TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Heidi N. Moore has been a financial reporter for more than a decade, working in such newsrooms as Institutional Investor, The Deal and The Wall Street Journal.
But in May 2009, Moore struck out on her own and became a freelance business journalist. Since then, she has written and reported on investment banking, Wall Street and capital markets.
Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Slate’s “The Big Money,” and the Financial Times, among others. Her Washington Post article on “The Myth of the Sophisticated Investor” was quoted in a speech by SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar on May 24, 2010 to bolster argument for SEC oversight of institutional investors.
In an e-mail interview with Talking Biz News, Moore, a Columbia University graduate, discussed what it’s like to be a freelance business reporter. What follows is an edited transcript.
1. After working at The Wall Street Journal, why do you freelance now?
It was time for a new intellectual challenge and a definite change in pace, though I didn’t expect to freelance when I decided to leave. After racking up around 1,100 print and Web bylines between January 2008 and May 2009, I thought I’d take a month off and then accept one of the newsroom jobs that had come my way. My job writing Deal Journal online and for the daily newspaper during the financial crisis trained my news reflexes to be very fast; It became consistently the No. 1 most popular blog at the Journal when I was there and I – and the team I worked with- took pride in it. It was something special.
But ultimately to everything there is a season. I was mining knowledge and sources I already had. With the financial crisis becoming less intense as of April 2009, it seemed like a good time to start picking up different skills and opening up my horizons a bit and most importantly, switching from short-form posts back to more digging and longer analysis. I’ve always been a news and features writer.
What surprised me at first was that a lot of my colleagues or people I knew were astounded and terrified by the idea of my completely going outside the newsroom system and freelancing; financial journalists are better paid than other journalists and tend to value security. I was the one making a change, but they were scared of the move. A British friend, a very wise man of the world, had the best explanation of this baffling reaction .”Of course they are, darling!” he explained. “You’re confronting them with the abyss.”
A lot has changed in the year since then; now I now several people who left big places or good jobs to freelance or work on a book or other projects. The financial crisis seems to have caused a major shake-out in business journalism. The decision to freelance is better understood now, I think.
I used to joke that when I was recruited to the Journal, I never expected to leave it — ever. I thought I would stay there forever and die at my desk. Then, during the financial crisis, the pace was superhuman and the possibility of dying at my desk seemed to take on an unexpectedly and disturbingly high probability to me. So personally I wanted a new challenge. At the same time, it seemed that the toughest part of the financial crisis was winding up and that blogs would not be as crucial to readers as they were when everything was falling apart; after the stress tests, banks weren’t going to drop any news on us any more. It was the time for me to do some digging and some contextualizing.
Working at the Journal was an intense and great experience, during which I met and closely worked with some of the best journalists that I – or anyone – will ever know, people who are both smart and have the best possible work ethics. Importantly, as well, the Journal built my name and really made it possible for me to freelance successfully. A good part of the luck and ease that I’ve had in freelancing comes from having that WSJ association. Editors tend not to like risks. So not only was it a valuable experience in itself, but it also created a great benefit afterward — and if anyone is thinking of freelancing, I would highly recommend working at a big publication first. It eases the way.
2. Do you find yourself working more, or working less, than when you were a full-time employee, and why?
Definitely less. That was the whole point of starting to freelance: I wanted to see what sunlight looked like outside an office in the middle of the day, to take my vacations and eat lunch somewhere other than a desk on most days, to schedule four source meetings in a row and not have a knot in my stomach about missing a daily or hourly deadline.
It was time to take a new approach anyway. The financial crisis had already been raging for two straight years of around-the-clock work; there hadn’t been a single slow day since April 2007 and people were running on adrenaline. There was an old story in The Onion headlined, “Wild, Unattached Twenties Spent at Work.” That was me. I covered Wall Street investment bankers so my hours became parallel to theirs, at least in terms of expecting phone calls.
Freelancing takes less time — financial stories or analysis just intrinsically don’t take that much time to report and write unless you’re working on an investigation — but it has a traffic-jam aspect that newsroom jobs rarely do. For instance, in a newsroom, you may be working on a long piece and also writing daily news, but there is an editor there to figure out work flow and prevent you from writing three things at once all at the same time. As a freelancer, you can end up taking on those three stories at once, all of them due roughly the same time and each of them for different publications, pretty much every week, and all on different topics. And you have to write each of them to different specifications of voice and editing; there’s no standardization of copy as you would have while writing for a single publication.
