Tips For Self-Employed Journalists
With local newsrooms closing all over the United States, more and more journalists find themselves working freelance jobs to make ends meet. Freelancing means depending on yourself for everything, though: getting enough work, writing enough content, publishing, income, etc. And having control of this can be intimidating if it’s not the journalist’s usual modus operandi.
Getting started, you’ll need to know what kind of work you want to do. Reflecting on your skill set is a great way to get the ball rolling here. Journalists have had to evolve their skill sets plenty in recent years due to the advent of online media and publishing, and as such, journalists have strengths and weaknesses both in their field of expertise and what kinds of stories they pursue, and what kind of technical skills they have. A journalist who knows how to manipulate Canva, per se, might be able to swing a couple of extra gigs here and there in order to assist smaller newsrooms.
These technical skills also come in handy for diversifying your resume—to a degree. Freelance journalists do not want to be a “jack of all trades,” according to Lizzie Davey of Medium. “While I enjoyed some of the projects,” said Davey, “there were far more that I did NOT enjoy. But the biggest downside was that I couldn’t make a name for myself doing anything because I didn’t do enough of any one thing.”
Rather, Davey recommends journalists focus on their most adept skills and market themselves in small niches: “In the end, niching down was the Best Thing I Ever Did for my business. It positioned me as an expert, gave me a lot of fodder for my portfolio, and it meant I could really focus on expanding my knowledge in a certain area.”
Next, the Society Of Professional Journalists (SPJ) suggests getting very familiar with writing query letters and story pitches. SPJ suggests browsing available news items, from newspapers at the grocery store to radio broadcasts, in order to find both material to report on and potential employers. Once you’ve decided which publication to approach, SPJ recommends turning to LinkedIn to find its employees and getting to contacting them.
“Once you’ve found potential markets for your work and identified a likely contact, write a short e-mail to introduce yourself and include a few links to samples of your work,” the organization recommends. “See if the contact is an SPJ member (search the membership directory), and if so, briefly refer to SPJ in the email. If you know someone in common, mention that. It will help open the door.”
Pitching work requires you to generate a lot of content, and SPJ recommends you should always be selling the story, not yourself. “Prospective freelancers often try to tell their life stories in their query letters when all an editor wants to know is whether the writer’s idea is worth attention,” it cautions. “Explain the story in one or two short sentences, focusing on the key questions all news stories try to answer: who, what, when, where, why and how.”
A final, really important piece of freelancing in today’s landscape is the journalist’s social media. Social media can be used to directly connect with communities and clients, and can also be a catalog for the journalist’s work and a place where your independent publications can get clicks and views. Understanding how best to utilize social media to ingratiate yourself to people who may be able to give you jobs is essential.
Freelance journalist John Card recommends LinkedIn, but also touts the usefulness of Twitter and Facebook to stay connected to communities and not just potential employers. Card also noted the role of social media is likely to change again even more in the next decade. “The future of the media is uncertain and no-one can remotely predict where we will be in 2030,” he said. “My advice: adapt, change and be entrepreneurial if you want to survive or, better still, thrive.”
With some focus and some tenacity, any journalist can make a living freelancing, and plenty of resources are available online to guide journalists looking to break into the market as their own bosses. As the nature of journalism continues to grow and evolve throughout the information age, freelancers are in a unique position to get ahead of these trends and pioneer paths for more journalists to take advantage of these tools.
