What Can a Freelancer Say on Social Media?

Freelancers must balance the power of a Twitter following with publications' poorly defined guidelines.

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs

Journalist Kim Kelly had never faced professional consequences for her activist social media persona before late last month, when NPR Music severed its long-term relationship with her as an independent contractor over a tweet that ended up on Tucker Carlson Tonight. She had tweeted her support of the anarchist who had been killed attacking an ICE facility in Arizona, and when that led to a right-wing backlash, NPR told her she could no longer contribute to their music coverage. Editors immediately killed a story they had commissioned from her months earlier.

NPR’s decision raises questions about what media workers can afford to say on social media, even as building a social media presence is increasingly vital to industry success. Kelly was not a full-time employee of NPR; she’s a freelancer who did work for them on and off over the past seven years with decreasing regularity. Yet management at the organization still saw fit to police her behavior online, outside the context of her articles for them.

In the immediate aftermath, Kelly told Study Hall she has no plans to stop talking publicly about her convictions. It’s not just that being demure in the face of a government that incarcerates children at the border would amount to moral cowardice; the fact of the matter is, Kelly has built a readership and a roster of reliable clients, including Teen Vogue, who are open to edgier, more explicitly activist content. “Behaving myself has never worked out,” she told Study Hall. “Being an irritating thorn in the side of a lot of people with bad ideas has been my bread and butter.”

But the whole episode has prompted some reflection about the shifting standards of acceptable online behavior and the wildly varying expectations each publication has for its freelance contributors. “I really am grappling with how to present myself,” Kelly told Study Hall. “Am I an activist or am I a journalist? And if both, how does that work?” Writers’ social media presences have been commodified along with their writing; the question is just how much control publications can expect to have over what their contributors say.

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Freelancers have to weigh building a social-media personal brand that could attract publications looking for sparkplug Twitter personalities against the impetus to keep it clean for prestige titles that have an old-school reverence for decorum.

In digital media, a Twitter presence is still your single best hope for selling yourself professionally, the best forum for promoting your work, and the surest way to build a network. A follow from an editor could lead to a gig opportunity. Writers who excel at Twitter often excel at serving up both personality and promotion for their articles, but understanding how to balance the two isn’t necessarily intuitive.

“Now you have this version of social media that is a professional-personal hybrid,” said freelance journalist and music critic Gary Suarez, “where if you want people to follow you, you need to provide them with something other than the articles you write — you need to provide them with takes and conversations.” There’s mounting pressure to do so: “For a freelancer specifically it becomes part of the gig. You need to stand out in the hopes of attracting attention and building a following that perhaps make you more desirable to an editor.”

Suarez has been writing about music for about two decades, and has been freelancing seriously for seven of those years; he’s been full-time freelance for about a year and a half. He has watched the function of social media shift from almost exclusively personal — a place for people to blow off steam, complain about bosses, and crack jokes — to a kind of office watercooler where the boss is always eavesdropping. This can be a good thing, he said. “I have editors see my tweets on a particular topic and be like, ‘Hey, we’d love you to write about that,’ so they slide into your DMs.”

Saurez also, by his own admission, has a “strong personality” on social media. That can be a problem — or, at the very least, it can influence where he gets work. “I don’t do a lot of legacy work as a result,” he said. The majority of his work is for VICE and similarly “edgy” publications.

It’s not that he’s been explicitly blacklisted anywhere, but after so many emails to an editor go unanswered, he knows how to take a hint. It’s also just a matter of understanding upfront he may not be the best fit for a certain publication, and that’s ok: the tweets that may have made him unhirable at a legacy publication almost certainly got him opportunities elsewhere. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to be published in the New York Times,” he said. “But I think I can go to my grave and be pretty fucking ok with that.”

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In a post-Gawker world, where it’s unremarkable for Deadspin’s Twitter account to tell a politician to “go eat shit” or for a Splinter writer to craft a blog post around calling a New York Times columnist “remarkably dumb,” navigating the shifting norms of professionalism can be confusing. Maybe you play it straight and you never rack up the Twitter followers and online attention Suarez credits with a steady workflow, all in the hopes you’ll have a shot at the Times. Or maybe you fire off crass political tweets and divisive jokes in hopes of getting Splinter’s attention, and you make peace with the fact that you might have trouble getting that Times gig. The only foolproof way to go about it, it seems, is to know what sort of media career you’d like to have before you start tweeting. But what kind of freelancer knows that, really?

“I think you find yourself between a rock and a hard place,” said writer Talia Lavin. “The Scylla of ‘Why don’t they have much of a Twitter presence’ and not even being on anyone’s radar versus the Charybdis of, if you wind up expressing yourself authentically you can violate the objectivity standards of some publication and wind up not being able to get a staff writer job down the line.”

For her part, Lavin’s authenticity has garnered her over 95,000 Twitter followers — a built-in audience she says has led editors to solicit her work — but that level of scrutiny has also harmed her career even as it’s bolstered it.

