Roach teaches at Diamond Mountain. The Cult of Mary has tens of millions of followers. The origin story of Mormonism includes golden tablets written by god and discovered by Joseph Smith in Palmyra New York. Smith was even tarred and feathered as he tried to spread the word of his new faith. The Hindu cosmology suggests that the universe sits on the back of a giant tortuous, who in turn is standing on the back of a giant turtle.  Who is to say that one irrational belief is more valid than another?

As I see it, the main difference between a cult and a religion is time. I’ve even make a formula:

Cult + Time = Religion

The great religions of the world are no more free of tragic, and even murderous, events than the cults of our age.  Christians in Salem Massachusetts burned witches at the stake.  The great Aztec faith prospered on human sacrifices. Islam has jihad and, as I recount in my book, even Buddhism had its holy wars. One monastery was happy to destroyed another one when some arcane and esoteric message was on the line.

We use the word “cult” to distance ourselves from what we think of as irrational beliefs in order to not take a good look at ourselves. Of course, many of these groups are sometimes dangerous. Many leaders use spiritual explanations in order to take advantage of their followers. And as my book lays out, Diamond Mountain is extremely problematic. But I won’t call it a cult. Doing so would let my readers off the hook from seeing how every spiritual journey holds the potential for danger.

Tantric Obsession

On Wednesday the Rubin Museum invited me to have a conversation with David Vago, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, to speak about tantric obsession and how spiritual bliss can sometimes go terribly wrong. It was a fascinating discussion in an amazing venue. Here are a few highlights.

The Enlightenment Trap

In March of 2006, Emily O’Conner was sure that she was on the cusp of enlightenment. We had spent the last seven days on a silent meditation retreat together in the holy city in India for Buddhists called Bodh Gaya. I was the director of her abroad program, and Emily was my student. Late in the night she filled her journal with a scrawl about what she had learned in the silence. She wrote that contemplating her own death was the key to deeper spiritual realizations. A few paragraphs later she wrote the words, “I’m scared that I will have this realization and go crazy.” Then, on the last page, in a paragraph all by itself, she penned her last words — a final resolution to her spiritual progress: “I am a Bodhisattva.”

When she was done writing she wrapped a shawl around her face, stood on the ledge of the three-story building, and jumped. One of the other students on the program found her body an hour later.

In Tibetan Buddhism a Bodhisattva is a fully realized being whose deep spiritual insights have opened the door to Nirvana. However, rather than stepping though the threshold, Bodhisattvas pledge to remain on earth to help other people to the same realizations. In a way, you could think of a Bodhisattva as a sort of god that exists beyond the realm of life and death. Almost three millennia earlier, in a spot less than a mile from where Emily took her own life, the man who would become known as the Buddha had a similar realization. He spent the remaining time he had on earth translating his knowledge to a growing community of followers.

I have often struggled with the apparent contradiction of how these spiritual lessons can be so profoundly beneficial for millions of people while at the same time be so profoundly damaging for a few. Indeed, even in the time of the Buddha, some of his followers pursuit of spiritual perfection ended in suicide. In the vinaya, early Buddhist writings recorded in Pali, there is a story of when Buddha asked his monks to meditate on the inevitable decay of their own bodies. He instructed them to sit in graveyards and watch bodies decay (a version of this practice called chod still exists in modern Tibetan Buddhism). Once he gave the lesson, the Buddha headed off into the mountains to mediate, trusting his flock to understand his commands. But the monks who followed the lesson were so overcome with insight that they committed suicide. Others implored a recluse monk namedMigalandika to slit their throats. When he returned, the Buddha put a stop to the carnage. The scholar Timothy Brook recently wrote that Migalandika’s story became canonized because it took aim “at the hopeless literalism that tends to arise when religious followers devise institutions they hope will enable them to live up to the ideals of an absent founder.”

This sort of literal interpretation in the face of metaphysical truths inflects the rhetoric of fundamentalists from ISIS to rogue American evangelicals. There’s no question in many of our minds that the world is more complex than the one defined by pure rationality. Science has its limitations, and any rational attempt at answering a moral question usually ends in a gray area, not in stark black or white. But people who can presume a direct connection to divine knowledge — either through textual fidelity or direct personal experience — don’t have ambiguities anymore.

The violent plague of Islamic fundamentalism in the Iraq and Syria has left hundreds of thousands of people dead in the name of an ultimate truth that is hidden from ordinary eyes. ISIS fighters carry out objectively heinous acts without a qualm to the moral order of the world they inhabit because their eyes are fixed on heaven.

In this way, the person who seeks enlightenment without regard to their own place in society risks falling into a similar disconnect that a jihadi does. A few turn violent, like the so-called “Bin Laden of Buddhism,” who encourages genocide against muslims in Burma. More frequently, the inward focus of eastern religions makes the struggle for ultimate knowledge personal, but even that turn can undermine the social order. Today the star yoga guru Bikram Choudhury appears to have rationalized his inappropriate sexual advances on his students through his spiritual insights. He now faces multiple sexual assault allegations. The same fate befell John Friend founder of Anusara Yoga a year ago and dozens of spiritual leaders from Osho toSogyal Rinpoche and Michael Roach before that. All claimed to be closer to a universal truth their their students. And they all took advantage of their power.

