The future of freelancing?
Posted on | January 17, 2009 |
What’s going to happen to us poor freelancers? Newspapers and magazines are closing or scaling back in record numbers. Budgets are being cut, and writers are getting laid off - which means more freelancers on the market, competing for less work. Chilling stuff, to be sure.
But there’s another problem facing freelancers, and it’s one that’s been around for a while: the limitations of commissioning editors. Don’t get me wrong. I love commissioning editors. They pay my wages. But there are only so many of them, and they only have so much budget, time, and space to go around. I’ve pitched stories to editors that I know are goers, only to be rejected on the grounds of budget (not enough money) issue size (not enough pages) or inclination (not enough interest). Sometimes, an editor just isn’t up to speed on a subject and doesn’t want to take the risk. I tried pitching a story about podcasting to an editor in 2004 before many people knew what it was. “That’s just radio over the Internet, isn’t it?” he said. “I don’t get it. Not interested.” Gagh.
With a surplus of freelancers and with a smaller number of publications with fewer pages, that problem is going to get worse. It also means that articles simply won’t get commissioned.
This isn’t just bad for writers. It’s bad for readers too. Local papers, often funded heavily by classified advertising, are getting broadsided by free alternatives like Craigslist and Kijiji. This, in combination with increased ownership by large conglomerates, means that quality often suffers. Canadian media giant Canwest (disclosure: I write copy for their national desk) owns my local paper, and while there is some local news in it, an awful lot comes off the wires. That puts local investigative journalism in a very dark place.
What’s a writer - or a reader - to do?
I was in San Francisco at MacWorld the other week, and I met David Cohn (blog, @digidave). David founded Spot.us, a site dedicated to community-funded, civic journalism.
In a nutshell, here’s how it works: You’re a journalist with an idea. You pitch it to the community of readers that visit the site, and you set a fee that you’d like to earn for researching and writing the article. Readers can then donate money to help you reach your goal. If (or before) you reach your goal, you can get cracking on the story and file the copy for everyone to read.
Readers can also post ideas or things that they’re interested in finding out about to the site. These posts, known as ‘tips’, are essentially story leads, and journalists can choose to base their own pitches on them. That naturally helps with funding because you’re catering to existing demand.
One thing that I like about this concept is that it doesn’t exclude news organisations from participating. In fact, news organisations contributing 50% or more to a pitch can license temporary copyright on an article, giving them first publication rights for a specific time. This is a non-profit venture, so the proceeds go back to the community members that funded the work.
I love the fact that would-be reporters can put together video pitches (you could have real fun with those), and that there’s a mini-blog for each story (even before it’s completely funded) so that the reporter can exchange information with the community. Check out this page for an example of what, at the time, was an almost-funded pitch. Oh, and you can share a pitch on your own blog, too, to help spread the word to get funding for a pitch that you’ve seen.
Spot.us is still in its early stages, but you can see where it’s going. I’d love to see some other things on this site:
- Collaboration tools so that multiple writers can work on the same article. That could include dynamic storyboarding (by integrating with this, for example) so that people (including readers, perhaps) could monitor the ongoing progress of a story.
- Integration with Google Maps for geo-specific civic reporting. This could be useful for geotagging tips where appropriate, alerting reporters to potential stories in their area of the city. It could also be used by reporters to collaborate with each other and create maps illustrating a story. Or perhaps even more powerfully, they could use it to solicit information from their readers. Example: A reporter asks readers to geotag the spot where they have seen a case of cancer reported in the last year. As data floods in, she notices that cancers are clustered near a local chemical plant.
- Source listings, so that multiple journalists and readers can all contribute contacts to a single place.
- A reputation system for journalists. Currently they have profiles, and articles are vetted by Spot.us-appointed fact checker editors, but a reputation system would be useful when people are considering whether to fund a particular writer.
