THE FREE LANCE

by Tabitha M. Powledge

Welcome to hard times?

Those of us who live by the maxim that the universe is a hostile place do it for a good reason: pessimists get only pleasant surprises. I just got one.

Laura Newman, an NASW member based in New York City, approached the freelance committee in November with a request. She had to give a talk to other writers about surviving as a freelance in a poor economy (especially in New York post-Sept. 11) and wanted suggestions about helpful things to say. The request sparked a flurry of comments among committee members and resulted in the decision to add the topic to the organized table talk at the next NASW workshops. (For those of you signed up for the Boston workshops, this designated chat luncheon, offering a choice of several topics, will take place Wed., Feb. 13, 2002).

The take-home message is that self-marketing tactics that work in good times work in hard times, too. The only difference is that you may have to do more of it. Especially network, network, network.

Dan Ferber wrote, "My instinct is to cultivate good relationships with editors as solid clients that are not going anywhere. But I was also doing that during the dotcom boom. It's worked for me. I think networking is always good advice. Diversifying into new markets is good if your client base gets too narrow or if you just want to try something new. As far as repackaging, why wouldn't that work as well in bad times as in good times?

"FWIW, I'm not sure freelancers need new strategies. We just need to work harder at the tried and true."

Another intriguing sentiment emerged as well, one that might be summarized thus: "Recession? What recession?" Some of us, it appears, aren't doing too badly.

Freelance survival in a downturn seems like a good topic to air here, too. But is there a downturn in freelance science writing? On the evidence of the committee discussion, that wasn't clear. So I decided to consult that peerless source of peer wisdom, the nasw-freelance listserv. And the answer there, too, was mostly encouraging.

(This is anecdotal evidence at its most egregious, and, as skeptical science writers, you are encouraged not to believe a word of it. At least two caveats: (1) People who are really suffering may well be disinclined to let fellow writers know about it, whereas those who aren't may well be inclined to brag. (2) The discussion on the freelance listserv was brief, drew in comparatively few people, and tailed off quickly into jokiness. That may in part reflect what I suspect is subscribers' current lack of interest in the listserv, but that's another topic.)

In fact, the economy of freelance science writing appears eerily similar to the national economy: pockets of misery, but many of us getting along much as normal, although often with somewhat less work, especially right after Sept. 11. Conferences were cancelled; projects in the pipeline were postponed and occasionally killed.

Postponements can, of course, be infuriating. Amy Stone reports this has happened to three of her projects, amounting to very serious money-and of course no real idea when (or if) they will return from Limbo. "I'm not unduly alarmed but I am working with a new level of skepticism, even with long-term clients, because so much of what happens is actually out of THEIR control," she notes.

It's often impossible, of course, to separate out the consequences of September 2001 and its aftermath from the national downturn that began in March 2001. But some seem clearly related to homeland terrorism. Alan Wachter recounts that clients he had dropped years ago have suddenly asked him to cover medical meetings. "This suggests to me the work may be there but not as many freelances are willing to travel," he speculates.

And those who stay home may have it rough, too. All of us-along with our fellow citizens-were disoriented and found it hard to buckle down after Sept. 11. John Hawes lost work when clients cancelled, and his cash flow suffered badly for a time, although things have returned to near normal. But he says his real problem was an inability to focus and take work seriously, plus the endless lure of CNN.

"One eerie thing I've noticed since Sept. 11 is that my workday got dramatically quieter. My phone doesn't ring as much, and I don't get as many e-mails as before," notes Emma Hitt. Like many of us, she has experienced a drop-off in assignments from some clients. But she has also acquired new ones, and expects her income in the last quarter of 2001 to remain comparable to previous quarters.

The fatness of your checking account is probably proportional to the sort of work you do. People who take on assignments for pharmaceuticals report business as usual-even with clients based in New York. Clients that depend on ad revenue are hurting, and trying to make a living writing for magazines may therefore be a lost cause, but that's been true for years.

The way to deal with the unbalanced nature of a downturn, as Dan Ferber pointed out, is diversification. Emma Hitt reports, "I try to find clients from as many different fields as possible. In the last six months I have written (mostly about cancer) for news services, dotcoms, pharmaceutical companies, a PR company, an ad agency, a non-profit, academic institutions, a consumer magazine, a med[ical] ed[ucation] company, and scientific journals."

The topics you specialize in also make a difference, sometimes bad, sometimes not, sometimes both. The market for pieces about bioterrorism was hot, hot, hot there for a minute or two. But-this is the Voice of Experience speaking-it was tough too, coming up with an angle different from countless competitors.

