> Writing for the mags won't make you rich,
Don't speak so fast - I wrote for the (USA) magazine Kim Flottum edited, "Bee Culture", in the 2000s. I swapped him articles for Bee-Quick ads, a 2000-3000 word article got me a 1/4 page display ad in a prime location.
In 2007, Hearst Newspapers approached me, having read my work in Bee Culture, and asked me to write a regular column, maybe weekly, on the bees, as this was the height of the "Save The Bees" trend. They had created a new online site called "The Daily Green", and they offered me a significant sum for a 2-year contract. I punted, as I simply did not have the time, and was not about to abandon my "real science" work for any amount of money. I passed the offer over to Kim, and told them that Kim was clearly the better choice for the role, and that I might write a "guest" piece if Kim invited me to do so.
Kim wrote for them, and, as I recall, made more off that gig than he did from his full-time employment with AI Root, putting out "Bee Culture". I did not ask him about his pay, but he was certainly sad when they pulled the plug on the effort a few years later.
But every such writing relationship is not without unexpected consequences, even when I was a contributor not listed on the masthead, who wrote on a very irregular basis. People in the media business keep rosters and scorecards.
The Daily Green editor was a "smooth operator", and ran an article reporting on another media outlet's breaking of the embargo on the announcement of the Penn State/USDA/Columbia U paper that incorrectly implied that "CCD" was cause d by the "IAPV" virus. Reporting on another outlet's leak is a sneaky way of leaking oneself. The staff at "Science" has no sense of humor at all, and called me, telling me that they would revoke my invitation to the press conference about the CCD paper, revoking their prior invite to me as the designated "reporter" for Bee Culture if I did not get the Daily Green to take down the offending article. So I had to call Kim, and he had to call the editor at the Daily Green and explain that we were being subjected to extortion, as Kim really wanted me to write yet another article about the off-the-rails group effort that had deteriorated into factions, name-calling, and withheld data due to poor crowd control by USDA ARS executives, who were themselves unwilling to be seen accepting the help of the US Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground bioweapon/disease detection group.
The article had already gotten enough eyeballs to have been "worth it", so The Daily Green pulled the article down, and Bee Culture (me) was unbanned from what turned out to be a very silly press conference about "metagenomics".
The lesson here is that sometimes, even writing about bees can be a full-body contact sport. I am an AAAS member, of course (no fellowship, as yet) and I had some very choice words for the board. Although I was a mere observer and reporter, rather than a participant in the "CCD Task Force", I was not at all happy with extortion being used to prompt me to ask my editor to ask HIS editor on another unrelated publication to pull an article that broke an embargo which the Daily Green was not obligated to respect. Extortion went just a bit too far.
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