Of course, the danger doesn’t only lie in the teacher. Anyone searching for ultimate knowledge runs the risk of discovering their own fundamental laws of the universe. After she died, I began to research similar cases to Emily’s. I wanted to try to understand how someone could become overcome with potentially dangerous spiritual insights after a meditation retreat. To my surprise, examples proliferated. In a matter of weeks I collected six journals of people who took their own life or ended up in mental asylums. I spoke to directors of alternative universities who told me that every year they send students to mental health professionals after bad experiences on their meditation cushions. Moreover, I met Tibetan scholars who told me about a curious condition among inveterate meditators called “lung” that can drive people to the brink of insanity. The diagnosis of lung goes back centuries — long before meditation ever came to America. I interviewed a neuroscientist at Brown University who has collected hundreds of anecdotes from mediators whose progress was cut short when they began to lose touch with reality.

Raising the notion that meditation can occasionally be dangerous is not popular among practitioners. Most people correctly note that mindfulness has improved their quality of life. They point to studies that show all sorts of qualitative and quantitative improvements to cardiovascular function, memory, and even empathy. But, like all things in life, nothing is truly black and white. Meditation and spiritual inquiry can be beneficial, maybe even necessary, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t risks.

I can never know why Emily killed herself, but it strikes me as the sort of tragedy that people who are trying to live spiritual lives try to shy away from. It is undoubtedly worthwhile to search for spiritual insights.

We can uncover deep and hidden parts of our own psyches in the process and perhaps become better people. The problem begins when the search ends. Just like the monks in Migalandika’s time, Emily believed that she had reached a sort communion with a divine truth. Enlightenment was a destination that she could observe just like a natural law. And her insight meant that she was infallible. Her journey was complete. At that point, what would it matter if she took her own life?

Enlightenment, if it exists, may be a goal worth striving for, but it is not worth achieving. While we may never understand the ultimate clockwork that makes the universe work — whether it is the law of karma or grace from a benevolent God — one thing that we do know is that people who claim to understand ultimate knowledge most often don’t feel that they need to follow the same rules as everyone else.

Scott Carney (scottcarney.com) is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. His book A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness and the Path to Enlightenment comes out on March 17.

Editors weigh in on market pitching

A few weeks ago I posted about the relative merits of market versus silo pitching and the post kicked up a lot of conversation around the internet. Yesterday Lesley Evans Ogden reached out to a few editors to see what they thought of the practice. Her piece “Simultaneous Pitching: Views from the Other Side of the Desk” has responses from seven editors, including one that I have known for four or five years (who somehow got my name wrong).

Of course, there’s no reason for editors to like the fact that they might have to compete for particular ideas. So I was happily surprised to see how open most of them were to the fact that the notion that simultaneous pitching is just a fact of the industry. While one or two bristled at the idea that not every pitch they receive might be truly exclusive, they also grudgingly admitted that it could take weeks to even read an idea. One wrote  that the ten minutes that they have to dedicate to reading a pitch can be a burden to an already packed work day. This of course assumes that it isn’t a burden to freelancer to wait in some sort of queue, possibly weeks, for an up or down answer that should only take minutes. What happens to that freelancer if the editor says no? There are only 52 weeks in a year, how many chances can an idea get at bat before it is stale?

All the editors did seem to agree that even if a pitch does get accepted into a magazine, it usually changes as writer and editor work together. And, from this perspective, you could say that there is no such thing as multi-pitching, anyway, since the final product will always adapt to the specific publication.

Tracy Hyatt, Editor, WestworldBC Magazine, notes:

“Back when I started 15 years ago, it [simultaneous pitching] was a no-no because every publication wanted to have exclusive content… Nowadays, we’re seeing a lot of the content repeated all over the place. So you don’t really have any exclusivity on any content, or any ideas for that matter.”

It’s definitely a worthwhile read. It also seems to clear the way for an idea that I’ve been working on to transform the way that ideas get to the market. Keep an eye on this website. Big things are going to

An (almost) Deadly Journey on Diamond Mountain

In 2012 Ian Thorson and his wife Lama Christie McNally attempted to find spiritual perfection on a mountain top in Arizona. Only a few loyal followers knew where they were and the supply drops were increasingly sporadic. Water was scarce, but they collected what they could of it in a tarp and a plastic jug after a lucky snowfall. They lived there for almost a month before Christie and then Ian fell sick with dysentery. At first Ian was filled with rage by his plight–going as far as hitting himself on the head with a piece of hard plastic in the cave. They packed an emergency locator beacon and a cell phone with them, but Christie waited three days before she sent out a call for help. It was too late for Ian.

Two months after Ian Thorson died her the arms I traveled to Arizona to try to understand the world through his eyes. I wanted to know why she hadn’t pushed the button that would have saved his life earlier. I wanted to see the place where it happened and feel desolate climate of this part of the world. Most importantly, I wanted to see the cave where Ian spent the last month of his life.

The journey could have killed me.

People at Diamond Mountain all told me that even though they knew where the cave was, no one wanted to visit it. Bad things had happened there and no one wanted to tempt fate.  The sheriff Larry Noland implored me waive off my expedition. He tried to scare me with storiesof poisonous cacti, impossible heat, bears and rattlesnakes in every rocky crevasse. But I was adamant and convinced a local rancher to escort me at least part of the way.

