Digest 12/07/2022

The dead season for freelancers has begun. Grace Byron asks, how do writers cope with holiday drop-off?

DEAD SEASON IS UPON US

By Grace Byron

 

After the tenth time I refresh my empty inbox, I decide to call it quits. It seems like editors just aren’t commissioning anything these days unless you want to write about Lindsay Lohan’s comeback Christmas tour. 

As is annual tradition, almost no one in the journalism industry commissions new work between November and January. I am not here to start a war; editors are our friends and they are just as tired as we are. They have families and loved ones to get back to, just as I would rather be lying in my boyfriend’s bed watching the TikToks he gathers for me than sending another pleading email. When Joan Didion died in December of last year, I couldn’t find an outlet without an out-of-office sign glowing neon in their email signature — the bounce-back email may as well have said good night and good luck. I say this to remind myself. 

Freelancing, as it turns out, is at a crossroads, and not just during this dead season. Publishing at large is facing a dark night of the soul, forced to reckon with overburdened, underpaid employees. The seasons of the freelance economy is one piece of the puzzle, forcing writers to be resourceful and patient in equal measure. 

During the dead season, editors are rushing to get ready for winter vacation, budgets are exhausted, and everyone’s worried about organizing their tax documents. The few stories that can be assigned are often given to regular columnists and in-house writers who may or may not have paid vacation. Meanwhile, freelancers are left waiting for editors to clear the holiday junk mail in January. 

Food writer and essayist Rax King’s writing year follows a familiar pattern. “Things heat up slowly from the beginning of the year into springtime, and I usually have a big burst of autumn activity, too,” King told Study Hall. Of course, food writing has a slightly different cycle. “The bitch of it is that this is definitely a busy season for holiday-themed food writing. But I’m Jewish, and have no interest in writing about Christmas. Frankly, I’d rather take non-writing work to make ends meet, than fart out some cheap holiday story that I don’t care about, anyway. So this season, I’m working in a restaurant to fill the gap.”

In addition to trouble tracking down editors during the holidays, culture writer Harron Walker has also found that there’s “the annual ebb and flow that I, as a trans woman writer whose freelance writing generally concerns trans people and trans stuff, experience every year that peaks in and around June, i.e. Pride Month, and basically declines until the following spring.” 

Though she can expect the best rates during the Pride window, she finds it is an intermittent phenomenon. “Literally the same publication that paid me a dollar a word in June offered me less than half that for a comparable assignment a few months later. I was able to negotiate up to $0.50 per word, but still! It makes me feel insane.” 

Even different writing hustles have similar dead periods, humorist and speechwriter Leah Abrams told Study Hall. “For ghostwriting, the work can be really seasonal. And the holiday drop-off is real. I’ve seen other people find success by securing longer-term projects, like books, over the holiday season, which allows them to hunker down for a few weeks and submerge in the New Year with a draft.” Just land a book deal already. Surely it can’t be that hard. 

Try pitching stories for the winter months long before they descend and hoard your nuts for the winter. But if foresight isn’t your skill there are some tricks of the trade. Give copywriting a go. Maybe you’ll learn something about crypto or NFTs and you can share your skills with the rest of us. No matter how tired you are, diversify your portfolio. Pick up a temporary side hobby (read: hustle) such as coding, pet-sitting, or retail. If all else fails, steal soup from the Whole Foods hot bar.

We’re living in a time when asking for an editor’s contact elicits an ominous whisper. Metrics are down. The collapse of the Hot Girl Freelance Ecosystem has begun on Twitter. In truth, I’ve already had several articles and pitches stall out over the course of writing this brief dispatch while consuming an unreasonable amount of Diet Coke. But fear not: New Year, new you. The Hot Girl Freelancer hasn’t gone away, she’s just in hibernation.

