LinkedIn just unwrapped a new feature that may be the social network’s best tool yet for freelance writers – a comprehensive company directory. The Companies feature is a database of LinkedIn’s 26 million members that can be searched by company, geography or industry. Freelancers can use it to look up editors at umpteen publishers of […]
Archives for August 2008
Freelancers should just say no to assignments, gigs that aren't a good fit
Can you tell when a freelance gig isn’t a good fit? Susan Johnston’s got some great tips for determining whether you should take a freelance job on her blog, The Urban Muse, in a post called 5 signs that this isn’t the gig for you. My favorite: when an editor sends your story back with […]
Use WordPress enhanced stats to improve your writing blog
The business reporter in me loves numbers, so I was pretty jazzed a couple weeks ago when I was deciding how to pre-write a bunch of blog posts to cover my vacation and noticed some statistics on WordPress.com I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t just me. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org, the hosted […]
Online News Association job fair, grants, NFL player access
Here’s some interesting tidbits from the Online News Association, one of the biggest groups for journalists and freelance writers who work online. * The finalists for this year’s Online Journalism Awards will be announced at the ONA’s annual conference on Sept. 13 at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C. Here is the complete list of […]
Keeping sources on the subject in short phone interviews
You’re on deadline and only have 15 minutes with a source before you need to hang up and move onto another previously scheduled phone interview. But your source wants to talk and talk and talk. And not necessarily about the matter at hand. Sound familiar? If you’ve written for any length of time, you’ve run […]
5 reasons why freelancers need to take vacations
Don’t underestimate the power of a good vacation. I just got back from one and the mental break was as beneficial as the extra physical activity I did while I was gone. It’s hard for freelancers to get away. When we don’t work, money doesn’t come in. It’s especially hard to turn down projects in […]