I am a reporter, teacher, and podcast host. My background is in public radio, and on this site you'll find links to recent work in radio and print/online as well as the occasional blog post about whatever I'm thinking about or working on.
These days I'm devoting most of my time to The Broad Experience, my podcast on women in the workplace, which I launched last year while studying on CUNY's entrepreneurial journalism program. You can listen here, at TheBroadExperience.com, or download the show from iTunes. In fact, please do.
What happened to paying freelancers?
June 11, 2013
Another day, another disappointing conversation about money. If you've been here before, you may have read my October 2012 post about the low pay meted out to freelance public radio reporters. That blog post about cash went more viral than anything I have ever done for Marketplace, NPR, or any other journalism outlet. But the more I interact with editors about pay, the more $400 begins to sound generous (though please don't get me wrong - it isn't, at least in my neck of the woods).
What has sparked me off today is this piece about freelance reporters on The Huffington Post. It's an important, well written piece by Lily Hindy, who works for Sebastian Junger's organization RISC (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues). She writes about the terrible risks freelance reporters take to report abroad, and how some of them are expected to do it on spec (yes, just go out to places like Afghanistan and Libya and risk their lives and then maybe, just maybe, the newspaper or other journalistic entity will deign to pay them for what they bring back). I hightly recommend the piece. But I had to roll my eyes at its exhortation to "treat freelancers like the professionals they are." I mean no offense to the writer, who, I'm pretty sure, was not paid for this very piece. That's my point. The Huffington Post apparently sees no irony in posting a great argument for paying freelancers on its own site...which doesn't pay freelancers. I'm sure The Huffington Post would argue that it is not 'a news agency'. But in today's media world it comes close enough. It has lured top talent away from publications like The New York Times. I can see how some smaller outfits could claim poverty, but HuffPo is not one of them. I know I'm cutting off any chance that Ms. Huffington will ever come on board as a funder of my podcast, The Broad Experience, but this topic is too important to ignore. There is only so much free writing to 'get your brand out there' that a person can or should do, me included.
HuffPo is, of course, not the only one that doesn't pay or barely pays. I was shocked two weeks ago to come away from an email conversation with an editor at a top journalism brand, which lately shut down its print arm, to find the page I was inquiring about pays between $150 and $300 per piece, and to get $300 you need to write 1,000 words or more. I'm sure this publication would point to journalism's gloomy economics as their reason for such low pay, or at least I assume they would. Last night I read this piece by Anna Pratt in the Society of Professional Journalists' quarterly magazine Quill. I had never heard of most of the freelance-oriented sites she mentions, but I have heard of and had some small dealings with Contently, and was disappointed. These are sites that aim, in theory, to make it easier for freelancers to find work. Contently, in its early days last year, certainly made it sound like it was on freelancers' side. So imagine my surprise when I was offered some work writing for iVillage that paid about $20 per post (and this would be a few times a week, so that's about $60 a week). Huh? I can only imagine that all these sites are relying on very young and inexperienced writers and reporters to work for them. The trouble is, where does that leave those of us who are neither particularly young nor inexperienced? Increasingly, I suspect, working as writers for large brands, which have money, even if they lack journalism's allure.
I'd be glad to hear from anyone else who has thoughts about this topic.
Why I'm bored of TED talks
May 14, 2013
I am totally over TED talks. Here's how I got here.
Several weeks ago my friend and journalism colleague Manoush Zomorodi wrote a post about how to give 'TED-like talks' that capture an audience. Manoush is a longtime TV reporter and has written an e-book about how to be camera-ready, so she really knows her stuff. I like her advice for budding speakers, but as I read the post it reminded me that I'm less and less impressed with the TED talks I view online. I then forgot about the topic until this week when I came across this post by marketing professor Dr. Dawn Edmiston. It extolls the virtues of the TED talk as a teaching tool. As you can see, she and I interacted under her post. The problem is, TED talks are everywhere. They've become so common they're no longer special in any way. Their impact has been massively diluted due to the sheer number of ideas discussed - there just aren't that many 'ideas worth spreading'. Almost everything now seems worthy of a TED talk. Except it isn't. These talks fired people's collective imagination and curiosity for a while, but I can't believe I'm the only one who now finds them dull and formalaic. They come off as too rehearsed, too glacially paced, and with no element of surprise. Yet TED continues to roll them out.
Of course there have been TED talks I've enjoyed. Like Dr. Edmiston, I loved Harvard professor Amy Cuddy's talk on the the power of body language (I am desperate to book her on The Broad Experience - no luck so far). More recently I enjoyed Dan Pallotta's talk on why the way we think about charity is wrong. And I can't leave out Laura Overdeck's powerful TEDxWomen talk 'Allergic to Algebra' on little girls, women and math anxiety, which I watched live back in December. But too many TED speakers these days aren't compelling and the ideas discussed are so flimsy they don't merit the time allotted. I signed up for the weekly TED email several months ago, so each week I get an email from TED with links to recent talks. I'm usually disappointed.
This 2012 piece by Nathan Jurgenson in The New Inquiry is a much more eloquent disquisition on the topic, and specifically focuses its criticism on TED for being exclusionary and out of touch. I love the second line:
"When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart?"
I think TED has stretched itself too thin. Does anyone else agree?
Since I first wrote this post a couple of days ago I've been pointed to this Harvard Business Review piece by Umair Haque, 'Let's Save Great Ideas from the Ideas Industry' - well worth reading.
