It started out as an online discussion with people seeking attention for their organizations, speaking with journalists like me about how best to accomplish that. I met one of the women at a hotel bar to talk further, and she began sending me story pitches about water and sanitation projects in Nicaragua, the second-poorest nation (after Haiti) in this Hemisphere.
I knew I could never place them — and made a bold suggestion: take me there and I’d write several stories for their own use, all expenses paid, plus a fee. It happened!
It became a truly life-changing, eye-opening week, full of joys and surprises and discoveries and adventures. The woman in charge of WaterAidAmerica’s PR brought a blogger from Maine, me, and a Mexican photographer. None of us had met before, even though we’d spend the next week working closely in 90+ degree temperatures. We all converged at the airport in Managua, a shockingly brief three hour flight from the casual and nonchalant affluence of the Atlanta airport — where even a sandwich costs more than a day’s wage for a Nicaraguan earning a typical $324 a month.
I lived for a while in Mexico and have been back several times. I’d been to Venezuela, so I had seen some Latin American poverty. This was next level — horse-drawn carts on city streets.
We flew in a very small aircraft — they weighed us! — to Bilwi, on the Pacific coast. I love small planes and enjoyed being able to really see the countryside.
Our flight from Managua to Bilwi
Every morning, after breakfast at the hotel, we’d pile into a rickety black minivan, praying the AC was working as the temperature climbed and climbed. Sometimes we had to get out and push it.
We visited tiny villages and spoke to residents finally gaining access to working toilets and wells, after losing hours every day fetching water for cooking, cleaning and hygiene. And this in a very hot country.
It was a huge insight into how spoiled anyone is with clean, plentiful running water in their home!
We saw plenty of children, smaller than healthy — their growth stunted by malnutrition.
We saw almost no cats or dogs, something wealthier people take for granted.
Dinner on the verandah of the wooden house we stayed in
We stayed one night in a large, wooden house on stilts…the shade beneath offering a respite with a hammock and a place for animals. The interior floor was smooth and shiny and immaculate. There were large windows with no glass. We slept in cots beneath mosquito nets. In all my travels — 41 countries so far — this might be the most memorable of all. The hospitality was gentle and kind, food cooked on a clay stove. The village had no electricity or running water. It was, by every North American standard, poor. It felt welcoming.
The next morning we walked to the river’s edge through a forest — followed by the family’s turkey, gobbling away. The edge was steep and sandy and an older female villager in gum boots casually wielded a machete and cut it into four pieces to make a seat for us in the awaiting wooden dugout canoe. Growing up in Canada, I was happy in a canoe — this was very narrow!
On assignment in Nicaragua for WaterAid — Jen in the bow of a dugout canoe
I can so easily picture it all still — a decade later. We spoke no shared language (they spoke Miskitu) but we managed to make it work, and had translators for interviews.
For a group of strangers — different ages, skills and nationalities — we quickly formed a tight and happy unit, heading out for beers after a long day of work.
A typical home
We drove long hours down dusty roads past wooden houses painted purple and yellow and emerald green.
We gratefully drank as much cold water as we were given.
The clay stove at the wooden house
When we finally parted at the Managua airport, the Canadian-born country director, a dead ringer for Hagrid!, said: “Ok, no tears!” Unlikely, perhaps, but true, we were sad to leave and to leave one another’s daily company.
I met the local team back home in New York to debrief at WaterAid’s office there, and, as we assembled around the table, I found myself — to my shock — in tears.
Try climbing those steps in the dark, wearing a headlamp!Reporting in Bilwi, Nicaragua for WaterAidOur aircraft from Managua to Bilwi — and back!Linda’s home, where we slept and ate and rested
That week had moved me deeply, in ways I never expected, and the tremendous care and kindness with which we were treated there, by Nicaraguans and the group’s staff, was unprecedented for me; journalism, unless you’re at the very top/pampered levels, is a macho, self-reliant, poorly-resourced affair — especially for anyone not on staff.
It forever changed how I wanted to work, to be treated with such respect and kindness.
It reminded me how incredibly affluent many of us are, in relationship to people whose lives we never see.
It reminded me that poverty doesn’t have to equal squalor — an ugly preconception.
This weekend, I and a friend in London, Matt Potter, are offering a 90 minute webinar to offer our best advice for how to sell your stories to websites, magazines, newspapers.
Pitching your story ideas is never easy and we’ve done a lot of it — successfully!
The event is 90 minutes and will include 40 minutes for your questions and answers.
This new book by a friend from Toronto needs to be as visible as possible to find readers —
which is why I wrote about it here. Mutual aid is key!
This is an excellent discussion, on Vox, of how much time and energy (hello, blogging!) many creatives now must spend endlessly promoting ourselves and our work:
The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. For some, it looks like updating your LinkedIn connections whenever you get promoted; for others, it’s asking customers to give you five stars on Google Reviews; for still more, it’s crafting an engaging-but-authentic persona on Instagram. And for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record, it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist.
It is really tedious and really necessary!
No more working away in obscurity hoping to be “discovered” — especially if everyone you’re competing with for work or commissions is very much visible and audible.
I confess, I have so far managed to survive nicely without using TikTok and YouTube, although I’ve considered both. I don’t think my target audiences for coaching live on those platforms, so for now Twitter is my go-to, still. I only today (!) looked at the number of lists there I’ve been added to and it’s surprisingly (to me) really extensive. I’m flattered!
So I blog (only once a week, now); I tweet, multiple times every day but not just monologue and self-promotion — but fun and funny interactions with others there, allowing my personality to show, for better or worse! I see people who only sellsellsellsellsell and think you are sooooooo boring!
More from Vox:
You can see this tension play out in the rise of “day in my life” videos, where authors and artists film themselves throughout their days and edit them into short TikToks or Reels. Despite the fact that for most people, the act of writing looks very boring, author-content creators succeed by making the visually uninteresting labor of typing on a laptop worthwhile to watch. You’ll see a lot of cottagecore-esque videos where the writer will sip tea by the fireplace against the soundtrack of Wes Anderson, or wake up in a forest cabin and read by a river, or women like this Oxford University student who dresses up like literary charactersand films herself working on her novel. Videos like these emulate the Romantic ideal of “solitary genius” artistry, evoking a time when writing was seen as a more “pure” or quaint profession. Yet what they best represent is the current state of art, where artists must skillfully package themselves as products for buyers to consume.
