It was a Sunday evening in May when Kyle Martin’s phone rang. He looked to see who it was — it was his boss.
“That’s strange,” he thought to himself. He rarely, if ever, gets a phone call from his boss, but definitely not on a day when he wasn’t supposed to be hearing from her. He wasn’t even working. Something was up.
“Hey,” he answered.
“Hey Kyle,” she said. “Because of the coronavirus, we have to make some cutbacks.”
She went on to tell him that COVID had greatly affected the media industry in the few months it had been in the U.S. and they were letting a few people go. He was one of those people.
Since Aug. 2019, he had been working part-time for the Bay City News in Northern California, where he covered the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, and city council meetings for San Jose, Mountainview and other towns around the South Bay and Silicon Valley. By March 2020, he had begun reporting on the pandemic as the virus first made its mark in the U. S. And with that phone call, COVID-19 made its mark on Martin’s life.
Martin wasn’t the only, but rather one of many staff journalists around the country who had been laid off due to COVID-19 and its effects on news organizations. In an April 2020 article, The New York Times estimated roughly 37,000 journalists were either laid off, furloughed or took a pay cut in newsrooms across the country due to the pandemic.
However, the issue of journalists losing jobs has been a longstanding one for the past decade due to declining print advertising sales and the advancement of the Internet.
“Facebook took up a lot of that revenue, the ad revenue, and Google, so that really hurt newspapers and different publications.” said Christian McPhate, managing editor for Local Profile Magazine in Plano, Texas.
According to an April 2020 Pew Research Center data analysis, newsroom employment continued to decline from 2008 to 2019. The analysis found that during this time overall newsroom employment dropped by 23%, down from 114, 000 newsroom employees in 2008 to 88,000 in 2019.
But McPhate said that doesn’t mean the stories have stopped and to fill the gap, there has been an increased demand for freelancers to write them.
“The jobs are out there, " he said. "The problem is just getting your foot in the door with a publication, and then just being able to stay on top of it."
Martin already had his foot in the door. While he was working with the Bay City News, he was supplementing his income by freelancing for the Metro Silicon Valley. However, it was not a stable paycheck.
“I’d be lucky to get three stories in one week,” Martin said. “Freelancing is hard, so it’s not like I’d have a regular story count per week either, every week. I tried to kind of plot out my months and try to get more stories as I go, but we’re talking one to zero to three stories per week. Depending on the week that changes, and that’s during the pandemic.”
He continued to freelance after being laid off. It wasn’t good money though. In fact, it was “absolutely bad money,” said Martin.
Two surveys conducted by the Freelancer Union in March and April 2020 found that 80% of respondents who “self-identified as journalists” were out of work by the end of April. This was a 13% increase from March, and freelancers also reported to have lost more than $5,000 in income since the pandemic started.
Martin lived with his cousin while he was freelancing. He hardly had money to survive, and certainly not enough to live comfortably. This only drove him to work harder.
“Freelancing through [the pandemic], you know it takes a lot of instinct to know that somebody is gonna pick you up, but more importantly it takes having a publication already wanting to publish your work,” Martin said. “And as a freelancer, that’s your main hustle. You have to have somebody that will publish your work.”
He had bills to pay, his bank account was running low, but there was still news to cover.
“People need information and you have the tools to get that information,” he said. “So it stresses you as a person to freelance and the pandemic did not make it any easier at all.”
But he was passionate about being a working journalist and despite the mounting stress, he took whatever assignments he could to survive. He couldn't give up now and certainly couldn't turn down his next assignment.
It was May 29, 2020, San Jose, California. Martin was working freelance, covering the protests sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. People gathered outdoors in large numbers even though it was the height of the pandemic. Some wore masks, others didn’t.
Protesters marched and shouted in the streets, many of them holding signs in their hands. Police shouted back, trying to keep the crowds in line. Tear gas canisters were flying through the air. Some people are shot with rubber bullets. Others were attacked by police officers. The 6-foot Filipino American reporter was in the thick of it. Martin was equipped with his backpack, camera and cell phone ready to cover the protest.
“We’re a few months in [the pandemic] but people didn’t care,” he said. “Covering that was wild because everybody was afraid to get the coronavirus, but not more than they were mad at the police.”
Martin had never covered anything like it. He was tear gassed and hit with a rubber bullet. He was surrounded by thousands of individuals who might have had COVID-19. He witnessed an officer smack a protester’s cell phone out of his hand and watched as other officers grabbed the protester, "busting him up," Martin said. He saw that the protesters leg was broken in several places. Watched the whole incident — even took photos of it.
