pitbullmedia.ca

It seems the gremlins have been at work and this post has vanished into cyberspace. I have been having problems with this blog but they were fixed last week. Apparently, though, it ate my posting.

I’ve resurrected it here but it’s out of synch.

Freelancing through a recession: Brother, can you spare an assignment?

I had a laugh the other day while researching a pitch around what businesses will prosper in a recession.

Except it wasn’t that funny.

Some wonk suggested that as media outlets downsize there was going to be lots of opportunities for outsourcing of content, meaning editors and writers could expect to do well.

Wrong! In theory perhaps, but in reality, a) owners don’t care about content anymore and are prepared to fill the white space around those precious ads with almost any old crap and b) media feeds on retail which in the current climate is sinking faster than the Titanic and in turn is taking the media in its wake.

No ads means no lineage means no freelance budgets, no special sections, no need for specialized expertise meaning no or fewer assignments.

For freelance journalists like me this means we’re falling back on the trades and clients who still want quality and that’s a thinning list.

It’s a time to take stock and look ahead. It’s going to take some imagination, balls and some savings and borrowing to get through the next year for we freelancers but I can’t say I never saw it coming.

John Cosway at TSF blog asked me to offer a snapshot of life as a freelancer in this economy. So, for those recently downsized in the ever downward spiral who wonder what freelancing is like, here’s a quick review and a look at what I’m going through with some advice if you’re seriously considering getting into those game.

I started freelancing for real in September 2004, having bailed out of my job at Air Miles in February that year with a small parachute which enabled me to wank and noodle about at the Canadian Film Centre’s New Media Lab for five months. I had of course, been thrown over the side by PKP in August 2001 as director of web operations at fyitoronto.com when the dot.com crash squelched his dreams of a Canoe/Netgraphe IPO spin off. Going back to the Sun where I’d spent 21 years in the newsroom from GA, City Hall, transit columnist, two way guy, photo desk (summer 1982) police desk chief (1987 89) senior writer (89 to 97) and associate business editor and tech guy, (97 to 2000) wasn’t an option given the squeeze which was already well underway.

By September it turned out the life of an artiste wasn’t for me. Too many wankers, not enough money. I made my first pitch to the Toronto section of the National Post – it was a weather story for Christsakes wrapping up the summer that wasn’t or the summer of Hades, I can’t remember now. They bit. It was the kind of a story a bored city editor would assign for the Labour Day paper to fill space and an equally bored GA would knock out in a couple of days back in the time when newspapers had staff.

But it sold on one phone call and I was officially a freelance journalist. Luck and reputation smiled on my and pretty soon I had a clientele which included Readers Digest, The Star, the Post and a couple of other publications. I was also teaching at Centennial College part time and between them I was making almost as much as I cleared in the corporate world and, with the tax write offs, no commute, no wardrobe and no need for lunch money, about even. Life was good.

Then in summer 2005 the program I was teaching was discontinued and they hired a full time professor for the other program. I was on my own. About the same time freelancing hit a couple of speed bumps and my income plummeted. I panicked and looked for a full time job, signing on as editor of the Daily Commercial News.

I quit after eight days.

I realized that once you’ve worked for yourself, you can’t go back. I didn’t like the hours, the commute, the cycle….I missed working from home and setting my own pace (as torrid as it was conversely)

I agreed to stay on until after Christmas and help them find someone to replace me and they became one of my best clients – even getting me to come in and ride their slot while the replacement editor went on vacation. Ron McGregor who worked on the Sun’s copy desk briefly is there now, by the way and I get a lot of assignments from him.

I haven’t looked back until now because my business took off. The Globe’s ROB came on board, then their Tech Quarterly Magazine. When the Globe’s tech editor went to CBC.ca I started getting assignments there too.

I was getting offers of junkets all over the place as money seemed to pour into the tech sector which accounted for a little more than 80 per cent of my income. In 2007 I was on the road a week a month, to places like Las Vegas, Rome, Shanghai, Silicon Valley, New York, San Diego and more. All of them provided great fodder for stories and gave me access to the top CEOs, executives, researchers and scientists in the sector.

Then, in November 2007 I started to feel the first winds of change. I even wrote about it

my blog in May 2008).

Those cool winds continued to blow until September…and we all know what happened next. I actually did alright, which left me thinking I’d actually get through it.

No more. I’m sinking with the rest of the ship of state.

So I’m cutting spending, revising budgets and making plans for worse case scenarios which include borrowing and pulling out funds from my already decimated RRSPs. I have no choice. Self employed writers can’t draw pogey, you know.

I’m not alone, I know that. My ex girlfriend got her real estate license in June 2007 after being laid off from KPMG in May 2007. It took a year of study, exams and a large outlay. But she has sold only two or three houses and now she too is struggling and has a condo to pay for.

