Becoming a financial journalist: Freelancing and social content creation

This week, I chat to Faith, a freelance personal finance journalist. She talks about her career journey from studying law to accidentally ending up at the Daily Telegraph and going freelance. She now writes for magazines, creates social media content, and occasionally appears on TV and radio

Participants

• Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ
• Faith Archer - financial journalist

Transcript

Emily Slade: Hello and welcome back to Future You. The podcast brought to you by graduate careers experts, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ. I'm your host, Emily Slade and in this episode I chat to Faith about being a financial journalist.  

Faith Archer: My name's Faith, Faith Archer, and I'm a freelance personal finance journalist. And that means I write about money.  

Emily Slade: Amazing. So, let's go right back to the beginning. What was your educational journey? 

Faith Archer: I think I had quite a twisted path, so my A levels were actually maths, further maths, physics and economics. I had a year out in France, and I was an au pair and I did French lessons and then university. I actually started off doing law. I was utterly convinced that I wanted to be a solicitor, got disillusioned with both the degree and the job, did quite a lot of work experience. And luckily my university, you could switch subjects. So I actually did. Part 1 law and then Part 2. history of art. 

Emily Slade: So the original plan was to be a lawyer. So how did you end up where you are? 

Faith Archer: Now, again partly securities and by accident I did the milk round. So when I was in university, I interviewed for a milk round job. I didn't have the I didn't actually have the option of going living at home looking for a job. So I interviewed to be a management consultant. 

Emily Slade: Oh, OK, sorry. Like, you said, milk round. I envisioned, like, dropping milk off at people's houses? 

Faith Archer: OK, the milk round was when lots of different companies used to show up at the university do presentations. And there was this whole process about you could apply and be interview. Food while you were still in your final year. So loads of you know, solicitors and accountants and consultants and bankers and you know there was this process that you could apply by certain dates. If you're at university and you know go through this. So what it meant was even before my finals, I knew that I had a job. Offer. To start in September, so I did strategy consulting for it was nearly six years, but I was looking for ways to get out of it, applied for a few jobs that didn't come off and finally decided. You know what? I want I don't want to be on a plane anymore. I want to rediscover daylight, so I just quit and I was doing freelance work in sales and marketing, consulting for Internet startups, justasthe.com bubble burst. And by this time I had a mortgage. And so I while I was applying for proper jobs, friend of mine had a temp agency. Tim, please, you know, work. I just need work. I can type, I can answer the phone, please. And one of the jobs he put me in for was at the Daily Telegraph.  

Emily Slade: Oh wow. 

Faith Archer: And it was covering the researcher role. So I was quite literally making the tea, organising editors, diary fielding calls from the readers, doing reading letters, doing, filing that kind of thing. And they asked me back a couple of times. Same person went on holiday and then. Somebody moved across to a different part of the paper. Everybody moved up one like musical chairs. There was a vacancy at the bottom and asked if I wanted to apply. Now I would never have applied for that job. Yeah, if I'd seen it advertised, I don't think they would have considered me if I hadn't been there and doing it basically. So, yes. So that was how I ended up. At the Telegraph and again certain amount of luck, it so happened that various people moved to left left. The company moved to different parts of the paper, and so, you know, I kept moving up and I ended up as Deputy Personal Finance editor. 

Emily Slade: Amazing. Yeah. OK. So because you're freelance, does that give you more of more freedom to do a variety of different things as opposed to just writing a column for a newspaper, for example? 

Faith Archer: I think my job has definitely involved more variety since going freelance. Partly I can, there's a certain element of picking and choosing to certainly send if people offer you work, you take it when you're you're freelance because you're not getting that regular salary that shows up every month. It's it depends on how much work. Yeah. So I'm still doing some of the kinds of work that I did at the Telegraph. I'm still writing features on money topics, but I don't just write for newspapers anymore. I do a lot of work for magazines, women's magazines. Now they take a lot more money content than they ever used to. And as one of the issues with journalism, the pay is not great. You know, you you may be aware of some of the like big name columnist. They might be getting a tonne of money. Most people in journalism are not. I suppose it's much like music industry or, you know, other arts being an actor or something. So to make the books balanced, I also do call. At work, because, let's face it, lots of people need content, so I will do work for, for example, some of the comparison websites and magic comparison websites. They want content for their customers, so I write articles for them. I've also got a contract with a pension company, pension bee. And so I do content for them. And when I say content, it's not just writing. Anymore since going freelance now I will do blog posts. I will script content for social media. I do, you know, appearances on the radio very rarely pop up on telly. I've hosted live events. I've taken part in web. Us so there's just lots of different things that are not solely writing for a newspaper anymore. 