In addition, you have to balance not just your work flow but by implication your income: longer pieces are more glamorous and pay more, but shorter pieces are quicker to do and pay the bills. You also have to get used to the fact that your paychecks will be piece-by-piece and it will take at least 30 days to get paid for those pieces. As a result, it’s important to create a “river” of work that will keep the pay flowing. It is very, very easy to get caught up in generating a lot of shorter pieces — and by “shorter” I mean 500 to 1000 words — and that is something I personally always contend with. It’s very easy for the deeper stuff to go by the wayside, which is one of the problems with freelancing as a platform.
The bright side is that when you freelance, the option to go off and do those long explorations is always there, which it usually isn’t in a newsroom unless you have a strong sponsor or mentor who can buy you some time – and even then, you still have to feed the news beast.
And of course there are the administrative aspects, which you have to do yourself and which I dislike intensely: writing invoices, tracking payments, making sure you have enough staples or whatever. Between balancing the different sources, publications, ideas and payments, freelancing is not for people who have an aversion to spreadsheets.
3. Are you still writing about the same topics, or have you branched out?
It’s been a great experience of branching out in topics, and mostly also in ‘voice.’ I spent nearly all of my career writing news, features or profiles, and the past year or so has been about exploring commentary as a way to share ideas. It’s great.
Financial coverage — capital markets, Wall Street, investment banking, corporate finance — will always be my core area because it is always changing in fascinating ways. Still, it’s nice to explore a bit.
Some of my favorite stretches have come from suggestions of the various editors I work with. Here’s one example: At Fortune.com, I proposed a piece about why there had been no commercial real estate crash; I had never written about commercial real estate before. It did extremely well — surprisingly so for such a wonky subject — in terms of traffic and pickups by other publications. It might have been a one-off. But then the Fortune.com editor, Dan Roth, asked, “who, specifically, is buying these CMBS?” He wanted identities, which are difficult in a relatively closed world like commercial real estate.
It seemed like a real challenge to find out, so I looked into it and it turned out to be a really interesting and somewhat technical journey through the accidental mechanics of bubble-prevention. Now I am writing a couple of other related stories on that, and all on a topic — commercial real estate — I never approached before. It’s invigorating to learn something new and hopefully add something to readers’ understanding of the issue.
Then there are the funnier incidents. Last year I went to help my mother buy a Mac at Best Buy and they tried to upsell her on a ridiculous “optimization” package. I vented about it on Twitter, and my editor at the now-defunct Big Money, Jim Ledbetter, saw it and suggested I write it up. I’m not a consumer writer — I prefer the sanitized mahogany halls of high finance — but figured, like Jim did, that other people must have gone through this too. It ended up being a fun piece to do and generated some hallelujahs from tech blogs and blogs like Consumerist, plus a nice mention from CJR.
That’s the mark of a good editor: one who sees where their writers’ attention is going, even if it’s not on their beat, and then says, “how about we focus that, dig down and see what it becomes?” Sometimes as an independent journalist you can be too busy to capitalize on these fleeting thoughts.
4. How do you find your freelance assignments?
Most of what I write comes from my own ideas, generated through conversations with sources. I think dialectically — through conversation — and I like to back it up with proof, like data and filings. Other reporters can go through a filing and immediately know their story; I like to bounce ideas off people first. Twitter has also been helpful because it’s such a good forum for both breaking news links and discussion, and most people tweet under their own names so they don’t act as if they’ve been raised by bears.
One of the great things in freelancing life was the old staff listserv at The Big Money/Slate, which was great for brainstorming. Someone would shoot out a random link on a subject no one else knew they cared about, and we’d start launching jokes and get into debates. A lot of ideas used to come out of that kind of scrum. That’s probably something most publications should have.
5. You recently did a short stint for Fortune. How did that come about?
The story is probably not interesting to anybody except that it’s just another lesson that it helps to have good relationships. That was a fun, short stint just filling in for Colin Barr on the Street Sweep blog.
I had already contributed some stories to Fortune.com and had helped out Dan Primack, the editor at peHUB, when he needed someone on that blog to fill in for a reporter of his who had quit. So the Fortune online editors asked me. I have a strong aversion to blogging — I did my time and then some — but I didn’t want to let them down. It ended up being really fun, particularly the chance to explore new topics like unemployment measures and economics and the impact of the Russian spying scandal on the world gold market.
6. How hard is it to find freelance work in business news?
The difficulty of finding work is in direct proportion to two things: the quality of your work and the quality of your editorial relationships. You can pitch your heart out all day long, but it’s best if people know your work, and if they know you. That way you also get incoming calls as well as the ones you send out.
