The Global Freelancer

Telling and Selling Foreign News

Steve Dorsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317329565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Giornalismo

In The Global Freelancer, award-winning journalist Steve Dorsey draws on his own experiences, as well as those of fellow reporters and editors, to instruct aspiring freelancers on all aspects of becoming a foreign correspondent. Topics covered include: delivering successful story pitches, location scouting, navigating foreign work documentation and visa requirements, confronting press freedom restrictions, leveraging digital media opportunities, and the new challenges of reporting from conflict zones safely.

As newspapers and networks are forced to close their overseas bureaus, news organizations are relying more than ever before on freelancers to fill the gap. This book offers the freelance foreign correspondents of tomorrow step-by-step guidance on how to seize these opportunities and make a name in this competitive field. Packed with practical guidance, tips, and anecdotes from working professionals, The Global Freelancer is your gateway to a career in foreign journalism.

Part I
Getting Started

Chapter 1	Preparing Yourself
Chapter 2	Choosing a Location
Chapter 3	Cold Calling and "the Visit"

1
Preparing Yourself

The opportunities and experiences working as a freelance foreign correspondent provides are limitless— but so are the risks and potential pitfalls.

Uprooting your life and traveling across the world without the guarantee of a steady paycheck is not something to take lightly. It can end relationships, plunge you into debt, and even stall your career. But, if you’re successful, the move could re-energize your love of journalism, allow you to make the world your office, introduce you to characters and people who could transform your global outlook, and push your limits.

So before you go, consider asking yourself why, before how. Are you escaping a limited career path at a local paper in Paducah? Are you running away from a ruined relationship? What do you want to accomplish? Are there no other trails for you to blaze at home or where you currently are? Do you think you’re ready? What do you have to lose by staying and what do you have to gain by going?

Deciding to Go

For many journalists who’ve boarded a flight on a one-way ticket to a foreign destination to begin a new life, deciding to work as a freelance foreign correspondent came after months, if not years, of dissatisfaction with their career or even their own lives.

In the 1990s, young Chicago journalist Maria Korolov dreamed of working as a foreign correspondent— especially for her then-employer the Chicago Tribune.

Only a year out of college, Korolov approached the newspaper’s editor asking how she could report overseas.

“He said, ‘First you work in a suburb’ [for the newspaper] which is what I was doing, ‘then, you work your way up to the city [desk], then you work at the state level, then you work at the national level, then you go overseas,’” she says. “And I’m like ‘I’ll be 50 by then!’”

“And he was like, ‘Yeah. That’s how old our foreign correspondents are.’”

But that wouldn’t satisfy Korolov.

“I was like, ‘What’s the other way to do it?’”

“He said, ‘Well you know, I can’t recommend this personally, but I hear that young people just go over there and they just try to find work. But if you do decide to do this option don’t expect our bureau to take you in. There’s no guarantee. This is a very risky thing.’”

So she thought to herself, “This is the way to get started.”

Korolov skipped her last month’s rent and used it to buy a plane ticket overseas.

She only had two requirements for a target country: it had to have a language she spoke and a couch on which to crash.

Fortunately for Korolov, she had a grandmother in Moscow and she spoke broken Russian she remembered from her childhood. She was born in Leningrad before she emigrated to the U.S. as a young child with her parents in the late 1970s.

Her Russian was barely usable at first when she returned to the country decades later, but she made it work and took advantage of her connections there.

Ultimately, it wasn’t a hard decision for Korolov who lusted for something more than what the Chicago suburbs could offer her.

Korolov says, “There are people who say ‘I’m hoping it comes along, but I’ve got other stuff.’”

Korolov didn’t want to take a chance and spend years riding the well-worn path to a foreign bureau. Instead, she wanted to do it immediately. She wanted to be in control of her own future.

“Once I decided I was going to go overseas the question became how, instead of will anyone ever send me?” she says.

Another freelance foreign correspondent, Nick Barnets, took a similar path, but leading instead to Greece.

Even while working for CBS News as a 2012 election researcher and a photographer for television station NY1, Barnets wanted something more.

“When I started out in news, I always wanted to do international news because I grew up in two different countries that being the U.S. and Greece,” Barnets says. “I developed a sense of the importance of international news, and why it’s important for Americans especially to know what’s going on around the world.”

But, like Korolov, Barnets was frustrated with the pace of his career toward his goals.