Emily Slade: And do you think that's fairly across the board?

Faith Archer: I think a lot of the people I know who started off at newspapers like the Telegraph, they will nowadays do a balance between freelance and corporate work, but I think it depends on the individual how much you embrace. For examples under the social channels. So one of the things I did when I was trying to get work with a startup blog and that opened a lot of opportunities for me and that made me much more focused on the social media side. 

Emily Slade: Yeah, absolutely. So are you literally writing skits? Are you providing sort of content that would be in a column but just repurposed for like an Instagram carousel? Like what kind of work are we talking about?

Faith Archer: Again, it varies, but for example, one of the things I'm due to do today, I've written A blog post for the pension company all about lifestyle lifestyling pension lifestyling is a way of investing and so the blog post that went to them, because pensions are regulated products, their listed company, it has to go through their compliance. Comments. So the content comes back, it may have been tweaked a bit so compliance is happy and then I use that to make a social media script and that will go back through compliance and then I will film it and send them the content because that's going to go out on their ticket. Channel if it's my content then it can be much more ad hoc and it might be just a photograph, or it might be a story or the kind of thing you can almost do. You know, holding the phone up when you're walking along, walking the dog or something. So it will vary.

Emily Slade: So did you have to upskill yourself with the incoming of social media and all of the different platforms? Coming out, you know you've gone from essentially. Typing on a computer to having to navigate TikTok, I mean, that's insane, broadband to TikTok, how did you upskill? 

Faith Archer: At the time I was on the Telegraph, it was a very interesting thing. We've gone from Charles Moore, who was a very, very traditional newspaper editor, and by the time I left, Will Lewis was in charge of it, who bet the farm on the Internet and he was very much embracing all kinds of channels. So I actually. And you know, this is like 2007. I was doing some podcasting interview, being interviewed for podcast then and writing content for the web. But otherwise, yeah, it is entirely as a freelancer. It's entirely on you. It's you don't have a company that's going to train you to do stuff. And one of the things that's definitely helped me is networking and maintaining links with journalists. I knew once I started blogging, you know, kind of met one Blogger, he'd set up a Facebook group for other bloggers. So I got to know lots of people I went to, I go to industry events, and it means that. I have a network so when I have queries then I can kind of you know fire them off to different people and part of Facebook groups for both bloggers and journalists. Sometimes you learn a lot from the questions. People are asking, some I don't even know the answer. I I don't even know what the whole the question means sometimes. But you can then go away. Research it, learn about it and it maybe they ask about things that you do know about so that you can kind of share your knowledge, help other people in turn after they've helped you.

Emily Slade: Yeah. Wonderful. How do you come up with the ideas for your articles and your blogs? Obviously, sometimes corporate are requesting specific content from you. But how do you come up with your own ideas?

Faith Archer: Well, even with corporate quite often. They will want ideas from you, I think, to a certain extent it's always at the back of my mind. And so. Part of staying up to date in a fast moving industry is, you know, I will listen to the radio. I will listen to podcasts. I will look at the headlines, I'll refer, you know, I will read other people's content, whether that's on social media or blogs or newspapers or websites. And so you're always thinking, OK, is that? Is that an angle? Is that something I can write about? Is that something I can take? Because you always think about the audience that you write about. So my most regular work is for a magazine called yours, and I used to do quite a lot of content for women in home. Those are very different audiences. So, for example, when there was the issue with the Mad Liz Trust budget and mortgage rates. Went through the roof and a lot of people worried about their mortgages. Some of my prime audiences, they won't have a mortgage anymore. They're sufficiently old. They will have cleared their housing debt. And so it was OK what's the angle for them? Well, it's kind of. They may well have children that are suffering this way that are asked. It might be asking for help. How do you what's the content that the audience would like to hear about, how they can judge whether they can afford to support their own children on their housing journey? So it's it's kind of and I do a certain amount of first person pieces. So it's kind of like what am I doing and could that be relevant to anybody else? So when we got refused car insurance, because our car insurance, just like no, we don't insure your hybrid car anymore. It's like right, I bet I can get this. Place somewhere, yeah. 

