Lee van der Voo
SEASON 2, EPISODE 9:
This week, we're talking about how to make investigative reporting work within a freelance career. So often we think of investigative reporting projects as money sucks that will wreck your sustainable business plan. You never know how much time or effort the reportage could take, and it can be tough to estimate time accurately because of that.
Wudan's conversation with investigative journalist Lee van der Voo turns that assumption on its head. Lee is an award-winning environmental journalist based in Portland, Oregon. She recently published a book called "As the World Burns," which is about 21 young people suing the U.S. government for climate-related crimes. You can find her investigations in places like The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Reuters, The Atlantic, Propublica, and beyond. And she's been supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation, The Fund for Investigative Journalism, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Lizzie Grossman Grant for Environmental Health Reporting. Lee and Wudan talk about breaking your reporting process into smaller pieces, and Lee offers innovative ways to use your reporting to spark other pitches, which you can sell to make money along the way. She also talks about working toward a book or longform project, and how to decide which end-game is the best choice for you. You can read more about her work here: https://leevandervoo.com/ Follow her on social media: https://twitter.com/lvdvoo Writers' Co-op members will receive a tip sheet from Lee that walks you through defining the many versions of stories that you could sell based on your longform reportage, so you can make money as you work toward the "big thing." If you're not a Co-op member, there's still time to join: https://www.patreon.com/twcpod
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Full Transcript Below:
J- Hello and welcome to The Writer's Co-op.
W- We are your co-hosts I'm Wudan Yan.
J- And I'm Jenni Gritters.
W- I can't believe another season of this podcast is about to come to a close.
J- Yeah, it feels very nutty.
W- Time somehow just flies in two-week increments.
J- Yes it does. So how are you doing, Wudan?
W- You know, I am getting back in the swing of things. New year, new goals, new business plans, the whole nine yards. You know how it is. I actually like the feeling of having a blank slate. What about you, Jenni? Also, where are you right now?
J- I am in Bend, Oregon right now. As I talked about a few episodes ago, my family decided to do some travel nursing in 2021, which meant we put everything in storage and then we're going to move every three months to a different location, and our first rotation is Bend. So, you know, lots of snow, lots of outdoor adventures, lots of good beer. Honestly, it has been a really good fit so far.
W- I really love Bend. It's so cute. And it's close to good trails and climbing.
J- So Wudan, tell us about this week's episode.
W- So this week we are going to talk about how to make it work as a freelance investigative journalist.
J- I am stoked for this episode because this is one of those things where we have both been like, how do we find a person who is making it all work?
W- I agree. And I think the way that lots of freelancers think about and even describe investigative work is that they believe it's a money loser, not something that you can do if you want to run a sustainable business. And of course there are just so many ways to spend infinite time on these stories.
J- For sure. It's like, you know, you're always digging for documents, chasing down impossible-to-reach sources, trying to pinpoint specific details, things that are hard to find. It's really not the type of project typically where you can estimate time accurately when you're headed into it because I think you never know what you're going to find.
W- Definitely. But I also think on the surface, many writers and journalists think about investigative journalism as producing the mother of all stories, like a gigundo 10,000 word, long form piece about whatever, right?
J- Totally. And like, I think also mentally people think of this as a story that they're going to stick to for like a really, really long tim.
W- I agree. And I should mention, I do some investigative work myself from time to time. And the reason I think a lot of us make it a part of our freelance business is because we value it so much.
J- Yeah, doing investigative work, especially when you're a freelancer is like this thing that's critical for our democracy. I really believe that. And freelancers have the time to lean into stories that staffers might miss. Freelancers who do this kind of work, I think pretty much every person that I've met who does this type of work, really believes in the importance of it. And Wudan and I definitely do as well.
W- Yeah, I really searched high and low for the right person for the show. We probably spoke with gosh, dozens of investigative journalists. Shout out to our production manager, Jen Monnier, for arranging handfuls of pre-interviews for this.
J- Yeah. Jen really spent a ton of time on this. And so much research went into this, on both of our parts. You basically like we used our casting skills, right? Wudan, you have those as an investigative journalist, I think. And we had to use them to find an investigative reporter just for this episode, which feels a little bit meta.
