Brent Foster walks along a pipe in Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums in Mumbai, India. Foster was working on an assignment for TIME.com to produce a story of life in the slum where Slum- dog Millionaire was shot. (Natalie Alcoba)

Freelancers hop on bandwagon

by Heather Roussi

At a time when being able to do it all as a multimedia journalist has become increasingly important, the ability to interview sources, photograph the story and upload it to the website from home may just make things a little easier.

With the increasing ease of creating and transmitting a multimedia story over the Internet, many journalists are choosing to work from home. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 19 percent of all journalists worked as freelancers in 2008, and that number is projected to increase in the next decade.

Megan Taylor, a recent graduate of the University of Florida’s School of Journalism who has been freelancing for almost a year, said that getting a foot in the door is the hardest part. As a freelance Web developer and multimedia producer, Taylor said most of the work she’s done for smaller online publications has been because a colleague recommended her for the job.

“I haven’t actually freelanced for any major papers,” Taylor said. “I tried a couple of times and mostly just didn’t get any responses. From talking to some freelancers who do work for major papers, though, I understand that getting started is the hardest part. You have to forge a relationship with an editor, and sometimes write for free for a while.”

Another challenge, Taylor said, is the lack of a community for a freelancer. Working from home means no one to confide in about the difficulties of juggling different projects and the continual search for new work. But Taylor said she did manage to find other freelancers to connect with.

Brent Foster works on a multimedia project in the Jharia Coal fields in the state of Jharkhand, India, 2009. (Paul Madsen/Bombay Flying Club)

“I was never really able to hook into a community, although the Poynter E-Media Tidbits blog has an e-mail list group where people pitch ideas and comment on stories,” Taylor said. “What I did do was follow a lot of blogs about freelancing and find some people I admired who were freelancing online and get in touch with them.”

Taylor also stressed the importance of multimedia news reporting as one of the most important aspects of journalism in the future, especially in an industry that is becoming increasingly defined by interactive content. “The reason multimedia is important is this: the Internet,” Taylor said. “The Internet allows us to very cheaply use many different mediums to tell a story. Millions of people watch video online now. People are looking for content to entertain them and interact with. Text alone is no longer enough.”

Another multimedia journalist, Chris Booker, has also recently started freelancing. Booker was a staff video journalist and media producer at the Chicago Tribune until 2009, when he joined Northwestern University as an assistant professor. He now teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in Doha, Qatar, and does freelance work for the Global Post, Time.com and Slate.com. Booker said there are more opportunities for U.S. journalists to succeed overseas because there’s less competition.

“In the U.S. you are competing with many more people and in some ways won’t be carving out a specialty or niche,” Booker said. “U.S. media outlets have decimated their foreign bureaus, but they still need foreign content. They are far more likely to use freelancers now because they have fired their foreign correspondents or closed their bureaus.”

More importantly, though, Booker said, freelancing abroad has allowed him to follow his interests when finding a story to produce.

“I have found that being overseas allows me tremendous freedom to pursue the stories I am interested in,” Booker said. “At the Tribune, it was a constant balancing act between fulfilling my duties to produce daily stories and pursue the stories I was interested in. Now I have a backlog of stories with my two primary outlets (Time.com and Global Post), all of which were my own pitches.”

When pitching a story idea to a potential editor, Booker said the final product, whether audio, video or photos, is often the result of specific subject matter. Although his creative process is always evolving, Booker likes to spend time “just taking things in” and always reminds himself of the reader’s viewpoint.

“I pitch my stories beforehand and then try to let the story dictate the medium,” Booker said. “I also really try to listen to what the space sounds like. What are some of the unique audio things that I could use within the final piece? This makes for interesting openings, endings and segues. Usually I will pitch just a video, but then I will shoot photos and panoramas and offer those up to the editors as well.”

Brent Foster, another freelancer living overseas, recently quit his job on staff at the Los Angeles Times and moved to New Delhi, India. Unlike Booker, Foster doesn’t have a support system for his work and said starting a freelancing career abroad has been extremely difficult.

“It’s not easy at all,” Foster said. “Leaving a staff job to freelance internationally has been a huge financial struggle. I do, however, look at it like beginning any new business. You can’t really expect to be incredibly successful financially the first year you open any business. I think the challenge is to make sure editors know who you are and where you are, and most importantly, think of you first when an assignment comes up in your region. I firmly believe, like anything else, a lot of the business comes down to personal relationships, be it in the flesh or via e-mail.”

Foster also said having an Internet connection is one of his main concerns when working on a project. Living in India sometimes means slow connections, power outages and even sending a hard drive across continents by FedEx. This means that one more step in story production is accounting for the time a single project may take.

“Some clients hire me to shoot, edit, research, write and basically give them a complete piece in the end ... others ask me to shoot only, and then want to edit the piece themselves,” Foster said.

“It really depends on the project. It takes an amazing amount of time to meet the right characters for the story, shoot, plan and eventually edit, which is the longest part of the process.”

Foster added that although the logistics of working as a freelancer on the other side of the globe might be time-consuming, in the future, newspapers will rely more on those reporters willing to risk not knowing where their next assignment might come from.

“I think freelancing is definitely the way of the future,” Foster said. “As the staff of a magazine and newspaper continues to dwindle, naturally freelancers will fill that void, for better or worse.”