Comments on: How thankful are you for your role in journalism today? http://www.ojr.org/p1800/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=p1800 Focusing on the future of digital journalism Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:43:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Jennie Phipps http://www.ojr.org/p1800/#comment-2142 Jennie Phipps Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:41:05 +0000 http://www.ojr.org/?p=1800#comment-2142 I’ve been a self-employed word wrangler for more than 13 years after spending 25 years in the newspaper business. The skills I learned as a reporter and an editor have served me well and so has the gritty get-the-job-done approach that prevailed during the 20 years that I worked for Gannett.

Self-employment has been good for me and I think it has been good for others as well who are similarly employed.

For the last 10 years, I’ve published a subscription newsletter and community for freelancers called Freelance Success (http://www.freelancesuccess.com). Last week as we neared the end of what many of us see as a tough year, I surveyed subscribers about their earnings and their perceptions of business conditions in 2009. Granted the participants were self selected, but I was surprised that of those people surveyed who freelance full time, about 50 percent said they earned between $40,000 and $70,000 this year and 25 percent reported making more than $70,000. 50 percent said that their income had declined in 2009 and about 60 percent of those people blamed their lowered earnings on cutbacks in the magazine world. About 25 percent said their income had risen last year and they credited their exploration of new markets — mostly new media markets.

I read these results as good news

]]> By: Marcela Vargas http://www.ojr.org/p1800/#comment-2141 Marcela Vargas Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:09:06 +0000 http://www.ojr.org/?p=1800#comment-2141 I am still a student, but I am also working my way through journalism. I am thankful for finding such an interesting profession, but I am also worried that some day I won’t be able to support myself or my family though my career.
I’m hopeful, though, that we are building a better future for our profession by embracing technology and by understanding that this is a new age for journalism.
We need to learn how to manage ourselves. Having a manager on the payroll that knows nothing about the basis of journalism is as much a mistake as having a journalist on the payroll that knows nothing about management basics. We need to branch out our academic and empirical preparation. Multitasking. We need to learn html, we need to learn accounting, we need to learn graphic design… so that the next time anyone asks if journalism is just about writing, we can show them it’s a whole more complicated than that, with arguments that non-journalists can actually understand.

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