Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Freelance

Write Thinking: How a tech freelancer became his own publisher

Laura Oliver — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:46:22 +0000

A guest post on Write Thinking, from (former) freelance journalist Roy H. Rubenstein on the launch of his new online magazine and how he’s set up sponsorship for the venture.

A specialist journalist (his new site Gazettabyte covers opticom developments in the datacom and telecom industries), Rubenstein had been freelancing for six years for a magazine, which was closed in July.

“I now have my own title. No more surprise phone calls telling me to stop writing as the magazine is about to fold,” he writes.

Full post at this link…

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – guide to freelance survival

Laura Oliver — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:10:07 +0000

Freelancers: Website Freelancers Anonymous has created a 12-step guide for surviving as a freelance journalist. You can download the handbook and manifesto for free. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link - we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

Freelancers – how well are you marketing yourself online?

Ed Martin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:15:05 +0000

It’s your last chance to book on Journalism.co.uk and Guy Clapperton’s ‘Introduction to online marketing for freelance journalists’ course, to be held at Journalism.co.uk’s central Brighton offices on Monday 12 October 2009.

For the low price of £85 + VAT, we’re offering attendees a place on this course as well as a year’s subscription to our online database of freelance journalists. This is normally £50 per year, so depending how you look at it you’re either getting yourself exposure to our 120,000 plus monthly unique users for free, as well as learning how to get the best possible exposure for yourself, or you’re making a great saving on a course that’s been described as ‘really useful’ and an ‘enjoyable evening’ by previous delegates with an ‘excellent’ tutor.

Guy Clapperton, who will be teaching the course, is a veteran freelance journalist, media trainer, and social media expert, and the author of ‘This is Social Media: Tweet, Blog, Link and Post Your Way to Business Success’. Guy will be taking you through all the steps you need to take in order to ensure you’re getting your name out there online, in the right avenues and in the best way. With the current economic climate, increasing numbers of journalists are looking at turning freelance, so it’s advisable to take advantage of any opportunity to make yourself stand out from the crowd that you can.

Your listing will include the following:
* a profile page in Journalism.co.uk’s database of freelance journalists
* a subscription to our freelance newsletter
* access to our members-only freelance forums, where you can find exclusive job leads sourced by us for you
* get your name out there to our unique community of visitors from all sectors of journalism and publishing.

For more information on the course and to book, please visit the course page.

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Freelance Advisor: Four ways to fail as a freelancer

Judith Townend — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:18:35 +0000

Leif Kendall shares four reasons why freelancers fail. Don’t be the Mr Poundland or TK Maxx of the industry, he advises.

Full post at this link…

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Freelance Frontline: Let us know what you’re up to

Laura Oliver — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:07:12 +0000

Journalism.co.uk has just posted the first in what we hope will become a regular series looking at the work of freelance journalists – in all its many and varied forms.

You can read the first installment featuring Stephen Maughan, on starting out as a freelancer; Mark Joyella, on his role as a ‘community supported journalist’; and new blogger Vik Iyer.

Let us know what you’re working on: we want to hear about published articles, book plans or newly launched websites.

Just finished a big commission? Send us a link. Looking for contributors for a new pitch? Get in touch.

You can drop our news team an email, send us a tweet or leave a comment below.

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Overdue freelance payment? Make a YouTube video

Judith Townend — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:24:52 +0000

US blogger and freelance writer Tina Dupuy has seen some success, after posting a video complaining that the Tampa Tribune in Florida had failed to pay her $75. She claimed she submitted a piece to the newspaper, which was then published without replying to her first to negotiate a payment. She said she sent them an invoice and didn’t hear back.

But following the video, the newspaper has now put her cheque in the post, she said in a new video this week.

Jim Beamguard, editorial writer at the Tampa Tribune, said Dupuy’s pay was her private business (although she was free to discuss it), and told Journalism.co.uk in an email:

“We receive hundreds of emailed items a day from people hoping to get published. Many are letters to the editor, but many more are from bloggers, professors, politicians, PR firms, special interests, and ordinary folks just wanting to be heard. Most of it goes out to every email address these writers can find. A lot of this material can be read free somewhere on the internet. Tina’s column arrived in the mix without mention of a fee. We didn’t just lift it from her blog. We only found out after it was published that she had been trying to sell it.”

And there is more good news for Dupuy: the strategy seems to have helped secure some other payments. She wrote to the LA Daily News chasing a cheque. She got this reply:

I am holding onto your check in the hopes we’d get you to do a YouTube video about not getting paid by us. We could use the plug.

Just kidding!!!

