Journalism Studies

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Maintaining a Freelance Career: How Journalists

Generate and Evaluate Freelance Work

Maria Norbäck

To cite this article: Maria Norbäck (2022) Maintaining a Freelance Career: How Journalists
Generate and Evaluate Freelance Work, Journalism Studies, 23:10, 1141-1159, DOI:
10.1080/1461670X.2022.2073257

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JOURNALISM STUDIES
2022, VOL. 23, NO. 10, 1141–1159
https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2022.2073257

Maintaining a Freelance Career: How Journalists Generate

and Evaluate Freelance Work
Maria Norbäck
School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article examines how journalists generate and evaluate their Freelance journalism;
freelance work to maintain their careers. Based on interviews with freelance career; collective
52 Swedish freelancers, it illustrates how they respond to organizing; precarious work;
post-industrial media work;
precarious working conditions. By drawing on literature dealing
atypical work;
with freelance careers, the study shows how journalists navigate entrepreneurship
the market in their pursuit of jobs that make their work worthwhile.
By means of networking, bundling jobs, blurring boundaries
between writing and editing, and being jacks of all trades, they can
partially influence which kinds of jobs they are offered, and what
kind of work they want to pursue in the future. However, most of
these practices function as career maintenance, directing focus and
effort at avoiding downward career movement rather than
achieving upward mobility. The study thus illustrates the difficulties
of achieving career progression as a freelance journalist. The article
ends with a discussion concerning the possibilities of journalists
organizing to improve their working conditions when freelancing.

Introduction
Journalistic work is changing and has been for decades, as news providers are trying to
deal with the loss of paying readerships, declining advertising revenues, recent economic
crises, and the impact of digital and novel forms of competition (Picard 2014; Siles and
Boczkowski 2012). Old business models and career jobs (Kalleberg and Vallas 2018) are
being transformed into an increasingly networked, marketized and fragmented labor
market for journalists. Here, journalistic work is being done both inside and outside of
newsrooms, in a complex media eco-system (Deuze and Witschge 2018: Waisbord
2019). Permanent employment has been reduced on many Western media markets
(O’Donnell, Zion, and Sherwood 2016; Cohen, Hunter, and O’Donnell 2019): For
example, in Australia, an estimated 2,000 newsroom jobs were lost between 2012 and
2018 (Sherwood and O’Donnell 2018), while in Sweden, an estimated 20–25 per cent of
permanent jobs have vanished over the past decade (Nygren and Wadbring 2019; Wadbr-
ing and Weibull 2020). In this world of journalistic work, newsrooms and editors are still
key players, but an increasing amount of work is conducted by freelancers. As an example,

CONTACT Maria Norbäck Maria.norback@handels.gu.se

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
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1142 M. NORBÄCK

in the UK, the number of freelance journalists increased by 67 per cent between 2000 and
2015 (Hayes and Silke 2018), while in Sweden, an estimated 20 per cent of all working
journalists are freelancers (SJF 2021). Freelancers have “patchwork and portfolio
careers” (Platman 2004), doing what has been denoted as “atypical work” (Deuze and For-
tunati 2011) in marketized production chains, where the barriers between traditional jour-
nalism and PR are inherently blurred (Ladendorf 2013; Fröhlich, Obermaier, and Koch
2013; Mathisen 2019; Obermaier and Koch 2015).
Taking these developments into account, journalism and media researchers are paying
increased attention to how freelance work is organized, and what this kind of work entails
(Cohen 2016; Gollmitzer 2019; Salamon 2020; Deuze and Witschge 2018). In the complex
media production networks, where these days “atypical work” is in fact a typical form of
work, journalistic work is becoming increasingly precarious (Cohen 2016; Örnebring 2018;
Salamon 2020). Long-term journalism careers are being replaced by short-term contracts,
work is being intensified, and burnout and stress are common (O’Donnell, Zion, and Sher-
wood 2016; Reinardy 2011). According to multiple studies, remuneration in the form of
freelance fees has remained relatively stagnant for freelance journalists (Cohen 2015a,
2016; Deuze and Witschge 2018; Deuze and van’t Hof 2021; Fröhlich, Obermaier, and
Koch 2013; Gollmitzer 2014, 2019; Ladendorf 2013; Marin-Sanchiz, Carvajal, and Gon-
zales-Esteban 2021; Mathisen 2019; Obermaier and Koch 2015; Salamon 2016; 2020;
Storey, Salaman, and Platman 2005; Werne 2015a, 2015b). Taking Sweden as an
example, a 2015 survey showed that more than half of the freelance journalists surveyed
earned less than the lowest remuneration level for employed journalists (set by the col-
lective agreement for journalists) (Werne 2015b). In the Netherlands, Deuze and Witschge
(2018) state that 60 per cent of Dutch freelancers report monthly earnings below the
minimum wage. In an Australian survey, almost two thirds of freelancers earned less
than half the average Australian wage (MEAA 2022).
However, even though the literature on freelance journalism shows how this work is
becoming increasingly precarious, and that freelancers are working hard to make ends
meet, more research is needed on how freelance journalists negotiate precarity to main-
tain a career, and on how career progression can be achieved. Informed by the sociology
of work literature, particularly the literature on freelance careers (Evans, Kunda, and Barley
2004; O’Mahony and Bechky 2006; Osnowitz 2010; Van den Born and Van Witteloostuijn
2013), this study aims to fill this gap by adding knowledge of how freelance journalism
careers are maintained in a slack labor market, where workers outnumber jobs. This
study thus contributes to studies of the everyday micro-practices (Rouleau 2005) of free-
lance journalistic work, illustrating how freelancers manage the sourcing, generation, and
evaluation of jobs, in relation to how these jobs may help them to maintain and advance
their freelance careers. The research questions posed in this article are:

1. How do freelance journalists source and generate work, and how do they evaluate
different kinds of work?
2. How do different kinds of work help freelance journalists to maintain and advance
their careers?

