The Age of the Freelancer: Should journalism contests rethink their fees?

Will Write Poems for Food, by Taymaz Valley, Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

In today’s newsletter, we find an example that runs counter or Betteridge’s Law. For my non-British readers, Betteridge’s Law, coined and named after Ian Betteridge is:

This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.” The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

Betteridge’s law of headlines, Wikipedia

That is a long-winded way of saying that in this case the answer might be yes, the question asked might be “yes”.

Nieman Lab looks at why journalism contests should rethink their fee structure as more and more journalists find themselves freelancing whether they like it or not.

Suchandrika Chakrabarti, my friend and former collaborator when she worked for Trinity-Mirror (now Reach) flagged this up from the newsletter today. She has not only launched her own freelance journalism career but also the wonderful Freelance Pod.

https://twitter.com/SuchandrikaC/status/1125387398358155265

And this LinkedIn post of hers is definitely going into the newsletter tomorrow. She starts the post off with:

It’s the anniversary of my third redundancy! Also, it’s a year since I went freelance. Let’s talk about it.

Looking back on a year of freelancing, via my third-person biographies, Suchandrika Chakrabarti

If you spot something that you think deserves to be in tomorrow’s newsletter, flag it up to me on Twitter, @kevglobal, and if you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, you can here.