Great post last week from Growing Your News Website about journalists responding to conversations that involve them, even when these conversations are taking place not on the MSM dot-com that employs them. Great example: Erie Media-Go-Round mentions the Erie Times-News probably every other day. But ETN reporters never join the conversation. Sure, in this particular … Continue Reading
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For journos and webheads: Growing Your News Website
Last week I learned that the Watertown (NY) Daily Times, despite putting all its content online for free, is losing out to a competitor, NewZJunky.com. Howard Owens, awesome blogger and journalist, wrote “Never before have I seen a newspaper.com get trounced in its own market by any competitor — not even a TV station. NewsJunky.com … Continue Reading
Photojournalists barred from selling reprints in Illinois
…in certain circumstances, that is. This entire article rubs me the wrong way. Summary: News photographers, especially high school sports photographers, have been barred from access to sports games if their paper sells a lot of reprints online or if they won’t sign a form promising not to sell reprints. Some of these photographers directly … Continue Reading
Got rights?
Despite being a mother of zero, today I’m blogging over at Freelance Parent. If “first North American Serial Rights” sounds like a phrase out of your nightmares, or if you’ve never thought about who owns your words, I suggest you head over.
Tuesday’s Tools: Remember The Milk & Gmail
Click to enlarge the screenshot. From Rememberthemilk.comOne more organization system: A Firefox plugin that integrates Remember the Milk, the online task-management service, and Gmail. It has some nifty features: You can automatically create tasks by adding tags to messages (for example: every mail tagged To Do can become a task with that e-mail’s subject line) … Continue Reading
Reviewed: The Areas of My Expertise (ON CD!!!)
I am so, so late to the party on this one, but nonetheless: I loved John Hodgman on Jon Stewart. I loved (still love) him as the stodgy PC to Justin Long’s faux-cool Mac. (Nobody else thinks Long is Trying Too Hard?) But I couldn’t get more than a few pages through The Areas of … Continue Reading
30 places to find free online courses for writers
Via Lifehacker, 10 places to get writing courses online including MIT, Utah State, Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (more of a reference, less of a class repository, but whatever), and more. Another free way to improve your writing: join a critique circle. I dabbled in a few through Meetup.com (just punch in your city/state and “writing” … Continue Reading
A glossary of journalism terms
Flickr: Thomas HawkFound while trawling the web: a five page (!) glossary of newspaper terms. Many of these are amusingly archaic (does anyone need to know “cablese” anymore?) but there will be times when you, a reporter, will be asked to write a “hed” and “deck” for your 10-“inch” story–or to go to the “morgue,” … Continue Reading
Blogs (and what they’re not)
Great piece in the New York Review of Books about blogs. We, you and I, are not its intended audience—if we were, the author Sarah Boxer would not have to define “blog,” “LOL,” “WTF.” Yet this is interesting reading: Bloggers assume that if you’re reading them, you’re one of their friends, or at least in … Continue Reading
No Tuesday’s Tools this week–instead, a discussion about quoting rates
There is a very interesting and heated discussion raging over at Freelance Writing Jobs about whether one should include a rate quote with a cover letter when requested in a want ad. My position is no, no, no. Why might you want to do this? As many commenters have pointed out, if a prospective client … Continue Reading