By addressing these questions, the study will add to our knowledge of postindustrial
journalistic work and careers (Deuze and Witschge 2018), focusing on freelance
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1143

journalists. The empirical material was generated from a comprehensive interview study
of 52 freelance journalists working in the west of Sweden.

Literature Review: Freelance Journalistic Work and Careers

The media industries have been transformed during recent decades due to a decrease in
paying readerships, declining advertising revenues, and the impact of digital and novel
forms of competition (Deuze and Witschge 2018; Mackenzie and McKinlay 2021; Kleis
Nielsen 2016; Örnebring and Conill 2016; Picard 2014; Witschge and Nygren 2009). The
technical and economic changes made have gone hand-in-hand with an ideological
change, i.e., the rise of a neo-liberalist discourse stressing the flexibilization, fragmentiza-
tion and individualization of work (Cohen 2016; Rubery 2015; Salamon 2016), whereby
much of the risk previously borne by the employer is now borne by the individual
worker. Media companies seeking to reduce their labor costs, through downsizing and
outsourcing (Cohen, Hunter, and O’Donnell 2019; O’Donnell, Zion, and Sherwood
2016), has resulted in an increase in freelance work (Bibby 2014: Hayes and Silke 2018).
A growing number of freelance journalism scholars have investigated freelance work
(Cohen 2015a; 2015b; 2016; Deuze and van’t Hof 2021; Edström and Ladendorf 2012; Ele-
fante and Deuze 2012; Gollmitzer 2014; Örnebring 2018; Norbäck and Styhre 2019;
Norbäck 2021; Salamon 2016, 2018, 2020). Even though these freelance studies depict
a working life with aspects of autonomy, and meaningful work with an attractive pro-
fessional identity, they also describe this type of work as precarious, usually defined as
work which, from the perspective of the worker, is “uncertain, unstable and insecure
and in which employees bear the risks” (Kalleberg and Vallas 2018, 2). For freelance jour-
nalists, work is precarious not only because of the low and irregular pay, but also due to
feast or famine workloads, problems with the work/life balance, the responsibility for pro-
fessional development resting with the individual, the lack of a wage premium for experi-
ence, and limited access to social benefits (Cohen 2016; Gold and Mustafa 2013;
Gollmitzer 2019; Templeman 2016; Salamon 2020). Scholars have begun to pay attention
to how these conditions are being experienced, and how they affect the whole life situ-
ation of those doing this kind of precarious work (Örnebring and Möller 2018). Research-
ers have also started to investigate how these precarious work conditions may be resisted
through collective organizing, e.g., advocating for standard freelance rates, fair copyright,
collective bargaining, and boycotts of various kinds (Cohen 2016; Patrick-Thomson and
Kranert 2021; Salamon 2016, 2018; 2020). This resistance has been organized by tra-
ditional unions and formal professional associations, but also through various digital net-
works and more informal professional communities. There are also studies illustrating
more individualized forms of resistance (Norbäck 2021), showing how freelancers indivi-
dually struggle to resist precarious work by avoiding especially exploitative work, such as
platform work (McDonald, Williams, and Mayes 2021), and by negotiating different ver-
sions of professionalism in the face of non-journalist PR work (Gollmitzer 2021). These
studies point to the need for fruitful ways of resisting precarious work using traditional
and novel forms of collective organizing.
Despite the precarious nature of freelance work, many freelance journalists still
manage to have a career as a freelancer. The literature on careers in the field of the soci-
ology of work is vast and has been informed by different social science disciplines. The
1144 M. NORBÄCK

common denominator is the attempt to “explain the unfolding of human work experience
over time” (O’Mahoney and Bechky 2006: 919). As new forms of work, e.g., contingent and
project work, including freelance work, are becoming more prevalent on most labor
markets, workers need to put more energy into managing their ability to get repeat
work. Furthermore, as the internal organizational labor markets of old are becoming
less relevant to many workers, workers in all forms of employment (from the traditional
open-ended contracts to various forms of contingent work) need to put their time and
energy into continuously working towards maintaining their employability. Halpin and
Smith (2017) call this “employment management work” and argue that, even though
all workers on a post-industrial labor market must engage in such work, the pressure
to do so is especially strong for those doing contingent work.
Studies of professional freelance work in the creative industries show how workers
attempt to manage a labor market in a context of high degrees of uncertainty (Armano
and Murgia 2017; Neff 2012; Osnowitz 2010; Scharff 2016; Storey et al. 2005). Halpin
and Smith (2017) summarize the practices that freelancers must engage in to maintain
their employability. First, they continuously calculate the trade-off between money and
time use to maximize income streams and minimize time per job (Evans et al. 2004).
Even so, most studies show many hours of unpaid work – what Standing (2011:120)
calls “work for labor” – seen as an investment in possible future income generation.
Second, freelancers work to expand their skills and knowledge base, and engage in com-
petence development in order to be considered relevant by potential clients. O’Mahoney
and Bechky (2006) use the concept of “stretchwork” to explain how individuals acquire
new skills to progressively get what they perceive as better work. Third, freelancers put
much effort into creating and maintaining their social-professional networks, as most free-
lance work is acquired through referrals and word-of-mouth (see Gandini 2016, for a dis-
cussion on the reputation economy). Fourth, freelancers engage in identity management
of various kinds, including self-branding and self-promotion. Scharff’s (2016) study of
female classical musicians illustrates these freelancers’ perceived need to project an
image of being successful, even though, in fact, they harbor feelings of insecurity and
inferiority.
Against the backdrop of the literature on freelance careers and precarity, this study will
add to our knowledge of how freelance journalists can maintain their careers and achieve
career progression, by focusing on how they source, generate, and evaluate freelance
jobs.

