The Silence After the Send

There is a particular kind of quiet that freelance journalists know well. It isn’t the peaceful kind. It’s the silence that follows an email pitch you spent hours refining. The one you researched, tailored, proofread, and sent with cautious optimism. The one that now sits unanswered in a client’s inbox while days turn into weeks. That silence has a name: professional ghosting, as David Corfield reflects...

Freelancing is built on reaching out. Pitching ideas. Introducing yourself. Asking – politely, professionally, persistently – for someone to say yes. Or at the very least no. But more often than not, what comes back is nothing at all. No rejection. No feedback. No acknowledgment that a real person took the time to write, to hope, to hit “send.” And that hurts.

Ghosting in journalism is rarely personal, but it always feels personal.

Clients are busy. Inboxes overflow. Budgets shrink. Publications close, merge, pivot, disappear. Freelancers are told this constantly, as if understanding the structural reasons for silence should make it hurt less. It doesn’t. Because behind every unanswered pitch is a calculation: Should I follow up? Am I being annoying? Did this email get lost, or was I quietly dismissed?

Following up becomes an emotional exercise in self-negotiation. You wait the recommended seven days. Then ten. Then two weeks. You draft a gentle nudge and delete it three times before sending. You try not to sound desperate, even though your livelihood depends on someone replying. You try not to internalise the quiet, even though it’s hard not to hear it as a verdict on your worth.

For freelance journalists, ghosting isn’t just discouraging, it’s destabilising. When you don’t hear back, you can’t plan. You don’t know whether to hold a story or pitch it elsewhere. You don’t know if your idea was almost accepted or immediately discarded. Silence creates limbo, and limbo doesn’t pay bills.

The false perception of freedom

What makes this harder is that freelancing is often romanticised as freedom. Flexible schedules. Working from anywhere. Being your own boss. But the reality is that freelancers shoulder all the risk. We absorb the unpaid labour of pitching, researching, and waiting. We live with the constant uncertainty of not knowing where the next byline or paycheck will come from. And we’re expected to do it with gratitude.

There’s also an unspoken hierarchy that ghosting reinforces. Clients (editors and marketing managers, in my case) have institutional power; freelancers orbit around it. Silence reminds you where you stand. It teaches you, subtly and repeatedly, that your time is less valuable. That your labour is speculative until proven otherwise. That professionalism, in practice, is often one-sided.

And yet, despite it all, us freelance journalists keep pitching.

We keep believing that the next idea will land, that the next email will be answered. We develop thick skins and spreadsheets to track submissions. We share advice in group chats about who replies and who don’t. We celebrate the small wins – a thoughtful rejection, a personal note, a “not right for us, but please pitch again” – because those moments of acknowledgment feel like oxygen.

Dealing with professional ghosting requires a strange mix of resilience and detachment. You learn not to read too much into silence, even though silence dominates the job. You remind yourself that no response is not a reflection of your talent, your intelligence, or your future. You pitch again. And again. And again.

But acknowledging the difficulty matters. Freelancing is hard, not because freelancers lack grit, but because the system relies on invisible labour and unanswered emails. Because it normalises silence in a profession built on communication. Because it asks writers to be endlessly patient in an industry that rarely is.

Maybe professionalism shouldn’t mean accepting being ignored. Maybe it should mean responding – even briefly – to the people whose work sustains publications and product launches. Until that changes, freelance journalists will keep writing into the void, hoping someone on the other side hits reply.

And when they do, even if the answer is no, it feels like a small act of mercy in a profession that all-too-often communicates through silence.