Do you know how to look for the cookies that get left on your computer’s hard drive after you visit some Web sites? Do you worry about sending sensitive documents – like book manuscripts – to editors through an ordinary email attachment? Do you have trouble keeping track of all the electronic gear, chargers and […]
Expert blogger tips: revisiting old posts, previewing new ones
File this under blog maintenance – great blogging advice from two experts. Reading old blog posts – The first comes from a social media expert I check in with often, Tac Anderson, a Web 2.0 manager at HP who I interviewed for a story awhile back and then got to know a little better. Anderson’s […]
5 reasons to say 'yes' if a fellow freelancer asks you to coffee
It’s good to meet up with fellow freelancers every once in a while. I found myself thinking about this after meeting up with a writer who was in town on business this week and asked me to coffee. Normally I’m chained to my desk during business hours, but it’s summer, the sun’s shining, what’s wrong […]
Can ProPublica be the public interest watchdog of online news?
While newspapers and magazines continue to lose some of their best writers to downsizing and other cutbacks, one news organization has been building up staff with the hope of becoming the preeminent investigative news source online. The organization is ProPublica, a privately-funded public-interest news Website that opened for business earlier this summer. ProPublica aims to […]
Top 10 things writers want from PR people
It’s popular for writers to look down on PR people. The stereotypical media relations representative is inexperienced, doesn’t know one publication from another, hasn’t a clue about how the news business works, and actually makes it harder to get through to a source. While that’s an exaggeration, it’s still true that in many cases the […]
More on blog post comments: be careful what you wish for
Last week I wrote a post lamenting how difficult it is to get people to leave comments on blog posts. The post generated a lot of comments – ironic yes, but a good thing too – because it proved food for additional thought on the subject. The general consensus of the dozen or so people […]