Where the Jobs Are
Amid the ongoing recession, American freelancers are finding more and more work abroad.
When Donavon Brutus got laid off from his animation job in June 2009, he knew the amount of freelance work near his home in Tampa, Fla., could not sustain him. But rather than spend months looking for a full-time, salaried position in a state with a 12.2 percent unemployment rate, Brutus went online and started working for oDesk, one of a growing number of Web sites that connect contract workers to temporary projects. Now Brutus earns an average of $16 per hour designing logos, 3-D graphics, and CD covers for companies as far away as China, Australia, and India. “The only issue has been the time difference,” he says. “But that’s only been a problem with one client in India, who wanted me to wake up at 3 a.m.”
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Nancy Cook is a staff writer for Newsweek and Newsweek.com, covering business and economics. In 2010, she and a team of two editors won the New York Press Club Award for Best Business Reporting on the Internet for their seven-month multimedia project called “Jobbed: How America Works Now,” which examined the future of work, careers and the labor market as the country emerged from the recession.
Cook has written about the way the stimulus money affected a single neighborhood to luxury retailers thrilled by record Wall Street bonuses to accounts of rank-and-file employees whose careers were turned upside down by Lehman Brothers’ collapse. She also has reported on politics and economic policy for Newsweek.com’s national affairs blog, focusing on the intersection between Washington D.C. and Wall Street.
Prior to coming to Newsweek, she worked as a producer on the 2008 presidential campaign at National Public Radio and as an on-air reporter for WRNI, the Rhode Island NPR affiliate. There, her enterprise and feature reporting on a lackluster urban school system and a federal lawsuit against the state child welfare agency earned her two regional Associated Press awards. She graduated from Carleton College and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she now teaches as an adjunct professor.
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