Methods
This study is based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 52 Swedish journalists
who reported doing 50 per cent or more of their paid work on a freelance basis. These
freelancers did various kinds of journalistic work as they produced content (texts,
audio, audiovisual and photo) and worked as editors for various media and non-media
outlets, digital and non-digital. However, for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to them
in this article as either writers or photographers depending on their main work focus.
Most of them also referred to themselves as either written-word journalists or photojourn-
alists. Their clients came from magazines (both legacy media-, trade-, union-, and mem-
bership magazines, as well as customer magazines), legacy newspapers, and various
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1145

on-line media. Some also did PR jobs for non-profits and companies. A few wrote texts for
books, reports, TV, radio, the theater, and did pod-casts. Many did jobs as sub-suppliers for
content bureaus and worked as freelance editors for various publications. A typical free-
lance job ranged between short assignments, on which the freelancers worked for a few
hours, and a couple of days or weeks of full-time work. Freelance jobs were paid by the
piece. Studies of freelance media work (e.g., Cohen 2016; Storey et al. 2005) have illus-
trated the blurred boundaries between media, journalistic fields, and outlets, that is
inherent in post-industrial media work, something that was present in this study too.
The freelancers were selected using the snowball method (Noy 2008), starting with the
first interviewees found through connections, who were then asked to recommend other
freelancers. As this snowballing went on, I employed theoretical sampling (Silverman
2015) by seeking to find interviewees with a wide range of characteristics, and by
asking for contacts with a specific characteristic, e.g., young men, or journalists at their
beginning of their freelancing careers. The sample of freelancers was hence chosen to
cover freelancers of different ages, genders, journalistic fields, types of clients, freelance
career durations, and work focus. Of the 52 freelancers, 22 worked mainly at producing
photographs/images while 30 worked mainly at producing texts/scripts in various
forms, although a few did both. Thirty-one were women and 21 were men, mirroring
the Swedish journalist corps (according to the available statistics from the Union of Jour-
nalists, 56 per cent of working journalists are women (SJF 2021)). Several freelancers had
started their careers in journalism as staffers, later moving into freelancing. Of the inter-
viewees, 19 had begun their careers as freelancers, with 18 previously working as staffers
and 15 previously gaining experience as serial or long-term temps in legacy media news-
rooms. (Table 1).
The interviewees were self-employed, either holding the so-called “F-tax certificate”
needed by the self-employed in Sweden or working with their own sole proprietorships
without employees. As previous studies of freelance journalists have shown, freelancers
often need to take on secondary jobs to get by financially (Cohen 2016; Örnebring
2018). This was also the case for some of the freelancers in this study, as 21 of the inter-
viewees had secondary employment, e.g., working on temporary teaching contracts or in
part time positions as publicists for non-profits. Generally, freelancers who had long-term
repeat freelance jobs had higher and more stable incomes (Werne 2015b) than freelancers
who had fewer repeat jobs, and hence had to take on secondary jobs. The vast majority of
the freelancers had undergone tertiary education, often in the form of gaining university
degrees in journalism or attending vocational journalism schools. The few that did not
have a formal education in journalism were in their 50s and 60s and had long careers
as journalists behind them.

Table 1. Age of interviewees.