“I decided I couldn’t go much farther while staying in New York to fulfill my goals of being an international journalist,” he says.

So Barnets targeted Athens, a place with which he was already familiar and whose language he spoke.

He now counts CBS Radio News as one of his strings.

Carey Wagner, a freelance photojournalist and cinematographer now based in Brooklyn, wanted to pursue more stories that made “a contribution to society.”

Although Wagner was satisfied with her work as a staff photographer at the Sun-Sentinel in South Florida she wanted to do lengthier examinations of communities across the world.

“I’m interested in thinking globally,” Wagner says.

She knew there were many communities, particularly Latinos in South Florida, that were impacted by news in other parts of the world like Latin America.

“It’s important to realize where we come from, and the connections we have around the world,” she says.

She was especially interested in focusing her work on human rights and women’s issues.

“Not everyone is living and expressing themselves in a way that I would say is completely free,” Wagner says. “It’s great to be able to connect with other women. I find it empowering.”

But Wagner’s decision to pursue her professional interests independently wasn’t easy.

“When I finally decided to leave, which was a very hard decision, I wanted to dedicate as much time as I could to telling stories I thought were important,” she remembers.

Wagner has since targeted her reporting on many stories abroad including child grooms in Nepal, sex workers in India, and religious communities in Indonesia.

For Daniel Bach, who now lives and works as a host and producer for CBC in Toronto, he piggybacked on the opportunity to freelance overseas through his girlfriend.

“I have a lot of experience in travel and so there was an opportunity with my partner to go live in France for a while,” Bach says.

It was an opportunity to follow his own interests while continuing a relationship.

“International news has always been my interest area, even way back in high school,” Bach recalls. “I always wanted to be involved in covering [international] news in some form.”

Bach worked primarily freelancing as a radio journalist not only in France, but also in the UK, and the Czech Republic. He says a journalism course he took in Prague helped initially prepare him for working as a freelance foreign correspondent: “Much of the toolkit and network I had as a foreign journalist came from the course.”

But Bach also relied on his network of contacts at CBC in Canada, where he had also worked prior to his experience in France: “It would have been much more difficult for me to sell stories at the start as well, had I not had a working relationship with CBC assignment producers from my time in Toronto,” he says.

In the world of freelance foreign correspondents, the stories of Korolov, Barnets, Wagner, and Bach are similar. Many others have followed the same goals, if not different paths.

And today, perhaps more than ever, as the way newsgathering changes, the chance to follow similar career paths is becoming an even clearer choice for many journalists toiling away covering school board meetings for a shrinking news organization that offers fewer and fewer opportunities for them year after year. Your time to prepare starts now. No matter where you are in your career, time could be your biggest advantage.

A Changing Industry, and Changing Career

Stuart Hughes, diplomatic producer for BBC News, has played a role in the massive global news organization’s foreign newsgathering efforts for decades. He’s watched the broadcaster and its industry evolve.

“The industry is becoming more reliant on freelancers,” Hughes says. “Few organizations can afford a network of bureaus. So the work falls to freelancers.”

Traditional brick-and-mortar bureaus have many expenses: staff correspondents, costly equipment sometimes including satellite trucks and professional video cameras, translators, drivers, and even a finance department to track expenses.

“You’re doing business in another country,” says Steve Redisch, Voice of America executive editor and former CNN deputy Washington bureau chief.

Having a physical presence in another country often means news organizations must follow foreign regulations and ensure overseas tax compliance while coordinating with government authorities in the target country and negotiating hiring and personnel practices.

“As an executive, you have to make a decision of whether that cost—that investment—is worth what you are going to get out of there,” Redisch says.

The U.S. government-funded VOA has hub bureaus in London and Johannesburg, and smaller operations in Moscow, Islamabad, and elsewhere. But through the years, the massive news organization that targets its broadcasts and digital efforts to audiences overseas has scaled back. It has closed bureaus and shifted resources as news priorities and newsgathering methods have changed.

“For a lot of years, the reason why organizations had a lot of bureaus was for communications,” he says.

Twenty-five years ago, television crews in remote areas of the Middle East, such as those covering the Gulf War, depended on fixed locations at which they could feed video back home and do live shots. That often meant returning to a bureau in Baghdad or Kuwait and using a large satellite dish to feed content back—infrastructure that couldn’t easily be moved.