Mariel Garza
Editor, LA Daily News

Here’s Dupuy’s second YouTube video:

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – multimedia tips for freelancers

Laura Oliver — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 07:51:54 +0000

Freelance: Multimedia journalist Adam Westbrook has created a six-part guide for freelance journalists covering branding, business, 'making things happen', audio, video and storytelling. It's packed with helpful tips and resources. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link - we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

Adam Westbrook: 6×6 tips for freelance journalists

Laura Oliver — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:23:56 +0000

During the last fortnight, multimedia journalist Adam Westbrook has published six guides for freelance journalists – with a strong emphasis on practical steps and digital tools available for freelancing.

You can read the full series at this link or jump to the individual posts listed below:

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Adam Westbrook: 6×6 how to make things happen as a freelancer

Laura Oliver — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:39:39 +0000

Making things happen

“When 900-years-old you reach, pithy phrases will you come up with.”

Ok, so a bit of hammy self-help from Master Yoda there, but he makes a good point. We’ve looked at branding and business, and the craft skills like audio and video, but they all mean nothing in the scary and ever shifting new world of journalism if you’re not prepared to do something with it.

If you’re trying to get your first job particularly, or going freelance especially, you have to be able to make things happen for yourself. This final post has little to do with journalism, but might be the difference between getting your vital first commission and spending your day in the company of Jeremy Kyle crying into your supernoodles.

1) Have goals – big ones
We’ve all got goals, right? Clear that debt, get that promotion, get that pay rise.

But what about dreams? They’re the goals which set your sex on fire. They get your heart racing with excitement and have you muttering to yourself, ‘that would be awesome… but I could never do that’.

It’s the novel you’ve had in the back of your mind to write one day; the photo essay you’d love to go and make in Chad; the media start-up you’d love to get going…

Point is, dismiss them as you may, big goals are what really get us going; once we’re on the track to doing them, they get us out of bed in the morning.

Life coach Jeff Archer says choosing big goals is vital: “Creating a future that excites you is of vital importance. If your future doesn’t excite you, then why go to all the time and trouble of making things happen?”

And Lindsey Agness at the Change Corporation agrees the goals must be ‘compelling’. She also says they must be all of the following:

Specific: ‘clearly define what you are going to do’
Measurable: ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it‘
Achievable: ‘they should be within the bounds of possibility for you’
Realistic: ‘set the bar high enough to find out what you are capable of, but not so high you get frustrated’
Timed: ’set a clear time frame for the goal’

So in practice this means avoiding goals like: ‘I will get a couple of articles published before Christmas’, and instead going with ‘I will pitch two written articles and one photo-essay every month’.

2) Write things down
Things start happening when you write them down. Apparently this has been proved by researchers at Harvard, who split a graduate class into those that had written down their plans for the future and those that hadn’t. And revisiting them 10 years later, the ones who had achieved what they wanted were those who put a pen to paper.

Mechanically, writing down ideas, dreams, plans on paper gets your mental juices flowing. You start to visualise what it might look and feel like to achieve them. And then you start doodling how to get there. The next thing you know you’ve got a list of steps to take to get you on your way.

And other people recommend keeping a journal, if you don’t already. Back to Jeff Archer: “Once you make yourself consciously aware of the highs and lows of each day you decide specifically what changes you’d like to make to make sure you can increase the positive and decrease the negative.”

On a practical level it means a quick post-mortem of your day or week and it keeps you focused on why you set out to do this all anyway.

3) Visualise the process – and the result
Rehearse doing things and rehearse them going well.

The first part is as simple as going through the things you need to do (not plan) the next day: the phone calls you need to make, the film you need to edit, the blog you need to write; picture yourself in your head, sitting down at your desk making those things happen. Alternatively you can write down the steps and describe what it’s like to carry them out. Rehearsing those steps makes them easier to do the next day.

The second part is all about visualising success. Athlete’s vividly visualise winning the 100m sprint until they can almost taste the sweat and feel the flag in their hands. Career coach Jonathan Fields, who’s written ‘Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love’ says this part is very important in overcoming any self-doubt:

“Repeatedly visualising a deeply sought after goal, seeing, feeling, hearing yourself accomplish this goal, over and over, has a profound effect. It conditions you slowly away from self-doubt and disbelief and moves you increasingly towards belief.”

4) The Dr Pepper test
This is asking yourself the question: what’s the worst that can happen? Taking the plunge, quitting your job, starting a company, even cold-calling some editors – they’re all scary obstacles. If you’ve thought about going freelance, or retraining, no-doubt you’ve thought quite hard about failing:

running out of money
not getting a job interview
not getting any commissions
getting kicked out of your flat
defaulting on your mortage
giving up

These are the classic scenarios played out by a part of our mentality the NLP lot call the ‘limiting mind’. It’s the voice in your head which says ‘naahh, that’s too difficult’, ‘it’ll never work‘, ‘you? a novelist? give over’. Sadly for many people the limiting mind wins and we talk ourselves out of doing something risky.

