Is Media That Delivers a Market That Isn't?

I often hear about freelance woes with various publications, and on rare occassions I do some investigation into them. That just happened today when Lynne Meredith Schreiber posted on a writers' board about a problem she was having with getting a payment from Estates West, which is published by Media That Delivers. She is not the only writer alleging problems with the company, and back in February WritersWeekly had a something about the company owing a writer $2000. Lynne has given me permission to use her name and mention the details. Here is an outline of the saga as she relates it:

1. Lynne wrote a "huge story" and submitted it on January 2. "[T]he editor loved it. They had said they paid on publication and the story was worth $975 - but the editor said she'd try to issue payment early."


2. In March she got a PDF of the story but no check. By April she began to email the editor "incessently" and was referred to the publisher, whom she quotes as saying, "It's a bad economy. A lot of our creditors are not paying us so we can't pay you just yet." She says that the publisher, Mike Dee, offered to send "less than half up front and then the rest when he could. He did not."


3. She had a lawyer contact the company, which sent a check for $100. The lawyer returned the check as inadequate and was told it was all the company could afford for now and that it wanted to set up a payment plan.

I wrote Mike Dee the following:

I write a reasonably well-read blog on the freelance business. I've been hearing that writers are being asked to wait very long periods for payment from your company, and so wanted to ask you about this before I put something on my blog.

I got a response today, as well, from Hayley Gudat, "Director of Estates West & Custom Publications Media That Deelivers, Inc." Here is the response:

Thanks for contacting us about your blog before making any comments about Media That Deelivers. While we cannot stop you from posting about us, we of course hope you will not, simply because we have always maintained excellent relationships with our freelancers, and in most cases have been using the same writers, photographers and stylists for years, which we believe is testiment to our reliability as a publisher of magazines. We have been in business over a decade and have probably the best reputation in our state, be it for our editorial content or the way we treat the people we work with.

In some situations, freelance payment can be late, but never, ever has an invoice gone unpaid. We try at all times to pay any freelancer on time, and in most cases we do, though of course there will be occurances of slight backlogs. We always communicate with our writers, should a payment be late, and from my experiences they appreciate the dialog and we have not had any problems to date. I hope this helps you. Please contact me if you have any other concerns or questions.

The related story and the response don't seem reconcilable to me, but perhaps there is something that I am not getting. At least what I'm missing is not a check, which is an unreasonable situation for any freelance writer to be in.