WHAT IF THEY STARTED A MAGAZINE AND NOBODY WROTE?
The publisher of the paper I work for recently said that he had discovered the dirty little secret of publishing: underpaying writers. The first piece I got paid to write netted me $15. That was in 1979. Twenty-six years later, the paper for which I work pays $25 to $50 per article. If you drive a very small car, publishing an article still, just about, pays for one tank of gas. Of course, if you had to do any driving to report for that article you would end up in the monetary hole.

Granted, there are writers who make much more money than the amount paid by community newspapers. On the whole, however, writers are the lowest paid members of whatever industry they work within. Copywriters make less in the advertising world than account executive or creative directors. Newspaper reporters make less than publishers or salespeople. Notoriously, screenwriters make far less than almost anyone else who is instrumental in getting movie made.

The pragmatic Dorothy Allison once pointed out that, “you write because you have to, not because you’re going to get rich.” She said this to a group of women who were taking a class she was teaching that was sponsored by the City of San Francisco. This class coincided with the several month period during which she was competing for the National Book Award for her novel “Bastard Out of Carolina.” “Look at me,” she remarked, “I wrote a book and was nominated for an award, and I still have to teach. You write for love. And for most people, writing will always be a second job.”

It is that love of words, and the inherent necessity that some individuals feel to write, that keeps the media world chugging along — and keeps publishers in the black while their content creators see red.

The alternative media is no exception to this rule. Though the members of the Association of Alternative Newspapers (AAN) like to portray themselves as nobler than their corporate counterparts, the sad reality is that corporations own most of the alternative weeklies in America. For writers the evolution of the weekly from independently owned to what it is today has been disastrous.

At the beginning, reporters and writers at AAN papers did write for love, for clips and mostly for peanuts. As the papers grew more profitable, writers benefited by getting larger salaries, though never comparable to the money publishers and sales managers were pulling down. A few papers, like New York’s venerable Village Voice, were finally forced to pay writers a living wage, when its writers joined a union.

That changed last week when editor-in-chief Don Forst announced to senior editors, at the 50-year-old Voice, that pay for a large portion of the paper’s content would be cut 20 to 45 percent. Just six weeks earlier the union had negotiated a new contract for writers, which definitely had not cut pay for writing.

The staff believes this is management’s way of getting pay in line with the rates paid by New Times, the “golden arches” of the AAN corporations — notorious for buying papers, firing the staffs and making the papers into cookie cutter versions of their neo-con-spewing mother-ship, the Phoenix New Times. Rumor has it, that New Times is swooping down to snatch up the Voice.

Voice writers and their union are threatening action in the form of a walk-out. It sounds grand, this idea that writers will rise up and demand a living wage, or stop creating content. The reality is, that newspapers, across the board — not to mention magazines, agencies and other businesses that depend on editorial content — are paying lower wages than they did during the ‘90s. (This is true of almost all businesses, as it is a buyers’, not a sellers’ market in terms of employment these days.) If the Voice writers walk out and refuse to work, it will be more difficult for them to find comparable jobs, than it will be for the managers to find a new crop of writers willing to work for the love of seeing their name in 14 point type.

One can almost picture the managers of these companies sitting around, assuring themselves that all they’ll need to do is call some relatively literate bloggers to come fill in. The reality is, that might just work. Let’s hope for the sake of the Voice writers, and, in the end, all writers, that the desire to be published will be outweighed by the desire to show that content shouldn’t be something publishers rely on getting for less than they pay for having their BMWs detailed.

Underpaying writers is the dirty, little secret of the publishing industry. But, now the secret is out. It may not make any difference in our capitalist, free market economy where there is always a lower-paid worker to displace one making a living wage. Still, shouldn’t there be some rule that makes it illegal to use the word, “alternative” to describe practices that are as common as they are immoral?

A SECOND OPINION
The gynecologist agreed to fit me into her ever-so-busy schedule even though she wasn’t seeing new patients. I was grateful for this, since I wanted to “get to the bottom” of things. Still, I was still peeved that I had to wait in her office for an hour beyond the agreed-upon appointment time in order to finally see her..

