The "weight loss snake oil of freelancing." WHY the "six figure freelancer" phenomenon with its huge elephant in the room has started to give me the ick.

When does aspirational turn to ick and then start to feel like people are trying to make money out of their friends and fellow freelancers?

When it comes to six figure freelancers, is there an elephant in the room?

There was a joke on LinkedIn the other day about a Guardian story on people having cosmetic surgery with the headline “Be honest… Have you had work?”

“Read this headline on The Guardian magazine and honestly thought it was going to be an article about freelancers,” laughed copywriter Joe Coleman. (Very funny - please hire him if you read this).

Because the honest truth is this year has been a very grim year for us self-employed journalists and writers. “No one has enough work at the moment,” a friend said when we were talking about the dire state of freelancing two weeks ago.

Yet what makes me laugh hysterically is that in the background now - as I threaten late payment fees for journalism work and chase up money for the higher paying non-journalism work too - is what’s become known as the “six figure freelancer”, insisting to us that these industries (journalism, writing and content) are lucrative. Quite often, the six figure freelancer, who may mention that figure or may not but is still telling us that they’re making a lot of money and therefore we can do the same, comes with coaching and (multiple) courses.

I am not the only one who has A LOT of thoughts about this. If I had a dollar for each time I have thought about the six figure freelancer, I would probably have 100k myself, in fact. I’ve thought about this phenomenon for several years now.

But this year it feels like things have really shifted in relation to the six figure freelancers. Whereas once in the past they may have been seem as aspirational, it feels like there’s now a backlash to the idea that you can make this amount of money from self-employment and why this figure matters. It’s no coincidence that this year it also feels like journalism and freelancing have really hit rock bottom and that the job market has been the worse it’s ever been.

I’ve spoken to other freelancers about it. And I’ve mentioned it on social media. “It’s the MFA pyramid scene model only more crassness and less tenure,” said one writer when I brought this up last year. She added that she worries about “selling lies that encourage people into an industry that offers so little”.

I should say firstly that there are some very successful writers out there with good intentions, and some brilliant newsletters, courses, and coaches who are decent people. Of course these are just my views, and they’ve been shaped by my own experiences in the media. But I have been freelancing for 12 years now, and been a journalist for even longer, all around the world. And it feels like we need to talk about this. Also, if you’re selling something and taking money off people, then I hate to break it to you, but it’s fair game.

Let’s start at the beginning. Once upon a time, journalists and writers made money from just that - journalism and writing. Then the industry began to fall apart. There was a need for new revenue streams. Enter courses, coaching and other ventures and some very wild claims about how much money you can make as a writer.

I will say before I go forward for transparency that I have started doing workshops and webinars in the past year on how to land media coverage aimed at PRs and media and comms people, who tend to earn a lot more than us, and NOT journalists. This was partly as a revenue stream but also born out of a realization that a lot of people don’t have these skills and if they were armed with this knowledge then they could do a lot more on their own.

But along the way something unsurprising happened. When a friend and another freelancer and PR consultant and I put on a webinar, we had a few freelancers sign up. Of course the skills between journalism and PR are transferrable. And I wanted to help people. But given that I know how low journalism rates are these days, I was also worried about charging freelancers money for this.

Also, I’m sick of the journalist coaching journalist model. It’s not something I’m interested in pursuing at this stage (and most likely never).

In the end, we priced our webinar at $50. (Actually all that the webinars and workshops that I’ve put on, even for PRs, have been reasonably priced and spoiler alert: I’m not making a killing from these).

Since then, I’ve had other freelancers approach me about these workshops. It’s interesting - I think that what it says is that we all need more work, but we’re also desperate to earn more money. So when I’ve helped out other freelancers, I haven’t charged them anything.

But one recent marketing pitch for a product while based on one miracle case study made my blood boil and for me bordered on being unethical. I’m not saying that it wasn’t true, it just didn’t seem very common or realistic. It referred to a certain amount of money someone was making in a certain place, yet the person presenting it (ie selling the product) wasn’t living on the ground in the place where this writer was supposedly earring this money. It felt like apples was being compared to pears, in that the amount of money that she was supposedly making for writing in her particular country might not be another person’s salary elsewhere. And in reality, she had simply lucked out.