Emily Slade: Wonderful. So you found your niche in the finance world. How did you fall into the finance aspect of it all, and would you ever try a different avenue or are you finance for life now?

Faith Archer: It was where the opportunity arose because that was the section of the Telegraph that I was temping for. But on the and I had been tempting for other bits of the Telegraph before that in Icon I think, was like the distribution department of the Spectator or something random. And somebody said, oh, there's a job that's come up in TV reviewing. Do you want to apply for that? And I just. But I'm not sure I would actually enjoy because you wouldn't even be watching the TV programmes that you were interested in. You'd be watching the TV programmes that somebody else said then you and you've got to write about them. And I just thought I'd be bored. But when something came up in personal finance, I thought, oh, actually that to me, I I would be interested in that. I thought it could be interesting. I thought it could develop. I thought to a certain extent it's it is a niche area that you could make a name for you could make. Once you build up the knowledge and you build up the contacts, I thought there would be opportunities going freelance later on, so I think it depends. Whatever you're interested in, there will be there are, you know, fashion journalists, sports journalists, current affairs journalists, all these different areas. So trying to find something that you're interested in you're passionate about and I enjoy. Writing about personal finance, it affects so many all areas of everybody's life, and it's useful, so I'm quite happy sticking with that. But I'm also aware there are other journalists that I know that have. Started off there. That moved into different areas because they're they're interests like elsewhere.

Emily Slade: Yeah, completely. So what advice would you give for anyone trying to break into this industry?

Faith Archer: Start writing. I mean, that's certainly something when I've gone back to university to talk to students about it. You know, as a journalist that is your, but you need to show you can write. So who can publish your writing? You know, whether that's a a school magazine, a university newspaper, a local paper. Who is it that you can write for? I think it's amazing nowadays that, you know, you could start up a personal blog, a sub stack newsletter you can. And just start writing. Start thinking about it. Stop pitching about it, because fundamentally writing as a journalist, you've got to deliver interesting copy to time and to length, and it's got to be accurate and you can start doing that. One of the things I'd say is you get any opportunity. Do the best job you can do. So when I was making the tea. And I and I had been doing very, very different jobs before that. And it's like, OK, well, I've been asked to do this. I will do, I will do what I'm asked. I will do the best I can, but then I've got free time. So I'm actually kind of saying, OK, so, you know, done, done, diary, done filing done, read the letters. What can I do next? And that's how I got my first ever piece into the Telegraph, badgering my editor. He still had time, so he got me to do a little case study. When you ring somebody up, like, you know, probably somebody had to make an insurance claim or something to go with an article about buildings and contents. Insurance, but it meant I got my first buy line, you know, 250. Where's my first line? I got it in there. So I think there's an element of. You never know where opportunities are going to come from, and probably if I hadn't been badgering him and taking those opportunities wouldn't have thought of me when the job came up.

Emily Slade: Oh, perfect. What's the best piece of financial advice that you've ever received? 

Faith Archer: Ah, start investing. 

Emily Slade: Oh yeah?

Faith Archer: Start investing because I didn't come from a... my family, did not invest in stocks and shares. I had a mother, who was like, yeah, you've got to get on the property ladder, get on the property ladder. And that is increasingly unaffordable right now. But with the growth of the internet and fintech companies, you can start investing. You do not have to be rich to start investing, you can invest like £25 a month and over the long term, it outperforms cash, and if you've got the opportunity to invest, I mean a pension. Is a long way ahead of you, but you do get given free money to kind of bribe you into doing it. So I'd I'd say especially as a woman there is the known gender pay gap, gender pension gap, so sort of weigh some of your money and don't just spend all of it. 

Emily Slade: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today.

Faith Archer: Thank you.

Emily Slade: Thanks again to Faith for their time. For more information on becoming a financial journalist, you can head to prospects.ac.uk or check out the links in the show notes below. For a full length video version of this episode, check out our YouTube channel @futureyoupod. If you enjoyed the episode, feel free to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. Thank you, as always, for listening and good luck on your journey to future you. 

Notes on transcript

This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.

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