It was only a mile and a half, but it was the hardest hike of my life.  It also turned out that Noland was right on almost every scary story that he told me. I heard rattle snakes, got stuck by a poisonous cacti. Luckily there were no bears.

What I did discover, though, was that McNally and Thorson spent their last days together in a small cave that offered magnificent views the retreat valley below, but very few amenities to support them. At one point the cave had been home to a Hohokom Indian who had stashed, but never recovered, a giant pot of grain on the dirt floor. I also learned that merely visiting the spot was dangerous enough to almost kill me. The rancher, Jerry, turned back after I pushed up a steep gravel slope. He was out of water and thought it too risky to continue.  I pushed on and found the cave. Getting back, however, was even more difficult than coming up.

This is a video I shot on my way back down. I think the pain in my voice explains much more than I ever could with with a keyboard.

This was the beginning of a project that would take me almost two years to complete. First with a story in Playboy magazine, and later as a book “A Death on Diamond Mountain“

Inside Pacific Standard Interview where I swear like...

A week or so ago Noah Davis, who writes a column for Pacific Standard called How Do You Make a Living, noticed the posts that I’d been doing about the broken model for freelance writing in this country. The series explores career paths as diverse as taxidermy to puzzle makers, but very few industries are as coercive or just plainly unfair as freelance writing.One thing, however, did surprise me when I read this interview. Apparently when someone asks me about the freelance business I can’t help but to swear like a sailor. It’s not something that I realize that I’m doing, but I guess this really does get under my skin.  Below are a few excerpts. Or hell, just read the full interview here.

When I first started writing, I did a lot for free. Even getting paid $0.10/word felt like a victory. That’s part of the problem, yes?

 “. . .We need to look at stories as works of art instead of as a raw commodity. Magazines, however, buy articles as commodities. The $2/word rate, which is the standard at most major magazines, is essentially saying that the war correspondent who went to Afghanistan, got shot at 500 times, and came back with this killer narrative should get paid the same amount as someone who sat down with Katy Perry for two hours and wrote something really bubbly. It’s a completely fucked up way to think about the value of writing.” 

So are the economics of writing going to keep getting worse?

This depends on writers getting a spine and standing up for their work. It’s already pretty clear that writers can’t make a living in the current system. It’s apparent that you can’t actually survive by getting paid $0.60/word or whatever people are getting paid on the Web these days. If you feel like it’s an honor to get published on MensJournal.com, NewYorker.com, or, hell, even the New Yorker, you’re not going to be able to put food on your plate. Honor doesn’t have any market value at the grocery store.

Fragile Freelancers and the Fate of Journalism

Earlier this month Project Word released a one-of-a-kind survey on the ways that freelance journalists make their livings. The 34-page report, titled “Untold Stories: A Survey of Freelance Investigative Reporters,” was part of a collaboration between 22 different journalism organizations and included responses from more than 200 investigative reporters. To no one’s surprise, the survey found that freelances are in in dire straights.Among the more shocking revelations were that:

• 44% of respondents said they were being paid less now than 5 years ago. 22% said that their income was half no than what it used to be.

• Inadequate support for investigative journalism has deprived the public of a minimum of nearly 600 stories that could have served the public good.

• 92% of 137 freelancers reported experiencing “anxiety on a daily basis over finances.

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The study lays out the plight of increasingly marginal freelancers in visceral detail, and peppers in writer’s own language for how they have struggled to make their livings.  Amidst bad contracts, limited reprint rights, declining pay, endless debt, and anxiety ultimately freelance investigative journalism is more charity than a career path.Here are my favorite three quotes:And since it pertains to the work I’ve been doing to crowdsource journalism rates.

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This also seems like a great idea:

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While it expertly lays out the plight of freelance reporters, the survey fails to suggest any innovative solutions. It calls for increased levels of external funding, streamlined grant processes and logistical support for in-depth reporting projects, but fails to take into account the increasingly predatory practices that publishers use to take advantage of freelance labor. It is true that some publications are struggling to make ends meet. However, even the publications who are almost literally rolling in giant piles of money continually fail to share their revenues with their writers.Take, for instance, this excerpt from

Mat Honan

‘s December piece in Wired titled “

Inside the Buzz-Fueled Media Startups Battling for Your Attention

” which explores how big media companies are adapting to new distribution models and reaping fortunes in the process. He points to the multi-billion dollar valuations of Vice, Vox and Buzzfeed and breaks down the reliable revenue streams at his own publication. One amazing infographic shows exactly how much money Wired made that issue:

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According to those numbers, the print issue that Honan’s article appeared in grossed a minimum of $2.7 million in December. While I don’t know exactly what web traffic Wired gets, it is likely that the magazine earned at least another million online. Compare that to what they paid their journalists. I checked out the masthead and started counting stories. The issue contained only 3 proper multi-page feature articles and 23 one to two page stories. All together the magazine barely published 20,000 words. Since Wired pays its writers $2-$3 per word, that means at the very most the magazine shelled out the equivalent of a single half-page of advertising on journalism. While Honan argues that the future of new media will depend on the quality of the articles that they write, it’s clear that publications do not value their writers enough to pay them fairly.