For most people in newsrooms, the most terrifying prospect of freelancing is the idea of being out at sea, looking for a life raft, or having to hustle for assignments. That’s too much work, and of the wrong kind.
So I’ve approached it as basically like having different journalistic “families” in terms of the places I contribute to — I have my family at Fortune.com, and my family at The Big Money/Slate and so on. You know the editors, and you know what they want for their publications. You have your choice of different formats, sometimes within the same publication: news, blog, commentary, feature. Similarly, they know your availability, you can be straightforward with them about what kind of work you’re balancing, and communication and feedback in general is better.
In my opinion it’s better to have three or four or more publications for which you write consistently. As a freelancer you can also be an unknown quantity, and having your name closely associated with stable publications or brands makes it easier for people to understand where you fit into the scheme of things.
The best parts of being independent has been the chance to work with different editors — and all excellent ones — and get these windows into how different publications work. It really improves your knowledge of the news business and expands your news judgment. When you’re independent, you’re somewhat outside the system and not a threat to anyone’s job, so you really get tremendously accurate inner looks into the business.
7. Have you ever turned an assignment down? If so, why?
Rarely, because it’s bad to leave people hanging. The very few times it’s happened, it’s usually been something on a tight deadline and I’m committed to another publication for something else. In one case, it was just a subject that would have taken me a long time to get up to speed on — I referred the editor to another freelancer who I thought would be excellent on the subject, and she was.
The important thing is that, even if you can’t do something, try to do some benevolent meddling. Have some ideas for the editor on finding someone who can, or just other journalists they should know in general. It’s important to do this with job offers or approaches that are not quite the right fit; I’ll send recruiters who come to me to a friend I know is bored or frustrated with his or her job. We all know the frustrating experience of doing good work and not being acknowledged for it; if you can make an introduction and help someone with an opportunity and prevent someone else from feeling stuck, there’s no downside.
You can’t do everything yourself, and it’s just good karma all around. There’s a terrific, important term in Judaism, “tikkun olam,” which means “repairing the world.” It’s usually about serving in charity but it really applies to everything in life. Repair the chaos. Soothe the frustration. Take a look at what’s not working for people or organizations and don’t be afraid to give a nudge or make a suggestion. It could go nowhere, or it might fail, but at least you didn’t sit there like a potato.
8. What do you like about freelancing vs. being in a newsroom?
The freedom is great: as a freelancer you can write from anywhere. I wrote some of the Street Sweep pieces from Montreal, where a friend and I had gone to attend JazzFest.
Also, the validation is great — the fact that you don’t need a giant global corporation behind you for people to return your calls or respect your work. When I first told my sources that I was leaving the Journal, I expected some backlash. They’re investment bankers whose whole careers have been predicated on rising within big organizations. They’re not hippies; this isn’t an “Eat, Pray, Love” crowd.
But no one cared, and everyone still returned my calls promptly. A few months into freelancing, I remember tentatively e-mailing a powerful source who ran a big investing division about some news story — he immediately wrote back, “let’s go have lunch at the Four Seasons.” And I got about four or five story ideas out of that. People on Wall Street all have friends who have struck out on their own and they know the drill: it doesn’t compromise your skills or who you are. As long as you stay committed to doing a good job and you’re honest about what you’re doing, people will engage with you.
I also like that as a freelancer, no single publication or person has too much power over what I do. There’s a natural portfolio aspect to it, an arbitrage between time and assignments and platforms that keeps it sane. Editors are really grateful for good work.
9. What do you dislike?
I’m very productive when I’m working alone but when a big project comes along it can be very isolating. Amy Sohn wrote a novel “Prospect Park South,” in which she coined the (insensitive) term “Mommy Aspberger’s,” about how uncommunicative she became while spending all day with her child. Most freelancers will recognize this; even though we are on the phone, there’s a person-to-person aspect that you have to overcompensate for because you don’t have a newsroom milling around you. You don’t want to go too many days without source meetings or editorial interactions.
Also, the invoicing and tracking checks really is a pain.
10. Would you ever go back to full-time work?
Yes. Not yet, but that was always my assumption. I saw freelancing as a kind of working sabbatical — a chance to try something new, master different skills and so on. At some point, with this business the way it is, almost every journalist will have to know how to freelance and I saw this as my opportunity. It has been one of the most thoroughly enjoyable times in my career. But there are some really great things about a newsroom — the discussions, the energy, the sense of mission; just hearing about what’s going on other people’s beats and sharing what’s happening on yours makes you smarter.
