Is there a living wage for journalists?  What should it be?  Arianna Huffington says a “living wage” for her journalists is still being worked out.  My opinion  –  and I may be wrong or just completely biased  –  is that journalism doesn’t pay a living wage.  You do it for the love.  I think in the long-term, I will make my money doing other things.  Can one make a good living in journalism today?

Now that I’ve raved about the sovereignty of working for oneself as a freelance writer…let me tell you about the downside.  The one thing that was lacking for me as a freelancer who worked at home was one of the most important: peers.  Say what you want about your coworkers, but they are essential.  Having a second opinion sitting one desk over from you is invaluable.

Can you recreate this experience as a freelancer?

It’s an important thing to ask yourself if you are thinking about going out on your own and stepping away from the corporate environment.  A lot of people here in Phoenix like to go to co-working places and/or coffee shops.  To be honest, sometimes I like working in coffee shops but other times, not so much.  I guess it depends on the atmosphere on any given day.  I most often like working in my own home office where I can control my own atmosphere.  But sometimes it gets to feeling like an island and the coffee shop starts to become appealing again.

But as a writer, peers are so important.  I work in a newsroom and can’t begin to tell you the importance of a second set of eyes on a piece of copy.  When I work on my own I have to change my work habits to give myself extra time for revisions.  I write and then let my work “cool” for a while before I re-read and revise.  Without a coworker sitting next to me to serve as my second set of eyes, I can only depend on my own.  So I come up with little tricks like letting a draft “cool” for a couple hours or overnight before I come back to it.  (This method has really helped with a few Boston University papers, too).

Freelancing from home means I have to create my own peers.  Twitter and Facebook are great for this. But so are instant messaging, email, and Skype.  It never hurts to have someone you can call or IM for advice or a second pair of eyes when needed.  I’ve met a few great freelance writers online and they have given great help over the years.  It’s also great to keep in touch with others to see how their careers take shape and see how they market themselves.  It’s so good to see how others succeed — it’s inspiring.

Sometimes that’s the most important thing.  Do your coworkers inspire you?  Do they make you better? Do they make you want to step up your game?  Are they supportive?  If not, maybe you would be better off creating a community of peers on your own.

I’d like to take a few blog posts to explain why, after two years of full-time employment, I am yearning for my old life as a freelance writer.  The first idea I’d like to get across is that freelance writing, however scary it may be at times, is a completely sovereign activity.  That’s the first and most important reason why I loved it, why I now miss it.  I miss my sovereignty as a freelance writer and realize I have desperately been trying to recreate it with my blogs in my spare time.  I don’t care if I only make $1 per month as a freelancer, as long as I am doing it again.

What brought this on?  I was reading this just now after reading the new Seth Godin ebook, “What Matters Now.”

I realize I cannot extol the virtues of Seth Godin in all corporate environments.  Some dig it while the cultures of some companies don’t make for happy, energetic, and creative environments.  But I can do that on my own as a freelancer!  I can enjoy Seth’s ideas all I want when I’m on my own.  I can even fit reading Seth’s blog into my actual workday as something that adds value to my experience.  But in some corporate environments, people just don’t get this.

I am really loving Seth’s new ebook today and stopped at Hugh Macleod’s entry in it, which took me to his website…and I realize I live my life more in the Hugh Macleod way than in the corporate sheep way. I think I’ll be buying Ignore Everybody later.

But first, I have to get to work.  Creativity time is over so I can go make a CEO richer.

Drumroll, please…  We still have no idea what the difference is between “affect” and “effect.”  Seriously!  According to Dictionary.com, the top 10 most-searched words in 2009 were:

1. Affect

2. Ubiquitous

3. Irony

4. Socialism

5. Effect

6. Melancholy

7. Love

8. Integrity

9. Nostalgic

10. Pedantic

I will be the first to admit to having had a lively discussion in our own newsroom about affect/effect.  We’ve all fallen victim to that one once or twice.

The only real interesting reflection of our culture in 2009 has to be #4.  Apparently we were all looking that one up to see if others were using it properly?  What term in 2009 was thrown around more casually than “socialism?” There had to be a few looking it up just to see if it fit their rhetoric.  And so, 2009 was the year we learned the definition of socialism.  Or tried to, anyway.

