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Songs of the Doomed

Long before November 2008, when a panicked U.S. Congress scrambled for emergency measures to bail out fiscally damaged automobile and financial services giants, those who toiled in the freelance sector of the arts and entertainment community knew that an apocalypse was at hand.

Even in a sunny economic climate the daily struggles of a freelance writer are far from easy and recommended only to those with a thick skin and an easy tolerance for overflowing ashtrays, spilled coffee, impossible deadlines, past due notices from landlords and bill collectors, and an eternally rumbling gut from hunger or an ulcer or both – not to mention the punishing hangovers in the early years before the doctors told you to quit drinking if you care to preserve your liver.

Depression 2.0: Creative Strategies for Tough Economic Times

Cletus Nelson

(Process; US: Jun 2009)

 Amazon

In Depression 2.0: Creative Strategies for Tough Economic Times, author Cletus Nelson accurately describes the plight of those who live off the nine-to-five grid:

Successful freelancing requires energy and dedication. Some work assignments, especially if you’re working under a deadline, may prove more exhausting than a regular full-time job, and working weekends is not uncommon. Along with the tension-filled weeks when you’re struggling with a deadline, there may be dry periods when you can’t seem to land work. Living in the present won’t be an option. Once you’ve completed a project, no matter how tired you might be, you will need to redouble your energies and start looking for new assignments. “The check is in the mail” will become a familiar refrain, as freelancers often aren’t paid on time and sometimes will wait weeks or even months before payment is received.

Economists tell us that the major recession we are currently weathering began in December 2007. But back in the year 2000, when Cletus Nelson and I were enjoying success as freelance feature contributors to Eye magazine (a now defunct fringe and pop culture journal) and Michel Berandi’s now-defunct underground newspaper, Panik, there were already signs of trouble on the horizon.

The Ingram Book Group, the world’s largest wholesale distributor of book products since 1964, placed impossible in-store sales demands on magazines like Eye, expecting small arts and culture rags to rack up impossible sales if they were to stay in mass circulation on news stands, book stores and other retail outlets. Unable to keep pace with the demands, magazines such as Eye were forced to close shop and cease operations; some took their magazines and content online, others simply vanished and gave up on publishing altogether.

When Eye magazine folded, my colleague Cletus was fortunate to have a day job to fall back on. I stayed independent, picking up a plush freelance job with E Commerce Business magazine, a subsidiary of the publishing behemoth Cahners Business Information. It was through my trade journalism work at E Commerce, poring over troubling business plans and even more disturbing public financial statements of upstart dot coms, that I realized the US economy had its neck in a hangman’s noose. If Silicon Valley was the face of the New Economy, as so many of us were led to believe, then we were whistling songs of the doomed.

Like the wild and speculative internet entrepreneurs that they lavished so much praise upon, E Commerce Business magazine abruptly went belly up in 2001. Over time, the freelance market became an ever-tightening coil with fewer and fewer jobs available, a dire situation that has become exacerbated in the last few years by severe editorial downsizing at major metropolitan dailies and magazines with national and international distribution.