Mau, 15, has fished every day for his family for the last three of four years — he can't remember exactly how long. He goes to school in the afternoons. The vast majority of Cambodian children work. Their labor is imperative for their survival and the survival of their families. --Jerry Redfern

Freelancing — the bottom line

By Karen J. Coates

I’m writing this story for free. I want to get that out of the way, right up front, because the bottom line these days is the top anxiety for any freelance journalist.
Americans don’t like to talk money, but we journalists must. It’s not that we’re cheap, greedy or pernicious. We need to eat. And we’re slogging through a complete overhaul of this industry as we know it: dying papers (35,000 layoffs since 2007), dead magazines (428 lost in 2009; including my former employer, Gourmet) and blogs that ask our time and words for nothing but exposure. Freelancers can’t afford to write for free — unless personal interests compel us to tell a story that must be told.

After all, that is what drives most of us into this business. But it is a business. And the trouble is, most of us J-School grads got here learning how to interview, report the news, check our facts and decide between further and farther — with not a whit of business know-how to back us up.

The traditional “separation of church and state” between the news side and the advertising side is responsible for much of this knowledge hole, writes Dan Gillmore in his new book, "Mediactive." Reporters traditionally were shunned from the ad offices “as if they’d get a terminal disease” by crossing over. “But a journalist who has no idea how his industry really works from a business perspective is missing way too much of the big picture,” Gillmore writes. “The so-called church-state wall has been one of 20th-century pro journalism’s cardinal flaws.”

Normally this time of year, my photojournalist husband, Jerry Redfern (also a UM grad), and I are sweating our way through an Asian jungle, trying to dredge up stories for anyone who wants them. I am lucky to take a hiatus this year, on a well-paid Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado. The other day, as I worked on campus, I overheard a conversation between two students discussing fundraising ideas for a couple of startup projects they and their peers had in mind. I had a major “duh” moment. I realized, clearly, how much I had missed in college by missing business entirely.

Let’s say you’re graduating from J-School soon and you want to write from foreign lands. Everyone wants to tie a scarf around the head, hail a tuk-tuk and breeze through the choked-up streets of someplace exotic, right? I’ve done it for a dozen years, and I think anyone who wants to start doing it — and keep doing it successfully — must begin with a few key questions:

How do I get paid?

It’s the toughest, most pivotal question whose answer often drives freelancers away. When Jerry and I first moved to Cambodia in 1998, I worked on staff for the English-language Cambodia Daily and he shot freelance for papers and agencies that flew in reporters to cover big news. That rarely happens anymore. Newsrooms (if they still exist) contract locals in the absence of travel budgets. And freelancers often look more toward grants, foundations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to pay their way. When all those fail, they quit or go commercial.

“Today, how we divide our time and do our work and get paid for it has virtually no connection to how things worked for those who started out a decade or two before us,” freelance photographer Justin Mott writes for Nieman Reports. He moved to Hanoi in 2007 with dreams of flying high on a newspaper’s dime. He snatched a few of those gigs, shooting for The New York Times across Asia in 2008. “By the next year news organizations’ budgets dried up; no longer was I traveling for the Times or anyone else.”

He hasn’t resigned, but he’s branched into bread-and-butter commercial photography that funds the long-term journalistic projects he really wants to do. “It was time to readjust my plans as a photographer and to market myself as a business.”

The one business concept I did learn at an early age was “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” For several years, Jerry and I survived on semi-regular checks from a few dependable, traditional sources (Gourmet at the top of that list). But take a look at the diversity in a sampling of our 2010 pay stubs: Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Sierra, GlobalPost, Women’s eNews, Lonely Planet, Random House, National Geographic Books, OnAsia Images, a couple of Thai travel magazines, an international media training group, the University of Colorado, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the German government.

Some of those jobs I never would have anticipated five years ago, nor would I have envisioned them as journalism outlets for my work. But today, it’s essential to think broadly and creatively in deciding how and where to market yourself as a freelancer. When British photojournalists Jason Florio and Neville Elder decided to shoot a documentary for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, they ran short of money for a promotional trailer. So they launched a page on Kickstarter (the “largest funding platform for creative projects in the world”) and asked the public to meet their $1,500 goal. It’s called crowdsourcing. And it generated more money than the two journalists had sought.

What is my job?

Your job, as a foreign freelancer, is to create your job. Just as newspapers are closing bureaus and investing far less in their newsrooms ($1.6 billion less in 2010 than three years earlier, according to the State of the News Media annual report), a host of “media futurists” are pouring dollars into new ideas. Innovation is paramount. So is the drive to “consume, share, create, comment, search, report, investigate, tweet, read, view, check in, bump,” so say the folks at We Media who have created the PitchIt! Challenge offering two projects $25,000 apiece to merge media, communication and technology. While traditional media outlets crumble, the organizers write, “a new generation of empowered, entrepreneurial digital creatives exchanges information, insight and knowledge on an unprecedented scale through global communications networks.”

If I’d written a sentence like that in Dennis Swibold’s reporting class, he’d have kicked me out the door and all the way back home to Wisconsin.

But these are people with money, funding independent journalists. PitchIt! isn’t alone. The Knight News Challenge doles out $5 million a year to people with “innovative ideas that develop platforms, tools and services to inform and transform community news, conversations and information distribution and visualization.” We can hate the language — but we need to learn it if we want money to do what we do best as freelance journalists.

How do I tell the story?

In the age of 140-character narratives, some say readers no longer have the eyes or minds for big blocks of text. “The long feature has largely disappeared,” journalist and professor Mark Lee Hunter told an audience at a 2010 European conference on the future of journalism.

I’m not sure I fully believe him, or maybe I don’t want to believe him because long features are what I enjoy doing — and reading — most. Plus, I just listened to former New Yorker staffer and author Dan Baum speak at length about the eternal power of good storytelling with strong, true characters. I do believe that.

But I also realize long-form journalism alone cannot sustain us. Years ago, we freelancers built a clip file. Today, we build an audience. And we do that in ways that often feel antithetical to the very nature of what we love. We tweet. We blog. We post on Facebook and gather friends who “like” the pages we’ve established entirely for the business sides of our lives. Publishers wouldn’t even think of giving us a nonfiction book deal without a ready-made core of readers.

Here’s one example of my multifaceted plans of attack:

Jerry and I are finishing a book on unexploded ordnance (UXO), which continues to kill kids and farmers in Laos nearly 40 years after the U.S. military dropped the bombs. The book deal will pay, eventually. But not a lot. We have published spinoff features in newspapers and magazines that pay as little as a few hundred dollars each, or nearly as much as the book itself. I’ve written blog posts on UXO, and then posted links on Facebook and Twitter. Jerry has exhibited his photos in Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Phnom Penh and Boulder. We’re talking with the Asia Society about presenting in San Francisco. And we’re never closing an eye to any creative means for getting the story out.

Why am I here?

Because the story needs to get out. People need to read it, see it and know it. These days we have infinite possibilities for that happening, though few of them fall into the scope of traditional journalism. That doesn’t matter so much to me. It’s the story that counts and the people who get it — not the means by which it happens.

If we can accept that, we have a shot at succeeding as freelancers.


Karen Coates is a freelance journalist and author whose wok for the last 15 years has focused on Southeast Asia. She will be the 2011 Pollner Professor at UM.

Jerry Redfern, an internationally recognized photojournalist, is married to Karen.

Click here to view a slideshow of photos taken in Cambodia by Jerry Redfern.