Freelance Means You Work for Free

When we think about the "de-skilling" of America, or the de-valuing of skilled labor here, we think of the loss of manufacturing jobs to low-wage competitors overseas, to the rise of a service-sector economy that pays poverty wages to workers lacking education and marketable skills. We blame immigrants, unions, employers and politicians. We may even acknowledge that technological innovation has killed good American jobs -- though we usually prefer to blame each other.

The Los Angeles Times has an alarming article showing that this de-valuing doesn't stop at the "shop floor" -- rates for freelance writing have dropped over the years from livable wages to no wages: from $2 per word to the value of "experience" in exchange for free creative or technical labor. Freelance writers are told that we should consider ourselves lucky to have the platform, to build our own audience, to get our names out there. Beyond eliminating writing as a professional career for millions of Americans, there are damaging consequences for readers, including under-reported, under-investigated and ignored news and information.

With the growth of large corporate conglomerates in the media industry making journalism's traditional practices of investigating and reporting beholden to a bottom line, our news sources have evolved into infotainment sites, with the cable news networks given over to entertaining blowhards for whom bluster and ideology trump facts and evidence. As ad revenues disappear, newspapers are closing bureaus and investigative units and fewer and fewer large sources are uncovering and disseminating stories, leading to a real loss in local reporting and a dearth of perspectives.

But to date little coverage of the decline of traditional media and the rise of web-based journalism has documented the devastating effects on people's economic livelihoods. We mostly hear what an opportunity it is that everyone can be a blogger now, that everyone has a platform to make their voice heard, that it's leveling the playing field. What this article suggests instead is that as the field becomes more "democratic" it's actually becoming more unequal and less valued. A select few, often corporate-backed voices dominate the news cycle.

Meanwhile, it's a race to the bottom financially for the rest of us as those who can and are willing to write for free take over jobs that were once compensated. Even many well-intended independent citizen journalism sites are adopting the same "low-wage labor" economic model, in which motivated citizenry with video cameras and laptops are paid based on traffic, if at all. Writer, editor and publicist are now rolled into one. When organizations like ProPublica do make the investment to get to the bottom of a story, it's almost as newsworthy as the story itself.

One solution is greater unionization among freelancers and new media workers. We should also encourage the trend towards non-profit journalism. Both responses recognize the need for independent, in-depth news reporting that relentlessly exposes corporate shenanigans and political propaganda, questionable back-room dealings and important stories that are likely to be overlooked. The challenges, of course, of non-profit businesses include ensuring a steady stream of funding, instituting fair compensation that doesn't exploit employee altruism (or guilt) and maintaining limited donor influence. For unions, issues of seniority and scale within the industry must be addressed. Citizen journalism would benefit from both models, but pay scales must be built on more than just traffic. After all, what compels the most people to click can rarely be called journalism.

This trend is delivering more noise, less information, bigger echo chambers and greater economic inequality. And few media sources today are interested in this story.

There's hope for us yet: Change.org is hiring paid bloggers!

Photo credit: johnonolan