FSP Opens Elections for 2024 Steering Committee!

The Freelance Solidarity Project / Digital Media Division is now electing its 2024-25 steering committee. Voting is open to FSP members between now and April 15 at midnight PT. The steering committee will be responsible for shaping the division’s strategy, supporting members on planning projects and events, communicating with membership, and guiding the ongoing work of the division’s working groups and subcommittees.

The candidates’ statements and bios are below, and once elected will hold their positions for a one-year term. Current DMD Co-Chairs Abigail Higgins and Olivia Schwob will continue on the steering committee.

Roshan Abraham

Candidacy statement

I’m a freelance journalist mainly covering affordable housing coming out of a year-long stint at Vice, which ended a week before the company imploded in February. I’ve been freelancing since 2017, for nearly my entire career as a journalist, and before that I was a freelance assistant video editor on reality television shows.

I’m helping with the newly-formed Media Economy committee. My goal is to have FSP more involved in advocating for good, worker-centered policy for funding journalism. I have watched in frustration as staff jobs and freelance budgets have evaporated and many journalists have treated it like a natural disaster rather than a result of intentional decisions by a few predatory tech and private equity companies enabled by negligent federal agencies.

I have learned in my short time on the media economy committee that there are a lot of different policy avenues open to us, there are many bills across the country in play that differ in how they protect or don’t protect workers, and that it’s incumbent on us to define a shared vision for how journalism is funded in the future before someone else does it for us. 

To that end I’m helping with the “Journalism Futures” virtual panel, which we are hoping will become part of a series. I’m also taking part in informal conversations with policy experts and hoping FSP can co-create some policy proposals/bills with other like-minded organizers that target tech companies and lift up workers and cooperatives.

Bio

Roshan Abraham is a Queens-based freelance journalist who writes about cities, policing and affordable housing. Roshan is a former staff writer at Motherboard, a housing correspondent for Next City and has written for The Verge, The Baffler, The Guardian, Slate, The New York Times and other publications. He is a former Open City fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop and his work has been funded with grants from Freelance Investigative Reporters and Editors and Solitary Watch. 

Rider Alsop

Candidacy statement

I joined NWU-FSP in August, at a time when both media and podcasting was taking an economic nose dive. I noticed the quality of my contract gigs were degrading in every way (pay, type of work, amount of support, etc) and wanted to find solidarity and alternative solutions. Since then, I’ve been involved with the legislative committee working on the Unemployment Bridge Program – a proposed NY state legislation that would provide unemployment insurance for traditionally excluded workers and also the media economy working group, thinking through policy and alternative economies (like worker co-ops, etc) for long-term solutions to the problems currently facing us as media workers. I’m interested in broad-based coalition and solidarity building and strengthening our organization so we can act rapidly, strategically and effectively. 

Bio

I’m a freelance reporter and writer working mostly in audio documentary/podcasting. 

Grace Benfell

Candidacy statement

I freelance as a critic and reporter on the internet, mostly in video games coverage. I am both autistic and trans. I have personal experience with how freelance work can be especially appealing to people who are physically and mentally vulnerable and how employers can exploit that vulnerability. I’ve organized with queer students at the conservative religious school Brigham Young University and volunteered at numerous mutual aid orgs in my current home of Chicago.

I believe that labor organizing is a cornerstone of broader liberatory struggle. I am inspired by and want to help continue the spirit of internationalism I’ve seen in the union. As gig work and side hustles become ever more prevalent, as inflation soars while rates stay the same, it is our responsibility and our joy to work together for our collective future. Looking forward to furthering that work with all of you, hand in hand.

Bio

Grace Benfell is a terminally unemployable and forever cranky freelance writer who has written for Paste Magazine, GameSpot, Vice, Bulletpoints Monthly, [lock-on], among many others. She writes fiction about messed-up mormons and guilty women and non-fiction about killing gods, electronic dysphorias, and virtual environmentalism. She creates for herself and for freaks like her.

Taylor Dorrell

Candidacy statement

My name is Taylor Dorrell, I’m a freelance photographer and writer based in Columbus, Ohio. I spend all of my time reading, writing, organizing, and following up on invoices. As a part of the Steering Committee, I’d like to help create a strong Midwestern presence for FSP and more generally aid in building a strong militant trade union movement for the 21st century. I hope to develop successful methods in recruiting new members as experimented with here in Columbus and also extend that membership to include media workers in different mediums like photography and video. 

Bio

Taylor Dorrell is a freelance photographer and writer based in Columbus, Ohio. He received his BFA in Photography from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 2017. After working as a photo assistant in NYC for three, he returned to Columbus where he worked as an aerial photographer and began writing for local publications. Dorrell founded the Mike Gold Collective in 2022, a writers collective in Columbus that covers unreported labor issues and political struggles. As an organizer in FSP, he helped pass a Columbus version of Freelance Isn’t Free in 2023. He’s a contributing writer to the Cleveland Review of Books, Business Insider, Jacobin, and is a columnist at Matter News.

Alexis Gunderson

Candidacy statement

I’m obviously coming into this election as a repeat candidate, and am bringing with me what I think is a solid record helping to build more robust structures in both FSP and NWU, and what I know is an appreciably deeper understanding of what it means to be an organizer in the freelance space. 

In terms of my last term, the work I’m most proud of is taking point on last summer’s WGA/SAG-AFTRA critics’ solidarity campaign; developing a framework, in the Generative AI working group, for members to come together from across the union to tackle issues that extend beyond any individual division or chapter; and working with my fellow Bylaws Refresh Team members to take a listening tour of our entire union in order to build relationships and establish a framework for the next iteration of NWU’s bylaws. 