Some of these courses also now cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars and I worry how much work are people going to have to do to make this back? How many stories would you have to sell? It seems it’s reached the point where you have to be already established as a journalist and writer or doing quite well or be another professional in a field to afford them. I wonder if students and people on low-incomes - whose voices we desperately need in journalism - can access these.

These are different to creative writing courses, workshops and coaching, which don’t promise that you can make money out of these fields, or sell a certain lifestyle where you can write and travel the world whenever you want. There are also some freelancer courses which are reasonably priced, of course. Some are even doing webinars for free which I don’t agree with because I think that people should be paid for their skills, experience and time, but that’s their decision.

After the courses and coaching came the newsletters it seems. “People are charging money for collating job ads,” a friend and fellow freelancer pointed out to me earlier this year, stressing that this has now become a side gig - a job itself - for people given the dire lack of opportunities in the media. The irony. (Some newsletters, I should say, are free or very reasonably priced and some such as

Sian Meades-Williams

and Sonia Weiser’s, who have helped me land commissions, are amazing. I love and highly recommend them).

Over the years, it seems that all of the above has multiplied. To break it down even more, there’s now a course on how to do courses.

I get it. I do. The media industry is so broken. Rates haven’t gone up for two decades. We are paid weeks even months after stories are published, as we are constantly moaning on social media without doing anything or very little about it. (Shout out to wonderful unions MEAA in Australia, NUJ in the UK and initiatives like Women in Journalism and freelancers who are pushing back on rates and conditions, in a bid to make them better for all of us).

I don’t blame people for looking for new ways to make money, of course. I am making no judgement on a course on how to do courses, because I don’t know anything about it. I’m simply noting that I think it’s interesting that there is one and wonder if it’s symptomatic of a broken industry.

However while the journalists coaching journalists model might help us out to a certain extent with getting more commissions and stories placed, I wonder are we going around in a loop? Is all of this really creating more opportunities for us and improving the industry in the long term? And who came up with the six figures as a measure of success?

Here’s where things become problematic for me and the question that I keep coming back to: if you are selling a course or coaching by telling others that journalism and writing, content or another form, is lucrative, then why do you have to do courses and coaching at all? If it’s highly likely that you’re now making MOST of your money not from journalism and writing but from courses and coaching, even with a bit of higher paying content writing thrown in, shouldn’t you be transparent about this? It’s a huge elephant in the room for me.

New fillers, or just a freelancer?

I don’t think asking this makes me underconfident, cynical, or nasty. What I think it makes me is critical. And honest. And after all, we are journalists so we’re supposed to question things - right? It’s gaslighting to simply dismiss me as cynical just for questioning this, especially when you are trying to make money selling something.

In my favourite episode of their fabulous Is this working? podcast, called Is coaching bullshit?, two of my favourite journalists Anna Codrea-Rado and Tiffany Philippou discuss this trend which came out of the pandemic and ask us to question it, but be fair. Tiffany notes that “if someone's making most money by telling you how they make their money then you have to just have your eyes open about that”.

For me, it’s what the six figure freelancers may not be saying, that I’m more curious about. The six figure freelancers who seem to be making this huge amount of money from coaching and courses seem to be making it from just that.

I know the rates. I know the word counts. I know how long it takes to get paid. It’s unlikely, given that they’re now so poor - the average article seems to pay $250 for instance - that these freelancers are making their money from journalism. It just does not add up. And even if you add content writing into the mix, does it make that much of a difference? Shouldn’t they acknowledge this?

But what else do I find jarring about the six figure freelancers that is starting to give me the ick? Another sticking point is that even if there are some people making six figures, how many are there? Are there enough out there to justify running courses claiming that you can earn this - or even just good money - from writing?

As a journalist, I once read some guidelines from an editor that if I’m pitching a trend-based piece I need to have three or four people doing the trend in order to demonstrate that it’s just that. Do I personally know three or four six figure freelancers? No. And how easy is it to become a six figure freelancer? What about people who have children?

I also think we need to look at what kind of work the six figure freelancer is including when they talk about their six figures. At 35p a word (as I was paid in Britain earlier this year) or $250 a story, it definitely cannot take in traditional news writing. (Rates vary, but in the UK for instance the most that I’ve been paid lately is £400 and in the US $400 - and that’s for a hell of a lot of work). And that’s fine. It’s a reality now that working in this industry now that if you want to get higher paying work and get by, you may need to do more content than journalism.