In some cases, television networks used a costly mobile satellite system. Correspondents such as NBC’s David Bloom and his cameraman Craig White could send video footage back during the 2003 invasion of Iraq through one of these systems. The Battlefield Satellite Newsgathering System, dubbed “the Bloommobile System” after the reporter’s early death from pulmonary embolism, included a gyro-stablized camera in an armored U.S. Army vehicle, and transmission equipment mounted in a protective dome in a trailing truck.¹ The network deployed the system again in 2010 to transmit live video of a convoy with U.S. combat troops leaving Iraq.²

Since then, smaller, cheaper, and more easily transportable digital newsgathering equipment has displaced expensive satellite systems at fixed locations using cumbersome infrastructure and costly satellite time. FTP has allowed broadcast news crews to transmit video anywhere with decent Wi-Fi or mobile broadband connectivity. Even once high-tech Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) units—which were essential to covering stories in poorly-connected locations like war zones—are now mostly obsolete. Basically satellite phones, the units provided marginal live shot and data connectivity with usually slow uploading times. But some crews in conflict zones worry they act as target beacons to forces such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad who can allegedly locate the transmission point to launch an attack.

The developments in technology have also changed field crew assignments and responsibilities. No longer are four-person crews necessary to cover a story abroad. Although they still exist today, especially in unionized domestic newsgathering in the U.S.—employing a video photographer, producer, sound engineer, and correspondent is costly. News organizations aren’t just paying for their time on assignment, but also their daily expenses like hotels, food, incidentals, and insurance.

These days it’s likely you’ll find that traditional crew family split in half.

Major broadcasters like VOA and ABC News rely on reporters who can do it all: shoot, write, edit, and feed back a live shot if needed. Sometimes the roles are divided between two people, for example, a reporter who produces and writes a story, and a photographer who shoots and edits it—a team you’ll often find in many larger local television markets in the U.S.

Some digital journalists are even shooting video entirely on smartphones, like some who work at Al Jazeera’s digital outlet AJ+. It’s a model that might just catch on.

“I also think about using digital assets first,” Redisch says.

This method of “backpack journalism” is not logistically possible in all cases—even many of its hardcore advocates admit that. For instance, if a network interviews a head of state, being able to professionally light the person and shoot it—sometimes with multiple cameras—is too time consuming a task for a solo journalist and an important official with only minutes to spare for an interview. It can also be too dangerous for a solo digital journalist to operate effectively in a conflict zone, where having a partner to watch your back can literally be the difference between life and death.

Sometimes, in foreign locations with only occasional news that would be of interest to international audiences, say perhaps in Bangalore, a “fixer” will do all these tasks. A fixer does many things—and can really live up to his nickname in the trade: he can fix things. Fixers—often locals or longtime foreign journalists based in-country hired by a large news organization to assist an out-of-town crew—can make miracles happen. They often arrange access to authorities and officials for interviews, help coordinate technical logistics for a shoot, and sometimes even drive or translate. They have intimate knowledge of a location and often come recommended by other journalists.

Digital newsgathering has also transformed crew locations and editorial priorities. News organizations now often rely on single-person “bureaus” staffed with these new digital journalists instead of full-fledged, fully staffed bureaus.

“It’s all portable, it’s all mobile,” Redisch says. “You don’t have a place to go. You can do it all on your own now.”

News organizations are also dedicating resources once meant for foreign coverage, to other priorities like developing content for Facebook and YouTube. This is also helping make an expensive, accomplished, seasoned old-media foreign correspondent a relic of news history. In many cases, except for positions meant for rising stars like chief European correspondents, these veterans are being replaced with much cheaper stringers. Many of these stringers are young, and can easily navigate the demands and developments of modern-day newsroom editorial priorities like Snapchat and Twitter.

In larger hub bureaus, stringers might also help supplement the coverage of full-time foreign correspondents, as is the case at VOA, according to Redisch. The American broadcaster relies on stringers to cover “day-to-day” news, which frees up staff reporters to cover “thematic” stories with sweeping time-consuming work and context.

The Payoff (Or Not)

These changes in how news is covered abroad and who covers it have tempted many journalists who see new opportunities for them. But Hughes warns as the number of freelancers working abroad increases, so does the competition.

“Don’t expect an easy way to make a living,” he says.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Getting Started
• PART II On the Ground
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Index