Freelance Pod

Deez Links is "a dailyish link to cool shit happening in & around the media industry." Each day, Delia Cai - also Growth & Trends Editor at Buzzfeed - sends out one link. Just one link. She really sells it, in the way you'd want a particularly well-informed and fun friend to sell it to you.

It's working out for her - Deez Links turned three in February, and was recently voted fourth most popular media newsletter, after Nieman Lab, Axios and American Press Institute.

We've got a new season of Black Mirror on Netflix, so here are Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones to talk us through Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too, Smithereens and Striking Vipers. They also take the piss out of each other and make me LOL.

Don't worry, there aren't any spoilers, so you're safe to listen before watching the season. 

Season 5 episodes discussed: Striking Vipers; Smithereens; Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too.

This episode for Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK features Dr Samara Linton, and will be out later today. She tells me about putting together The Colour of Madness, the book that she co-edited. It's about the black and minority ethnic experience of mental illness, mainly in the UK, the medical services around it and how racial stereotypes remain, grimly, a part of that process.

It's part two of my interview with Twitter's Director of Curation, Joanna Geary. She takes us through her career from working at The Guardian to starting out at Twitter in 2013, with loads of great insight on how the journalism industry has tried and tried and tried again to mould itself to the demands of the internet. 

Joanna's also got some great tips on taking your skills out of the newsroom and into a tech company, if you're starting to look at other options.

Joanna Geary started out as a print journalist in 2004 - as a business reporter on the Birmingham Post - and ended up in charge of Twitter's Curation team in 2017. That's a job and a company that didn't exist when she started her career.

From blogging in Birmingham, to setting up Hacks/Hackers in London, via The Times' paywall and The Guardian's social strategy, Joanna tells me how her career has been shaped by working at the intersection of news and digital.

Every freelancer I've interviewed for this podcast - or just met in the past 11.5 months of freelancing - has worn multiple work hats. It's just the way of things, as freelance consumer journalism is very unlikely to pay the bills to live in a major western city in 2019 AD.

Deanna Cioppa, Executive Editor at Contently, joins me on this episode to talk about how to start a portfolio to appeal to brands, and how content marketing differs from journalism in some important ways.

If you're a keen podcast listener, you might recognise Caroline's name from the Hot Pod newsletter, or, since yesterday, from The Browser's daily inbox offering.

Podcasts and newsletters have a lot in common: each one develops its own voice and character, and gets delivered into its audience's private spaces: ears and email inbox. Caroline and I discuss how both are a good substitute for having your own column.

Caroline is also a podcaster, with the British Podcast Awards-nominated Shedunnit.

Bonus mini-episode!

Freelance Pod was featured on BBC Radio 4 Extra's Podcast Radio Hour! Host Amanda Litherland and guest Renay Richardson listened to a clip from the third episode of the podcast, Music sounds better with you, feat. BBC 6 Music producer Shola Aleje. They went on to discuss Shola's advice on making a podcast, freelancing and self-care. 

Find the whole show on BBC Sounds here.

Two years ago, audio producer Lewis Raven Wallace was fired from his job at a radio programme made by American Public Media.

He'd refused to take down a blogpost he had written in response to Donald Trump's recent inauguration. As a member of a marginalised group - Lewis is trans - he delves into the myth of 'journalistic objectivity'.

Lewis has since gone freelance, and is about to publish his first a book. It will be accompanied by his new podcast - both called The View From Somewhere.

This episode's guest is writer, coach and podcaster Rebecca L. Weber. Born and raised in Boston, Rebecca takes us along on her journey from the US to South Africa, and from teaching to journalism to teaching writers to build freelance businesses, and coaching those new to writing on their way to becoming freelancers. Like many freelance writers, Rebecca wrote a newsletter, but it only really started making sense when she converted it into The Writing Coach Podcast.