“Let’s get through this quickly. We know you have to start your Über shifts.” So began the 1st annual Freelance Journalism Awards, hosted by Guild Freelancers, a unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. The emcee’s opening remark introduced a theme repeated throughout the night in jokes, speeches, and song: Freelancers don’t get paid very much. As one of my former editors said, it’s “more like beer money than rent money,” and it’s nearly impossible to make a living doing it without supplementing that income with odd jobs (like giving rides though peer-to-peer driving platforms like Über.) We do it because we enjoy writing and we’re passionate about our subjects. It’s a labor of love. But a little recognition doesn’t hurt. Hence these awards.

I’ve been writing a piece called “Alamedia” in Alameda Magazine for over two years, each time profiling a different local artist. I’ve written 16 so far, and submitted representative pieces from 2013 to the guild in the “Columns/Criticism” category. I was quite pleased to take 3rd place. According to the judges, mostly freelancers from Washington, D.C., “Let the record show that these categories were extremely difficult to judge — in addition to having a lot of submissions, the entries were stellar. We were extremely impressed by the smart, tough and socially conscious work of the freelancers who entered.” The emcee, Chron writer Joe Garafoli, translated this as “we stopped reading when we ran out of beer, then flipped a coin.”

2nd place went to Jonathan Curiel, who writes for SF Weekly, as I also do on a regular basis. Joel Engardo of the San Francisco Examiner took top honors in that category.

The awards ceremony was held in San Francisco on June 19. Another writer there that evening was David Bacon, a self-described “labor writer” who received awards for pieces that appeared in Al Jazeera America and The Nation. He also took home the grand prize, an award named for longtime journalist Raul Ramirez, who died last year. Ramirez was my Journalism 101 instructor when I studied at UC Berkeley in the mid-eighties. I remember him proofreading one of my pieces, correcting the capitalization of several words. “People always capitalize what’s important to them,” he joked gently. I plan to keep on writing about what’s important to me–Art and Culture with a capital A and C–even though it doesn’t pay the rent. The emcee was wrong about one thing, though: I don’t drive for Über! Actually… I drive for Lyft, their competitor.

Michael Singman-Aste
Postdiluvian Photo