WordCountMagazines

Business is on the road to recovery, and so is the business news

Michelle V. Rafter — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:08:10 +0000

An article in today’s New York Times, Business is a beat deflated, by the paper’s media critic David Carr suggests the business press as we’ve known it – Forbes, BusinessWeek et al – has fallen on hard times and isn’t getting back up again any time soon, if ever.

Forbes just announced yet another layoff. Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek from McGraw Hill for a song. Fortune’s scaling back the number of issues it will produce next year. The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau. Advertising in other business publications has fallen precipitously. Carr suggests that a lot of what passed for business journalism was aspirational in nature, showing would-be captains of industry the prescribed formula to follow if they wanted to be the next Wall Street millionaire. Now that the mighty have fallen, he reasons, people have stopped caring about the the publications that praised them.

While I buy into the fact that the print business press has suffered what might be a fatal blow, it’s not the end of the world for business reporting.

For every Forbes or BusinessWeek that’s downsizing or sold, new publications are popping up online. New entities might not have the gravitas of the old ones. But they don’t have the overhead either. That might be bad in the short run – not as much money equals not as many resources to do investigative pieces or go after the important stories of the day. But at least they’ve got a better shot at living to see another day.

Some of these new publications aren’t really new. One of the best business stories of the year was The Giant Pool of Money, a listener-friendly take on how we got into the present economic mess in the first place, that was a collaboration between NPR and American Public Media’s quirky radio show This American Life. It was such a hit NPR is now teaming up with local public broadcasters on EconomyStory.org, a website that will showcase all the parties’ economy-related reporting.

Other new outlets for business news are starting up all the time. Two I’m acquainted with because I’ve done some work for them: MoneyWatch.com, created by CBS earlier this year, and a still in beta start-up on personal finance for women.

The old guard of online business news, sites such as MarketWatch.com, The Street, The Motley Fool and CNNMoney are still going strong, as are newer outfits such as VentureBeat and The Business Insider.

So, while some of the big glossies might be fading into the sunset, the genre can hardly be said to be dying.

If you cover business, where’s your work coming from these days?

WordCount Q&A: Making new money from old queries

Michelle V. Rafter — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:01:40 +0000

Teri Cettina was frustrated by the vagaries of freelance life – assignments coming in one month but not the next, checks arriving whenever a publisher decides to send them. There’s got to be something I can do to help even things out, the Portland freelance writer thought.

Not long after, Cettina met up with two other freelancer friends at a writer’s conference who’d had similar thoughts. Coincidentally, all three wrote for parenting magazines. What, they asked each other, if we pooled our resources and came up with a money-making venture we could do together.

With that, the idea for Cash in on Your Kids: Parenting Queries that Worked was born. The e-book, written by Cettina, Kris Bordessa and Jeannette Moninger is a collection of 16 queries that landed the three assignments with national magazines such as Real Simple, Parenting, Parents and Redbook.

In addition to queries, the 61-page e-book includes information on getting started in freelancing and other tricks of the trade aspiring parenting writers might find helpful.

Currently, the three writers are busy marketing the $14.95 e-book through a website and other channels.

WordCount talked to Cettina, a long-time freelancer based in Portland, Oregon, recently about how the e-book came together, working with co-authors and more. Read on:

How did you connect with your partners on this project?
We were in a query challenge group where we’d email each other every day, then we created a Google group and then we met in person at the Freelance Success conference last October in Florida. We hit it off in person.

How did you come up with the idea of re-selling your queries?
I’ve downloaded query packets from places like Renegade Writer, which shares a packet of actual queries they sold to publications. Six or seven years ago, I bought a packet of queries from an editor who had compiled queries from five or six nationally known magazine writers. That was a way to get inside information on how much detail they put into their queries, how they’d gotten theirs ideas, and how much money they made. I thought, why can’t I do this for parenting markets? I could pitch queries to newbie mom writers, woman who were mommy bloggers and thinking about moving into querying magazines.

What made you decide to do this as an e-book through Lulu.com, the print on demand publisher?
Kris had done some e-books and she said it sounded like something we could do as an e-book. She’s worked with Lulu.com. It’s a great low-risk way to try your idea. You don’t pay anything to have the product up, only when you sell, they take a percentage.

How did you decide which queries to include?
We pulled our queries together, shared the ones we thought were best and made sure we have diversity of markets and topics. We included queries for short and long assignments, and then came up with the queries we wanted to offer. We decided we needed to add some introductory information on how to get started as a freelance parenting writer and what a query is.

