Being a freelancer in California is going to get a whole lot tougher, because outlets don't want to risk getting forced into making you an employee just for buying and publishing your work.
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John Conroy's first glimmer of California's new approach to freelance journalists came last fall, when an editor at a travel publication that provided a large share of his income abruptly informed him that its parent company would cease using California-based freelancers.
Freelance writers and photographers in California are in a panic that Conroy's case is the canary in the coal mine that signals a sharp contraction in their opportunities for work.
AB 5 specifically exempts about a dozen work categories from its provisions, such as doctors, accountants, fishermen, stockbrokers and travel agents. But not journalists. Writers and photographers who submit more than 35 published works per year to a publisher must be treated as an employee of that publisher.
"If I'm a publisher from out of state," says David Swanson, a San Diego writer who is the outgoing president of the Society of American Travel Writers, "and I have a choice of hiring a writer from California to do a job, or somebody from Colorado or Texas or Canada or India — and I'd have no chance of being sued — who do you think I'm going to hire? AB 5 simply makes it unattractive to hire writers from California."
Concerns about the impact of AB 5, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, have been percolating for months. But anxiety seemed to surge over the weekend, after an article in the Hollywood Reporter painted an especially dire picture of its consequences.
But defining a freelancer's work routine isn't easy. Some contribute occasional pieces to myriad publishers, some are regular content providers to only a handful of sources. Some contribute short squibs as often as several times a day; others, deeply reported investigations or features a few times a year. Among travel writers, Swanson told me, "no two of us have the same business model, so creating a carve-out that covers all of us is a fool's errand."
That difficulty became evident during the drafting of AB 5, when Gonzalez met several times with a coalition of freelancer groups. She was willing to offer a partial exemption to writers and photographers, but the question was where to set the line. Gonzalez initially suggested exempting those who contributed 25 or fewer submissions per year to any given publisher, on the grounds that twice-a-month work seemed reasonably to fall below the level of a full- or part-time employee.
How much blacklisting of California freelancers is happening or may develop in the future remains unclear. The most commonly cited example is that of Northstar Travel Media, the New Jersey-based publisher of travel trade journals that issued the blanket ban experienced by Conroy. (His publisher converted him to part-time staff status, but that still means a cutback in his earnings.) Northstar didn't respond to requests for comment. Other freelancers have noticed online want ads instructing Californians not to apply, but none appears to have been placed by journalism enterprises.
Gonzalez says she's open to revising AB 5 to address freelancers' concerns. "I'm willing to talk about raising the number of submissions, sure," she told me. "That's the easiest discussion to have." But any change wouldn't take effect before Jan. 1, 2021.
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