W- It's true. But we did find the right person and that's Lee van der Voo. She's an award-winning investigative and environmental journalist based in Portland, Oregon. She just published a book. It's called As the World Burns, which is about 21 young people suing the U.S. government. Her investigations have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Reuters, the Atlantic, ProPublica and more. And she has been supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Lizzie Grossman Grant for Environmental Health Reporting.
J- Basically the TLDR is that Lee is just like really impressive, but I also think she has a really practical philosophy about doing investigative work and I'm really excited for everybody to listen to her advice.
W- All right, here is that interview.
W- Hi Lee, and welcome to The Writers' Co-op.
Lee van der Voo- Hi, thanks for having me.
W- I'm really excited to talk about how you make investigative journalism work for you.
L- Me too!
W- Why don't you start and tell us what are you working on right now?
L- Right now, I'm just finishing up marketing for my last book. So it's not a super heavy load. I have a piece in edits with The Guardian. It's about the 2020 wildfire season, and I'm kind of kicking around some proposals and doing some informational interviews about projects that I might take on next. But I consider myself somewhat between things which is nice.
W- That is a nice spot and congratulations on the book as well.
L- Thank you.
W- So Lee, I want to start talking about how, you know, your upbringing shaped your relationship with money and how that trickles into your business. Jenni and I talk about this a lot on the show. So what was that like for you and how did those early experiences shape your relationship with money and what impact did that have on how you run your freelance business?
L- Great question. I think that my mom really drilled into me from an early age, that real estate is how ordinary people accrue wealth. You know, my parents divorced when I was pretty young and that came with, you know, the attending financial insecurities and sometimes housing insecurity. And I watched my mom climb out of that through buying her first home alone and starting a business of her own. So I kind of entered the adult working world with a pretty keen sense of what equity is and what it means to personal freedom. And I bought a house with my husband pretty young, like right after I got my first full-time job. So I think now, like having fixed those overhead costs pretty early really helped me pursue the work life that I wanted to have instead of letting the financial needs dictate the work.
W- Yeah, definitely. It's interesting. I feel like, you know, I'm in my thirties. A lot of people, our generation don't really talk about that real estate anymore. So it's fascinating to hear that.
L- Yeah. I think it's pretty different and I realized that and I try to be mindful of it, you know, when I'm talking to people about freelancing that I'm coming at it from this place.
W- Definitely. So Lee, can you take me back a little to when you began freelancing? I think in our early conversations, you mentioned you were in staff jobs. So how did you manage the switch from staff to freelancing and what was that like personally and as a business?
L- Well, it was a pretty dramatic shift. I mean, early days I was very happy to just have a staff job and plug away and pay that mortgage. The first 10 years of my career were in newspapers and I really didn't imagine doing much else. And then, you know, the recession hit and I got laid off in 2008 and I was reassigned to another job, but I wasn't that crazy about it. And I came to see starting a freelance business in kind of the same way I came to see owning a home, that it would give me more freedom to work and not just on the projects that were meaningful to me, but at all. You know, I didn't want anyone else to decide my career trajectory for me. And I realized that that could happen to me if I lost my job in a recession and I watched it happen to friends of mine or, or friends of mine move to communities they weren't that familiar with and get laid off there where they had no support.
So at the same time, you know, the journalism was in a crisis. And I thought that I could be part of the solution that I had, you know, the freedom of being sort of double income, no kids without a lot of overhead and that I could afford to take some risks. And if I did that it could be fun and exciting and maybe I'd be on the ground floor of something really cool. You know, ironically in a recession, there was ton of a ton of work because nobody wanted to hire. So, you know, I put together a handful of contracts that paid the bills pretty early and I used the leftover to pursue new ideas or put investigations in the pipeline. But obviously like the higher dollar work is in magazines. And I didn't have that experience. I had this newspaper background, but I had a lot of relationships in the local market. So I just, you know, got my first gigs doing work for regional magazines where I could learn the ropes and kind of aim for that higher dollar income. And I just worked my way up to bigger publications from, from there.
W- That's fascinating. I mean, first of all, I'm fascinated that you were able to buy a house while being a staff reporter at a newspaper. And second of all, I think, you know, the point of view entering freelancing at a moment where there was a major recession is really relatable to this present moment that we're in now with the pandemic and publications shuttering, and more people than ever before going freelancing. What advice would you give folks who have been laid off and are trying to build contacts possibly to start freelancing as a journalist or a writer?
