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| Volume 51, Number 2, Spring 2002 |
THE FREE LANCEby Tabitha M. Powledge Freelances of the world, arise! Is there any hope that writing contracts will improve? That we can retain the right to reuse our own pieces? That there'll be a tad more in the check if the client wants to post a print piece on the Web site? That clients purporting to do journalism won't try to sucker us into that work-for-hire thing? That the outrageous indemnity clause will vanish, and writers will be covered automatically by the client's indemnity insurance and protected from frivolous lawsuits? That clients will no longer have the nerve to offer 35 (or 25, or 10) cents a word, because no one will take it? Maybe, if you're young and strong and at an early stage in your career-and you live long enough. The NASW workshop on contracts in Boston left me somewhat hopeful that freelance writing contracts may get better eventually, if writers can overcome their natural contrarian tendencies and act collectively. The short term, however, looks grimmer. Maybe even grimmer than ever. Panelist Joel Shurkin thinks
the Tasini decision, which seemed so like a heartwarming tale of puny
David Scribe triumphing over the mighty publishing Goliath, has had
exactly the opposite effect. As a result of the decision, publishers
will be offering only all-rights contracts all the time, he argued,
and doing it much sooner than if Tasini had never happened. (For those
of you just joining our broadcast, the briefest of recaps: Tasini
is a 1999 U.S. Court of Appeals decision ruling that publishers-among
whom were the New York Times, Time, and Lexis-Nexis-cannot
reuse material purchased from a freelance writer without the writer's
permission, even in the absence of a contract. Reuse would include,
for example, posting it on a Web site, selling the It was the eponymous chief plaintiff himself who generated smidgens of hope at the workshop. The NWU is a genuine old-time union just like the kind your greatgrandmother used to make. (It's even affiliated with the United Auto Workers.) Tasini's message isn't complicated: organize. Taking it to heart is what's complicated. Tasini himself conceded that we may need 30 or 40 years to get there. Tasini said he believes that major publishers and data aggregators
(and their insurers) are deeply frightened because they are facing
hundreds of millions in dollar losses from the writers' lawsuits.
Mediations are now going on with publishing companies; the goal is
not just to get paid for past uses, but also to press companies for
better contracts and enforceable mechanisms to make sure writers are
treated fairly, he said. Writers have enormous leverage at the moment,
and NWU is trying to use the case to develop union power, to achieve
collective-bargaining rights for freelance authors similar to those
enjoyed by hospital and government workers. The only way we can survive
individually, Seattle freelance writer Diedtra Henderson, who put the workshop together, questioned whether a group as diverse as writers could come together collectively. Science writers are an extreme example, as crabby exchanges on the NASW listservs make clear all the time. We do different kinds of work with different rates of pay and different rules, and getting together on anything is like-well, I won't say herding cats, but only because the American Society of Journalists and Authors has recently appropriated that simile for its policy committee. Tasini reported that NWU is working with members of Congress on legislation that will alter antitrust laws to permit independent contractors to bargain collectively, which is not now legal. Like everything else, the timetable for this has been disrupted by Sept. 11, so the bill has yet to be introduced. But Tasini said he hoped for passage in two or three years. In the meantime, writers can get better contracts. I've turned down outrageous ones and bargained for better terms on others, and plenty of the rest of us do the same. As Shurkin has pointed out repeatedly, a contract is a negotiable document. Publishers often have two or more versions of their boilerplate, but they offer the all-rights contract first because so many writers sign it without asking for changes. You may be surprised at how easy it can be to do better. There is a lot of backbone-bolstering information and encouragement about this scary process of contract negotiations to be had from writers' groups. ASJA's matchless Contracts Watch can be consulted free at www.asja.org/cw/cw.php, and Bob Finn also posts it on the freelance listserv. NWU runs training programs in contract negotiation; see www.nwu.org/. NASW is, as usual, not so organized. But you can find out a lot about science-related contracts by consulting the listserv archives at nasw.org/lists/, and by posting questions on the nasw-freelance listserv; sign up at nasw.org/swlist.htm. Think of successful contract negotiations as your very own collective bargaining. You end up with more control over your work and more money in your pocket. But you are also raising the bar, letting publishers know that writers expect better contracts and won't accept lousy ones. When one of us succeeds at this, she helps herself, but she also helps the rest of us. Information no longer wants to be free For some years, I've been using ad-blocking software. All that blinking, flashing, cavorting, irrelevant, and sometimes downright deceitful stuff makes me crazy, in addition to clogging up my antediluvian dial-up connection to the 'Net. I won't tell you about the program I've used because it was killed off a couple years ago and so can no longer be had. I've stuck with it until recently because it still works fine on embedded ads. But of course ad progress marches onward, and the program cannot be upgraded to kill off those wretched pop-ups. I had read praise for AdSubtract (www.adsubtract.com/).
And the name itself is brilliant, so I'm having a fling with the free
version. So-called free version. It's as good as my previous software
on embedded ads, maybe a bit better, and even appears to prevent some
pop-ups, although only the paid version claims to do that. But as
we all know, You Get What You Pay For. The price exacted by the "free"
AdSubtract is, oxymoronically, ads-dancing, twinkling, and probably
deceitful ads for itself. They appear at bootup, this morning claiming
to have killed off 1460 ads and saved me 59 minutes in the couple
of weeks I've been Yeah, I know, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and how do I
expect the programmers to eat theirs if they don't sell their program?
But there is something singularly churlish about software purporting
to stifle ads while hypocritically It's not just that Web ads are an annoying waste of our time and resources. They threaten our livelihood by skewing our search results and potentially biasing what we write. Major search engines now peddle their choice top listings routinely. Even my beloved Google sells space, although it vows not to sell placement, as many others do. On some search engines, like Google, paid listings can be distinguished easily from ordinary search results, but on others they can't. This recalls the shabby past practices of print publications and their advertorials that looked like ordinary editorial content. This print deceit has now largely disappeared; magazine advertising sections usually are labeled as such and use different typefaces from the publications they appear in. The Web will probably clean up its act too, under pressure. Eventually, but not soon. Consumer groups have complained about search-engine deceit to the Federal Trade Commission. But the FTC has so far taken no steps and given no indication that it's even thinking about the problem. So those of us who base our work on information culled from the Web must be more careful than ever about the sources of that information. We can also expect the gradual growth of fees for getting to stuff once available at no charge-especially the trustworthy stuff. Those of us who provide Web content expect to be paid for it, so it's hardly outrageous that useful sites will start asking for payment to access their goods. Through fees, through ads, sometimes both. Fair, yet still hard to get used to. Note that I am not so virtuous as to be willing to abandon ad-blocking software and let myself be bludgeoned by come-ons for things I don't want and can't use, even though they're subsidizing my research. It's a cliché, but no exaggeration, to say that the 'Net has truly revolutionized the way we do our work. No one who has become a science writer in the past decade can imagine what it was like to spend days slogging to a medical library, searching the tiny type of the Index Medicus for references, waiting hours for journals to be delivered to the circulation desk (or to find out that they were Not On Shelf), and then more hours feeding dimes into a blurry photocopier-or even, in the prehistoric pre-copier times that some of us grew up in, taking notes by hand on 4" x 6" cards. Wrapped in my wooly robe, sipping my coffee, today I go everywhere and everywhen in the twinkling of an electron, kvetching all the while about my slow dial-up connection. Even for someone who lived and worked through the Bad Old Days, it's easy to forget that the 'Net is a research fantasy made manifest-and, for a glorious moment that now appears to be drawing to a close, the best approximation ever to a genuine free lunch. # Tabitha M. Powledge can be reached via e-mail at tam@nasw.org. |