Navigating the freelance life: How perceptions of newswork mediate work-related stressors of self-employed journalists

Abstract

This study explores how Dutch self-employed journalists’ perceptions of what newswork is moderate or exacerbate three health-compromising stressors they experience on the job: lack of reciprocity, low organizational justice and high work demands. An inductive analysis of 47 semi-structured interviews with both earlier and later career Dutch self-employed journalists suggests that a traditional newsroom-centric perception of journalism is related to experiencing languish on the job. On the other hand, freelance reporters with a more flexible or “liquidˮ perception of newswork are related to flourishing in today’s complex, multi-platform news industry. As such, this research appreciates how the precarious organization of work for many in the news industry shapes and influences freelancers’ perceptions of newswork as well as their well-being. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings for journalism studies and education.

Introduction

This study explores how Dutch self-employed journalists’ perceptions of what newswork is moderate or exacerbate stressors they experience on the job. Self-employed journalists work in challenging circumstances due to an ongoing shift of risks at work from institutions to individuals amid a global rise of “atypical” media work (Örnebring and Ferrer Conill, 2016; Rick and Hanitzsch, 2024). Due to the ‘radical responsibilization of the workforce’ (Fleming, 2017 quoted in Norbäck and Styhre, 2019), freelancers tend to have low and unstable incomes, limited access to social benefits, and face general career uncertainty (Cohen, 2016; Örnebring, 2018; Rick and Hanitzsch, 2024). According to a recent survey among members of the Dutch Journalists’ Association, 40% of journalists in the country work as freelancers. For many, the income they generate from journalistic work is insufficient to make ends meet (Kivits, 2024). Beyond the Netherlands, there is consensus that freelance journalists face precarity (Chadha and Steiner, 2021; Örnebring, 2018). Within this study, we refer to precarious working circumstances when self-employed journalists “fall significantly below a level of income, protection and social integration due to their work, which is recognized in contemporary society as the standardˮ (Brinkmann et al., 2006 17 quoted in Rick and Hanitzsch, 2024, 202).

Despite the omnipresence of precarity, research suggests that many self-employed journalists do not consider quitting. Passionate involvement with the profession and perceptions of autonomy - the feeling of being able to decide when to work and what to work on - are self-reported reasons why journalists value freelancing (Edstrom and Ladendorf, 2012; Mathisen and Knudsen, 2022). Such emphasis on the “free” in freelancing is also found in the Netherlands. The aforementioned survey reports that four out of five Dutch freelancers prefer to maintain this status (Kivits, 2024).

The commitment of many freelancers to continue has considerable health consequences. Precarious working conditions are related to more days of poor physical and mental health (Bhattacharya and Ray, 2021). This is also found explicitly in the working lives of self-employed journalists (Ertel et al., 2005; Springer and Rick, 2025). Reports on the mental health and well-being of journalists in recent years - during and after the COVID-19 pandemic - suggest that reporters tend to score high on depression, stress, and burnout, and sometimes even consider suicide due of circumstances at work (Aoki et al., 2013; Posetti et al., 2020; Pew Research Centre, 2022). Several recent high-profile works document a mental health crisis among reporters around the world (Bossio et al., 2024; Storm, 2024). It seems that the “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011) with which so many pursue their stressful, uncertain career in journalism while fully appreciating how problematic and even destructive this may be is cause for real concern.

A freelancer is not a one-size-fits-all category of journalist. There is consensus within earlier literature that freelancers’ precarious working conditions inform and shape their perceptions of newswork in particular ways (Rick and Hanitzsch, 2024) Mediated by the necessity to do work “beyond journalism” (Deuze and Witschge, 2020) to make ends meet (such as PR work and teaching), these perceptions have been typified as “blurring lines between freelance journalists and self-employed media workers” (Josephi & O’Donnell, 2023) and “boundaryless” (Hudson, 2025) in the United States. Navigating between “idealism and entrepreneurship” (Mathisen, 2019) in Norway and “hybrid or fluid” in Germany (Gollmitzer, 2023). All this research highlights freelancers’ complex, dynamic, and situational sense-making of what working in journalism is (or should be) in conjunction with their precarious position within their country’s news industry. This insight aligns with earlier fundamental calls to “put the work (back) in journalism studies” (Siegelbaum and Thomas, 2016 386) to appreciate how freelance newswork is experienced and redefined within a general context of ongoing flexibilization and casualization of work (Cohen, 2019; Ornebring, 2018) and to “blow up the newsroom” (Anderson, 2011) as journalism studies’ central unit of analysis given the rising number of self-employed journalists worldwide

This project contributes to the existing body of work by exploring the working lives of Dutch freelance journalists, with a specific emphasis on how their perceptions of newswork and subsequent career navigation choices mediate their experiences of stressors related to living “the freelance life”. Within the context of this study, we define perceptions as individual reporters’ beliefs, expectations, and understandings of what journalism and being a journalist is (or should be). The geographical context of this study is relevant, given that the Netherlands holds a forerunner position in the flexibilization of creative labor worldwide (Been, 2025).

