Look after us, we’ll look after you
Why are commissioning editors so rude to freelances? asks ALEX KLAUSHOFER. They should follow the NUJ’s guidelines to get the best work from their contributors
WHEN I started thinking about a career in journalism, a friend — misquoting Woody Allen — told me: “In media, it’s not so much Dog Eat Dog. It’s more that dogs don’t return other dogs’ phone calls.”
Her words were prophetic. On bad freelance days, what strikes me as the biggest downside of my chosen path is not so much the poor pay or job insecurity — it’s the sheer bad manners of some commissioning editors.
At the soft end are things like not replying to pitches and taking longer than is decent to pay. At the hard end is refusing to pay, grabbing copyright and commissioning copy which is read and happily accepted and then holding onto it until it’s too out of date to publish. (Thank you, foreign desk).
The freelance will often only get a proportion of the agreed fee, as if the work’s value has suddenly been reduced by the publication’s editorial processes. Some don’t pay at all. One editor told me: “We cannot pay kill fees. It’s bad, I know, but that’s how it is.”
This is not to decry the courteous, professional behaviour of many editors. In any case, I suspect that the reasons for editors behaving badly are far too complex to be reduced to a mantra of “freelances good, editors bad”.
They have, in part, to do with the pressures faced by staffers — many of whom may have been, or will become freelances themselves — trying to produce quality journalism in the face of bosses’ conflicting requirements, shrinking budgets and overflowing inboxes.
Many editors, coming from careers as writers, have no experience in the art of commissioning. One commissioning editor for News International says that over five years he has commissioned work worth nearly £1 million, with no training or guidance whatever. “I hope I have treated freelances well,” he says, “but if I have, it is more by luck than any effort on the newspaper’s part.”
But in some cases there’s no getting away from the fact that — trading on the power imbalance inherent in our highly competitive field — editors behave badly simply because they can. It’s a situation aided by the invisibility of freelances, all beavering away in solitary frustration.
This is why earlier this year the NUJ published a set of good practice guidelines and sent them to commissioning editors on national newspapers. They emerged out of discussions on a network for freelances contributing to the papers formerly known as broadsheets and reflect the concerns of a significant section of the industry’s workforce. Necessarily, they don’t cover everything, but the gaps can be covered by the spirit of what is there: a plea for fair and professional dealing.
The message for editors is: “Treat freelances as you would wish to be treated, and we’ll deliver the service on which you rely.”
Copies of the guidelines are available from the NUJ freelance office on 020 7843 3703.