What information is included?
The e-book has 16 queries that netted us up to $3,600 a piece, some were shorts where we maybe made $300 and a lot were features. We shared what we made on each, which is part of the draw for people, understanding that they could make decent money at this. We shared a little about how we came up with the idea, changes we made and how we found sources.

How long did it take?
It took a few months to put the whole thing together, learn about working together and how to create a .pdf. We hired a graphic designer to do a cover. It’s been out 6 or 8 weeks and now we’re figuring out how to market it. Just by word of mouth we’ve sold copies, less than 100, but we’re just getting started and haven’t done intensive marketing yet.

What are your marketing plans?
We started with simple stuff, like the website. We’ve added our e-book reference to our email signatures, which seems like a small thing but we’ve gotten a few people who’ve noticed it from that. We’re mentioning it on writer’s websites and mommy blog websites. We’re doing a mass mailing of free tips from our book to regional parenting publications. I’ve also been playing around with doing a Google AdWords campaign. One thing I learned from a friend in the computer business, if you can get on Craigslist it boosts your Google search results, so we put the e-book on in a couple markets to see what would happen. But Craigslist people don’t like e-books, they don’t feel they’re tangible products, so we got complaints that it wasn’t the right place. And it was hard to place. I was putting it under babies and kids items for sale, but that wasn’t an exact fit. We’re just learning about marketing, none of us have done direct marketing before.

How do you split the proceeds on Lulu.com?
One person is the banker and they pay expenses, like the graphic designer, and distribute money to the others. So far that’s worked out fine. It’s not like we’re making money yet, but we’re figuring out how we’ll do it on an ongoing basis. We hope it will be successful so you have to figure out how it’ll be managed. Probably we’ll do a partnership agreement and the partnership will get the proceeds and then we’ll do a distribution once a quarter.

What’s the investment been on your part?
Time only. The queries were written. It took a little time to find them because some of them were a couple years old. Creating the intro and the materials took time. But we were re-purposing what we had, so it was worth a try.

Guest post: Canadian freelancers form agency to negotiate fees, market their work

Michelle V. Rafter — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:38:56 +0000

Today’s guest post is written by David Hayes, an award winning freelance writer living in Toronto. In addition to contributing articles, essays and reviews to publications such as Toronto Life, Reader’s Digest and The New York Times Magazine, Hayes has written or ghost-written five nonfiction books. He also teaches advanced feature writing in Ryerson’s G. Raymond Chaug School of Continuing Studies and has lectured on various aspects of journalism to a variety of organizations.

In Canada, the biggest freelance issue in recent years has been rates.

For decades, the basic fee for the top, most prestigious consumer magazines was roughly $1/word and it has remained, for the most part, at $1/word to the present day.

Very recently, a few senior writers have negotiated up. I mainly write for the largest Canadian magazines and for several years have worked for $1.50/word, and somewhat more in the case of Reader’s Digest. If I were writing for some of the equivalent top magazines in the U.S., with my level of experience and a brace of National Magazine Awards on my resume, I would command anywhere from $2.50 to as high as $5/word. Still, for the most part here in Canada, writers are still being offered, and accepting, $1/word.

According to a 2006 report by the Professional Writers Association of Canada, in 1979 the average annual income for a Canadian freelance writer was $25,000. In 2005, it was $24,035. Yes, it dropped. If you were to take just three examples from 1979 – the cost of office leasing space in downtown Toronto, the price being charged by the better printers, and the salary of a magazine’s advertising sales director – and compare them to 2009, they will have risen exponentially. Not only have writers’ rates remained stagnant, but publishers today are demanding more rights and often taking even longer to pay than they did three decades ago.

With discontent rising amongst the ranks of freelance writers, several years ago a Canadian Freelance Union formed under the umbrella of the large Communications, Energy & Paperworkers union, which unionized much of Canada’s newspaper and broadcast industries. Nothing much seems to have happened with it. However, the mere threat of a union began to create a nervousness among publishers and owners of publications.

Then, just a few weeks ago, Derek Finkle, a freelance writer and former magazine editor, created the Canadian Writers Group, which functions much like the literary agencies many of us are signed to for book work. Its goal is to relieve freelance writers of the responsibility of negotiating their fees – like it or not, many excellent reporters and writers are less than brilliant businesspeople – and seek a more equitable rate structure as well as more favorable rights arrangements.

Some argued that launching the agency in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression was a bad idea. But after more than three decades of publishers stubbornly claiming they couldn’t afford to increase writers’ rates even as they found ways to absorb rising prices for every cost associated with their business, many of us thought the momentum happened to build now so the time had come.