The Globe has killed its tech pages in the ROB, frozen its online tech pages, killed TQ magazine. Collectively, that represents more than $15,000 a year in revenue to me. The CBC.ca has frozen its budget as have several other clients. At the same time I’ve added new clients but the better paying clients are eroding faster than I can replace them.

All told I was about 10 per cent down at the end of the year last year despite adding several new clients. This year, as I said, I’m already 50 per cent down in January and 40 per cent in Feburary.

My one regret is that I don’t have enough corporate clients – I was too busy to develop them in the last few years.

There are queries out there with editors and hopes things will pick up. Certainly, the downtime will let me do other things like investigate other markets in the US and Europe perhaps but with a cold start and no contacts, it’s an uphill battle. Ditto for developing corporate clients.

Maybe I’ll get around to writing that novel which I’ve outlined? But novels don’t pay the mortgage, put gas in my truck and get my 19-year-old through school. So maybe back to a full time job? I really don’t know if I could go back to a regular job.

And alas, there aren’t many of those are they? And truth be told, I’d have to suck it up and work for a lot less money. Heck, I can stay home for the same take home pay one you take my tax write offs – car, gas, insurance, part of the house costs, cable, cell, meals, entertainment and travel – into account.

So, a pick up in work for freelancers? In my dreams but it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Maybe the tongue-in-cheek announcement I wrote in my blog last fall wasn’t too far off the mark in retrospect.

In my world you treat your best customers like gold. They’re precious and they’re rare.

Not so for much of the corporate world. The same corporate greed for easy money is now manifesting itself in a whole new way and it will also hit the economy where it hurts just as the Asset Backed Commercial Paper scam triggered the credit meltdown and the recession we’re suffering through now.

Instead of coming up with innovative ways of dealing with a rocky economy, companies are doing what they always do: cut jobs. Of course, we don’t see those CEO packages being trimmed by 50, 60 or 70 per cent do we?

I’d take meglomanic Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau a lot more seriously if he announced he was taking a pay cut of 50 per cent as he laid off 600 more employees aross Sun Media last month. But then the man has pretty much destroyed everything his father created because of his stubborn, blinkered and twisted vision. So why would he change now?

 Worse, there’s an alarming trend I’ve started to see in the last month or so and I think I’ve seen this movie back during the last recessions.  It’s called Price Hikes.

Even more scary, I know how it ends: rampant inflation. You see, when the recession end, and prices are higher, we’re going to demand our wages rise so that we can restore our previous standard of living.

And that will cause rounds of inflation.

Last month Rogers raised my cable and Internet rates, the latter going up 10% to $60 a month. It wouldn ‘t be so bad but for the fact that Rogers has also capped customers’ bandwidth and is packet shaping which is why I suspect my Skype doesn’t work half the time - because Rogers is slowing down my outgoing packets. And why wouldn’t they? It competes with their overpriced and unworkable Home Phone Service.

Now the GTAA is raising passenger taxes 25% to $25 arguing that fewer passengers means lost revenues. Does that makes sense? You’re best customers are the ones still flying so you reward them by making them pay MORE?

And of course Mayor Commissaire-General David Millernik is ramming a 4 per cent property tax hike. This after they’ve hosed us for garbage collection fee, sewage fees, car taxes and land transfer taxes,

Add it up Comrade Millernik and you’ll see you’ve squeezed a lot more than 4 per cent out of the Toronto proletariat, mostly by screwing over the suburbs again.

Five per cent here, 10 per cent there, four per cent over here, it all starts to add up. We’re getting squeezed by the corporate juggernaut which is still clinging to it credo of shareholder value in a time which screams out for a different approach.

With all the tax money being poured into stimulus packages, the corporate monoliths could at least find a little soul and integrity and hold the line wherever possible.

Heck, he may even be a great marketing strategy: We’re going to loose a little more money so you don’t hurt as much because when it comes down to it, we’re all in this together.

And that’s why I salute companies like Intel which have announced they’re going to spend their way out of this recession by building new manufacturing plants.

They know this recession will end and when it does people will buy electronics and IT again like never before.

And what that happens Intel will not only be well positioned to supply those items, but they may just be remembered as one of the few companies which did the right thing at the right time.

And you can’t say that about many companies - or people.

The last post suggested work was drying up for freelance journalists, but as always happens, the unpredictable has come into play.

 Within hours of posting it I landed a nice assignment with Profit Magazine and a smaller story with CBC.ca.

Now, if I can just get a few more clients to pry loose some contracts and others to publish work they’ve asked for and not run (and thus not pay me for since they’re on a pay on publication model, not pay on acceptance) life would be even better!

But no, I’m not unleashing the dogs of my wallet just yet.