Writer’s Market is here
Posted: August 23, 2011 Filed under: analyzing newspaper markets, Uncategorized, Writer's Market, Writers Market online | Tags: finding markets for writing, market listings, Poets & Writers, The Writer, Writer's Market Leave a comment »My copy of the new Writer’s Market arrived yesterday. This fat volume is loaded with information, advice and places to send your work. I can’t remember when I first started getting this book, but I believe it’s essential for anyone writing for publication. Its publishers, Writer’s Digest, also offer an online version, writersmarket.com, which is also handy. In fact you can buy the deluxe package and get both for a year, or you can try writersmarket.com for a modest monthly fee.
Why get the book when you can read it online? Well, I’m the kind of girl who likes to take the book to the beach or crash on the couch with Writer’s Market in one hand and a pen in the other. But writing is an online business these days. Writersmarket.com allows you to search for specific topics and publications, then follow the links to the publications’ web pages, where you can peruse the content and read their submission guidelines.
I don’t want to spend my blog advertising Writer’s Digest, but they do seem to have set the gold standard. You can also find market listings at websites operated by The Writer magazine and Poets & Writers, among others. The latter tends toward literary magazines. I’ll give you some more places to find markets next week.
These market guides are a wonderful place to start if you don’t know where to send your work. They offer names, addresses, lists of what the editors are looking for, the percentage of freelance vs. staff writing, and more. But they are just a start. We need to go beyond the listings to read their guidelines, usually available online. And then, we need to look at the publication. At least peruse what they post online.
Best case, read the magazine, newspaper or zine. Read it all, including the ads, and read as many back issues as you can find. You may find that your work won’t fit in some of the places that sounded good from the Writer’s Market listing. If it does seem to fit, you’ll have a better idea of how to entice them with your writing.
Take some time to browse the listings. They tend to spark ideas. Keep paper and pen nearby.
Are newspapers still a viable freelance market?
Posted: June 7, 2011 Filed under: analyzing newspaper markets, newspaper cutbacks, newspaper jobs vs. freelancing, newspaper layoffs | Tags: freelance writing opportunities, freelancing for newspapers, future of newspapers, online writing jobs.com, sf weekly Leave a comment »As the author of Freelancing for Newspapers (Quill Driver, 2007), I am frequently asked if newspapers are still a viable market. About the time my book came out, the economy began to crash and the newspaper business crashed even harder. Thousands of reporters and editors have lost their jobs. Those who are left are saddled with doing more work for the same pay.
Newspapers were double-slammed by the economy—loss of advertising—and the hyper-growth of the Internet. Why subscribe to the newspaper when you can get your news immediately online, as well as on TV, radio or smartphone?
In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I spent 25 years working for community newspapers, employment has decreased by 43 percent, more than the national average of 36 percent. This SF Weekly article lays out the sad truth. The figures are similar at papers across the country. More than one major newspaper has ceased publication or stopped publishing a print newspaper, going completely online. Most papers now sport fewer pages and an increased online presence with blogs, articles, videos, and reader input. There’s no question the industry is changing, but what does this mean for freelancers?
It seems to be a mixed bag. Some papers have stopped using freelance while others are hiring freelancers to do what staff writers and editors used to do. In fact, our local weekly, which never used freelancers in the past, now publishes freelance articles on a regular basis. It’s certainly a more economical option for them, with no guaranteed hours, equipment or benefits to pay for.
Many of the freelance opportunities in newspapers that I wrote about in my book still exist to a certain extent. You can still sell travel articles, opinion pieces, reviews, features and columns, but papers are buying fewer of them and we are now competing with staff writers who have lost their jobs.
The types of freelance opportunities available have changed from what they were in the last century. Tonight, I’ve been looking at Online-writing -jobs.com. I was surprised to find some newspapers seeking freelance reporters to cover regular beats such as health, auto accidents, and government meetings. If any of them were local, I would try it because it sounds like easy work for a regular market.
But some of the other opportunities make me nervous. Mancave Daily? There are listings for ghost writers and writers of press releases, blogs and other online content. It looks like we writers of nonfiction need to be willing to use our talents to write anything and everything to make a living. (Writers of fiction and poetry should already know they need a “day job” to pay the bills.)
Many of the employers listed are corporations, not newspapers. Some may be ripoffs. Tread carefully, especially if you have never heard of the company before. But you might strike gold here, too.
In future postings, we will look at other sources of freelance writing opportunities.
>Education for freelance journalists
Posted: April 8, 2008 Filed under: analyzing newspaper markets, college degrees, Lisa Romeo, MFA 1 Comment »>There’s a great blog discussion at Lisa Romeo’s site, with experts giving their opinions about the value of an MFA, a master of fine art’s degree, in writing. Is it worth the effort and money? Does it give you a boost in your career?