Who's who in digital media – 25 trendsetters you need to know

Michelle V. Rafter — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:05:15 +0000

A funny thing happened on the way to compiling this list of digital media trendsetters.

I’d put out a call to writers and editors on LinkedIn asking for names of industry folks I should include. But instead of news industry luminaries, I kept getting social media trailblazers. Wait a minute, I wanted to say, you don’t understand – social media isn’t the same as online news.

Then I started using Twitter. It didn’t take long to figure out that for the people who hang out on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other online networks the social media hotdogs and digital media trendsetters are one in the same. They’re the ones people friend, follow and read. They’re the ones broadcasting the news of a US Airways plane going down in the Hudson River and Barack Obama’s inauguration – regardless of who they are, where they are, their day job, their background or experience.

That meant I had to rethink my definition of trendsetter.

Here’s what I came up with. It’s totally subjective and different from what I would have picked six month ago, and probably what I’d pick six months from now. When possible, I’ve linked their names to their Twitter IDs or websites.

The Old School

Bill Keller - Executive editor of the New York Times, charged with bringing the Grey Lady into the 21st century. Appointed paper’s first social media editor earlier this week.
Jonathan Miller – Former AOL chief recently hired by Rupert Murdoch to run News Corp.’s digital interests, including MySpace and Hulu (minus the Wall Street Journal).
Russ Stanton – Los Angeles Times editor. Figuring out a way how to stay relevant – and solvent – in the Internet age.
Dean Singleton – Head of MediaNews Group, which owns the Denver Post and 99 other media properties, and leader of the charge to help newspapers monetize the Web.

The New Wave

Tina Brown – Proprietress of The Daily Beast, a cross between the Conde Nast glossies she used to edit and a daily politics and gossip column.
Arianna Huffington – HuffPost founder; gadfly turned new media publisher.
Hyperlocal news bloggers – NeighborsGo, NewzJunky, SealBeachDaily.com, WestSeattleBlog, Neighborhood Notes, the list goes on and on
Josh Marshall – Creator of Talking Points Memo, political blog that won a George Polk Award in 2008 for reporting on the firings of US attorneys.
Paul Steiger – Former WSJ managing editor and current editor in chief at ProPublica, another high-profile online-only news outfit doing original investigative journalism on a non-profit basis.

The Professors

Jeff Jarvis – J-school prof at City University of New York, Buzz Machine blogger, author of What Would Google Do? and former magazine and newspaper reporter, columnist and editor.
Jay Rosen – NYU journalism prof, PressThink blogger and director of NewAssignment.Net, “an experiment in open-source reporting.”
Sree Sreenivasan – Tech evangelist and professor at Columbia Journalism School, know for his extensive new media workshops.

The Promoters

Seth Godin – Author, viral marketer extraordinaire, quipster.
Guy Kawasaki – Entrepreneur, author, social media guru, proprietor of AllTop “online magazine rack” and blogger at How to Change the World. On Twitter at @guykawasaki.
Peter Shankman – PR guy and founder of Help a Reporter Out crowdsourcing service for reporters.

The Pundits

Paul Gillin – Social media expert, author and chronicler of newspaper hard times at Newspaper Deathwatch.
Mark Glaser – Columnist for PBS MediaShift, “Your guide to the digital media revolution.”
Alan Mutter – Newsman turned venture capitalist and blogger at Reflections of a Newsosaur.
Jeremiah Owyang – Forrester Research social media analyst.

The Tech Geeks

Chris Brogan – Mr. Social Media. Read and learn.
Matt Mullenweg – Founding developer of WordPress blogging software, used by newspapers such as the New York Times, and head of WordPress’ parent company, Automattic.
Dipchand “Deep” Nishar – Former Google exec who became LinkedIn’s v.p. of products in early December and has since rolled out a bevy of service upgrades.
Darren Rowse – The Aussie blogging mastermind behind ProBlogger.
Robert Scoble – Uber tech geek. Former Microsoft tech evangelist and Fast Company videographer blogging at Scobleizer.com.
Biz Stone and Evan Williams – Co-founder and CEO of Twitter respectively. Reportedly turned down a $500 million buy out offer from Facebook earlier this year.

Know other new media pioneers I should include? Leave a comment. If I get enough I’ll re-post an expanded list.

Sometimes they're just not that into you

Michelle V. Rafter — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:36:53 +0000

A friend who sells medical supplies takes a pragmatic approach to rejection. When a company says no to what she’s selling, she brushes it off and moves onto the next prospect. “In my personal life I can’t handle that kind of rejection, but at work it doesn’t bother me,” she says. “It’s just business.”

