Last week, it happened. I remember where I was, I remember what I was wearing, I remember it all. Yes, last week marked the first time in eight years that I was actually offered money for writing an article. I should probably explain the reasons behind my near decade spanning financial failure: I was first published at the age of 13, and have been writing consistently for a variety of publications, both national and otherwise, ever since. Throughout this time, I have been happy to keep offering my services free of charge, hoping that one day the experience will pay for itself if someone ever ventures to employ me.
But with my degree drawing to a close, freelancing is becoming an increasingly likely career route into journalism, and getting paid for this kind of work on a regular basis seems almost alien. At the risk of sounding overdramatic, some publications expect work that verges on exploitation, and believe they can get away with demanding it of you because you're a student desperate to get a foot in the industry's door. Recently, I had agreed to write an article for a leading men's mag about the best things in Birmingham, where I study. Upon sending my copy over, however, I was informed that I should have taken pictures of people in and around the city and surveyed Joe public to get some quirky quotes.
In principle, I have no objection to these various components, but where I draw the line is being told this after having written something of which the format had been agreed between myself and one of the staff members there. To expect a twenty year old to travel the length and breadth of a city on their own battered purse strings simply because they are a student is - and there are no two ways about it - taking advantage. When I mentioned these concerns to my contact there, I was met with no response, which further hammered home to me that I am the tiniest of fish in an overwhelmingly huge, and unforgiving, pond.
This treatment has also forced me to consider the various work experience placements I have undertaken over the past few years. Whilst I do genuinely enjoy seeing how different publications are run and learning about what the industry is like first hand on a large scale, I am perhaps a little sceptical about where this ultimately leads. Since 2006, I have undertaken five short term placements at a mixture of large and smaller scale publications and agencies, as well as being involved on a long term basis with several others. I have kept in contact and continued to write for the majority of the companies I have interned at, but with staff jobs at the bare minimum in so many of these places, I wonder if work experience will ever really lead to paid work.
Over the next few months, I will be undertaking placements at two major national newspapers in the UK, and truly am excited to get as involved as I possibly can with the work there. But, niggling in my mind is the fact that, as a soon to be graduate, there will soon come a time when I can no longer afford to work for free. Of course in an ideal world, one of these publications would snap me up and thereby eradicate my unemployment fears, but until then, I can only hope that my regular freelancing-for-free actually pays off in the end - in more ways than one.