Well, $100K/year would probably pay someone to write things up full time, if we only had the right candidate hire for it—I’m not sure we do. The issue is almost never danger, it’s just that writing stuff up is hard.
I can certainly see that people who can both understand these issues and write them up for a general audience would be rare. Working in your favor is the fact that writers in general are terribly underpaid, and a lot of smart tech journalists have been laid off in recent years. (I used to be the news editor for Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and although I am not looking for a job right now, I have contacts who could probably fill the position for you.)
But I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and it doesn’t seem like this effort would pay for itself. I doubt you have enough questions like this to cover a daily article, and for a weekly one you’d need to take in over $2K in donations (counting taxes) to cover your writer’s salary. And that seems...unlikely.
Well, $100K/year would probably pay someone to write things up full time, if we only had the right candidate hire for it—I’m not sure we do. The issue is almost never danger, it’s just that writing stuff up is hard.
Apropos the above conversation: Do you know Annalee Newitz? (Of io9). If not, would you like to? I think you guys would get on like a house on fire.
I can certainly see that people who can both understand these issues and write them up for a general audience would be rare. Working in your favor is the fact that writers in general are terribly underpaid, and a lot of smart tech journalists have been laid off in recent years. (I used to be the news editor for Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and although I am not looking for a job right now, I have contacts who could probably fill the position for you.)
But I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and it doesn’t seem like this effort would pay for itself. I doubt you have enough questions like this to cover a daily article, and for a weekly one you’d need to take in over $2K in donations (counting taxes) to cover your writer’s salary. And that seems...unlikely.
Sad! But I get it.