[This entry--which is Part 2 to the Part 1 of May 10--has been difficult to prepare, but if you can give it an astute scan, it is important to understand the story of “The Gary Laverne Group,” told in a separate blog entry that came out earlier on July 9, which is more easily produced.]
As I ended my last entry on the nature of editing,
What is atypical about medical-advertising agencies’ use of editors? Editing in the realm of medical advertising has long had its own quirks, some of them troubling today in parallel with problems that have increased in the industry over the past decade. In addition to technical idiosyncrasies, the biggest problem with how editors are used is how the value of their work is applied. With every other area of publishing in which I’ve worked, the editor is understood to add value to the process of making a product. He does his work—as long as it meets the company’s requirements—and is paid for what it is worth (this can vary in line with [1] the editor’s experience, [2] what the editor tries to arrange for in terms of pay, and [3] what the company is willing to pay and/or what the industry at large tends to pay). Obviously, one would think that a company would not normally pay a higher-than-usual rate for the kind of editing the editor provides if the work did not serve the interests of the product (and its cost got covered by the price of the product).
To further elaborate, I will talk about editing at medical advertising/promotion agencies in general, as I’ve developed any sort of general idea of it, and practices in it, over about a decade. As an illustration of the company-structure-based aspect to this situation, I will refer to one company that went out of business a few years ago [as it happens, this story, on Boron, LePore, will not be included in this BETA version].
How many medical advertising/promotions companies have I worked at? If you counted just based on whether the company has been a separate, standalone firm, even if within one larger conglomerate (and if you didn’t count individual divisions within one company that started as a sort of confederation of originally separate little companies), maybe eight to 10. This does not include firms that primarily or only do medical publications—that is, journals, whether subscription (where a recipient would deliberately and individually subscribe to the publication) or fixed-circulation (where the publication is sent, automatically, to a host of recipients on a mailing list, because, e.g., the recipient is a member of a certain professional association). If you counted individual divisions of one confederation, then I’ve been at maybe 15 or more. If you count a pharmaceutical company whose promotional department I worked within, add another. And how many of all of these have I worked at through a placement agency? Most of these. But starting in 2006, and through 2010, most of my “gigs” at such places were working directly—hired as a freelancer directly by the company, not through a placement agency.
I mention the placement agency aspect because when I started (my “tenure” in medical editing can be said to have run from 2001 through 2010), the only way you could get in (at least as I found) was via placement agencies, the primary one of which in New Jersey, for places mostly in Parsippany, through about 2001, seemed to be Horizon Graphics. Later the primary agency seemed to be what I’ve pseudonymed The Gary Laverne Group. (I say “seemed” in an impressionistic sense; there are many placement firms working within New Jersey, but I am mentioning the two that I was most aware of as handling editors I knew, and that I was employed by, in the decade 2001-10.) In a general sense, this was like getting work in television or radio—or maybe movies—via an agency: it was the only way to get apparently prestigious work, and the pay was well beyond what I’d gotten in the 1990s for more regular editing, at publishing companies.
One of the first things I found was that you spent a lot of time idle—this was as true in 2001 as it could be late in the decade. You could have an hour or so of work, if you kept close track of your time, while being in an office of a client firm seven or eight hours (including lunch). Guidelines by the placement agency basically said that you put all the time you were there (exclusive of lunch) on a timesheet; the placement agency, after getting your timesheets (signed by a representative of the medical-media firm), would bill the medical-media firm; and independent of whenever the placement agency got paid soon by the client company for this, you got paid by the placement agency in a payroll fashion—on a regular schedule, with the usual payroll withholding taxes taken out. On the level of earning pay and having your taxes taken care of, this was a fine arrangement.
The one peculiarity in all this was how much time you spent idle.
Idle time and what this means financially. Usually a medical-media firm told you how to account for time at their end. If you spent an hour total on actual work for the whole day, but you were there in the office seven hours, and if you worked on two or three separate accounts (typically identified by numbers), you split the seven hours between the two or three accounts. Sometimes there would be another account number, ostensibly for something you hadn’t worked on, that would be used to apply some of your time. That way, say, you had “done” two and a half hours of work on account 12345, another two and a half hours on 34567, and two hours on 56789. The medical-media firm thus had seven hours of work accounted for you, and in their accounting department, this was linked (however notationally explained, or not) to the seven hours for which the placement agency billed the medical-media firm for your time. Meanwhile, the placement agency billed that firm not just for your work wages per hour plus a certain amount to cover your Social Security (because, in general, if 15 percent of your wages went to Social Security, the employer had to match this 15 percent out of its own revenue—a standard way Social Security is funded across industries).