I’m not sneery about this. I have done this work before and would do it again. No doubt I will. But even if I did more higher paying work, I still don’t think that I’d make six figures. Even if I did more PR work (completely separate from my journalism and which I also love because I’m getting visibility for organisations and causes) I’m still not sure I’d make six figures. Content work seems that it is also becoming harder to find, given that it tends to be higher paying.

Someone else pointed out to me earlier this year when we were discussing the issue of the six figure freelancer at the International Journalism Festival that they may also be including work or retainers that they previously had before they started doing in their six figure freelance tallies.

The six figure freelancer phenomenon also seems to offer a rather rosy picture of this industry which isn’t realistic. Yes, journalism is not like working at the library. (I’m not saying that librarians have it easy). But if we’re being honest now although there are still some wonderful editors out there, we are working much of the time under appalling conditions.

It’s not just ghosting to get the commission, doing so much pre-reporting before you’ve even landed it, then not being briefed properly, then more work (interviewing and transcribing) before you’ve even started the writing, then having to chase the invoices and being paid late. Stories may even be stolen and given to staff journalists.

In a post on here from 2021, Anna says:

“As much as going freelance has been a boon for my career, the time I spend on what I call ‘traditional journalism’ (reporting and writing features for mags and rags) has been an exercise in screaming into the void. My pitches go unanswered. Not because I don’t know how to pitch or who to send them to, but because the pitching system is broken. On top of paltry rates, I pay the emotional tax of chasing late invoices.

“All this has left me thinking, can I – or indeed do I even want to be – a journalist working under these conditions?”

Do the six figure freelancers in their courses have modules on all of this?

I sometimes wonder if they don’t want to acknowledge things like this at all because they don’t want people to become so disillusioned that they abandon the industry. Do they want you to believe that six figures is attainable and keep you in the course?

Perhaps I am just a bit bitter that the six figure freelancers are making six figures and I am not making anywhere near it? Maybe I am really cynical? Yes? Perhaps a bit. But then I ask myself this: would I be comfortable coaching people and taking a lot of money off them when it’s likely that they may not get their story commissioned and even if they do get a pittance for it? I don’t think that I would be. Does that make me self-righteous?

In my opinion, we owe it to others to speak up and be honest about the challenges in this industry. It’s not being negative to say that I am not ever going to make 100k from journalism and writing even if I add content to the mix and that it’s now become hard work to get by, as much as I love it and may never want to do anything else.

For me it’s being honest and it’s being realistic. I owe this to myself, in what has been a terribly hard year, to acknowledge this. But I also owe it to my colleagues, peers, and friends, especially those starting out. I owe it to them because I want them to know that they are talented, committed and hardworking and if they ever feel like they’re struggling it’s not them - it’s this broken system. And that the work that they do is so important and valuable, that it doesn’t matter whether they’re close to being a six figure freelancer or nowhere near it.

Sorry if it sounds a bit harsh, but I don’t think that the six figure freelance phenomenon holds up. It seems that all that is behind it is certain marketing and messaging, and it doesn’t seem very sophisticated, but is to simply keep things vague. Is the only thing that separates myself and the six figure freelancers transparency?

With the arrival of the “seven figure freelance” courses and the seven figure freelancers, and six figure freelance photography courses now around (someone told me about these this week), questions like this aren’t likely to disappear any time soon.

For me personally, I think I am also now letting go of the idea of making any decent amount of money from journalism or writing. I have started to realize that trying to make money out of this complicates it. When you’re writing or when you’re doing anything that you love but you’re not trying to make money out of it (such as this Substack), you have a much different relationship with it than when you are. I’ve come to this conclusion partly after seeing writers who I really admire like Tiffany and Anna doing other work but still writing.

When I put this question about six figure freelancers offering coaching and courses on here, I had some very interesting responses from some fellow freelancers, ALL of them very successful on and off here (and worth following and reading). I hope that they don’t mind me including their responses in this post, but I respect all of them and think that they make some really valid points.

Thanks so much

Sudi Pigott

,

Stephanie Wood

,

Sian Meades-Williams

,

Felicity Spector

,

Jennifer Chowdhury

,

Jon Bruford

,

Faith Liversedge

,

Daniel Puzzo

,

Sharath C George

and

Nika Talbot ✨

. Hopefully I’ve not missed any one, but if I have apologies.

Please let me know your thoughts, and if I’m missing something. And let’s continue to discuss this.