Last Thursday, Minnesota Public Radio’s “Midday” aired the documentary “No Brother of Mine,” which followed four Minnesota sex offenders after their prison releases.

The work, by Minneapolis documentarians Todd Melby and Diane Richard, took four years and “about a thousand hours” to make, Melby says. He called last week looking for some publicity, but it turned out the doc aired a day earlier than he thought. So we fell into a conversation about how a small family nonprofit production company (Melby and Richard, who are married, comprise the wryly named 2 Below Zero) pulled off the equivalent of six months of 40-hour work weeks.

The economics are sobering. Melby and Richard not only didn’t make a dime from the MPR airing — they actually paid to get “No Brother of Mine” some exposure. The fee wasn’t huge — “around $100,” Melby recalls — but exploited freelancers and fair-pay believers will certainly groan about worker bees paying to benefit much-better-funded entities.

The money, by the way, didn’t go to MPR, but to a National Public Radio entity known as PRSS Content Depot, a programming clearinghouse.

Melby later emphasized he did not feel exploited by MPR, or Seattle’s KUOW, which also grabbed the documentary from PRSS. It was his and Richards’ choice to fork over, as a way to reach the public and, potentially, funders.

“I'm really grateful and happy that MPR aired it,” Melby says. “They've got huge listener numbers and an important, influential audience.”

Still, there’s something crazy-making about a system where a small Grand Marais station, WTIP-FM, put more money in 2 Below Zero’s pockets than the state’s biggest public radio network.

WTIP grabbed the documentary from Public Radio Exchange, a PRSS competitor where stations pay based on their size. Two Below Zero’s share of PRX's fee was a token amount — $29.80, Melby says, adding that he also received $104.30 from Chicago Public Radio and $68.54 from Austin, Texas’ KUT-FM. (The doc has also aired on Minneapolis-based KFAI.)

So did the couple work four years for basically nothing? Not quite. After being constantly turned down by the foundation community, Melby and Richard received $5,000 from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, whose mission is to give “grants to reporters working outside the protection and backing of major news organizations.”

In effect, Melby and Richard took some of FIJ’s check to buy the resulting product a chance at airtime.

Still, if you add it up, and Melby and Richard made at most $6 an hour — before expenses — for the in-depth reporting smart people say they crave. Lots of freelancers have toiled for that or less, but not many have done so on a single project, for so long.

Why do it, I asked Melby?

“Because I love it, and I think it’s important, but I do at times question whether it’s smart — whether it’s worth all the work to get it done,” he says.

“It’s great to have foundations that fund just pure journalism, and it doesn’t have to be in a fancy new medium or something,” he adds. (I'd note that MinnPost, which has been pretty good at grabbing foundation bucks, exists in that fancy new medium.) “But really good journalism takes an enormous amount of time” and the system is not set up well for longitudinal reporting that follows subjects for more than a few days or weeks.

Melby and his wife, who have other jobs, “worked Christmas Eve, Friday afternoons, Christmas Day. These prisoners we interviewed who are now free, we talked to them at least seven, eight, nine times. Plus talking to experts, plus writing, rewriting and mixing.”

It all boiled down to a radio hour with the men often unheard from after they’ve made themselves society’s outcasts. Melby says none of the four subjects who agreed to participate is a Level III offender, the most serious designation. However, one was nearly civilly committed by Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner, who just exited the governor’s race. In Minnesota, civil commitment after a prison stay has amounted to a life sentence, an issue “No Brother of Mine” explores.

That offender, an ex-gangbanger, got a post-prison job breaking up pallets, but was fired and is now unemployed, Melby says. However, another offender, who attempted to rape a woman at a bar, met the documentarians outside prison in a Mercedes; he’s now a car salesman, and Melby says they captured a “good back-and-forth” between him and his then-girlfriend.

Another subject — a street drug dealer who raped his girlfriend’s daughter — got married, has been at the same job for three years, and goes to church, Melby reports.

The duo — whose previous documentaries won two Edward R. Murrow awards from the Radio and Television Digital News Association — do make more than prison wages, though not the federal minimum wage ($7.25). It remains to be seen if the $100 they spent for promotion distribution and exposure gets them above that humble rate some day.