Freelance 101

By Caitlin Kelly

The reason I’m in Tucson for the moment is that my husband help to teach a two-week workshop called The New York Times Student Journalism Institute, offered twice a year to Hispanic and African-American students. Participants win two weeks mentoring one-on-one, while reporting stories here, with Times staff. (The other program is offered in New Orleans.)

All expenses paid, plus a stipend.

Oh, and your work may end up in the Times. Pretty amazing opportunity!

English: The New York Times building in New York, NY across from the Port Authority. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spoke to the students about how to freelance, several of  whom had already begun to do it, and one lesson I shared is that you join a small community of people (even internationally) if you stay in the industry — one of the editors here was my city editor in 2006 at the New York Daily News — who I hadn’t seen since then.

I went hiking here with a woman I’d never met before, who moved to New York from the Seattle newspaper, and she is close friends with someone there I met on a fellowship in Maryland about 15 years ago.

Like that!

This is the hand-out I gave them:

ABC: Always be Closing. Successful full-time freelancers spend a great deal of their time – sometimes the majority of it – marketing their work and skills to potential clients, whether corporate, small business, non-profit, academic or journalism. You must be setting up or closing sales almost every day to insure a continuous and unbroken revenue stream. It’s a fact of life – no sooner do you have a great relationship established with a well-paid client than they move to a different position or company and you have start all over again. Or their budget is cut.

 Remember the 80/20 rule – 80 percent of your business will probably come from 20 percent of your clients. Consider every first-time assignment a combination of audition and job interview. Knock their socks off! Meet your word count, deliver clean, accurate copy early and you’ll make a great impression. Unless (which happens) your client is a total PITA, you’ll want repeat business from them. So much easier than finding a new one, and another!

 What are your monthly living costs? Now add 20 to 30 percent above that, at least, for short and long-term savings, your 15% payment to Social Security and your own retirement funds.

As a freelancer, you must know to the penny what you have, what you owe, who owes you what and when, the APRs on your credit cards and loans (and how to negotiate lower ones), and your FICO score. Payments often arrive later than you expect or need – how will you cover that shortfall?

Who will you be working for? There are many places to find freelance assignments: local, regional, national and international newspapers, magazines and websites and trade publications, in addition to corporate, small business, non-profit and academic clients. What rights are they demanding to your work? Can you re-sell it? How soon?

How will you find clients? Create a great website with clips, resume, your phone numbers, email address, Twitter handle. Use social media. Attend writers’ conferences like Neiman and ASJA to meet and start networking with other writers; referrals will become your best source of qualified leads. Update your LinkedIn profile regularly.

Do you have a specialty? It might be sports, science, environment, politics, culture, immigration, women’s issues, business, medicine, technology. It helps when pitching, but don’t feel you have to pigeonhole yourself either.

It’s all on you! The fun (and terror) of working freelance means you’re all on your own. No one sets your hours or schedule. It’s all up to you to find and manage every client, invoice, track payments, pay taxes, claim deductions, do your own training and development, and maybe find and hire and manage an assistant. Keep very close tally of all your income and expenses.

 Ideas are everywhere – which markets are the best for each? The best stories have multiple angles making them saleable to a variety of editors: trade, consumer, websites. The same story could be a profile, business piece, trend story, regional item – or all of these.

 Learn the lingo: FOB, LOI, WMFH, POP, etc.

The FOB, for example, is the front of the book – those small, short items that often make it easier to break into a big national magazine. An LOI is a letter of introduction, in which you reach out to a new editor and ask for work. WMFH is a work made for hire – they own all rights to it forever, and POP is pay on publication, not a great idea!

Four useful websites

Freelancefolder.com – general tips on the business of freelancing

therenegadewriter.com (and her book) – Linda Formichelli also offers regular motivational tips by email

Freelancesuccess.com — $99/year gains you access to online forums to talk with other writers and information about new markets

http://dollarsanddeadlines.blogspot.com (and her book) – Kelly James-Enger offers smart, helpful, practical tips like TEA: Thank, Explain, Ask when trying to bump up your fees. I tried it – it worked!

Asja.org – The American Society of Journalists and Authors. Their annual conference, held at the end of April in Manhattan, offers a reduced student admission. Great place to meet editors, agents and fellow writers.

Anything you’d like to know about what it’s like to freelance full-time for a living?

How to not get eaten by a mountain lion

By Caitlin Kelly

It was only after we saw this sign that we turned to one another — cool New York City journalists who are expected to know a lot about the world every day — that we asked each other: “What is it we’re supposed to do?”

We had started our hike through Sabino Canyon, on the edge of Tucson, before reading the warning signs. You do not run. You do not turn your back. You try to make yourself larger than before (eat a doughnut? Eat a dozen?) in order to scare it.

Yeah, right.

We did not, luckily, see a mountain lion.

English: This is a view of Sabino Canyon, northeast of Tucson, AZ, nestled in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We did see three white-tailed deer, a bunny (might have been a jackalope), doves and about five different sorts of lizard, one so tiny he was the width of my middle finger and would easily have fit into my palm. They would pause, virtually invisible against a small rock or a tree trunk, waving their frond of a tail back and forth. They were impossibly lovely, so perfectly designed for their environment. One was striped in rust, white and brown, reminding me of a chipmunk.