Lavin was famously targeted by ICE and far-right outlets over mistaken (and quickly deleted) tweet. She chose to resign from her position as fact checker at The New Yorker, but the publication hardly had her back, issuing a statement to the National Review distancing themselves from Lavin and denouncing her “viewpoint,” essentially conceding to the right’s distortion of what was simply a well-intentioned error. It’s hard not to wonder how events may have gone differently had The New Yorker instead chosen to condemn a federal agency for targeting a citizen by name.

“Not only do we say, ‘You have to have a Twitter and the more readers you have the better,’ but also, if you make an oopsie you’re just culled from the herd,” she said. “It’s so demoralizing to realize that to bosses we’re all interchangeable.”

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Luke O’Neil has experienced the highs and lows of freelance life as a writer with a “strong personality” online. His trademark vulgarity made him national news when his longtime client the Boston Globe pulled a column in which he made the tongue-in-cheek recommendation to pee in the food of Trump administration officials. Not only that, but his editor threw him under the bus, refusing to take responsibility for the published piece and clarifying that O’Neil was not on staff. It seemed the Globe wanted to benefit from his voice — there could not possibly have been any ambiguity about what they were getting when they brought O’Neil on as a contributor — right up to the point at which the resulting outrage became a liability for them.

This precarity, a core feature of freelance life, makes navigating these waters especially tricky — you are doubly disposable as an independent contractor, so one errant joke and a publication could decide it’s easier to drop-kick you than deal with the fallout. That same precarity also makes the enforcement of decorum standards on social media seem unnecessarily constricting, because there’s no commitment. It’s one thing for your full-time boss to enforce workplace standards; that enforcement lands differently when it’s coming from someone who just occasionally commissions you. In some ways, it’s akin to Uber’s efforts to control how and when their drivers drive — which is technically illegal, by the way.

A few years ago, when writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, O’Neil wrote a tweet that caused enough trouble to make its way up the masthead; he had to “get spoken to,” he recalled. “I think that sort of thing is really insulting, especially when you’re a freelancer and you’re scraping out articles at $300 a pop every few weeks to be able to have these rich top editors say that your ability to make a living is conditional on you adhering to some outdated standards of decorum,” he said.

He was also spoken to during his time at Esquire, where he had a title of “writer-at-large” but was still very much a freelancer. “I said, ‘Well, if you want to give me health insurance and give me a salary every week then we can talk about my Twitter, but until then I can do what I want.’”

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In January, the New York Times’s Associate Managing Editor for Standards sent out a mass email to the paper’s contributors reminding them they are bound to the same ethics policy that dictates staffer behavior at the Times (they regularly remind freelancers of the policies). “Freelancers…should take care to avoid activities on social media that would damage the credibility of the journalism they do for The Times,” read the email in part. “Strident partisan advocacy or offensive personal attacks risk undercutting a journalist’s credibility. Times editors may decide not to offer future assignments if they believe a journalist’s online presence shows poor judgment or could undermine The Times’s reputation.”

One freelancer who has written for the Times said the email at first made them paranoid and a little annoyed, like they were being monitored despite doing sporadic contract work, and like the Times was pushing its own definition of objectivity. “I felt like Ray Liotta in that scene in Goodfellas in the end, where he’s driving and looking at the helicopter,” said the freelancer, who would only talk to Study Hall on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize their relationship with the Times. (I also got the email and it made me similarly edgy, despite having written for the Times precisely once in the past.)

But then they gave it some more thought — did they really want to run the risk of tweets that might harm their career?

“It actually in the end has helped redirect energy I would otherwise spend tweeting at no one to actually be like, ok, just close out of Tweetdeck and go work, report, transcribe, figure out a new pitch,” they said. But in a way this was easy for them to say — they didn’t have the knack for Twitter that had made it so useful for others. “I’m not Luke O’Neil,” they said. “I’m not any of the people from the former Gawker websites. I just don’t have that persona on Twitter and I’m never going to.”

When you do have that persona, the decision isn’t as clear-cut. Nearly a month after the NPR debacle, Kelly says she’s still negotiating how much of herself to offer up for public consumption. The question of how to present herself — of whether she is an activist or a journalist — remains unsolved. “My career wouldn’t look the way it does if I didn’t have Twitter,” she said. And losing the NPR gig has opened other doors for her — it has led her to invest more in personal and activist writing.

“After the NPR thing, I got a lot of support,” she said. “And just seeing a really big outpouring of support for me and my work, I realized, ok people actually do value what I do and want me to continue doing it.” That support spurred her to launch a Patreon, where she can write more freely and with greater vulnerability, out of the shadow of an editor’s filter or a publication’s ethics standards. Other Twitter personalities have done the same. Talia Lavin launched a Patreon last year, which she temporarily shut down but recently revived, and Luke O’Neil has a highly successful Substack that has scored him a book deal. Kelly just launched her Patreon earlier this month, but says she’s almost making enough off of it to cover her rent.

So how does she now weigh the positives and negatives of having a strong public persona online? “I think it is still a net positive,” she said, but with a series of caveats. “It’s been absolute murder on my mental health, it’s messed with friendships, it’s messed with job things. It’s like a very ornate sword,” she concluded. “If you know how to wield it, it can be useful in certain situations — but you can just end up stabbing yourself.”

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