Jeff Hecht notes, "I write a lot about fiber optics and communications, and that whole market ran off the cliff in the spring. Fortunately, I have ongoing relationships with a couple of trade magazines in the field to write tutorial features, and those haven't gone away. What has gone away are the calls from magazines desperate for a writer who knows something about fiber optics, and the occasional would-be PR client. One irregular magazine client almost went belly-up in the crunch, with a feature of mine in the queue, but fortunately managed to get extra funding.

"I haven't had to go looking for new work, but I really wasn't looking before. I think this reflects some of the niches I write in, and my style of working with a few magazines regularly."

Lorraine Hopping Egan's workload in the education market took a tumble, too. She reports going from "frantically overstretched" to having time to garden, do puzzles, even houseclean. Her career has taken her through two other downturns-1982 and 1991-that turned up before long, so she's pretty sanguine. Education spending goes down and up, she observes, but never goes away. Just the same, she's thinking about branching out into noneducational markets and non-print media.

Bill Thomasson points out that it's hard to know whether an assignment lost during an economic slowdown might not have been lost even in good times. He reports a slowdown in payments, however. Lara Pullen and a couple of other people report something even worse: drastic cuts in rates, with past clients offering only 50 percent of their previous fees. Scary.

On the whole, though, the news wasn't as bad as I feared it might be. So, early in December, I asked Laura Newman how she was faring since she raised the topic on the freelance committee a month before.

That's when my Inner Pessimist got that pleasant surprise. Laura was so busy she hardly had time to reply. The week before, she said, she got eight (yes, eight) assignments in a single day.

How did she make this wondrous turnaround happen? "I have moved into new areas that I might not have had the courage to do in a flush economy. I sort of feel like I have nothing much to lose. It is working for me."

Laura went on to declare, cautiously and sensibly, that she knows her new good fortune does not guarantee that the good times are about to roll again. But her experience has underscored for her that the hoariest of freelancing precepts continue to work in bad times, too. Maxims like spending a substantial amount of time marketing yourself, and looking around all the time for possible new clients, and new kinds of clients.

Not to mention: Network, network, network.

The search is still on

For years the best general search engine has been Google, and it continues to get better. Google remains unequalled at giving you what you need in the first hit, or at least the first page or two. A while back it added links to the Open Directory project, which means that you can also avail yourself of a hierarchical directory-style search setup like Yahoo!'s. These listings are put together and even evaluated by members of your own species, which makes searching the Google Directory just right for some kinds of lookups.

Google also has added an image search that I find more useful than Alta Vista's. And it has a new Group search in beta that will rummage around in the Usenet news groups. A decade or so ago, when the World Wide Web notion of linking everything to everything was not yet real, these special interest groups-thousands of them, on every possible subject and not a few impossible ones-were the hottest source of information (and rumor and gossip and scandal and outrage and outrageousness) on the Internet. I haven't tested the Group search yet, but it offers some possibilities for finding fresh sources of expertise and comment (and, doubtless, rumor and gossip and scandal, etc.).

Google is still the best. But for the first time it has a competitor. AlltheWeb is very fast, although that may mostly be lack of traffic, because it's also very new. Like Google, AlltheWeb permits discrete searches of different sorts of material. In addition to the Web, there are searches for pictures, videos, MP3, and FTP files-and (for us, probably the most useful) news. AlltheWeb claims this index covers 3,000 top news sources, crawled continuously and updated every two hours.

AlltheWeb presents your news hits in reverse chronological order if you like, which means you get the most recent stuff on top. That's how I discovered a juicy bit of company news related to a piece I was doing, one that had been released only the previous day and indexed by AlltheWeb only a few hours before. Google would never have unearthed this handout because Google uses a kind of popularity contest to rank sites by relevance to your query. This is a perfect strategy for most searches, but it takes time to develop a history of hits, so it's less than perfect if you want the latest rather than the most relevant.

AlltheWeb will also order other kinds of searches chronologically, too. And it presents your hit lists with a sidebar of links to other kinds of searches. A "news" search gives you a sidebar of Web hits, and a "Web" search puts two news hits at the top of your hit list, with a link to more. In essence, you are doing the two searches simultaneously.

The Yahoo! news site still does the best job of presenting an array of related material from magazines, broadcast outlets, Web sites, and other sources when you do a news search. This feature (and its e-mail alerting service) are excellent reasons to stick with Yahoo! when it's breaking news you want. But AlltheWeb promises more of this sort of thing-links to images and multimedia files, for example. Perhaps they'll be there by the time you read this.

I have no plans to abandon Google, and still expect to use it most of the time. I've even added a Google search box to my browser toolbar. (Handy. Enter your search terms and you bypass the home page and get your hits directly. This feature is customizable, free, and, astonishingly, ad-free at the Google site.) Still, AlltheWeb is the first search engine in years to join the small, select group on my toolbar.

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Tabitha M. Powledge can be reached via e-mail at tam@nasw.org.