It’s precisely the kind of work that is uncomfortable for most artists, who by definition concern themselves with what it means to be a person in the world, not what it means to be a brand. There’s been a fair amount of backlash to this imperative, recently among musicians on TikTok.
This pathetic pile is my desk drawer!
My dears, as I bang this out on my laptop on top of the dining table (we have no office space), I’m still in my sweaty workout clothes from spin class. I have zero impulse to show anyone how I work. The most essential thing, anyway, is how I think. That’s unique to me and I’m not clear that blasting it across social media helps anyone much.
It’s not even noon, and I’ve already emailed an editor and sources for two separate stories. I still have to deal with paperwork for one of them and am also planning a Feb. 25 webinar on how to pitch…with a pal in London. We’ll split the proceeds, maybe a few hundred dollars each. It will be a lot of fun — but also a logical place to pitch my own individual coaching sessions. None of this activity is the least bit photogenic! Admin. rarely is.
I really loathe the word “brand” when it refers to creatives….all I can picture is a piece of hot iron hitting a cow’s ass.
A recent Gallup polls finds 32 percent of Americans say they trust the media — a new low.
It’s time to talk more candidly, and especially to NON journalists, about what journalists do and why and for whom. It’s clear millions of voters have no idea at all what journalism actually is and what people do to produce it.
I found this recent story interesting — raising some questions about what we do and how we might do it better, and this bit, from Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, especially:
Mr. Woodward went on to argue for more openness on the part of the media as a way to help win the public’s trust. He explained that although The Post’s reporting is guided internally by four pillars for sourcing — witnesses, participants, contemporaneous notes and documents — it did not make these standards public.
The paper should publish them, Mr. Woodward said: “By telling people, I think it has the potential to enhance the credibility and address what I think is your most potent question: trust.”
This is crucial. While some newsrooms/outlets have close ties with their communities, no newsroom I’ve worked in ever asked what readers want(ed.) Maybe it’s less about what we choose to cover than why we choose it.
Everyone who works in journalism — from the youngest interns to war-hardened correspondents — knows or quickly learns what tends to drives coverage, even when we massively disagree with it or how it’s being handled. But how much, if at all, of this insider knowledge and decision-making is shared with readers, listeners and viewers? When, where and how do they have any access at all to understanding the quick and routine decisions we make about what’s deemed important?
The usual rules still apply: proximity (hence the endless paucity, in most American media, of foreign stories), celebrity, recency, novelty, power/wealth, to name only a few. The military. War, natural disasters, crime. Three’s a trend! We need to ruthlessly question what we consider important, adding and dropping traditional beats — religion now seems to be invisible, poverty mostly so — while climate change surges, as it must, to the forefront.
What do our audiences want…and is it silly celebrity fluff?
I’ve worked in journalism for more than 40 years, staff and freelance, and for three major newspapers — two Canadian, one in NY — and three American national magazines.
Some thoughts:
We need journalism: local, regional, national, global
While hundreds of local newspapers have closed down, (thanks to the loss of ad revenue due to the Internet), others are thriving, often now digital and non-profit, places like The 19th., focused on news about women. A program called Report for America, for whom I mentor two early career journalists, one in St. Paul, Minnesota and one in Charleston, WV, hires young reporters into smaller local and regional newsrooms around the U.S., offering an extra stipend to their employers to pay them better. It also offers individual mentoring from veterans like me, the older, wiser and more experienced pro’s usually the first laid off because we’re “expensive.” Local outlets include radio and television, like WYNC in New York, whose Brian Lehrer show, a smart, analytical show focused on politics, draws listeners from around the country (thanks to the Internet).
The ongoing loss of local journalism means plenty of important stories will remain unreported, and local politicians and law enforcement can behave with even greater impunity.
National media — some with enormous budgets — range from “legacy media” like USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times to broadcasts like 60 Minutes and Dateline to the many TV talk shows and ProPublica, whose reporting is extraordinary — like this database of the judges of the Supreme Court listing every extra little trip and gift they enjoyed, because, after all, who can scrape by on a mere $285,400 a year? ($298,500 for the chief justice.)
Global media include outlets like the NYT, FT, CNN, RFI, CBC, AP, BBC and Al Jazeera, to name only a few — many of whom routinely cover parts of the world (Africa, Asia, South America, for example) you’ll never hear or see in parochial American media — nightly television news especially — focused endlessly on sentiment, war, domestic politics or violence. I read the Financial Times (a globally focused British newspaper) daily and every day learn something I’m not finding elsewhere.
Plus thousands of podcasts produced by these legitimate outlets and their staff.
Here’s writer McKay Coppins, talking to PBS about his reporting on the rapacious hedge fund that’s been busy buying up American newspapers and stripping them for parts:
There’s a huge body of research that shows when a local newspaper either disappears or is significantly diminished, there are downstream effects on the communities they serve.
So, voter turnout drops. Misinformation spreads more easily. Civic engagement is lower. There is even evidence to suggest that city budgets get larger because there’s more dysfunction and corruption without a bustling newsroom of reporters holding city hall to account.
And what’s — what we have seen play out with the newspapers that Alden has bought is fairly similar, right? You have seen newspapers dramatically shrink their coverage of local government, of education, schools. In the case of The Chicago Tribune, which Alden bought earlier this year, they very quickly lost a quarter of their newsroom, which made it more difficult to cover, for example, the resignation of a powerful state lawmaker amid bribery charges.
This was an extraordinary NYC panel, held in 2019 — even before the explosion of AI.
No one tells us what to write
OK, not exactly.
There are many who now very firmly believe our corporate overlords stand beside our desks and tell us what to say, line by line, making sure we vilify the people they admire and exalt the people they loathe (MAGAs are devout in this belief.)
No.
