Readers!
Mailbag time! A reader writes: My company just laid off a lot of people. As a freelancer, do you worry when this happens — that all those laid off writers will now be competing with you for work?
Throughout my entire freelance career, I’ve watched wave after wave of journalism layoffs. So the answer is no, for three big reasons:
- Freelancing isn’t competitive. Maybe if you say you’ll only write for Harper’s, The New Yorker and Vogue, you’ll have a problem. But I don’t know anyone who can afford to only freelance for whatever top flight publications like that can offer — with their long editorial and pay timelines — unless they have family or spouse money to back them up. For most of us, we’re coming into freelancing with different skills and backgrounds and bringing our own unique experiences and ideas to a lot of different tables. The freelancers I know write about a wild variety of topics for all sorts of publications and clients, and many get their best assignments come not through job board ads or opportunity postings, but through marketing and networking to find work that isn’t advertised anywhere. Good freelancers also help each other! I’ve passed a lot of work on to other people, and have had a lot of work passed onto me. I worry more about terrible people using AI to slop pitches at editors, which makes it harder for us to break through, than I am about more competition from real people.
- Most laid off journalist don’t freelance full time for long. Freelancing isn’t for everyone. It can be a difficult, nerve wracking way to make a living, especially if you don’t like running a business. Also, not everyone has a long financial runway to take the risk of getting a freelancing career off the ground (I was in my 20s with extremely cheap rent when I started). Or someone just needs health insurance for their family. So venturing out to start your own thing, especially right after losing your full time job, isn’t for everyone. I know a lot of laid off journalists who freelanced until they found the next full-time gig, either in or out of journalism, which is totally fine! This is also why you should only listen to people who freelance by choice, and have done it for a long time, about how to do this right (ahem).
- It might mean more work for us. Before you start screaming at me: I don’t like this either. But as I said before, I’ve lived through rounds of layoffs and seen what it does to freelancers, and this is just reality. Whenever a company lays off full time employees, it means they might have to get freelancers to fill in the gap. I don’t mean a company replacing a full time person with a “permlancer” who is paid as an independent contractor to do 32 hours a week on site or whatever (and a little birdie told me one such company notorious for doing this is under investigation by the N.J. Department of Labor HO HUM). I mean more “we need someone who can write about this specific topic a few times” kind of thing. I’m not saying take advantage of it. It’s not like I’m going to go email the letter writer’s boss and say “let me freelance for you!” But at some point, they might buy a pitch from a freelancer where they might not have before. Again: it’s reality. I also know a lot of laid off journalists who start their freelance careers by freelancing for their former employer, so that kind of opportunity has been the launching pad for more than a few people.
Fortunately, the letter writer didn’t lose his job in the layoffs, but he’s worried about it in the future. Lucky for him, I wrote an ebook about freelancing for recently laid off journalists and those who want to quit. For that ebook, I interviewed journalists about how they built their freelance careers, so you can see why we all build our own businesses in our own fashion. Thank you letter writer for the letter and for letting me plug my ebook. What can I say, I got a dog to feed!
Also one update from last week’s newsletter: I said I wasn’t going to reply to email from an editor at a magazine I used to write for, from someone I roasted for doing an Instagram video staring at the camera while driving. After another ding dong driver almost hit me while I was out running, and pointed to his phone as if that was an OK excuse for blowing a stop sign, I changed my mind. There’s really something to using your twenty plus years of professional writing experience to let someone who very much deserved it, have it.
Recent Bylines
“What to do when a team says its short staffed,” HR Dive
“Wistar scientists identify connection between nervous system and aggressive prostate cancer,” Wistar Institute
What I’m Reading
- Home Stretch by Graham Norton. Three people are killed in a car crash in a small Irish town, and of course no one’s lives are ever the same. This novel mostly follows Connor, the young man blamed for the crash as he is sent away to England and his travels thereafter; and his sister Ellen, who stays behind. It’s a sad book, as you might imagine, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. I mostly liked it, but thought the pacing was off and that the twist wasn’t earned when we got there. Still, I stayed up too late two nights in a row to finish it. And yes this is the same Graham Norton whose talk show I love. Absolute chaos. I had no idea he wrote novels until I found two of them at the give a book/take a book shelf at the pool I go to in the summer.
- Postcards: True Stories that Never Happened, edited by Jason Rodriguez. I am a sender of postcards, and a friend suggested I read this. I would have done so sooner if I knew the elephant on the cover was Lucy the Elephant. It’s an anthology of short story comics a based on postcards. The stories are wide ranging, from a woman trapped with an abusive husband to a superhero. Harvey Pekar is in here, so it’s a pretty good group.
What I’m Watching
- Fuze. Oh no a bomb! Oh no, guys using the bomb as an excuse to rob a bank! This is pretty standard thriller with a bunch of interchangeable James Bond candidates in it, and an Eurotrash techno soundtrack. Sure why not!
Nail Polish of the Week
You Don’t Know Jacques! by OPI. Yes, this brownish mauve is very fall, but it’s also the color I wore when I ran a 5K at a nudist resort, knowing that the kind of photo that ran at the top would most likely be taken. I agonized over the nail polish choice. Wouldn’t you?
Until next time!
Jen A. Miller (she/her)
Notes from a Hired Pen ebook series
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