Newspapers reject overreaching freelance photography contracts
by Rachel Sanders Freelance photographers have something to celebrate this week: a little pushback from newspapers against overreaching contracts for concert photography. The Montreal Gazette, La Presse, Le Journal de Montréal, Le Devoir and Métro refused to send photographers to the Taylor Swift show at the Bell Centre in Montreal last Tuesday because of a […]
@crapwritinggigs Twitter account mocks low-paying jobs for writers
by Rachel Sanders $5 per post. $0.02 per word. It’s numbers like these that make a freelance writer’s heart sink. And there’s no shortage of jobs with this kind of rock bottom writing rate being advertised on the internet these days. For one writer, it all just got to be too much. Six months ago that person […]
The Globe and Mail urged to “pay the writers”
A small campaign has blossomed on Facebook over the past few hours as freelance writers press The Globe and Mail to pay the writers of their popular Facts & Arguments essay. In the comments section of a Facebook post celebrating the essay’s 25th anniversary writers have been complaining that the paper does not offer any compensation for accepted submissions. Toronto writer […]
President of NPAC decries Black Press newspaper’s call for volunteer photographers
by Rachel Sanders Stories about the devaluing of photojournalism are all too common these days, but it’s still shocking when things hit a new low. When John Lehmann, president of the News Photographers Association of Canada, heard that a newspaper in Victoria was advertising for volunteer photographers to cover weekend events, he found the news jaw-dropping. Even more […]
Radio freelancers battle for copyright
by Rachel Sanders In the two and a half years since I’ve been the editor of Story Board, I’ve posted all kinds of news and opinion pieces about negotiations and disputes over freelance contracts. The contracts in question have come from a wide variety of media outlets — ranging from Canada Wide Media, to the Toronto Star, […]
Unpaid Pan Am Games writing jobs raise ire
Last Thursday, Toronto freelance writer and investigative journalist Andrew Livingstone ran across a job ad posted by the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Games. The ad was seeking five writers to produce feature content for websites, publications, newsletters and brochures. Duties included interviewing sources, fact checking and writing to deadline, as well as attending and covering events and […]
A Twitterstorm about unpaid writing… Storified
[View the story “Journalists react to Pan Am Games’ ad for volunteer feature writers” on Storify]
Saint John Seven end strike, MBS Radio begins lock-out
The seven unionized workers at MBS Radio in Saint John, New Brunswick called an end to their 686-day strike last week. Their employer responded with a lock-out notice, saying they will not be allowed to return to work without a collective agreement. The Saint John Seven joined the Canadian Media Guild in 2011 and spent almost a […]
Podcasting patent threatens independent media
by J.P. Davidson Like blogging and web video, podcasting has matured in recent years – from nerdy niche to viable independent media platform. Marc Maron is one success story: the interviews he conducts from his garage in LA go out to a massive online following. The show revived Maron’s career and even landed him a […]
The Unpaid Internship Conspiracy
Why Toronto Life’s first intern backs the Ontario labour ministry in shutting down the magazine’s twenty-one-year-old internship program and others that don’t pay by Derek Finkle I won’t lie: when John Macfarlane called me in May of 1993 and offered me a four-month internship at Toronto Life, the magazine he then edited, I was overcome. I […]