- Dynamically updated stories. One of the interesting thing about local investigative journalism is that stories are often inclined to develop over time. There should be some way of enabling stories to develop using this community-funded system, perhaps without necessarily having to go and re-fund a separate project each time. And imagine the power of somehow showing how that story developed, visually? If events in stories were date tagged, and with the stories themselves tagged by subject, you could create a system that dynamically built timelines on the fly based on subject tags. Searching on ‘Gavin Newsom’ and ’solar’ could produce two timelines showing events related to Newsom, and events related to the development of the solar industry in the Bay Area, for example. That could be extremely powerful.
- I’d love to see a site like this use semantic entities, a la Silobreaker. They’re much more powerful than straightforward tags. Bob Smith is a person. He is the cousin of Jill Jones and the owner of Spudcorp, which is a company dealing in food production. This is coded into the system using semantic tagging, enabling journalists to find connections between Bob and other semantic entities worth investigating. A journalist is writing a story about Spudcorp winning a contract with the school board. The journalist types in the name of school board department head Jim Jones, who the system knows is also a spouse of Jill Jones. It alerts the journalist that:
Jim Jones > spouse of < Jill Jones > cousin of < Bob Jones > owner of < Spudcorp.
Geddit? Civic journalism and semantic web technologies go together like politicians and payoffs.
Anyway, as David says, there are only so many things you can do at one time, and what’s up there now is only about a quarter of what he wants to do. Who knows, maybe some of this stuff is on his list. He’s a smart guy working with some smart people, including Jeff Jarvis (blog, @jeffjarvis) and Jay Rosen (blog, @jayrosen_nyu), both whom I’ve had the privilege of interviewing in the past. I’m sure that a lot of stuff none of us have thought of is on his list too.
As a small venture you have to stay focused. Partly because of his funding, David had to restrict Spot.us to the Bay Area, at least initially. But the thing that most excites me about this is that it’s an open source project. And he says that when the code has been tweaked enough, he is going to release it to the general public to do with as they will. Rough timeline: about three months from now. I’d love to see a version of Spot.us in my community, or even run it. And there’s nothing to stop versions of the project being created for special interest groups (how about a spot.us dedicated to the next election, or focusing on the healthcare industry?)
Freelancers probably won’t be able to make their entire living off this, but it gives them a chance to air the stories that they’re passionate about, and to interact directly with their audience in an entirely new way. Very exciting stuff. Very exciting indeed.
Picture: ‘newspaper blackout poem’ courtesy of Precious Roy. Thanks!
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5 Responses to “The future of freelancing?”
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Word Herder is a site for writers and readers of both fiction and non-fiction. Surf here to read more about useful tools to help you organise your writing and optimise your research. I'm Danny Bradbury and I'm a freelance technology writer writing for the Guardian , the Financial Times, the National Post, Backbone magazine, MSN Canada, and the trade press. Here's a feed showing some of my work.
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January 19th, 2009 @ 8:41 pm
It was great getting the chance to meet you. Hope we can run into each other again. Let me know if you come back down to SF.
Best
January 28th, 2009 @ 9:24 pm
Nice meeting you too - will be back in April! Looking forward to another beer with you and Tom et al then.
February 9th, 2009 @ 9:11 am
“And he says that when the code has been tweaked enough, he is going to release it to the general public to do with as they will. Rough timeline: about three months from now. I’d love to see a version of Spot.us in my community, or even run it. And there’s nothing to stop versions of the project being created for special interest groups (how about a spot.us dedicated to the next election, or focusing on the healthcare industry?)”
Thanks for the tip on spot.us - a few professor friends and I are interested in building something of a repository/headquarters for hard hitting journalism about poverty, its causes and its varied solutions. Huge, huge ups to open source - this is the sort of tool that would make all of my dorky dreams come true.
In the words of Darth Vadar, “Nothing will stop us now.”
June 13th, 2009 @ 1:35 pm
Greg, sorry for the late reply. If you do pull something together, please do let me know. I’m very interested to hear how people use the software.
November 16th, 2009 @ 9:37 am
This is a great read. I’d love to add it as a guest post to our ‘Future of Freelancing’ section on Freelance Advisor
http://www.freelanceadvisor.co.uk/tag/Future-of-Freelancing/