I lost the freelance gig at the Cook County Chronicle
Back on the afternoon of March 13, I got an e-mail from my editor at the Cook County Chronicle. They had to cut their freelance budget, he wrote. While I could turn in the article I worked on for that week and get paid for it, but past that, they wouldn’t pay for anything. Not even the three articles that were already approved a few weeks earlier.
I have been writing for them since, ironically enough, March 2017. Back in December 2016, I sent out a blitz of desperate e-mails looking for work after I was laid off from the Niles Bugle. It took a while for the editor to get back to me, but once he did, he offered me better terms than I expected. One feature article a week, covering virtually any topic in Chicago and suburban Cook County. And I would be paid $100 per article, plus $25 per photos. This at the time when $50 per article seems to have become a standard rate for community newspapers.
And it was a pretty cushy gig, for what it was. Sure, I was almost never given an opportunity to do more than one article a week, but I was still earning an equivalent of what I would earn for around 2.5 articles in other papers And, like I said, I was able to cover seemingly anything that wasn’t politics. Whether I wanted to talk about coffee shops on the South Side, or the intricacies of Pace express buses, or a Chicago comic book chain’s expansion into Wisconsin, or a quirky art shop in suburban McHerny County, it seemed like sky was the limit. I could count the number of rejected pitches with fingers on my hands.
And yet, I can’t say I haven’t been waiting for the other shoe to drop. In this day and age, whether you are writing for a paper or a digital media outlet like Streetblog Chicago, you learn to assume that something, somehow, will go wrong. You learn to pay attention to things like ads and other sources of revenue, or things like how many staff positions are there, the page count, the number of colored pages, etc.
Cook County Chronicle is part of a chain of newspapers in central Illinois, Chicagoland six-county region (except, for some reason, Will County), East St. Louis “Metro East” region and Rockford and its suburbs in northern Illinois. The best I can figure out, the chain traces its roots to the long-time newspaper chain in Peoria, Illinois region. I have no idea why it was rebranded “Chronicle Media,” why it expanded so far beyond its original coverage area. I do know that I first spotted in early version of Cook County Chronicle in Chicago in the fall of 2014, while coming back from a chemo session. It was a small, four-page black-and-white thing. But within years, it grew in size and color, offering a mix of original and syndicated content. The back pages were fat with legal advertising - one of the few reliable revenue sources newspapers still have, but there weren’t a lot of just plain old ads. So I was kind of surprised that they would pay me more than most others. And the more I worked, I wondered how they would keep paying me.
Back in May of last year, I asked my editor of I could do more work for them. Doing even one more article a week would mean that I would be able to lighten my workload, so I figured it was worth a shot. While my editor said he was amenable to the idea, he wanted to make sure there was enough money in the budget. And he eventually told me that there wasn’t.
In the last few months, I started noticing other things. The paper was once reliably delivered to almost every 7-Eleven in Chicagoland. While there were only a few copies delivered to each location, they weren’t that hard to find. But suddenly, deliveries became much less regular, and some locations that stocked them would only get some issues, but not others. And I noticed in the paper’s information section, the name of circulation coordinator was suddenly blank.
Incidentally, in the March 20 issue, I couldn’t help but notice that circulation coordinator position was suddenly filled. So now I knew where some of that freelance budget might have gone.
Since I got that e-mail, I have been trying to find more freelance opportunities and apply for the few jobs that are available. If nothing else, this gave me impetus to send out queries to media outlets I was thinking about sending queries to but couldn’t simply because of how much I was trying to juggle. So far, no luck - but, as Cook County Chronicle shows, sometimes, those things take a while. (And, I admit, I haven’t been able to get out as many pitches/applications as I would like, because I still need to do the freelance work for other papers that still have me).
In the near term - I actually got lucky. I managed to pick up enough freelance assignments to fill the financial hole left by the Chronicle not paying me for second half of the month. So I will be able to pay rent/Internet/transit pass/phone. Past that… I suppose we’ll see.
Especially with taxes on the horizon.