Age Number
20–30 9
31–40 19
41–50 17
51–60 5
61- 2
N (sample) 52
1146 M. NORBÄCK

The freelancers in this study worked in the west of Sweden in the metropolitan area of
Gothenburg, the second largest city in Sweden with a regional population of 1 million.
None of the interviewees could be described as stars or “big names”, even though
many were well respected professionally in their specific journalistic fields. The focus
on this part of Sweden explains the sample’s relatively low focus on broadcast television,
as the center of the television industry is Sweden’s capital, Stockholm. The interviews took
place during the fall of 2016 and the spring of 2017 and were conducted at the freelan-
cers’ workplaces (mostly in freelance offices but also in the freelancers’ homes), or in my
office at university. All the interviewees have been anonymized and given pseudonyms.
As the interviews were semi-structured, their form was what Burgess (1984: 102) calls
“conversations with a purpose”. They lasted between one and two hours and were
recorded and transcribed. The interview guide was organized into themes covering
such things as professional and educational background; current work situation; generat-
ing, pitching for and finding jobs; different kinds of jobs and accompanying rates; net-
works and collaborations; the pros and cons of freelancing; the economic situation; and
life in general. The purpose of the interviews was to give the freelancers the opportunity
to both talk relatively freely about and reflect upon their work: i.e., how, where and when
they worked; their different jobs and how they evaluated these jobs; and their relation-
ships with clients.
Once the interviews had been transcribed, they were coded using NVivo software and
the material was analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006; Silverma 2015).
The initial first order codes were coded close to the empirical material and based on
empirical categories such as “jobs”, “freelance rates”, and “clients”. The code “job”
included sub-codes such as “good jobs/bad jobs”, “job duration”, “repeat jobs versus
one-off jobs”. The second stage of the analysis was more theoretically informed (Braun
and Clarke 2006) by the literature on careers in freelance journalism. As the research ques-
tion focuses on freelance jobs and how freelancers did “employment management work”
(Halpin and Smith 2017), in order to maintain their freelance careers, themes took shape
that dealt with how jobs were generated and evaluated in relation to how these jobs
affected the journalist’s ability to both maintain and advance in his/her freelance
career. In the article, two main themes are elaborated on. The first concerns sourcing
and generating jobs, with subthemes illustrating networking, bundling jobs, blurring
boundaries between writing and editing, and being a jack of all trades. The second
main theme deals with evaluating jobs, with subthemes illustrating recommended free-
lance fees, and the “2 out of 3 freelance job rule” with its subheadings well-paid jobs,
fun and fulfilling jobs, and educational jobs and hope labor.

Findings
Sourcing and Generating Jobs
The freelancers had started their careers as journalists in different forms of employment.
Some had begun as freelancers, while others had started out as staffers working for news-
papers, magazines and broadcasters, or on serial short-term contracts (e.g., summer
stand-ins and temporary employees working on projects) before they began freelancing.
Almost all of those starting as staffers had been made redundant, often after accepting
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1147

severance pay during organizational restructuring. A few had chosen to leave by their
own choice. As this study will demonstrate, connections and networks with editors are
paramount for a freelance career (cf. Gandini 2016). Therefore, the freelancers that had
begun working directly in freelancing had done internships while at journalism school.
These internships had then provided these freelancers with relationships with editors,
who would provide them with the freelance work that got their freelance careers moving.
The journalists that had started freelancing in the 90s and 00s, and had thus been free-
lancers for a long time, had seen the industry change, with its increased competition for
jobs and stagnant rates. Some had switched between open-ended employment and free-
lancing several times during their careers: Each time they “came back” to freelancing, they
had realized that the financial circumstances had deteriorated in tandem with the general
employment conditions of the whole industry. Writer David described his experience of
this: “Over the two years that had passed [as I’d been away from freelancing], I felt that
there was a great difference. Both in the number of assignments, and that in the rates
had fallen. And that they [clients] often wanted more for less. There was a clear differ-
ence.” Writer Ylva discussed how it was still possible to maintain a freelance career,
even though freelancing had changed:
Everyone where I work [a freelance collective], we all make a living from freelancing. But
today, nobody is doing what they did ten years ago, selling articles piecemeal to clients.
Everyone’s doing more: You’re an editor of something, or you’re working with bigger
things, you’re writing a book project, you’re writing TV series, manuscripts. Nobody goes
round to magazines selling one article at a time.

Work sociologist Guy Standing (2011) has described how unpaid work to get paid labor is
an integral part of post-industrial work. For the freelancers, there was a need to minimize
their non-billable work hours in order to maintain a career and to get a viable income. The
aim of all the practices described in the following section: i.e., networking, bundling jobs,
doing editorial work, and being a “jack of all trades”, was to get repeat jobs that would
sustain the freelancers’ careers over a longer period of time, preventing downtime and
unemployment. Hence, besides reducing non-billable working time, another important
aspect was trying to get the kinds of jobs that would ensure long-term, continuous
work, instead of doing piecemeal jobs that would only allow a hand-to-mouth existence.
One important way of keeping jobs coming in was creating and maintaining networks in
which jobs were created and distributed.

Networking: Keeping up with Editors and Colleagues

Networking was an integral part of the freelancers’ everyday work. Studies of post-indus-
trial work (Cockayne 2016; Gregg 2011) show how “compulsory sociality” is an essential
part of networked, marketized and individualized work (Deuze and Witschge 2018).
Hence, the freelancers talked about how networking was important for meeting and
keeping editors and clients. Even if you had a working relationship with a specific
editor, due to editors changing jobs or leaving the business entirely, you could never
be certain that this relationship would last. Photographer Hanna said:
I don’t know how long my contacts [clients] will stay in their jobs. So it can be quite risky, it
might be that someone suddenly stops calling, just because she’s left her job. It has been the
1148 M. NORBÄCK

case that people retire, and then you don’t hear anything at all. There’s no security in that
sense, so you have to assert yourself all the time.

Sometimes, however, as editors moved on to other positions, they would take “their” free-
lancers with them, giving these freelancers new clients. Also, as jobs were often handed
out via referrals from other freelancers, it was important not only to maintain client net-
works but also freelance networks. Many freelancers had colleagues with whom they had
often worked, and who also passed jobs on to each other. These groups functioned as
latent teams (much as in other forms of media production, cf. Starkey, Barnatt and
Tempest 2000) that would be activated when any member of the team was given a job
that required other freelancers. Writers often paired up with photographers and then
looked for jobs in pairs. Writer Sandra explained: “Most often, it’s the writing journalist
that sells jobs, but it’s often easier if you can show photographs and that you’re a
team.” As most jobs were generated via word-of-mouth and referrals, the freelancers
knew that jobs usually generated more jobs: However, you could never really know
how and when. Photographer Gustav gave an example of how this could happen
when he did a job for a client who, two years later, had phoned back and commissioned
an additional job on the basis of the previous one. This meant that many freelancers went
to great lengths not to turn down the jobs being offered, especially if they were reason-
ably well-paid, as there was always the risk of the client turning to another freelancer next
time. However, the freelancers with a steady network of peers felt more comfortable refer-
ring clients to other freelancer colleagues as they felt these colleagues would return the
favor next time.

