Meet a Journalist

A journalist's profile, stories and career in the field of journalism. Know a journalist who should be profiled here? Send an e-mail to Janet E. Bardon

September 30, 2000
Kevin Yarr
Freelancer
Charlottetown, PE
k.yarr@pei.sympatico.ca

When I started my third year of engineering at university I knew I didn't want to be an engineer, but I had no idea what I did want to be, so I carried on. Just for fun, I volunteered at CKDU, Dalhousie University's campus radio station. I became entertainment editor and was quickly hooked.

I knew what I wanted to do.

My career has turned down side roads since then, including four years in England, where I had the wrong accent to work in radio, and so worked in marketing for a publishing company. I came back to Canada in 1993 to find CBC Radio facing funding cuts and not in a hiring mood. Private radio news departments were being reduced to wire copy reading services. If I was going to tell the stories I wanted to tell it looked as if I would need to find a place outside of radio to tell them.

I found magazines. Freelancing for magazines is an outrageously difficult way to make a living. I have joked that one of the greatest assets of a freelancer is a spouse with a steady income, but it's not really a very funny joke. I was four years at it before I was making a living. Even today, with credits in national and international publications and regular work in the region's two most prominent magazines, I can take nothing for granted.

My timing in taking up writing for magazines, 1994, did not make earning a living any easier. This was the year the World Wide Web was born, and magazines were amongst the first to search for ways to take advantage of this new medium. Unfortunately, publishers found it expedient to pay nothing extra to freelancers to post material on the Web, and so destroyed a comfortable and highly functional tradition in the publisher/freelancer relationship. Previously, publishers paid to use freelance material once, and freelancers were free to use it again. Reselling work was one way freelancers dealt with relatively low pay from magazines.

Now, many publishers want freelancers to subsidize their Web experiments. Some new contracts demand all rights to freelance material without further compensation to the writer. Protection of copyright is a big challenge in the Internet era, and it will be some time before new business models are fully developed to deal with this new medium. To help ensure the model is developed in favour of writers, I have joined the Periodical Writers Association of Canada, one of the leading organizations in the fight for writers' rights.

There are easier ways to make a living, even in journalism, which should be no one's idea of a get rich career, but there is no better way to tell the stories you want to tell, the way you want to tell them. With thousands of titles to write for, most of your stories will find a home.