On Thanks­giv­ing Day 2012, Amer­i­can free­lance reporter James Foley van­ished. Uniden­ti­fied men wield­ing AK-47s pulled him from a car in the north­west Syr­i­an province of Idlib, where gov­ern­ment and rebel forces had been clash­ing, and drove away. Many news reports and a fam­i­ly appeal for his release at Free​James​Fo​ley​.org have described him as ​“kid­napped,” but kid­nap­pers tend to make demands. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there have been none dur­ing the months since — just awful silence.

“It’s the freelancer’s conundrum taking bigger risks to beat staffers,” Jim said in a Newsweek story published a few weeks before his abduction. “I think it’s just basic laws of competition; you need to have something the staffers don’t, but in a conflict zone that means you take bigger risks: go in sooner, stay longer, go closer.”

Jim had spent most of the pre­vi­ous five years report­ing in war zones: first Iraq, then Afghanistan, Libya and Syr­ia. I was lucky enough to call him a friend and col­league — we lived togeth­er as stu­dents in North­west­ern University’s grad­u­ate jour­nal­ism pro­gram, and he con­tributed sto­ries to In These Times while I was a staff edi­tor. He is a writer and video­g­ra­ph­er and has filed sto­ries for news orga­ni­za­tions includ­ing Glob­al­Post, Agence France-Presse, CBS, PBS and CNN.

But for vir­tu­al­ly his entire career in jour­nal­ism, Jim has also been a free­lancer piec­ing togeth­er a liv­ing in a field that has been falling to pieces since he entered it in 2008 at the depths of the reces­sion. It’s hard­ly news, of course, that the news indus­try is col­laps­ing and increas­ing­ly reliant on free­lancers to gen­er­ate con­tent for the Internet’s hun­gry maw and shrink­ing news­pa­pers. Less noticed is that much of the U.S. economy’s so-called recov­ery has been built on the backs of a new, grow­ing class of ​“per­ma-temp” work­ers. And that for decades com­pa­nies have been expand­ing the pre­car­i­ous ranks of contract/​freelance/​temp work­ers while reduc­ing the type of employ­ment we still instinc­tive­ly asso­ciate with the word ​“job.”

Free­lanc­ing isn’t easy for most, despite myr­i­ad self-help books detail­ing the glo­ry of being your own boss and set­ting your own sched­ule. But for jour­nal­ists report­ing from war zones, the most dan­ger­ous edge of America’s grow­ing free­lance econ­o­my, it can be fatal.

​“If you are a staffer, you can afford every­one that pro­tects you,” says Stephen Franklin, a for­mer Chica­go Tri­bune reporter who cov­ered five wars and was near­ly killed in Beirut in 1982. ​“If you are a free­lancer, you have lit­tle sup­port: no mon­ey for equip­ment, for dri­vers, for back-up, for med­ical equip­ment, for satel­lite phones. There’s no ques­tion there’s a dif­fer­ence, and it is almost a fatal difference.”

Jim Foley was just one of scores of jour­nal­ists who dis­ap­peared or were killed while work­ing in 2012, one of the dead­liest years on record for reporters in no small part because of the con­flict in Syria.

Accord­ing to the Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists (CPJ), which has tracked vio­lence against jour­nal­ists since 1992, 19 of the 70 jour­nal­ists killed in 2012 were free­lancers. By con­trast, in 1994, when 66 jour­nal­ists were killed, nine were freelancers.

Espe­cial­ly since 2006, there’s a trend in these grim num­bers: More and more of the dead are freelancers.

The exact rea­sons for this increase are obscured by the fog of war. Is it because free­lancers lack the bud­get for armed secu­ri­ty while in a com­bat zone? Do they lack the expe­ri­ence and train­ing to rec­og­nize and avoid fatal risks? What is cer­tain is that in recent years, most U.S. news orga­ni­za­tions have dis­man­tled expen­sive for­eign bureaus. When wars and oth­er events abroad demand atten­tion, these orga­ni­za­tions now turn to free­lancers to fill the news hole.

​“The whole mod­el that made me a for­eign cor­re­spon­dent has been blown up,” says Over­seas Press Club Foun­da­tion Pres­i­dent Bill Hol­stein, who report­ed from Hong Kong for Unit­ed Press Inter­na­tion­al in the ear­ly 1980s. ​“Edi­tors and pro­duc­ers have resort­ed to using free­lancers on a much wider, sys­tem­at­ic scale. Since so many of them are young, they lack knowl­edge about how to oper­ate in dan­ger­ous places.”