This paper is structured as follows: We first outline key work-related psychosocial risk factors for stress-related mental disorders from general literature on occupational health. We consider how such stressors occur specifically in the working lives of self-employed journalists. This provides the scaffolding for our argument that freelancers’ perceptions of newswork mediate structural stressors related to working as journalists in a self-employed capacity. A report on the data collection, analytical procedure, and subsequent analysis ensues. In the results section, we articulate two archetypal perceptions of newswork in self-employed journalism: a newsroom-centric perception and a liquid journalism perception, which we discuss in tandem with the earlier literature on the relation between freelancers’ perceptions of journalism and career navigation. In conclusion, we explore how this study can aid individual self-employed journalists to a more autonomous and agentic experience, making it less likely for them to languish on the job (Beam and Spratt, 2009; Bossio et al., 2024). Furthermore, we evaluate how our findings support the post-constructivist position of journalism conceptualized as more than institutions, techniques, routines, and a variety of actors. It is also constructed in the heads and hearts of its practitioners, and their affective individual and shared imagination of the “world”of journalism (Lewis and Zamith, 2017) is generative of a distinct material reality of newswork.

Health-compromising stressors in freelance newswork

Meta-reviews from the field of occupational medicine suggest there are three key work-related psychosocial risk factors for stress-related mental disorders, which together explain 60% to 90% of cases where circumstances on any job make people sick: lack of reciprocity, low organizational justice, and unusually high job demands (see reviews of the field in Nieuwenhuijsen et al., 2010; Harvey et al., 2017; Van der Molen et al., 2020). As we recognize that anyone can struggle at times, and increased awareness efforts may lead people to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems (Foulkes and Andrews, 2023), it is important to consider what aspects of freelance newswork exactly predict whether people can get sick on the job. Below, we appreciate the specific instantiation of the three risk factors in the working lives of self-employed journalists. The relevance of outlining these key stressors lies in their prevalence in the everyday, mundane experience of being a freelance journalist, offering us a chance to consider how different perceptions of newswork among self-employed journalists may serve to moderate or exacerbate such experiences as they navigate the world of journalism.

Lack of reciprocity

A lack of reciprocity between one’s effort and the kind of rewards available at work entails a form of low status control, such as a general lack of career progression prospects and job insecurity. Journalists often bring their “whole selves” to the job, meaning that journalism, to them, is not something you do, but are (Bossio et al., 2024; Josephi & O’Donnell, 2023). Such passionate engagement with newswork has been signalled in research on freelance journalists as a reason to continue their work despite precarious working circumstances (Gollmitzer, 2023; Lukan and Čehovin Zajc, 2023). These perceptions of self feel particularly acute when experiencing or perceiving little or no relation between individual performance and getting, having, or keeping a job or client as a self-employed journalist (Cohen, 2016; Salamon, 2019). Self-employed journalists have been typified as having “patchwork” (Alacovska, 2021) careers in attempts to navigate a “gig-economy” (Cohen, 2016), signalling freelancers’ lived experience of “permanence in impermanence” forever flexibilized on the outside as well as on the inside of news institutions (Van ‘t Hof and Deuze, 2023 191). Following Norbäck (2022) this means that the passionate involvement of freelancers may not result in career advancement, but instead lead to career maintenance, “where they direct focus and effort at avoiding downward career movement rather than achieving upward mobility” (1). A rare study examining psychosocial working conditions of freelance media professionals in Germany suggests that all of the above affects individuals’ mental health. Drawing on survey data, the study reports that poor effort-reward balance was the most frequent self-reported factor contributing to mental health difficulties of self-employed journalists (Ertel et al., 2005).

