How Do Freelancers Survive Today? An Interview with a 20-Year Veteran

Earlier this year, I met freelance writer Noah Berlatsky as part of a panel I was moderating on Substack. What caught my attention right away is that he’s been in the freelance writing game for 20 years now, while supporting a family, all without bailing and moving to a different occupation with more dependable work and money. After our panel concluded, I asked if he’d be up for a conversation about his career and how he sustains it in an increasingly difficult environment for freelancers.

Currently Noah runs a Substack newsletter, Everything Is Horrible, that people pay to receive (even though they don’t have to), in addition to traditional freelance work. He also writes and publishes poetry.

Our conversation took place in August over Zoom; it has been edited and condensed for publication.

Jane Friedman: As you know, the impetus for this interview is that you have been in the freelance game for so long and you still, at least outwardly, appear to be … I don’t know. Cheerful might not be the right word.

Noah Berlatsky: [laughs]

You’re not a total Eeyore. You seem to have a dark sense of humor about it, which maybe is necessary. And when I looked at all of the places that you’ve published, you’ve outlasted a lot of the outlets you’ve contributed to.

Yeah, that’s true. Outlasted even more than it looks like, because a lot of places, they’re still doing stuff, but the section that I was involved with is gone.

Precisely. You haven’t yet gone into accounting. [laughs]

You know, if I had accounting skills, maybe. [laughs] The other options for me, I feel like are somewhat limited. I don’t know what I’d do.

Maybe that’s why you’ve stuck it out. You have no choice. Regardless, it takes an amazing amount of stubbornness and a belief that it will work itself out. There will be another gig or there will be another opportunity. Do you have a good network that keeps things rolling along?

There’s a couple of things that make it possible. The biggest one is I’m married to somebody who has a steady job and health insurance. People maybe don’t talk about that or underrate how important that is. But, I mean, that’s huge, right? That means there’s really a cushion. I started before the ACA really kicked in and when my daughter was born [in the early 2000s]. When my daughter was born, we decided that was a good time for me to start freelancing and have a more flexible schedule. My wife, she went into work, so that I could do more childcare.

So, I think that that’s probably the single most important thing, being married to somebody who has a less precarious job.

And the second thing?

After that, I feel like it’s a lot of luck. I’m constantly pitching. I try to pitch somewhere every day, and I try to constantly try to find new outlets and connect with old outlets. Sometimes it’s useful and sometimes I’m just annoying editors. But [laughs] I don’t really know how else to do it. You try to have as broad a range of clients as possible so that when one thing collapses, you’ve got something to continue with. It’s still very anxiety producing, I have to say.

[One outlet] went bankrupt owing me $10,000. So that was terrifying and horrible, right? I thought I’m never gonna see that money. But in fact I did, because they wanted to keep going with some things, so they figured they needed to pay me. So they did eventually pay me out. But it was super stressful. I mean, it was so stressful in fact that I had a seizure. [laughs]

Oh, my God.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like, “Oh, my God.” But it wasn’t really that. I mean, people have seizures more often than you think. [laughs] Apparently. Basically I was dreaming and I couldn’t wake up, wouldn’t wake up. My wife was terrified. She called the ambulance. I had to go to the hospital. There’s been no long-term effects. But, you know, obviously that’s the side of how stressful it was that I had this kind of medical event. Because it was like, “I’ve lost $10,000. What the hell am I gonna do?”

Every time you think you’ve got a steady client where you can kinda count on them and it seems like it’s gonna be okay, like as soon as you think that, it’s gone.

You’ve done a lot of op-ed work in your career, and it seems that work is hard to come by—or most of it is now destined for Substack, I’d say.

There was a brief period there where I had regular op-ed columns at like three places. And I thought, “This’ll work. I could do this forever.” I was at The Independent, NBC Think, I was working for this kind of blog called The Editorial Board. [But] there aren’t really op-ed outlets anymore. I think in part because like a lot of stuff’s moved to Substack but you know there’s also political incentives.

I had somebody reach out who I’d worked with before. They wanted me to write about the Texas Democrats leaving Texas, right? I said, “Oh yeah, I could write about that.” They said, “Well, they’re in Illinois, so talk about the Illinois context, and, make it funny, and, you know, don’t be like ‘Republicans are the bad guys.’”

And, you know, I did my best … but they didn’t use the piece. I think that that kind of logic has shut down a lot of op-eds. They want to feel like they can appeal to conservative voters … but they’re also afraid of like, you know, getting pushback from Trump or the people who own them like Trump. So those kind of things have caused there to be fewer outlets for op-eds, which is bad for op-ed writers like me.

So that all collapsed. And I was writing for CNN Opinion, and I was writing mostly movie think pieces, which was a lot of fun. Arts criticism is what I would do if I had a choice of what to do. And that’s all dried up too. I used to write book reviews for the LA Times. Their culture section was destroyed, right? … They don’t really have an arts section. All the editors I worked with either got fired or shifted elsewhere.

You’ve also had to deal with getting canceled.

Yeah, there was sort of a content mill I was working for. I mean, it wasn’t a great place to work for and they didn’t pay that much, but it was sort of steady. It was, like, semi-employment in terms of you could write two or three articles a week and that was money I could count on.

