Who: Freelance media workers everywhere
The ask: Over the course of one year, starting May 1, 2024, for each freelance project you complete, submit your rate to FSP’s rate-sharing database. Sign up to join the challenge below!
Also: If you can, PLEASE track and report the hours you spend on each project, because this will allow us to figure out whether freelancers are making a minimum wage!
What for? We need better data about freelancer pay in order to build campaigns to increase freelance rates.
What we know already: There’s a huge gap between what freelance media workers are paid per project vs what staffers make. There’s a gap, too, between freelancer rates and living wages.
What we don’t know: We can only begin to tell the story of what it means to be a freelancer, because the data in our rates database is sparse. We need more people to submit their rates.
We also need more people to share how many hours each project takes, so that we can understand what you’re actually getting paid.
Why now? More than a third of working journalists are now freelancers, according to a study published before the media industry shed 20,000 jobs in 2023.
As more and more of us become freelancers, it’s time for our industry to reckon with this gap, and with rates that have remained stagnant — or dropped — as inflation has increased.
Sign up! We’ll send you periodic reminders to submit your rates, updates about what the data is telling us, tips about how to track your time, and opportunities for action. (PS – if you’re having trouble signing up using the form below, try turning off your ad blocker.)
The better we understand freelance rates, the more effectively we can organize to change them.