In the news
Journalism startups carve out niches for themselves in Canada
April 21, 2016
By: H.G. Watson
Excerpt from J-Source
[…]
Erin Millar had been working as a freelance journalist for about five years, writing primarily about education. She could see systemic educational issues playing out in her stories, but she felt like a broken record with the news-driven work she was doing. “I was sort of losing connection to the impact I was having,” she said. Millar figured she could either change careers or contribute to the sort of organization where she could address those systemic issues.
Originally, she and two fellow journalists, Christine McLaren and Colleen Kimmett, were going to start what Millar describes as almost a collective of freelancers, where they could support each other’s journalism and pool their resources and do more collaborative work.
But as Millar began tracking her hours to see how much went into the creation of a feature story, her assumptions about the real cost of doing journalism were overturned. “It was shocking for me to learn that,” she said. “I definitely should have known better by what I was making and what I was doing.”
[…]