The placement agency also billed--that is, added to the billing for your time--for its own “administrative expenses.” As a general example, if your pay was $35 per hour gross, and another $5.25 was needed to cover the employer’s part of your Social Security contribution, there could be another $14.75 per hour added to the hourly fee the placement agency charged the medical-media firm, for a total of $55 per hour the placement agency charged the medical-media firm for use of your services. I can’t tell you what all this $14.75 to the placement agency went for, but suffice it to say that a placement agency that essentially called you up to get you into a given medical-media firm, and handling your timesheets, payroll needs, etc., on a weekly basis, seemed to be adequately compensated out of that $14.75 per hour, times whatever hours you worked in a week, and that amount multiplied by the full number of freelance editors the placement agency handled.
If this seems as if I am spilling trade secrets, I think this is the least I can say about this industry, for the benefit of those who have worked hard in editing in more normal (and comparatively low-paying) publishing situations, and who wonder what the “rarified world” of medical editing is like. And the general structure of how pay is handled shouldn’t be so shocking, to those who are familiar with other types of work in which outside consultants are used. I think what I've explained is fairly reasonable business that, if anyone outside it speculated how it might work, would be postulated about the same way by this person; and my account probably is a bit oversimplifying anyway.
Editorial efficiency is ignored by the system. One of the ironies about how medical editors are used, paid, and billed for to clients, which can be a source of anger to these editors (if they started out in other types of editing), is that when you get paid for idle time along with time working, there is no appreciation—in a business sense—for your being able to work fast and efficiently, which of course is valued by non-medical types of publishers. Thus, if you get paid for seven hours yet only did two hours of work, this suits the medical-media agency fine, because it means they can bill the Big Pharma client for seven hours of editorial work. But the fact that you can work well and fast is overlooked, and links to no direct business benefits to the medical-media firm (or to the Big Pharma client): the Big Pharma client was billed for seven hours of work on one short “master visual aid,” so for all they know, that’s the best that medical editing can do, hence they pay the bill amount for it.
How would laypeople regard medical-editor costs? To those laypeople who think about how a medicine they buy has been advertised and promoted in mass media and otherwise, and think how an editor who was used to proofread some item used for advertising and paid at $35 an hour, with another $20 an hour billed to the medical-media firm by a placement agency, with the total $55 an hour billed in turn by the medical-media firm to the pharmaceutical company for which the medical media firm is working, PLUS whatever add-on/surcharge/“administrative expense” the medical-media firm likely adds to that $55 an hour…this all may seem like a scam.
But I have long been ready to argue that the costs posed by freelance editors, or what is more scandalous to me (but which I won’t detail in this entry) the larger sum of costs posed by the medical-media firm in how it bills apart from freelance editors, are hardly the worst of what revenue is generated off the backs of Big Pharma’s products (and implicitly paid by the consumer or by insurance companies that pay for consumers’ obtaining the products). There are other parts of the industry that I am sure are engaged in far more waste or “corruption,” some of which I hardly know the details of, which seems likely to exist given the stories you hear of giant recalls (as of Johnson & Johnson products), or many-multi-million-dollar settlements and fines levied by the Justice Department on Big Pharma companies for the illegal marketing of some of it products (which freelance editors essentially have no responsibility for).
One aspect of all this is that this industry involves products that, if prescription, command huge retail prices per unit sold, and can involve many millions of patients. The revenue overall is much higher than in many other industries. Thus, even in so relatively piddling a component of the overall industry as editors proofreading or copy editing copy used in advertising, the rates of pay can end up being made high (by managers), because, after all, the managerial logic would seem, with so much revenue at stake, why shouldn’t the pay rate for editors be high?
One aspect of all this is that this industry involves products that, if prescription, command huge retail prices per unit sold, and can involve many millions of patients. The revenue overall is much higher than in many other industries. Thus, even in so relatively piddling a component of the overall industry as editors proofreading or copy editing copy used in advertising, the rates of pay can end up being made high (by managers), because, after all, the managerial logic would seem, with so much revenue at stake, why shouldn’t the pay rate for editors be high?
On a more practical-work level (and where your virtue as a skilled editor can be in play), what makes medical editing (at medical-advertising promotions firms) different from other kinds of editing is that your role is pretty controlled and limited. You have only as much say in what goes on as you are directly, as the industry tends to outline, and as the material (and relevant style rules) requires. One of the remarkable things is how little copy is involved, per item of work done (an advertising “tactic”—a “slim jim” [a narrow booklet used by advertising detail men]; a print magazine ad; a “master visual aid” [a sort of tool used by detail men]; or whatever else). You could handle millions of words during your time at one magazine firm, and precision is basically required of you, and there you make $12 an hour or less. But at $35 an hour or more at a medical ad/promotions firm, the amount of words can be less. And when so often you are merely checking to see that a certain small amount of corrections have been put in to a new version of an item, you are functioning as a sort of cog in a larger corporate machine.