Low organizational justice

Organizational justice refers to the extent to which professionals perceive work-related procedures, interactions, and outcomes as fair, including the justness of interpersonal treatment (Nieuwenhuijsen et al., 2010). Using interviews and survey data from within Dutch newsrooms, Porcu et al. (2022) argue that so-called “flex people” - a category encompassing freelancers - are situated at the bottom of newsroom hierarchies and often excluded from meaningful decision-making power over their work. This structural marginalization is compounded by the fact that most Dutch journalistic media outlets are owned by a handful of media companies, where signing non-negotiable, “rights-grabbing” (Salamon, 2016) contracts is a precondition for freelance work. International studies corroborate the limited bargaining power of freelance journalists, particularly in terms of remuneration (for an overview, see Rick and Hanitzsch, 2024). Freelancers frequently face opaque and arbitrarily applied tariff structures, leaving them little recourse or leverage to negotiate better pay (Cohen, 2016). In the Netherlands, perceived injustices regarding pay and contract terms are a central issue for freelancers, serving as a catalyst for collective actions (such as walkouts and writing up demand letters to upper management) by Dutch freelance journalists in 2020 to protest precarious working conditions (Kivits, 2024).

High job demands

Although many jobs and different kinds of work can place a high demand on a person, job strain, as expressed in the combination of (enduring) high demands and low job control, can be quite acute and a reason to leave the field of journalism (Ivask, 2017). Self-employed journalists balance working for a job with constantly seeking and preparing for their next opportunity. Literature suggests that this endeavour consists of a considerable amount of unpaid “work for labor” (Standing, 2011) such as managing personal brands on social media (Brems et al., 2017), networking with peers and clients to get jobs (Norbäck and Styhre, 2019), and writing up funding proposals for securing foundation funding (Van ‘t Hof and Deuze, 2022). In the Netherlands, one-third of all hours worked by freelance journalists have been self-reported as unpaid (Kivits, 2024). Given all of this, freelance journalists are prone to experience limited work-life balance as being a self-employed journalist “never stopsˮ (Brouwers and Witschge, 2019), and it is nearly impossible to “switch offˮ (Hayes and Silke, 2018).

In an already demanding profession, facing one or a combination of these specific self-employed journalist related stressors is challenging for anyone, all in the context of a professional culture where speaking out about any of these issues is generally frowned upon, or deemed to be unsafe for fears of being seen as weak, not being up to the task of being a journalist possibly leading to a loss of clients (Greenberg et al., 2009; Porcu et al., 2022) all while often receiving little support and care from the organizations they work for (Šimunjak and Menke, 2023). It is here where individual self-employed journalists’ beliefs, expectations, and understandings of what journalism and being a journalist is forcefully come into play to make sense of and navigate the precarious character of their work.

Methodology

This research relies on a secondary analysis of interview data for a practical handbook for self-employed reporters (Arends and Van ‘t Hof, 2020). Between 2017 and 2019, the first author (with Sjoerd Arends) conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with fifty self-employed Dutch journalists. Semi-structured interviews were chosen because they provide flexibility and interactivity during the data-gathering process, to “generate interviewees’ accounts of their perspectives, perceptions, experiences, understandings, interpretations and interactionsˮ (Mason, 2004 1020). The initial project’s focus was to explore how self-employed journalists make ends meet when covering stories that matter most to them. Our secondary analysis is a supplementary analysis to pursue “a more in-depth analysis of an emergent issue or aspect of the data, that was not addressed or was partially addressed in the primary study” (Heaton, 2008 39). In this secondary analysis, the aspect of the data emphasized is how self-employed journalists discuss what newswork should be like and how this informs their navigational choices trough the news industry. All interviewees have consented to the use of their transcripts for future research.