Also, I miss the jokes. There is only so much you can do to entertain yourself.
Freelancing teaches you about yourself, so I have a better idea of what will work for me when I do decide to rejoin the full-time squad. Collaborative cultures are best, for one thing, as is newsroom collegiality. One editor who offered me a job a couple of months ago said, “We have a remarkably few number of a**holes working here,” and I almost accepted on the spot just because he was so canny.
11. Are you making more, or less, than when you were full-time?
Less, but that’s by design and proportional because I’m working less too. Also, when I was full-time I was being paid on a higher scale because I had been a bureau chief at one point. Everything comes with a trade-off; it’s just a matter of deciding which trade-offs work for you, and for how long. Nothing is perfect, the grass is not always greener. It’s like maintaining a marriage: just figure out what you can live with and what your dealbreakers are, and work within that.
12. Are you primarily freelancing for media organizations, or are there other opportunities out there for you?
It is 98 percent media. I have only one other project. I follow newsroom rules. I have kept the Dow Jones Code of Ethics as my rulebook; some of the things that have happened at the New York Times with perceived conflicts with their freelancers show the wisdom of that. When I first started freelancing I heard from investment banks or financial services companies that needed people to write white papers or research reports or things along those lines. A lot of freelancers do that, because obviously it pays the bills. But I considered that a conflict, since banks are what I write about. I can’t work for them in any capacity. I don’t own stocks or bonds or securities, just as I never did when I was full-time.
There is only one project I maintain outside of news reporting and financial journalism, and it still closely related. I help choose the speakers and create the agenda for the Women’s Alternative Investment Summit. It is basically reporting — interviewing high-powered women, finding the topics of interest in finance, and then creating an agenda around that. I enjoy the dark-mastermind aspect and the chance to stay on top of important subjects; it generates reporting ideas for me. I am not involved in the business side of the conference at all. I also speak or moderate at other conferences or panels — at Wharton, for Marketplace Radio, at the Milken Institute global conference, and others — and I don’t accept any money for those.
13. How do you market yourself?
I don’t do anything intentionally. This is one of the things that I think is destroying journalism: this cynical idea of individuals “branding” themselves.What people call “branding” is more simply known as “reputation.” We are not putting Dove Soap on the shelves. Moreover, those who create “brands” are really just creating pens for themselves — they start evaluating potential projects on the basis of its value to the “brand” and not on the basis of its actual merit. It is more intellectually honest — and professional — to focus on the quality of the work itself rather than creating some kind of superstructure around the image of the quality of the work. As journalists our job is to puncture pomposity, not add to it or adopt it for ourselves.
That said, if you think you’re doing good work you naturally want people to see it. You’re writing it for their benefit, after all. So having a variety of publishing platforms and media is a way not only to reach more readers, but also to show people what you’re interested in, which then generates more inquiries.
One of my favorite things in the world is my involvement with Marketplace Radio; for nearly two years I’ve done the Weekly Wrap with other commentators. I love doing that and the show has a loyal fanbase.
Another thing is Twitter. I used to scorn Twitter, but when I left the Journal — and thus no longer had my Dow Jones Newswires screen — Twitter became a kind of proxy wire service for me. Twitter headlines are what wires call “snaps,” basically. I re-tweeted the stories I was interested in, sometimes with a little commentary, figuring other people would be interested too. It became a newsfeed for others and took on a life of its own. 99 percent of my Twitter feed is spent linking to other people or promoting their work; people have even sent me books so that I can read them and maybe mention them on Twitter. It’s exactly like having a little publication of your own, equal parts news, commentary and graffitti.
It’s very useful for me both as an informational tool and a publishing platform; from Twitter I get story ideas, discussions, job offers, and engagement with an audience that I otherwise wouldn’t meet in the ivory tower of a newsroom where editors are the reader proxies. Twitter is also highly collaborative and non-hierarchical.
I also like Twitter because it is often underestimated. A lot of people make a pompous show of looking down on it as beneath them, as being useless. So it attracted me because it’s another chance to take something no one believes in and try to make it good or engaging. There is a quote I really love: “If Shakespeare had been born in this generation he would have prospered; he would have refused to die in a corner. He would have taken the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men though them incapable of. Alive today, he would have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying, ‘This medium is no good,’ he would have used it and made it good.”
That applies to Twitter, it applies to blogs, and it gets to the heart of the matter about branding and marketing and the business of journalism: whatever you do, do it well and do it often and do it with regard and respect for your audience. Recognition is a lagging indicator. Do the best work you can do, first.
