first person


StartingOut


Jem Collins has begun a full-time job - a role that she created herself from her Journo Resources start-up


I


’ve been freelancing since 2016, when I was told the company I worked for no longer had the


budget to pay me. It was my second journalism job. Since then, I’ve dabbled with a few part-time staff roles, but freelancing was my steady gig. I preferred the certainty of making my own luck rather than being at the whim of someone else’s strategies or budgets. Recently though, after five years, I returned to a full-time staff job. The difference? This is one I created for myself.


Journo Resources, the social


enterprise I run, was set up shortly after I was let go from that staff job five years ago. Aged just 24 with no connections and no real idea how I would continue to pay the rent, I felt completely lost. How do you even find freelance gigs?


How much do journalism jobs pay? What should a pitch or job application look like? When I talked to friends, I didn’t find answers so much as my own questions reflected back at me. At 3am one morning, in sheer


frustration, I registered a domain name and started pulling together resources I thought people like me might find useful. It didn’t feel like a lot but it was something tangible. It started with a list of all current journalism graduate schemes, updated once a month. It sounds simple but it didn’t exist anywhere else. It still doesn’t now.


18 | theJournalist


There was never a grand plan for Journo Resources but it seemed to resonate. People started following, so I ploughed in as much time as I could around shifts, pitches and part-time jobs. I didn’t have any money to invest, so it grew slowly, as I tried to figure out a plan along the way. We’ve never taken any kind of investment – not only did I not know how, but also it wouldn’t have fitted our ethos of a community – supporting each other and, crucially, keeping everything free for users. For a long time it felt like I was stuck


in a catch-22 – too big to fail, too small to fly. Until, finally, after five years of juggling, we reached a turning point. In a sentence I still find unbelievable to type, Journo Resources is now one of the UK’s leading resources for journalists, despite being built in snatched hours with no staff. Tens of thousands of people use our


journalism jobs board – the only one to refuse jobs without salaries. Our community has shared thousands of real examples of their salaries, CVs and pitches, and we give personalised advice every week. Perhaps more crucially, it has now reached the point where I can pay myself a small salary. The money comes from several pots, added over time. We take job advertisements, offer affiliate partnerships, have a subscriber option for community members to ‘give back’ and offer annual sponsorship deals to organisations. I’d be lying if I said this was part of a strategic plan – and I’m still trying to get past the discomfort of asking people for money.


And so, at the start of August, I sat


down to my new full-time job, one I’d spent five years building. I was joined by two part-time trainee journalists, funded through the government’s Kickstart scheme, and we still have our tiny team of freelances working on job sales and admin. This might sound bizarre but I felt lost.. Without the drumbeat of clients, pitches and shifts, I really was in full control of my time. What should I be doing? Who should


“ “


Tens of thousands of people use our journalism jobs board – the only one to refuse jobs without salaries


I be chasing? What were my priorities? Again, there was no one to ask. And, really, shouldn’t I know what I was doing? This transition has been one of the steepest learning curves I’ve experienced. I can now tell you way more than you’d ever care to know about staff pay, taxes and pensions – and how none of these systems are joined up. This article is my first piece of writing in weeks, though this is something I hope to change as we grow. I’ll always be a journalist at heart. Both myself and Journo Resources


have grown a lot over the past five years but the industry remains as confusing as ever. We still have a media that doesn’t look like the people it serves. Pay transparency is still a work in progress. And far too many of us are based in London.


There are a lot of people doing good things to fix this, but it’s going to take an effort from all of us to tackle the most systemic problems in our industry. I’m still working out how my new job works, but I hope Journo Resources will be part of fixing what’s wrong.


@Jem_Collins


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