DATELINE: HONG KONG

I was able to hold them [my publishers] hostage! : Dave Lindorff, a freelance foreign correspondent who had been told once too often that his cheque was in the mail.

Introduction : Freelance journalism offers reporters escape from the daily grind of formula news stories. But freelance reporters often have a tenuous link with editors who sometimes misunderstand stories and publishers who often forget to pay. Dave Lindorff became a freelancer in 1979 . He spent a year in Shanghai as a Fulbright sponsored journalism professor before coming to Hong Kong in 1992.
Lindorff: I did a piece for the Nation that was based on an interview I did with Han Dong Fang on China and the editor of the Nation which is a left wing journal in the US, came back and said that she thought his view was to apocalyptic in terms of China's future. He has an apocalyptic view of China and I think there is a lot of validity to it. His notion being that the labour situation is in crisis in China and it threatens to blow the party out of the water, at which point all kinds of possibilities arise including the break up of China. That's fairly apocalyptic but I don't think it is an unreasonable or irrational view. But the view at the Nation was that it was further than they wanted to go. They thought it put them out on a limb, even though the focus of the piece was on Han Dong Fang .

Knight: Were you expected to change the quotes?

Lindorff: I've argued with them and we are going to use the piece. I agreed to soften the conclusions so that it is clear that it is his view on the future of China.

Knight: Do freelancers have less power over what goes into print than full time correspondents?

Lindorff: I have always felt free-er as a freelance writer. There are two grounds for that. One is that you don't have to take a position of a publication that you don't like because you don't have to stay with them, you can move to another one. If the publication is not happy with the piece you are doing, you can move the piece. As a staff person, you can't do that. I could count on one hand the number of pieces I have had killed in fifteen years. I manage to market them to another publication so that they see the light of day which is better than my record in daily journalism. Pieces would just die for one reason or another.

I would also argue that as a freelancer, I have to sell a piece before I do it. I either get an assignment from an editor and they generated the idea in which case I know where we are going with the story before I take it. If I am selling the story, I have to make a fairly good pitch before I do it. If they don't like it, I am not doing it in the first place for them.

Knight: So what's the worst thing about working as a freelance?

Lindorff: Late payment. Last year I ended up with one publications owing me US$10,000. They kept saying, "The cheque is in the mail. The cheque is in the mail". I never paid attention to it when the cheque never arrived, because I have my wife's income too. It built up when I wasn't looking. When I realised and went back and added it up I said, " Oh God! This has added up to a phenomenal amount of money". I had a new assignment from them and finished it. I waited until deadline day and said, " This is all sitting in my computer and it is not coming to you until I receive the cheque for US$10,000." By then it was part of a package of stories and I was really holding up their production process. There was no way they could fill that hole. I got the checque by express mail. I was able to hold them hostage.

Alan Knight

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