Respon­si­bil­i­ty to protect?

Jim was no cub war reporter — he embed­ded with the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2008 and 2010, and after being ambushed by gov­ern­ment forces on a bat­tle­field in Libya in ear­ly 2011, was impris­oned for 45 days.

Jim took respon­si­bil­i­ty for pro­tect­ing him­self by tak­ing a hos­tile-envi­ron­ment week­end course in 2007 while in grad­u­ate school (I was with him), and a bat­tle­field med­ical train­ing course in April 2012 through Reporters Instruct­ed in Sav­ing Col­leagues (RISC), the orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by writer Sebas­t­ian Junger after pho­to­jour­nal­ist Tim Hetherington’s death in Libya in 2011. He wore a flak jack­et and hel­met, and car­ried painful lessons from his ordeal in Libya.

​“Now more than any­thing, I have a sense that no short-term news sto­ry that involves an adren­a­line fix is worth the pain of what could hap­pen if you don’t make that deci­sion to step back and assess the sit­u­a­tion before mov­ing for­ward,” Jim wrote in essay includ­ed in GlobalPost’s 2012 Field Guide for Correspondents.

Reporters in war zones are ulti­mate­ly respon­si­ble for their own safe­ty, but the ques­tion is: Has a com­pet­i­tive free­lance envi­ron­ment forced reporters to take unrea­son­able risks and put them­selves in harm’s way? And if so, should news out­lets be held part­ly respon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing them?

Jim had a clear answer to the first ques­tion: ​“It’s the freelancer’s conun­drum tak­ing big­ger risks to beat staffers,” he said in a Newsweek sto­ry pub­lished a few weeks before his abduc­tion. ​“I think it’s just basic laws of com­pe­ti­tion; you need to have some­thing the staffers don’t, but in a con­flict zone that means you take big­ger risks: go in soon­er, stay longer, go closer.”

Jim was on the front lines not only of war, but of a U.S. indus­try and econ­o­my increas­ing­ly reliant on free­lancers. The trag­ic irony is that some free­lancers may be tak­ing fatal risks to sur­vive in an era when staff jobs are increas­ing­ly scarce and pay rates are stagnant.

High risk, low reward

The share of the U.S. labor mar­ket com­prised of con­trac­tors, free­lancers or con­sul­tants has increased by almost half in the last decade, to about 30 per­cent, says Richard Green­wald, a his­to­ri­an cur­rent­ly at work on a book titled The Death of 9 – 5: Per­ma­nent Free­lancers, Emp­ty Offices and the New Way Amer­i­ca Works. Green­wald has called the shift away from tra­di­tion­al 9‑to‑5 jobs a ​“sea change” in the Amer­i­can work­place that ​“will be as pro­found for 21st cen­tu­ry as the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion’s shift from farms to fac­to­ries was for the 19th cen­tu­ry. One of the fastest grow­ing con­tin­gent work­er groups today is col­lege-edu­cat­ed, white-col­lar pro­fes­sion­als. They grew up think­ing they would lead lives of eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty and cor­po­rate advancement.”

Of course, aspir­ing (and cur­rent) for­eign cor­re­spon­dents aren’t dream­ing of cor­po­rate advance­ment. They’re drawn to the thrill of trav­el, the priv­i­lege of telling impor­tant sto­ries, the oblig­a­tion to bear wit­ness to his­to­ry. Inde­pen­dence was always part of the allure.

But inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists in con­flict zones see the insta­bil­i­ty of our free­lance econ­o­my up close, both phys­i­cal­ly and finan­cial­ly. The vast major­i­ty can’t afford the secu­ri­ty detail often pro­vid­ed to staffers. Many trav­el with oth­er jour­nal­ists to save mon­ey on dri­vers, trans­la­tors and fix­ers, as Jim did. They scrape by, liv­ing arti­cle to arti­cle, split­ting pay­ment with those who helped them report a story.

And those pay­ments are shock­ing­ly low: Major nation­al pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing out­lets like the Los Ange­les Times, For­eign Pol­i­cy, and Dai­ly Beast/​Newsweek, pay between $100 and $500 for arti­cles that can take weeks to pro­duce, free­lancers say.