Instead of simply taking the story that magazine fortunes are declining at face value, it would have been more helpful for Project Word to hold publishers accountable for the precarious positions that they put their workers in. Solving writerly woes shouldn’t depend on charity from external funding institutions, but reforming the existing markets to include journalists in the proceeds of the business.

On his own part, Honan has since left Wired and gone on to become a bureau chief at Buzzfeed.

Why ISIS probably isn't selling organs

In the last few weeks disturbing reports surfaced out of Iraq that the stating that the Islamic militant group ISIS had expanded its terror operations to include organ trafficking. The reports originate from a lone official in the Iraqi embassy and reference dozens of bodies in mass graves missing their internal organs.  The story has since been reported everywhere from fringe new sources like the Jewish Press and the right-wing Freedom Center all the way to more respectable outlets like CNN. FOX news has jumped all over the organ harvesting story and repeated it in numerous reports. In the last week I’ve received two interview requests from major news organizations who were aware of my book The Red Market and wanted me to comment.

It’s true that there is a long history of organ theft  during times of war–most notably during the war in Kosovo and more recently Israel security forces in Palestine. I have no illusions that ISIS would be happy to get into the organ trafficking business if it meant that they could make a little money to support their ongoing terrorist operations. However, I just don’t believe that the reports are credible or that ISIS really has the infrastructure to make it work.

In the six years that I spent investigating organ trafficking networks the recipient and the donor were always in the same city when the operation took place. This usually meant that the recipient flew to India, Pakistan, China or Egypt and the donor was sourced from a prison or a nearby slum. Sometimes they were paid, sometimes they were kidnapped. Occasionally both the donor and the recipient would fly to a Caribbean Island or South Africa for the operation.  I never have heard of a single case of a kidney or heart being harvested in one country illegally and then being sent by air to another one.

The reason boils down to logistics. Transplants are highly coordinated affairs and require the cooperation from hospitals, ambulance services, laboratories, police, customs officials and other government agencies. Everything needs to be timed perfectly or the brief window of keeping the organ alive for transplant will pass.

In order to reduce the possibility of rejection n donor organ should be HLA matched to its recipient. This needs to be done in advance. In China death row and political prisoners are often tissue typed while incarcerated. Their executions are preformed on demand in order to facilitate transplants. It is still technically possible to dose someone with enough immune-supresant drugs that HLA matching is necessary, but turning off the recipient’s immune system carries other serious health risks. Non-matched transplants are really only ever done in times of extreme duress.

If you consider the reports from Iraq, the allegations of organ trafficking just seem, well, far fetched. Even if ISIS did want to get into the organ business, how would they coordinate the mass execution of prisoners with their intended recipients?  The reports say that ISIS killed more than a dozen doctors who refused to preform the operations. How many of the remaining surgeons in the city would be qualified? Some reports suggest that the organs are headed to Europe. So, now we’re asked to believe that somehow a flight from an ISIS controlled area isn’t considered suspicious. Can we imagine that a team of people from this plane being expedited through customs and to a European hospital with a package that says it’s a live organ?

Forget the fact that they could just as easily get a cheap and reliable illegal organ transplant in South Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil or India without going to a war zone, perhaps the recipient flies into Iraq, instead. If so, why do they need to harvest the kidneys from several prisoners at once?  Won’t one kidney do just fine?  Or, are we to assume that the business is to busy that there are twelve simultaneous transplants going on at the local bomb-blasted hospital? That’s a feat that even John’s Hopkins would find challenging.

Of course, it might be possible that one or two black market transplant are happening in ISIS controlled territory. But these wouldn’t be for-profit affairs. I can imagine that perhaps some ISIS commander or his family member might have kidney failure and they turn to their prisoners as a source of replacement body parts. It might indeed be possible to convince a doctor to preform the operation under duress. But to think that this is a reliable revenue stream is pure fantasy.

It is far more likely that the reports of mutilated bodies with organs torn out were actually the result of torture. The New York Times reports, there’s a video going around of an ISIS fighter removing the organ of an executed prisoner and then taking a bite. This is also a terrible and horrible thing. It’s just not organ trafficking.

Let me propose another narrative for why the media is so fascinated with this story. Perhaps people are so disturbed by the atrocities that ISIS is committing on a daily basis that we want to make them seem even more depraved then they are. It’s the same tendency that some people have to suggest that Hitler didn’t only perpetrate the Holocaust, but was also a warlock involved in evil occult practices. Wasn’t the holocaust bad enough? In the present day, what is worse than mad-dog boogeymen cutting out the organs of their helpless prisoners and selling them back to us? So yes, while ISIS is evil and responsible for some of the most reprehensible crimes I can imagine. I can’t imagine that they’re sophisticated enough to be successful in the organ business. At least, not yet.

What Hollywood can teach Magazine Writers

How is it that a screenwriter in Hollywood can get paid a six figure salary by simply giving a movie studio the option to see their work before anyone else does? How are some authors able to convince publishers to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars on their book advances? And, why is it that freelance journalists are almost perpetually broke and rarely make more than two dollars a word?

