SABEW to assess freelance business journalism market

The Society of American Business Editors and Writers is conducting an anonymous survey of freelance business journalists throughout the country to determine their pay and the type of work they perform.

The results of the survey will be made available to all SABEW members by the end of the year on its site, and the data will be updated annually to determine whether pay for freelancers and the work they perform is changing.

To do that, SABEW needs the help of freelancers. Please go to the link at the end of this message and click on it. Answering the questions will take less than a minute, but will provide valuable data for freelancer business journalists such as yourselves.

“The freelancer survey is part of SABEW’s increasing focus on providing information and career services to its members,” said Rob Reuteman, SABEW’s president and the former business editor of the Rocky Mountain News who is now a freelance business journalist. “We hope this data will become useful for our freelance members so that they can see what is going on in the industry.”

The survey results will be analyzed by SABEW’s research director, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill journalism professor Chris Roush, and will be broken out among geographic areas in the country, as well as by position, by length of time freelancing, and by experience.

The survey can be found at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/67RSH5M. For questions, about the survey, e-mail Roush at croush@email.unc.edu.

If you know of a freelance business journalist who is not a SABEW member, please forward the survey to him or her.