Roughcast magazine puts freelancers first
Erin Rimmer and Simon Doherty are two of the founders of Roughcast, a brilliantly abrasive, punk-inspired magazine that’s here to shake up what it calls the “dull pastiche” of British media. It’s a passion project run by a group of friends, but it also has some big ideas about the way media works, particularly relating to freelancers, and as you’ll hear in this episode, they’ve resolved to pay their freelance contributors on the same day they receive their invoices, even if that’s before the issue comes out.
They’re not making a case for this as a business model that everyone else should be following, rather it’s a point of principle that has emerged from years of experience working as freelancers themselves, painfully aware of the urgent need to find a model of publishing that doesn’t depend on the routine exploitation of junior writers, photographers, illustrators and other contributors.
I hope you enjoy our conversation – we have lots more discussions with independent magazine makers waiting in our archive, and of course if you follow us wherever you get your podcasts, we’ll be able to deliver our new episodes to you as soon as they’re ready.