L- I see a lot of opportunity there, honestly. And it is weird sort of paradoxical thing to think "I'm going to start a business in a recession." And I had a lot of people, people who meant well, but try to discourage me from doing this in 2008. And it still sort of funny: I would see folks who had these staff jobs and they'd be like, "are you still freelancing?" Like almost as if like "how's your cancer?" Like this terrible thing was happening to me. But honestly the ability to just go and get work wherever it is, I think it makes you really nimble, and just one relationship at a time. I'm not sure that it needs to be much more complicated than that. You know, I just tried to maybe think about a couple of new publications that I'd like to get to know every year and develop relationships with those editors as best I could. Of course, they change a lot and you try to carry them all forward. It doesn't always work, but I think that the barrier to entry in journalism is lower than it's ever been. And that's a great thing. This thing that I had to do of climbing up, I don't know that that's really still true anymore. Maybe people get to just start wherever they fit.
W- Yeah, I think about that a lot too. In some ways we have the internet and social media that makes story finding and source gathering so much easier. And there are so many resources out there too. So I don't really know. I don't know. Lee, let's fastforward about a decade or more. What does your freelance business look like right now? What do you have going on in the mix?
L- It's kind of a mix of long form writing. And that includes a couple of books that I've written and investigative projects with a very long timelines with occasional breaking news. I do a bit of speaking, mostly for book promo, but occasionally that'll lead to like a speaking gig. And recently I got the performance gig for my audio book. So that was kind of an interesting new path. And I hope I can make it more of a part of my mix going forward. I also do a bit of consulting work for news nonprofits because that was where I got a lot of my work over the first decade of my freelancing. And I do some project management for collaborative journalism projects.
W- Wow. That's really diverse. And so cool to think about all the different ways you can earn money, even as an investigative reporter. Do you ever take on copywriting or non journalistic work?
L- I haven't done that. There was a period right when I first started out where I tried some of that work, just because if you're going to be a freelancer in journalism, I think you really got to know that you love it and that there isn't something else that you'd rather be doing. So, you know, I tried kicking the tires on some things and kind of came to the conclusion that I wanted to stick with my career. So I did a little bit of contract interviewing once upon a time and some contract research gigs, but I like the marriage of those two things. And I think I did one copywriting job. So maybe the marriage of all three of those things rather than one at a time.
W- Yeah. The other thing I've heard a lot from investigative reporters, freelance investigative reporters specifically, is that we have to really avoid conflicts of interest. And I'm curious to hear your thought process on that. I know everyone's thinking is really different, but would you share yours?
L- Yeah, I get that. It's super tough. I mean, I think that being as far along in my career as I was when I became a freelancer probably helped me on that score because I was able to pick up beats that were complimentary to my reporting without ever really having to have clients that weren't editorial clients. So you know, everything I do is journalism. So I didn't really run that risk to the extent that people are able to do that, I would recommend it. For example, while I was writing my last book, which was about the 21 kids and young people who sued the federal government over climate change, I covered breaking news in the youth climate movement. And so like the climate strikes and major litigation climate litigation plus breaking news in the Juliana v. U.S. case, which was the subject of my book.
So I think those kinds of mixes, in the past I've covered energy issues or sustainable industries. Being able to mix that reporting with kind of bigger projects is really nice. Not only because it helps, just make the financial backbone of the business, but because it keeps you from overextending yourself if you can kind of report in roughly the same area that you're doing most of your work, I've heard colleagues talk about things like one of my colleagues asks everybody where they went to college and then spins profiles to alumni magazines to kind of, you know, beef up her income. I have another colleague who sells everything three times, which should be a breaking news piece, a long form or a column and like a travel piece all at once, you know. And that's just what he's good at. So I think there are ways to kind of look at what your specialty is and try to carve out things that don't break you, but can help you kind of boost your income.
W- Yeah, definitely like don't feel if you feel sleazy about taking something, that's probably a sign that you shouldn't,
L- It's hard to use that word "shouldn't" though. I mean, I understand how difficult it is like in the industry to really make it pay. I mean, it seems like it pays exactly the same and sometimes less than what it paid 10 years ago, quite honestly. So yeah, there's some gymnastics, but to the extent those tips can be helpful, then there they are.
