Sportswriter Frankie de la Cretaz on Labor Rights And The Sports Beat

"You can get pretty much anyone to care about sports if you're framing the story correctly."

On March 9, 2022, sportswriter Frankie de la Cretaz, co-author of HAIL MARY: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League, joined Study Hall to discuss why media workers should turn to athletes when trying to understand the struggles and rights of laborers, even in the media industry. De la Cretaz was formerly the sports columnist for Longreads, as well as the former sports and culture columnist for Bitch Media. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, the Washington Post, Bleacher Report, The Ringer, The Atlantic, and many others. 

 

One of the things I’ve really admired about your work is a consistent emphasis on how labor shapes our understanding of the world. You’ve been really clear about how gender affects how athletes are perceived, treated, paid, etc. But also that their situation is eerily similar to similar gaps within the media industry. There is also the big glaring bit about how media has an omnipresent role in how sports are consumed. I have to wonder if all that makes you tired as hell! Are there any major lessons you’ve learned in your writing and reporting and has your mentality about these subjects changed or changed you?

It does make me tired. Sports and sports journalism are pretty disrespected in the larger media industry. We sports journalists are largely written off as frivolous. I think that’s partially because there are media members who cover sports without a larger, cultural, anti-oppression lens in place. 

The “stick to sports” mantra really just doesn’t cut it — sports don’t exist in a vacuum. Sports stories are human stories, and they are reflective of the larger culture. Something I’ve learned over the course of doing this work is that you can get pretty much anyone to care about sports if you’re framing the story correctly. I think of myself as someone who writes about sports for people who don’t think they care about sports.

The challenge is getting editors to agree. I’ve been widely published, but that is a result of freelancing with a beat that’s considered niche and having editors willing to accept only one story every six months from me, so I’ve had to bounce around. 

 

As someone who has been working at the intersection of gender and sports for years and has a sense for what stories get attention, editorial support, and financial backing, how do you determine which stories to take on versus those you pass to someone else? Or, if you find yourself in a situation where someone wants to use you as a source because of something you’ve written?  

If it’s a 101 piece I will be a source for someone, especially if it’s something as basic as “how to cover trans people.” I don’t want to write those stories anymore and I’m happy to let someone else take them.

But as someone who writes about trans people and sports, I feel this question in my bones! Look how relevant that work is now. What if reporting on trans athletes hadn’t been written off as a niche in the years before this cultural moment? Could it have reshaped the current dialogue? I think about that a lot. I have a few pieces in the works right now that are highly nuanced on these issues, and now that trans athletes are in the news, editors want them. I’m going to capitalize on that opportunity. Plus, the nuanced work from people who know the issue inside and out pushes the conversation forward. 

 

It sounds like you have decided to work with editors when they’re ready to work with you, but prioritize yourself otherwise. Can you tell me more about this strategy and the experiences that informed it?

 I want to note my level of relative privilege here in that I basically charge $1 per word as my floor at this point in my career. Also, about half of my assignments are ones that I’ve been approached by editors to write. So I don’t have to hustle in the way I did earlier in my career. 

At the same time, because of the kind of work I do, I prioritize editorial relationships that respect my expertise and point-of-view. I recently pulled a piece because I didn’t like the direction the editor wanted to go — I’m not willing to write something about trans people that I ultimately find harmful, especially not in this current moment. I’m really selective and thoughtful about where I pitch, who I work with, and what I allow out into the world with my byline on it.

 

In the beginning, did it take you a long time to find the right places for your niche pieces? Getting started is the most challenging part, right?

Yes! Now I have a few editors that I rotate between. But in the beginning of my career, I would send like 10 pitches a week! Sports pubs considered my work to be “women’s issues” and women’s pubs considered my work to be “sports,” which they wrongly assumed their audience didn’t care about. I could get a pitch accepted somewhere like once or twice a year. 

Twitter was super helpful in those situations. In one case, I landed a piece at a women’s pub because I followed the editor on Twitter and knew she was a Chicago Cubs fan, so she accepted a baseball pitch! That kind of info is super helpful and I utilized social media a lot to hone in on that strategy.

I’ll also add that you can get super creative about where you land your stories. I’ve been published in the New York Times three times, but never in the sports section. I landed one story about youth sports in their Well Family vertical, another about jumbotron proposals in their Vows section, and the third about WNBA fashion in their Opinion section. My advice is to think strategically and get creative about where your work can fit and make the case! Then it won’t overcrowd the seemingly “obvious” section where people might expect it to live. 

 

Can you tell us what it was like and how you wrote your book while freelancing? What do you know now that you wish you knew before starting? 

This is probably true for a lot of freelancers, but it was really hard for me to turn off the hustle and scarcity mindset of freelance culture to focus on the book. I kept taking assignments because I felt like I had to. To some extent, I did. My advance was $45,000, split in half with my co-author, and paid over four installments, so it was not enough to cover me. In theory, my plan was to dedicate three days a week to freelance work and two days a week to the book. In actuality, I wrote like 20,000 words the week before the book’s deadline. I wish I had been more organized about sticking to my schedule and not letting the urgency of freelance culture sidetrack me. Those edits can usually wait a day, even if they feel like they can’t.

