MAJ Archives
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.
May 4, 2002
Philip Moscovitch
Freelance Writer
Glen Margaret, Nova Scotia
writer@moscovitch.comI never really chose to become a journalist. I chose to become a writer, then wound up falling into journalism almost inadvertently.
Early on, I had aspirations of becoming a literary writer. I did a creative writing degree at Concordia but then went on to an MA in the history and philosophy of religion, and briefly considered an academic career.
Meanwhile, during my undergrad years, I had started freelancing. A friend (Montreal Gazette writer Andy Riga, who was then a journalism student) got me involved with the student paper, and taught me how to write a news story. My first had the scintillating headline, "Slovenian Youth Journal Banned."
As soon as I sold my first story (to the Concordia public relations paper Thursday Report) I was hooked. Suddenly, writing didn't just mean struggling to publish poems that hardly anyone would read. It meant money, and it meant getting to meet all kinds of interesting people.
After finishing my MA, I got a job as a writer/editor in marketing at the National Film Board. For the next few years, I worked full-time while continuing to build my freelance portfolio but I realized I just wasn't cut-out for 9 to 5 work. I quit the job, moved with my wife and kids to a rural area outside of Halifax, and began to freelance full-time.
While I do journalism, I'm not a journalist exclusively. I also write web sites and marketing and promotional materials for companies; I research and write documentary films; I translate from French to English; and I write the "Daisy Dreamer" comic strip for Chickadee magazine (aimed at kids between six and nine years old).
The thing I love most about my work is that it immerses me in new worlds all the time. When I was working on the documentary series Dogs With Jobs, I got to spend time talking to women at a federal penitentiary in Nova Scotia, and I learned how to train a bomb-sniffing dog. Writing narration for Lost (which aired on CBC-TV's, The Nature of Things) I learned that there is a whole science to finding people who get lost in the woods, and that Nova Scotians are world leaders in that science.
The biggest challenges for freelancers these days are money and maintaining control of copyright. So many magazines want your copyright now or, if not copyright, then they want so many rights that copyright bcomes nearly meaningless. Resist their efforts. If you sign over copyright to a story it's gone forever. Forget about ever re-selling the piece, or even using it in a book you've written.
That said, writing is a great life. Thanks to communications technology, you can live in a rural area while writing for clients (and interviewing sources) just about anywhere in the world.