W- Definitely, let's talk more about money and this gymnastics. Frankly, when I've done investigative work myself, and when I talk to other freelance investigative reporters, there's this big, big, big sentiment that investigative work is a money loser. So how do you personally prevent that from happening? How do you estimate how much time a big project would take you?
L- Well, I mean, I completely agree with the sentiment that investigations can be a money pit, for sure. And I think if you're not careful, especially if you don't have that anchor client in the mix and you're depending on investigative as like a major part of your income, then, you know, that's especially risky. But I think honestly that the cost runaway is always in not knowing and defining the scope of work before you start. Like, it's really easy to pick up a story and be like, this is great. And then keep falling and falling and falling down the rabbit hole of reporting it without turning it into a product. And that I think is where the harm's done.
So when I said earlier that I like to stock the pipeline for investigative, in saying that what I mean is I do a lot of front end work defining the scope of these projects. So I'll do interviews, I'll do research, without really planning on earning anything quite until I know what it is. And then I define like a pretty minimum deliverable. Like what's the lowest, worst possible story that I could get out of this and what's the best? And then I try to bring a client on in kind of under promise what can be there. And with that, I've had publications, then sign-on support for me to write grants, to cover kind of the big costs that tend to come with these things. So I've gotten grants from the Fund for Investigative Sournalism, for example, or the society of Environmental Journalists. There are various funds. And as I'm going along, then, assuming my expenses are covered, I have determined: here's my minimum deliverable. This is how long it's gonna take me to do. And I've sold that piece.
I'm also reporting out potentially the bigger story and whether then that becomes a series with that client, or it just is like deeper and deeper reporting that I sell as I go forward. It just really depends on how it shakes out with that particular publication, but I'm not looking to sell the whole investigation at first. I'm just selling that like low hanging fruit of it and using it as a vehicle to keep pushing forward. You know, as I get deeper in, then I'm selling breaking news as I go. And when I'm done with the whole project and I've run it like as far as it can go, very often there's a cutting room floor there where there were stories that these were really good threads, but essentially they were tangents to the overall project. And then I go back to those and just look to sell the cutting room floor.
W- Wow. So it's never, it's never the mother of all projects. It sounds like you do a shorter version, the low hanging fruit, maybe that's a news story, right? And then that you gather more string and you're getting paid to gather more string to report out a longer piece. That's really interesting. And at what point do you stop reporting on that project once everything is done and, and published?
L- Yeah, pretty much when I've run it to ground. I have kind of an obsessive personality, so I just kind of go and go and go and go. And when I start to come around to the same stories and the same ideas, then it's like, "okay, I've really reported this as far as I can." And there was a point in the past where at that point that became a book. Like I compiled a lot of my reporting about fisheries into a book called The Fish Market in 2016. Sometimes it's just, you're done and you find something else to do.
W- Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Can you tell us about a recent investigation you did? And I think we should define that as not that bare minimum story that your at first selling, but something, you know, that probably took a year-ish from, from ideation to production. Tell us a little about how long it took and how do you price something that can be so long-winded,
L- It's tough, but I think if you know your way around your work, then it becomes kind of obvious, right? So I guess I'll talk about the project that became my last book. It's called As the World Burns. And like I said, it's about the Juliana versus United States case, and I'd been hearing about this case in 2018 when it was going to go to trial in October. I started following it pretty closely in March of that year because it had what seemed like finally a really firm trial date. And at that point it had been in litigation for three years and it had survived every legal challenge that even experts had said would knock it down. So it looked historically significant to me. And I was super fascinated, not only by the idea of like kids suing the federal government over climate change, but just like the question of who are they, you know, are they being staged-managed by hand-wringing parents? Are they really into this, and why? So I had a conversation with one of the staffers at Our Children's Trust, which is the law firm that represents the plaintiffs and ask the question: is anybody following these kids now? Considering something book-length and planning on sitting in on the trial. And she kind of gave me the lay of the land in terms of like, okay, so we have these publications that we know are flying somebody out and they're going to be there the whole time, but there's nobody advance reporting it. There's nobody developing that kind of editorial relationship with the plaintiff. So I thought it was potentially a great thing to do. And I made an application to the Society of Environmental Journalists for their inaugural Lizzy grant for environmental health reporting to go and meet the plaintiffs and report on climate impacts where they lived, get to know them, get to know their families and their story as a vehicle for just making my trial coverage really, really deep, really informed and much more personal.
