Freelance Unbound

Sad news from Condé Nast as it closes Portfolio magazine. 
I discovered Portfolio late last year when I stumbled on a dissection of the Wall Street collapse by Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis. It was riveting and very well written – as you would expect, I guess.
The reason for the closure seems to be plummeting ad revenues. I have no idea whether this is just because of the tanking economy, or also because the new digital world doesn’t have room for it. 
[Update: there’s a useful Valleywag piece here that lifts the lid on Portfolio‘s slide.] 
I’m not a believer in print for print’s sake – but I do think it’s a shame that high quality publications go to the wall as well as indifferent ones. 
I never bought a copy, of course – I just read it online. Which is the key problem for news and magazine publishing now.
So, yes. I guess that would make it my fault…

Part 1;   Part 2;   Part 3;   Part 4;   Part 5;
At last, the end of the journey and a handy summary.
But first, Recovering Journalist Mark Potts has a very good post on Life After Journalism that is really worth reading.
A former 20-year journalist (hmm – like me), Mark Potts is now “an entrepreneur and consultant”. That means he managed to escape the media implosion – but still uses the range of journalistic skills he’s acquired in his new career. It’s a good post with some useful advice.
So, now – your eight-point summary.

1) Assess your existing skills

I just got into an interesting spat with Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at the University of Kent’s Centre for Journalism. 
Apparently he thinks only the phone is good enough for journalists to use to chase up stories.

For contact with interviewees or sources of information the telephone is ALWAYS the right way to make the first approach […] There is no room for debate about this. 

Well, uh, I think there is (hence his slightly snarky defence later on in the post’s comments section).
I use email far more than the phone now when writing features (OK, that’s not news reporting – I understand that. But then, journalism/media isn’t all news reporting either.) 
It has clear benefits – particularly if you’re dealing with people in different time zones, the people you’re dealing with prefer to use digital communications rather than the phone, or simply that you’re trying to contact people at a tech firm.
Tech firms in particular live online – it’s the water they swim in, so it makes a lot of sense to fish in that pool if you want to reach them. 
As a journalist, I’ve covered the response of retail and service companies to the explosion of digital communications available. The savviest companies expend some effort in making sure they use the right one to reach their customers – not everyone wants to be called up; not everyone uses email; some people still prefer a letter. 
It’s a lesson that journalism needs to learn too. There’s a generation growing up who only use SMS and Facebook to communicate. In a few years’ time, when a journalist from Kent University is beaten to a story by someone who understands that and gets to a source by text first, maybe the penny will drop…
[HT: FleetStreetBlues]

No, it’s not advice from me. It’s advice from hyperactive blogmeister John Scalzi, who has posted a handy video of a forum from the Tools of Change online media publishing conference thing in New York in February.
I was aware of the event, and it looked very interesting. I would have liked to have gone but, given that it was in New York and cost $1,600 for a ticket – well.
Scalzi’s panel – “Where Do you Go With 40,000 Readers? A Study in Online Community Building” – is chock full of info for all keen bloggers and those who want to develop an online presence.
If you’re interested in the rest of the conference (and if you’re going to be involved with journalism at all, online or offline, you probably should be), all the conference sessions are archived here on Blip.tv.

Part 1;   Part 2;   Part 3;   Part 4;   Part 5;

It’s been a bit of a marathon, but finally we’re getting to the end of the recession-busting advice.

In the next post, I’ll put together a handy summary, so you don’t have to wade through so much copy to see the bullet points.

First – A follow-up note on the whole business of advertising yourself.

Using freelance online marketplaces

One of the things I tried at the end of last year was to register on People Per Hour – an online marketplace for freelancers in a wide range of fields, including media-type stuff such as writing and design.

I thought it might be a good way of tapping into a wider market than I could reach through my own contacts, and also improve my ability to pitch for new work.

In brief, I found it didn’t really work for me, but it might work for you, especially, I suspect, if you’re a student or similar. I posted about this at greater length earlier, so it might be worth you checking out the pros and cons here.

Should you work for free in the hope of getting paid work later on?

When I went to blather at Kingston, I got involved in a discussion with one of the students about doing unpaid writing work. Although he was only in the first year, he’d been enterprising enough to get an unpaid commission to write for a publication (I didn’t catch which one, as I arrived late into the conversation).

Should you do this? Is it exploitation? Does it undermine your fellow journalists who rely on real income from writing to pay the rent? Does it make it easier or more difficult to get paid for your work further down the line?