Bundling Jobs
Another way of maintaining freelance careers was trying to bundle smaller jobs or nego-
tiating with clients to make jobs bigger in terms of their scope. Sophie, a writer who some-
times took temporary employment at a journalism school, teaching freelance journalism,
said that her main advice to future freelancers was to try to land repeat jobs that would
guarantee some basic stability and provide some backbone for the freelancer’s career.
Most freelancers argued that repeat jobs were so important that they would charge a
lower rate for that kind of work. Writer Kajsa explained: “I usually think that there’s
value in and a point to having repeat assignments. So, when it comes to repeat assign-
ments, I can agree to reduce my rates [per job].” Another writer, Johan, said that he
had tried, in a similar vein, to reduce the number of small jobs, and instead get larger
assignments: “I try to think like that, to get fewer but bigger jobs rather than many
small ones. At least if I have to do the selling.” Many freelancers argued that this was
the only way to maintain a freelance career, by adapting to the changing conditions of
the freelancing industry (Platman 2004), where one-off jobs were no longer a sustainable
way of making a living.

Blurring Boundaries Between Writing and Editing

One way to ensure getting repeat work was working as freelance editor, typically for a
membership magazine or a newspaper supplement. Thus, the blurring of boundaries
on the post-industrial labor market for journalists is not only about the boundaries
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1149

between traditional journalism and PR (Rottwilm 2014), it is also about blurred pro-
fessional roles (Deuze and Witschge 2018). Freelance editors were responsible for filling
magazines and newspapers with content, usually by sourcing content from other freelan-
cers, even though many editors did some of the writing themselves. Writer Ylva explained
how her freelance editorship had meant she was able to take “a step up in the food chain”:
I’m the editor of [name of magazine], so I’m in charge of sourcing, buying material. I have a
lump sum of money that I can either choose to keep, by doing the work myself, or buy
material with. I usually buy this from talented people. It’s fun, because it’s a different kind
of role. It’s about where you are in the food chain, in a way. Taking a step up in the food
chain often means more money and greater freedom.

Freelance editorships were therefore sought-after. Writer Lars had gained his current edi-
torship of a membership magazine on the recommendations of the previous freelance
editor and had “paid” his predecessor by doing 40,000 SEK (4,000 Euros) of work for
the magazine without billing for it. However, for some freelance editors, the dual role
of being both an editor and a supplier of work could be tricky, especially when it came
to the issue of freelance rates. Writer Gabriella, who worked as a freelance editor, said:
“The tricky part is that I’m sitting on two chairs. I want to work toward getting my free-
lance rates up, but I have to work to keep other people’s rates down because I have a
budget to keep.” Thus, in the networked and marketized media industry, journalistic pro-
duction doesn’t just take place in increasingly complex value chains, the professional roles
of journalists are also becoming increasingly complex and less standardized. As Platman
(2004:592) concludes in his study of freelance media work in the UK: “The lines were far
too blurred to represent anything like a clear-cut division between workers and employ-
ers, exploited and exploiters.” This therefore seems to be true for media work done in
other national contexts too.

Being a Jack of all Trades

The overall situation for freelance journalism is causing the freelancers to produce many
different sorts of content. It also creates what Platman (2004) called the “amoebic” prop-
erties of the freelancers, in the sense that, in order to maintain a career as a freelancer, you
have to adjust your work to the ever-changing marketplace. Writer Monica described
herself as writing about “absolutely everything”: “This year alone I’ve written a book
about concrete spraying. I’m currently writing an article about diabetes. I write about
recruitment in local government, I write about rented flats and business development.”
Writer Johan said:
I think you have to be creative [businesswise] and driven as a freelancer today, and you have
to have an open mind about what to work with. I do a pod, I write articles for companies, and
sometimes I make their communication plans. You can’t think you’ll only be writing about
your own subject in the special media.

Hence, many of the interviewed freelancers had become “jacks of all trades” in order
to generate enough (paid) work. Only a few freelancers described themselves as
specialized journalists working in one single field: Of these, only those that had
been able to find a subject field, where freelance rates were still decent, reported
living well off their freelancing. For the other specialized freelancers, especially
1150 M. NORBÄCK

those specializing in the arts, culture and entertainment/music, the financial situation
was often precarious.
To summarize, in order to generate enough paid work to have a sustainable freelance
career, the freelancers networked and bundled their jobs, held editorships and worked
with many different media, clients and tasks, and became jacks of all trades. In maintain-
ing their careers, continuous relationships with their clients and repeat work became
imperative. The freelancers lacking access to a continuous stream of work were often
in the 20s and 30s and less established, in turn leading to underemployment and a pre-
carious financial situation.

