Freelance Journalists are relatively popular in bigger cities and especially with storm chasing. Some media places don't want to pay for a news crew to be on overnight, so freelancers will go to incident scenes and shoot some video and then sell it to a TV station. A dude I know in Vancouver does it quite a bit. Some incidents pay quite a bit, pays for most of his vacations usually.
Theirs a few other chase teams out there right now catching tornadoes for a new series on The Discovery Channel this fall.
Jason