The Fall of Freelance

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The Fall of Freelance

the eye interviews moira mccormick

By Zach Dyer

PrintPrint

Moira McCormick worked as the Midwest editor for Billboard magazine for 20 years, and Rolling Stone for 10, as well as working at CREEM magazine, Circus magazine, the New York Times, TV Guide, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune. Now, with the decline of the economy and the increasing popularity of online publications, Zach Dyer joins McCormick to discuss the death of what was once a profitable career.

First of all, what are the main difficulties for freelance writers in this economy?

Let’s put it this way, freelancing has always been a frustrating and challenging way to make a living as a writer more than many other pursuits because it is a tradeoff. The freedom that you have in not being tied to one specific publication is great, but the other side to that is that you constantly have to be off selling yourself and pitching stories. So that leads to a very unpredictable income unless you get a regular column with someone, which I was able to land a couple times in my career. I had a column through Billboard for example. So it was always challenging but now with so many publications and newspapers in particular going under, no one knows what is going to be happening in the publishing industry.

You mentioned not being able to write for the Chicago Tribune anymore. Is there anyone left?

For the Tribune, I haven’t even been able to reach an editor in several months. They declared bankruptcy in December and ever since then, I just can’t seem to find the editor that I’ve always worked with. I’ve talked to other people I know that have done freelance for them and they say essentially the same thing. Tthe landscape is so unknown and budgets are going crazy, that is to say plummeting, so it’s harder and harder for publications to even afford freelancers.

With all these publications ditching their history of freelancing, do you think the quality of publications changes at all when they use only staff writers?

Well I think almost by definition it’s going to get more monochromatic, more uniform in a way. When you don’t have as much outside blood performing these little transfusions with these articles they write, it’s definitely going to stagnate the content a little bit.

You mentioned more recently writing for RollingStone.com. Do you find there’s suddenly a higher demand for online work?

Yeah, it does seem that publications are pushing freelancers in the direction of writing for them. Blurt Online is a music magazine that is only online, they’re one example of where a lot of writers are forced into. The online publications are all out there, they are flying thick and fast. But in general, they don’t pay nearly as much. When I was writing in the late 80s to the late 90s for Rolling Stone—say the last time I was writing for them, in 1996, thirteen years ago, a 1000 word article would get you upwards of 800 dollars. Which was decent money, it certainly was at the time. When I worked for rollingstone.com over the summer, I turned in a 400 word review. That should be you know, 300 bucks, 400 bucks? Not at all. It was 125. Online publications, where freelancers are being pushed, don’t pay nearly as much as print. It’s become much harder to earn a living this way.

With this move to more online publications, do you think that is one of the difficulties that print publications are facing in trying to stay in the black? Or do you think that the two exist in separate worlds?

Well I would like to think that it is the latter of the two. I would like to think that there is still a demand for print out there. I’ve been saying for 10 years now, why would anybody want to read a magazine on that tiny little screen, where they can’t possibly get the full impact of the photographs or whatever artwork is going with it. … If you happen to leave your copy of rolling stone on the subway, well that only sets you back a couple dollars. Magazines, print publications are so much more portable and you have so much less invested in them monetarily. So I would like to think that somewhere there are people who think this, and want to read print. But maybe that’s just too oldschool. I think that virtually all magazines have online components now, but they only really reach a certain.

You’ve mentioned writing for online publications and the possibility of there being publications that are ditching their staff writers for freelance. Is there anything else you have been doing, or does this look like the end?

Truthfully for me, I’ve gone from where freelance writing for magazines was my entire income and I did fairly nicely considering it was part time. I’ve gone from that to realizing that I just can’t make a living on it anymore. I make my money tutoring! I’d write for someone’s blog and do it for free, just a labor of love again. And if that’s what it ends up being, it will have really come full circle! You know, when I was starting out in the mid seventies, I wrote for free and I remember my first paycheck for like 30 dollars and I was turning handsprings. It’s funny that I went from there to turning in a fairly decent annual wage just freelance writing for music magazines, and now, I’ve come back to ‘oh my god, I’ll write for anybody who will put it in print and I don’t care if you pay me anymore.

So, what I’ve gotten from you is that the trend we’ve got going for print media, at least, is that since they have less money to work with, they have less money to pay their writers, and the quality of the publications will decrease, and then they’ll sell less papers and have even less money. Do you see any end to this vicious cycle?

Now let’s say that even more newspapers and magazines bite the dust and it all goes electronic and no one works in print anymore. I feel like in X amount of years, some small communities will form that will you know, want something a little more tangible, and a little less tethered to a device. But there is no predicting how things will go. Look at the way music media has changed over the past 30 odd years. When I was growing up, we had vinyl records and we would just pour over the jackets, most of them had really cool artwork and you could spend so much time gazing at the artwork, it was always so complex. Look at The Beatle’s Sgt. Pepper’s. Then come CDs and suddenly the impact of the artwork is minimized. And now, everybody downloads everything and the artwork has become incidental, if at all. So I expect that once again, people will want to hold something in their hands that is what it is—newsprint!

As far as this vicious cycle, really, for myself, I don’t see being able to freelance as a major income at this point, I think that option is pretty much over—there’s no coming back.

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30 April 2009
vol. 6, issue 12

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