Draft Four: Freelancing lessons

And a pitch to grow an ecosystem.

A couple of weekends ago, I was in Paros, a stunning island in Greece. I took the ferry from Athens on a cloudy Saturday afternoon, and the wind stretched an almost four hour journey into six and change. By the end, a woman was lying in the aisle, overcome with sea sickness. It was 10 pm, and everyone seemed so shaken you’d think we had crossed to the end of the world.

When I got to my hotel in the hills of Parikia, the staff was closing shop, and one was intrigued: alone? And you came all this way? Without a car? The answer to all was “yes”. My idea when I booked the trip a few months back was to spend a few days there between a conference in Bergen, Norway, and one in Athens. Ideally maybe even unwind, although the simplest way to explain my plan is this: read somewhere close to a large body of water. (Something I apparently need to do for a few days a year for my inner peace).

By the time I got there I was a little distraught by not drawing a crowd in Norway, something I wrote about two weeks ago. By the time I left, I was consumed by the unfairness with which the University of Bucharest had treated me and my colleagues, which I wrote about last week.

This is about what happened in between.

Paros from my hotel balcony.

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The short of it is that I was on Paros for three and a half days. For one day, maybe one day and a half, I fulfilled my reading by the water fantasies (and read Miranda July’s stupendous novel All Fours). The rest of the time I worked or tried to put out fires back home. This means I got to confront some of the lessons I learned about freelancing over the past year and a half. Some of you know these and will find it amusing to hear someone (re)discovering them in their 40s, but they’re worth repeating, as some carry profound meaning.

Money. This is the obvious one. Today is the most stable I have felt financially in over a year – this means I have restored a small emergency fund, set some money aside for next year’s taxes, and I can cover monthly expenses. But until October 1, especially since March, I’ve gone from crisis to crisis, having to borrow cash on two separate occasions. My yearly income is higher – significantly so – than it was when I was employed (by myself), but it’s way more irregular. At DoR we were never able to pay ourselves tremendous wages, but they were transparent, and they were reliable. Steady precarity felt better than earning more, but erratically.

Freelancing is seeing the bank account fill up today, and maybe nothing coming in for the next three-four months, even though you’re working, and invoicing. This is not my first freelance rodeo, but 15 years ago life cost less, the jobs were smaller, so the payments were more frequent. On the upside, the jobs are better now, but if you can’t find the right mix, there can be painful moments.

Workload. At the Athens conference I chatted with quite a few freelancers, lots of them journalists who also do project management in various grants or consortia. The reason and the upside? It’s a long term freelance gig that provides a steadier stream of income for a while, and they tack on other projects to it. The downside is you string together two-three decent gigs, but you’re not able to control the process, there’s scope creep, things fall apart, you pick up tasks others have dropped, and soon you realize you don’t have enough time for the personal projects you were dreaming of when you started freelancing in the first place.

This is not about organizing yourself better. Or it’s not only that. I’ve talked with many people who are plenty good at optimizing their own work, but there are limits. First, you can have the best flow possible; if others don’t, it’ll still be a slog. Second, in this profession (and not only), and in this part of the world (and not only) we’re overworked, and underpaid. I do think we’d work less and work better if we felt safer.

Working conditions. I suspected this, but now I’m certain: I don’t work well on the road, I couldn’t do the “digital nomad” thing, I like to have an office as a place to go to, and I’m more productive if I have “desk time”. Plus, Zooms are great when working with colleagues abroad, but in other cases, if I can avoid, I will. Again, this is my experience and my preferences, and I work hard to make Zooms inclusive and relevant. But do I enjoy it over sitting together with people? No.

Quality control. Let me see if I can explain this. This weekend I was supposed to be in Bonn to moderate a panel, and also speak about care in journalism at a conference I very much wanted to attend. I didn’t go, and the reason I didn’t is because a handful of the projects I’m involved in are shaky, anxiety got the better of me, so I cancelled. I enjoyed many of the things I’ve done recently but there is something that’s becoming more and more obvious: I don’t control the quality of the outcome or the output.

And I’m not talking about the illusion that you can control what happens to a story or a project or an event or a team (or life, in general). I’m talking about the decision making, and the execution, and the process that isn’t calibrated to deliver the best that a group can deliver.

Things happen in a way where you don’t know if your work was good or bad, because the process obscures a full assessment. Maybe my talk in Norway would have been bad, and people might have walked out, but I don’t know since the room was mostly empty to begin with. I could have bombed at teaching my class at the University, but they never asked me to return. And there’s quite a few others.