And the right-wing people were like, “Oh, this guy’s a bad guy. Don’t publish him.” And [my editors] weren’t saying, “Oh, you’re a bad person.” They were just like, “Oh, I hate cancel culture, but we’re gonna fire you anyway.” [laughs]

People just don’t necessarily treat their writers that well. I mean, the whole reason to hire freelance people is because you can fire them, you know, without really having to do anything.

So let’s talk about what’s going right. We were on a panel together to talk about Substack, and you’re making good money there.

I started writing for Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice, which is a huge Substack. He has a huge subscription list. And I’m basically writing op-eds for Aaron, who’s fantastic. Like, in my 20 years of experience, he’s one of the best handful of editors I’ve worked for. It’s great to work for him, and because of Substack’s network effects, that means a lot of people find [my Substack] through him, which means that I kind of have a sustainable income stream on Substack. It’s around $36,000 a year, $37,000 a year. I still need to get other income, but that’s a good cushion if things fall through.

But I don’t necessarily know that Substack’s gonna last forever either. They don’t really tell you what they’re doing, but I saw a dramatic decrease in free subscribers coming in earlier this year. I mean, basically, I kind of flatlined. I was getting as many people in as were leaving. And then I had a post that went semi-viral, and I got a couple hundred more subscribers. And now I’m back to kind of flat-lining again.

I’m not panicked. I still have new people finding me, I still have people paying. But it’s kind of an indication that, you know, Substack can f— you. [laughs] You know?

That’s the sort of thing I’ve been worried about all along and why I would not move my newsletters to Substack.

I mean, I know Aaron, so I feel like if I really had a problem, I could probably get help. But it doesn’t make you feel stable. It doesn’t make you feel, “Oh, I found the one true solution and I can just ride this to retirement,” right? My livelihood is dependent on these people who I don’t trust or like. That’s not that different than, like, any kind of job. But it’s precarious.

What else are you earning from these days?

I do writing for Mariame Kaba, who’s an anti-prison activist, and she’s amazing. And that’s kind of regular. And we’re friends, and she’s also an amazing boss. I have a couple things that feel stable or stable-ish. But you’re also constantly trying to find new outlets. Whenever I’m like, “Holy sh—, I’m doomed,” my wife is like, “Well, you’ve said that before and it always works out.”

Let’s say you’re at a writer’s conference or some industry event, and a fresh-faced grad walks up to you and they say, “I want to start freelance writing.” What would you tell them?

The best preparation for being a freelance writer, the absolute best thing, the thing that will ensure success and ensure financial stability, is to be born rich.

And if you can’t be born rich, you should marry somebody who’s rich. And if you can’t do either of those things, you’re kind of screwed. [laughs] The way the industry is now, I couldn’t in good conscience recommend anybody do this.

You know, one of the things that sort of keeps you going when you’re a writer is that you have dream jobs. You’re like, “Oh, I would love to do that.” Right? I mean, maybe I’ll never get there, but it’s nice to think about maybe getting there at some point. Now it’s not my own employment that’s disappearing but all the dream jobs.

So what do you aspire to now?

I just aspire to getting to retirement. That’s really where I’m at. I wanna be able to have an income for another 10 years. There aren’t any staff jobs, and the ones there are, people just get fired. Looking at the Washington Post now, all these respected columnists and writers who worked there for years, they all had to leave. They go to Substack, the New Republic has picked up a bunch.

You’re competing with the editors you once worked for, it seems.

Right, right. You’re competing with people who have been staff writers for years or decades. Or if they’re like, “We wanna be young and hip,” they’ll hire somebody who’s young and hip. Which isn’t me. I’m old, I’ve been doing this forever [laughs]. You just hope that you can sort of scrabble along for another 10 years.

You know, I’d love to feel like Substack will just keep growing, and eventually I can transition to just doing that full time. And then retire, and I can keep writing a little. But I don’t really believe in it. I don’t think Substack’s gonna be around for another 10 years in that way.

Well, shoot. I thought we would end on something encouraging.

I can’t really encourage people. I wish I could. I try to point young writers toward editors who might help, but there’s fewer and fewer people. It’s all been devastated, and that’s a problem for theaters, it’s a problem for film, it’s a problem for museums, it’s a problem for local music scenes. Like, anybody who wants to make art or write about art, this stuff has all collapsed.

It wouldn’t take that much money from Democratic funders to revive that. Like, if they took the money that they’re spending on trying to find a liberal Joe Rogan, and they said, “Wait, we have this entire infrastructure. If we’d only support it…” Part of that is that local weeklies used to write about politics, right? So you’d have lots of arts coverage and then you’d have progressive politics, and it was all sort of in one place, and that helps people form an identity around culture and progressive politics.

Democrats have a lot to worry about, but even at the local level, I mean, there’s just no real interest in funding arts or funding writing, treating it as a public good. There’s no real sense that anybody cares, right? We can’t even defend public broadcasting.

Or libraries. [IMLS was one of the first federal agencies to be cut by the Trump administration in 2025. Learn more.]

Exactly. Even in the best case scenario … it looks pretty bleak. Everybody’s getting rid of their critics. There were content mill jobs where people would get started in freelance writing, and those were exploitive and horrible jobs. But it’s even worse now if there’s some sort of AI slop quasi-review, which is just there to get clicks and maybe let people know some movie exists.

Note from Jane: Are you a freelance writer? How do you make it work? Let us know in the comments.