By Jeff Israely
Like many of the freelancers we’ve worked with, I wish we could’ve hired Carl. Alas… hiring is hard, hiring is expensive, business is tight. Eventually, he and his sharp prose and smart ideas wound up somewhere else. And so did we. Such is life. Such is the news industry of the past 15 years. And many more to come.
The good news for Carl (byline: Carl-Johan Karlsson) is that he’s still very much in the journalism game, which is sadly not the case for many of the other past freelancers we weren’t able to hire.
Even Carl’s success and solid CV come with caveats: his two staff jobs over the past decade were for B2B publications, not general readership outlets he’d prefer. And now that he’s back to freelancing, he tells me, times are even tougher and less lucrative – and journalism alone doesn’t come close to paying the bills. (More on that later.)
Carl’s is just one story, but it should sound familiar enough – not only to other freelancers, but to any editor or publisher who has taken a moment to hear from the people out there pounding the pavement and producing the news for them.
The freelance question, of course, is not new. From underpaid, always-on-call stringers to marquee bylines-for-hire, freelancers have always been part of the way journalism is produced.
But since the internet upended the industry’s economics and triggered a steady drumbeat of staff layoffs, freelance journalists account for an ever larger share of the news industry’s work force.
The Pew Research Center found last year that 34% of the US-based journalists it surveyed indicated that they are freelance or self-employed. Germany’s Deutsche Journalistinnen- und Journalisten-Union reports that about two-thirds of its members identify as freelance journalists.
Rank and file
And how’s it going for the growing ranks of freelancers?
A new survey of journalists in 33 European countries – spearheaded by the Taktak project that Worldcrunch and WAN-IFRA are both part of – reveals serious concerns about the viability of freelancing in the news industry.
Of the freelance journalists responding, 62% say they are forced to work other jobs to make ends meet. Some 60% have faced burnout, while 52% say they are worried about the impact of AI on their work.
The EU-backed Taktak project was launched in the spirit of finding new industry-wide ways for media and independent journalists to work together.
We did so by building a donation and payment tool with a unique revenue share functionality that allows a reader to support both the media and the individual journalist responsible for any given article.
No doubt there are other ways to encourage such collaborations between the journalists who get the stories, editors who make them better and publishers who bring the eyeballs.
As a smaller, independent media company that works across multiple languages, Worldcrunch has always had more freelancers than staffers.
This makes it vital that we think hard about how to work with them: Not just in terms of pay, deadlines and working hours, but in considering the best ways to communicate, and how to make freelancers feel invested in what we’re doing – even while respecting the “free” (as in freedom, not free labour) in freelance. Still, in the hustle and the churn of getting the work done, under always tight budgets, I know we’ve sometimes fallen short for our freelancers.
Asked about his relationships with the media he’s currently freelancing for, Carl offers a diplomatic: “It depends.”
Still, like the respondents to the survey, he is starting to lose faith. The requests of independent journalists to editors and news organisations are pretty basic: answer emails (even if it’s a no thank you); provide direction, give feedback, pay fairly, pay promptly.
Of viability and sustainability
Of course the more structural question is the economics. Like the majority of freelancers, Carl must effectively subsidise his journalistic work with other sources of income. In his case, he makes pretty good money with corporate copywriting that he can generally crank out quite efficiently. His estimate is that the corporate work accounts for 25% of his time and 75% of his income, with the inverse for his journalism gigs.
But how long will even that math hold up? AI is also seen as a threat to PR and communications work. “There must be a viable way to make money in journalism,” Carl says. “Like any profession, you don’t want a small talent pool.”
Carl notes that a deep uncertainty about the profession has been looming ever since he got into it. “None of us can figure out where journalism is going, and you never get used to it. Have we hit the bottom? Can it get worse? And now you have AI in that mix. Everyone’s making predictions, but nobody knows.”
The only predictions I’ll add here is that most editors and publishers won’t always be able to hire all the good people — and that we will always need good people.
Yes, people. So we’ll need to figure out how to take care of them, financially and otherwise.
I lost Carl seven years ago. As an industry, let’s figure out how to not lose him for good.
