When I began my Feet in 2 Worlds editing fellowship in October 2024, I spoke about finding out I was autistic and feeling that the puzzle pieces of my life finally fit together. In that essay, I discussed remote work and accessibility, and I talked about why I decided to edit and produce our podcast series, The Hustle. But at the time, I didn’t dive into my specific experience of autism.
Now, as my fellowship concludes, I’m reflecting on one autistic trait that has guided my approach as an editor. “Justice sensitivity,” as Simply Psychology describes it, is “a heightened sense of fairness, equity, and inclusion, coupled with a strong need to address and correct injustices.” In other words, when I witness something unjust, I experience severe distress, and I am unable to look away or do nothing. As a result, I speak up about what I perceive to be unfair, and that has often come at a great cost. I have lost close family and friends — and sometimes even jobs — because I can’t just keep quiet when someone else is treated unjustly, and certainly not when I am treated unfairly. Being justice sensitive can be really inconvenient.
As an independent producer active in freelance communities like the Journalists of Color Slack or the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), one of my ongoing frustrations is the lack of pay transparency in our industry. When an independent producer negotiates one’s rate, this lack of transparency often leads to lower pay and to scope creep, where your duties keep increasing beyond what you originally agreed on or are being paid for.
After greenlighting The Hustle — a narrative podcast series about immigrants and a changing economy — our team put out a call for pitches to solicit stories. In November 2024, I was on a Zoom call with my bosses (Managing Editor Quincy Surasmith and Managing Director Mia Warren) when we decided to hire a freelance producer we liked. We believed in their pitch, and in the interview, I gauged that they seemed fairly experienced. Mia tasked me with putting together a contract for this producer. She suggested that I offer a number with the expectation that the producer would negotiate up. Suddenly, it hit me — I realized that for the first time, I was on the other side of the hiring process and that I was in a position to do something about the lack of pay transparency.
So I made my case to Mia and Quincy: Wouldn’t it be great if all the freelancers I hired knew what the pay criteria was? What if we could avoid the negotiation song and dance so that newcomers who are less familiar with contract negotiations could still get a fair deal? Let’s be transparent. What could go wrong? Mia was receptive and told me to go ahead and write it out.
When I got to work on developing a pay transparency model, I based it on a seemingly reasonable assumption that if a producer were more experienced, they would need less support from the editorial team — and therefore, should be paid more. If they were less experienced, the editorial team would require additional time to work with them, and they would be paid less. Based on this framework, I tried to hire an equal share of more experienced and less experienced freelancers. On paper, this made perfect sense.
Once our producers signed their contracts, the production process began in earnest. Feet in 2 Worlds’ editorial process is highly iterative and pretty extensive, which is how such a small team delivers consistently high quality work. So when producers work with us, they receive a lot of support — and as a result, they advance their skills leaps and strides. As the Editing Fellow, I assigned our stories, put together a production schedule, and built in room for producers to make mistakes.
Leading up to the publication of The Hustle, I met with each producer every one to two weeks for at least six months. I helped them identify strong characters, guided them to gather specific tape, and discussed what angle each voice would bring to the story. I learned that sometimes, my role was not to make quick decisions, but to listen and reflect their ideas back to them. If an interview fell through because of unanticipated logistical challenges and a producer started to panic, we brainstormed ways to pivot and to keep calm. I led with empathy, and I shared about times when I was in their shoes and my stories also fell apart.
When it was time for the producers to write the first draft of their scripts, I wanted to avoid perfection paralysis — a condition that often plagued me, where the desire to write the perfect script gets in the way of writing anything. I set a first deadline and encouraged them to get something down on paper.
Throughout this process, communication was a challenge for me. How could I give feedback in a way that the producer would best receive it? What should I do when they miss a deadline? A direct approach that was effective for one person backfired when I used it with another. A firm deadline was effective for some, but made others panic. It was constant trial and error on my part, and it took a lot of effort not to listen to my imposter syndrome. But it was extremely rewarding when someone who wanted my input on everything started to work more independently. It felt good when another person’s news judgment got sharper with every draft. That’s what I couldn’t have seen on paper; it only emerged in the editing process.
But as each story went through the stages of production, from reporting to writing to voicing to cutting tape, my experience criteria started to fall apart. Some of the more experienced producers needed help adjusting to our specific style and required more editorial support than I had anticipated. Meanwhile, some of the less experienced producers were eager to gain experience and prove themselves, so they put in extra time and effort, exceeding my initial expectations. The harder they worked, the more I wished I could upgrade their pay tier. But the contracts were signed and I felt stuck in the model I had created. I began to see that transparency didn’t always equate to fairness.
As a freelance producer myself, I already had experience advocating for myself in contract negotiations. But being on the other side of the hiring process, I understood the challenges facing editors and managers. I wanted to advocate for freelance producers, but the challenge, I realized, is bigger than just pay transparency.
Like the stories in The Hustle demonstrated, the nature of work is changing. That has been reflected in our creative industry for years. Since 2023, major podcasting companies from NPR to SiriusXM have been laying workers off. A career where you get hired as an intern and climb the ladder until you’re an executive is increasingly rare. As freelancers, we know this means you have to get more and more creative in finding ways to make ends meet while trying to gain skills. This also poses a challenge to hiring managers, who must gauge skills and experience when looking at non-linear resumes and candidates.
The problem with the way I structured the pay transparency model is that in an attempt to be equal, it was not equitable. What I learned during my fellowship is that no one size fits all. Every producer needs a tailored approach, and every story poses different challenges. Equity in hiring and compensation also requires this tailored approach. So how can we treat workers uniquely but also fairly? How can we still be transparent but also flexible when it comes to pay? These are just some of the questions to think about in pursuit of a more just compensation model.
As I reflect on my fellowship, I realize how much I have grown. This was sometimes easy to forget, especially as I was shepherding the entire project forward and sprinting toward the end. But I feel proud of the work we have done on The Hustle, especially as anti-immigrant legislation was evolving every day, and earning the trust of immigrant communities to share their stories with us became more difficult. Our producers did incredible work in the face of increasing criminalization of both immigrant communities and journalists more broadly. The Hustle demonstrates that economic coverage can’t be divorced from immigration coverage. I hope to see future reporting take this intersectional approach, and I am grateful to have been part of shifting the conversation.