Our rationale for revisiting the dataset developed in two ways. First, in recent years, we have become increasingly aware of the rising mental health crisis in journalism. This is driven by a surge of research initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted the stressful conditions journalists encountered during this period, prompting us to rethink earlier explanations for the patterns and themes we found in the data (Bossio et al., 2024; Storm, 2024). This assumption is corroborated by a wave of industry reports published before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, documenting journalists’ mental health crisis (for an overview see Deuze, 2025). Second, although COVID-19 and its consequences heightened awareness of journalists’ mental health within the industry and journalism studies, we contend that, for many self-employed journalists, the pandemic represented more of an anomaly than a fundamental change in their work organization and experience. We acknowledge the dire situation faced by many during this period, as documented in recent research and reports. For instance, Swedish freelance journalists lost work from one day to the next when COVID began, reporting increasing feelings of precarity (Norbäck 2022). Josephi and O’Donnell (2023), drawing on interviews with Australian self-employed journalists conducted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, argue that “many freelancers lost their regular contracts and had to resort to jobs outside journalism, although this pattern was already established prior to the pandemic” (140). The latter is corroborated by a longitudinal study of the Australian labour market for journalists (Dawson et al., 2021). Similarly, a report by the Thomas Reuters Foundation (2021) highlights how journalists in the Global South, faced a significant loss of work. That said, research suggests that the disruption caused by the pandemic was short-lived for freelance journalists. Gollmitzer (2023), relying on longitudinal interviews with German freelance journalists, argues that they report little change in their living arrangements, employment status, or economic context compared to several years after the pandemic began. Similarly, a comparison between survey data from Dutch freelance journalists in 2018 and 2024 suggests continuity regarding the precarious working circumstances of self-employed journalists. Both studies report that roughly one-third of freelance journalists have yearly earnings below the Dutch minimum wage (Kivits, 2024; Vinken and Mariën, 2019). In the 2024 report, the principal investigator argues that the Dutch labor market in journalism returned to the “old normal” (6) from before the pandemic. We see no reason to assume that the news industry has undergone massive changes between 2017 and 2024, other than an acceleration of trends we signal throughout this paper, especially regarding the casualization and flexibilization of labor in newswork (Örnebring, 2018). As Hudson (2025) argues, reflecting on her interviews with USA-based freelance photojournalists during the pandemic: “the data may very well speak to unique experiences and feelings presented by the COVID-19 pandemic” (953). Considering all the above, we believe our dataset allows for a focus on the core and constant factors of freelance work that prevailed through COVID-19 and after, compared to recent studies that are coloured by the heightened stress and particular experiences of working during the pandemic (Crowley and Garthwaite, 2020).

We included the transcripts of 47 interviews in our secondary analysis, excluding three because these reporters did not work in the Netherlands at the time of the interview. All interviewees had at least 5 years of experience working as a journalist at the time of the interview. Except for three journalists, all freelancers had prior experience working within the walls of newsrooms in various capacities: as interns, doing freelance (editing) shifts, and being (temporarily) employed. 32 journalists identified as male, and 15 journalists identified as female. The interviewees were grouped into two categories: earlier-career freelancers (aged 35 and under, 22 participants) and later-career freelancers (over 35, 25 participants). The interviews lasted between 45 and 120 minutes. The themes of the interview protocol were job motivation, work happiness, work routines, self-identification as a journalist, work-life balance, finances, and future career perspectives. For the analysis, we used an inductive thematic research approach, continuously iterating between relevant literature and the interview data (following Braun and Clarke, 2006). This approach enabled us to code for our focus on beliefs of journalists about their work and how these relate to experiences of key work-related psychosocial risk factors.

Findings

We found that self-employed journalists’ perceptions of newswork consist of interlinked core beliefs about journalism in general, everyday newswork, and what a career path in journalism is (or should be). The findings section formulates two archetypal perceptions held by the interviewees, which we term a “newsroom-centric” and a “liquid” perception of journalism. In the “newsroom-centric” perception, what journalism is gets reduced to what happens in the newsrooms of traditional news organizations. As such, the key propositions of this perception align with Wahl-Jorgensen’s (2009) observation that much of Journalism Studies is limited to the examination of newsrooms in legacy media organizations, inspiring the name of the perception. The name of the “liquid” perception is guided by Deuze’s (2008) argument in its assumption that “uncertainty, flux, change, unpredictability (…) structurally define or even determine the way people, media, and society interact” (860), which embodied notion of “permanent impermanence” inspires and informs the reporters with this belief-state. What follows is an elucidation of both perceptions and how, informed by this perception, the subsequent ways of practicing journalism mediate stressors in newswork.

The newsroom-centric perception

Journalists with a newsroom-centric perception of newswork believe journalism has a “core” represented by legacy newsrooms and other institutional structures that they consider “real” journalism (see Witschge et al., 2019). Interviewees use journalistic “god terms” (Zelizer, 2004) like “objectivity”, “autonomy” and “truth” to describe their ideal-type of journalism and what they want to do on a day-to-day basis. Individual meaning-making of what “good” journalism is and what newswork “should be” is thus benchmarked by an almost literal reading of occupational ideology (Deuze, 2025). For them, the core of journalism is institutionally represented by so-called “quality” regional and national (online) newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news organizations appealing to a general audience.