After reading all of Vogue, the only magazine in the examination room, while wondering if I should just leave because my time was as valuable as hers, she finally burst into the room. She was one of those wiry and wired type of people who talk fast, move fast and seem to have a million things to do that don’t include you so they have to hurry you along to get to something or someone more important. Simply put, her manner was not comforting.

We discussed my case for a few minutes while she scribbled things on my chart and nodded. “I’m going to do another ultrasound. I think you were just ovulating and we won’t find anything this time,” she declared, finally.

So, off we went to the ultrasound room. “Take your clothes off from the waist down,” she said as she hurried out of the room. After sitting on the table, pantless, for another fifteen minutes she finally returned and proceeded, with little ado, to put a finger up my vagina and another one up my anus (just to get me in the mood, I think.) After that violation she moved on to the ultrasound.

“See, it’s nothing. Here, take a look at the screen if you don’t believe me.”

She turned the cooter computer’s monitor toward me and I looked at some black blobs flit across the screen. “That’s your left ovary. Just some eggs. They must have scanned you just as you were ovulating and didn’t read the pictures right. See?”

I was going to have to take her word for this. My ability to read an ultrasound is less skilled than, well… my first doctor’s. But then, that is why she referred me,

“They should never do these ultrasounds when women are ovulating. They should just do them when you’re already bleeding. It’s so much better.”

Indeed.

“Just to make sure everything is all right, which I think it is, I’m going to do a cervical biopsy. It will hurt a little. Like a bad cramp, really.

A bad cramp, I thought. I’ve had very bad cramps throughout my life. I can handle a bad cramp.

She called a nurse into the room. “So you’ll have someone to hold onto.” As if I would need someone to hold onto for cramps.

Next, she shoved a speculum into my vagina and cranked it open. This had gotten more unpleasant with each passing moment. “Relax,” the nurse said. Naturally I tensed up as I felt the doctor entering me with a long, plastic instrument.

“Nurse, get the forceps, She’s small and I need to open her up,” I heard from behind the sheet.

The next thing I knew, there was pain; probing and pain that was decidedly not like a cramp. I could feel her sticking the instrument up me again and again while she pushed down on my stomach. She was like a pilot circling the airport, again and again, looking for a safe decent. After she had made her approach for the sixth or seventh time, she seemed ready to come in for a landing.

“Okay, cough,” she said.

I coughed and heard a simultaneous snipping sound that accompanied by blinding pain. I grabbed the nurse’s hand, which I proceeded to crush —as I would have a bullet between my teeth — while I let out a string of curses.

“Jesus Christ, Mother Fucking, Son of a Bitch, Goddamn, Shit!” I stopped short of adding cunt, because it seemed wrong under the circumstances. I’ll bet they wished they’d just given me the bullet.

The blinding pain of the cut was followed by what did feel like a terrible cramping.

“Are you done?” I demanded in a strangled voice.

“Yes,” she replied continuing to probe around, with the speculum remaining inside me cranked to the wide position. “I’m just making sure you don’t bleed.”

Within two minutes, the cramps had subsided and my breathing returned to normal.

“You know, women who are having fertility treatments do this kind of thing all the time,” she informed me as I put my pants back on.

All the more reason to be glad I had no desire to reproduce, I thought. If this is the kind of thing women do “all the time,” when they’ve waited too long to have kids, I could only wonder why adoption wasn’t even more popular.

“I don’t think we’ll find anything on the biopsy, but I’ll let you know. The rest, however, is fine. No cyst, no uterine wall abnormalities. You’re lucky, if we’d found that, I would have had to do a DNC.”

I was lucky, I thought, as I got the hell out of there. I was lucky I was only going through menopause and not trying to conceive at the same time. I was lucky there was no cyst. I was lucky to be getting away from this office.

Thirty minutes later, after I stopped shaking, I felt better than I had in weeks.