I Took the Stable Fintech Job

After two years of struggling to find full-time employment in magazine journalism, Angely Mercado decided to work at a fintech trade publication and freelance on the side.

By Angely Mercado

When I finished graduate school in December of 2016, with a masters in urban reporting and a successful internship at DNAinfo (RIP) under my belt, I felt prepared. I had gotten the hang of writing on deadline, finding sources, and editing audio at 2 a.m. I knew it was going to be a challenge to land a job, but I saw openings online and I felt hopeful that I would find a way to cover NYC breaking news.

I was amazingly wrong. The next two years of my life were filled with internships, temp jobs, five-part edit tests that seldom led to jobs, and rare, well-paying freelancing opportunities. Some of the publications I wrote for shuttered, while others have cut their freelancing budgets.

In 2019, after a year of working two to three jobs at a time, I became an editorial intern and fact-checker at The Nation. I told myself that it would be my final internship; I was determined to get a job or sustain myself from freelance work afterwards. Right before the internship ended, I had enough leads to feel cautiously optimistic about my future in media. But less than a month before my internship ended, a publication that was interested in my work shut down. I started my first week of full-time freelancing feeling stranded and very afraid for my future finances.

Throughout that summer, I balanced freelance work, chronic pain, and demanding, fruitless job interviews. By that August, I was worried that I would face another year of being ghosted by editors, constant rejection, and sending “Hi! Just following up on this,” emails every week.

Then an old classmate from J-school reached out to me and said that the financial technology trade publication he worked at was hiring for a reporter and associate editor position. I hesitated: it was a job, but I had never written about fintech before, much less for a business audience. I was worried about adopting the structure and tone of the publication. But I remembered that a professor at my graduate school advised us that some topics like business and science were more likely to bring a steady paycheck, so I figured it would be an interesting challenge to learn a new beat while actually affording a life.

I said yes and sent my classmate a copy of my resume, which he passed on to his boss. Soon after I met the other editors at the publication and was offered a job a few days later, which I accepted. I was thrown into learning about financial technology pretty quickly; I read articles during my commute and tried to digest the information before I made it into the office. It was a bit of a culture shock at first. Timeliness and newsworthiness did guide the workflow, but there were a lot of outside business goals for the company that also shaped my work.

My job entailed writing an article every day; helping send out invites for events and going over scripts for hosting panels; recording, editing and producing podcast episodes; and strategizing social media. And I had to send daily reports of my progress as well. It was a challenging job, but it comes with a collaborative environment and I’ve learned a lot about fintech. I’ve learned about the kind of technology that deals with my money every single day, why AI is so important, and why banks are the way that they are. I’ve had epiphanies when speaking to analysts and fintech creators about AI as a “black box,” a way for companies to understand their own data.

Some days I felt like I knew exactly what I was doing; other days, I wasn’t so sure. But I was constantly learning something new. I figure out how to make do with limited editorial resources, but unlike freelancing, there were other people around me that I could immediately turn to for advice, and my monthly paycheck didn’t depend on how many of my pitches were accepted. My brain was able to settle into a routine for the first time in a while, and I even had some weekends off.

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Although I was content at my job, it did feel like the people I know who worked in mainstream media or still freelanced were hanging out in a central hub, while I lived in an outer borough and commuted in whenever I could. I worked on my own writing at 5 a.m., or on weekends in between running errands and trying to recover from a busy workweek. While I was a fintech staffer, I’d written about Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s first year as a politician for Remezcla and about helping raise my neighbor’s son for The New York Times. I loved each project, but it felt like dipping a toe into mainstream work while spending most of my energy at the trade publication.

Some days, I miss the kind of work I was doing before I got my full-time job. As an intern at The Nation, I spoke to student protestor Alexandria Villaseñor for an article about climate activism; I’ve attended restaurant openings for Edible Manhattan and Edible Brooklyn; I covered the lack of racial representation in specialized schools for Brooklyn Based. But so many small publications can’t pay very much, and it was stressful to be unsure of my monthly income while I was being worn out from long hours and all of the weekends that I worked. While I was an intern, I would write early in the morning or late into the night, interview people during my lunch breaks, and draft emails on my phone while I commuted home. I kept that schedule in order to freelance while I was at my fintech job.

Although it was difficult and I was tired all the time, it was amazing to have a steady paycheck for the first time in my entire life. I was able to buy groceries at a real supermarket and not just at the Dollar Tree or at a 99 cent store, and I slept better knowing that I had a financial buffer. It was nice to buy bougie waffles and two-for-a-dollar platanos (even though it is an insult to me and my people). Freelancing while I was a staffer gave me the time and leverage to negotiate higher rates for my freelance pieces instead of accepting the first offer because I need to be paid right away.

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Then this March, after the coronavirus began to shut down parts of the economy, I was laid off, along with several others in editorial positions. I was scared and upset that day — I saw how COVID-19 was affecting the economy and worried about how I would find my next job or enough freelance work to sustain me. Still, I don’t regret taking the stable fintech job in the first place. It allowed me to save money, and I was able to continue writing essays on the side. Though freelancing while working at a business trade publication was difficult, that job also brought me to events where I’ve met other trade writers that have been at their jobs for years. Some have gone on to successful communications jobs that they have really liked.

Working at a finance trade publication can be a challenge, but it’s gotten me into exclusive events where I see how the other half lives — think people in vests that look like something straight out of the Midtown Uniform Instagram account, or people wearing shoes that probably cost more than my entire life. Often, I’ve been one of the few Latinx people I see, and there often aren’t very many women. I’d stand around feeling poor, tan, and inadequate, and text friends that there should be some hazard pay involved. That being said, the lack of diversity is not different from many of the newsrooms I’ve been in: different industry, same leadership composition.

Though being laid off — my first real media layoff — was a blow, it has been reassuring that my time at the trade publication is leading to new opportunities. I’ve had a few calls with recruiters, I’ve since worked on a fact-checking project, and I’m currently speaking to an editor about writing on blockchain technology. It is still hard to be laid off due to something I can’t control, but I feel more prepared to weather the storm of freelancing this time around than I did a year ago. I know that if I can learn how to write about something as niche as a data gateway, I can figure out how to land more freelance assignments during a pandemic.

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