This “newsroom-centricity” (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2009) of journalists makes legacy news outlets their preferred (and often exclusive) clients. To publish their work in legacy media outlets, self-employed journalists adopt a cyclical workflow: brainstorm, pitch, negotiate, create, invoice, and repeat. Interviewed journalists with such a perception tend to work as generalists, producing stories about a variety of topics. In the words of one interviewee: “as a journalist, you can follow your interest. On one occasion, you write about history and another time about psychology.” Another interviewee gets more specific, while still covering a wide range of issues from a broad perspective of public value:

“I write stories about science because I think it is important for people to be informed about the latest developments.”

The cyclical approach towards newswork while exclusively targeting clients perceived as being part of the “core” of journalism can exacerbate stressors on the job, such as a lack of reciprocity. This is because income is dependent on continuously coming up with and pitching new story ideas for legacy media organisations without any guaranteed success or repeat assignments. One interviewee eventually abandoned the cyclical approach towards newswork because he “could not take the constant pressure anymore.” Another interviewee says:

“I am always thinking about new stories. I don’t really know what weekends are, because everything I do and everyone I interact with could inspire the next story.”

For self-employed journalists, the stress associated with continuous speculative labour of pitching story ideas gets compounded by the generally low pay that legacy media companies offer. Making ends meet while working exclusively for legacy clients means having to maintain a near-constant stream of new stories just to stay afloat. One interviewee’s assessment suggests that this approach to newswork is akin to the experience of moral injury (Feinstein et al., 2018):

“While I was still working for legacy media organisations, at one point I felt that I was not really making journalism anymore (…) I did not care about the work at all anymore, when I handed it in, I never looked at it again.”

The data suggests that journalists who focus their work exclusively on legacy media are more likely to envision the work as something where quantity over quality reigns. Cohen (2016) describes this as journalism’s “precarity penalty”. Interviewees who work like this while refusing to sacrifice the quality of their work mention stress-inducing financial circumstances. One interviewee argues:

“It takes a long time to get familiar with a new subject, to interview all people and process its contents. Next, you must analyse all the information and write the article in a logical and interesting way. If I calculate how much I make per hour, then it is very little. (…) There have been times I asked my father to help me with the bills, which was very stressful.”

Despite the anxiety associated with financial precarity, journalists with a newsroom-centric perception hesitate to work for so-called “non-journalistic” clients, especially when these have strictly commercial aims. This is because they feel it could negatively influence their professional integrity. Interviewees with this perception describe non-journalistic information work as “the dark side” or downright “dirty work.” Having something other than work for legacy media organisations tends to be considered a personal failure to “make it work” in the world of journalism, leading journalists to “accept financial penalties associated with mostly pursuing journalistic work” (Gollmitzer, 2023 1026). When self-employed journalists do decide to take on non-journalistic work, a continuous process of “ethical boundary setting” (Gollmitzer, 2023) ensues, and considering whether they should “allow” themselves to do so adds additional strain and (perceived) reputation management to already highly pressured work demands. This corroborates earlier findings by Obermaier and Koch (2015), Mathisen (2019) and Springer and Rick (2025) that freelancers who do more PR work can experience “moral stress” (Ibid. 2) due to this conflicting with their perception of professional integrity.

In the interview sample, the cyclical and generalist approach to newswork, along with a reluctance to engage in work outside the “core” institutions of journalism, was shared by both earlier and later career freelancers regardless whether they spent a prolonged time working within the walls of newsrooms. This aligns with a point made by Deuze and Witschge (2020) that socialization within journalism not only occurs within legacy media institutions but also in the broader world or network of the profession, including at journalism schools, professional conventions, and freelancers’ shared workspaces.

In the interview data, it was primarily earlier career freelancers who still believed in a traditional career ladder in journalism, presupposing that seniority, merit, and experience will eventually “guide the professional toward higher positions in the office hierarchy” (Deuze and Witschge, 2018 7). This results in “hope labor” (Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013) where precarious working conditions are tolerated “due to some expected future reward” (Gollmitzer, 2023 2168). This reward is defined by earlier career interviewees as gaining an employed position at a legacy media organization, being granted prestigious recurring assignments, or receiving more pay. Because career progression is believed to be dependent on acceptance or rejection by particular organizations, journalists working within this model feel the stressors associated with low organizational justice quite acutely, as tariff structures, story assignments, promotion possibilities and other institutional policies tend to be experienced as non-transparent, unpredictable, even arbitrary. These findings corroborate those of a longitudinal study by Lukan and Čehovin Zajc (2023) of Slovenian journalists’ career navigation, finding that precariously employed journalists often engage in hope labor at the beginning of their careers, and changing their attitude when faced by the realities of working within the news industry for a prolonged amount of time.

