Like many of the people I spoke to for my feature, I have mixed feelings about the time and effort I have spent working for free.
There’s a direct correlation between the hours I spent writing for little or no money, and the fact I landed a journalism job straight out of uni, with no qualification more practical than a media studies degree.
That said, recognising the value of my work, and asking to be compensated as such, was the first step from ‘idealistic amateur’ to ‘bit more professional’.
When I started at uni, aged 17, I started writing music reviews for Victoria University’s weekly magazine, Salient, and a couple of music websites. In the case of all three, I was under no obligation to write a set number of pieces, and I did turn down a few opportunities to write when I had assignments due, but on average, it worked out to be about a piece or two a week.
It was a great arrangement, because it motivated me to write – it’s a personal failing, but without an assignment, a deadline and an expectant editor, I’m more inclined to spend my time watching hours of consecutive episodes of Mad Men and eating crisps in bed than “honing my craft” – and gave me experience of working under an editor and writing for an audience.
At the time, asking to be paid didn’t even cross my mind, because I didn’t think I was good enough. And I was totally right. (My misguided review of The xx’s debut earned me a couple of half-hearted death threats, though, if history is kind to me, it will read now as a clever troll.)
All my editors had also been upfront about having next to no budget for contributors, so I had no expectations. I sold the CDs I was sent to review on Trade Me to basics who don’t know how to download music, and I got a few gig tickets out of it (and, at the time, being able to say “I’m on the door” was pretty cool).
Because there wasn’t any expectation on me to deliver x words, x times a month, and because my editors were lovely to work for, it felt like a fair exchange.
But at the start of my second year of uni, I decided to stop writing for free – more or less just like that. I was committed to four papers a semester and a part-time job, and had also been locked down as a feature writer for Salient, paid for five hours a week, as a direct result of the contribution I’d made to the magazine for nothing the previous year.
I felt that if I was to both make the most of the opportunity and not drop the ball on my other commitments, I’d have to cut down on unpaid writing gigs. I also felt I’d had enough of music criticism, and was ready for a new challenge.
Though the 2000-word cover stories I was assigned to write for Salient in 2010 took much, much more than five hours a week, they pushed me to develop as a writer and journalist. I learned how to hold a decent interview, how to structure a longform piece, how to be impartial, and how to cultivate a #personalbrand. When I won a legit “mainstream media” award for a portfolio of three features, it was as much a victory for the editor I worked under at Salient (hi Sarah!) as it was for me.
A lot of the time, too, Salient felt like something between a newsroom, a sitcom, and the best party, full of the best people, I’d ever been to: I felt lucky to be paid for even a small proportion of the time I worked (“worked”).
My positive experiences at Salient led an immensely talented friend (hi Uther!) and me to contest the next year’s editorship – and we won.
It was stressful, sleepless eight months, during which we worked full-time but were paid for 20 hours a week. As we wrote in our final editorial, “This isn’t intended to be seen as a whine about how difficult our job has been – more a commentary on the commitment that is coming to an end and the lessons we’ve learned in the hot seat – which is to say, a lot.”
Elle Hunt and Uther Dean c. Salient '11 Photo: Rachel Brandon
I continue to draw far more from the experience of leading a team, developing writers and producing a weekly magazine than I do from my three-and-a-half years’ study of English literature and media studies.
Moreover, my commitment to Salient led to an actual job: through the contacts I made as co-editor, I started writing features for a couple of publications freelance – and through the contacts I made doing that, I ended up landing a full-time reporting job at Fairfax, starting two weeks after my last exam.
Even over the 18-odd months I freelanced, the rates dropped at a noticeable pace. I went from receiving somewhere in the region of a thousand bucks for a cover story – it seems incredible now – to an editor, at a different publication, attempting to pay me 15 cents per word. Even at 20 cents per word, which became fairly standard, you do wonder if it’s worth the effort.
Given the changing landscape, I’m pleased not to be out there fighting over what remains of many publications’ freelance budgets. One, which I used to write for fairly regularly, had its allocation for freelance writers cut in favour of printing facsimiles of Guardian features and Slate blog posts (which, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading – on the Guardian online, three weeks earlier).
I don’t mean this to read like a complaint about how little as I was paid, as really, as an under-qualified, over-confident student journalist, I was entirely reliant on the support and goodwill of a handful of editors for any kind of break.
As much as it makes financial sense to reproduce Guardian interviews and Slate blog posts, it’s not much of an expression of commitment to local, up-and-coming talent.
But as grateful as I am to those individuals (hi Catherine, Rose, Mark, Richard, Donna and Simon!) for not asking me to work for free, their editing, their advice and their support was priceless.
As earnest as it sounds, accumulating riches, word by 20-cent word, was less important than the opportunity to learn and to grow and to get better.
And, as has been touched upon by individuals far more eloquent than me here, here and here, as much as it makes financial sense to reproduce Guardian interviews and Slate blog posts, it’s not much of an expression of commitment to, or an investment in, local, up-and-coming talent.
So, like I said, mixed feelings. My advice to others in a similar position would be to take whatever opportunities to make contacts or be published, and where there are no opportunities, make them: it seems counter-intuitive, but in my experience you’re far more likely to get a job or internship if you hustle for one that doesn’t exist, as opposed to being one of hundreds, if not thousands of applicants for one that does.
Above else, if you take yourself seriously as a writer, photographer, designer, whatever, others will, too. It’s in the same spirit of the old law school dictum, “dress for the job you want, not the job you have”, without the implicit instruction to buy up big at Country Road.