I love the desert. It is such an elemental place, filled with a beauty that is specific and subtle. Cactus have a cartoony presence when fleshy, green and alive — but their bones, as it were, are an astonishing interior architecture, when dried and brittle and gray, that looks like coral. Every student of art, design and architecture needs to spend hours, days, weeks, studying this landscape.

As we walked, flakes of mica winked up at us from the rocky path. I picked up three of them. If I found a really big one I could use it as a mirror and flash it at the sky for an SOS signal. (If I knew Morse code. Oooops.)

Aren’t they gorgeous?

We started our hike at 8:00 a.m., although the sun had been up since 6:00. I knew there are rattlesnakes and my friend asked me to make the sound they make but I am not very good at imitating it. I did know enough not to stick my hand beneath any rocks or to sit down without looking around very carefully.

One of the reasons I so love being out in the desert is the necessary reminder that, out there — as in our every urban day, deceptively cocooned by labels and technology and fast/fine food and taxis and buses and jobs — we are merely one more species on this fragile planet.

We are poorly adapted, too. Our skin is fragile, easily punctured or torn by the spines and thorns of the plants out there. We will quickly overheat and char if we do not drink a lot of water and wear a wide-brimmed hat and sunscreen.

It is a deeply powerful, humbling reminder how silly and small we are in the greater scheme of things. As we walked through the landscape, I realized how much I don’t know about the natural world. What’s the name of that tree? Why are those rocks darker than the others? How can trees grow so high and healthy in so arid a place? (Snow melt and monsoons, a guide told us later.)

Bombycilla cedrorum Sabino Canyon, Tucson, Arizona (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And the silence! Doves coo. Wind rustles leaves.

But ego and time melt away in a landscape clearly indifferent to our human presence. Is it 2013? 1813? 1513?

Who knows? Who cares?

Which landscape most moves or touches you?

Princess, schmincess — a few very cool role models for a little girl

Loved this!

So my amazing daughter, Emma,  turned 5 last month, and I had been searching everywhere for new-creative inspiration for her 5yr pictures. I noticed quite a pattern of so many young girls dressing up as beautiful Disney Princesses, no matter where I looked 95% of the “ideas” were the “How to’s” of  how to dress your little girl like a Disney Princess…
It started me thinking about all the REAL women for my daughter to know about and look up too, REAL women who without ever meeting Emma have changed her life for the better. My daughter wasn’t born into royalty, but she was born into a country where she can now vote, become a doctor, a pilot, an astronaut, or even President if she wants and that’s what REALLY matters. I wanted her to know the value of these amazing women who had gone against everything so she can now have everything. We chose 5 women (five amazing and strong women), as it was her 5th birthday but there are thousands of unbelievable women (and girls) who have beat the odds and fought (and still fight) for their equal rights all over the world……..so let’s set aside the Barbie Dolls and the Disney Princesses for just a moment, and let’s show our girls the REAL women they can be.

The black and white photos of Emma, dressed and posed as Amelia Earhart, Coco Chanel, Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller and Jane Goodall are charming, lovely and thought-provoking — taken by her mother, Austin, TX-based photographer Jaime Moore.

English: Helen Keller. Français : Helen Keller. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don’t have a daughter or even nieces to hang out with, but smart, powerful, high-achieving role models are huge for young girls, especially in cultures that tend to value women primarily or exclusively for being thin/pretty/docile/mothers.

It’s not easy to be a smart, ferociously determined young woman, and find a welcoming place in a larger world that is sharp-elbowed enough as it is.

Molly Ivins (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Growing up, some of the women in my field of journalism who inspired me included contemporary photographers Susan Meiselas, Deborah Turbeville, and Jill Krementz (who I got to meet and shadow for a day, {also Kurt Vonnegut’s wife}) and other successful women journalists, from Molly Ivins and Nelly Bly and Margaret Bourke-White to war correspondents Marguerite Higgins and Martha Gellhorn, (also one of Hemingway’s wives).

Have you ever heard of Washington Post photographer Carol Guzy?

She has (so far!) won four Pulitzer Prizes:

As a young girl, Carol Guzy always wanted to be an artist. But as she was coming of age in a working-class family in Bethlehem, Pa., such an ambition seemed impossible. “Everyone I knew said, ‘Oh, if you’re an artist, you’ll starve,’” she recalls. “You have to do something really practical.’” So Guzy chose to go to nursing school. Halfway through she realized she would not, could not, be a nurse. “I was scared to death I was going to kill someone by making some stupid mistake,” she laughs. So while she was trying to figure out what to do with her life, a friend gave her a camera and she took a photography course. Her fascination with photography led to an internship and then a job at the Miami Herald. In 1988 she moved to The Post. Her photographs have won three Pulitzer Prizes and three Photographer of the Year awards in the National Press Photographers’ annual contest.

A long list of cool, brave women led the way so that I could do the work I enjoy. I admire the hell out of them and am grateful to them for speaking up and out and taking risks, both physical and professional.

Signature of Susan B Anthony (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Did you have a role model growing up?

Who — and how did that affect you?