If you’re a staff writer/broadcaster, you will have an editor directly above you to whom you report. That person will read and review everything you produce — and you won’t produce anything without them knowing about it beforehand and approving of it, from length to tone to sourcing (who you choose to interview/quote as experts.) That editor also reports to multiple layers of senior management, each of whom can challenge or question the work. They may spike it — an ancient newsroom term (when paper stories were jammed onto a spike atop their desk) — or kill it. It will never be heard or seen. Many newsrooms are still run on a military model of hierarchy, with a very clear chain of command. You mess with it at your professional peril.
In the best newsrooms, these are collegial relationships of mutual trust and respect. Too often, they’re not. Reporters are passionate curious people, often resembling truffle hunters — digging long and hard until we get a story we know is as complete as we can make it. But that zeal bumps up against our bosses’ hunger for clicks, views and a lot of content ground out quickly, which mitigates against quality. If you read/listen to specific outlets (like Fox) you will see a bias…just as readers of the NYT and Guardian know theirs as well. Choose accordingly, and be aware.
Press conferences/political events are bullshit theater
I’ve been to plenty and they’re often a joke. The people at the podium are in charge and on message, often allowing very little time for questions. The peer pressure of pack journalism means many reporters simply won’t even ask a question, for fear of looking stupid or giving something away to competitors. The only way to get real information is by cultivating our own sources, people we trust and who trust us, to spill the tea, sometimes off the record or on background.
Local journalism remains essential…$$$?!
“It took a generation for the American news industry to unravel, and it will take a generation to fully rebuild it,” Sarabeth Berman, C.E.O. of the American Journalism Project, which funds nonprofit newsrooms, said in a recent speech. “But real progress is underway.”
Here are some terrific examples, aggregated by The New York Times:
In the Hunter Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, idle freight trains blocked a main road, sometimes for more than 30 hours. — Capital B News
A city manager used political muscle and a community’s trust to remake DuBois, Pa., while granting himself raises, engaging in conflicts of interest, and allegedly stealing hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. — Spotlight PA
An investigative report of wage theft in New York State uncovered rampant abuse in the horse racing industry, with repeat offenders owing workers over $4.4 million. — Documented
In his poem “Why Bother?”Sean Thomas Dougherty wrote, “Because right now, there is someone/out there with/a wound in the exact shape/of your words.” Those words are ours to provide, those wounds ours to plaster. Contrary to the widespread notion that speaking truth to power means being antagonistic and cold, journalists can, instead, act as a care-taking profession — one that soothes and nurtures. And we are among the only professions that can do so at a scale commensurate with the scope of the crises before us. We can make people who feel invisible feel seen. We can make everyone else look.
Tabloids and broadsheets — the difference
Tabloids are those like the New York Daily News, while a broadsheet is the NYT or Wall Street Journal, the size you have to fold up neatly to read it in print in public. They differ widely/wildly in what they deem newsworthy and why — hence lots of lurid crime stories in the tabs, often winning “the wood”, the entire front page. Broadsheets tend to be more ponderous and wordy (offering more physical space, in print, to write long.)
I’ve been on staff at both — the Daily News is so hyper-local that if Christ re-appeared beyond the city’s five boroughs they’d let a competitor have it. Their audience is much lower-income than that of the Times, so my reporting took me to Queens and Harlem and the Bronx, showing me a wholly different city than one I previously knew. (Ask me about the old lady with the tire iron who threatened me when I mistakenly stole her parking spot beside the Bronx courthouse.)
Women journalists are bullied on social media daily
I won’t share the filth they hear and see, but doxxing (revealing where they/their families live to intimidate them) is a favorite. Being a woman journalist, especially a woman of color, means keeping a calm demeanor and emotional armor in the face of insults and degradation — usually for daring to simply do our job, which can mean challenging authority, aka white men with money. They hate that!
The late, great NYT media writer David Carr, a lively and funny speaker
Facts matter, a lot
Politicians lie. Corporate bigwigs lie. The military lies.
Power lies.
The journalist’s job is to ferret out bullshit (boosting profits, winning pork barrel legislation, deceiving voters.) Do some journalists lie? Probably. Once found out, though, they’re unlikely to ever work in the business again. In an era of such diminished audience trust, they’re a liability.
But without trained, smart, tough journalists asking a lot of nosy and persistent questions, challenging evidently absurd statements no matter how many millions of people think must be right and truthful because someone they admire said it! –— without us holding these people to account — everyone is screwed. We’ll consume tainted food and drink filthy water, take useless drugs, submit to un-needed medical procedures, all in the name of profit.
Like this, part of an ongoing NYT series on profitable and dubious medical procedures, some of which leave lasting damage on patients — in this case babies whose tongues are cut (!) to putatively make breastfeeding easier.
Who else is going to call these miscreants to account?
Once a story is submitted for publication or broadcast, copy editors read it over to check for clarity, house style (names, etc.), potential libel and more. Our work is fact-checked; when I write freelance for the NYT, my stories are read and questioned by as many as four different editors, each with new and and additional concerns, before they ever see the light of day. I have to answer every single one. Some national magazines still employ fact-checkers, whose job is to make sure everything in a story is accurate — from statistics to quotes. One medium that doesn’t have this? Books!
Attribution matters
When I left my native Canada to work in the U.S., I noticed this difference immediately — editors’ insistence on attribution: who said it. And not just “a think tank” but whether they lean left or right or are mostly funded by the Koch brothers, for example. Readers deserve to know who they’re being asked to listen to and why.
The news too often focuses on rich white people
Both in audience and story focus: billionaires and celebrities and give me a break! I loathe this, and am heartily sick of it. Americans are living in a time of truly grotesque income inequality — and every day The New York Times publishes enormous ads for Graff, whose diamonds are the size of a baby’s fist. It’s a real middle finger to non ULHNW readers (ultra high net worth) but there they are…
Editors with true power are still too often older white men who see the world, and what stories matter most, through old white men biases — while younger staffers and freelancers of every race, ethnicity and gender keep proposing a wider vision. But they’re last in and first out, with a difficult enough time even getting a full-time job and some can’t afford to work for low wages. Working in journalism as a person of color is often deeply exhausting and dis-spiriting.