In terms of the organizing work that excites me going forward, I am really compelled to keep working on building out our internal division and union structures, work which will include creating a more comprehensive “landing page” for our rate sharing project, establishing stronger connections with other NWU chapters and divisions, and helping to develop more member-leaders to support our work as we continue to build power. I’m also looking forward  to reaching the point where I can start to more actively organize within my own, historically hard-to-crack entertainment writing space.

Solidarity always!

Bio

Originally from Wyoming, now a (primarily) TV critic based in Maryland. Dogs, puzzles, and basketball (watching, not playing) fill my free time.

Khawla Nakua

Candidacy statement

Hello, my name is Khawla Nakua, I am a free criminal justice reporter and an organizer at FSP. I am here today to say my candidate statement to be elected as part of the Steering Committee. I have been an FSP member for close to 3 years and in that time I have done a lot of organizing projects that I been proud of. Like the rate research project, which looks at the issues with freelance rates and why freelancers don’t make a living wage with these rates. Incarcerated writers initiative, organizing a panel that would discuss issues that incarcerated writers go to hold prison officials accountable and the Palestinian solidarity work that came up after the October 7th attack. I have been one of the organizers that have been working on this retaliation report of media workers who have been retaliated against who spoke out about Palestine. I would like to continue to amplify and strengthen these areas of organizing as a member of the steering committee. I have many ideas on where I think area work can go and I would love the opportunity to implement them as a member of the steering committee.

Bio

Khawla Nakua is a freelance criminal justice reporter based in Canada. 

Elena Novak

Candidacy statement

I came to the union through a friend and fellow member. I had recently quit my job, which my coworkers and I had tried diligently to unionize. My friend knew that I, as a nascent freelance writer, could find a new political home in FSP – and I truly have! I have never organized in a space that so seamlessly marries effectiveness and care, and I feel immensely proud to call myself a member of this union. I joined a little over a year ago, and since July have held a role on the steering committee as well as the role of NWU’s communications manager. I’ve co-organized the In These Times UA campaign, helped bring Florida members together for a happy hour, facilitated discussions on Emergent Strategy, and worked on a team to revamp our union’s bylaws. While the media industry feels floundering and bleak, our work is building the future we want to see – media workers organizing to win better conditions and to build supportive community against the systems that want to keep us in precarity. By staying on the steering committee, I hope to continue uplifting and applying our powerful strategy and messaging across the whole union so we can be the ‘assertive, militant, pugnacious’ union Toni Morrison envisioned us to be. 

Bio

Over the last decade, I’ve written for two newspapers and a few online publications. I recently became a freelance writer after spending three years as a full-time organizer in the Tampa Bay area leading behavioral health and environmental campaigns. Since then, I’ve published in YES! Magazine and Waging Nonviolence with a focus on movement journalism. Most recently, I wrote about how community members in Southwest Florida fought back against disaster capitalism after Hurricane Ian, which displaced my parents to Tennessee. I currently live with my partner in Lakeland, Florida (until we move to Tennessee this summer!) and spend most of my free time cultivating queer community and falling in love with my home state before I leave it. I’m also preparing to help facilitate the 2024 cohort of the Anne Braden Anti-Racist Organizer Training Program, which I recommend especially to anyone organizing in the South!

Jess Pinkham

Candidacy statement

I’ve freelanced my entire adult life – appropriate for someone who pursued Jazz Studies. Improvisation is a comfortable zone, an asset for anyone necessarily familiar with precarity. I understand stability to be illusory, and, like everything, temporary. This feeling – less nihilistic than it reads – has grown as I age (and get into Buddhism!). It’s gifted me clarity: what I really care about is interdependence and joy.

I was adrienne maree brown’s first assistant. Following her adage that what you pay attention to grows, I want to be involved in FSP in a more focused way. So far, I’ve been a scattered maximalist. Joining the Steering Committee would help; I want to serve as a sort of librarian. I’ll maintain a Bookshop page (Alexis Gunderson’s brilliant idea she’s consented I run into the endzone) I envision partly as a resource for people who, like me, feel chronically underinformed, and explicit encouragement for them to not let that limit their engagement. I’ll curate a crowdsourced list, ensuring a wide array of tastes, including but not limited to labor organizing. I know from my work in television (field producing How To With John Wilson) and with children (teaching at a summer camp that identifies as Burning Man for 7 to 14-year-olds) that sideways is often the most satisfying approach. I helped Maxine Gordon develop the Dexter Gordon Recorded Sound Archive, purchased by the Library of Congress, and transcribing has been my one consistent gig, besides babysitting, since college. I run archival, and I’ve long dreamt of working in a bookstore. And of course, with a queer lens, I intend to present organizing as hot – easy to do, since I consider it to be intrinsically so.

Bio

Jess Pinkham’s a native Manhattanite living in New Orleans because she believes it’s where joymongers belong. A devotee of all things analogue, she’s never without a 35mm camera and collects cassettes. Every morning, she reads a poem and sends a postcard; her enamorment with USPS led to an ongoing portrait project of postal workers begun in spring of 2020. She believes in tangibility, and still subscribes to magazines and buys books. She prioritizes integrity and excitement over concern of career. This, like her decision not to pursue parenthood, perplexes people, which she considers a failure of imagination.  

Chris Randle

Candidacy statement

 I mainly write cultural criticism, essays on books or cinema, so I’m excited about how last year’s Hollywood strikes galvanized our own battle against the media industry’s feckless bosses. Like some other FSP-NWU siblings, I’m also a member of Writers Against the War on Gaza, and I’m proud of our union’s efforts to defend media workers facing reprisals for their solidarity with Palestinians, that we continue to refuse.

Bio

I’m a Canadian writer living in NYC.