Despite the totally different audiences and topics, the books are fundamentally about the same thing: You, you brilliant snowflake you, can break out of the molds The Man’s put you in and do your own thing. Money, by the way, is not an issue.

The books take totally opposite tacks, though. The Four-Hour Workweek seems to extol the ideas of selling a product—and doing whatever you can to let that product sell itself while you take a bite of the profits. Whether that means hiring a bookkeeper or outsourcing your entire operation, you want to own a thing and make money from that thing.

Be The Media talks about self-publishing for authors, self-distribution for musicians, and so forth, but those products—those things—are a means to an end. The end is some service you provide: in the case of writing, your “service” is usually a seminar or workshop or consulting.

Both these models are tempting..who doesn’t want to have piles of cash to roll around in? But neither leaves much room for writers. Someone who wants to create something for its own sake, not as a promotional vehicle for a seminar. The Four-Hour Workweek’s model is more promising, but a writer can’t hire someone else to write for her. (Unless, again, the written product is a means to an end, not an end in itself.)

I apologize in advance for the wretched portmanteau, but what would a true writerpreneur look like?

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For freelancers, getting paid is just as important as writing. (I wish it weren’t so!) But what if you’re not making as much as you want to be?

Inspired Author asks writers to think about how much they want to make per hour and how to turn that number into a per-project or per-word rate, plus tips for making that number real. A British organization, LondonFreelance, includes conversation-starters for negotiating a higher rate after you’ve built a relationship with a client. Finally, you’ll want to know the going rates for various kinds of writing so you’ll have a platform from which to negotiate.

With one in ten employers actually thinking less of someone who doesn’t try for more money, what do you have to lose? After all, all you’ve got to do is ask.

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Take those “blow-in” subscription cards that we put in our magazines. Our circulation department wants to put in as many as possible, because five cards have a slightly higher chance of one being sent back than four, and six is slightly higher yet. As long as those cards earn more in subscriptions than the cost of paper and print, they’re consider a good thing from the circulation department perspective.Yet as we editors who talk to readers and get their email know, people HATE those cards. They fall out of magazines when you pick them up, forcing you to bend over to retrieve them and find a trash can in which to throw them away. [The Connection Between Global Warming, PR spam and Magazines]

Why do magazine circulation departments treat people like idiots? Well, sadly you know the answer to that one, too: because it works. [When is my industry going to stop lying?]

Good reads, both.

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Kevin Streelman arrived, as always, by car. He placed his Callaway golf clubs in the trunk of his Toyota Camry parked outside his condo in Scottsdale, Ariz., wasted two hours in Phoenix rush hour and then drove 300 miles northwest to Las Vegas. He stopped only once, for gas. Streelman already had logged almost 6,000 driving miles in May alone — from South Carolina to Pennsylvania to Illinois to California.Bob Kahan arrived, as always, by private jet. He drove up to the runway at a small airport in Santa Rosa, Calif., and handed his car keys to a valet. Kahan and three friends climbed on board his $15 million Dassault Falcon, furnished with 13 leather seats and burled wood interior. They sipped bottled water and read newspapers. The flight to Vegas lasted 55 minutes.

So begins Eli Saslow’s second installment in the series, “Why We Compete,” a look at sports in the 21st century. The link was thrown my way by Chris Combs, who always finds good things for me to look at.

Saslow does a great job of conveying the class differences between Streelman and Kahan without being heavy-handed. This next passage, I think, is brilliant:

Streelman told one of his favorite stories, about cramming into a trailer with four other golfers during a tournament on the North and South Dakota tour and paying $5 per head to sleep on worn cots in a field located 70 miles from the nearest town. Kahan laughed and then told one of his favorite stories, about forgetting that he had purchased a membership, a locker and clubs at the swank Shadow Creek Golf Course in North Las Vegas until an employee there called him a decade later and asked Kahan if he still wanted his golf clubs.

I’ll be going back to read the first installment in the series, and waiting eagerly for the next. Check it out.

(Edit: I did read the first installment, about a little-known ultramarathon race and the runners who push themselves to complete it. All I can say is WOW.)

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Photographer: davidfg. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Mr. Nusca makes some good points, and yes, there are many who take this same viewpoint, but I believe there are some things the naysayers don’t address.

As I interpret it, Nusca sums up the problem like so:

-An internship is virtually necessary to get a job in this industry these days.

-Internships that look good on your resume (with big, well-known magazines or newspapers) pay little or nothing.

-Internships with smaller papers or magazines are not worth an intern’s time.

-Therefore, only J-students subsidized by their parents can afford to work three months for peanuts, therefore anyone doing “the right thing” is punished.

Point 1 is absolutely true. That’s just the way it is. Journalism really cannot be learned from anyone else; you learn by doing. Since no college newspaper or radio station mirrors a real newsroom, the only way to become qualified to work in a newsroom is to work in one.

“When did such a low-paying industry become so elite?” asks Nusca.

Maybe when the profession became so popular. A survey published in 2006 hailed the fact that out of all the 2005 graduates receiving bachelor’s degrees in journalism, 62% of them had found jobs by the end of the year. That means over a third were unemployed for over seven months. And this is good news? I bet nursing students don’t have to wait over half a year for a job offer.

