Behind the Byline: Navigating Challenges and Improving Working Conditions for Freelance Journalists

By Donna Ferguson

Panellists included:

            Donna Ferguson (award-winning freelance journalist and head of the Women in Journalism Freelance Chapter)

            Lily Canter (co-founder of Freelancing for Journalists, the UK's largest freelance journalism community) will discuss the challenges freelance journalists face.

            Charlotte Tobitt (UK Editor, Press Gazette)

Charlotte Tobitt, the UK editor of Press Gazette, kicked off the session by explaining that last year, Press Gazette tracked at least 8,000 journalism job cuts in the UK and North America. She estimated at least 1,200 of those were jobs in the UK, and that there had been at least 550 journalism job cuts in the UK this year.

Print and digital are continuing to merge, she said, and editors and teams are increasingly being shared across related titles. Publishers have been having a hard time financially, and in the past few years have seen fewer click throughs and reductions in ad revenues. “But, from our recent events with senior leaders at these publishers, things are looking better financially this year than they did last year, which hopefully adds some security.”

Overall, however, she concluded that freelance journalists aren’t a priority for editors and that the disconnect between editorial and accounts teams is “bigger than ever”.

Donna Ferguson, who is head of Women in Journalism’s Freelance Charter, explained that this is one of the reasons that Women in Journalism decided to develop the Women in Journalism Freelance Guidelines, with help from Freelancing for Journalists and the campaigner Anna Codrea-Rado.

Donna ran through the guidelines, and said: “On payments and fees, a lot of it is just straightforward common sense: initiate payment when the work is filed, always pay in full, provide a written contract as standard, have transparency about the rate, clarity about how you’ll pay the freelancer, and have fit for purpose payment processes.”

The hope is that editors will use these guidelines when looking for guidance about how to treat freelance journalists, she said, and that freelancers who feel comfortable doing so can use the guidelines to say to editors: this is best practice and you’re not following it.

Alternatively, if you do not feel comfortable emailing an editor directly and saying, you can email WiJFreelanceChapter@gmail.com and ask Women in Journalism to contact the editor instead. “And we will email the editor and draw attention to the guidelines without needing to name you,” Donna said. “It’s a small step to raise awareness that this is a problem in the industry, that we are monitoring it and we want to do something about it.”

Lily Canter, co-founder of Freelancing for Journalists, highlighted the need to gather information from freelance journalists in order to address the challenges we face. “It’s really important that when we, as freelancers, have concerns, we’ve actually got some data to back up the things we say are concerning us - our challenges, our issues in the industry - and that’s very much where the freelance journalism survey comes in.”

This survey, which Lily is running, is here: https://forms.gle/vJhJAbVDqPqNQSCV8 and will form the basis of a report on freelance journalism, set to be published next year. “If you haven’t filled it in, I’d urge you to do it, it’s really quick and easy and it’s a way for us to gather information about what freelancing looks like in the UK today,” said Lily.

The survey covers the impact of the pandemic, the importance of community among freelance journalists and the big variations in pay that freelance journalists get. “We’ll also be speaking to editors as part of this process and trying to understand how their relationship with freelancers is changing,” Lilly added.

Charlotte suggested that the best way to push the guidelines would be to focus on small publishers first. “Smaller ones are able to innovate a lot better than the large legacy publishers...  there could be an advantage to really pushing it with the small to medium sized ones, and so eventually the nationals will be like: we’re the only ones not signed up.”

Donna was asked by a member of the audience whether now was a particularly bad time to be a freelance journalist. “I think it’s as good as ever,” she replied. “If you’re a good writer, with good ideas, there’s work out there. But freelancing is not for the risk averse. You have to be prepared to take risks, not just with your income, but with your heart. You need to be able to take rejection, to be resilient, to be tough - but then you will succeed,” she said. “It’s always possible to find work, but you might need to adapt and look for different places to write for.”

Lily agreed: “You actually create your own security as a freelancer by having a diverse portfolio of clients, while as a staffer, you never know when the rug’s going to be pulled out from underneath you, particularly at the moment when there’s so many redundancies.”

Donna was asked by a member of the audience what editors should do to make life easier for freelance journalists. “Everything in the guidelines,” she replied. “But number one is kill fees. Fight within your organisation so that you never offer a kill fee,” she urged. “If you’ve contracted somebody to carry out the work and they’ve done exactly what you wanted, fulfilled the brief and filed one time, they deserve to be paid in full.”