“Writer’s Rights will establish Cohen as the leading authority on freelance journalism for many years to come”

— Ursula Huws, University of Hertfordshire

Writers' Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age

As media industries undergo rapid change, the conditions of media work are shifting just as quickly, with an explosion in the number of journalists working as freelancers. Although commentary frequently lauds freelancers as ideal workers for the information age – adaptable, multi-skilled, and entrepreneurial – Nicole Cohen argues that freelance media work is increasingly precarious, marked by declining incomes, loss of control over one’s work, intense workloads, long hours, and limited access to labour and social protections.

— Publishers Weekly

“Cohen has crafted a surprisingly hopeful, decidedly thorough treatise on shifting power structures and business ethics in a field that’s constantly reinventing itself.”

Writers’ Rights provides context for freelancers’ struggles and identifies the points of contention between journalists and big business. Through interviews and a survey of freelancers, Cohen highlights the paradoxes of freelancing, which can be simultaneously precarious and satisfying, risky and rewarding. She documents the transformation of freelancing from a way for journalists to resist salaried labour in pursuit of autonomy into a strategy for media firms to intensify exploitation of freelance writers’ labour power, and presents case studies of freelancers’ efforts to collectively transform their conditions.

A groundbreaking and timely intervention into debates about the future of journalism, organizing precariously employed workers, and the transformation of media work in the digital age, Writers’ Rights makes clear what is at stake for journalism’s democratic role when the costs and risks of its production are offloaded onto individuals.

  • “This is a lucid, informative and passionate defence of the central role that journalists continue to play in enriching democratic debate and a valuable addition to the literature on self-employment more broadly.”

    — LSE Review of Books

  • “Research like Cohen’s is becoming more pressing as freelancing and other forms of precarious employment permeate the culture industry.”

    —  Media International Australia

  • “By bringing Marx into her analysis, Cohen allows us to see freelance writing as both a site of struggle and a space of potential change.”

    —  Canadian Journal of Media Studies

  • “Writers’ Rights is a stellar contribution to the political economy of communications. Holistic, historical, geographical, moral, critical, dialectical, and guided by praxis, it is a paragon of the political economy of communications approach and an expression of its continuing analytical and explanatory power.”

    —  Journal of Labor and Society