Study Hall Digest 3/23/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

***Quarantine Edition: Issue 2***

Freelancing During a Pandemic: How Coronavirus Is Impacting Workers

Freelancing is always precarious work — we move from gig to gig, from busy times to dry spells with little warning. Now, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as virtually every publication reshuffles its priorities and reexamines its budget, work feels more precarious than ever. We spoke to a handful of freelancers about how the pandemic has impacted their income and how they plan to get by.

The fact that no one is traveling has put a dent in travel writers’ income. “In the past few weeks, I’ve definitely seen a nosedive in the amount of work I receive,” freelance travel writer Marina Nazario told Study Hall. She’s been able to get some work in the form of easy, evergreen stories, but some editors she works with have temporarily cut her loose. “I’ve reached out to a lot of editors I’ve worked with in the past and they’ve been really transparent in saying ‘It’s not a good time, check back with us in like a month,’” she said.

She also has two retainer marketing clients in Australia: one in the tourism industry, which has put all her work on hold because it no longer has a freelance budget, and a mattress company that has had to halt the shipping of its products and so no longer needs content. Both clients put her projects on an indefinite hold, with no indication of when they might pick them back up. She’s staying with her parents so not currently worried about rent, but she’s still anxious about finances. “My income is probably $2,000 less a month than I would normally make,” Nazario said.

Writers in the real estate and restaurant space are seeing work dry up, too. Freelancer Rebecca Fishbein had a steady, longtime gig writing columns on listings for a real estate website. She got an email from her editor on Monday letting her know that, due to financial constraints, they could no longer pay her to work — all of the publication’s ads are real estate ads, and no one is buying property at the moment (which also renders the subject of her column obsolete). “That cut my regular income — not in half, but it definitely limited it,” she said.

She’s still stringing together enough projects to make ends meet for now, but she’s concerned about the stability of some of her other jobs. “I have a couple of other gigs that I think won’t exist anymore because they were writing about restaurants,” she said. She also had a few projects in the works that she and her editors mutually cancelled because they seemed irrelevant or didn’t strike the right tone in light of the pandemic.

“It’s always precarious to be a freelancer, you’re always living on the edge of collapse, so maybe I always expected this to happen,” she said. “But I just don’t know how to make money.”

What will happen to magazines as photoshoots are cancelled? Freelancer Cybelle Tondu primarily works as an assistant food stylist: she spends hours grocery shopping for items to be used in food photoshoots, then assists in the shoot itself, which can involve cooking. As photoshoots, which require groups to work closely together, have become effectively forbidden grocery shopping has become risky, her work has dwindled.

She told Study Hall she had been losing gigs over the past few weeks and wondered if it was due to coronavirus concerns. Then, last week, as she herself became increasingly anxious about doing her job, her supervisor at a Hearst publication pulled out of a scheduled photoshoot, citing the virus. Tondu was relieved, but also anxious about what it could mean for her future and the future of her industry.

“I was just thinking, ‘I don’t want to be there, I don’t know if I can even find the things I need to get,’” she said of the upcoming photoshoot. “But every magazine depends on photoshoots to run and people have to physically be there, and if they don’t have photos they don’t have a magazine. It’s a ripple effect. It’s scary to think about.”

“It’s so non-essential, the kind of work that I do, that nobody’s hiring,” she added. “I haven’t even been thinking about what I could be doing to make money at the moment. It just feels like everything’s stopped.”

To peg your pitches to the current crisis or not: that is the question. Freelancer Kate Mooney told Study Hall she’s been tailoring her pitches to the coronavirus crisis, in part because it seems like the only thing to write about — she had an editor recently put a story of hers on the back burner because it wasn’t relevant to the pandemic. A writer at another publication told her that it had totally slashed its freelance budget for its “Sex and Relationships” section. But when everyone is scrambling to write about one thing, it can be a challenge to come up with an original angle, especially one not being written in-house.

“You want to write something that has gravitas right now and has to do with coronavirus, but everyone is thinking of the same stories, so it becomes harder to stand out as a freelancer,” said Mooney. “A lot of the things you want to write about are perhaps already being covered by staff.”

She also had an editor she regularly works with drop off communication; it’s hard to know if the silence is simply due to the editor being overwhelmed, but it makes work feel more precarious. “Communication feels more uncertain with editors because you don’t know what’s going on on their end,” she said. “They’re overloaded — in some cases their budgets are slashed. You’re approaching every workday with heightened anxiety over everything, and [as a result] the work that you do takes a lot longer.”

Study Hall Recommends: Tucked away in the upstate New York village of Montgomery is a 92-acre sanctuary for horses and other animals, bordered by farmland and a wooded county park. The sanctuary, Squirrelwood Farms, tweets a short video of their animals (horses, goats, cows, pigs, donkeys, a small gang of boxer dogs) going to bed every night around 11:30 pm. If you, like me, get into bed, turn off the lights, and then read an hour of anxiety-inducing tweets, I highly recommend watching the Squirrelwood animals make minor pandemonium instead. — Erin Schwartz

Other (But, Let’s Be Honest, Mostly COVID-19-Related) News

– Alt-weeklies are suffering mass layoffs and pay cuts, and in some cases cutting print production or circulation. The publications have come to depend on live events as an alternative revenue stream, and with those banned, their budgets have been abruptly cut. Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger announced it has temporarily laid off 18 employees and suspended its print issue, noting that “ninety percent of The Stranger‘s revenue comes from people being able to gather in public.” Its sister paper The Portland Mercury cut print production and laid off 10 employees. (The Stranger had launched an amateur film festival that had brought in a lot of revenue; now, of course, film festivals are out of the question.)

– Other publications are pivoting to quarantine-focused content. Pitchfork created “The Isolation Check-In,” a curated list of things to watch and listen to while in isolation, updated daily. Others are wondering what the current crisis will mean for creative output in the future: in the New York Times, Sloane Crosley mused about the inevitability of an onslaught of mediocre novels about life with coronavirus.

– On Twitter, the “Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine” discourse persists. Should we put pressure on ourselves to create a work of genius while locked in our apartments, in a constant state of terror and dread? Or should we lay in bed and not move? Anti-King Learists are saying we should be gentle with ourselves, but how gentle is too gentle? Help.

– Organizations are aggregating lists of resources. Here’s one from Trupo, which features healthcare information; here’s one from BOMB magazine, useful for writers and artists. We also recommend following Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) on Twitter for information on mutual aid resources.