2022 Freelance Journalists conference
Bob Burton

Valuing your skills – setting your income targets 

The MEAA’s recommended freelance rates are $1.04 per word up to 1000 words and then 96 cents per word. It recommends a day rate for a freelance journalist or photographer at $1028.

(NB: These numbers below are higher than I used in the video call – I had looked at the wrong journalist award and used figures from 2021/22FY, not  the 2022/23 FY.)

The MEAA rates are based on the J5 Journalist Grade in the MEAA Enterprise Agreement with News Corp Australia Newspapers. The October 2021 summary has J5 for 2022/23 at $1741 per week. 

You can adopt your own assumptions to calculate your target income, but assuming you are freelancing full-time, here’s one possible framework.
•	$1741.10 per week X 52 weeks = $90,537. 
•	Add 10% for superannuation = $9053
•	Add your average annual overheads, let’s say $15,000
•	Total = $114,590 per annum.
•	As a business owner, you should also have a profit margin, not just be paying yourself the equivalent of a wage. I haven’t included any allowance for that here.

OK, how many work hours a year do you have?
•	365 days in a year minus 104 days which are weekends = 261 days.
•	Annual leave for staff journalists = 4 weeks is 20 days = 241 days.
•	Allow for long service leave (4.3 days p.a) & sick leave 15 days = 222 days.
•	Allowance for 10% admin is 22 days = 200 days.
•	200 paid work days translates to 40 weeks. Based on a 38-hour week, 7.6 work hours per day gives you 1520 work hours per year.

So to reach your target income without undermining your essential holiday and other entitlements, you need to earn $2865 per work week.

How many well-researched and written words can you write in a week? Various authors estimate that 2000 to 2500 words per week is a reasonable estimate. 

Let’s assume that over 40 weeks you produce about 80,000 to 100,000 words in a year.  

To meet your target income of $114,590 (excluding any profit margin for the business) producing 2-2500 words per work week, you need to earn over $1 per word. 

There are comparatively few publications that pay $1 per word and more that pay around 75 cents a word. Some for-profit news publishers pay freelancers 25 cents a word or less. 

The more of your work commissioned below the $1 a word rate, the more you have to produce to meet your income target. 

Tax: Once you are on track to cross the $75,000 gross revenue (minus GST), you need to register for GST with the Australian Tax Office. To register for GST, you must have an Australian Business Number. 

Once registered for GST, you must submit a quarterly BAS return for GST and Pay as You Go Tax by 28 days after the quarter. The ATO will suggest a tax rate for quarterly instalments based on your previous annual or quarterly returns (though you can vary it if you have significant quarterly fluctuations).

Doing your quarterly BAS is also an opportunity to review how your business strategy is going, even if it exists only in your head. What worked well? What improvements could be made to yield the best return for the least amount of additional effort? Were there black holes for time best avoided in the future? Did you get published in a new outlet? If so, do you have a follow-up planned? 

Building a strategy

Some of the elements that make full-time freelancing possible

•	Build a portfolio of a handful of outlets you write for regularly (it is easier to get commissioned by editors/outlets that know you and your work). 

Once you break into a new outlet, don’t let the lead go cold – keep pitching for follow-up work. If there is a change of editor for the section you had material published in, re-establish contact with a new pitch and add links to what you have done for the publication before. 

With a fair amount of work involved before pitching, you want to aim for a very high strike rate of commissions from pitches. 

•	One of freelancers' key strengths is their knowledge of one or more areas. How much do you want to specialise and in what topics? Be clear about what your key areas are. It also helps to know what you don’t want to do. 

•	From local to global: think about international outlets that might be interested in your work, research their rates and build contacts. (For tax purposes, international work counts as an export and is GST free.) Remember that mid-range freelance rates in some international outlets can be good in Australia if the exchange rate works in your favour.

•	Some people have a bedrock project (i.e. 2-3 days of guaranteed work a week to take the stress out of meeting your targets) with other freelancing work layered on top. Or it might be a seasonal project where you have a block of work for a few weeks each year.

•	Keep control of the copyright of your work as much as possible. Under the Copyright Act, the copyright remains with the creator until you sign it away. Many publishers assume/demand you sign away all rights to the publisher. Think about it before you do – your copyright can be valuable. 

•	If you keep copyright:
•	You may be able to multi-sell your work and earn multiple payments off one piece of work;
•	It also preserves options to repackage your work for other projects, i.e. books etc. 
•	Your copyright control may also entitle you to payments under the Public Lending Right and Educational Lending Right programs. (Details here). 

•	Take a bit of time to plan a project/story out:
•	If you control copyright, are there multiple outlets that could be interested? (This is where the MEAA’s Freelance Rate Tracker comes in handy.) Pitch the best paying publisher first, then work your way down the list.
•	If you can’t multi-sell the same version of a story, it may be possible to produce multiple stories with different angles for different publications based on shared research.
•	If that is not possible, it may be worth mapping out the likely progression of a story over a year or so. You maybe be able to invest a chunk of time and take a loss on researching the first story but make it up in later ones. (e.g. major incident, inquiry, findings, the response of govt agency, prosecution of the individual, ruling, etc.) 

•	Capture as much material as possible while out on a story as possible: it could be pictures etc. 

A TV freelancer I know got commissioned to do a few stories in rarely visited locations/countries. So he filmed what was necessary for the story and then got as much other footage as possible of different things in the area – he made more $ from selling his unique file footage than he did from the story he was commissioned to do.  

•	Some of the key elements to getting commissioned

•	Personal connections are invaluable;
•	Know the best time to pitch to the relevant editor:
•	Concisely outline what exactly your proposal is, who will be featured in the story, the proposed story length, when you will deliver the work, and any copyright conditions 
•	If you haven’t worked for the outlet before, include a link to earlier work etc.
•	If you pitch via email but then discuss the pitch via phone, document the agreement in a follow-up email. This information may be critical later in case there are any issues with payment etc.
•	Respond to queries promptly.