Important stories like poverty are grim and depressing, as is opioid use, tainted water, unethical medical procedures funneling profit — but must be covered as well as fawning profiles of movie stars promoting their latest film.
Terrible freelance pay makes it an expensive hobby
Many many glossy magazines have gone digital — so easy to read! But their pay rates have also dropped from $3 or $2/word (yes, the Dickensian way writers are still paid) to barely 50 cents a word, in a time of crippling costs for rent, food, health insurance and university education. Yet we’re expected to keep bringing the same level of skill for pennies on the dollar.
I recently won two new assignments — at $300 per story, barely 30 cents a word. I agreed to do a personal essay I can write quickly, and chose not to do a reported story for that rate.
Quality costs money.
I’ve been writing for The New York Times since the 1990s — and their profits and audience are growing — while I still get exactly the same unchanged pay rate. This trend has driven many trained, smart, experienced freelance writers out of journalism. We simply can’t afford to take the time to do the work to produce the quality YOU deserve.
Yes, we make mistakes
Of course we do — and, thanks to the speed of the Internet — readers and listeners are quick to tell us, directly to us, to our employers and through social media.
I doubt many journalists start their day determined to lie and mislead, even though this is a growing perception. We arrive to our work with biases and blind spots, as do our editors. At best, we fight to see them and name them and work past them. But it’s a daily battle. I think acknowledging that could help (re) build some measure of trust in us.
Are there any news outlets you rely on and trust?
Any individual reporters/broadcasters? Who and why?
One of my best adventures ever! At 26, chasing the Queen around Canada
By Caitlin Kelly
First, this post is mostly about journalism and written by someone who has been — by choice — a lifelong generalist, not a niche specialist in science, medicine, tech, crypto, cannabis, etc.
I’ve never studied journalism although I’ve taught it at several colleges.
You don’t need a journalism degree to be a good journalist; to get a full-time staff job, maybe. But they’re thinner on the ground than they once were — 43,000 journalists have lost their jobs in the past few years.
But also…having a staff job, if the pay is decent and the atmosphere workable, is also highly useful for better understanding how editors think and what they most need.
I began writing for a living in Toronto as a 19-year-old undergrad at the University of Toronto. I actually first began making money as a freelance photographer, with my images in the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and Time Canada. Plus three cover photos for Toronto Calendar, sold when I was in high school.
I worked on staff at The Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette and New York Daily News as a reporter and feature writer. I learned a lot that has helped me as a freelancer and one thing is — be efficient!
I’ve written for newspapers, magazines and websites in Canada, the U.S., Europe, even New Zealand.
If you only read Twitter, you think everyone writes only for the highest prestige places: The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The NYT Magazine, Washington Post. etc.
Not true!
Most of us also teach, coach, have a part-time non-writing income and produce “content” for companies and non-profits, as I have as well.
Here’s a partial list of the places who have bought my work and published it:
The Yale University alumni magazine
Boy’s Life (the Boy Scouts magazine)
The New York Times
The Washington Post
The Wall Street Journal
VSD (a French weekly)
The New Zealand Herald
The Miami Herald
The Boston Globe
The Ottawa Citizen
The Financial Times
Quartz
HemAware (a magazine read by/for hemophiliacs)
The Canadian Medical Association Journal
JWM magazine(a magazine for guests of Marriott hotels)
Smithsonian
USA Today
The American Prospect
NBC News
The Harvard Business Review
Salon
Elm Street (Canadian women’s magazine; defunct. That piece won my Canadian National Magazine Award.)
Cosmopolitan
Glamour (print)
Marie Claire (print)
Mademoiselle (print)
Family Circle (print)
House Beautiful
Ms.
Penthouse (yes, really. Fantastic editor, very good pay and enough time to do the research that led to my first book)
AgroVie (a magazine read by French speaking farmers. I did two stories for them on assignment in Quebec. Had never even been to a farm before.)
Mechanical Engineering (one story on STEM education, one on new ways to find and create fresh water.)
American Banker (learned about neural networks back in the 90s)
Chatelaine (Canada’s women’s magazine)
Flare (Canada’s younger women’s magazine)
Toronto Life
Canadian Business
Report on Business magazine (a Globe and Mail supplement)
The New Yorker — who killed my story and I had to pay my then agent 15% to even have an editor look at me.
Planning out my 5,0000 word investigative story on Canadian healthcare — the result of three months’ reporting. This image has been redacted to protect the identity of two sources.
Here are some home truths:
You need talent
You just do. If you truly find reporting, interviewing, researching and writing a tedious chore and a burden you avoid every time — maybe this is just not for you. Or you need to strengthen your skills, using online material or webinars or conferences or classes or coaching. Maybe all of these. You don’t have to be amazing at all of these skills, as some reporters are excellent diggers but not lyrical writers and vice versa. But you must be 100% comfortable speaking to a wide array of people and putting them at ease — or confronting them as needed. That means, yes, on the phone and/or face to face. Your talents also need to include emotional intelligence, being comfortable working with many different personalities.
You have to invest in your business — it is a business!
You need a phone, reliable Internet and a computer. You need a quiet, safe place to work (unless you’re working in a conflict zone, then it’s whatever you can find and you’ll also likely need a helmet and Kevlar vest.) If you want to work in a conflict zone PLEASE take HEFAT or HEAT training (risk assessment, first aid) and get a client to pay for it. Here’s a link to British and U.S. places that offer it.
You may need to pay someone to design a great looking website rather than some sad, generic one that looks like all your competitors’. I paid $3,000 for mine and it was a huge amount for me. I regret nothing. It’s my 24/7 billboard. If you do take on an assignment that requires a fixer and/or translator, those costs will be tax deductions — but your client (s) should be paying for them, and for your travel and lodging.
You need a terrific website
With an easy way to contact you, lots of recent (or awesome) work samples, maybe some testimonials. I like seeing a nice headshot and a short, interesting bio. Why does someone want you especially?