 

Can you talk about how, when, and why you became a freelancer? It sounds like you freelance full-time at this point? 

I was a social worker who got pushed out of my job while on maternity leave with my first child in 2014. I always wanted to write but had never taken a writing class in my life. At the time, I was sure no one would ever pay me to write. I always had a blog, though. A Facebook friend messaged me after I posted about losing my job and suggested I could publish some essays. She later introduced me to an editor at Hearst. Shortly after that, I wrote a personal essay for Cosmopolitan. My first several years of freelancing were very “first person industrial complex” kind of work, but eventually I ran out of things to say about myself and essays don’t pay well. 

But I also wasn’t a journalist. I joined the Binders group and threw myself into every single thread about how to pitch and find editors. I began pitching reported essays and pretended I knew how to do those, and eventually leveraged those into straight reporting. Now I publish about two creative nonfiction essays per year whenever I feel like it, but my work is full-time freelance and has been since 2014. I pivoted to sports around 2016 because I’m stubborn and became convinced that I needed to elbow my way into a beat that didn’t seem to have space for a voice like mine. I think my stubbornness makes me a good freelancer. Whenever I’m rejected I become determined to prove a story is a good one and will pitch it until it lands somewhere, even if it takes a few years. Rejection doesn’t make me upset, it lights a fire for me.

 

If that isn’t the gender, labor, and politics clusterfuck in a nutshell! Aside from going on a tear about what kinds of labor seem to be disqualified as labor precisely because they are necessary, I’m really curious about any skepticism you’ve developed toward journalism and reporting. 

The rate I maintain has taken me years to get to and still isn’t enough. I have two pieces I’m finishing up right now that are decent rates. One is a 4,000-word feature at $1 per word and another is a 3,500-word feature at $1.50 per word. But both have taken a year to write and go through multiple rounds of edits. So that’s two pieces for a little over $9,000, but I’ve been working on them for a year. Plus, I can’t get paid until they run, so I still haven’t seen the money. Early in my career, I was filing three to five stories a week just to make $100 to $250 a pop. It’s been a slow grind to higher rates. 

 

I usually ask our guests to talk about a political issue affecting media workers and freelancers near the end of our chat, but given the above thread it feels pertinent to jump right into that question here. I’m sure you have several issues you could lay out for us, but how about your top contenders for 2022?

I say this as a trans person writing about trans people who cannot get a full-time job: The media is literally killing us. Every time our work or our stories are written off as niche, every time we can’t get hired into newsrooms, every time an editor fights me about they/them pronouns, it contributes to a larger culture in which we are being legislated out of existence. 

The media shapes narratives and public understanding about issues and the lack of coverage or lack of understanding by cis writers about trans people is violent. The NYT and The Atlantic, in particular, have played a major role in this. Poynter published a good piece about how The Atlantic has contributed to the current wave of anti-trans legislation.

 

How should freelancers go about negotiating? Besides rates, what other assets should they negotiate for or look out for in contracts?

You should always ask for more money than you would accept. Editors come in planning to negotiate and if they offer less, you’re still likely to get the rate you’re after. For folks who don’t know how to do that, here are my scripts:

“Any chance you can go a little higher?”

“Can you do $X?”

“My usual rate for stories of this scope is $X. Can you do that?”

“Do you have any wiggle room in your budget?”

“Due to the amount of research/reporting this story will require, can you do $X?”

Regarding other contract things to look out for: 

1) Look at your IP! Don’t sign work-for-hire contracts if you can avoid them, and don’t give away your rights indefinitely. Ask if rights to the writing, film, and TV can revert back to you in a year or six months. If they say no, decide if it’s worth signing. I will likely sign a work-for-hire for an op-ed, for example, which is likely never going to be optioned for film. 

2) It’s always worth asking on larger projects if you can invoice after you file a first draft, especially if you know it’s going to take a while for the project.

I think a lot of people don’t know this but if you never sign a contract, legally, your email agreement about rate and scope functions as your contract. So if you don’t sign a contract and are struggling to get paid from a pub, that email from an editor is enough to prove legally that you are entitled to your money.

 

Is there anything you wanted to share or hype? Anything we missed? People we should pay attention to?

Don’t give up your power and agency in editorial relationships. Often, freelancers feel like we have to say yes to a bad rate or to edits we really don’t agree with because editors have the power. But once you have a pitch accepted, you actually have the thing the editor wants. You have the ability to be much more in control of the negotiation and creative process than you think. An editorial relationship is not top-down; it’s a collaboration between writer and editor(s) that should allow for discussion and disagreement and compromise and creative energy!

In terms of who to pay attention to, I’m going to hype other folks doing good work in the sports space since I think we are often overlooked: Syndey Bauer, Natalie Weiner, Julie Kliegman (who I know you had a recent AMA with), Katie Barnes, and Marisa Ingemi, a beat writer who takes a critical lens to the league(s) she covers. I would love to see more beat writers emulating her work!

UPCOMING AMAs:

ALEX HAZLETT
April 27, 2022
3PM ET

ZACHARY SIEGEL
May 4, 2022
3PM ET

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