As newsrooms have laid off more and more journalists, those former employees have found themselves with a choice: Do I return to a staff job with some of the same problems, do I leave the profession altogether or do I try something different? Needless to say, some choose the final option, embarking on a path of self-employment with its own pros and cons. (I should note that I am one of them.)
One big problem is that it’s hard to find a universal definition of what constitutes a freelancer. Is a freelancer someone who writes one story a month for a publication? What if they write one story a day? Can they be a weekend editor for a legacy magazine, working double-digit hours every week for the same client?
