1. The New Yorker – My favorite magazine. From week to week, you never know what stories you’ll find – wild boars, smallpox, Seymour Hirsch’s latest Iraq war expose, a George Clooney profile. Jenny Allen’s humor essay, Awake, in the June 2, 2008, issue had me laughing out loud.

2. The New York Times – Not for the obvious reasons. I’m a West Coast girl and cut my news teeth on the Los Angeles Times. But when it comes to crosswords, the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzles are the best. I buy spiral-bound volumes at Powell’s Books and take them on plane trips and vacations.

3. I’m usually down on New York-based publishers because too many of them carry stories with sources based in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut and completely ignore the rest of the country. This is especially irritating in shelter magazines that feature page after page of suggestions for doing up your 650-square foot Manhattan apartment but never showcase stunning homes, large or small, in places like Spokane, Washington, or Sacramento, California – for those you have to read Sunset. But now that I’m visiting, I’m glad so many publishers are based here, it makes for an easier trip.

4. Because so many magazines are based here, a lot of writers are based here too. So in my off hours, l’ll be hanging out with a handful of former colleagues I haven’t seen in a while, and getting together with a writer who I’ve worked with for some time but never met in person.

5. The term “media” includes more than just newspapers and magazines – it’s movies too. That’s why I purposely waited to see Sex in the City on the big screen until I was here where all takes place. Somebody get me a cosmo.

What’s your favorite New York media memory?

One of my regular clients is a technology Web site that pays 50 cents a word for 500-word stories. That’s $250 per story – like I said, not a lot of money. However, I’ve been able to make this market work for me by:

• Sticking to my going hourly rate for the amount of time I put into the stories.
• Doing multiple stories around a single topic so I can interview one source for two stories.
• Getting the editor to assign a story and graphics – which pay an additional fee – on the same topic so I can stretch the research even further.
• Focusing on topics that fall within my already established beat, so instead of starting from scratch on every story I have a pool of sources to draw from or know where to go to find them. I’ve always been a beat reporter, so this is standard operating procedure for me.
• Spinning ideas and sources I find for these stories into pitches at other tech outlets I write for.
• Using stories as basis for posts to this blog, which I guess is a different way of stretching my research.

And since I have an ongoing relationship with the client, I get work from them every month, some of which is assigned, some of which is based on my queries, so for very little marketing on my part I have a steady income stream. Multiply this times a few clients and voila, you’ve got a business.

My style of marketing works for me, but it might not suit everyone. Another Freelance Success member who blogs about the business of writing is Eric Sherman. Check out his blog, Erik Sherman’s WriterBiz. I’d love to hear other freelancers’ marketing secrets.