Freebies
As a local journalist, you are likely to be paid considerably less than all your friends who have roughly the same amount of talent as you.
Because of how badly you are paid, it can be worth keeping an eye out for opportunies for getting things for free.
What You Can Get For Free
There are plenty of opportunities to get things for free as a journalist.
- Free meal if you are writing a restaurant review
- Free entry to bars and clubs and some drinks
- Free entry to sporting events if you write a report on them
- Free theatre tickets if you write a review
- Free cinema tickets if you write a review
- Free health and beauty treatments
But it is worth bearing in mind that when you are getting a freebie you will generally be expected to represent your newspaper. I once had a lovely free meal in a restaurant in Barnet but then the owner joined us for dessert and we had to endure a long explanation of her vision for the restaurant.
The Morality of Freebies
The only reason an organisation will give you something for free is that they think it will directly or indirectly influence your coverage of them. Even if they are not actually asking for coverage, if they did not think they could get anything out of it then why would they do it?
The owner of a nightclub who gives you free entry is not doing it for no reason. They may think that one day they might be involved in a contentious licensing issue and be aware that your paper's coverage would be important.
For free entry into local attractions and health and beauty treatments, it is often more obvious why they are doing it and you will generally be expected to write a feature about your experience. But because you have got something for free, have you put yourself in a position where you are expected to write a positive story? And if so, is this letting down the reader who will be using your article to make a decision about whether to pay for the experience themselves?
Every time you take a freebie of any kind, there is a moral ambiguity and it is your decision what sort of freebies you do and do not accept.
The best advice is to be sure in your own mind that any freebies are not putting you in a difficult position or affecting the tone of the copy you write. It is also worth finding out your paper's rules on accepting gifts and making sure you stick to them.
Press Trips
Of all the freebies available to local journalists, the best by some distance is the press trip, which offers you a free holiday at a time in your life when you are likely to have difficulty affording one.
Press trips give you the chance to see the world and to do so while staying in top hotels and eating in nice restaurants. And all you need to do in return is write a feature about it.
If you are interested in press trips, talk to the features editor about whether this is something you can do. Many newspapers have a system for deciding who gets to go on press trips, such as names being pulled out of a hat.
The quality of press trips a newspaper will be offered largely depends on its circulation. But to give you an idea of what is available, during a one-year stint at a regional paper I went on trips to Florida, Dubai and Austria.
You can also be proactive about arranging press trips. It is worth phoning travel companies to see if they will give you a free ticket or trip in exchange for writing a feature. Often, they might not give you it for free but will offer a significant discount.
The main thing to realise with press trips is that whoever arranges it for you will expect positive coverage and that by accepting you are implicitly agreeing to this. Editors want travel sections in their papers but do not want to pay for press trips out of their budget. Because of this, over the years an understanding has developed that the travel industry pays for press trips and that the resulting coverage is positive.
You could view this as giving up your journalistic integrity and while it is a fairly harmless piece of collusion between the newspaper and travel industries, you would probably be right. If you do not feel comfortable with it, then do not go on them.