And I pitched Reuters on that trial coverage. And I got a yes to both. I think Reuters actually signed on in support of my grant application. So at that point I was headed into trial to cover this thing by October with a $5,000 grant from SEJ, a contract relationship through Reuters for somewhat regular coverage, having done all the travel and the background interviewing of the plaintiffs, which I did on my own time, but thinking potentially I could sell profile stories or Parenting mags—who knows. But right then I was just kind of filling the can. I guess I also pitched Rolling Stone on some long form to come from trial coverage. So was pretty set up and I went to Eugene, Oregon to cover this trial and it ended up never happening. Like, I don't know how much your listeners will know this story, but Juliana v. U.S. Is one of, I think, five federal court cases that the Trump administration really ruled out some pretty nuclear options in the courtroom. So this was one of them. I'm not going to tell the whole book story, but suffice it to say very unusual legal maneuvers. The trial was canceled like a few days before it happened. So I had relocated. All the plaintiffs were in Oregon for this trial. Their experts were there, their attorneys were there, and the trial just never happened. At which point, I was completely out of work, but also, you know, faced with this just kind of neat opportunity that I was there with all these people who were still the subject of what I think is monumental and historically important court case. So I spent some time with them, but also pivoted to covering the campfire, which lit up in California about the same time. So went down there and covered that for about a week. I think that was like another thousand dollars or something.
And then I just pivoted to doing some consulting work for a while because they didn't know where all this was going to go. And I ended up getting a Logan Foundation Residency at the Cary Institute for Global Good. It's called the Logan Nonfiction Residency. It was a great opportunity to just go sit with this material and see what I had, and also spend some time reading the court record and trying to decide, you know, is this something to push forward with? And in that time, the IPCC came out and said "we have 12 years to do something about climate change or bust." You know, we lost an entire city in California and a lot of other assets there. And like what was just an epically horrible fire season in 2018. And then there was this epic fight for congressional power, with a president who was refusing to acknowledge any of it. All the while, I had gotten to know these really young people who were giving me this incredible gen Z perspective on what it all meant to them. So I decided that there was real fruit there. I wrote a book proposal while I was at Logan. I already had an agent for my last experience writing a book. So I pitched that and it sold right before I left. So my advance on the book was $30,000 to write it in the next nine months and then maybe a few months more of editing. So I guess that was about a year. And I sold the audio rights to that and then my performance reading the book, which I think combined was like another $8,000, minus agenting fees, which I don't recall what they were. When that was over then I just started selling the cutting room floor. And that's kind of a bit of what I'm doing right now and the proposals that I'm writing and some of what I've written this year. So, you know, if you do the math on how long I've been at this, I'm clearly not getting rich. But also it's a really important part of my income mix. And I got to do this really awesome project that I think is so interesting and historically important. And I got to be there also and see what little bits of this case hit a courtroom and hopefully help these, these gen Z plaintiffs really articulate themselves. And maybe there's a long tail there for me. I've kind of gotten to view books in some ways, the way I view owning my own business and the way I view owning my house is that they have a shelf life of forever, and that's my equity and something that could hopefully earn income for me in the future. So I like to think about it like that.
W- Yeah. Listening to you talk about that. It's like a series of small investments, right? A small investment to go to Eugene to cover the trial. And that gave you the seed to pivot for the Campfire and then all these other things that came after. That's really interesting. So that really gives me a new perspective on pricing investigative work. Lee, can you say a little more about money? How much are you making right now and how much time are you also taking off with that level of work?
L- COVID has not been helpful for me this year, so I don't know that this would be the best example. But I would say baseline, I have to earn the $30,000 to be able to like make expenses and eat food. And I've earned up to 70,000 a year in this work. So, it's quite a range, obviously. It's worth saying that I'm based in Oregon and here that range is very much the range for full-time staff jobs in journalism. And quite a number of them honestly are paying less than 40. So I feel like I'm kind of most of the time doing better than I would be if I had stayed in newspapers. But obviously the money is not my first love.
