- Details
- Published on 12 August 2011
But the question is: can a foreign freelancer any longer survive - and if so, how? It appears I'm going to find out.
For the past decade and more we've been told the "business" of foreign correspondents is over, that the role international freelance journalists have long played as a profession, an industry - and by implication, as a value to society - has up and vanished. Consolidated corporate media, shrunken newsroom budgets and, so they tell us, the public's shrunken appetite for foreign news are to blame. But the most shameful defeat would be if we let them convince us it had to be this way.
True, by the time I left Berlin two years ago, most of my freelance colleagues were, like me, ready to hang it up and find regular paid work while clinging desperately to the last vines in that dwindling jungle called the paid media. But now that I've given "regular work" a shot, I've returned to the notion that the opportunities, excitement and challenges of freelance life are, for the moment anyway, preferable. And reasoning tells me there are two reasons freelancers like myself and others should be optimistic about our trade:
Mobility + Efficiency. Okay, so climate change is upon us and the price of fuel will soon be skyrocketing. In the meantime, getting cheap air flights to destinations across the globe has never been easier nor has a correspondent's ability to travel with all that s/he needs to do the job: laptop, camera, video equipment - and most importantly, a near ubiquitous Internet signal that allows us to download, attach, export and post material online as quick as we're able to turn it out. Blogs, news sites, Youtube, etc are an open global canvas for freelancers to paint the colors of the world they wish to show. How much more freedom and access to coverage do you want?
Funding. Aside from the apathy of a majority of readers and viewers back home, lack of funding is what's most commonly used as the crutch to explain why our business dried up: there's simply no one who can afford to pay us. Not only do I believe this not to be true, I know it. Foundations, institutes and organizations are increasingly offering grants for foreign reportage; online fundraising tools for freelance proposals are on the rise; and, perhaps in magazines more than in newspapers these days, budgets for foreign freelance assignments still do exist. Without a doubt, the golden age of media's limitless expenditures for coverage abroad is over. But the opportunities for developing new, crowd-sourced types of funding are just beginning, and we have to tap that trend if we are to survive these lean times.
A belief in the importance - more truly, the necessity - of an honest, reliable, descriptive class of reporting from abroad, and the rights of foreign correspondents to earn a wage comparable to their experience and the valuable work they provide, was a guiding principle behind the founding of this agency (ARA) a little over two years ago. The financing structures, the use of multi-media, the brand of reporting outlets can all change: what cannot change is that the readers and viewers and listeners back home continue to receive informed accounts and analyses of complex events across the globe, and that our reports from abroad matter and help people to make some sense.
Freelancing was never easy. Every new story is like summiting a mountain: find an original idea, gather evidence for that idea, sell the idea as a story, do the work to produce the story, receive payment upon publication of the story. It takes a certain hardened, tenacious personality to be able to climb and descend with relative ease. Believe me, if sitting behind a screen in an office for 40 to 50 hours a week was easier for me, I'd do it. But the problem with stability is that it's stable. So, in August, I'll be driving from California across the U.S. and landing one month later in Berlin, then on to points further south and east where, I hope, I'll catch a freelance train to somewhere.
-- Michael Levitin, somewhere and freelance-bound