Seriously! Work rarely just lands in your lap without a lot of prior experience, and/or a network for referrals. Places cut their budgets all the time. Be prepared. Don’t focus only on one idea and one market…you need to have lots of both, all the time.
Charm and genuine enthusiasm are much under-rated
I mean it. This not the place to be cool or hip or pretend you don’t care much if you get the gig. Be a person people whose energy would make them gravitate to you at a party. If you’re shy, yes it’s more challenging.
Make sure you know, like and trust other skilled and experienced freelancers — and vice versa.
We may work alone but we can’t make it in this very tough business without others’ help and their reliance on us as well. Be selective, not naive. Be ethical, always.
Don’t be a Big Name Clip snob
Not everyone is going to write for the Big Outlets, not at first. And maybe even never. So what? Do consistently excellent work that shows your talents and keeps your bills paid on time! Every single story, from a basic service piece to a profile to a breaking news story, polishes your skills.
But…Big Name Clips/Clients will open new doors
They reassure other clients and editors that you can work to a very high standard and handle a lot of rigorous editing. The stronger your proven, consistent skills, the more ambitious projects you can pitch and win. That can take time.
Having some language skills is a terrific advantage
My French and Spanish skills have gotten me some truly amazing work opportunities — like a 2014 work trip to Nicaragua with WaterAid.
There are many many competitors. Not all will have your talent, skills, experience, networks and drive.
The NYT’s columnist Maureen Dowd recently posted this lament for the good old days of newsrooms:
As Mayer recalled, when a big story broke at The Star: “You could see history happening. People would cluster over a reporter’s desk, pile into the boss’s office, and sometimes break into incredibly loud fights. There were weirdos in newsrooms, and fabulous role models occasionally, and the spirit of being part of a motley entourage. Now, it’s just you and the little cursor on your screen.”
If you have watched TV shows like Alaska Daily, about a small paper in Anchorage, or Borgen, or (a million years ago) Lou Grant or the Mary Tyler Moore Show or The Newsroom, or films like Spotlight (2015 Best Picture), All the President’s Men, Broadcast News, The Paper or The Verdict or….You might think you know what working in a newsroom is like.
Having survived three of them, The Toronto Globe and Mail for 2.5 years at age 26, the Montreal Gazette at 30 for 1.5 years and one brutal year decades later at the New York Daily News, lemme tell ya! My husband worked 31 years at The New York Times, in the main newsroom in New York City and, earlier, in its Washington bureau.
We know. Oh, we know. Jose worked many assignments with Dowd, including some huge front page stories.
I agree there are few places — maybe as an ER physician or nurse, or a firefighter — where adrenaline surges are a normal part of every working day. Whenever I walked up the rear ramp of the Globe’s parking lot, past the enormous satellite dish that would (!!) transmit all our words to printing plants across Canada later that day, my blood pressure always always rose.
It was exciting but terrifying.
What if the Toronto Star or CBC beat us? What if we got something wrong? Working in daily news always means the fear of someone else getting the “scoop” first.
Most newsrooms — whatever the medium — look the same. Rows of desks, some piled very very high with papers and magazines and documents. Few windows. Open plan so everyone can see if you’re there and working and an editor can (and does) yell at/for you from far away. Your co-workers work barely a few feet away from you, so forget any sort of personal or professional privacy. No smelly food! No loud conversations!
Managers get offices with glass walls so they can see what we’re up to.
Ideally, this fosters camaraderie and collaboration, and sometimes it does.
Despite the chaos of the industry — so many layoffs! — it retains a military hierarchy and chain of command, from interns to publisher. Mess with it at your peril.
The irony, of course, is that it’s called a newsroom when the news is never there.
It’s in Kyiv or Islamabad or Edmonton or Des Moines, and that’s the true strength and beauty of them — the immediate transfer of information, words and images that flow into and out of the editors’ desks in the newsroom. There’s often someone who does rewrite (I have!) which is wild…a reporter calls in with their story and reads it to you over the phone so you have to type really fast and accurately! I’ve also dictated my own stories by phone as well. Very 1940s!
A crucial — and unseen/unheralded — part of every functional newsroom are its editors, for copy, graphics, maps, illustrations and photos. There are also, depending on the size of the media outlet, lawyers who may review a story for accuracy and defense against a charge of libel.
I first worked in a time when our laptops were very slow, TRS-80s, with tiny screens and we had to transmit our stories to the newsroom using alligator clips you attached to the handset of a telephone. That’s if you could even find a phone on deadline! Research meant actually reading and speaking to sources as our only font of information — no Google!
Competing with a better-funded paper like the Toronto Star could be a nightmare, like the night there was a prison riot in a city 2.5 hours east of Toronto. The Star, of course, got reporters to the scene while I, sitting in the newsroom, had to update five editions with very very little material. We even had to ask a senior manager whenever we needed a new notebook.
But I really miss its wit and repartee….like the night I was banging away on deadline and an editor shouted down the room…”Where is it?!”
“Hey, you can’t rush perfection,” I replied. The Venus de Milo wasn’t made in a day!”
“Do you type like her?”
The Montreal Gazette was another world, with one key editor who was deeply Catholic so I was cautioned never to suggest a story about abortion. It was one-paper town (in English) — compared to three in Toronto. The metabolism was slower. It wasn’t a great fit for me.
The NY Daily News hired me without previous NYC paper experience nor work for a tabloid. At prior papers, 1,000 words was a warm-up; at the News, deemed a long feature. Its halls held enormous copies of legendary moments in history, their front pages, framed. No pressure!
It was a very male place, with a few star reporters who were women. The photo editor shouted at me, again in an open newsroom where everyone was his unwilling audience, when I dared to ask for some basic instructions. I explained to my boss — who told me the man had once thrown a radio at him.
Like that.
I broke several national stories and learned how to write tighter. I reported on a very different — much less affluent, much more diverse — New York than I’d ever known. Our stories were in Harlem and Queens and the Bronx, not the Upper East Side.
But the manager who hired me soon left, and my time there became extremely difficult. I won’t say more, but I’ve never worked in a newsroom since.
I miss them.
I do.
