Since the year 1802, when Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review began the tradition of paying essayists more than a pittance for their work, the best periodicals in Europe and North America have paid their writers for their work—sometimes well, sometimes poorly, but always something. The WEEKLY STANDARD stands in that tradition. Any essay or review good enough to be published in our pages is the result of talent and diligent work, and we would not consider asking a writer to produce such work for free.
We were appalled to learn, then, that an institution with vastly greater resources than this magazine possesses has been asking writers to write for free for some time: the Library of Congress. The news comes from a letter sent to the Library from the music critic Ted Gioia and posted via Twitter.
Back in 2014 Gioia had heard the Library was commissioning essays from academic scholars and freelance writers without offering to pay for them. He complained to the agency’s communications director, who indicated that the practice was unacceptable. Yet four years later, it’s still happening.
The twisted irony is twofold. First, the Library of Congress exists in part to guard authors’ copyright from unlawful infringement; indeed, as Gioia rightly points out, the Copyright Office is housed in the Library. The point of copyright is to protect a work’s creator from fraudulent imitations and so give him or her the opportunity to profit from it. Second, the Library of Congress has a budget in the region of $595 million.The institution undertakes an array of worthy causes, to be sure, but it surely has the resources to pay some modest amount for the essays it commissions.
The Library should consider, too, that its location in the District of Columbia makes it a prime and often just target for accusations of complaisant unconcern about the rest of the nation’s economic struggles. By far most of the richest counties in America, remember, are located in the greater D.C. area. That a grand federal institution at the center of the nation’s wealth and power can’t be bothered to pay hardscrabble writers in Des Moines and Memphis and Tucson even some small amount for their labors is a minor outrage.
There are many things wrong with the U.S. government that can’t be fixed immediately. This thing can be.
