This week’s Sunday Read is a Longreads roundtable conversation between freelancers about how to succeed in the cutthroat industry of journalism for hire.
In the piece, four freelance writers – Eva Holland, Josh Dean, Jason Fagone and May Jeong – discuss how to find inspiration, how to pitch stories, and what to do about unpaid invoices.
On the face of it, there is more support for freelancers now than ever before, including the recently launched site WordRates, which aims to be the “Yelp for journalists”.
However, there are still high profile cases of exploitation. In October last year, Wil Wheaton, a celebrity blogger who rose to fame in the late 1980s as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, publicly turned down an offer to write for the Huffington Post because of their policy of reimbursing writers with “exposure” instead of payment. Wheaton’s response, “you can’t pay your rent with ‘the unique platform and reach our site provides’”, went viral.
In a story related to our Sunday Read, Longreads founder Mark Armstrong suggests three simple ideas for adjusting the balance of power between editors and writers:
- 1. Stop offering stories exclusively to one publication. (And editors, stop insisting on it.)
- 2. Set a hard deadline for a response, and propose a timeline for reporting/writing.
- 3. Propose a flat fee upfront, in your story pitch.
A recent piece by Fagone on Medium details six pieces of more immediate, practical advice on how to pitch a freelance story, including “no attachments”:
Write the pitch in an email. Do not attach a file. An attachment makes it harder for the editor. Editors are busy people and get a lot of email. Also, editors hate email. I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate how much they hate it. I mean, we all hate it, but editors definitely hate it. My point is that in my mental model of the editorial mind, email is bad, but email with attachments is worse. I can’t say I have verified this theory in real-life conversations with editors but I do live “as if” it were true.
In the Freelancers’ Roundtable, Holland begins by asking the other participants what the most difficult part of being a freelancer is – and receives the unanimous response: developing stories:
Eva Holland: I like to gripe on Twitter about overdue invoices as much as the next freelancer, but for all the talk about finances, I think my biggest challenge is still in story idea generation: I have plenty of half-baked ideas, but which ones really matter? Which ones will sell? Which ones will result in stories that people care about and remember? The experience of idea generation as a freelancer is so different from being on staff, where you have a roomful of colleagues to kick things around with, and you can really tell when the group is getting excited—that’s when you know you’re onto something.
So I guess I’m wondering: What’s the hardest part of the job, for you guys? Coming up with ideas? Working alone? The writing process itself? The relentless, but necessary, grind of self-promotion? Getting paid? (All of the above? Ha.)
Jason Fagone: So right out of the gate you asked the big question! For me, the hardest part of the job is finding and developing ideas. When I read interviews with other journalists, sometimes I skip through the interview to see if they talk about how they find ideas, because that’s what I really want to know. Unfortunately it must be difficult to talk about this subject or else I would not still be staring at this sentence thinking about what to type next.
Book details
- My So-Called Freelance Life: How to Survive and Thrive as a Creative Professional for Hire by Michelle Goodman
EAN: 9781580052597
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- The Freelancer’s Bible: Everything You Need to Know to Have the Career of Your Dreams on Your Terms by Sara Horowitz
EAN: 9780761164883
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- The Wealthy Freelancer by Steve Slaunwhite, Pete Savage, Ed Gandia
EAN: 9781592579679
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