One of the nice things about being a freelance journalist used to be the company you kept. During the 1980s I was one of a group of freelancers in my town, and we would get together occasionally for lunch or beers or just to talk about where the next assignment might come from.

Sometimes we were obnoxious. But we were never more than one assignment from a blank calendar, and that knowledge leavened our arrogance. Editors held the reins of our happiness, and we knew it.

Perhaps you have read Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield. In it is a loquacious character named Mr. Micawber, a man who owed much, and earned less. He was forever between opportunities, certain that "something good will surely turn up."

In the 1938 movie, this incurable optimist was played, strangely, by the curmudgeonly W.C. Fields. Stranger still, a new version is being made now, with Micawber being played by Michael Richards -- Seinfeld's Kramer.

Micawber was a symptom of one of Victorian England's great problems - the emptying of the British countrysides, and the ensuing inability of the city to accommodate the influx.

A similar dynamic has overtaken writers. Only, instead of a transition from agrarian to industrial living, we are experiencing a transition from industrial to post-industrial living.

And like Micawber, we are caught between one economy that only has gas enough for the entrenched establishment, and a new economy whose shape is not yet clear to us - and whose opportunities are not easy to grasp.

I'm 47, and I spent most of my career in print journalism, as a newspaper editor and writer. When I saw the first signs of the new economy in 1983, I began to specialize in computers and business.

By the time the Internet blossomed, print publishing was already in deep trouble from broadcast competitors able to get info to people faster and flashier. When online competitors came along who were able to get info out even faster, even flashier, and at a fraction of the cost, print publishers knew the jig was up.

Print is slowly dying. But its alternative, the world of online publishing, is still in the gelatinous stage. Big print syndicates and online entities like MSNBC and Nando Times rely on reprints from their print staff, wire services, or affiliates.

Leading net-based syndicates like Newsbytes American Reporter don't pay if they can help it. Their own revenues are precariously thin, and they figure getting published in their cyberpages is "good exposure."

Net result, as Micawber liked to say, is that what was once a pretty good profession is now a game of musical chairs, with only a few chairs, some of them pretty badly broken.

In my town, of my generation of freelancers, I am about the only one still free-lancing. Tom went into direct merchandising. Eddie opened a coffeeshop. Louise took a job with a newspaper writing about casinos. Jim - what ever did happen to Jim?

They always seemed to me to be better writers than me, on one way or another. But I am more shameless. Around 1994 I redefined my niche again, this time as the "human side of change." Though my paper canceled my column, I keep writing it, offering it to newspapers by e-mail every week, and publishing it on my website. If you can't get a good gig, I figure, why not give myself one?

My website features columns, business articles, tech reviews, book excerpts, a novel, humor, poems, and divers other stuff. My site is nearly as huge as Dickens' life output, even though he was paid by the word, while I to write to fit.

At least a hundred people come to my site every day. So even when I don't have any assignment, I feel like I'm getting read. Which is mother's milk to a writer.

And it's free. Someday, when the new economy declares itself, and there is a way to charge people who surf through the site, I would like to charge a quarter of a penny for every piece downloaded or viewed. It's not much, but it's something.

I would like very much for visitors to my site to push themselves away from their keyboards saying, "I must have read fifteen cents worth. I couldn't read another byte!"

I know what you're thinking - that self-publishing is a short-cut, that it's not true publishing, that it bears a passing resemblance to the sin of self-love.

But I say tut-tut, my good fellow, to all that. Because by nature I'm a Micawber. Though storm clouds gather, I am confident something good will turn up. So I'm sticking around, until the new economy drops anchor, and I come into my reward.

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