Writers Rise to Kill the Kill Fee
It didn’t. So the magazine canceled the section, and Watson collected $225 for his article, a quarter of what he’d have been paid if it ran.
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Watson arrived here in August 1990 and quickly signed to do a story for Chicago magazine. What Chicago wanted, he tells us, was 3,500 words on personal finance, with separate sections explaining how to maneuver shrewdly in the realms of accounting, banking, real estate, insurance, investing, and finding a lawyer. The working title was “Getting More for Less.”
The assignment didn’t ring Watson’s chimes. “Looking back on it, I think, this is crazy, why would I have taken this assignment? It’s obviously unfocused. I figured I had to go do a shitty assignment so they’d give me something decent down the road. So I went along with it.”
You did sign a contract, didn’t you? we asked him.
“Another problem is magazines overassigning. Lots of magazines overassign massively, expecting they’ll be killing two out of three pieces. Since they have so little financial risk, they can do that. It’s true, once in a while there’ll be a piece that comes in that’s inadequate. If a piece is inadequate, we have said in our bill of rights there should be arbitration.”
Keith Watson was a new face at Chicago. The magazine didn’t know his work, and a friend who’d been a regular contributor helped him get the assignment. Even so, Watson did the story, damn it, and when he didn’t get paid in full he turned to the NWU’s Chicago local for help. Grievance officer Ron Dorfman wrote Babcock, who said in response just what you’d have said in his shoes, which was that all this took place on Hillel Levin’s watch and he saw no reason to second-guess Levin.
