Comparative analysis of the legal status of freelance journalists in Russia and abroad

Abstract

New technologies, widespread digitalization, and then the coronavirus pandemic have made remote work and freelancing a familiar part of our reality. At the same time, the media sphere is one of the most popular for freelancing. However, neither the legal status of a freelancer nor the term itself is defined in Russian legislation. Russian freelance journalists also have no tradition of uniting in professional communities for mutual support and protection of their rights and legitimate interests. The longer experience of freelancing in Western countries, where most freelance journalists are members of trade unions and collectively defend their rights, achieving concrete results, may be interesting in this sense. We analyzed foreign legislation and research by Western scientists on the subject of successful practices of regulating the work of freelance journalists, and also found 200 materials in open sources in which freelance journalists shared their experience of freelancing, adding to them the results of surveys conducted by us in thematic online communities of media freelancers. The results show that Russian freelance journalists are more scattered and less protected than Western ones. Many of them have faced unscrupulous clients and unprofitable requirements (for example, to register the status of an individual entrepreneur or self-employed, which shifts business risks and responsibility to a journalist and is actually an unprofitable contract). To solve the existing problems, it is necessary to settle this issue at the level of legislation, as well as to change the mentality of freelance journalists themselves: they should communicate and cooperate, feeling like colleagues, not competitors.