Contract Issues
You will learn more about legal considerations later, but for now, consider this list of things that a magazine may demand of you in exchange for a $500 or $1,000 story assignment:
The right to use your image or likeness however it wants, whenever it wants, without so much as notifying you
The right to sell your article to other parties, including advertisers, without giving you a percentage of the sale income
The right to make you pay all of the magazine's legal expenses should someone file a lawsuit regarding your article
The right to reprint your article, or parts of it, in other media outlets the magazine's parent company owns without compensating you for the additional use of your work
These demands appear in magazine writers' contracts every day. They are insulting at best and terrifying at worst.
Imagine signing away the right for a magazine to use your image in exchange for writing an article about mental-health institutions. Then imagine that a major mental-health news story breaks a few months after your article appears. You just may find your words, and your photograph, on the nightly news under the headline “Schizophrenia Stabbing” — only because you happen to tune in to that channel.
The magazine would not even have to alert you to the fact that it was going to use your image, and your words, to gain publicity. And you certainly won't be receiving any royalty checks for the additional income the magazine generates through this extra publicity.
It is imperative that when you sign a contract with a magazine, you understand not only what you are agreeing to write, but also what rights you are giving away to the magazine's parent company.
If that's not enough to get your attention, imagine that you sign a contract stating that your work will not violate the rights or agreements of your sources or anyone else with whom they have third-party agreements. Say your story is about the fancy new home of a professional athlete. You visit the home at a marketing director's invitation, take a tour with the marketing director, and write an article about the work the interior designer has done.
It all seems very routine until a few weeks after your story appears, when you are served with a subpoena — because the interior designer claims the marketing director had no right to show you the home. Now you have to hire a $300-an-hour attorney (and perhaps pay for the magazine's legal expenses, too) because your story — spoon-fed to you by a legitimate marketing director — may have violated a third-party agreement the director had with the interior designer. An agreement you had no way of knowing, or even suspecting, existed.
It's easy to see how the new structure and contractual demands of magazine parent companies make scenarios like this not only possible, but probable. And it's therefore easy to see why you, the magazine writer, need to understand the business of writing as well as the craft. You also need to understand that you are part of a greater universe of magazine writers, one that includes a good bit of congeniality but also a great deal of competition.