The answer to these questions lies in the history of these different industries. At one point most journalists had staff jobs at newspapers or on the mastheads of magazines. They were expected to produce a lot of material, had stable salaries and their work pretty much always belonged to the companies they worked for. Hollywood and book publishing were different. No one was guaranteed work. Writers came up with their own ideas and then sold them to movie studios and publishers on a freelance basis. They hired agents who knew the industry, looked out for their interests and held auctions to drive up the price of their work. Book publishers and studios paid the increasingly high prices and still turned a profit.

In the last decade the rise of the internet led magazines and newspapers to drastically reduce the size of their staffs. Now they produce a lot more content but have to rely on freelance labor to produce it. And here is where the problem started. They kept the old model of keeping all the rights for themselves, but never offered their freelancer workers stability in exchange. For some reason–most likely the general sense of inferiority that most writers feel–freelance journalists never fought to have their work sell at a market rate. They often gave up their movie rights and accepted kill fees and chronically late payments by the publications they worked for. The major publishing houses had no reason to raise rates and today they spend less than .6% of their gross revenues paying writers. Meanwhile, those publishers post quarterly reports that reflect multi-billion dollar valuations.

Today it’s almost impossible to make a living as a freelance writer without having a job on the side or a generous spouse to support your work. Even the most successful freelancers out there–I count myself among their numbers–know that you don’t make money from magazines, but from the book and TV deals that come afterwards. This doesn’t have to be the case. Being a journalist could actually be a middle class profession again. There’s a way to change the industry for the better.

Writers need to take a page from Hollywood and start fighting for better pay and stronger copyright. They need to hire agents to represent their very best work and force multiple publications to bid for the right to publish it. Of course, magazine publishers will resist at first. Some writers will lose assignments in the process. However, it will soon become clear to them that in order to publish the best stories magazines will have to give writers a cut of advertising revenues. When you take into account the incredibly high rate that magazines sell advertising for, this might mean that some writers could command as much as $20 for every published word–which would put them on par with what has become industry standard 10% royalty rate among book publishers.

For the last few weeks I’ve been talking to some of the highest profile literary agents and writers in the country in an attempt to suss out how feasible it would be to start a literary agency for magazine writers. Instead of pitching a magazine, writers would pitch the agency. And the agency would work for them to get the very best rate possible. For this to work, it will need to attract the best writers in the country to join the effort. It will need to become a broker of amazing ideas: an exclusive destination for top-notch reporting.

In other words, it will have to be the sort of effort that made being a script writer or book writer a viable profession. It is something that we could make happen together.

__

UPDATE: There are a few ways to fight back. I recently started offering an online video course teaching some of the tricks that I use to negotiate better contracts, and grow my freelancing business from nothing to becoming a New York Times bestselling author. It might be useful for you. Check it out.

Brian William and the Myth of the Intrepid Tv...

For almost a decade NBC anchor Brian Williams has repeated a story that when he was reporting from Iraq the helicopter he was flying in was hit by a rocket propelled grenade. It turns out that he was lying and for the last week he has been at the center of a media whirlwind with people across the country calling for his resignation. After he apologized, investigative sleuths dug deeper into other statements that he has made over the years and it appears that quite a few of his stories don’t check out. A lot of digital ink has been spilled on the affair, but I think that there is a larger issue at stake that has a lot more to do with the American public’s lack of knowledge about the media rather than Williams’ own statements.

Television is a medium for entertainment, and just about everything that appears on it is carefully produced behind the scenes. While it often appears that television hosts are investigating black markets, on the front lines of a war, or painstakingly filing FOIA requests to uncover government corruption on their own, the truth is that while the information they may present might be accurate and fact checked, the representation you see is almost always a fabrication. Before an anchor appears in the field producers, researchers, fixers and investigators have already tracked down leads, scouted potential locations, shot B-roll and prepped the interviewees and had them fill out release forms. When the anchor arrives on the scene the story is wrapped up in a tight little package and most of the time all the host has to do is shoot a few hours of film and then fly hope to begin prepping another story. The host gets the credit for the story and the TV viewing audience gets to identify with a single personality from one broadcast to another.

The end result is that TV journalists–and to some degree the big names in print and radio as well–are able to craft an outsized image of intrepid journalists working under dangerous conditions. They seem to be able to accomplish amazing feats of investigation almost every night as they scoot around the world and are always in the right place at the right moment.  It’s all fiction. Hosts are characters, not journalists.

This holds true for any news personality you see. Whether it’s Anderson Cooper , Shane Smith, Lisa Ling, Diane Sawyer or Mike Rowe all of them benefit and take credit for the work of their staff. These hosts are often called “the talent” by the channels they work for, much to the chagrin of the people who actually do the groundwork that enables the veneer.

Given that this is the general state of the media, is it really any shock that Williams might make up a story about being shot at while on the job? The whole career path is based on the fiction that he is always at the center of the action. The job description includes him helicoptering into the middle of a developing story, shooting a few minutes and then flying back out to safety. The stories that he made up of being in the middle of the action help to cement his reputation with the general public and are simply an extension of the sorts of news shows that viewers demand.

We want to see hosts who are in the middle of things. We want to believe that the journalists that we have a nightly relationship with on the screen are the real deal. But it’s an impossible image to sustain. There is no way that Williams, or any other host, could actually do that amount of work even if they are supremely talented, as I have no doubt Williams is. I’ve been an investigative journalist for almost ten years and while I have been in the middle of “the action” a few times–held up by child soldiers, shadowed by hit men, and confronted organ traffickers–those events are extremely rare. Most of the time I sit at a desk and do the ground work for my stories all on my own. A full investigation can take six months to a year and only result in one tantalizing anecdote.  The reason that Williams and other hosts are able to present the image that they do is because there are dozens of people like me working behind them to set up the scenes.

