Am I responsible for a shitty freelance market?
Yesterday I posted about using Medium as a platform for my second year students. In passing I mentioned that Contributoria also looked like a good bet. That led to a brief exchange with Sarah Hartley (editor at Contributoria) which also included Leeds Met uni lecturer Karl Hodge, about how the process of pitching to contributoria could be included in teaching. That lead to this from freelancer @digitaldjeli (whose website on news from Africa and more I can recommend btw.)
@karlhodge @contributoria @digidickinson @foodiesarah so much for supporting freelance journalists who NEED to earn a living :(
— digitaldjeli (@digitaldjeli) August 26, 2014
A fairly lengthy exchange followed which I found a bit frustrating and ill-tempered (I actually said ‘rude’ at the time). I’m sure digitaldjeli thought much the same of me. But it was food for thought and I wanted to get down a couple of points down. (Yes, it’s my blog and I can ruminate if I want to)
Looking back, the conversation seemed to touch upon a few broad, interrelated points:
Journalism courses (encouraging students to pitch) skew the market
I wasn’t sure who or what that original tweet was aimed at, so I asked digitaldjeli if it was the fact that it was students pitching:
@digidickinson YES - in industry that is hammered + w no support + they don't need to feed their kids @karlhodge @contributoria @foodiesarah
— digitaldjeli (@digitaldjeli) August 26, 2014
I’m not really sure that I like the distinction between students and journalists here. I expect that mine are both. Or for that matter that all students are carefree with no responsibilities. As to whether it’s courses like mine that are adding to the weight of the hammer I don’t know.
A brief look through of the figures suggests that there would be around 14-16,000 people studying journalism and information related degrees in the UK( a guesstimate based on figures from the OECD). That’s not taking into consideration NCTJ type courses etc. But let’s also factor into that the industry redundancies. Estimates put job losses in papers alone at the 8,000 mark (that was a few years ago). I’d say there were more journalists entering the market than students. But, being fair, across the industry as a whole, that’s a lot of people that could be fighting to be heard in the freelance market.
All of which suggests a broader point I heard echoed in digitaldjeli’s tweets:
The freelance industry is a in a shitty state, please don’t make it worse
It’s easy to see how that point connects with the first – it can’t support the people already in the market so why flood it with more. In that respect I think it’s appropriate to question if offering the courses we do is unfair on everyone, including those students on a course who might expect to make a living; asking who is taking the risk. But taking the industry as a whole we aren’t great at being fair.
I can be generous and say it’s competitive. But the truth is that people will take whatever edge they can to get ahead; everything from dropping a name, leveraging a contact, citing past employers on bios or paying for a course. Healthy competition is OK and the great thing about the web is that it means players like contributoria can explore ways to help broaden (and maybe flatten) the playing field. But plenty of people will exploit that. It’s as likely to be a dodgy internship as much as a training course that exploits or closes a door on broader opportunity.
I recognize that the compulsion to analyse the industry and its models to understand sustainability isn’t one that stops with the mainstream parts of the industry. Journalism education and training, in all its forms, is just as much part of that process and it’s right that we should feel that pressure and be held to account. The vast majority of people I know in the edu/training sphere care and worry very deeply about that.
I’m certainly not comfortable with the idea of us essentially ring fencing certain aspects of what is essentially an economy; barring one element to protect another. If we do that we have to get into the idea of what makes one lot a journalist and another not. (good luck with that but I really don’t care for the distinction). But maybe a shift in perspective doesn’t hurt
Expectation or responsibility
It seems that the last 10-15 years of the journalism industry are defined by the concept of expectation. An expectation by some that life will continue, untroubled as it always has. An expectation that the web will make things better. An expectation that there should be special treatment or exceptions made. I’ve always seen a big part of my job as managing and informing expectation so that people can make informed choices. But one result of the conversation has been to get me thinking about* responsibility*. Where does my responsibility for this begin and end?
There doesn’t seem like there is going to be much settling down in the media landscape any time soon and it’s certainly not going to get flatter (or fairer). Asking how we can be more responsible in cultivating that landscape seems a more positive one than finding ways to deal with a set of increasingly conflicting expectations.