W- Yeah. I think with investigative work, especially from my own experience, I do it because like you said, I'm just so obsessed and it's the stuff that I can't put down. And then I just now have to figure out how to make everything else work around that obsession. I think Jenni and I talk about our values, right? And I think the value of investigative journalism is chasing the truth, chasing these obsessions that the public has to know something.
L- Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that approach. If you've got the, the anchor clients to pay the bills and you're doing this in your extra time, then fabulous. Right? It's only when it starts to ruin you financially that you've got a problem with it. But I do think that chunking it out in these tiny pieces really works. And I say very casually that I like to sell the cutting room floor in the end. But if you think about what that is at the point that you've already written a book that is some very deep research, very deep investigative. So those pieces alone, the last one that I sold, I made $5,000 on. So it's not chump change to think about if you can price your way through it, that kind of like the bigger carrots are toward the end.
W- Definitely. How do you manage all your projects? It sounds like there's like one big thing. Right. And then all of these tentacles sprouting out of it. So yeah. What's your system of tracking your work?
L- Well, it does tend to be the one big thing. When I'm project managing like a group project, I would do this very differently. But if it's just me and I'm working in a body of work, I basically just have, I have transcripts of all my interviews that I either record as I'm doing them, if I did them on the phone or I get audio files in person and I run them through Temi. I have audio files of everything. I record absolutely everything: documents, obviously document files, and then financials for the project. I actually track those as I go. So like the kinds of things that we're talking about now need to make sense on paper. And when you start putting grants in the mix, of course the grantors want you to have that information. So if you track it as you go, it's much more helpful.
L- I keep separate files then for each of the freelance projects that are going in them. You know, files for proposals and social. And I do kind of now that I've done a couple books, I collect things that are like maybe fodder for social media later because I, I know how much that comes into the marketing. Obviously I keep files of the writing, the one full main project that I tend to break down by chapter, but probably the thing that is most helpful to me in terms of—I don't know if it's an organizing thing, but it's a huge part of my process—is after I go and do an interview somewhere with somebody, I write just anything, just like free write my impressions of it. And I have a file that I just call "my impressions," and I have those records for every place that I've gone or person that I've met that are just kind of raw narrative about the experience. And that kind of happened by accident when I'd be reporting and I'd just kind of fill time on trains and planes and think "maybe I'll use this later, but I want to get this thought down." And I've discovered that those like initial impressions and those pieces of writing are really the best writing that I do. If I try to sit down and recreate a lot of that later, I just make a mess. So I use those mostly. It turns out as like the backbone for my longer form writing.
W- That makes a lot of sense. I do something very, very similar. I got it from Ira glass, which is the end of the day at your hotel room and you're exhausted, what do you still remember from your day? Yeah, you're right. It does keep things in track, but you don't have like a master spreadsheet or something of the main project. And do you subset it out? People love applications and technology on how to make your life easier. So I wanted to hear your thoughts on that too.
L- I love all those things too. I definitely deploy a lot more of that when I'm managing projects that involve more reporters than just me, but I do love a good spreadsheet. I sometimes will use a spreadsheet just to track sources in an area of reporting. Cause sometimes if I'm like years into this, it gets to where I've met a person and I am then recommended to talk to them again or something. I don't remember if I have, or if I met them. So I'll keep sometimes spreadsheets if the pool of subjects really is that large. In this last case that I described that wasn't true, but I did keep spreadsheets on experts, expert witnesses in the case, and some background on them. And I found those really helpful. I kept spreadsheets on certain types of maneuvers in the litigation. Those were helpful. So it kind of depends a little bit on the project, but yeah, I definitely find Excel to be like a really handy tool for reporting. Sometimes just like apps for the sake of apps can be a little more trouble than they're worth, but it depends on the project and the team.
W- Yeah, I agree. All right, Lee, last question for you. Tell me about the best business decision that you've made.