How to overcome it? The answer, suggests Jonathan Fields, is to visualise and quantify failure – but only once. Sit down and write out exactly how failure would happen – if the worst came to the worst how long would you keep going? What would happen when you ran out of money? Where would you go?

You should (hopefully) realise that in fact you will always have a place to stay, you can always get another job, and failure isn’t that bad at all. When you stop being afraid of failing, you are unstoppable.

And accept: you will fail. So fail fast, and learn from it.

5) Get messy
Right to business. If there’s one thing I’ve learned the best thing you can do to get started is… to get started. Sounds stupid I know, but my idea of ‘getting started’ was writing lots of to-do lists, creating a financial spreadsheet, reading books on freelancing. Surprise, surprise, nothing happened.

Then I realised I needed to start doing stuff. Ready or not, start contacting editors, start filming, start editing, start writing. Go out there, and do it now! The sooner you start doing things the sooner you get results. And the sooner you fail, so you can get over it.

Too many of us spend time being the proverbial think-tank, when we should be a do-tank.
6) Don’t give up
And for the love of God don’t give up. This is going to be really hard, but as Corey Tennis pointed out it is supposed to be. Being hard done by is what makes us great writers. Pursuing this new world of multimedia journalism – which is right in its infant stages – means an uncertain future.

But any more uncertain than full time jobs and pensions? The recession has dispelled that myth.

When times get tough, read this inspirational piece of gold by freelance writer Tumblenoose:

“Do not give up. Don’t you dare. You’re going to want to. You’re going to think that the security of a paycheck every two weeks is really worth the trade off for working for someone else. Don’t do it, you hear?

“Remember your dream. Remember your bright-eyed, take-the-world-by-storm vision that sent you down the path. Yes, the journey is hard. Yes, you will be discouraged when you feel like nothing is happening, like you aren’t moving forward. Hold your nose and stick through those tough times. Keep working your plan. Keep putting yourself out there. Keep making the connections. Keep building your community. Do not give up.”

The final word

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”

Helen Keller

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Adam Westbrook: 6×6 audio for freelance journalists

Laura Oliver — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:56:59 +0000

This is the fifth post in a series of six blog posts by Adam Westbrook, each with six tips for the next generation of freelance multimedia journalists, republished here with permission.

Follow the series at this link or visit Adam’s blog.

Audio
Audio is one of the most powerful mediums available to the multimedia journalist. Whether it’s radio, podcasts, on video or audio slideshows, audio brings a piece to life. So why is it almost always an afterthought? Too many good films and audio slideshows have been let down by bad quality audio. Here are six tips to make sure that doesn’t happen to you:

1) Let sound breathe

“[A]s soon as a voice comes out of the speakers, the listener attempts to visualise what he hears to create in the mind’s eye the owner of the voice (…) unlike [video] where the pictures are limited to the size of the screen, radio pictures are any size you care to make them.”

Robert McLeish, Radio Production

In other words, with audio your limit is the size of your imagination. Last time I checked, that was pretty big.

So for the love of God, show audio some respect. First off a piece of audio does not have to consist entirely of voices with no gaps in between. In fact that sucks. When you’re out recording, take a moment to listen for sounds – in radio it’s called actuality and it is a key ingredient in bringing sound to life. Doing a story about some people on a boat? We want to hear the water lapping up against the bow. Is your scene in a cafe? Let’s hear the cups clinking, the chatter of everyday conversation, the whoosh! of the coffee machine in action.

This more often than not is recorded as wildtrack. After filming, taking photos, interviewing, whatever, record at least 60 seconds of actuality. It’ll make editing a lot easier too.

Let the audio breathe. Give it a few seconds just to play in your listeners’ imaginations and don’t talk over it. It’ll do more to paint a picture than overladen voice over will.

2) Invest in a good microphone
Audio is so often an afterthought for video and photojournalists alike. This is mostly manifested in using a crap microphone. VJs – don’t use your camera’s onboard mic unless you’re lucky to have something nice like a Canon XL2, Sony EX3, Z1 etc. If you can, buy an external microphone to attach to your camera’s horseshoe. For interviews, it is worth investing in a lapel mic.