​“The pay is ter­ri­ble,” says Franklin, a for­mer pres­i­dent of the Soci­ety of Pro­fes­sion­al Jour­nal­ists’ Chica­go chap­ter. ​“Last sum­mer, I report­ed along the Turk­ish-Syr­i­an bor­der, vis­it­ing Syr­i­an refugee camps. I did my own trans­la­tions and hired a young Syr­i­an fix­er who worked with me. I got paid about $250 for each sto­ry.” (His costs were off­set by a grant from the Pulitzer Cen­ter on Cri­sis Reporting.)

Worst of all, this is not a case of young and adven­tur­ous jour­nal­ists pay­ing their dues in order to land staff posi­tions at estab­lished out­lets. Those jobs have most­ly dis­ap­peared; per­pet­u­al free­lanc­ing may be the new norm.

​‘Luck on top of all else’

Jim is one of the few who found a sta­ble job in jour­nal­ism wait­ing for him after return­ing home. After being released by the Libyan gov­ern­ment and return­ing home in 2011, Glob­al­Post, which had helped nego­ti­ate his release, offered him a deputy edi­tor posi­tion at its Boston head­quar­ters. He accept­ed, but after a few months quit to report from Libya dur­ing the final months of Muam­mar Gaddafi’s régime — he was com­mit­ted to cov­er­ing the Arab Spring upris­ings. (Flu­ent in Span­ish, Jim also declined Glob­al­Post​’s offer to become a cor­re­spon­dent in Latin American.)

A web-based orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to inter­na­tion­al news that launched in 2009, Glob­al­Post relies pri­mar­i­ly on a net­work of free­lancers around the world who are paid by the arti­cle. (Its ​“senior cor­re­spon­dents” work as full-time con­trac­tors.) It is the only U.S. out­let I know that requires free­lancers report­ing from con­flict areas to have received haz­ardous-envi­ron­ment train­ing. If they have not, it will pay for the cours­es, which tend to be pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive for freelancers.

​“In any planned cov­er­age of a con­flict zone, the train­ing should be a pre­req­ui­site,” says Phil Bal­boni, Glob­al­Post​’s pres­i­dent and CEO. ​“I don’t think in gen­er­al we have any influ­ence over the con­duct of the par­tic­i­pants in con­flict zones, so the respon­si­bil­i­ty falls to the news orga­ni­za­tion to take the need­ed precautions.”

But Bal­boni, a for­mer for­eign cor­re­spon­dent who is per­son­al­ly man­ag­ing efforts to locate Jim, doesn’t think free­lancers would be any safer if they could afford or were pro­vid­ed with armed secu­ri­ty guards.

​“We don’t feel it makes some­one any more safe,” he says. ​“If you have a deter­mined group of peo­ple who want to take you, they will take you.” He cit­ed the recent case of NBC chief cor­re­spon­dent Richard Engel, who in Decem­ber was seized along with his four-per­son crew and secu­ri­ty guard in the same Syr­i­an province as Jim. They man­aged to escape unharmed less than a week lat­er, after a fire­fight at a rebel-held checkpoint.

Mean­while, a patch­work of orga­ni­za­tions like RISC and the Inter­na­tion­al News Safe­ty Insti­tute are work­ing to pro­vide free­lance cor­re­spon­dents with poten­tial­ly life-sav­ing train­ing. The Over­seas Press Club Foun­da­tion, which awards schol­ar­ships to young aspir­ing cor­re­spon­dents, recent­ly launched ​“Glob­al Para­chute,” an online closed-access plat­form that allows reporters and edi­tors to ​“exchange valu­able infor­ma­tion that will enhance news-gath­er­ing and maybe even be life-saving.”

But this patch­work of sup­port is a far cry from the train­ing and secu­ri­ty once paid for by news orga­ni­za­tions flush with cash. For now, an incon­stant force in war may be strug­gling free­lancers’ most impor­tant ally.

​“One crit­i­cal point is sheer luck,” says Stephen Franklin. ​“I can think of a dozen times when there were bombs, or bul­lets or an explo­sion that were not far from me and some­how noth­ing hap­pened. Luck on top of all else.”

Now more than ever, jour­nal­ism is more of a call­ing than a career. We should hon­or the jour­nal­ists who assume enor­mous risk to tell impor­tant sto­ries, but we must not ignore the larg­er con­text that makes them even less safe on 21st-cen­tu­ry bat­tle­fields. The grow­ing free­lance econ­o­my push­es risk onto work­ers, nowhere more stark­ly than war cor­re­spon­dents. Con­flict reporters like Jim — espe­cial­ly Jim — have always need­ed luck to sur­vive. But increas­ing­ly, so do mil­lions of oth­er free­lance workers.