Evaluating Jobs
Another part of the process of generating jobs in order to maintain a freelance career was
evaluating and deliberating upon whether or not a job was worth taking, and how it
should be valued. As most jobs came at a fixed rate, the freelancer had to decide for
him-/herself whether or not a job was worth doing in relation to other potential jobs.
During this evaluation process, the qualities of the job were also assessed, as well as
what kind of joy, knowledge, or experience the freelancer would derive from it, in addition
to actual monetary compensation. As we shall see, how the freelancers thought about
pricing their jobs was far from straightforward, as the price was not just about how
much time they put into their jobs, but also what kinds of clients had commissioned
these jobs, as well as how fulfilling and educational a job was deemed to be. Hence, free-
lance rates will be discussed next, as well as the more qualitative aspects of different kinds
of jobs and clients.

Recommended Freelance Rates

In the Swedish freelance setting, several associations have issued recommendations for
freelance fees. The associations most referred to by the interviewees were the Union of
Journalists and the Image Suppliers’ Association together with the Swedish Association
of Professional Photographers. Hence, many freelancers referred to these recommen-
dations when asked to explain how they went about pricing their work.
Interviewer: What’s your reasoning when setting a price for a job?

Photographer Mikael: Looking at [the recommendations of] the Image Suppliers’ Association,
as regards newspapers, it starts at 800–900 SEK [ 80–90 Euros] for the first two hours, which
then falls to 700 SEK [70 Euros]. If you work for [name of local newspaper], then you get 400
SEK [40 Euros] per hour. So that’s slightly too little.

As photographer Mikael said, the fees often differed between clients, most often on the
basis of whether it was a commercial or a journalism client. “Proper” journalism paid the
least. Writer Monica explained: “Real journalism is paid less, and there is much more com-
petition and it’s more of a buyer’s market there”. The drop in “real” journalism freelance
rates had made Monica move more towards membership magazines, PR, and information
jobs, as these still paid relatively well. For these jobs, she had a rule of thumb of 1,000 SEK
[100 Euros] per hour: She explained how she adjusted her working hours according to
what she was paid: “If they [clients] say that I’ll only get 6,000 SEK [600 Euros] for a job,
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1151

well then it’ll have to take six hours, and then that’s what they’ll get. Then I’ll arrange the
work accordingly”.1
The Swedish Union of Journalists’ overview of freelance rates (SJF 2021) confirms that
traditional journalism and legacy media outlets paid less than non-media corporations
and organizations. Hence, freelancers specializing in traditional journalism aimed at
legacy media outlets found it difficult to charge according to the recommended rates,
much like the freelancers in the study by Storey et al. (2005) of UK freelancers who said
that such recommendations were “fairly mythical”.

The 2 out of 3 Freelance job Rule

The freelancers had developed personal strategies regarding how to evaluate job offers.
Writer Johan had worked with a more senior colleague who had taught him the “2 out of 3
rule”, as he called it:
[My colleague] usually says that a job must have at least two things out of three right: It
should be fun, or rewarding – that is rewarding educationally or that you learn something,
or really well paid. Two out of three, otherwise you turn it down.

When it came to getting acceptable payment for their work, the freelancers discussed
various ways of achieving this.

Well-paid Jobs
Many freelancers had different pricing strategies that varied with the client in question.
Photographer Gustav described it as “charging the rich” in the sense that he tried to
keep the recommended freelance rate when working for corporations that ought to be
able to afford to pay decently. However, when he worked for non-profits, often in the
arts, he would reduce his price, as he argued that these organizations often had a slim
budget, with many people working on a voluntary basis. Writer Johan had a similar
strategy:
I guess I adjust my counterbid to the kind of client. I have, in principle, stopped working with
the least well-off clients, for example [name of media group], which I’ve worked with pre-
viously. I won’t work for them again, because they have no money and they never pay on
time.

In the same vein, Johan explained how he justified what he described as “boring PR work”
where the job was writing about a certain corporation or product. He explained that he
then charged extra to make this unfulfilling work at least pay well: “[In these instances] I
have a sort of secret hourly rate where I calculate differently. If my usual goal is to get
1,000 SEK [100 Euros] per hour, then maybe I want 1,500 SEK [150 Euros] for those
kinds of jobs.” When asked whether this meant, in fact, that he had a sort of “bullshit
rate”, he laughed and said, “I guess so, but I wouldn’t admit it publicly.”
Other freelancers found corporate jobs – “commissioned journalism” being the term
used in the industry (Uppdragsjournalistik in Swedish) – problematic and tried to stay
away from them if they could afford to, in order to focus on jobs they considered more
fulfilling.
1152 M. NORBÄCK

Fun and Fulfilling Jobs

Many freelancers strove to get work that allowed them to learn something new or to meet
interesting people, or to get jobs that would make a difference. Photographer Oscar
explained that most of all he enjoyed jobs that dealt with “things that he cared about”:
I just got back home last week from Rwanda. We were there with Clowns without borders. To
be in a refugee camp with 2,000 people in the audience, and with these clowns performing.
To be there at that moment, while making a living from it. I wouldn’t have wanted to be any-
where else in the world right then. It’s fantastic. It doesn’t pay very well, but it pays in terms of
quality of life.

