My friend Craig Silverman has written a post with some great advice for freelance journalists trying to develop their career in difficult economic times: Freelancing the future. He came to this in response to a post by Adrian Monck, who has been making the case recently that journalism is not at fault for the decline in newspapers.
Monck is almost certainly right, and Craig’s advice is really good advice – not just for freelance journalists but for any independent consultant-type person trying to get things going. But it’s the business side of the news media business that has and continues to screw everything up, IMO. When the net came along, they said, “look, blogs are great, everyone wants more opinion and context” and went ahead and gutted their news reporting function in favour of more opinion, more columnists, more of what the blogosphere was doing very well from it’s inception.
The problem is – that was the exact opposite of the bet they should have made. Opinions are like noses – everyone has one – and no one gives a damn if it’s some “journalist” (whose publisher likely sold him/her out long ago) who has written the opinion piece. On any conceivable subject, I can go out into the blogs and find at least one if not a dozen writers with more experience, more context, and more knowledge about a subject than any journalist has.
What we need – and by “we” I mean society at large – is honest, exhaustive, factual reporting. Newspapers should have (and should be) increasing their reporting budgets and decreasing their spend on columnists and opinions. I do want more opinion and context – but the last place I want to go to get it is a newspaper.
Patrick says
“difficult economic times”
Currently??
mikel says
For freelance journalists, yes. Their environment has changed for no fault of their own and the mistakes of the business side of the publishing world continue to make it worse and worse.
The contract a new freelancer gets from a newspaper today is a fraction of what we used to get, and most of the traditional writer’s rights have been removed. Plus, the amount of material published (for pay) overall has gone down.
10 years ago, if you wrote a story for Voir or Hour (for example) you were licensing the rights to first publication only. After it was published there, you were free (and indeed encouraged) to sell the article to others. So I could sell a piece for $250 this week, and turn around and sell the same piece (maybe modified slightly) to any one of a dozen similar papers next week for $150 each. A good, enterprising freelance writer could make a living like that.
I don’t know the details of the current contract, but essentially these rights were removed from freelancers because the papers made them sign a new contract that gave them the right to publish the piece on the website, in perpetuity – BUT with no additional compensation for the author.
Sure – of course it makes sense, and as a web guy and consumer that’s how I want things to be – but for the writers, it was a big problem because you can’t re-sell something that is already available for free on the net. So, in the past when I sold an article to Hour and 5 other papers in North America my revenue was $900. Now, I would get at most $250. Difficult times.
The galling part for me is that if publishers had been smarter about it (and less in denial), there would have been compensation for the writer in terms of more and longer pieces, so it could have balanced out a bit. Instead, we have publishers crying about Craigslist taking away 30% of revenues and making the exact opposite kind of investment they should have made.
Patrick says
Thanks for the details. I thought you were saying in general it’s difficult economic time and I don’t think they are currently in Canada, even though some keep hinting at it, because of the subprime thing in the US, we’re not there yet in Canada and saying we are is, to me, helping a self realizing profecy. But never mind, not what you were saying :)
mikel says
But you were right to call that into question – I agree that we’re not at all in generally “difficult economic times” so that is an important distinction I hadn’t made.