L- Well, this happened by accident, but I do think it was a really smart decision is that I incorporated initially as an S-corp, which is not terribly different from an LLC. And I think a lot of folks who are doing investigative are advised to incorporate for legal protections and a lawyer friend that I was talking to at the time when I started out encouraged me to go with an S-corp because he thought that it was proven out to be a little more legally protective. And because I'm an Oregon, interestingly, I have been a defendant and a couple of lawsuits over public records. We used to have a law, and I'm pretty sure we still do. Maybe it's changed. I've lost track, but if you win public records from an appeals process in this state and an agency wants to block you, they have to sue you, they can't sue the company that you work for. It has to be an individual. So having been roped into that a couple of times already, it just seemed wise to have that additional protection. And of course, you know, there's a tax benefit to incorporating, I think it's like 8% or something. So an S-Corp is definitely a bit more fuss in that I file quarterly payroll on myself, but the upside to that is that I pay unemployment tax on myself, which is something that I never really gave too much thought to before this year. But it was kind of always like in the back of my mind, like this is a really unstable business and I'm glad that I pay this. And that definitely helped me this year because I took a hit with COVID. I had a couple of gigs set up for right after I finished my book project that just didn't materialize. I also had a couple of clients, like in the beginning of the year, that I had done work for that weren't able to pay me. So I got caught just like with no cash flowing for a short period there. And I was able to just like file for unemployment, get a claim, get in the system. And despite the chaos of the overall unemployment system, I got through it a lot faster than most of my colleagues who had to wait for the PUA and grapple with all of that. So I felt lucky to have that this year. And it ended up being maybe not as necessary as I feared, but it was, it was nice for filling that gap.
W- Definitely. And when you say you incorporated, it's just you right under your S-corp, or did you go into it with other people?
L- It is just me. I am the officer of all the positions. I am the president, I am the treasurer, I am all the shareholders. This year, my husband actually transitioned from having a wage job to freelancing in his industry right before COVID, which is super interesting. So he is now added and that's pretty new. So we're now a corporation of two.
W- That's fascinating. And thank you for sharing. I don't think we've talked about that— LLCs versus S-Corp versus just being a sole proprietor for sure. Well, Lee, thanks so much for coming on the show. There was some really great insights and we so appreciate your time.
L- Hey, thanks for having me. It's fun to talk about all this.
J- Wow, I think Lee just changed the way I think about investigative work from a business standpoint.
W- I know, right? I mean, I'll be thinking about that for a long time. Basically the idea of how to get yourself paid for an assignment that looks like the lowest hanging fruit first before jumping into more, and that the best nuggets and stories are often hanging once you follow a path all the way down to the end.
J- Yeah. It's wild. I have never really thought about this kind of work in this way. Like one investigation or one idea can turn into many, many assignments in different forms. And I think that's an incredibly savvy way to run a business. I really loved how Lee said that she knows people who take an interviewee, figure out where they went to school, and then also pitch a profile of them to a university mag or like people sell three versions of a story, a news, a feature, and a long form piece. It's a really cool way to think about selling your products in multiple forms. And on that note, one of our resources is going to be a list of questions from Lee that she thinks through when she wants to determine what the lowest hanging fruit would be for a project, or basically the thing that she wants to sell first.
W- Yeah. Consider this to be like a checklist basically.
J- Yeah, definitely.
W- We are also including resources for you to track your investigative reporting. I think earlier in the season we used what's called a dossier.
J- Yeah. At dossier. And because Lee talked about finding the lowest hanging fruit, that worksheet, that was a part of our Q&A on identifying different angles for a story is going to be attached this week as well, because we think it's super helpful for figuring out what your bandwidth is and what you can do.
W- All right. I love this. It's all really good stuff. And I think that's all for this week.
J- Yes. We will be back in two weeks for our last regular episode of this season. And we're getting into the business of book writing, which is another very dicey topic that has taken a lot of work for us to figure out and find the right person. But the good news is we have an awesome guest lined up
W- After that, a secret sauce episode for our Patreon listeners.
J- Have I said that, that one's my favorite? It's my favorite.
W- It's always the best.
W- It really is. Sign up in advance on Patreon to make sure you get it. It's secret for a reason. That's on patrion.com/twcpod.
J- Alright, Wudan. I will see you soon on the internet.
W- Season two of The Writers' Co-op is made possible by a grant from the International Women's Media Foundation. Susan Vallot is our editor and Jen Monnier handles research, admin and more as our producer. The Writers' Co-op is hosted by me, Wudan Yan and Jenni Gritters.