As many of the freelancers had chosen their line of work to engage in traditional journal-
ism (even if this was not always done for legacy news outlets), some argued that they
thought it was worthwhile making less money if that meant they could do the kind of
work they enjoyed and saw as meaningful. However, this stance was most often taken
by freelancers in their 20s and 30s with fewer financial responsibilities (and thus the
ability to live cheaply), as well as by freelancers with other forms of financial security
(spouses etc.). Freelancers with financial responsibilities (children, mortgages), tried to
mix bread-and-butter jobs, which would put food on the table, with more fulfilling
ones that paid less, thus achieving a balance in their freelance career. One way of poten-
tially ensuring more qualitative work in the future was engaging in what the literature on
post-industrial work has described as “hope labor” (Kuehn and Corrigan 2013; Mackenzie
and McKinlay 2021).

Educational Jobs and Hope Labour

Studies of media work have shown how workers often undertake un- or under-paid work;
what Kuehn and Corrigan (2013) call “hope labor”. This is work done in the present in
order to gain exposure or experience which will hopefully lead to future (better paid or
more fulfilling) work. Similarly, the freelancers in this study sometimes did poorly-paid
but professionally fulfilling work for prestigious journalistic outlets, as these jobs provided
exposure and recognition that could lead in the future to other better-paid work. This kind
of work was important to freelancers taking jobs as event-moderators (something which
often paid well) since these jobs were offered to journalists with a certain level of pro-
fessional credibility and reputation.
Hope work could also be less prestigious and professionally fulfilling, e.g., PR work paid
for by corporations. Writer Monica explained what she thought about these kinds of jobs:
It’s sometimes the case that I write those kinds of paid-for advertisements in supplements in
[Name of Business Newspaper]. But I only do that since it might lead me into other jobs. /… /
It’s my way of introducing myself to them. I recently did a really big assignment which I got
that way. Usually, they’re rather boring jobs. But it’s kind of a sales channel.

Hence, hope labor could be fulfilling and poorly-paid, but it could also be boring and
rather well-paid. In the case of the latter, the aim was often to develop connections
that would help in the maintaining of a freelance career, in which jobs came in and in
which non-billable pitching-and sales-work was reduced.
One thing that studies of freelance professionals have identified (Da Silva and Turrini
2015; Platman 2004; van den Born and Witteloostuijn 2013) is the difficulty freelancers
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1153

face receiving a wage premium for their experience. In comparison to careers in tra-
ditional open-ended employment, in which progression in the form of raises and task
complexity usually go hand-in-hand with experience and seniority (i.e., formal career
ladders), freelance careers often lack this “built in” career guidance mechanism (O’Maho-
ney and Bechky 2006). In this study, many freelancers talked about this, as they had
experienced difficulties achieving career progression. Apart from getting editorships,
not so many career advancement strategies were available. Writer Johan talked about
possibly setting up his own content bureau to work on bigger assignments: “I’d take a
big assignment and outsource some of it to students. But I don’t know if it’s worth it
really. But that’s what you do if you want to make big bucks”. However, of the 52 freelan-
cers interviewed, only one (writer Monica) outsourced her work to other freelancers on a
regular basis. For the others, even though many were in a situation in which incoming
work afforded them what they considered a reasonable income and workload, there
were not enough jobs to allow them to pass any on to other freelancers.

Concluding Discussion
This study adds to our knowledge of how freelancers maintain their careers and the
difficulties of achieving career progression as a freelance journalist, while pointing to
the need for freelancers to effectively organize to improve their working conditions.
The findings illustrate how freelancers work toward procuring long-term repeat work
that will create a minimum level of financial and temporal stability in an otherwise inse-
cure and uncertain field of work. The findings also illustrate how freelancers evaluate their
work opportunities and how jobs are assessed on the basis of their potential to generate
value – in the form of financial remuneration, professional satisfaction, or future opportu-
nities for better (or more) work.
This study contributes to the literature on freelance journalism careers by illustrating
the limited possibilities of career progression faced by the average freelance journalist.
The findings show how there are a limited number of ways for senior, established freelan-
cers to progress to more strategic, complex, or qualified jobs. Hence, the freelancer’s pos-
ition along the production chain, where he/she has little strategic control over the content
being produced, made it difficult to achieve career progression over time. What most free-
lancers settled for was what is described here; networking, bundling jobs, and being a jack
of all trades. Only working as an editor offered the chance of getting freelance work that
entailed a career progression in terms of more strategic and (sometimes) better-paid
work. Hence, much of what the freelancers did to source, generate and evaluate their
jobs could be described as career maintenance, whereby their focus and efforts were
directed at avoiding a downward movement rather than achieving upward mobility.
This study adds to previous studies of career management work (Halpin and Smith
2017; O’Mahoney and Bechky 2006) by illustrating the continuous work that goes into
the basic maintenance of a freelance career.
The current study shows how freelancers are not just passively responding to precar-
ious conditions as they work to maintain their freelance careers. Indeed, the freelancers in
this study are actively navigating the market in their pursuit of the jobs that will make
their work worthwhile. What Cohen (2016: 117) calls the “micro-autonomy” of freelancing
is not just the ability of freelancers to decide when, where and how to work on a particular
1154 M. NORBÄCK