On that note, the top decliners of 2009 were:

1. Bush

2. Maverick

3. Solace

4. Liberal

5. Obsequious

6. Rhetoric

7. Superfluous

8. Condescending

9. Cynical

10. Ostentatious

Apparently the abuse of “maverick” stopped in 2009.  I think we all know who we can credit that too…and she was probably responsible for putting “socialism” at #4 in the first list.  So what did we want more of in 2009?  Greed!  Dictionary.com users needed a new word for it, and “esurient” was the one. Twitter made it in at #10 on the list of 2009 gainers in an obvious nod to the growth of the social networking site.  I honestly have no idea how “namaste” made it onto the list unless yoga had a boom in popularity this year too.

Top Gainers of 2009:

1. Esurient

2. Impeded

3. Shuddering

4. Fugacious

5. Suffering

6. Negative

7. Namaste

8. Adjuvant

9. Callipygian

10. Twitter

I am surprised to see that words like “furlough” and “bailout” didn’t make the list.  But most of us know the meaning of those all too well.

Just a little thought for the day:

Where are your ideas?  Are they so light they evaporate up into the atmosphere?  Are they so heavy they sink with a thud, never able to get off the ground?  Or are they light enough to just levitate around you? What gives them that levity? What keeps them close to your awareness?

I couldn’t agree more with FishBowl LA.  This sinks pretty low to the level of sleaze.  This can’t even be called “journalism.”  If ever I would have done something like this, it would have been as a morning radio jock doing a stunt and never considered “news” or “journalism.”  Michael Jackson has been a star for 40 years; certainly we can all come up with something better than this to fill space.  With “This Is It” just smoking the box office right now, this cannot be the best a person can do.  Good grief, go see the film and review it.  But don’t screw around putting out trash.  Find a new angle or let the story die.

I give up.  Who is it?  The Huffington Post is asking this question and we get to vote on the nominees.  I hardly think of anyone making traditional media moves as a game-changer.  I’m learning towards the folks at The Atlantic for “treating its website as an extension of the brand.”  I’d like to see every traditional media business adopt this way of doing things.  Print and broadcast can benefit from evolving onto the web and finding new and non-traditional ways of creating revenue.

Who are the game changers in the media?  People like Gary Vaynerchuk?  How about Pam Slim?  I like people like Shira Lazar and iJustine.  All of these people have done something unique by combining their personal brand with several forms of media.  You can’t just be in one kind of media anymore–you have to expand.  I can’t just do radio and expect to survive.  I love radio, but I also want to change it.  The old models don’t work.  So who’s coming up with the new business model?  Who do you think the game game-changers are?

This Q&A with John Mayer by New York Magazine’s pop culture “Vulture” was pretty dang funny, to say the least.  I only happened upon it after one of my Twitter followers sent out a tweet that Mayer had threatened to sodomize female journalists.  As both a fan of Mayer and as a radio professional who has played his records since the beginning, I had to click on the link in her tweet.  As I started to read the Q&A with Mayer, I began to realize the joke, but my Twitter friend hadn’t and instead was upset with Mayer.  She had taken his words literally when he said, “I’m going to forcefully sodomize your editor.”

Here’s what might have happened.

An editor gave her writer questions to ask Mayer that were absurd.  But how absurd are they really?  In an age when what we post online is driven by page views and how much audience we can gain, the NY editor didn’t really make a mistake here.  The Q&A has me blogging about it and, earlier in the week, my twitter pal was up in arms about it.  So that’s two people driving traffic to the NY Mag site.

It seems to me like the editor thought she may get Mayer to say something controversial and newsworthy about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. The questions asked seemed like attempts to snag something newsworthy to drive traffic to the site by asking serious questions.  We see TMZ.com do it all the time in their videos.  But the plan doesn’t always work when you ask a celeb a question like this.  Usually, they have no opinion or nothing newsworthy to say.

