How much does the Mirror website pay for stories, photos and videos?

Answer: The Mirror website pays £60 to include photos, writer’s fee and any payment to the interviewee

Shocked? The Mirror tells readers their story to them for a ‘sum of money’. At the same time story sellers will need to click to agree terms and conditions which give them all rights to use forever your story – and you lose all rights to it forever.

This fee was disclosed by the National Association of Press Agencies (NAPA) during an article for Press Gazette.

Featureworld believes it further demonstrates it is vital that people selling a story do not try to go it alone and seek independent and professional advice.

Quite often by the time people selling a story have come to Featureworld they have already uploaded or told their story to papers such as the Mirror, Daily Mail and The Sun. When the fee offered is much lower than expected, they then contact Featureworld saying “I haven’t signed anything yet.”

The issue is legally you don’t have to sign anything when selling a story. Terms and Conditions like this on newspaper websites mean the fact you have contacted the paper and shown them photos or videos is giving them permission – and in fact when you ticked that box you were signing away all your rights.

And you can be giving away those rights for a very small fee.

Unfortunately, while it is certainly possible to obtain excellent fees for very strong stories generally speaking the price for a story has dropped. Prices for stories on websites only can be particularly low.

Because of the amount of stories offered for free – given to papers by thousands of PR companies all vying for publicity and via social media ‘sharing’ – it is much harder to get a story into a paper (which usually pays more than website only).

As discussed in a previous blog post it is simply not possible to give a valuation until an agent has sent brief details about a story round to editors to ask how much they will offer.

It can then be extremely hard to tell an interviewee who has a tragic story to sell that if they want publicity they might not get any payment – or that a payment is likely be very low.

For a start most people who contact Featureworld (and any other agencies, publications or broadcasters) will never have sold a story before.

Understandably they can feel as if they are being ripped off when you explain that for example, the Mirror website’s standard fee for a story – to include photos, writer’s fee and any payment to the interviewee – is just £60.

But this is the reality. The difference is at Featureworld I can ask multiple editors what they will pay for your story – and if the price isn’t what you hoped you can decide not to go ahead at all and nothing will be published.

Contact me at Featureworld for free advice about selling your story >>>