Magazine Publisher Forced by Attorney General to Actually Pay Her Writers

The owner of a defunct Boston magazine has been ordered by the state Attorney General’s office to make good on a promise of scholarships for students whose work she exploited, the Boston Globe reports. It’s a shocking never-before-heard-of case of a publication not paying its writers that could rock the media world to its core.

Wallis Amanda Mills was somehow not also fined for the title of her magazine, Enterteenment, arguably as bad an offense to journalistic standards. The magazine, which went under last summer, focused on issues concerning teens, although considering how often we’re subjected to stories about #teens in the mainstream media, that hardly seems uncharted territory. The difference here, however, is that the publication was predominately written by high school students, who Mills promised scholarships of up to $5,000 for their work, which reminds me: I need to ask Mediaite for a raise.

Mills will be required to pay out $11,300 to the students whose labor she took advantage of, and $5,700 in fines. Students from outside of Massachusetts will not get any of the money because they don’t live in a communist state like Taxachusetts where sicko activist AGs like Martha Coakley expect employers to pay people:

A former beauty pageant coach, she said the magazine never took off due to a lack of advertisers, so she funded it out of pocket with money from a divorce settlement. A glossy print version of the magazine appeared in late 2012, featuring stories about the rapper B-Capp and tips on “ways to give back” over the holidays.

Not included in that piece on ways to give back, presumably, was paying your employees.

Mills was also fined $4,400 for failing to pay three adult workers, the Globe writes.

On the plus side, the burgeoning reporters who never received compensation for their devalued labor might already have a head start on their peers when it comes to understanding how the world off freelancing works. And if the experience has soured them on the profession in general, they might take heart in learning that a career as a reporter is a dead end anyway. As the American Journalism Review points out, recent Bureau of Labor statistics show that the “mean salary for reporters and correspondents rose from $40,090 in May 2003 to $44,360 in May 2013, an increase of 10.7 percent,” while all other professions increased “28 percent, from $36,210 in 2003 to $46,440 in 2013.”

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>> Luke O’Neil is a journalist and blogger in Boston. Follow him on Twitter (@lukeoneil47).

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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