Williams shouldn’t have lied. It did a disservice to the soldiers who actually were under fire that day. However, if the media is going to crucify him for his accounts they should also take this time to acknowledge that much of what the see on TV isn’t exactly true, either.

How kill fees ruin writers, hurt magazines and destroy...

Just about every journalism contract contains a clause called a “kill fee” that states that if the magazine decides not to run a particular story then it will pay out only a fraction of the agreed upon rate. The writer is then free to sell the story to another publication. The logic behind this policy is that the clause is insurance so that a writer won’t simply accept a contract and then write a half-baked and poorly reported story and then run off with the full payment. Unfortunately the kill fee serves a much more diabolical role in the modern magazine industry. Not only it is bad for writers, it also exposes magazines to potential libel suits and degrades the overall quality of journalism in America.

Last week I had a conversation with a former editor at the New York Times Magazine who told me that they kill between 1/4 and 1/3 all assignments they issued to their on-contract writers. The magazine killed a much higher percentage of stories that they assigned to freelancers who weren’t already on the masthead.

While a kill fee is supposed to be insurance against bad writing, the NYT magazine was using it in a different way. A story can be killed for literally any reason: not only because of poor quality, but because an editor no longer thinks an idea is fresh, or that a character doesn’t “pop” on the page, or the piece was covered in another magazine between the time it was assigned and then scheduled to be published. (Those are three reasons that I’ve had stories killed over the years). Instead publications now routinely use the kill fee system as a way to increase the overall pool of material they can choose from to publish.  They intentionally over-assign and account for a certain percentage of killed pieces in advance.  Stories that are on the bottom of their list don’t make the cut.  This policy has nothing to do with the quality of what a writer submits, rather a business model that intentionally transfers risks reporting onto the backs of their authors.

Anyone who has written for a major publication knows that there is a wide gap between what a writer pitches to a magazine and what they encounter when they are actually reporting a piece in the field. This is the basic  disconnect between any proposal and the reality on which that proposal hangs. There is no guarantee that when a reporter gets out into the field that they will find the juicy narrative anecdotes that will make a piece sing on the page. Still, the only way to find out what is happening in the world is to actually do the work, travel to the locations, report the hell out of what you find and then try to write it up.

Let me give an example. A year or two ago I took an assignment with the NYTimes magazine about an epidemic of counterfeit drugs in India that had been reported on by several NGOs. The pitch went well and I flew across the world to look for evidence. When I got to Delhi, however, it turned out that the issue was essentially made up by major pharmaceutical companies in order to keep their market share secure from loose Indian patent laws. It was a different issue from the one I pitched, and the editor wasn’t interested in the actual facts.  I spent a month searching for evidence of a large-scale counterfeit market that Big Pharma had promised but couldn’t find anything strong enough. When I came back to America I sent the best draft of the piece I could to my editor. He didn’t like it. So I rewrote it. He wanted stronger anecdotes, so I rewrote it again. Over the course of the next seven months I rewrote the draft at least 9 times from scratch looking for better angles and more powerful anecdotes.  In the end the editor, who never really gave me much useful feedback despite my endless rewrites,  killed the piece. The NYTimes issued me a 25% fee as per the terms of their contract.  I had spent the better part of a year working on the story.

There are two major problems with this. First, I worked in good faith that the story I published would eventually appear in the pages of the magazine. If the same editor had hired a painter to slap a new coat of paint on his house, but at the end of the day decided to that the color wasn’t quite right, he would still have to pay the painter a full rate for the work that he did do.  Apparently the same rules don’t apply to writers.  Instead I had spent a great deal of effort on a piece that not only would never appear in print, but that I didn’t even receive the expected fee for.

For those unconcerned about writer’s finances lets talk about the second problem. Think instead of what this does to a journalist in the field whose paycheck, rent, insurance, loan payments and everything else literally depends on the salaciousness of their story. The journalist may have an incentive to take extra risks during their reporting–going to increasingly hostile and difficult terrain in the hopes of finding the right salacious anecdote. Or, perhaps even more disheartening, they might decide that the only way to get full pay is to simply make things up. In the last decade the media has been racked by one journalism scandal after another where poorly reported stories resulted in lawsuits and made the public at large distrust major news organizations. Just this year a Rolling Stone reporter completely failed to check a rape allegations at UVA resulting in what will likely be a costly libel lawsuit. Would it be any shock if the reporter worried that her story might get killed if her details weren’t cover worthy enough that she was seduced by the perfect anecdote? Who is to say that I wouldn’t have been able to save my story, seven months of work and 75% of my income if I had just played a little more fast and loose with the anecdotes that I came up with when I was reporting in India? Certainly I had incentive to do so. The only thing that stopped me was a general sense of propriety in my work.

