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Context is everything.
Detailed stories on technology startups, business and economic current affairs.
Detailed stories on technology startups, business and economic current affairs.
In a failing news ecosystem, independent journalists keep the story alive. A sneak peek into how they do things to get the best results and the challenges they face.
To say these are edgy times for journalists is an understatement. With traditional news models floundering miserably, newsrooms nervously trying everything to survive, press freedom around the world suffering crushing blows, public trust in news collapsing and artificial intelligence adding to the madness, staying in journalism is increasingly an act of defiance. Even bolder are those who have chosen to walk the freelance path.
The value independent journalists bring to the table is immense, especially in today’s wildly precarious news landscape.
“With newsroom budgets getting tighter across the globe, it’s hard for most organizations to afford a staff member everywhere. This increases the risk of ‘helicopter journalism’—superficial coverage without deep context or local perspective. This is where the role of independent journalists or freelance reporters becomes critical,” says Itika Sharma Punit, a deputy editor at Rest of World, a New York-headquartered nonprofit publication founded in 2019. She adds that freelance reporters are more important now than ever as “misinformation and AI biases corrupt the news”.
Punit, who is based in Bengaluru, swears by Rest of World’s network of freelance journalists. The lean newsroom has reported stories from over 100 countries over the past five years. She herself has worked extensively on stories fromBangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Mali, among other places. These stories “have ground reporting—characters and scenes from cities and neighbourhoods. This would not have been possible without the freelancers who have worked on these stories painstakingly,” she says.
For Makepeace Sitlhou, an independent journalist and producer based in New Delhi and Guwahati, the experience of working in a Delhi newsroom “with a very top-down view on the Northeast region that I was covering” bolstered her decision to go freelance. “I decided that I would rather go it alone than bear the liability of a publication with a Delhi aka state-centric view on the region,” she says.
There are many reasons why journalists decide to go it alone—freedom to choose projects, a flexible work schedule, job loss, caregiving demands and so on. For all their efforts and ambitions, though, freelance journalists don’t have it easy in the slightest.
“Response times are slow, payment cycles can be delayed, most people (myself included) don’t have a press card, which makes our access to some spaces iffy. The pay itself is often low and life as a full-time freelancer can be difficult to sustain,” says Bhavya Dore, who has been a freelance journalist for more than a decade and is also a managing editor at a legal podcast. While she does acknowledge the many opportunities freelancing has afforded her, she misses the “community and camaraderie of a newsroom”.
On top of that, landing a story with a publication is a long-drawn-out process, full of uncertainty. Freelance journalists often go the extra mile to make sure their stories see the light of day. To understand what the process entails, I got in touch with some people who have spent considerable time navigating this maze and decided to pick their brains.
First things first, what does pitching as a freelance reporter look like?
“Pitching as a freelancer is very different from pitching a story to your boss in a newsroom,” says Dore. “For one, you need to know a lot more about the story and need to be able to explain it succinctly. You need to have done a lot of reporting already. You should be able to explain why it matters and why you are the best person to report on it.” To her, pitching is like an audition and “you need to showcase your best self”.
Going back to the basics always helps. “Please try and pitch stories. Do not pitch ideas,” says Raksha Kumar, a freelance multimedia journalist focusing on human rights and social injustice. The difference matters a great deal. She explains: “An idea is much larger, it's broader, it doesn't necessarily have a focus… [A story has] a beginning, middle, end, it has characters, it has interviews, expert interviews, etc… The pitch would also have a very sharply chiselled focus. So your potential story would try to answer a particular question or a hypothesis, and that is the most important part.”
At the end of the day, though, pitching in general is a hit or miss. That’s Sitlhou’s take on the outcome. “It really depends on the timing of the story and whether the lens/angle you're pitching fits the publication or channel's view and politics,” she says.
Rest of World’s Punit shares some of her biggest peeves about pitches. In her words:
Which brings us to the next question.
“Pre-reporting is the hero of good pitches,” says Punit. “Even to identify the strongest framing for a pitch, one needs to do some pre-reporting.”
But how much pre-reporting is necessary? The ideal amount, according to Punit, “would involve reading up about the topic, knowing the latest developments and commentary about it, knowing who the key stakeholders are and who you would reach out to for the story (if it’s about a single character, it is wise to ensure access), and having some data handy to support your pitch”.
At the same time, deciding how much pre-reporting to do is a unique challenge for freelancers. Sitlhou points out that investigative reports, deep dives and documentaries call for a lot of legwork even to get enough preliminary evidence or what is needed to get a scoop. This, she says, is the “most unfortunate part of freelancing because it’s very rare for channels or publications to pay you for the pre-reporting or the story development”.
Punit cautions freelancers against excessive pre-reporting. “It’s a bad idea to report the entire story—including speaking with all sources or writing out a draft—and have no room for inputs from the publication,” she says.
She particularly advises against submitting the entire draft instead of a pitch because “it’s very hard for an editor to go backwards—from a draft to a pitch and then bring it back to a draft”.
For the same reason, there needs to be clarity about how much communication is required between an editor and a freelance reporter once the story is commissioned. While every story is unique, there are some ground rules.
“If the reporter anticipates any delays or hurdles or finds any new information during the reporting that could change the framing of the story, then they must update the editor immediately,” says Punit.
For Dore, it completely depends on the story. “At times, editors like to be very involved and get updates during the course of the reporting. If things are going very well or very badly, I sometimes keep the editor in the loop. Otherwise, I prefer to be left to myself during the course of the reporting until I have turned in a first draft,” she says. However, she keeps the editors updated if she expects a delay, wants a deadline extension, needs to check if it’s okay to use anonymous sources, or encounters any problems during reporting.
While all reporters, whether staffers or freelancers, face challenges during reporting, the latter have some specific obstacles.
The lack of institutional support is one such challenge. It is what makes “an independent journalist more often than not pick ‘safe stories’,” says Kumar. “You want to do an investigation, you want to ask the hard questions, you want to question the powerful. But it gets tougher and tougher because you don't have the kind of security that comes with being associated with a larger journalistic institution.” While she highlights the importance of associations, collectives and journalist networks to deal with the issue, working outside of a professional newsroom “still leaves you vulnerable”.
Dore highlights another problem: that of people not taking freelance journalists seriously or being unwilling to speak because they lack the backing of a newsroom.
Then there’s the elephant in the room: the issue of pay.
Kumar laments that a lot of editors do not make the rates public. How much a freelance journalist gets paid depends on several factors. “Some of it is experience, and I get why. With experience, the amount of work an editor has to do is reduced. If you are turning in a thorough copy, the chances of the editor rewriting it or doing more research or adding to your work would be less,” she says. “But I still believe that pay rates have to be equal.”
However, Kumar does make an important distinction here. There are smaller organizations that cannot afford to pay reporters a lot; editors in these publications are not paid a lot either. This is in stark contrast to larger organizations where editors “take fat packages and freelance journalists are paid peanuts”.
Regardless, freelance journalists do what they do.
Sitlhou argues that independent reporters stick it out “despite the lack of interest big media shows in stories from the margins or even big breaking news from the actual ground. They do this despite not getting any travel advance or often not enough money that breaks even the reporting costs. They do this despite newsrooms hiring AI or pliant staff reporters—one and the same—to fill their already dwindling pages”.
“The least you can do is treat them with some dignity, which includes money that is commensurate with the work.”
Cover image from Unsplash.
