by Elizabeth Mays
Summary
You don’t have to create your own media outlet or technology company to be an entrepreneur in the journalism or communications space. You may want to sell your own services on a contractual basis to companies who need them.
Being a freelancer means you are responsible for marketing your services, finding clients, providing your services to them, billing them, and reporting on your activities to tax and governing bodies.
This chapter will talk more about the ups and downs of life as a freelance journalist or content producer, and how to navigate them.
Learning Objectives
- Understand what it means to be a solopreneur-style consultant and how this is different from other models of entrepreneurship.
- Know steps you will typically need to take to set up your own business.
- Discover how to create value and exchange it for income.
- Learn how to market, price, and sell your services.
- Understand the downsides and risks to earning your income as a freelancer and learn ways to mitigate these, including bootstrapping a side hustle as a route to eventual full-time entrepreneurship.
- Get a sense of the day-to-day freelance lifestyle in firsthand perspectives from freelancers in the media and communications industry.
Inside this Chapter
- Freelancing as Entrepreneurship and Consulting as Business Models
- From the Field: How to Get and Keep Gigs as a Freelance Journalist, by Georgann Yara
- From the Field: How I Ditched the 9 to 5 and Built a Business I Could Live With, by Lori Benjamin
Elizabeth Mays’ clients include the Canadian nonprofit the Rebus Foundation, software company Pressbooks and others. She is also an adjunct professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication who has taught audience acquisition, business and future of journalism, and editing. Reach her on Twitter at @theeditress.