job, but also to strategically organize their working lives so as to reduce the harshest
aspects of freelance work. This is done by using various strategies concerning different
kinds of jobs, as this is an aspect of work that freelancers have a high degree of
influence over. Even though they may not be able to influence the pool of jobs actually
available, they can at least partially influence what kinds of jobs they are offered, and what
kind of work they want to pursue in the future. In particular, this study has shown what
freelancers do to acquire jobs, and how they reduce non-billable work by evaluating jobs
according to certain criteria. However, it should be noted that, even though this micro-
autonomy does allow a certain level of professional discretion and choice when it
comes to freelance jobs, it is still a weak buffer against the exploitative and precarious
working conditions of freelancing in the post-industrial media industry (Cohen 2016).
As more journalism is being produced by freelancers and other journalists with precar-
ious working conditions, more journalists are being forced to engage in journalism that
can be “sold [and] produced quickly, making the small fee paid per work, per article, or
per hour worth a freelancer’s time” (Cohen 2016:22). What Cohen (2016) describes as jour-
nalism’s precarity penalty is thus limiting the kind of journalism being produced in the
current media economy. As journalists’ working conditions are shaping the content
being created (Bibby 2014), their increasingly precarious employment situation world-
wide is affecting the form and quality of their journalism. Hence, how work is organized
and the quality of media employment are problems for society, as journalists serve the
democratic and cultural lives of our societies (Salamon 2020). The COVID pandemic
made the already precarious situation of freelance journalists even worse, as they lost
work from one day to the next. Neither did many national financial relief programs
include freelance workers, or did so only during the pandemic’s later stages (IFJ 2021).
Many freelancers worldwide have also experienced problems related to their employment
status, e.g., a lack of, and uncertain access to, sickness and unemployment benefits (Oliver
2021). In the Swedish context, freelance journalists reported having significantly less work
during the first six months of the pandemic, as well as problems receiving financial aid, as
their self-employed status did not make them eligible for national financial support
during the first part of the pandemic (Jolu 2020).
As studies of self-employment in different industries have shown (e.g., Wood, Graham,
Lehdonvirta, & Hjorth 2019), freelance work diminishes the collective power of labor exer-
cised by workers’ collectives by means of organizing and collective bargaining. This
means that the individual market power of the single worker (due to his/her expertise,
skills or experience being in great demand in the marketplace) is amplified in comparison
with employees in regular employment. On freelance labor markets, there will thus be
more polarization between winners and losers than there would be for employed labor
regulated by collective agreements in the same profession.
Due to the risk that precarious work will continue to grow (Picard 2015; Wahl-Jorgen-
sen et al. 2016), adding to the already large inequalities of the post-industrial economy,
journalism scholars and activists are focusing on what can be done to improve the pre-
carious working arrangements for freelancers (Cohen 2011; Salamon 2018; Werne
2015b). One way forward could be collective organizing aimed at stopping working con-
ditions from deteriorating even further (Cohen 2016; Salamon 2016, 2018, 2020; Wood,
Lehdonvirta, & Graham 2018). However, as freelance work is inherently individualized,
there are several problems facing the collective organizing of freelance journalists.
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 1155

Firstly, under some national competition laws, freelancers may not be allowed to bargain
collectively for wages, as this would amount to a price cartel due to freelancers most often
being seen as competing independent contractors. Even so, in some countries, journalism
and media unions have been working to create collective bargaining agreements with
media houses. For example, the Australian union for media, entertainment, and the arts
(MEAA 2022) is working to establish and enforce collective agreements for freelancers
working for specific media outlets, in addition to establishing a “freelance charter of
rights” containing set standard freelance rates and pay, and copyright rules. Similar
work is also being undertaken by freelance unions in other parts of the world, such as
in the UK (Cohen 2016).
However, and this is the second main obstacle to collective organizing by freelance
journalists, even if freelancers have the legal right to bargain collectively over their
rates, this alone will not be enough. For collective bargaining to make a difference,
there would need to be laws concerning the minimum fees to be enforced (Grosheide
& Barenberg 2015) or collective agreements that were upheld by the respective social
partners. As this study has shown, only having recommended fees that are issued by
trade unions and professional organizations is not enough, as clients can disregard
these at will. Thirdly, for potential collective bargaining to be effective, freelancers
would have to unite and agree not to work for less than the set fee. This would require
organizing freelance journalists like the traditional labor movements, something that
may prove challenging when it comes to freelancers as they often see themselves, not
as workers belonging to a collective, but rather as “lone wolves” cherishing their auton-
omy and individuality (Cohen 2011, 2016; Salamon 2020).
As this study has shown, even though there are freelance journalist unions, as well as
other professional organizations, that are working to improve freelancing conditions, this
will not automatically make working conditions fair as these bodies have a weak position
compared to their counterparts. However, conditions would arguably be even worse had
these bodies not existed, as fee recommendations and boycotts of clients who violate
copyright (Salamon 2016, 2018) at least make these problems visible and demand
accountability from clients.

Note
1. According to Statistics Sweden (SCB), the average monthly salary for employed journalists is
40,200 SEK (4,020 Euros) (SCB, 2020). The Swedish Union of Journalists’ section for freelancers
set its recommended hourly rate at 100 Euros, which it argues will match the average salary of
employed journalists in Sweden (SJF, 2021).

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by Jan Wallander’s and Tom Hedelius’ Foundation [Grant Number Postdoc
Grant W2012-0203:1]; Stiftelsen Länsförsäkringsbolagens Forskningsfond/Länsförsäkringar Alliance
Research Foundation [Grant Number P8/20 Ojämlikheter på svensk arbetsmarknad].
1156 M. NORBÄCK

ORCID
Maria Norbäck http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4327-7814

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