Since succeeding as a journalist is perceived as closely related to working for legacy media organizations, the interviews suggest that freelancers who believe in linear careers are also more susceptible to lack of reciprocity. One journalist argues:

“I feel that a lot is expected from freelancers. They expect you to be always available, that you deliver beautiful stories when they need them. But as a freelancer, you are not really incorporated in the organization (…). You hand in your stories, and that’s it.”

The interview data suggest that both earlier and later career self-employed journalists do not feel like part of the news organization they, at least ideologically, hold in high regard. Most self-employed journalists rarely visit the newsrooms they work with. The paradoxical experience of being attached to a legacy news organization while at the same time not feeling seen by the same company was a commonly expressed feeling among all interviewees who internalized the various beliefs of the newsroom-centric perception. At the heart of this lies the lived experience of powerlessness over both one’s work as well as one’s future - a key reason for journalists to quit altogether (Mathews et al., 2023).

The liquid perception of newswork

Self-employed journalists with a liquid perception of the profession and industry are critically aware of the complex, dynamic and precarious nature of newswork, as well as the stifling nature of deterministic assumptions about what journalism “should be”, “should do” and who can be considered a “real” journalist. Their overall interpretation of journalism tends to be that of a richly diverse and highly dynamic field of work, driven by the same occupational ideology as their newsroom-centric counterparts - including the belief that journalism has core principles like objectivity, truth, and autonomy. As a result, self-employed journalists with a liquid perception feel freer to move away or beyond distinctions between fake or real journalism, legacy versus alternative news outlets, hard and soft news, and so on. Instead, these reporters adopt a more flexible notion of journalism, enabling individuals to develop an idiosyncratic interpretation of journalism that matches their personality, preferences, and intrinsic motivation. An example of this is a journalist in his forties who, after finding working for legacy media no longer fulfilling, decided to pursue other work. He now writes commissioned biographical stories to provide family members with a written memory of a loved one. This work is based on a profoundly personal interpretation of what journalism is:

“For me, journalism is telling the people about the people, that’s the interpretation I like the best (…) Now I make work that is meaningful to others. Not to a mass audience, but to a few people.”

What this interviewee and other interviewees who do more “traditional” or widely recognized newswork such as investigative journalism have in common is that they feel the freedom to determine what good journalism is to them, also when this means a lack of alignment with normative notions of what constitutes the “right” kind of journalism. These conceptions were shared by both earlier and later career interviewees, albeit with differing rationales. Earlier career self-employed journalists, in the words of one interviewee, reasoned that ‘since there were no jobs for them in formal institutions,’ it was up to them to evaluate and decide which kind of journalism was worth pursuing. Later career freelancers felt that freelancing freed them from institutional constraints and newsroom rituals and routines. One self-employed journalist with experience in various newsrooms argues:

“When you are part of an editorial staff, you ultimately end up being lived by it. Even if you have a really nice editorial team, you still end up with meetings. Office politics is everywhere.”

When asked why interviewees work in journalism, those with a liquid perception of the profession provide concrete topics and themes they cover, underlining why these stories matter most to them. One award-winning documentary filmmaker captures this sentiment:

“Making documentaries is not easy. The process of getting the finances together is also not easy. That’s why we only start a project when we are blown away by the subject matter. (…) This intrinsic motivation is the engine running every documentary we make.”

Another journalist, a freelance war reporter who spent a period of his life in a foster home before being adopted, articulates his intrinsic motivation for journalism from a deeply personal perspective: “I feel like I’ve been given a second chance. Therefore, I’ve always had the feeling that I had to give something back to others.” This inspired him to work on a Dutch television program about abandoned children and, later, as a war reporter. An earlier career journalist argues that he became a Formula 1 reporter because he did not want to end up “having a serious job like his father.” What all these journalists share is a clearly expressed intrinsic motivation as a point of reference when making sense of newswork. Where and how their stories end up and to what extent this aligns with “traditional” notions of what journalism is matters less than their personal drive, which in turn enables these journalists to navigate the precarious reality of working as a freelancer in a less prescribed way as their newsroom-oriented counterparts.

