Is it time for freelancers to take a full-time job?
On Monday the House voted down the Bush Administration’s $700 billion Wall Street bail out and stocks took their biggest dive in 20 years. People are freaking out over lost retirement savings and whether they’ll be able to make their mortgage payments. There’s a presidential election in five weeks, and who knows what change that [...]
Technorati 2008 state of the blogosphere report
This week Technorati, the blog search engine, is releasing its annual state of the blogosphere report, with new chunks of information every day for five days. If you’re into numbers or want to compare your blog to the blogging world at large it’s fascinating stuff – and probably fodder for lots of posts for your [...]
Thank you Clay Felker for creating New West
Clay Felker is the reason I got into magazine journalism. Felker, who died last week at 82, was better known as the editor of New York and Esquire and champion of New Journalism, as this New York Times’ remembrance so aptly summarizes. But to me he’ll always be the guy who started New West. In [...]
Bad times good for new media's business news writers
It might be bad times for business, and bad times for newspaper business sections, but it appears to be a great time to be a business journalist. Last week on the same day that Wall Street tanked, Slate introduced its new business section, called The Big Money, edited by ex-deputy managing editor of CNN Money [...]
The secret to my LinkedIn success
Today, I’m blogging over at The Renegade Writer, a Website for freelancers run by Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell. The topic: The Secret to My LinkedIn Success. If you’ve been to WordCount before, you know I’m a huge LinkedIn fan, using it every day to troll for sources, manage contacts and participate in discussion groups. [...]
Dear editor, I'm leaving you
Dear Editor: I’m leaving you. It’s been coming on for some time now, but I didn’t want to say anything that would jeopardize what we had until I was absolutely sure. Now I am. I can’t work for you anymore. I’ve held up my end of the relationship. I’ve done what I said I’d do. [...]
Poynter offers Sept. 25 Webinar on reporting with video
Most freelancers I know have a print background and little to no training using video to tell stories, myself included. But as the media business goes online, video is showing up on more news and magazine Websites. It seems like a good idea to at least learn the basics of using video to report stories, [...]
Doonesbury's Redfern gets laid off from the Post
Everybody in the newspaper business is getting laid off. Even Rick Redfern. Redfern, the fictional investigative reporter in Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip, is getting canned by the Washington Post after 33 years on the job, according to a story line that debuted in the strip this week. He’s one of the lucky ones, Redfern’s [...]
New WordPress features for writers
If you’re a freelancer or other writer who uses WordPress.com or WordPress.org for your work or personal blogs, there are a couple new features you might want to know about. Sticky Posts – The first new feature is Sticky Posts, a feature you can use to make one post stay at the top of a [...]
WordCount is finalist for top writing blogs award
Thanks to the nominations submitted by all you faithful readers, WordCount has been tapped as a finalist for Writing White Papers’ 3rd annual top writing blogs contest. Yahoo! The contest, created by Michael Stelzner, proprietor of the Writing White Papers blog, received 300 nominations, which he narrowed down to 37. According to Stelzner, he’ll choose [...]
