Rachel Kaufman, freelance reporter

I'm an interrogator of gargoyle lovers, frog fondlers, and the eternal optimists saving the news industry. These are some of the stories I've written.

Posts Tagged ‘journalism’

Tuesday’s Tools: Journos’ web sites

By • Oct 2nd, 2007 • Category: Uncategorized

(This is the fourth in a weekly series about tools for writers. For the rest of the series, go here.) Here’s a big list of journalists’ personal web sites, compiled by Sreenath Sreenivasan. This came in handy for me recently when I was updating my resume and wasn’t sure how to phrase certain items. I [...]



Small newspaper ethics

By • Aug 7th, 2007 • Category: Uncategorized

Came across this link in my travels today: Post Register Staff Disclosure Conflicts Okay, so the president of the paper is running for governor of the state, the acting executive editor is married to an important school official, but the paper seems to be handling these potential conflicts as well as could be hoped. I [...]



Getting press coverage part 2: the editor’s desk

By • Jun 29th, 2007 • Category: Uncategorized

I promised over a month ago to write a guide to getting your work into print. Before we start, though, a disclaimer: If you are serious about starting a writing career, there are books and web sites galore that will give you more than enough information about the process of writing query letters, the right [...]



Horn-toot #2

By • Jun 25th, 2007 • Category: Uncategorized

Here’s a column on GoErie.com that riffs off an earlier blog post I made: Language to survive its purists The English language has been destroyed. That’s what language purists would want us to believe, anyway. And for a while, I was with them. Again, registration required.



Poynter covers disabilities

By • Jun 21st, 2007 • Category: Uncategorized

Two recent posts on Poynter about writing about people with disabilites caught my attention recently: [1] [2] I think most of us have gotten past the poor high school girl’s quandary in #2:”I wanted to write a good story about overcoming obstacles,” she said. It’s important to write what happened, not try to fit notes [...]



LOLcat goes mainstream

By • Jun 20th, 2007 • Category: Uncategorized

A coworker pointed me in the direction of this Houston Chronicle piece about LOLcats. Yes, for real. It’s hard to be a twenty-something, cutting-edge Internet hipster and read about cutting-edge hip things written by People Who Just Don’t Get It, but Dwight Silverman is not one of those people. I remember when my sister and [...]



Tooting my own horn

By • Jun 19th, 2007 • Category: Uncategorized

Some articles I’ve worked on lately that are now up at GoErie.com: Rider takes challenges of competing internationally in stride The first obstacle was the cost: $25,000.Then there was the horse’s injury. Obstacles, though, are nothing to Becca Hart, a 22-year-old Erie native who is one of four Americans selected to compete at the Fédération [...]



Interviewing by instant message

By • Jun 18th, 2007 • Category: Uncategorized

Leann Frola, a Naughton Fellow at Poynter, posted an interview she did with a MediaBistro blogger who’s been hired by the New York Times. The content of the interview is interesting; I always love to hear about bloggers who’ve been snapped up to teach mainstream media what’s what (hint, hint!), even if more questions are [...]



Worth Reading: Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta

By • Jun 13th, 2007 • Category: Uncategorized

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta from last January’s issue of Technology Review (how do I FIND these things?) profiles Charles Simonyi, who designed Microsoft Office (as well as worked on the world’s first word processor, back at Xerox PARC). He’s perhaps the most successful programmer in the world. (The article makes the [...]



Do You Speak American?

By • Jun 5th, 2007 • Category: Uncategorized

After finding PBS’s web site for Do You Speak American? I intended to have a long post on this topic, but I’ve been browsing through the material for days and have still found no end to it. It looks as if there was a documentary broadcast on TV back in 2005, and the producers organized [...]