Are freelancers the wave of the future for newspapers?
They might be. Daily newspapers are trimming jobs and looking for other ways to cut costs, and one way to do that is by using contract workers such as freelancers.
Some papers, including major dailies such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, routinely use freelancers or stringers for certain types of stories – travel pieces, features, essays, high school sports stories and war reporting. But others consider freelancers second-class citizens, because they believe freelancers lack newsroom training or because of past experiences they had with writers who turned in sub-par work.
But as more newspaper reporters lose their jobs, it’s inevitable some of them will use it as a springboard to start freelance careers. This is already happening, but recent actions such as the announcement from McClatchy earlier this week that it will axe 1,400 jobs nationwide is pushing it to the forefront.
Some newspaper industry insiders get this. One of them is Edward D. Miller, a former editor and publisher and current newspaper industry consultant and coach. In an essay he wrote for the weekly newsletter his firm, Newsroom Leadership Group emails to 10,000 newspaper editors, Miller cautions them not to continue viewing freelancers as outsiders and “amateurs.” He writes: “More than a few are serious and capable writers. Many have community connections that are deeper than our own. Collectively, these outsiders have knowledge and wisdom that we could be tapping into.”
Miller, one-time editor and publisher of The Morning Call in Allentown, PA, and an affiliate of The Poynter Institute, the newspaper industry think thank and training center, also admonishes editors to vet freelancers the same way they would other writers, including putting them through typical newsroom testing and training, involving them in the story decision making process and “treating them like insiders.” He also recommends paying a decent wage.
That’s music to a freelancer’s ears. Who wouldn’t want to work for an organization that treated its freelancers like that?
To read Miller’s piece in its entirety, you can sign up for his Reflections on Leadership newsletter, or wait for two weeks (that’s be June 30) and look for it on his Website under “Reflections.”
It’s difficult to understand why it so often appears seemingly impossible for people who have been long-enmeshed in a particular business or endeavor to break from the mindset of, “We do things this way because this is the way we do things”.
A few years ago, when ink-and-paper media first began feeling the rumblings of an uncertain future, I had a discussion with a friend who was the editor of a decent-sized east coast daily paper. I told him I thought the paper of the future would evolve from an enterprise with a large stable of full-time, mostly specialized, reporters to a much leaner operation consisting of a much smaller but solid reporting staff augmented by a large group of talented freelance writers and reporters who would happily take on assignments as part of their choice to work freelance. In addition, there was the undeniable benefit to the paper to be able to, audition, in effect, younger people looking to break into the field in a full-time capacity.
With the explosion of the internet, I explained, it wasn’t just that people didn’t want to deal with the hassle of a physical paper, they were opting for a forum where they could find ten different opinions on a topic that of interest to them, and the writing in the various internet forums was often insightful and passionate. (and then came my quite accidental insult) I asked him why, if that was an option, would people opt to go out of their way and pay to buy his paper when their coverage never went beyond, “Here is a topic that is controversial; the people on one side feel this way – insert generic quote – where people on the other side feel this way – opposing generic quote.
He pretty much told me I was an idiot, that what I proposed could never work and would never be adopted by any serious editor or owner. I think his reason actually was because what I envisioned was simply not how journalism based publications were run.
P.S. I now write about a half-dozen pieces a year for him…on a freelance basis…of course my doing so was his brilliant idea…go figure.