C’mon, editors, like you’re really going to get well-coached stars to say something to give you a hot story?  Mayer would rather say something smart ass about sodomizing you than take a Nobel question seriously.  He’s got a record to promote, so he’s not going to say anything to piss off his red state or blue state fans.  To me, this just seemed like an attempt to compete with TMZ gone wrong.

We’ve hit the saturation point with celebrity news and gossip.  How are we going to do it differently?

By not falling victims to trends or by copying what everyone else is doing.  But there’s also one vital thing to do.  If you’re going to cover celebrity news for a living, it doesn’t stop  when your 40 hours a week are up in the newsroom.  You don’t walk up to Mayer and ask him dumb questions like he’s a stranger you have no respect for.  Do your research.  And when I say “research,” Google doesn’t count.

You have to live this stuff.

You lifestyle has to be celebrity/entertainment news 24/7/365.  You can’t miss a thing.  Mayer fans know he’s a smart ass with dry, sarcastic, rude humor.  The fans also know he loves to liberally dish out his unique humor to journalists.  The editor and her writer would have known this if they’d been fans, or had at least watched Mayer on some TMZ videos verbally sparring with paparazzi and journalists.  The guy’s current single is about, “who says I can’t?”  Well, what do you think you’re going to get when you hit him up with your tape recorder at a party or on a red carpet?  Who says I can’t smart-ass this journalist chick who didn’t do her homework on me?

I’ve got clients to serve who want news on Mayer’s new album.  I’m not going to waste 2 minutes with him by asking him lame questions.  Tell me about “Battle Studies.”  (She did at least ask about that after asking a bunch of questions that annoyed him.  Way to go to build rapport…)

You never know where a conversation will go anyway.

I talked to Mike Kennerty of the All-American Rejects last week about how the band was getting back on the road after Tyson Ritter had emergency knee surgery.  Somehow we got to talking about a few different subjects, which was really cool and unexpected.  It wasn’t an exclusive; a lot of us got to do press over the phone with members of the band.  So we all had the story about them going back on tour.  But I know I got a couple of other tidbits out of him that will be exclusive to my Westwood One clients only.

I get what I get from people by doing my own thing and not trying to be like everyone else out there.  I treat artists with respect.  In Kennerty’s case, he was calling from London on a day off.  How would you like a bunch of strangers asking you questions for a few hours on end on your “day off?”  Exactly.  This is why you get so much more as a journalist just by being cool with people.

Anyone can put up a blog and start trying to compete with TMZ or Perez Hilton or whomever in online celebrity news and gossip you idolize.  Some of us were doing celeb news before it grew to what is currently is online, which is a massive echo-chamber.  I did it in radio first and I still do it for radio.

How do you do entertainment news today and stand out from the crowd?  How do you not fall victim to the echo chamber trap?  How can you do music news and still compete with countless blogs all writing about the same thing at the same time?  Should we even call it “news” any more?

Disclosure: I am a “New York” magazine subscriber and long-time fan of the online site.  Opinions expressed on this blog do not reflect that of any of my various employers.  I have also bought every John Mayer album I’ve ever had.

This is why I stopped freelancing nearly two years ago.  I wanted a “comfort zone” and was driven by a boyfriend-at-the-time to “get a real job” that was “steady” that I could “depend on.”  It was a nice idea at the time and it’s just what I did.  I don’t think such a thing exists anymore and it is something I never believed in anyway.  The reason why I was freelancing to begin with was because I felt to my core that you can’t depend on anyone but yourself to make a living.  I have also worked in radio broadcasting for 11 years now, which is an unpredictable industry to say the least.  I was used to the idea of always having a resume ready to go.

Two years later and single, my core beliefs have been proven right on once again.  The economy is much different than it was then, and in ways I couldn’t have foreseen.  I knew then you couldn’t depend on “father employer” to always provide for you, and today we all see why that is.  When Westwood One told us about our pay cut/furloughs at the end of September, I realized you can no longer depend 100% on a full-time job for income.  Since we got the news, I started talking to friends whose furloughs and pay cuts are more severe than mine, and also to friends who’ve been out of work for over a year now.

