Humanities at Work

The Risks and Rewards of Freelance Careers in Media

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By Hadass Sheffer

So what else can you do with a love for creating new knowledge, an expertise in foreign languages, and a Ph.D. in the humanities? Jennifer Bryson and Deborah Fryer have crafted freelance careers for themselves in films and television.

With a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from Yale University, Ms. Bryson started a year ago as a researcher and journalist on the CBS news show 48 Hours and on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, on PBS. She has since acquired some experience in television news production and now works for Newsmax.com writing about the Al Jazeera network and its coverage of the war on terrorism.

Ms. Fryer, who holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature and classics from Princeton University, is a documentary film producer and freelance writer who has worked on films for the History Channel, NOVA, Frontline, PBS, MSNBC, Discovery Channel, and Turner's Superstation. She has also translated more than 120 foreign documentaries into English.

Both women started their doctoral studies expecting to pursue academic careers. But they have few regrets about trading in the promise of tenure for an unscripted future.

Switching Gears

At Yale, Ms. Bryson chose to concentrate her doctoral training on Arabic and Islamic studies. After spending two years in Egypt learning Arabic, she returned to Yale to study the cultures, religions, and history of the Islamic empires. As she finished up her Ph.D., however, her interests shifted toward the modern world. She realized that she was not interested in continuing the kind of focused research that is demanded for tenure, but at the same time she was not willing to give up her scholarly curiosity.

Her interest in journalism developed in part, Ms. Bryson says, "from my voracious appetite for news: Some people have a subscription to The Economist. ... I have an addiction to it." As a journalist, she says, she has to learn quickly about many different topics, evaluate her sources, and then communicate complex stories clearly, often in a very short period of time. In addition to the intellectual gratification she feels when working on a story, and the sense of accomplishment when it airs, she thrives on "the adrenaline rush when an exciting story breaks."

Ms. Fryer found her interest in an academic career waning after she took a job at a documentary-film distribution company in New Jersey to support herself while she searched for a tenure-track position in academe. At the company, Films for the Humanities and Sciences, she used her language and research skills to translate film scripts into English. She fell in love with filmmaking, and 100 film scripts later decided to refocus her job search.

"I have always been interested in other cultures, languages, history, and literatures, and have enjoyed research and writing," she says. "Documentary-film production offered the perfect conflation of these elements: travel, the opportunity to speak different languages, anthropology. I love the connections we make with people in the field. My work is about the environment, health care, and social issues, and it makes a difference to people all over the world that we want to hear their stories. I love the fact that I am doing good work that changes people's lives."

The Big Break

The film and news industries are notoriously hard to enter, unless you are fresh out of college and prepared to lug around cameras and extension cords for a while. When Ms. Bryson first applied for entry-level jobs, she was told that her background was attractive, but her lack of experience problematic. Then she was advised to consider an internship. "It was a little bit difficult to accept the prospect of having to start with an unpaid internship after working so hard for so many years in graduate school," Ms. Bryson says, "but the reality was that I needed hands-on experience."

Many journalism internships require the interns to receive college credit for the internship, seemingly ruling out Ph.D.'s. Yet Ms. Bryson's first application, for an unpaid internship with 48 Hours, was immediately accepted.

Encouraged, she took out a loan and applied for a small grant to tide her over. Her reward came soon after the internship when she applied for, and landed, a six-month paid position as a desk assistant at The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Ms. Fryer faced similar barriers. Employers were reluctant to consider her academic experience as directly relevant to documentary filmmaking, and some viewed her as overqualified. "I was 29 years old at the time, and my biggest obstacle was my Ph.D.," she says. "Many potential employers suggested I take the Ph.D. off my résumé. I refused to do that. I was proud of it."

She finally broke into documentary filmmaking through a personal contact: "My mother knew someone who knew someone who was a documentary producer in Boston." After an informational interview, she was offered an internship in Cambridge, Mass. The internship was unpaid, but it was an opportunity. Although the first months were rough, she managed to cover her living expenses, first on unemployment and then with part-time jobs.

Meanwhile, she was making new contacts. And within six months, she had moved up the ladder from intern to paid production assistant. Over the next six years, accumulating experience and responsibilities, she rose from associate producer to field producer. Now she produces, writes, and directs her own programs.

Network, network, network

Work in a production team provides direct contact with producers, directors, and reporters. As in most industries, these connections are the key to future work. The nature of freelancing allows you to create a network that spans corporations. Ms. Bryson's contacts at the NewsHour, for example, have landed her other assignments with PBS as well as a television-production stint with a professional soccer organization. She found her current position with an Internet news provider through a friend.

As her understanding of the work developed, Ms. Bryson realized that her academic background gave her an unexpected advantage: "The wide variety of very well-educated specialists whom I know from Yale has proved already to be a very valuable pool of contacts." A graduate fresh out of college is not likely to have such contacts.

People with Ph.D.'s have other advantages in this line of work, say Ms. Bryson and Ms. Fryer. They have research and writing skills -- the capacity to be at ease with large bodies of information, to extract what is most important, to synthesize and communicate this information to diverse audiences, to interweave narrative threads, to situate stories within the context of history, geography, cultures, religions.

When filming abroad, Ms. Fryer's doctoral training has helped in her dealings with local authorities and with citizens in the communities where she was filming. And at times, she has found her background surprisingly helpful when interviewing professors. "I am used to dealing with academics," she says, "and I understand some of their idiosyncrasies and fears about appearing on camera."

The downside

The picture isn't entirely rosy, the women say. Ms. Fryer admits that knowing how to write for an academic audience is not such a useful skill in television. When you're writing for people who range in age from 8 to 88, she says, "the narration needs to be clear, punchy, and accessible."

Another downside is the relatively low pay. Beginning production assistants and writers earn the freelance equivalent of a salary in the mid-$20s and often lack benefits such as health insurance.

The biggest challenge, however, is the uncertainty of a freelance career. Says Ms. Fryer: "I worry if my ideas will be funded, especially in these tough economic times, but I try to have faith."

To fellow humanities Ph.D.'s interested in similar careers, Ms. Bryson recommends: "Be realistic. Be patient and persevere. The hardest part is finding the first internship or job. After that it gets easier."

Ms. Fryer's advice: "Follow your heart and don't be afraid. It is so easy to put up obstacles about how we aren't trained to do that, we can't afford to take the risk, we are too old to change careers. Life is too short to not live your dreams." Ever the scholar, she quotes Goethe: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness had genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now." Faithful to her own advice, she says, "I would like to be the next Bill Moyers, to make films for theatrical release, and of course, to have a couple of Emmys on my shelf, and an Academy Award would be nice, too." Remember her name.