“Mothers: Don’t let your babies grow up to be freelancers,” cracks one journalist, freelancing after leaving a staff job, as quoted by Rebecca Rosen Lum in California Progress Report story Freelance Journalists Suffering in Second Wave of News Media Collapse 6-23-10
A survey of Northern California independent journalists by Guild Freelancers, a unit of California Media Workers designed to support the self-employed, suggests that "falling freelance rates, coupled with skyrocketing costs for health insurance and other basic living expenses, are making continued careers in journalism feel increasingly unrealistic." In a world competing with online journalism, the old rate of a dollar a world is fast disappearing and that had been the rate for decades--and wasn't that great to begin with!
Bad news for freelance journalists and newsrooms alike in this story.
A survey of Northern California independent journalists by Guild Freelancers, a unit of California Media Workers designed to support the self-employed, suggests that "falling freelance rates, coupled with skyrocketing costs for health insurance and other basic living expenses, are making continued careers in journalism feel increasingly unrealistic." In a world competing with online journalism, the old rate of a dollar a world is fast disappearing and that had been the rate for decades--and wasn't that great to begin with!
Bad news for freelance journalists and newsrooms alike in this story.