Even though he was surrounded by chaos and anger and violence, he returned the next day to cover it all again.
Around this time, his mental health started to decline and yet, he persisted. He had to keep working. Although it had been a year since he had seen his family who lived in Texas, freelancing and the pandemic made it impossible for him to visit.
Martin wasn't alone in the emotional strain he experienced. Freelance journalist Alejandro Medellin worked from his home in Denton, Texas during the pandemic.
“Not belonging to a team and working from home, not being able to leave and hang out with friends and family. I just felt very isolated,” Medellin said. “That’s been the hardest thing for me. The isolation. I think it’s compounded because of the pandemic. I started going to therapy this past year because of it.”
For Martin, the burnout only increased as he searched for work, getting freelance gigs covering dark topics such as COVID deaths, doing some ghostwriting and some manual labor, just to survive.
“In freelance, you’re always chasing a check,” he said. “Every time you’re working, you’re chasing a check. You’re chasing something. And that chase can drain you if you don’t have the support under you that you need.”
When his car broke down — the one he had driven when he moved from Texas to California in 2018 — it was a sign he couldn’t ignore. With no means of transportation, he knew it was time to take a break.
So, in July 2020, Martin returned home to McKinney, Texas to visit his family. He needed to hit the reset button. He began to reflect on why he got into journalism in the first place. Funny thing is, he wasn’t always going to be a journalist. He entered the University of North Texas in 2014 as a business major.
“I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all,” Martin said. “I had my homegirl and family, Julia Falcon, who used to work for the North Texas Daily — I'm not related to her, but the joke was that we were cousins — she hooked it up. She said, ‘Come check out the North Texas Daily,’ and I’d always liked writing and creative stuff, so I was like, ‘F--k it, OK, I’ll try it.’ And I stuck around.”
What made him stick with journalism, despite the pandemic, was more than just being good at what he does. It was also about being a representative for his community.
“Being Filipino, I feel like where I live there’s a lot of Asian people or just minority/ethnic people in general. And I feel like if they see a Filipino dude pull up to them and ask them questions, it’s more normal and that gets people more comfortable with me. I don’t know if that’s true or not, that’s just my thinking.”
Returning home and seeing his mother, father and three siblings helped him get right mentally. He helped build his parents a deck in their backyard and built his mom a raised garden bed. He did some skateboarding in the Texas heat.
He didn’t take much of a break, though. Once he began to feel better, he spent time job hunting — searching and applying for open positions at news publications across the country.
“I was ready. I had to figure something out, and if a job popped up in f--king Chicago or f--king Oregon or anywhere,” he said, “anywhere that would’ve been able to pay my bills and give me a place to stay, I probably would’ve taken it.”
After he returned to California without a job, his parents gave him an ultimatum.
“You’ve got two months,” they said. “Two months to figure it out, or we’re going to come and bring you back.”
Things stayed bad, for a time, stayed rough financially as he continued to figure things out. But he didn’t exactly have a plan for how he would find stable employment, so he kept taking freelance work — and anything else to get by.
And then it happened.
“One fateful day,” Martin called it. It was a Monday, Sept. 7, 2020. He was working a job doing flower arrangements for a company. He had just helped unload some trucks to set up the flowers. He had his skateboard with him. He skated down a hill and broke his arm.
“I broke my wrist real bad,” Martin said. “I had to go to the emergency room and then it turns out that I needed some pretty serious surgery. I had to get a plate, 10 screws and two pins in my wrist because of how bad I broke my arm. So that was a huge setback. Basically, that stuck me back in California for another month. This was at the end of the two-month period that I was gonna have to pack up and leave.”
But while convalescing, he saw a job posting for a staff writer position at the Palo Alto Daily Post.
“I’m just in a cast, in a splint, thinking about my life and how I need to make something happen,” Martin said. “So, I applied, one-armed, for the job.”
Within two weeks, he interviewed for the job and got it.
“All of a sudden, my life turned around and now I have some stability,” he said. “Now I have a way to support myself.”
He began work in October — a full-time staff writer, responsible for covering 20 stories a week. For the first time in months, he would not have to worry about making ends meet. He would be OK.
“I’m better now than I was months ago, but there are things I miss about freelancing,” he said. “Like the freedom to write about what you want and track down any story you want. What I don’t miss is that instability, I don’t miss struggling.”