Freelancer networking

There are occasional informal gatherings of freelance journalists in several cities. They are usually advertised in the MEAA’s email newsletter, so keep an eye out for them. 

Some of the benefits are:
•	Most freelancers work alone and usually from a home-based office, so it is nice to break the isolation; 
•	Other freelancers are very generous in offering contacts, support and suggestions, but it takes a personal connection; it also helps build a more collaborative journalism culture; 
•	It is helpful to know who else is around with skills that complement yours (photographers, illustrators, web designers etc.); personal connections made with other freelancers may lead to collaborative projects;
•	If an editor approaches you about a story, but you can’t do it because of other commitments, it is nice if you can refer them to someone else you know who could do the job.

If there isn’t a local freelancers group, why not start one in your area? They don’t have to be anything other than an occasional, informal get-together over drinks or a meal. You may well discover there are more freelancers in your area than you knew about.

If you are into Facebook, there is an MEAA Media Freelancers group.

Freelancing from the regions

If you live in a regional area, the odds are that your local, regional news outlets will have a limited (if any) budget for freelancers or pay a low rate. (I have heard of regional rates as low as 25 cents a word.) 

If working for existing local outlets is not feasible, your options are:
•	Working for national outlets;
•	Building a portfolio of international publications you work for;
•	Creating something yourself. It could have a local focus or something much broader in scope.

Traditionally, most freelancers have focussed on the first two, but there are new avenues for the third, i.e. a local news website, Patreon/Substack newsletters etc.

Website: Most existing print publications have gone for either a hard paywall or a metered paywall to limit access to articles to herd readers towards subscribing. The main open access news site may be the ABC at a local level. Even then, there are likely to be many stories not covered.

A locally-focussed news website can be viable based on the Guardian model (open access, voluntary contributions plus advertising) or a stripped-down version (as we have done with Tasmanian Inquirer) of open access with just voluntary contributions. Central to this is building an email list to drive traffic to the website and a social media following.

It takes time to establish and build a profile and contributor base. It is unlikely that this will be instantly financially viable unless you land a start-up grant. But it could build to a good income stream in the medium term. (If you have questions on this, feel free to email me here. A caveat here is that Thursday/Friday are my best days.) 

Patreon/Substack

I haven’t used these directly, but I know some freelancers have a reasonable degree of success (ranging from a couple of work per week to a solid income.)

One freelancer who uses Patreon described setting up an account a few years back as a “game changer”. That said, Patreon or Substack is not a panacea. (There are some minor differences between the platforms (such as design, text vs pictures/videos).

Some of the key elements to consider are:
•	Are you already known and have a personal following on a topic that is not readily available elsewhere? 
•	Be clear about what you offer: how frequently will you post material? What will you be posting about? How much of a time commitment are you willing to make? For how long? It takes time to build a solid following and to keep it growing.
•	Building a core of a couple of hundred supporters can add up to a significant income stream. 
•	Patreon takes a 5% cut, plus processing fees. PayPal, which processes credit card transactions, takes an amount too.  
•	The initial steps are setting up the page: design, intro (who you are, what you do, what the page will be), some pics, and a welcome/thank you note;
•	Are you offering tiered rewards: different benefits for people who contribute more? If so, what are the levels and what are the rewards? (You can park this issue initially if you want to. The minimum rate is US$1 per month.)
•	You can decide to have some posts as open access – and use these for promotion – but with most open only to subscribers. The articles you think have the most significant potential to get shared on social media are the ones that will be the best to help build your profile and supporter base.  
•	Communicate directly with your supporters and keep them informed on what you are working on and other upcoming things.
•	Promotion is vital with active participation on social media. Interaction with supporters is a crucial element of building a growing base. You need to constantly seek to recruit new supporters to offset a background level of turnover. (Some people stop being supporters due to a change in circumstances/priorities, sometimes due to expiring credit cards.)

An important aspect of publishing work on platforms such as Patreon is that you retain copyright. If your readers cover the cost of your initial work, there is scope for reselling some pieces elsewhere.

There was a question in the chat on the zoom call from someone finishing a journalism course who asked whether they should go straight to freelancing.

I wish I could have answered this more fully on the call, as it is an important question. (If you asked this question and want more than is covered below, feel free to email me here.) 

Most journalists that go freelance come from having worked in a newsroom. They benefit from personal connections with commissioning editors in one or more newsrooms and have good insider knowledge of the potential gaps they can fill. They also tend to have a definite idea of what they want to work on (theme, geographic area etc.)

Freelancing straight from university is probably the most challenging path to travel. Three key initial hurdles are:
•	building connections with commissioning editors;
•	having a portfolio of published work you can supply links to (or scanned copies of);
•	having a cash reserve while you build up your connections and profile (or having a part-time job you can use to cross-subsidise the start-up phase of freelancing).

But it can be done. The benefit of freelancing is that you get to focus on the issues you care about most. 

Some publishers press new freelancers to contribute work for free and “for exposure”. Avoid this – it is exploitation. It is rewarding their flawed business model.  

So the first step is outlining what those topics are. The next step is identifying the priority publications (local, national, international) for each topic area. Then fill in as much detail as possible on each (so you can rank them by the criteria that matter most to you – pay rate, frequency of the publication, standard article lengths, copyright, how quickly they pay etc.). 

Take the effort to get to know the publications so you can anticipate what the commissioning editors are interested in. (Editors says it is common for them to be pitched a story idea which is clearly not a good fit for the publication, suggesting the freelancer doesn’t read or really know the masthead.) Ideally, you want your first pitch to be successful and make it easy for the editor to say yes.