The flexible approach towards journalism moderates the psychosocial risk factor of unusually high work demands. For instance, non-journalistic work is not necessarily internalised as something that “real” journalists should never do, but rather as making it possible to work on stories that matter to them. Such cross-subsidizing of work, where people do work they have to do in order to do the kind of work they want to do, was highlighted by several interviewees. A journalist in his twenties wrote PR stories for an energy company while working on a longread on political developments in Eastern Europe:

“The work was fine, but not the work I dreamed about. It made sure I had a financial base. I knew I could pay my rent, which gave peace of mind.”

One senior investigative journalist calls temporary editing shifts in newsrooms an “oasis”:

“When I’m done with a big story, I always must decompress for a while. These shifts enable that for me.”

Mindsets like these align with what Gollmitzer (2023) calls a “hybrid or fluid professional identity” where journalists “juggle meaningful work that is precarious with non-journalistic work that pays better or is more stable” (1026). Similarly, Josephi and O’Donnell (2023) found that multiple award-winning Australian journalists “leveraged the material resources for their highly regarded journalistic work through other jobs” (152). Our interviews suggest that freelancers do not view the amount of work they do outside traditional journalism boundaries as reflecting on the quality and integrity of journalism they produce.

Journalists with a liquid perception seem to handle the industry’s lack of reciprocity more successfully, since the appreciation they get from their work is not dependent on acceptance of (editors and peers at) legacy media organizations, but rather on whether the work they do aligns with personal values, motivations, and ethics. While this mindset does not exclude working for legacy media organisations, their increased independence from legacy media furthermore somewhat shields them from the lack of organizational justice within the industry. Grounding a sense of self-worth in one’s intrinsic motivation rather than relying on “making it” within a particular newsroom aligns with Martela and Pessi’s (2018) analysis that the key dimensions of experiencing one’s work as meaningful and fulfilling are a sense of self-realization and broader purpose rather than institutional “belongingness and unification” (9).

Self-employed journalists with a liquid perception of the work and industry perceive their path through the profession as a portfolio-based or patchwork career, assembling a wide variety of experiences, clients and productions over time. Within the sample, both earlier and later career freelancers indicate to not necessarily desire employment within a media company, potentially freeing them from the pressure to have to protect or improve their position within (the hierarchy of) a newsroom. Journalists who perceive careers as a patchwork focus on complementary work, meaning that “workers strategically bundle different types of work together to increase earning and advance their careers” (Schieber, 2018: 2). Based on their intrinsic motivation, they aim to aggregate as much work as possible in direct relation to telling stories that matter most to them. Multiple journalists who used such a complementary work strategy argue in the interviews that this approach necessitates a move beyond publishing in one medium or focusing on one (legacy) media company, instead taking their accumulated knowledge and dossier as the centre of their business practice. This “liquid” way of tackling newswork enabled them to publish their work within as well as beyond the field of journalism, in writing as much as audio and video production, online and offline, thus using the digitization of newswork as an advantage to fulfil their own ambitions.

A core element of the work of a “liquid” journalist is to self-promote and do the kind of “relational labor” (Baym, 2015) necessary to connect with audiences, prospective clients and funders, as well as sources and other contacts. While such promotional practice is core to all forms of media work, managing one’s professional identity and work across multiple (digital) platforms and working environments becomes a tactical and time-consuming enterprise. This can include using the credentials of having work done for legacy news brands to increase awareness (and potential income) from other types of clients. One interviewee in his forties, whose self-proclaimed goal is to “spread reliable information about the Dutch energy transition,” explained this promotional work as follows:

“It certainly helps to get published by a well-known news brand. If I’m invited to speak somewhere, which usually pays significantly more than an article, I am regularly introduced as ajournalist who writes for [name of a quality news title].”

In sum, self-employed journalists with a liquid perception “found that the work they published across different channels does not exist in a vacuum but influences and feeds off each other” (Van ‘t Hof and Deuze, 2022 199). In the specific case of the example above, economic capital (in terms of remuneration) alone made it not worthwhile for the journalists to publish with a legacy news outlet. However, the symbolic capital of being associated with a quality news brand led to more opportunities, both financially and otherwise.

Intrinsically motivated interviewees with an explicit specialization - generally developed slowly over the course of years of dedicated and cross-subsidised work and therefore predominantly held more later career freelancers within the interview dataset - argued that, while still being critical of the industry’s low pay, their bond with such news organisations tends to be more reciprocal, typified by mutual benefit. More fundamentally, journalists with a liquid perception overall feel and seem to experience less powerlessness and more autonomy in their work, at least as expressed in our interviews.

