Pricing a Story Before You Report It

Freelance journalism has an odd habit of hiding its true costs until a piece is already finished. A story that looked straightforward at the pitch stage — a quick interview, a bit of background reading — can quietly consume three or four times the hours anyone expected, and by the time that becomes clear, there's usually little choice but to finish it anyway.

A rough estimate done before accepting a commission won't be perfect, but it does something valuable: it turns an invisible risk into a visible number you can weigh against the fee on offer, while there's still time to negotiate or decline.

A simple way to estimate hours

Break the piece into its likely stages — background reading, arranging and conducting interviews, travel if any, writing, and back-and-forth with an editor — and put a rough hour figure against each, based on similar work you've done before. Reporters who track their time even loosely tend to find their estimates get noticeably more accurate after just a few pieces, simply because they start correcting for the stages they habitually underestimate.

Travel deserves particular honesty. A single interview forty minutes outside town rarely costs just the drive; it usually costs the drive, the wait, the conversation, and the drive back, plus whatever flexibility you lose in the rest of that day's schedule.

Comparing the estimate to the fee

Once you have a rough hour total, divide the fee by it. The resulting figure — an effective hourly rate — is more useful than the headline fee alone, because it lets you compare commissions of very different sizes on the same terms. A large fee for a story that will take weeks may pay worse, hour for hour, than a modest fee for something you can turn around in a day.

This isn't a reason to chase every well-paying assignment and turn down every meaningful one. Some stories are worth doing at a lower effective rate because they matter, build a relationship, or open doors. The value of the exercise is simply knowing which trade-off you're actually making, rather than discovering it after the fact.