Note: “cog in a machine” doesn’t mean you are negligible, or downright unskilled. It does mean you have a value, but one that is defined largely in a corporate-machine context. Also, your ability to use judgment isn’t entirely nullified; judgment always comes into play in editing work. (Amazingly, people who are afraid of editors think the editor is apt to run with the ball in some way. Actually, while there are some editors who are incompetent or licentious [at times], editing is usually pretty rule-bound and conservative-judgment-related. In my experience, in the medical-media realm, the biggest problem is that a lot of non-editors not only tend to see the editor as a kind of flunky but tend to disparage editors in one way or another [as a sort of “bad office habit”—the general sort of phenomenon of “bad office habits/behavior” by non-editors toward editors is seen in all kinds of editorial offices, not just medical; but a classic one in medical-media firms is general disparagement of editors]. In some idealistic sense, I never understood the reason for this, though there are some possible reasons we can speculate on, including the idea that editors get paid “too much” per hour for some of the errors they can accidentally make; but again, this hourly rate is dictated by higher-ups, such as a placement agency and administration at a medical-media firm.)
Problems in this field; e.g., billing for down time. In this situation, you may feel gratified by making so much more per hour, and the worst problem you have to deal with on a daily basis is boredom when you are idle. But there are a few problems that are typical of this field, which help define it, and which provide the basis for seeing bigger, systematic, and more troubling problems.
Again, I am being general based on work at numerous firms. When you are idle half the time or more, how bill for the down time? This has always been a problem for me. Some editors see no problem with billing for the entire time they spend in an office, if it’s eight hours, whether or not they did only a total of a half-hour of work in that time. But my own rule became this: if I did X amount of time actual work, and the rest was idle time—if I was there 7 hours, then idle time was 7 – X (“down time” does not include lunch—believe it or not, some editors actually bill for lunch, though typically you get told, by the placement agency, not to do this), then the time 7 – X I would split in two: if it was four hours, two I would bill for, and two I would not. So the total time I would bill for the day, if I’d worked a solid three hours total, would be 3 + 2 = 5, with the remaining 2 not billed for. Then the question was, in my filling out timesheets that were for the medical-media firm only, how to divide the five hours among whatever accounts I’d worked on.
This seemed to me the fairest way to handle the down-time issue across the numerous firms I worked at. It had the advantage of “splitting the difference”—billing for only half the down-time—and made dividing the “puffed-up” time between separate accounts less disturbing (to me). It seemed good to have this regular way of doing this in place because, as the decade went on, the weirdness of how you were handled at some firms, and the sometimes too-weird differences some firms had in handling down-time compared to others, seemed best countenanced by having a principled way of handling down-time.
If this seems like my giving away trade secrets within an industry that obviously holds its cards close to its vest, with its confidentiality agreements and so on, again I note I am speaking generally, on an industry that (1) not only is at significant odds with how I learned to be professional within a different, and more arduous, area of the media world in the 1990s, but (2) ended up (in 2010) putting me in a difficult spot with respect to continuing my career, for no good reason.
A little more to the point, the peculiarities of this industry—with respect to deviating from what had seemed to be its own typical rules over years—when they are seen in how they impinge on a seasoned editor, bring home the need to shed light on this industry even more. And perhaps the most relevant aspect of this for consumers is, if an editor is utilized by a medical-media firm not only on the surface for his skills based on experience but in actuality for purposes quite at variance with this, and this has the effect of possibly harming the products the firm makes with possible negative implications for consumers, then, of course, it becomes choiceworthy, if not imperative, to expose this.
A little more to the point, the peculiarities of this industry—with respect to deviating from what had seemed to be its own typical rules over years—when they are seen in how they impinge on a seasoned editor, bring home the need to shed light on this industry even more. And perhaps the most relevant aspect of this for consumers is, if an editor is utilized by a medical-media firm not only on the surface for his skills based on experience but in actuality for purposes quite at variance with this, and this has the effect of possibly harming the products the firm makes with possible negative implications for consumers, then, of course, it becomes choiceworthy, if not imperative, to expose this.
How peculiar this industry can be can be looked at in one firm’s example—a firm that went out of business. What kind of right to exist does a medical-media firm have to exist? Does it have proprietary ways of producing advertising tools like “slim jims” or “master visual aids”? Does it have secret recipes for certain products, or a patented way of producing a potent elixir of a medication? Does its right to bill a Big Pharma client, say, $1 million for a given account mean that there is tremendous value that only that medical-media firm brings forth in service to the client that the fee covers? Or does the medical-media firm have only the best “creative types” in the industry—no other company has them—therefore it has the right to bill sky-high for an account?
Actually, a medical-media firm is rather like a film production company, to the extent I understand the latter. This film production company can hire X for cinematography, Y for production design, Z for casting, AB for film editing, CD for sound editing, etc. All these people are renowned in their industry for their skills. Bring them together, along with a belief in the project and masterful leadership by the film editor, and you may have a valuable product made that earns many millions at the box office and maybe even a few Oscars. (Well, today, maybe these two goals are usually mutually exclusive.)
But the point is, the film production company is rather temporary. Whether it’s an established firm like Paramount
You can have a medical-media firm that is going great guns in some years, with many millions in yearly revenue, and hungry freelance editors yearn to work there and finally do, and then the firm can shrink or disappear after it no longer has certain accounts in later years.
