How are Australian freelance journalists funding their work?

A 2009 Alan Moir cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald 

When Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist Alan Moir was caught up in the deep cuts at Fairfax earlier this year, he needed to find a way to supplement his income. Moir tells Crikey he was lucky to retain his regular Saturday editorial cartoon spot, but losing his Monday-to-Friday cartoons was a financial hit.

So, at his wife Diana’s suggestion, he set up a subscriber-based distribution of new daily cartoons.

“It’s only been going a couple of weeks, but is promising, some days better than others. If every day was like yesterday, for instance, I’ve estimated it would take 360 years to replace my previous salary. But there are better days too. We expect it to be only a supplementary income in the longer term. We hover ‘somewhere between disaster and dream’, as Diana describes it.”

As legacy media cuts just keep running deeper, and as they rely more heavily on freelance and contract work, rates are falling and there is an increasing need for freelancers to supplement their work in other ways.

Gemma Clarke is founding editor of GlobalHobo.com.au, a travel and lifestyle website that she funds with some advertising, but mostly by selling merchandise and running writing workshops overseas. And she thinks her model is what outlets should be doing, rather than relying on diminishing advertising revenues.

“I honestly think everyone should try to self-fund, like I have: surf publications should run surf trips; health publications should run health retreats; news publications could bring their sections to life and host panel discussions and media events that news consumers are interested in paying for and attending. But so far I haven’t really seen anyone else doing that,” Clarke told Crikey.

[Editorial bloodbath: Fairfax cuts run deep, staff walk off the job]

Ginger Gorman was made redundant from the ABC in 2015, and her freelance work is now regularly published in major outlets. But her business has multiple strands — she writes, teaches, mentors, does public speaking and has just started media training. She also uses crowdfunding through Patreon and PayPal. All this is because freelancing on its own would not pay the bills.

“I might spend five or six months investigating a crucial social justice issue and then write a 2000-word article as a result of that work. Even if I get paid $2000 for that article — which is viewed as a decent word rate in the freelancing sector — the story never pays for itself (and in no universe can a girl live off that income!). So in business terms I treat my investigative journalism, which is my passion, as a loss leader … When I teach brand new freelancers how to survive this is what I tell them: you must have multiple income strands.”

Clarke agreed, saying freelancers needed to have their fingers in as many pies as they could to stay afloat:

“As inviting as freelancing is, it also means no sick pay, no superannuation and no budget to do truly investigative stories, as you’re always just writing on the hope that you can sell your piece afterwards. Not only that, but I know a number of publications my friends write for are continuing to cut their per-word pay due to budget constraints, so whereas writing two stories a week at 50 cents a word may have been enough to live off a year or two ago, now they’re writing for 35 cents a word, so have to work more.”

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To support his freelance work, technology journalist Anthony Agius runs a daily tech email wrap, The Sizzle.

“I love writing about tech stuff. That’s how I envisage it to be, that I could subsidise these long-form stories about tech stuff with The Sizzle,” he told Crikey.

But something that he and Moir have both found is that the subscriber model takes a lot of marketing work.

“By far the biggest challenge to funding my work is getting the marketing right. I personally find that a huge chore, as well as a huge bore, but without it I don’t get paid, so it has to be done,” Agius said.

Agius has worked out he needs 750 subscribers to maintain a living wage — a target he’s still about 300 short of.

“It means continual promotion reminding subscribers,” Moir said.

But for all the struggles, Gorman said that while crowd-funding might not necessarily be the future for journalism in Australia, the fracturing of the industry might push the media into a “healthy media ecosystem”.

“If we get past the fear and devastation at what’s happening to our industry right now, perhaps this disruption could offer us opportunities for innovation. In essence, I simply don’t agree that just because advertisers have always supported journalism, that the funding model has to stay this way … Maybe it’s time for us, the journalists, to think about new ways of supporting our work and maintaining a healthy media ecosystem that holds those with power to account. As reporters, we must continue to make the voices of the voiceless heard.”