The only thing I can conclude from this experience is that every one of us must learn to provide for ourselves.  Here’s what I’m thinking…

My full-time, 40-hours-per-week job no longer pays my bills.  At least, not for the next three months and even after these three tight months are past, it still doesn’t help me meet my financial goals.  However, it does have some benefits I won’t get in freelancing like a paycheck every two weeks.  I do know I will at least get some kind of check every two weeks, no matter how small.

I also get health insurance for a dirt cheap monthly fee.  While I do still get stiffed with a lot of health bills I can’t afford on my salary, I know it could be much worse.  I’ve been there, done that in the days of providing my own health insurance.  I don’t even want to know what that would cost me today.  I am guessing at least $300 a month with expensive copays and prescriptions on top of that.

Another benefit of a full-time job, even if I don’t make full-time pay is sick and vacation time.  If I’m running a fever, I can call in sick, unlike in freelancing where a deadline is a deadline.  I do also have paid vacation time.  It’s so hard to take a vacation or sick day when you are your own boss.  If I am too sick to leave my home, I can call in sick to my full-time job but I’ll still have to turn in my freelance work.  Hey, at least I won’t have to do both.

Having a full-time job also gets me out of the house  five days a week, which is also a plus.  I get to interact with coworkers and learn from them, which is something I don’t get working alone at home. Freelancing interaction for me in 2006-2008 was limited to email, phone, Skype, MySpace, and Twitter.  I spent next to nothing on gas, but I think I also ended up out of touch without all those great “water cooler” chats I have now with coworkers.

So those are all the great things about having a full-time job.  You get sick time, vacation time, a paycheck every two weeks, cheaper health benefits than one can provide oneself, and a sense of community.  Not to mention how good it looks on the resume as you seek jobs.  The best time to get a job is when you already have a job.  I know it’s a cliche, but it’s true.

But when the rent doesn’t get paid…it’s not so fun anymore.  This brings me to the entire point of this post:

Don’t depend on an employer to be your everything in 2009 and beyond!

We have got to be moonlighting on the side, whether it is by selling crafts, cleaning houses, DJ’ing weddings, or walking dogs.  I just don’t see being able to get by on one income anymore like our employers are some kind of gods meant to provide for us.  Being in such a comfort zone is a mistake.

I plan to treat my full-time job as my main source of income and benefits–but not as my only source of income and benefits.  To me now, it’s like just another freelance gig to juggle; the income from it can go away at any time.  When I juggled several freelance gigs, I knew this.  When one gig went away, it didn’t make me sad or angry.  I just moved on to the next gig.

So I can continue to be bitter and angry at my employer for cutting my pay, or I can move on to the next gig.  I think I can accept what I’ve known for years in my gut–that only I can create my income by using my unique talents and ideas to find meaningful work I enjoy that pays the bills.

I am on a furlough day today.  After catching up on “The Office” and “Community” on Hulu.com this morning, my attention naturally drifted towards searching the Internet for freelance writing gigs.  As a full-time entertainment news writer suffering a severe pay cut, I feel the need to support my writing habit with…more writing jobs.

So I begin a serious search for gigs once again for the first time in nearly two years.  I honestly don’t remember where I found the good gigs before.  Some quick searches today showed me that ads online for gigs haven’t changed much in two years.  I used to apply for any and every appealing gig I saw–and took every single one I was offered.  I had to; freelancing was my primary income.  I would like my freelance income to supplement my main income today, as I do have a full-time job and therefore not as much time to freelance.

Branding

The other thing I want to accomplish with freelancing now that I didn’t think about before is personal branding.  Each gig I take now is an opportunity to increase my personal brand.  I can write about anything.  Freelance writers are generalists and being able to write about any and every subject assigned to you is survival.  But there are a few things I am really good at like music news, entertainment news, podcasting, being a radio personality, writing for the web, national news, and anything pop culture.  Actually, increasing my pop culture brand is the best thing I can do right now.

My Brand: Pop Culture

I think that’s a good goal above all else: increase my brand as a pop culture writer/content provider. Because I can create pop culture content for the web, print, and broadcast.  I hope you’ll join me as I blog about my career recreation right now.  Is it a recreation?  A makeover?  A re-branding?  I am not sure which word applies best to what I am trying to do.  I guess we’ll see as time goes on how this evolves…