It turns out that I wasn’t entirely done with the freelance work. I’ve been working on a few couple of articles this weekend, mainly to help out a friend who was in dire need of assistance. I will be getting paid though, so I’m not going to claim that I’m riding to the rescue out of a sense of altruism.
Journalism is an industry where doing work for free is depressingly normalised, although they call it work experience or even worse, exposure. A fact I’m proud of is that I’ve never worked for free in journalism in my almost 14-year career. It’s not a bad feat for someone who got into it with no training or experience, just applied to a job ad and somehow got it. Yet I managed to my way and never really questioned it.
This include my two years where I was getting regular paid work for a national newspaper, when I being paid far more than my relative inexperience warranted. But you’ve got to take what you can get in journalism and take your wins where you can. It’s not an industry built on fairness or merit. Plus, when you’ve worked at the coal face for a local newspaper, being regularly shouted at, burnt out, and spent hours covering parish council meetings, I feel I’ve earned whatever has come my way.
I’ve enjoyed doing the freelance work again as it’s something different. I just can’t do it on a regular basis as free evenings and weekends are a precious commodity now I’m working full-time again. And eventually, I will be doing gigs again at some point in my evenings. Journalism and comedy, two unstable careers I’ve managed to survive in this long.