If, on the other hand, publications paid people for the work that they actually conduct in the field, then there would be less financial pressure to take extra risks or make up facts while on assignment. Publications, in turn, would have to worry a little bit less about the safety of their reporters and the quality of journalism that they publish. It’s not as if the major magazines don’t have enough money to pay writers for the work they do in the field. Last year the New York Times posted a profit of $92 million. Conde Nast, the publisher of GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker in turn, spends less than 1% of its gross revenues on words.

The policy of magazines paying almost nothing for killed stories needs to change. When a reporter goes into the field they need to be secure in the knowledge that the magazine has their back even if the world turns out to be more complex than the original pitch.  Killing the kill fee would be good for writers and good for the magazines they write for.

__UPDATE: This, of course is pretty bad news for freelancers, but there are a few ways to fight back. I recently started offering an online video course teaching some of the tricks that I use to negotiate better contracts, and grow my freelancing business from nothing to becoming a New York Times bestselling author.  It might be useful for you. Check it out.

Are you Pitching to Silo or a Market?

At this point it’s no secret that writers get a pretty lousy deal in the publishing business. Every day someone asks me if there’s a way to fight back. In fact, there’s one common practice that writers take on that hobbles them from the very start, and it’s our fault that the problem exists at all. Most journalism schools, editors, and old-time-freelancers advise new writers to only pitch one magazine at a time when they are trying to sell a story. In turn, most editors assume that pitches are exclusive material and will go as far as to say that they wont even consider an idea if another publication is reviewing it as well. This is called “silo pitching”, and it’s the surest route to penury for a writer.

That silo pitching is the standard method to market story ideas to publications is indicative of just how scared writers are of the people they work for. Most writers tell me that they would never take their ideas out to multiple publications because they worry they might be blacklisted and never find work again. Loyalty, they say, also has its perks because a good editorial relationship might secure future assignments. Unfortunately the loyalty that writers feel to their editors is rarely reciprocated. At the mainstream magazines editors almost always take a very long time to respond to pitches. Even after an initial expression of interest, an assignment can take months—yes months–to finally receive a green light. Sometimes editors don’t even bother to respond in the first place which means that a good idea that might have found a home at another magazine could malinger and die in the inbox of the first editor you sent it to.

A more serious problem with silo pitching is that by extending exclusivity to a single magazine in advance means the the writer has effectively given up any ability to negotiate the contract when it comes time to sign. There’s never a chance to allow the market to value a writers’ work by getting input from multiple potential buyers. Instead the writer has almost no option than accept whatever deal the magazine puts up. This is why bad deals are now the industry standard. Forget the lamentable payment terms, most magazines now also suck away film and reprint rights, offer low kill fees, and won’t pay their writers until months, and in some cases, years after the magazine has appeared in print. 

Silo pitching completely violates any attempt for a writer to receive a market value for their work.

 In Hollywood and in book publishing exclusivity deals are well compensated. A good script writer might make upwards of $50,000 a year from a single studio just so that they have the right of first refusal on whatever they come up with. That journalists give away this right by default shows just how sick this business actually is.

The solution, of course, is simple. It’s called “market pitching,” which is exactly the model that exists in Hollywood and book publishing. In a market pitch a writer puts together their very best material (I can’t stress this enough: your pitch needs to be a work of art) and then takes it out to every potential publication on the market.  While each publication might get a slightly tweaked version of the story, the idea is fairly straight forward: if the idea is good enough you will get multiple offers. At the very least this might mean the difference between a feature that runs 5000 words or something that runs as little more than a long paragraph in the front of the book.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago I pitched a story to thirty magazines about the death of a single mediatory in the mountains of Arizona. After far too long, I received an offer from the Atlantic for a 1000 word piece that would run in the front of the magazine. It wasn’t nearly long enough for the story that I wanted to write. Luckily I’d also pitched Playboy and they came back a day later with an offer to run a full feature at 6500 words. It was more than six times the money. If I had only pitched the Atlantic I would have never gotten the deal that eventually matured into my forthcoming book “A Death on Diamond Mountain”. Even worse, if I had only written to the New Yorker and waited for months for them to never respond, I would never have written a story at all.

Of course, another advantage of market pitching is that it also give you leverage to negotiate publishing contracts. Standard contracts at different magazines might vary widely, and some publications are more open to negotiating contract points than others.

At the very least, market pitching offers a writer the ability to say that they got the best deal available for their work. If you pitch 20 magazines and only one gives an offer, then maybe the deal they give you really IS what your story was worth. Then again, if three or four offers come in then you have the ability to take the best deal on the table. Now think about what happens if you come across an important story that every magazine wants to have in its pages. Something that will likely steer the national conversation for a few days or weeks?  There’s no reason why you couldn’t hold an auction and have magazines bid for the right to have you. In that case the sky is the limit for payment because the magazine knows that it will be able to sell more advertisements–often for upwards of six figures each–if they have your story in their pages.  It’s entirely possible that a writer in an auction could receive hundreds of thousands of dollars for the right story.

Of course, writers are incredibly reticent to try market pitching because it seems risky. Writers cherish their relationships with editors and often worry that playing one magazine off of another for a better deal will put them on some sort of black list. I admit that this is possible. But any editor that doesn’t understand the pressures that freelancers face is probably not worth working with anyway. Risking the ire of one person is not a reason to submit yourself to a life of poverty. Instead, take heart in a depressing fact about the publishing industry today: most magazines have an incredibly high turnover rate. While you may cherish your relationship with a particular editor, most editors wont last in their positions more than a few years without moving on. Call me cynical if you like, but in my ten years as a freelancer I’ve learned that just about anyone you upset will be at another publication pretty soon, or, more likely, end up in an entirely different field.

