Hi, Roy--I didn't get paid anything for that piece. It was 10,000 words and took many months of work. I had no expectation that anyone would be interested in publishing it or paying me. I knew Vincent and asked him about posting it there. He read it and liked it, and so that's how that happened.
How much would I have been paid? Well, that's hard to say. No one would have wanted such a story, so there isn't really a way to say it's "worth" anything at all. But if the question is, how much might I have gotten if someone had actually wanted it, we can look at some payment rates. These days I write stories for Kaiser Health News and they pay $2 per published word. Going by that metric, the piece's value would be $20,000, although of course KHN runs stories that are 1,000 words but not 10,000. But that's not out of line for a major piece in a major national publication. Most pay less. When I wrote an 8,000-word piece for the MIT-based science magazine Undark in 2016, I got $5000. (That was supposed to be $1/word, but I wrote longer--so that ended up in a lower amount per word.)
I didn't ask for any donations then. It would never have occurred to me. I had no plans to do any crowdfunding until the change in my Berkeley position and the university's funding issues in Spring, 2016. If that hadn't happened, I guess I would just have continued my 50% Berkeley job and worked on this as a public service or volunteer project, which is how I thought of it when I started. I certainly had no intention of spending 3-4 years or whatever on this project. I thought the 2015 Trial by Error series was a one-off because it would likely kill off the PACE trial. The fact that it has hung on is mind-boggling to me.
