Before moonlighting, there was freelance journalism but without the debate

(Illustration by Suneesh K)

The debate around moonlighting is snowballing into a major issue with corporate honchos forced into casting their vote for or against the phenomenon. Salil Parekh, CEO of Infosys, which recently said dual employment could lead to termination, used the company's quarterly results briefing on October 13 to clarify that it encourages employees to pursue other interests outside the company as long as they seek prior consent.

Viewing the ongoing developments with amusement are freelance journalists, many of whom have been moonlighting for years, negotiating its painful curves of eclecticism and freedom with dollops of dilettantism. Given the low wages they get, many need a side hustle for paying the bills. Others have chosen to go all the way, giving up full-time jobs to serve multiple masters. Indeed, long before the millennials discovered ghosting, journalism already had contributed ghostwriting to the language.

Despite being accused of irresponsibility by family and friends, the freelance journalist peddling his wares to all comers, has been an essential feature of the media landscape for as long as it has been around. Their heyday was in the late 1990s and the early years of this century when new publications sprouted overnight. And closed with equal alacrity. Most were mom-and-pop shops that hired only a few staffers permanently and that too for essential functions, while leaning on contributors for the bulk of their content. It worked well for both parties and for that reason it was too good to last.

Soon enough there were more contributors than there was work and the balance of power shifted to the few media outlets that had survived. Rates fell and assignments shrank. The committed freelancers, though, stayed. Freelancing does give you an illusion of choice in that you decide where, when, how and with whom you work. With current technology and the growth of digital media, work-from-anywhere-but-the-office, is in any case, the preferred mode.

But perish the thought that the freelancers’ life is one of privilege. The more lucrative or prestigious assignments have always gone to people with connections and power, or those who already have some brand equity. So celebrated television anchors write at will on subjects they often know little about. It is the name that sells, not the material.

For the journeyman journo, the ratio of pitches to acceptances continues to be unpredictable and many a young journalist has seen her soul dyed with constant rejections. There are long radio silences before pitches are acknowledged and payments eventually arrive with a lag phase of three to six months. Most efforts just disappear down the rabbit hole of unanswered emails and WhatsApp messages.

Also read: Healing Space | How the IT sector created the moonlighter

Consequently, the aspiring free agent (a term coined by Businessweek in the mid 1990s when the magazine declared that this new class of workers would eventually take over the world of work) needs to develop intellectual resources to deliver the desired content but also emotional sinew to cope with the silent treatment. In addition, there is ignorance, malice, sexual advances and low rates (paid per word). The moonlighter, of course, has no recourse since she operates in a shadowy world where the words are hers but the authorship is someone else’s. Freelancers have it somewhat better, though mostly they need to scrounge for work. International publications, thanks to the exchange rate, save the day for a precious few, but there again it is only a handful of names that sell.

Years ago, Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, wrote that a freelancer would need 1,000 new fans to pay $100 to buy all that they wrote, to make it worth their while. That would be a dream scenario for a freelancer because it would bypass gatekeepers. But getting readers to cough up Rs 2,000-3,000 a year is a tall ask even for large media houses. Under the circumstances, many such journalists are self-selecting silos like Substack to make their own mini media markets where they can find possible buyers for their writing. Sadly, their scalability is suspect. There are simply far more writers than readers.

What’s more, the moonlighter and the freelancer are all part of the same pool of laid off, furloughed or job-seeking journalists. And it isn’t getting easier for them as the media does the delicate dance between journalism and monetization.