I'm glad you don't rely on freelancing, Harry, and I'm grateful for your politically oriented substack. The media landscape is SO different to the one I worked in (decades ago in another country) that you might find my comment irrelevant, but here goes. It seems to me that the problem goes back to the lack of unionization. When I trained under the auspices of the UK's National Council of Journalists and worked as a cub reporter on a London newspaper, nobody would ever have found employment as a reporter without being a member of the National Union of Journalists. After emigrating to the US and getting a Master's in Communication at Stanford I was amazed to be able to write immediately as a freelancer for local Bay Area papers. The pay was lousy — not surprisingly, I thought, because there were umpteen well-educated and well-off people around who were happy to write for peanuts & the glory of a byline. So it was bad back then for freelancers, and I'm sad that it seems to be even worse now.
You know it's funny, as all the digital media companies unionized the organizers (me included) never saw freelance labor as the competition and didn't try to restrict the use of it, maybe because so many of us had freelanced or else were close friends with freelancers.
I'm not sure what percentage of US journalists are in a union, but it's probably pretty high. (I'm in the WGAE.) The problem, imo, is that when the industry as a whole is shrinking unions can only do so much — they can help raise pay and secure strong severance packages, but they can't stop layoffs.
YES to every word in this piece.
I remember the years of $1.50 a word for 3,000-word or 4,000-word pieces. Yes, I'm bitter.
I'm glad you don't rely on freelancing, Harry, and I'm grateful for your politically oriented substack. The media landscape is SO different to the one I worked in (decades ago in another country) that you might find my comment irrelevant, but here goes. It seems to me that the problem goes back to the lack of unionization. When I trained under the auspices of the UK's National Council of Journalists and worked as a cub reporter on a London newspaper, nobody would ever have found employment as a reporter without being a member of the National Union of Journalists. After emigrating to the US and getting a Master's in Communication at Stanford I was amazed to be able to write immediately as a freelancer for local Bay Area papers. The pay was lousy — not surprisingly, I thought, because there were umpteen well-educated and well-off people around who were happy to write for peanuts & the glory of a byline. So it was bad back then for freelancers, and I'm sad that it seems to be even worse now.
You know it's funny, as all the digital media companies unionized the organizers (me included) never saw freelance labor as the competition and didn't try to restrict the use of it, maybe because so many of us had freelanced or else were close friends with freelancers.
I'm not sure what percentage of US journalists are in a union, but it's probably pretty high. (I'm in the WGAE.) The problem, imo, is that when the industry as a whole is shrinking unions can only do so much — they can help raise pay and secure strong severance packages, but they can't stop layoffs.