Pivoting on Their Writerly Skills: How Australian Freelance Journalists Fared During the Pandemic

This chapter explores how freelance journalists found work and managed income insecurity after major employers suspended freelance budgets during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Based on interviews with 32 Australian freelance journalists, it details how the most vulnerable of journalists dealt with the crisis. Drawing on the literature analysing decline in journalists’ employment conditions, the study shows the survival strategies many freelancer journalists were forced to adopt. For some, this meant focussing on saleable journalistic skills, such as writing and storytelling, and repurposing them to access better-paid work outside journalism. However, many of the freelancers in our cohort saw this pivot to corporate and client-based jobs as nothing more than a workaround, which provided some income during the slump in news, magazine and editing work. Importantly, our interviewees continued to identify themselves as journalists. Most of them did not see working across content genres, clienteles and industry sectors as problematic. The study then moves to discuss and draw conclusions around emerging shifts in the conceptualization of what signifies being a journalist. It ends with the suggestion that the traditional journalistic ideology is giving way to a new view of journalism as a ‘passion’ rather than a profession with permanency.