Writers deal with rejection all the time. But when a magazine editor says no to a query or kills a story, how many of us brush it off as easily as my saleswoman friend?

Rejection has been the topic du jour since Dan Baum wrote about his 2007 firing from The New Yorker in 140 character installments on Twitter a few days ago and then reassembled it as a whole piece on his website.

Not only was Baum fired by New Yorker editor David Remnick, he had five stories killed in the three-plus years he was a staff writer. Given the standing of The New Yorker in the American publishing industry, that’s rejection on an epic scale.

After reading Baum’s explanations of why he was fired and why the stories were killed, the whole episode seems less an edict on Baum’s abilities and more a confluence of unfortunate events and personality mismatch with a little bad decision making thrown in for good measure.

For example, in 2004, Baum wrote a story about how Florida was preparing for the presidential election that was killed over concerns about reporter bias after he mentioned to an editor he’d spent an afternoon distributing Kerry literature. A 2004 story about geneticists was killed after editors decided it was too similar to one by Malcolm Gladwell that had appeared in the magazine eight years earlier. A story on U.S. Special Forces troops training the Philippine army to fight terrorists never ran, according to Baum, because editors let it sit for months then killed it after a competitor ran a piece on a similar topic.

Baum wants it to be known that his explanations, which are posted on his website along with the complete manuscripts of all the killed stories, are only his own, how the killing of these stories looked to him at the time. He allows that he could be all wrong, that the stories were killed because they simply were no good.

What Baum’s explanations show me is that sometimes, it’s not you, it’s them. As a writer you can hit all the marks – write the perfect query or turn in exactly what you were assigned, – and still be rejected because circumstances have changed, the editors changed their minds, or when all is said and done, they’re just not that into you. Another great example of this is William Georgiades’ 2004 Mediabistro piece on his dealing with a Conde Nast editor over an ill-fated travel piece.

The moral of the story: Even though writing is a creative process, it’s still a business. The sooner freelancers come to terms with that, the easier it is to put rejection in its place, and like my saleswoman friend, move onto the next prospect.

According to Baum, he decided to come clean about his New Yorker experience after being asked about it at readings for Nine Lives, his book about post-Katrina New Orleans that debuted in February. You can read more about Baum, the book and his New Yorker days in a recent interview with the Colorado Springs Independent.

You can read more of what people are saying about how Baum used Twitter to tell his New Yorker saga in Gawker’s take on the story.

Not all rejections are bad. In fact, some are worth celebrating, according to Tim Beyers, a Denver freelance writer for Motley Fool and host of the weekly #editorchat session on Twitter, in a post called A word about rejection: dude. Beyers writes: “One I received last month from a national publication included this note from the editor: ‘You’re a good writer, and I wish you all the best.’ I think she means it. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself these days.”

To deconstruct other reasons magazines turn down writers’ queries, read Susan Johnston’s blog post on The Urban Muse, called 15 reasons your idea got rejected.

ASBPE guest post: Driving traffic to your blog

Michelle V. Rafter — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:00:30 +0000

Today you’ll find me over on the national blog of the American Society of Business Publication Editors. The ASBPE’s national blog is re-running my blog post Top 10 strategies to drive traffic to your blog.

ASBPE is a 45-year-old professional association for full-time and freelance editors and writers working in the business, trade and specialty press. The group holds an annual meeting – the 2009 conference is July 15-17 in Washington D.C. – and this year is also sponsoring a one-day digital workshop, which takes place Nov. 5 in San Francisco. The ASBPE also runs 14 local chapters, a job bank, members-only online forums and Webinars. Membership is $75 for staff editors and $50 for freelancers.

You can find out more on the ASBPE Website or on the ASBPE Group page on LinkedIn, which currently has about 322 members. For updates on Twitter, follow @ASBPE.

ASBPE guest post: simple steps to starting a blog

Michelle V. Rafter — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:22:27 +0000

Today there are more reasons than ever for writers to have a blog. With the media world going digital, freelancers need to keep up with new forms of writing in order to earn their daily bread, or just have a simple way for editors to check out their work.

But getting started can be intimidating. What to write about? What software to use? And how to get anybody to visit once it’s there?

I addressed all of these issues in a post that’s making a guest appearance today on the national blog of the American Society of Business Publication Editors, a professional organization for business magazine editors and writers. You can read the post here.

If you’ve started blogging to support your freelancing business, how is it helping? What’s it taught you? How are you making it work for you?