There is there, at its best, a tremendous sense of teamwork and accomplishment. For some.
There is, at its best, ready access to some of the smartest and most fun and boldest people you’re ever likely to meet — colleagues who’ve worked in places like Kabul and Kandahar, not just Kalamazoo.
So many people want to be known as a writer, preferably one with multiple best-selling books, maybe a movie or TV deal on top of that.
Hope is charming.
But the reality of writing for income is simply not that, for the vast majority.
If you want to produce freelance journalism, you need a steady supply of sale-able ideas, smart editors ready to reply to you quickly, pay you well, edit you intelligently and promote the work. That’s a lot to hope for in one person!
Despite the lone-wolf perception of freelancers like me, having a wide and supportive network of smart, generous peers is essential — we steer one another away from lousy clients, share pay rates, send work to others when it’s not one of our specialties (and vice versa.) We meet at conferences, join online communities like ASJA and Study Hall.
Journalism pay rates have dropped enormously to a “competitive” $1/word — banal in the 80s when $2/word was standard at every glossy magazine. Today that’s a wildly elusive rate and we’re all struggling with inflation.
I still write occasionally for The New York Times, at a pay rate unchanged since the 90s. But if I can do the story efficiently and have an impact, there’s value in that for me.
I became an editor by volunteering for an Asian American magazine, a nonprofit mission-driven labor of love where no one drew a salary. Ten to fifteen hours of unpaid labor a week in exchange for the editorial experience I wanted was, to me, an acceptable trade—nearly all my labor then was unpaid. I cared for my infant and toddler during the day, then went to writing class at night. I spent every spare moment I had and some that I didn’t pitching freelance pieces and working on my first book proposal.
Then one of my favorite indie websites hired me to edit on a part-time basis. The job started at thirteen dollars an hour, twenty hours a week, and after a couple of months I was brought on full-time and granted a salary in the mid-30s. I loved that role, the tiny team I worked with, our community of readers. I was responsible for editing and publishing two to three freelance pieces a day, reading and responding to hundreds of pitches a week, and handling social media. I found my confidence as an editor, as the volume of work meant I had no time for imposter syndrome. By the time that website shuttered two years later, my salary had risen to the mid-40s. My agent and I had finally managed to sell my first book for a small advance. The independent publisher that acquired it later offered me a job as managing editor of its digital publications, starting at a few thousand more than I’d made in my previous role. Again, I felt lucky, working and collaborating with fellow writers every day—it felt like a dream job.
People who want to sell their books — certainly fiction — face multiple challenges, from finding an agent to represent their work (or self-publishing) to finding a reputable publisher. There are scammers out there preying on the naive.
Even those of us who have been multiply published may have to find a new agent — a slog — and a publisher, another slog. Obstacles appear you could only dream of, like a friend whose new book has not gotten the publicity boost she very much needs due to a strike by workers at that publishing company — this, after a decade of her hard work on the book.
Then you face another serious challenge — getting the word out as far and fast and wide as humanly possible — to boost your book sales. This is where a wide network with some serious social capital can offer a real help; I called the host of a TV show I appeared on many years before to tell them about a friend’s new book. It may now get a second look.
As I wrote here earlier, my husband and I co-authored a book proposal and found an agent, but 30 publishers rejected it. We offer tremendous credentials and a huge potential audience…but no luck. I may try again, but have been too discouraged since January by this failure.
An interesting recent story finds that later-life journalists in their 60s, 70s and beyond, are now working as mentors and editors, still passionate about the essential value of journalism.
From Neiman Reports:
These retirees include everyone from a onetime local sportswriter in Washington state to former top editors at The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Reuters, a retired senior editorial director at CNN, familiar names from NPR, the ex-editors of the San Diego Union-Tribune and Miami Herald, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalists, a retired AP bureau chief and a former top executive at Hearst. Many are in their 70s or 80s.
Many also share a collective frustration with the decline of the profession in which they spent careers that date back to a time when media organizations were flush with resources and influence.
“If you can do something to help reverse that tide, you do it,” says Walter Robinson, the former editor of The Boston Globe Spotlight Team, who has taken on a second career helping set up nonprofit community news sites, mentoring younger journalists, and serving on the board of a government accountability and First Amendment coalition.
“I had a great run and a lot of good fortune, and I just feel I have an obligation to give something back,” says Robinson, who is 77, of his continued involvement in the cause of journalism. “A lot of people I know who are my age have the same impulse.”
I recently signed up to become a mentor with Report for America and am very much heartened that others want to keep our industry thriving in whatever way we can.
Two lovely signs of ongoing life for my two books…524 libraries hold a copy of Blown Away, according to Worldcat., arguably the coolest website in the world for authors — as it lists every library in the world with a copy of your book, beginning with those physically closest.
I am so honored to see it in the libraries, and law libraries, of major American universities like Harvard, Yale, Brown, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins, and many smaller colleges, including community colleges. This, not making a best-seller list, was always my goal. I wanted my intensive national research to help inform and guide possible policy decisions.
It’s held by libraries in New Zealand, Germany, Viet Nam, the Philippines and the Netherlands, to name only a few.
The other joy, annually, is a small check I get thanks to Canada’s Public Lending Rights program — which pays authors for the public use of their books in libraries.
It means a great deal to me to know my hard work has had some lasting value.
Typical of such summits, the people speaking were largely white, upper middle class and already perched high in the industry…not necessarily the best place from which to enact meaningful change. By the time you’ve hit the heights, so to speak — like any industry, really — you’ve climbed the greasy pole and know how many ways you can slip back to the bottom: pissing off your advertisers or publisher, to start with. I’ve been working in journalism since I was 19, freelance and staff — a senior editor at three national magazines and a reporter and feature writer for three big dailies. I enjoyed my career, but I’m mostly out of it now, and not subject to the exhausting chase for clicks and views. The Washington Post recently hired a social media coach (!) to work with their reporters. This is, for me, a fresh hell. Not enough any longer to produce terrific stories…
An excerpt from that conference, as reported by The New York Times:
“The media” pops up on your smartphone and is thrown onto your front porch. It is transmitted on television sets and is featured in glossy magazines. It’s so varied in so many ways but is similar in one respect: Many Americans don’t trust it.
