The end of traditional freelancing

In the Doha airport, I met a young photographer who had been working for a large UK newspaper covering the war in Iraq. He was heading home from the Mid-east for good. Traditionally, news outlets would send their own staff photographers to cover wars, set them up with press passes, a place to stay, something to eat, and some form of vague security protection in the form of a Peace Corps or UN escort. The days of wearing a helmet with the word “PRESS” in white paint on it are, according to this photographer, long gone. Instead we are seeing more and more freelance photographers entering war zones hoping to sell single images to news outlets. The photographer I spoke to flew from Istanbul to Baghdad and used Twitter to find “where the shots where,” this pun, I believe, was darkly intentional.

In a climate where television outlets post videos uploaded by witnesses (not journalists) on the scene, it’s obvious that newspapers have stopped sending staff and started picking up on YouTube clips in the vein of reporting we saw from the Arab Spring. This leaves people like the photographer incredibly vulnerable, and it wasn’t long before he picked up a gun while he was out shooting, before joining a unit of soldiers for protection. Apart from the obvious ethical issues surrounding journalists being armed and joining soldiers in the field, it also means that without media backing, these photographers aren’t getting paid until they email their photographs from an Internet cafe in a war-torn country to an editor in another continent and invoicing them. And if the editor doesn’t like or need the photo that day, these photographers don’t get paid. And they essentially risk their life for nothing. While this is an extreme example of the bottom falling out of freelancing jobs, it’s simply one of millions of jobs that have been desecrated beyond recognition in a market flooded with creative workers ready to work. This is just one story. It was just one guy in one airport.

Get a job, or six

This photographer along with nearly every creative freelancer I know is now part of an entire generation of over-educated post-graduates who are over-worked and under-paid. A demographic working 4, 5, or 6 jobs just to pay the bills. Vast masses of the modern Western population are finding themselves with an under-employed surplus of labor. If you’re under 35 and a “creative” professional, or a “creative” anything, you’re part of this demographic. You probably know one — they have a stunning portfolio, a sleek personal website, have a reputation as being good and fast, and have a two page CV to match. They’ve moved to bigger cities and have their own community of creatives, and they’re working 6 different small jobs to live with three other people. They’re 30, broke, and working like dogs.

Some artists I know have blamed the spread of information technologies for this phenomena, but blaming “the Internet” or “globalization” is far too simplistic. Young artists, designers, illustrators, curators, and creative beings are being forced to bend to free market expansions of the new art world buzz word “creative industries.” I don’t have an answer as to why we’ve ended up with a no man’s land for creative freelancers, I think the answer is disparate and complex, but here are some ideas: We have too many art school graduates flooding the market. This has lead to overall low-paying jobs for art school grads, with some of the highest rates of personal debt belonging to ex-art students. This makes the market incredibly competitive so jobs are hard to come by. Not to mention that media outlets don’t pay for content as much as they used to, if at all.

This employment drought has had some strange effects on creative workers.