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In 2017 I left the newsroom & started freelancing & the majority of editors I have worked with over the past two years have been absolutely brilliant but I have also battled everything from bullying to no response on commissioned work for months & on other pieces...still no pay
However this is the first time that I felt the need to publicly comment on a publication and perhaps I feel the need to even more because of the difficult times freelancers and all of us are in right now financially and mentally
I was contacted by @NewNaratif asking for pitches. They picked up the story I pitched and we discussed the brief and I submitted an article based on the commissioned brief which included interviewing four people amid a Covid-19 lockdown
They emailed back a week after I had submitted & said they decided they didn’t want to publish it and would pay a $50 kill fee. Upon prompting them on why this was and why I hadn’t received any feedback or edits & sharing with them the commissioned brief again, they said
“I am sorry you feel hard done by...New Naratif decides to 'kill' pieces for many different reasons. Most of those reasons have nothing to do with the quality of a piece. In your case I can state quite clearly that your piece is excellent. But it's not for us
After doing this for over two years, we've been developing a clearer idea of what a "New Naratif article" is, This is highly subjective and it means that sometimes we decide to move on from perfectly good pieces. Sometimes we kill a piece that we might have taken a year ago.”
I am sharing this experience in hope that other journalists do not risk their personal safety & time to report for a publication who commissions on the off chance that they might publish the piece. And when they don’t - offer $50 for four days work reporting during Coronavirus.
I should add that I offered to integrate their feedback in another draft, now that I have received it but they declined and they again declined to pay more then $50.