When journalist Ryan Singel freelanced in the early 2000s, there was still cheap rent in California’s Bay Area and publications typically paid anywhere from 50 cents to $1.50 a word.
Though he felt comfortable that he wouldn’t go completely broke, Singel says it was still tough financially.
“I lived with a bunch of musicians. I paid cheap rent. I worked at a bar for cash money,” he said. “I had a couple of years where I made $20,000 a year from journalism, but I was able to do that because my rent was $350. But now, how do you do it when your rent’s $2,000?”
As freelancing budgets falter and housing grows less and less affordable, freelancing is only becoming more difficult. Despite this, journalists are increasingly having to rely on freelancing as a source of income due to rampant layoffs across a volatile media industry.
“The future is freelance,” said Katherine Reynolds Lewis, the founder of the Institute for Independent Journalists, an organization dedicated to helping freelancers achieve emotional and financial sustainability. “When you look at surveys of young journalists in their 20s and 30s, there’s a much bigger interest in freelancing.”
Lewis started freelancing in 2008 after a layoff from a full-time position. She founded the Institute for Independent Journalists to address some of the issues she faced herself as a freelancer, wanting her work to be valued, consistent and fairly compensated.
“We’d like to change the industry,” Lewis said. “Right now, freelancers are at the bottom of the ladder and we’re not part of conversations about sustainable journalism. And yet, every single news organization relies on freelancers in some capacity and often exploits them.”
Freelancing is also a way in which many emerging journalists get their start in the industry. Take Emily Bloch, for example: Now a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bloch began her career freelancing during college, a job that also helped her supplement her student expenses at the time.
Bloch worked her way up through freelancing, using clips from her college newspaper to land pieces in local alt-weeklies before becoming a regular contributor for publications like Teen Vogue and Cosmopolitan.
Bloch says one of the hardest things about the job was bouncing paycheck to paycheck without the stability of a regular salary.
“A lot of it is learning how to be your own accountant, and also your own deadline keeper and your own secretary all in one,” she said.
Matt Saincome, who co-founded The Hard Times, a satirical punk music publication, faced similar challenges freelancing in the early 2010s.
“My biggest challenges were one, finding work, and after I found the work and filed it and got it published, it was getting paid on time,” Saincome said. “And so that really stuck in my head. It felt like something that should be fixed but just wasn’t.”
Saincome’s frustrations with being paid on time led him to found OutVoice, a software application that helps publishers onboard and pay freelancers quickly. Saincome is also the CEO of Study Hall, a platform which helps freelancers find work.
“I think editors need to be mindful of the fact that this work is really inconsistent,” Bloch said. “And it’s a two-way street: If an editor’s budget for freelance is not very flush then there’s only so much they can do. But I think if they find freelancers that show promise, and that they enjoy working with, it’s making sure that that communication and relationship stays constant.”
Singel added that it’s important for publications to make pitching easier. For example, having a clear way to send pitches on a publication’s website and, overall, valuing freelancer’s contributions more.
“In the course of a journalism career, it’s highly likely that most people will need to freelance, whether it’s for three to six months or a few years because of a layoff, a family emergency or whatever life circumstance that makes them not able to go into an office,” Lewis said. “And so we see that ability to sustainably freelance as crucial to journalists’ career planning, as well as to the future of the industry.”
Victoria Valenzuela contributed reporting to this story.
