The Pay Transparency Project (PTP) is a community-driven database that offers nonfiction video professionals timely insight into hiring trends and pay parity practices, while tracking structural industry shifts and recommendations. This grassroots initiative grew from a collective commitment to advancing equity, justice, inclusion, and transparency across the documentary and nonfiction video fields.

PTP supports storytellers at all career stages, from emerging professionals to industry veterans navigating freelance work. Department heads and hiring executives are also encouraged to contribute and use PTP to help strengthen standards and promote a more equitable, sustainable industry for all.

We are at a pivotal moment. Marginalized communities continue to be disproportionately impacted by inequitable workplace practices, and meaningful change requires reimagining how our industry operates. As we reexamine who is in front of and behind the camera, we must be intentional about how stories are told, who shapes them, and how filmmakers can build sustainable careers. Equitable pay, fair credit, and expanded access remain essential.

Origins

PTP was born in 2019, when a group of video journalist-members of Video Consortium (VC) was frustrated with the industry’s lack of transparency around pay standards. Looking at the many secret pay rate spreadsheets floating amongst professional peers, they huddled together and dreamt of a tool, a central place, where everyone could come to give and get information that could better serve nonfiction video professionals working to earn a sustainable living, doing what they love. Sharing the same vision, Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BGDM) joined the effort as an implementation partner in the summer of 2022.

Together, VC and BGDM look to welcome organizations and communities across the industry to join as partners in calling for equitable pay transparency in the nonfiction space.

Join us and help build a more transparent future!