How did you end up in the cul-de-sac that is business journalism? It was a question put to me at a London lunch party with a bunch of film buffs back in 2001, by a successful somebody who should have known better. I remember feeling like I’d been slapped in the face.
But after my coffee this week with a London-based freelance foreign correspondent – let’s call her Clare – who is around the same age as I was then, maybe, just maybe, I got lucky. Although I was disappointed at the time, perhaps the editor who hired me in the 1990s at Business Day, a national daily in South Africa, did me a favour.
‘What do you want to cover,’ was the first question he put to me in my interview. I told him I’d done a law degree, and had ideals, so of course, my dream job would be covering politics. ‘But you can’t,’ he responded. ‘You’re the wrong colour’.
This was early post-apartheid South Africa and, rightly, they were trying to get more young black reporters onto the newsdesk, and understandably many wanted to cover politics. So, I ended up on the companies and markets team, covering ICT. It could have been worse. It was, after all, almost the turn of the century, and the big question was would the world crash into darkness as the clocks ticked over. At the same time, the Internet was changing everything and the South African government was moving all its archaic paper-based systems onto computers. Among South Africa’s smartest minds were tasked with heading up these IT-related roles – for example, Hassen Ebrahim,who helped draft the South African constitution, was Deputy-Director of the Department of Justice and its first CIO, Andile Ngcaba was DG of Communications, and there were countless others. The stories kept coming; my first front page, a week after joining, was about a data leak by a global company that compromised millions of customers bank details. The more things change…
This early grounding also set me up well. And, despite being a bit of a generalist, I’ve remained focused on African business, and a strong believer that with the right government policies, technological innovation and ethical business practices, big things can happen, and are happening, on the continent.
Back to the present
For one reason and another, I found myself back in London where I met Sally White while doing a freelance gig at Investors Chronicle. It was Sally, a financial journalist and economist, and now long-standing mentor, colleague and friend, who introduced me to Clare.
In an introductory email last month, Sally wrote: “She is extremely quick to grasp new subjects and put up ideas, but needs to start writing/subbing in other areas to gain the business-related knowledge that she needs [to earn more]. On political and social affairs stuff, as you can see, she is well experienced. Can you help at all?”
Sally has been very generous with her time and expertise over the years, so I thought it was the least I could do. Before contacting Clare, I checked out her website. Errr, I thought, in a sort-of childish foot-stamping way, and why can’t she help me?
Clare’s CV reads like the one I’ve always wanted. She has written for countless high-profile outlets including The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, BBC Radio 4, The World Today, as well as lesser-known ones, and more. She has reported from Iraq, Uganda, Rwanda, Serbia and Kosovo primarily on development, refugees, women’s rights, migration, human rights, and so on. Oh, and she is also working on a novel which Harper Collins is interested in, and her photography isn’t too bad either.
Meeting in person, Clare tells me: ‘I’m a bit rogue’. She reminds me a little of my younger self, the journalist I wanted to be. Ideallistic, socially aware, passionate about human rights – though smarter, and certainly way more successful! But the bottom line is that the work she loves is unsustainable; she’d like to have children and earn a bit more for a bit less stress. Her best paying work as a freelance foreign desk editor, for which she earns a rate of £150 for a nine-hour shift, with no break, is as good as it gets. That doesn’t surprise me that much, but let’s just say wages haven’t increased in about 10 years then – that was the day rate for a freelance reporter at Investors Chronicle back in 2001.
More surprising is that when she is in the field, Clare funds everything from her flights to the fixer, food and accommodation. If she is lucky, the pitch is accepted and she is paid, at best, 30p per word – news stories can be anything from around 300 to 800 words, so do the maths. ‘Often that doesn’t even cover the cost of the fixer,’ she says. ‘I love this job but I’m kind of paying to put my own life at risk.’
It’s getting tiresome, not to mention demoralising. Very often news desks, which have previously commissioned work on a regular basis, don’t even bother to respond with a: ‘No thanks, it’s not for us.’
So has serious journalism become a pathway for the few not the many, for those who can afford to work for very little and those who have contacts? ‘I do absolutely think journalism is a career for the privileged, but I also think that as the wages have plummeted, more women have jumped in. But it’s still middle class white men who do best out of it though,’ says Clare.
You get what you pay for
Unsurprisingly, the pride and the meaning in what Clare does are fading. It may sound glamorous and makes for great dinner party conversation but if she has children, and she’d like that, it won’t pay for the nappies!
That makes me a sad. Sad, because it’s clear that traditional media really is in trouble. The once great, free British press has become free, literally – well, almost. Sad because somebody like Clare may stop doing what she loves, and also that this will be one less story that the world needs to hear. Sadder still that others may be put off by her experience; given the range and quality of her work, journalist wannabes regularly make contact to ask how they can get into the profession, how she did it. But her response, increasingly, is this: ‘If there is absolutely anything else you can do and want to do, then don’t, don’t do it [journalism]’.
I should know this too. Though business journalism may pay better, unless you’re at the top of your game, most of us have to do ‘dark side’ stuff too. The trick is to earn the bread and butter so that you can do things like investigative journalism or creative writing, or whatever. Rightly or wrongly, I tell Clare she absolutely mustn’t give up on the dream.
On the plus side, however, potentially Clare expanding her net means business journalism gains a competent storyteller. She’s worried that she can’t do it, but she is going to be fine. When I suggest that she does a piece on the urban flying taxi and gets to grips with the potential for blockchain, she is immediately curious, and already has ideas about how a piece could work for a glossy mag.
So that’s my rant and on a final note, if you are still with me, the next time you feel the urge to criticise shoddy, biased, unethical journalists and journalism, then consider this: could it be that we are getting what we pay for?