With any “glamour profession” there has to be some sort of winnowing process. What career counselor worth his salt would advise an aspiring actor without a warning that the road ahead is tough and pays terribly? If a counselor neglected to tell said actor that he or she would most likely be working for free or cheap for years, waiting tables in the meantime, the counselor would be fired.

(Just to be clear, I’m not comparing journalists to actors in any sense other than that they’re both popular professions. Surely we can agree that journalists are far more necessary than actors. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson once say “If I had to choose between Hollywood without newspapers, and newspapers without Hollywood, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter”? Perhaps I am paraphrasing.)

Nusca goes on to crunch some numbers for a hypothetical intern living in New York. I’ll let you read his math at his site. The basic idea is that interning 2-3 days a week and working the rest of the weekday is nowhere near enough money for rent, food, and transportation. One could argue that perhaps the hypothetical intern could work only two days a week and take a paying job for four (One might argue this, because, in fact, it’s what I did), but it’s true not many people want to give up even half their weekend to sell sandwiches. (“Pressatas,” in my case. Sexy.)

Nusca agrees: I am leaving weekends out of this. Not only does any sane human need time off…

(But he also writes: An intern would give 50 or 60 hours a week if they did not have to worry about basic living needs. Hmm.)

Okay, okay, 50 hours working at a deli is not nearly as much fun as 50 hours in a newsroom. But 50 hours is 50 hours. Since as Woody Allen says, 80% of success is showing up, can we call this a system of weeding out the people who want to be journalists because they think it “sounds fun” or because they don’t know what else to do? Someone only mildly interested in journalism will not make it through this system.

Is it true that internships discriminate against the poor by making it possible for only those subsidized by parents or loans to intern? Yes, it’s harder for someone on his or her own to survive a summer of remarkably tightened belts, but it’s possible to do regardless. This is true for any profession or any aspect of life, and I don’t see why journalism is a special case. If internship providers discriminate, then the rest of the world does, and we should be trying to fix the problem as a whole, not one symptom of it.

The other problem, Nusca explains, is that big papers think they can get away with not paying because you’re getting a line item on your resume, but that doesn’t excuse no-name rags who’re simply trying to score free labor.

Really, how many times have you seen “NO-NAME MAGAZINE” offering unpaid internships? Why? Never heard of it! And then you want me to work for you for free? Side-by-side with full-time employees the same age as me? And assume that I’m learning a lot because 1) you say I am, 2) you’re a publication, 3) I’m working closely with the ‘editor,’ one of three total people on staff, and 4) clerical duties really subscribe to an experience an internship can provide but a secretary job can’t?

This might not be an internship I’d take, but I can see the draw, and I don’t think Nusca should be so quick to dismiss it. Two days a week with a magazine that is or could be an up-and-coming publication is something you can take away at the end of the summer and show to employers. It looks good if you say “I put this entire spread together. This is mine, this is mine, and this is mine.” An internship like this might be worth a shot, because you will not be performing clerical duties on a staff of four, I can guarantee that. What will you have to show at the end of a summer in the mailroom or fact-checking department?

Besides, smaller newspapers–which are not at all the same as “No-Name Magazine,” though Nusca seems to conflate the concepts–are…I don’t want to say “perfectly respectable” because that’s still looking at them from a “big city” lens. A smaller paper is more than perfectly respectable, it’s an aspiring journo’s ticket to the big dailies. Expect to be asked to choose between a resume line that looks good but translates to filing, photocopying, and inventorying the newsroom’s “junk closet”–or a resume line with a small paper and a portfolio full of clips.

So is the system “broken”?

School can only teach you so much. You can only learn to write from having written. Is it really so terrible to let someone to work for free two days a week? By taking on an intern, sure, a company’s getting free labor, but they also have to deal with supervising the kid to make sure he/she doesn’t totally screw up. Most internships offer some sort of mentoring program along with the work a student’s expected to do. More time and resources. Am I so cynical that I wouldn’t trust most of my peers in a major metropolitan daily? Actually, yes. Hell, I wouldn’t trust myself. Hence the internship I’ve accepted. I don’t mean to apologize for a system that many find unfair, but it’s a system that’s worked for me and for many others. (Oh. I guess I do mean to apologize for the system.)

(And I’ve heard the “well move to another city then!” thing before, and I think it’s hogwash. Media is here. Opportunities are here. Why move away?)

Because if someone can’t find an opportunity, especially with multiple internships under his or her belt, how are we so sure so sure the jobs are here? The market here is saturated. Let’s be realistic. I love New York, but I’m not going to spend five years writing obits for the Daily News just so I can have the chance of moving up to court reporting, so I can maybe see my name in the New York Times a quarter-century from now. In 2002, everyone was recommending doing a stint outside the tri-state area. I doubt much has changed, so I’m going to spend some time away from New York, build up my skills, become someone more valuable than an obituary writer, and then, maybe five years from now, I’ll come back.

And I’ll be better for it.

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