OOO with the Wind 🔥🏠🔥
Jobs 👉MIT, NYT, Illinois Tech👈
Gigs and Internships
Audio girlies! The NYT is looking for an audio producer for a new tech podcast.
The Verge is looking for a reporting fellow. Writing a story a day sounds like hell to me, but hey, maybe you’re built different?
Illinois Tech is hiring for a video producer. Engineering nerds, wya?
MIT is also looking for a senior video producer to make videos about AI.
Axiom Space is looking for a start-to-finish video producer to make stuff about their human spaceflight initiatives.
👀 Cool Weird Job
The National Gallery is hiring for a digital producer. Apply by the 30th!
Hu$tle Tips
Have a coastal science documentary idea? The Pulitzer Center is accepting grants!
You might then pitch that documentary to Aeons, which accepts video pitches.
Work Smarter
💵 Freelance Rates Edition
How to get paid more for your freelance work: (From a former freelancer and commissioning editor)
- Pitch smaller orgs. Did you know that Southwest’s in-flight magazine pays $1 a word? The most I was ever paid was from a now-defunct ra-ra-democracy mag nobody’s heard of. Tiny Medium blogs are a goldmine.
- Ask for a kill fee. This is the thing you get if they decide to kill your story without publishing. It’s usually 25-50% of the full rate you agreed on with the commissioning editor.
- Ask for more. Not right away, obviously, but if your 3-4 person story has turned into 7-8 interviews, you’re fully within your rights to point this out to the editor and politely but firmly ask for another $100.
- Charge late fees. A lot of orgs won’t pay them to freelancers, because they view you as highly expendable, but sometimes you’ll get a rare gem that honors the contract. The general rule of thumb is within 30-60 days of publication is when you should be paid - shorter than that is logistically challenging, even for a tiny org (esp for a tiny org). Longer than that is pure disrespect.
What got me through last week:
This lofi-adjacent remix of the Disco Elysium soundtrack. Groovy!