What It Actually Costs an Indie Journalist to Take a Vacation

Hi there,

Quick housekeeping before we get into it: the new Project C member directory is live — 50+ independent creator journalists, searchable by beat, platform and geography. If you're a member and haven't added yourself yet, add your listing here. If you're looking to connect with independent journalists working in your space, browse the directory now! - Liz

Today, around 4 p.m. (or whenever I actually wind up wrapping up work for the day) I am going on vacation for the first time since last August. For me, that's a long time. Too long. I am spiritually ready to be sitting next to a pool/ocean with an actual paper book in my hand and nothing to do but read and maybe fall asleep in the sun a couple of times.

If only it were just being spiritually ready. But instead of just thinking about which bathing suits and board games to take, there is anxiety that is running at a low hum beneath all of the planning and anticipatory beaching. The last time I took a vacation (yes, to the same place because yes, we go to the same beach every August), it took me about half of the week to actually fully relax. As a small business owner, it is really difficult to put down the responsibility and sense that everything hinges on you and your presence to keep the momentum moving forward. Because often everything does hinge on you keeping the momentum moving forward.

So, as I started thinking about how I was going to set myself up to be able to actually step away for seven days, I did what I often do when I need inspiration: I asked the Project C community – all of them also small business owners – how they did it.

I took a lot of comfort from Amanda Shendruk in her own pre-vacation post earlier this summer, when she wrote, “There's something insidious about creating your own thing: You think you can't take a break.”

A lot of people in our community feel that same tension. But what’s interesting is they haven't all landed on the same answer.

Rabia Chaudry, who produces two episodes of the Undisclosed podcast each week, said the last time she actually got away was during her kids' spring break – four days at a family resort in Mexico that she'd booked so far in advance she wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise. She still had to bank episodes ahead of time and stayed in close touch with her executive producer the whole trip. But a real vacation, for her, means fully checking out, and she said even a couple of days of that is “incredibly restorative.”

Stumptown Savings’ Bryan M. Vance runs grocery deals guides, which means his content has roughly the shelf life of the produce he writes about. He can't pre-write his posts the way someone covering, say, media trends or climate news might be able to. He said he'd taken short trips over the past 16 months, always with his laptop, working from hotel rooms, his mother-in-law's kitchen counter and airport terminals.

“It's hard to call those trips vacations,” Bryan wrote in our group Slack conversation about taking time off.

This week, he and his wife are finally taking a two-week trip to Romania they'd had to put on hold before he got laid off and went solo. He's leaving the laptop behind this time, deleting social media off his phone and setting an out-of-office reply before he goes. He also told the group what it took to get there: weeks of working seven days a week, pre-writing what he could and building out his editorial calendar so nothing falls through the cracks while he's gone.

After this trip, he doesn't expect to be able to take another one anytime soon.

Matt Kiser, who runs What The Fuck Just Happened Today, checked his own archive (he keeps what he calls a “big grid” of every day he's published) and found the last time he took a proper week off was August 2025, plus a handful of four- and five-day stretches around the holidays. He described the specific bind of being a solo news aggregator: the entire value of what he does is that he's doomscrolling so his readers don't have to, so when he goes quiet, the thing he's selling effectively stops existing. He used to hire freelancers to cover for him, but doesn't anymore. What he's found instead is that telling his audience the plain truth – that he's a person who sometimes needs a break – builds more trust than publishing something thinner just to keep the feed moving. He calls it living between “regular is reliable” and what he calls “the business of enough.”

And then there's The Food Section's Hanna Raskin, who has built the break directly into her business model. Every August, her outlet goes fully dark, no new stories until September – and pauses every reader's payment for that entire stretch. Her reasoning: “We ask readers to pay for the food journalism we produce, and it's hardly fair to charge them when our output is zilch.” The month isn't really a vacation for her staff so much as room to do the kind of reporting a daily publishing schedule doesn't allow. But structurally, it's the closest thing in this whole roundup to an actual, plannable, no-guilt break.

None of this is really about willpower. A recent report on independent information providers from CNTI and Project C found that most people running solo journalism operations described working something close to every waking hour, split between actually producing the work and everything else it takes to keep a small business alive. That's the ground floor Bryan, Rabia, Amanda, Matt, Hanna and everyone else in the creator journalism game are operating from. Without institutional backup, a week away isn't a benefit you've accrued. It's a bet you're making that your business survives your absence.

Scary, right?

Caitlin Dewey tried something radically different when she took parental leave from her newsletter, Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends, to give birth to her daughter last summer. Before leaving, Caitlin shared that the only way she would be able to afford taking parental leave was if 120 new subscribers signed up for paid subscriptions.

Luckily, we are friends (though we don't Gchat. Hmmm.) and I checked back in with her this week to ask how it looks a year out. She told me she used to think (like Hanna) that asking readers to keep paying during her leave was asking them to “pay for nothing.” She's since come around to seeing that as a potential misread of the relationship in this new era of indie journalism.

“They're not buying a commodity, the way they buy a T-shirt or a Netflix subscription,” Caitlin said. “They're buying into a larger project, and they want to see that project, me personally, succeed and thrive long term. That means taking parental leave and vacation.”

Looking back, her regret runs the opposite direction from what I'd expected. She wishes she'd taken more leave, not less.

“I felt a lot of self-imposed pressure to show readers I wasn't squandering their investment,” she said. “But I'm a person, not a corporation, which I now understand is why they were 'investing,' to begin with.”

So I'm going on vacation this afternoon, but with some caveats and some moves borrowed from the journalists quoted in this piece. I'm not doing any meetings. I am going to try REALLY HARD to stay away from the Slack community. And I'm going to dial back checking email to once a day. But that said, I have some long-term projects that need some space and time, so I am anticipating a few quiet mornings on the back porch with my laptop.

Is this the right way to unplug? I have no idea if there even is a right way. Some of us are Hanna, building the break into the business itself. Some of us are Bryan, white-knuckling our way to two weeks because we need it too badly not to. Some of us are Caitlin, asking our audience to support an ideal. And some of us are me, slowing down but not losing all of the momentum.

So tell me: when was the last time you actually took a vacation, and what did it cost you to do it? Reply to this email or, if you're a Community member, drop it in the Project C Slack. I'd love to keep this conversation going, and I might feature more of your answers in a future issue.

How this newsletter is made: A human (hi, it's Liz 👋) writes, edits and makes every editorial call here. I use Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, as a research tool — each week it sweeps my sources and assembles the first draft of the links roundup. Every link and every word gets a human read before it reaches you.