Rodemic do some pretty decent offers, including a camera mic for under £100 ($180). For radio journalists, or photojournalists doing audio slideshows, there are a good range of digital audio recorders you can look at. The Marantz PMD620 is small, easy to use and so reliable you’d let it babysit your kids. I took it out to Iraq earlier this year and it was great. It starts at around £300/$500.

The Edirol R-09HR (£211/$349) has had produced some great sounding audio for freelancer Ciara Leeming and journalists are raving about the Olympus DS-40(£82/$135).

3) Get the mic in close
Microphones do not have selective hearing like our ears do: they won’t pick out the voice across the room you’re pointing them at. So get in close to your interviewee – really close – like a little under their chin (if they’re ok with that). It eliminates a lot of background noise, like air conditioning, traffic, squeaks of chairs and all that. And more often than not it gives the recording a richness and an intimacy.

Compare, for example, the effect of these two recordings: the first with a mic held too far away in a large room, the other with it right in close.

Another great tip I picked up: if you can, record your interviews outside – it eliminates that shallow echo you get in peoples’ offices and living rooms.

4) Let the characters talk
A bit of a personal bugbear this, but often the temptation with multimedia projects is to talk all over them, y’know, like they do on the TV and that. But new media means new ways of doing things. And I think one of the great new trends emerging is the silencing of the journalist/reporter voice over.

If you’ve recorded some great audio for your story, let it breathe – let the characters tell their own story. We don’t need to hear you saying, ‘Angie is a mum of three struggling to make ends meet’, when we can hear Angie saying, ‘Things are really hard right now, tryin’ to support three kids, y’know, payin’ the bills… every day’s a struggle.’

This takes some planning in the interview stages – most of all, you need to ask open questions, so your interviewees’ answers start as full sentences. It has been industry practice for many years to ask interviewees to include your question in their answer:

Why are you finding it so hard to make ends meet?

I’m finding it so hard to make ends meet because….etc.

5) Use pauses
If you’re new to using audio, especially if you’re moving from print or photojournalism, the first thing you will notice when you listen back to your interviews is yourself. Going ‘uhuh, yeah, hmmmm, sure…’ all over their answers.

Ask a question – then keep shtum. This pays dividends in some interviews – especially emotional ones – where your interviewee finishes their point. There’s a pause… you would normally fill it by asking a question… but don’t. Stay silent – and let the interviewee fill the pause. It’s a bit mean, but it gets them to reiterate their point, and in the process show what they’re really thinking.

And then keep those pauses in your piece. They are a natural part of speech and often reveal more about your character than their words.

6) Take them on a journey
There are times when it’s right to bring yourself into the piece. But try not to use it just for dry voice overs recorded in a studio. Your voice is best when you’re somewhere your audience wants to be, and you can show them what it’s like.

To achieve this, you’ll need to be very descriptive in your writing. Tell people where you are and what you’re doing in vivid detail.

For the best examples, we have to go way back, to the first broadcast journalists:

“I began to see what was happening to Berlin. The small incendiaries were going down like a fistful of white rice thrown on a piece of black velvet. The cookies – the 4,000-pound high explosives – were bursting below like great sunflowers gone mad.

“And then, as we started down again still held in the light, I remembered that the Dog still had one of those cookies and a whole basket of incendiaries in his belly. And the light still held it, and I was very frightened. I looked down, and the white fires had turned red. They were beginning to merge and spread, just like butter does on a hot plate.”

Ed Murrow, on a bombing raid over Berlin, 1944

Or:

“There were perhaps a 150 of them, all so thin that their skin glistened like stretched rubber on their bones. Some of the poor starved creatures whose bodies were there looked so utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined that they’d never lived at all. They were like polished skeletons, the skeletons that medical students like to play practical jokes with.

“At one end of the pile a cluster of men and women were gathered round a small fire. They were using rags and old shoes taken from the bodies to keep it alight.”

Richard Dimbleby at Bergen Belsen, 1945

The BBC’s Alan Little is one of the finest radio writers, still alive – here’s his advice:

“Try to use old words, words that reach into the very core, the very oldest part of the language. They have the most impact (…) beware of adjectives. This is a rule I keep breaking and I have to exercise great vigilance to rein myself in. Adjectives are fine in moderation and when they genuinely add to the meaning or clarity of the image being conveyed.”

The final word…
From award-winning multimedia producers Duckrabbit, the combo of a great photographer and a great audio producer:

“Many great photographers make really bad audio slideshows because they treat audio as afterthought, or they try to do a voiceover without having any presentation skills. They might as well not bother.

“Actually I’d go further then that. When you put your photos together with poor audio you actually diminish the value of your photos. Good audio is like a bad dog. It gets its teeth into you and won’t let go.”

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