Hi folks,

For about six years now I’ve been working as a photojournalist, and also for the past three as a writer, most recently for TIME magazine in Baghdad. I’ve always been motivated by a passion for stories and issues. It always seemed just short of magical that with the right story idea/proposal and lot of luck a major paper or magazine would accommodate or alter their content and allow the person who authored the pitch to take the lead crafting the story (even if it did ultimately get butchered by an editor).

But it’s not a lucrative market, and for a long time I lived hand-to-mouth, badly in debt, paycheck to paycheck. These days my luck has changed for the better but it seems that in most countries in the world newspapers and magazines are truly going down the shitter and interest in foreign news especially seems to be waning and dumbing down.

At the same time I’ve always had some small measure of success reselling stories (text and photos) as packages multiple times around the world, mostly to English-language media, sometimes to non-English language media. While some of the stories I work on are located in a specific culture, many are not, and translate relatively easily into say, Belgium or Germany or Switzerland.

If, as a freelance journalist, you also have two goals, to make a living (to feed and clothe and house yourself) and to execute and disseminate the stories you are passionate about, then this seems to be the next logical step: collaborate with other freelance journalists from different media markets on (a) reselling each others work and (b) working together across platforms / media on stories.

I know, there are countless logistical challenges (who will translate, how will we split a paycheck, where will i find these people) but i don’t think any of them are insurmountable.

I’m trying to start an organization that does exactly this, that’s small in size and dedicated to the idea that good journalism (focusing on features, not news) should be disseminated widely and that toiling alone isn’t nearly as rewarding as collaborating with other individual committed to a core set of principles concerning social justice and journalistic ethics.

I know this sounds pretty vague and flighty, but I doubt I’m the only person thinking along these lines. If you’re interested please shoot me an email, or reply to this post and start a discussion about why something like this could or could not work.

dp