Freelances working full-time in journalism in the UK earn an average of £27,000 per year with payment rates “stagnating”, according to a new survey.
Freelance journalists who spend at least 50% of their working time on journalism, but not all of it, earn £17,500 on average. Those in this group brought their total earnings up to £25,500 a year on average by taking on additional non-journalism work.
The survey found that most freelance journalists subsidise their earnings with other non-journalism work.
The findings come from a survey of 458 journalists in the UK commissioned by the UK Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) in collaboration with the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and carried out by CREATE (Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy) at the University of Glasgow.
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Almost half (48% or 264) of respondents said they spend more than 50% of their time on freelance journalism (with the report dubbing these “primary occupation journalists”) and 29% (134) of the total said freelance journalism was their only occupation.
The ALCS is a membership organisation through which writers, including journalists, can register articles they have written (in magazines, not newspapers) and receive royalties if these are licensed out by the publications – similar to PRS payments to musicians whose songs are played in public.
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It wanted to examine contracts and copyright payments for freelance journalism but also gathered wider earnings data which painted a dire picture for many freelances.
[Read more: Is freelance journalism becoming unviable?]
Freelance journalist Anna Codrea-Rado, who shares quarterly income reports about how she made her money to her Substack subscribers, said to mark the report’s release: “The ALCS report hammers home a harsh reality: freelance journalism pay cannot sustain a livelihood. It doesn’t for me, nor scores of my freelance colleagues.”
The distribution of earnings is also very uneven: the top 10% of freelance earners take 37% of the total earnings pie, the report found.
There was anecdotal evidence that pay is stagnating and is no longer appropriate to the degree of time and labour spent on work – the same problem facing news agencies.
One freelance journalist said: “In staff jobs people get pay rises and promotions – or they change jobs and get an increased salary. As freelancers we just get paid the same rate. I think most freelancers are afraid to ask for more in case they aren’t commissioned anymore.”
One journalist noted that it pays to get commissioned from outside the UK: “There are incredibly low rates for UK publishers – I make the lion’s share of my income from US based publications.” Journalists working mostly for international (£22,500) and “other” (£28,750) outlets earned more on average than those working mainly for national (£17,500) and local (£12,750) titles.
Another journalist told the survey: “In general, journalism has become a much more unstable and challenging profession. It is not well rewarded – and I’m one of the luckier ones. I’ve never felt secure in 35 years. Every day doing the job is a small victory.”
[Read more: How to earn £100k+ as a freelance journalist]
Payment on publication was a practice raised by multiple respondents, who the report said described it as “problematic both for increasing the risk borne by the journalist in the event their work is not used, and as disproportionately affecting those journalists covering controversial or hard-hitting topics, which are less likely to be published”.
Some 8% of all those surveyed said they had ever received a payment resulting from licensing agreements between publishers and platforms, averaging around £500 per year for those people. The reasons explaining which types of freelance journalists benefited these payments remained “opaque”, the report concluded.
It suggested lawmakers should ensure individual journalists benefit alongside publishers and other rightsholders from the upcoming Digital Markets Bill plan to force platforms to negotiate over payments for news content.
ALCS chief executive Barbara Hayes said: “This report reveals some worrying trends for the profession, including low pay and informal work practices. While digital platforms and artificial intelligence present both risks and opportunities for freelance journalists, the Government must do more to empower these creators, by supporting mechanisms to negotiate compensation for the use of works in the platform economy.”
The report also found that editing is more profitable than writing, and multimedia skills trumped both. Average earnings for journalists who spent most of their time writing was £17,500, compared with £22,500 who spent most of their time editing and £27,500 for those classed as “sophisticated multimedia development journalists”.
UK freelance journalism is ‘elite profession’
Freelance journalism in the UK faces a class problem, the report suggested. Almost two-thirds (63%) of respondents for whom freelance journalism is their main job have parents whose professional background is associated with the highest levels of social and economic privilege – compared to 23.5% in the general UK population. Some 12% of primary occupation freelance journalists fell into the “intermediate” category with 19% from “lower” socio-economic backgrounds.
Journalists from lower socio-economic backgrounds earned almost half that of journalists from more privileged backgrounds.
The report said: “These findings suggest that freelance journalism is an ‘elite’ profession which is overwhelmingly the remit of those who have, on the face of it, benefitted from more social connections and economic facilitations to support their career.”
One journalist told the survey: “Everyone seems to assume you’ve got a private income – so class is a factor. It makes me furious.”
Freelance journalism is “overwhelmingly white”, the report added, with white journalists making up 87% of the primary occupation journalists who filled in the survey. This is slightly higher than the general population of England and Wales on 82%.
Black journalists who responded to the survey earned seven times less than white journalists, although the report noted this was from a “very small” sample size.
Meanwhile 6% of primary occupation journalists said they have a disability – 44% an unseen disability and 36% a physical impairment. They also earned less on average, typically on £11,250.
One disabled respondent said: “There’s a great deal of invisible exclusion, masked a lot by performative inclusion.”
The survey found a “reverse gender gap” with more women than men among the respondents and women earning slightly more (£18,000 on average).
But as one journalist explained, women can feel forced into going freelance: “There is a lack of career opportunities in the industry, particularly for post career break women who are forced into a freelance work pattern due to non-existent jobs and gender-based discrimination.”
There was also a higher percentage of LGBTQ+ journalists in the freelance industry (7%) compared to the general population (3.2%), and they also earned a slightly higher average of £18,000.
More than three-quarters (78%) of the primary occupation journalists who filled in the survey were based in London.
[Read more: Ten ways to survive (and even thrive) as a freelance journalist]
‘Wild West’ of freelance journalism
A “surprising amount” of respondents described modern freelance journalism in the UK as a “Wild West”, the report said.
ALCS highlighted that contracts for freelance journalists are often made using “off-hand emails, Whatsapps and oral agreements… which lessens the security of a freelance journalist if they are exposed to a dispute.
“More worryingly, 40% of [primary occupation] freelance journalists undertook work without any contract at all.”
Those with some kind of custom contract earned more (£22,500) than those with no contract at all (£17,323) although the report noted this may be a result of those earning more being more able to afford legal advice to draw up contracts.
Simply having a contract is also not necessarily reassuring, with some journalists saying the “trend towards non-negotiable, buy-out contracts offered in ‘boilerplate’ format is a more ‘black and white’ account of the power imbalance between them and the publisher”.
The report also described a “rights grab” with almost half (47%) of freelance journalists signing away their copyright to news publishers. One respondent said: “I have no rights, it seems.”
In the UK freelance journalists working on commissioned projects generally own the copyright to their work by default unless a contract specifies otherwise.
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