According to a recent Gallup poll, trust in mass media has hit a near record low: Only 34 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media, while 38 percent of Americans have none at all...
“We do need some level of news, but there are so many people that just need basic information,” argued Sarah Alvarez of Outlier Media, a news organization focused on low-income Detroiters.…
“You can’t do a big investigation if you are not covering the city council every day,” said Sara Just of “PBS NewsHour.” You can’t find out who the corrupt mayor is if you are not there every day.” The disappearance of that kind of local journalism, she said, is what “worries me the most. That’s not going to be the for-profit center, but it is how we find out what’s going on.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, whose publication, The Atlantic, put up a paywall shortly before the pandemic, argued for a subscriber-funded model: “Our industry made a mistake 20 years ago by giving away quality journalism for free — we trained readers to expect something that took work, time and energy and funding and we gave it away. And we have to stop doing that.”
As some of you may know, George Santos — a lying sack of garbage — not only recently got elected as a Republican Congressman from Long Island, despite a barrage of lies about his work, education, life and but now sits on two committees.
Only one small local newspaper noticed what a grifter he is but there was no other media interest in following up.
I found this analysis by Dame insightful and, sadly, spot-on:
We live in a golden age of national media startups. Every week another group of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed media personalities launches another cleverly branded news site to solve all of American journalism’s problems.
So why do all these sites sound the same?
Why do political news sites, begun with lots of fanfare about how different and innovative and disruptive they plan to be, end up covering the same stories covered by every other established media source?
Why are they all obsessed with whatever Donald Trump spews onto his private social accounts? Why do they listen every time GQP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks? Why do they report on what senators say on Tucker Carlson’s show, on each other’s podcasts, on Chuck Todd’s Status Quo Fetish Hour?
Why do they all move in a pack, chasing the same ball, like 5-year-olds playing soccer for the first time?
Because — as any honest journalist knows — the few who rise to a position of any power or influence, let alone a job with a liveable salary – has already been co-opted. When a year at one of the fancy journalism schools will cost more than a year’s salary and the industry is already highly insecure, only a brave (or trust-funded few) can even still afford to buy entree to the industry or stick around very long.
So those who become staff journalists can start to look and sound the same….as does their reporting.
Pack journalism dominates — one person chasing all the others to match a story (no matter how tedious!) for fear their managers (as as they will) ask why they aren’t covering it?
Not IF they should at all!
It’s lazy and easy to sneer “fake news” when you dislike what you hear or see.
I rarely see anyone ask…what’s the upside for this worldview?
It’s also pretty obvious that those sneering “fake news” have rarely, if ever, even met or spoken to anyone, anywhere, who actually works in journalism — bringing any genuine curiosity about what it’s like to produce news or features.
We all have some idea what doctors or lawyers or cops or teachers do all day but few of journalism’s most toxic and virulent critics really have a clue about the ecosystem of news production — which is why such attacks leave me unmoved.
I agree that mainstream American journalism needs to be a lot better, but few wake up in the morning determined to print or broadcast something they know to be false.
Believe it or not, like many journalists, I’m disappointed by too much of it every day.
Not because it’s “fake news” but because it’s:
repetitive
overly focused on crime, violence, sentimentality and military
boring
ignores most of the world beyond the U.S.
rarely addresses the roots of complex issues like poverty and homelessness
doing a lousy job covering and explaining the urgency of climate change
sucking up to corporate interests
I have no illusion all journalists are good guys! Some are inevitably lazy, unethical, rushed, underfunded, poorly trained and edited.
But it doesn’t mean journalism is unimportant to democracy, regardless of its flaws. If you can’t access basic, verifiable, mulitply sourced facts about corrupt politicians or dangerous medical issues, to name only two key issues affecting us all — good luck!
Untrue assertions make their way to mainstream news consumers in several ways. Common tactics sources use include false equivalence, whataboutism, bothsidesism and good old-fashioned lying. Well-meaning journalists play a role by allowing sources to give “their side” of an argument — true or not — out of a belief that fair, ethical journalism requires them to do so.
False equivalence refers broadly to situations where a source makes an assertion that two things that share some similarities are equal despite significant differences between them. Comparing Trump supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021, protest in Washington, D.C., to protests following the death of George Floyd is an example. The Floyd protests didn’t turn into a deadly riot that overtook the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.
Whataboutism is a form of false equivalence in which a source responds to an allegation by claiming that someone else did something similar or worse without addressing the substance of the allegation.
Two journalism films are worth your time no matter how much you want to dismiss my defense and protestations, the 2015 film Spotlight, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, about an investigation by the Boston Globe investigative team of three reporters that uncovered 249 abusive Catholic priests and 1,000 victims….many more exist worldwide, as evidenced by the long list in the film’s final credits, from Igloolik, Canada to Argentina.
At its best, this is what journalists do.
Also, the 2022 film She Said, about two New York Times journalists who uncovered decades of abuse by former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein — now in prison for those crimes.
Both are slow moving and procedural but also show the internal hierarchies of power at each paper and how they impeded or helped the reporters and the emotional and physical toll that such reporting on difficult issues affects us.
Because it does.
How cynically — if you even consume news or journalism — do you view the industry?
It’s foundational to everything we do, from earliest childhood to later years — we (have to!) place our trust in medicine and health procedures, in the men and women who pilot airplanes and drive subway trains and schoolbuses, in the chefs and cooks who prepare our meals when we eat away from home — and the health inspectors whose role it is to make sure it is safe.
If you live in the U.S. and follow news — which some of you don’t — a big story of late has been a shocking, relentless barrage of lies from a newly elected Republican congressman from Long Island, George Santos.
From The Daily Beast:
The perplexing series of alleged lies from George Santos, the Republican congressman-elect from Long Island under investigation by county, state and federal prosecutors, have continued to roll in this week—with each “embellishment” as shocking as the last.