I have an MFA in creative nonfiction, earned in 2003, so I can address some of those questions myself, but first let’s start at the beginning. Do you need any kind of degree at all?
I also have a bachelor’s degree in journalism, with a newspaper reporting and edting concentration. I grew up wanting to write poetry and fiction, but I had a strong enough practical side to see that I might need to earn a living and it wouldn’t happen in creative writing. It was a good choice. It got me working on newspapers for years, and I can still always go back to that if I need a job. If you want to be staff writer for a newspaper, a journalism degree is the most direct route. If you majored in something else, all is not lost as long you can prove that you can write. But you do need a degree in something to get a newspaper job.
As a freelancer for newspapers, it’s extremely helpful to have had training and experience in journalism. You’ll learn newspaper style, learn to meet deadlines quickly, and be required to complete an internship in the business to get the degree. You’ll make contacts that will help you find work. My curriculum also included classes in freelancing that I could apply directly to my work. Earning my BA in journalism was one of the smartest things I ever did.
I never got a postgrad degree in journalism because the curriculum seemed to be all theory and minimal writing. Really the only use for it seemed to be if one wanted to teach. For a long time, I didn’t have any interest in that. Now there are MA programs in creative nonfiction or literary journalism that can be quite helpful, but you certainly don’t need them to be a freelance writer.
I did want an MFA however, mostly to get back to that creative writing I had been doing all my life. The degree was good for me in a lot of ways. It did get me back into poetry and fiction. It forced me to read great works of literature, and it forced me to take a new look at how I was writing. After decades of journalism, my prose had gone a little stale. I had also changed my mind about teaching, and the degree launched my teaching career.
But has the MFA helped me sell more articles or books? Nope. Has it paid for itself yet? Not even close. As you will see if you read Romeo’s article, editors really don’t care what degrees you have; they just want you to be able to write well and produce the kinds of work they need.
Now, a secondary degree in a specialized subject might be very useful in allowing you to write specialized articles in a particular subject such as business, science or law. But do you need an MA or MFA in writing or journalism to freelance? No. It’s nice to have, but not necessary.
Just write. That’s all it comes down to. Find out what they need and write it.
>Study the paper and the guidelines
Posted: February 19, 2008 Filed under: analyzing newspaper markets, Associated Press, contributing editor, South Coast Writers Conference, syndicates, Writer's Market 1 Comment »>I taught my “Freelancing for Newspapers” class at the South Coast Writers Conference in Gold Beach, Oregon last weekend. We were blessed with sunny weather and a wonderful group of writers and presenters.
As one of my class exercises, I passed out newspapers and had teams analyze the freelance possibilities in those papers. It was an interesting experiment. If you remember back to my blog entry about the Christian Science Monitor, you’ll remember it seemed like a pretty good market. Well, the students who had that paper flipped through it and said, “There’s nothing here for us.” Not having seen the guidelines, they had no idea about the many sections open to freelancers. It really is important to look for a paper’s submission guidelines to understand the possibilities. Read the paper AND the guidelines, and you should have a clear picture of whether you can write for them.
There were a lot of questions about terms that I have known for so long that I guess I forget everyone doesn’t know them. So let me clarify for one and all:
* Staff writers are usually identified as such in the byline. Articles with no byline are either staff-written or press releases run without pay.
* If an article says “for” the Tribune or “special to”, it was probably written by a freelancer.
* If the byline doesn’t give you a clue, look for a tag at the end of the article. Also look in the masthead and see if the name is listed among the editors or staff writers. If it’s not, the writer is a freelancer.
* “Contributing editor” and “contributors” listed in a byline or in the masthead are freelancers. They are not paid staff members. The contributing editors may have an agreement to write for every issue. Contributors may write for every issue or just this one.
* Stringers are also regular freelance contributors. It’s an old-fashioned term that comes from the way editors used to measure stories by the inch, using a marked string.
* Associated Press is an organization to which newspapers belong. Most articles are written by staff writers for their own papers and picked up by the Associated Press to offer to other member papers. The articles arrive online each day, and the editors pick out which ones they want. People do freelance for AP, but it’s a hard job to get.
* News services, such as Cox News Service, are syndicates that work like AP, offering a menu of stories to member or subscriber newspapers. You can freelance for them. Check Writer’s Market for a list of some of these, but they do favor employee writers with strong track records.
If you can’t find guidelines in Writer’s Market or on the newspaper’s web site, e-mail or telephone the editor and ask: “Do you take freelance? Can I send you some ideas?”
Feel free to ask questions about this stuff, and remember, wherever you go, grab a newspaper.
