In the United States, working as a freelance journalist often means dealing with unpredictable assignments, delayed payments from clients, and other challenges. Many people barely make ends meet, and the problem has only gotten worse in recent years, says Alissa Quart ’97JRN, the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP), a nonprofit that hires struggling journalists to report on economic inequality.

“Around thirty thousand newspaper reporters lost their jobs between 2008 and 2015,” explains Quart, herself a journalist and poet. “Media tends to be made by rich people, for middle-class people, about poor people. We exist in part to change that equation so more of the people writing about the working poor or struggling middle class are themselves working poor or struggling middle class.”

Read more in Columbia Magazine.