It’s far more important to cultivate a market strategy than worry about any one particular person’s feelings. After all, it’s not personal. It’s business.

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UPDATE: This, of course is pretty bad news for freelancers, but there are a few ways to fight back. I recently started offering an online video course teaching some of the tricks that I use to negotiate better contracts, and grow my freelancing business from nothing to becoming a New York Times bestselling author.  It might be useful for you. Check it out.

The case for 20$ per word

WARNING: I’m about to make statement that is so revolutionary that you might begin to question my sanity. It’s a goal for writers that will seem not only unattainable, but impossible: as if I’ve been living on an entirely different planet. What I’m going to propose is that writers at mainstream magazines–particularly the ones in the Conde Nast empire, but also Wenner Media, and Hearst–should be paid not only a living wage, but one that values them in the same way that magazines sell their writing to advertisers.  I’m going to suggest that writers at the top magazines in America should make at least $20 per word.

The number is ten times the standard going rate of $2 that most magazines pay (check out current rates at my crowdsourced Google Doc).  However, given the current economics of the industry, I have to argue that it also is the only fair rate for our work after you account for how much print advertisements sell for. Take for instance the fact that average rate that Conde Nast sells a single page of advertising to their clients for is about $130,000. Magazines vary pretty widely in their page count, but over the last few days I’ve counted the adds in about a dozen different issues and the smallest magazines have about 30 ads, the fattest more than 100. For argument’s sake, lets saw that the average Conde Nast magazine has 50 pages of advertising. After they give their clients a steep discount, they reap about $70,000 per page in revenues. It’s pretty conservative to say that a run of the mill Conde Nast magazine makes at least $3.5 million per issue. At the very most, the fattest mags in the empire run about 40,000 words for a total payout of $80,000 to writers. That’s only  1% of its gross revenues dedicated to words. However, if you were to ask just about any reader I’m pretty sure that they would tend to agree that words and stories make up more than 1% of the value of a magazine.

(At some point people here are gonna say, “what about the New Yorker?” they barely have any ads. I admit they’re a bit of a special case, but bear with me. If you average the payouts across all of Conde Nast they you also have to include Glamour, Vogue, Self and Lucky, which more or less are simply books full of ads with very little original content at all.)

 The really radical thing that I’d like to suggest is that the budget for writers should reflect their actual value to the industry. To figure out what that is I’m going to borrow a page from the book publishing business–something that as the author of two books, I know a little bit about. In the publishing contracts that I’ve signed I get paid between 8% and 12.5% of the gross revenues that my books sell. The remaining 87.5%  –  92% of the revenues are enough to fully fund distribution, pay editors, print copies of the book, employ a marketing staff and everything else that I didn’t list here. Indeed, that split still allows book publishers to make pretty decent revenue overall.

So how did I come up with $20 per word? Multiplication. If we were to make just 10% of the gross revenues of a given magazine then we would earn at least $20 for every word we publish.

Think about it. We’re the ones who come up with the ideas for our stories and execute them. Sometimes we travel to potentially dangerous locations–I can remember at least one story I wrote for Wired where I was surrounded by men with guns and swords who would have been happy to take my life if I’d said the wrong thing. They might cover our travel expenses, but we craft the narratives that become movies and book deals. And we always run the risk of having our stories killed and not getting paid for our work.  We deserve at least the same fair shake that book writers get.

Of course some people will crow the common fallacy that the magazine business is dying.  How on earth could writers ask for a larger slice of the pie when print pubs are shutting their doors left and right? Well, according to their own press releases Conde Nast is not embattled. It’s actually turning a profit. There are more ad pages every year since the recession. There’s more internet presence. And even the New Yorker, which traditionally looses about $20 million a year, is in the black.  Need more proof? Lets look at its executive leadership. The company is owned by Samuel Newhouse Jr. whose current net worth is $8.2 billion. That’s a lot of money. It’s enough money to Conde Nast to have a huge architecturally amazing building in Times Square–the most expensive real-estate in the country and then buy a  second 104 floor office building on Wall Street with over a million square feet of office space. Meanwhile, if you pooled all of the payouts to writers by Conde Nast on any given year into one pool, we would barely be able to collectively afford the median price for a three bedroom flat in the same city.

Journalists and writers have long suffered from an inadequacy complex. The assumption is that it’s an honor to break into the mainstream publishing business, and they mostly just sign the contracts offered to them without bothering to offer a counter proposal or even ask for a higher rate. Over the years this attitude has allowed publishers to assume that words are not very valuable on their own. This is our own fault. But if we started to demand out fair share and turning down terrible contacts then perhaps we’d be able to show magazine publishers that our words are worth more than just 1% of what they sell our words for to other people.

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UPDATE: This, of course is pretty bad news for freelancers, but there are a few ways to fight back. I recently started offering an online video course teaching some of the tricks that I use to negotiate better contracts, and grow my freelancing business from nothing to becoming a New York Times bestselling author.  It might be useful for you. Check it out.