It wasn't always thus.And today's story of what they used to make:
In 1898 young Winston Churchill, after a couple other writing gigs (Daily Graphic, Telegraph) went off to war with a commission to write for The Morning Post. He produced thirteen articles between September 23 and October 8, 1898 for which he was paid fifteen pounds each. According to the ever handy BoE inflation calculator that is the equivalent of £1651.03 per, or £21463.39 for the lot, $33,053 in today's reserve currency for 15 days work. Not rich but not bad.
More on Churchill another time, but here are a couple more factoids: He charged a half-crown (2 1/2 shillings, $11.38) per word in the 1930's, in 1936 his writing income was the equivalent of $800,000 now.
Again, not rich but able to afford his Pol Roger.
Then he went on to become the highest paid scribbler of his day and did some other stuff too....
...Hearst was enamored with Italian Premier Benito Mussolini, first hiring him in 1928 to write about the fascist perspective on gender relations, which is exactly what you might think: “Man is in full possession of woman’s liberties, and measures them to her as a merchant does a piece of cloth,” etc. Mussolini faced backlash at the time, but Hearst still contracted him in 1931 for a monthly column in Cosmopolitan for $1 a word. That’s $15.66 per word today....That's from "How Much is a Word Worth" by Malcolm Harris at Medium.
Here's a ProTip:
Okay, not a real Churchill quote but pretty funny. Here's the Churchill Centre's "Famous Quotations and Stories".
In addition to the false quote above there are hundreds of others that can be debunked using the Centre's 2.5 million word database. (the guy just couldn't shut up)
Churchill Centre homepage
As I've said, we like jounos, they've given us some of our best ideas.