Discussion

Given the mental health crisis among journalists, well-being and happiness at work have become crucial themes for journalism studies (Deuze, 2025). In this contribution, we first considered how key work-related psychosocial risk factors for stress-related mental disorders manifest in the working lives of freelance journalists. Following meta-reviews in the field of occupational medicine, we identified these risk factors as high work demands, lack of reciprocity, and low organizational justice. This led us to revisit earlier interviews with Dutch self-employed journalists to see how their different perceptions of freelance newswork influenced the experience of such risk factors. We hypothesized that different belief-states about the nature of freelance newswork either moderated or exacerbated structural stressors in journalism.

Based on our secondary analysis of interviews with Dutch self-employed journalists conducted just before the coronavirus crisis, we articulate two archetypal perceptions held by self-employed journalists: a newsroom-centred perception and a liquid journalism perception. A newsroom-centric perception makes it more likely for self-employed journalists to exacerbate the experience of stressors associated with psychosocial risk factors of newswork - in other words: to suffer more while doing the job. Their entire focus on getting onto the pages and in the reports of legacy news organizations perceived as solely responsible for publishing “real” or “quality” journalism made them more vulnerable to precarious working circumstances particularly experienced by freelancers.

Stressors associated with the already high work demands every self-employed journalist faces exacerbate because income is dependent on continuously having to come up with new story ideas all the time to pitch to newsrooms who offer low renumeration. Stressors associated with lack of reciprocity are exacerbated by the “hope labour” that performing well will lead to a gradual improvement of working conditions, a belief dominantly held by younger interviewees with less experience in the world of journalism. Similarly, stressors associated with low organizational justice exacerbate since one’s career progression is perceived as being dependent on acceptance or rejection by a limited range of legacy media organizations.

Self-employed journalists with a liquid perception of journalism seem more able to moderate stressors associated with newswork - in other words, to flourish while doing the job. Taking personal motivations as their main point of reference, they use the current complex, digitized, and multi-platform global news industry to gather, package, and market their topical and thematic expertise in a flexible variety of ways. Legacy news media are just another option for these self-employed journalists, certainly an important one, as publication with such brands allows them to raise awareness, gain recognition, and negotiate higher tariffs for their work throughout the media ecosystem.

Between these two archetypal perceptions of self-employed journalists of their work lies a gap between 1) the idea that there is coherence within the news industry exclusively embodied by newsrooms of legacy media organizations and 2) the everyday experience of newsworkers characterized by unpredictable flux and constant change while navigating persistently precarious working circumstances. As neither perspective on journalism is wrong, it seems to us that scholars have a responsibility to recognize how reporters navigate the frothy waters in this gap. Fundamentally, this study underlines that journalism does not just consist of various “objective” structures in the world - such as industries, companies, organizations, newsrooms and professional associations - nor is it solely made up of various “solid” routines, techniques and practices. As we and the recent literature on freelancers’ perceptions of newswork in other contexts within the Global North suggest, journalism is also shaped in the minds and hearts of its practitioners, and their individual and affective imagination generates a distinct material reality of newswork. An imagination that additionally directly influences whether individuals get sick on the job due to facing psychological risk factors.

This does not mean we naively suggest that self-employed journalists can “perceive” and “navigate” their individual way from being affected by the psychosocial risk factors of freelance newswork altogether. Structural improvements in mental health literacy and awareness of the precarious working circumstances self-employed journalists face within the news industry are necessary. This is especially true for younger practitioners who may enter the profession with expectations about journalistic conduct and career progression that are only compatible with permanent employment at a prestigious legacy media institution. Therefore, we agree with Nelson and Cohen’s (2025) call for a “labor turn” in journalism education to “inoculate students against the vagaries of the industry and better equip them to survive and thrive in precarious times” (32), especially since many of them will enter the field as freelancers.

Until then, we hope that our project contributes to a more wilful awareness for and among self-employed journalists to improve their work life, and for scholars to adopt a “more nuanced reassessment of creative work’s futurity” (Alacovska, 2019 1118). By embracing the complexity as well as agency in what it means (and what it takes) to “make it workˮ in the world of journalism, we see opportunities for deliberately moving beyond binary perceptions (such as real and fake, core and periphery) of what journalism is and should be like, grounded in everyday practices of the self-employed.