This post came my way courtesy of the hive mind (Delicious popular bookmarks) and it was worth a mention: how to outline a big piece. Meranda of Meranda Writes posts her outlining method here. It’s analog and oldschool, but effective…she writes each “fact” on a post-it note sliver and rearranges. I did something like this [...]
I’ve “read” (skimmed) two books in the last few days: Be The Media and The Four-Hour Workweek. They’ve gotten me thinking about quite a few things. Despite the totally different audiences and topics, the books are fundamentally about the same thing: You, you brilliant snowflake you, can break out of the molds The Man’s put [...]
I thought this piece from Edward Wasserman at the Society of American Business Writers and Editors was very pertinent to today’s world. In essence, he says, today’s journalism comes from interested citizens, freelancers who may do other, non-journalism writing on the side, and writers funded by direct advertising, grants, or some other model. In other [...]
Here’s a horror story for freelancers out there. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. I was at a media professionals mixer the other day, chatting with a number of TV journalists and writers. Then I saw a woman making her way through the crowd, staring at nametags. She grabbed this guy behind me [...]
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A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare by Jeremy Butterfield My review rating: 4 of 5 starsA fascinating study of words *as people actually use them.* Most books on language do not have the power of the Corpus behind them, which is what makes Damp Squid so special. This book is written for a [...]
Image via Wikipedia My Tuesday posts have been lacking, I know, but that’s because I’ve started blogging at mediabistro.com’s MediaJobsDaily. So instead of a list of markets and freelance opportunities this week, I’d like to highlight a few tech tools I’ve found indispensable for my new role as breaking-news-blogger and social media maven. Twitlet – [...]
Image via CrunchBase One of the things I’ve found time-consuming about blogging is finding appropriate images to go along with posts (which is why so many of these posts are image-less…which is faster, but boring!) I’ve just discovered a free Firefox plugin that claims to take the work out of this semi-arduous task. Zemanta does [...]
Well–last night I stumbled onto the last third of a chat taking place via Twitter. This is a relatively new phenomenon. Tweetgrid, a third-party service that makes Twitterchatting much easier, is only a couple months old. I must say I still don’t fully understand the advantage of chatting through Twitter using hashtags. I posted 8 [...]
Well, last week I was too busy pitching to blog, so now I’m back…with a vengeance. Writer’s Guidelines: I search for them so you don’t have to I fired a pitch off to Endless Vacation magazine, which is a travel mag sent to RCI (timeshare) members. But you don’t have to be writing about timeshare [...]