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THE VIEW FROM NOWHERE

With its Semaform, Ben Smith’s new journalism startup Semafor tried to reinvent the view from nowhere. Instead of feigning neutrality, many reported stories include slugged subsections like “Reporter’s View,” “Room for Disagreement,” and “The View From” as spaces for personal or dissenting opinions. But as its two first journalism scandals show, a lot of biases still can only be read in-between the lines (or inside of ad units). 

This week, climate editor Bill Spindle left the company, which only launched in October, saying his tenure was “marred by an over-dependence on Chevron advertising.” The oil giant was an unexpected lead sponsor for Semafor’s climate newsletter, to say the very least. Spindle clearly felt the same way: in a Twitter thread, he said that he asked for the sponsorship to be removed from his stories, which management assented to by removing the ads from his newsletter. But Chevron ads remained on Spindle’s climate stories that appeared in the site, like his extensive coverage of the latest climate summit in Egypt. 

Then there’s Smith’s own reputation-laundering column on Junot Díaz, who, in addition to halting publishing since allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him in 2018, hasn’t been inside of a bookstore — that is, until Smith dramatically dragged him to one for the piece. The meat of the story is an investigation undertaken by the Pulitzer Board, on which Díaz still has a seat, that cleared him of any wrongdoing. But after the column was published, many of Smith’s own sources and others expressed frustration over how much was left out of the story — including the allegations made by Alisa Rivera, who says Díaz used a slur against her when he allegedly assaulted her — in what felt like a deliberate effort to run a piece that cleared Díaz. “There are MANY allegations out there,” writer Zinzi Clemmons, who was the first to go public about an interaction with Díaz back in 2018, tweeted about Smith’s piece. “Only a handful of us have gone on record. The others fear the kind of retribution I’m experiencing now.”

On Twitter the other day, Smith posted a lengthy editor’s note from ProPublica addressing criticism of a story published with Vanity Fair about the origins of COVID-19. “A graceful rowback,” he wrote. Reporter’s View: Semafor, which denied Spindle’s allegation to climate reporter Emily Atkin, and has not publicly addressed the Díaz profile, doesn’t seem willing to do the same. — Willy Blackmore

REVENGE PORN FOR REVENGE PORN ENTHUSIASTS

Putting aside how exactly Hunter Biden’s porn-filled MacBook ended up at the computer repair shop of a legally blind Trump supporter who turned it over to former New York City mayor and Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani, Hunter’s laptop is once again making waves in the media cycle, this time thanks to the “Twitter Files.”

Last week, new Twitter owner Elon Musk promised a bombshell report about Twitter’s censorship activities, and said the materials would be made public that evening. The report came in the form of a lengthy thread from former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi, which claimed that the Biden campaign (not the current administration!) had crossed into murky legal territory while trying to keep Hunter’s private life off the internet in the lead up to the 2020 election.

The stolen laptop narrative was no doubt doctored by the Trump campaign, for whom it had lackluster results. But as Musk’s attempt to muckrake shows, there is a crowd of people, Kyle Rittenhouse among them, that still believes that Twitter’s censorship needs to be further investigated. 

As many reporters have already pointed out, the documents gathered in the “Twitter Files” don’t deliver on Musk’s promise of a bombshell. In fact, the real victims of the report were the Twitter employees — many having since left the company — whose names and private exchanges were published inside. As one former employee told The Washington Post, “We’re furious…. It’s absolutely abhorrent they would release names to the public. It can get someone killed.”

To date, Musk has acknowledged slight missteps in the reveal (not including disbanding Twitter’s communications team). Meanwhile, Taibbi, who was gallantly featured in The New York Times’ coverage of the kerfuffle, has continued his defensive posting and indicated that he will release more information in the coming week. — Evan Kleekamp

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Grace Byron is a writer who used to make films. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, Xtra, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Observer.

Willy Blackmore is a contributing editor at Study Hall, and has written for New York, The Los Angeles Times, Down East, and elsewhere.

Evan Kleekamp is Study Hall’s cat-enthusiast-in-residence and sometimes development director.