This is not yet a fully formed thought – so maybe your replies will help – but I’m understanding the nuances of why I’ve always felt better starting my own thing or taking responsibility for the quality of a project. It’s not that I don’t like having a boss, or that I like my freedom (which I do), it’s that I prefer to succeed or fail on my own terms, and my own terms usually involve a higher than average standard of quality of process or outcome. Being in a project where people just shrug or let things go, when this will ultimately create a lesser experience for a customer, a team, a public of any kind, is a terrible feeling.

I’m not saying this is how you should look at it, or that it’s advisable to treat everything as such, or that every project warrants that care and attention, but I am saying I am at my best, and feel at my best, when these are the terms. You could say I like to be responsible for my own shortcomings.

Took my self out to dinner. This, I must admit, was spectacular. If you’re ever on Paros, this is the place (it’s called Arodo).

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All of the above are partly why I’m trying to cut down on outside projects I’m taking on and, as the year wraps up, try to focus my energy on generating a few new ones myself or alongside partners and former colleagues. (Yes, generating revenue for them will be part of the challenge).

One of the working days in Paros involved writing a grant for around 10.000 euros to run an experiment. Arguably we might be able to run this even without getting the grant, but that money will make it more easy and more targeted. While we wait for the reply, I’ll share the general idea with you – just in case you might be the person this grant is envisioning, or you have the right person in mind (it’d have to be someone who is Romanian).

In short, a group of us newsletter writers want to train and then work with a business/audience/product developer (the title is less important) to find solutions to grow our revenues and audiences. Basically upskill somebody who can then take an entire group of independent journalists to the next level. This is taken from the grant proposal:

We want to train a newsletter ecosystem development manager in Romania, who would then create audience growth and business plans for freelance/independent journalists who built loyal audiences on niche subjects, ranging from healthcare policy to conservation, to gender equality in sports.

The problems we identified:

• some of the best specialized reporters in Romania are freelancers because existing newsrooms can’t absorb them. In the past few years they have grown their own newsletters by focusing on quality content but have had mixed success with attracting reader revenue. It’s not for lack of quality (open rates for most are over 60%), as much as it is a lack of business knowledge and time available to invest;

• Romanian journalism lacks talent in business roles – be it fundraising, audience development or product management. Most independent newsrooms chose to sacrifice innovation and business savvy in favor of editorial coverage, which is a recipe for 3-4 years of excitement, and then the problems start. (As veterans of the independent scene we have seen this cycle many times in the past 15 years).

The solution we want to test:

• create more collaboration between freelance independent journalists by sharing business resources and knowledge that would allow the whole ecosystem to grow (in this specific case, the newsletter ecosystem);

• upskill a young journalist interested in the business side, specifically in the audience and product development side.

• have this person develop and implement business plans for the creators involved to grow and better monetize their newsletters, so they can better meet their mission, become more sustainable and thus be able to devote even more time to the work.

So if you’re slightly tech savvy, know or want to learn about email platforms, and want to try your hand at developing individualized business plans for a slew of different creators, let me know. Whether we get that 10K or not, we’ll find a way to get this done.

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SIDE DISHES:

1. The best thing that happened this week is that we announced that The Power of Storytelling is coming back on March 22-23, 2025. We put together a team or former colleagues, but also new folks, to bring one of Romania’s most beloved gatherings back after a five year hiatus. I’ll write a lot more about it in the weeks and months to come, but for now, subscribe to the newsletter to stay updated.

2. The session I moderated in Athens on how to involve community in the design of your news product is up on YouTube. There are tremendous lessons there about what citizens think of us (that we are like the police), what they’d like more of (in person interaction), and how we can stop being so extractive. Amira, Rhiannon, and Shirish were a joy to chat with, and I hope you’ll enjoy this, too.

3. I’m editing for an show, Oamenii Dreptății, which stands for People for Justice, and it’s a live journalism/storytelling show that takes you on a rollercoaster of true stories about what it means to have your rights denied, and what it takes to fight for them. There’ll be stories, theater, music, and wine! Come check out us out in Brașov (October 14), Sibiu (October 22), or București (November 12). Tickets for all are here. (Tell your friends, as well).

4. Miranda July’s All Fours is an escape from the day to day. It’s best going into it knowing as little as possible – or maybe knowing that it’s about change (or the possibility of change). Here’s a quote I liked: “I guess any calling, no matter what it is, is a kind of unresolved ache. It’s a problem that you can’t fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will commit your whole life to trying. Every second you have is somehow for it.”

5. This interview with John Oliver about how his HBO show gets made is 🔥.