Among the new claims under scrutiny in the last 24 hours: Santos’ high school education, his claim to be half-Black, a claim that his family’s Jewish last name was Zabrovsky, and that “9/11 claimed” his mother’s life after she’d “fled socialism” in Europe.
Basically everything he told voters is a lie. And…he will still be sworn into office.
HOW?
I think about trust all the time because trust in journalists — my career since university — is very very low.
This causes endless problems if voters believe a pathological liar like Santos — but not the reporters who uncovered those lies.
It’s a problem when people shriek “Fake news!” when they hear things they don’t want to, like COVID running rampant still.
It’s a problem when we keep sending our hard-earned tax dollars to governments that don’t do what they said they would, further eroding our trust in them, which, for Americans especially, seems subterranean at best.
From the moment a writer proposes a story, there’s a level of trust between them and their editor, whether they’re on staff or freelance. A staffer can be disciplined, suspended or fired for lying while a freelancer can lose access to a coveted market; The New York Times, for which I’ve written more than 100 stories, periodically sends every freelancer its long and detailed ethics code, and those who break it are out.
But there are legendary stories of lying reporters and their names are known to those of us in the industry, like Janet Cooke and Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, all of whom were — of course — much lauded for brining in powerful stories and every ambitious editor wants material like that. Until they turn out to be false.
Every time I ask a source to speak to me, they generally agree quickly and kindly, which, in itself is a sign if trust that I’ll behave professionally; my website makes clear I have a long and solid career in place as testament to that. Only once, and it was interesting, was I told “oh hell no!” when I tried to get sources, by an agency that helps teens on Riker’s Island accused of crimes. Only after pleading my case to them face to face did I win the interviews, which are in my first book “Blown Away: American Women and Guns.” I’m proud of having won these stories, as they were untold and powerful and I’ve never forgotten them — and I’ve done thousands of interviews in my career.
That took trust.
We live in an era of easy, quick and profitable manipulation — of words, ideas, images. A few years ago the news agency Reuters invited a group of New York journalists (arguably pretty savvy) to listen to a powerful and frightening presentation about how easy it now is to alter images, whether video or still. It was deeply sobering to know how much energy is spent trying to sort out the garbage. My husband, Jose, is a photo editor for The New York Times, and it’s also his job — like every news editor now — to sniff out fake images. Staff photographers and longtime freelancers have earned their trust, Many photos arrive through a photo agency like the AP, Getty and and Reuters, to name three major ones — by the time they’re looked at for publication, they’ve been vetted by many editors who’ve already vetted their photographers.
Trust requires a long unbroken chain.
In 1997, as I think I’ve written here before, I became the victim — one of many! — of a skilled and determined con man who had duped many people in Chicago, done time and moved to New York where he picked up again. I won’t get into all the grim details, but it was a lesson for me, for anyone, in what behaviors inspire our trust and why.
He was physically attractive.
He dressed well.
He was very intelligent and engaging.
He was (of course!) initially charming — later creepy and threatening.
I fell quite ill the day before I was to fly from New York to Sydney Australia alone, hoping to research my first book — he brought me a pot of homemade soup.
How can one — when should one — mistrust kindness?
Read The Gift of Fear, a must-read book for every girl and woman — which includes charm and niceness as warning signs.
I know…we were all supposed to have fled to Hive or Tribel or Mastodon or somewhere…oh yeah, Post, where I’m wait-listed.
No question, since Elon Musk bought Twitter, a lot of great people have fled for other platforms. For now, not me.
I started using Twitter in 2014 and still use it daily.
As one wise social media expert says — social media only amplifies who we really are. If you’re a jerk in real life, you’re a bigger, louder and more visible jerk on social media.
Here are 10 things I’ve found of value:
Access to extraordinary archeology finds, whether mosaics, Roman ruins or the oddments found on the Thames foreshore by mudlarkers liker Laura Maiklem. I’m passionate about material history, and not just that owned by royalty or the wealthy, the stuff that tends to fill museums. Laura finds things like 16th century pins or Tudor shoe soles. Amazing!
Stunning works of art. One of my treasured follows is Canadian paintings, with a wide array of art, curated by an elementary school teacher who remains anonymous. Alexandra Epps posts from London and even the man whose artwork graced the cover of Elton John’s album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Ian Archie Beck. posts his lovely contemporary work as well.
Stunning wildlife and nature photography, from Scotland, Iceland, Namibia and more.
Birders! My feed recently was filled with amazing close-ups of a saw-whet, a barred owl and a great horned owl — all in Manhattan’s Central Park.
A better appreciation for the many challenges of people with chronic illness and disabilities. There’s a lot of conversation there. Hence I learned the word “spoons” and its meaning.
I’ve made friends far away — like an archeologist in Berlin I had lunch with in July 2017 on my first visit there, and an editor near London who sent me to a colleague in Helsinki (!) who assigned me a great story. I “know” a farmer’s wife in Saskatchewan, an Australian living in France, a marketing maven in Guatemala. Not sure how I might ever have encountered them otherwise.
I recently set up a three-way, three-nation Zoom with two Twitter pals — one in England and one in Montreal and me in NY — to practice our Spanish!
Amazingly — a gorgeous box of homemade shortbread, made using a 100 year old mold — arrived this week from a Twitter pal in Ontario. YUM!
The most up-to-date information on COVID, through a network of health care workers and virologists. The government has basically given up. I see highly informative threads on matters like long COVID, handheld devices to measure a room’s Co2, and boxes used for filtration.
Almost daily I see work opportunities, some full-time and many for freelance work.
I really enjoy Twitterchats, although I only participate now in two, one for freelancers and one focused on travel. They meet every week on the same day at the same time, drawing fellow enthusiasts. The travel one, run by a man living in Nairobi, draws people from Vancouver, Dundee, Malawi, Kazakhstan! I always learn about a place I’d like to visit (like Jordan) and am able to share many of my own travel tips, having been to 41 countries and lived in five.
Thanks to direct messaging, I’ve been able to access some information I need and couldn’t really have gotten with a cold email. I’ve found it socially and professionally helpful.
I’ve been lucky — rarely trolled or bullied. And I don’t hesitate to mute or block!
Broadside 