March 18, 2020 is the day on which Michael Rappe loses all orders within hours. The day on which Angela Merkel announced the first corona lockdown in Germany in her now legendary speech to the nation. The day when shops, schools and playgrounds close from one day to the next, the cinemas, the bars – and the football stadiums.
Especially the stadium hits Michael Rappe hard, because he has been a freelance sports journalist for 22 years. He writes mainly for local media in the region around Heidelberg and Mannheim. He usually stands on the sidelines every weekend, interviewing players and track and field professionals. Suddenly all sporting events are canceled: “One coach, one club after the other called: We don’t play at the weekend.”
According to Hendrik Zörner, press spokesman for the German Association of Journalists (DJV), Michael Rappe is one of those in the media industry who have been hit the hardest by the pandemic. Freelance culture and sports journalists could practically no longer work overnight. No events, no reporting.
The line money for daily newspapers is too low to provide for a crisis
Rappe got by with Corona aid to secure his livelihood, that worked somehow. But when the games started again, it became apparent that the pandemic had simply hardened a very fundamental problem: “The line money for daily newspapers is still devastatingly low, so you don’t have the basis for a crisis like this.” This is also confirmed by Sigrid March. She is a freelance science journalist and chair of the Freischreiber, the professional association of freelance journalists. “Of course, the pandemic was drastic for journalism,” says März. “But the freelance journalists weren’t doing well even before that. The working conditions were and are precarious.”
That has too shown in a study by the Otto Brenner Foundation, which was published a few weeks ago: The pandemic was a shock for the 17 surveyed freelancers in the state of Bremen, but for many the situation normalized after the first lockdown. However: After that, long-standing differences within the industry would have shown up. As a rule, freelance journalists in public service broadcasting earned better than their colleagues in daily and local newspapers. Both Zörner and March see these developments nationwide.
Because they are paid by the line rather than by the hour, freelancers at daily and local newspapers often earn well below minimum wage. “I can clap a line and end up getting the same money as someone who had to research that line for two hours,” says März. She therefore sees the abolition of line money as the most important step against precariousness in free journalism: Instead, fees should be based on the amount of work.
Even a good education and prices do not guarantee a secure income
Pascale Müller sees it that way too. She is in her early 30s, an investigative journalist with a showcase CV, researching labor exploitation and sexualised violence. In 2019 she won the Nannen Prize for extensive research on Spanish harvest workers who were sexually abused, and in 2018 she was on Medium magazine’s “30 under 30” list, which ennobles young journalists as new stars in the media sky. For a journalist, one might think, the early years could hardly be any better.
But with her investigative, journalistic work, according to her own statements, she earned just 800 euros a month last year. This means that Müller lives well below the subsistence level, her hourly rate is often so low “that it’s better not to calculate it,” as she says. Müller calls her work the “unprofitable art” of journalism. The research effort is huge and the fee is relatively low. She often hears: You have to negotiate better. The Freischreiber also offer regular seminars on good negotiation. According to sports journalist Rappe, this is hardly possible locally: “If you ask for more money, it says: ‘Then we’ll give the text to student XY.’ The newspapers have the upper hand.”
Pascale Müller also often finds the power imbalance between her and the people in the editorial offices stressful. In negotiations, freelancers sometimes get the feeling: “I’m an inferior journalist because I’m paid inferiorly,” she says. Of course, there are also editors who try very hard to find freelancers, but in some cases the relationship is almost “poisoned”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/medien/.”Sometimes I have the feeling that the editors with whom you negotiating, don’t understand that this is my rent,” she says. When she once negotiated the fee for a story she researched full-time for three months, the editor said, “You know you can’t make a living from it.”
Journalists’ representatives demand the right to take legal action
According to March von Freischreiber, this power imbalance is also the reason why it is so difficult to change the working conditions. That is why the Freischreiber – like all advocacy groups for freelance journalists – have been demanding the right to take legal action as a group for years. “Of course, as freelancers we can sue ourselves, but then we’re burned out and we’ll never get another job from this client,” says März. In order to prevent this and still give freelancers a means of defending themselves against fees that are too low or exploitative contracts, the association must be able to sue – if possible without naming the freelancer concerned.
“These are all topics that are known. They are discussed,” says März. “But nothing has moved for years.” As in many other precarious jobs, the pandemic would only have exacerbated existing problems. “The free ones, who were hit really hard in the first lockdown – they weren’t there later,” she says of the free writers’ talks. There are no official figures on how many freelance journalists have changed careers in recent years. March’s impression, however, is that some of those who got out would have thought about it for a long time. The pandemic was only “the last drop”.
Pascale Müller now has a second job. She does bookkeeping 13 hours a week. However, she still wants to spend the rest of her time working independently and investigatively: “I just fell in love with this job.”
Michael Rappe used the free time during the pandemic to talk to a colleague from Berlin FiDo to found – a magazine for women’s football, which was published in March 2022 for the last time, the money has run out. Now Rappe will continue to be a freelance reporter. At 59, he thinks: “I’m too old to do anything else.”