My take is that it’s absolutely fine to work for nothing – under certain circumstances. The key is to ask yourself what you’re getting out of your pro bono work:

1. Experience. If you really don’t have experience (you’re a student, say), then it pays to get it. The money’s not as important as the skills and ability you develop. Make sure, however, that you get feedback on your work so you can improve. This is especially important for students, but is also valid for professionals if they are moving into a new field, for example.
2. Exposure. This works at any stage in your career. I recently wrote a piece for the members’ magazine of the British Association of Communicators in Business (CiB), because I wanted to get some exposure to the corporate communications market. It didn’t pay any money, but it is a useful thing to point to when I’m talking to potential corporate writing clients, particularly as I have spent pretty much all of my career in business journalism, and don’t have that much corporate work to show off.
3. Contacts. If you want to break into a particular field of writing, it’s worth trying to build up contacts in that world. There are plenty of specialist publications dealing with things such as the arts, say, or other niche areas, most of which are produced by enthusiasts using volunteer contributions. If you put some effort into contributing to these magazines and newsletters, you kill two birds with one stone – you get experience writing in a specialist field, and you also start building up a contacts book of the field’s movers and shakers. And what does a successful journalist have? A solid contacts book. This in itself has a value to potential employers, not counting the clippings you are building up.

OK, then – there are good reasons to write (and do other media-type work) for free. But what are the downsides?

Primarily, you run the risk that doing work for nothing will actually undermine your ability to get paid work in future. Here’s how that works.

If you want to write music features for something like Uncut, for example, it may not be such a good idea to persuade the editor to give you a payment-free trial. After all, once you’ve given it away for free, why would they rush to start paying you full whack? It’s much more likely that your try-out period gets strangely extended and you end up donating far more than you had planned. And even if you do start getting paid, you may find it’s not at the full rate the “professionals” get.

I’m sure the fine Uncut doesn’t operate so shabbily, by the way (unless you know differently), and I’m sure this approach has worked for some. But logically it’s risky. It’s far better to donate your free writing to media outlets that don’t pay anyway. That means when you come to tout for paying work you have a bulging portfolio, but no track record of giving out freebies to potentially paying clients.

Also, make sure you get some kind of return from the free work. As noted before, if you’re a student wanting to write something for your portfolio and you get a friendly editor or features editor to commission it, ask them to give you advice and feedback in return. Many will be happy – or at least prepared – to do so. (If they’re not, that’s an indication to try somewhere else.)

I’ve been talking about writing, but the principle holds good for other media-type skills.

If you want to move into web design, for example, then by all means design web sites for free – just make sure it’s not for people that might otherwise pay you. And potential magazine designers can spend many happy hours working up newsletters and leaflets for small charities to hone their InDesign chops.

The moral? Sometimes you have to give before you can receive. Just make sure you give to the right people.

Next: the handy summary to all this verbiage.

Part 1;   Part 2;   Part 3;   Part 4;   Part 5;

Nice headline from my local Surrey & Hants News this week – which is apparently “Surrey’s oldest newspaper”, and which seems to be run by a team of five that includes no editorial staff.

So – does he think it’s facing the wrong way? Maybe he doesn’t like the view towards West Sussex…

Part 1;   Part 2;   Part 3;   Part 4;   Part 5;

It’s round three of media survival tips for recessionary times.

Last time, I talked about Assessing Your Skills, Learning New Skills and Updating Your CV.

Now we’re pretty much focusing on networking, networking and networking. And maybe some advertising. First, though:

Draw up a plan

Be organised. This means putting together some kind of chart to keep track of the type of work you’re hustling for, the contact details of the people you’re hustling and updates of the progress you’ve made. If you’re any kind of freelance journalist at all, you should know how useful this is to do. I use something like this – but anything that works for you is fine. The key thing is to keep track of all your contacts, when you call or email them, and when you need to follow up.

Whose names do you put on your super-organised chart? I’m glad you asked…

Talk to your friends

Mates look after mates, as someone I know wisely said about the latest recession. So the most likely source of work is either direct from people you know, or from their recommendations.

This can be a bit awkward if you’re a Brit, as we tend not to like hustling our friends. It’s a bit like going out for a drink with someone you know and then trying to sell them insurance.

Get over it. You need to pay your rent and the chances are that, if they’re in the media, they’ll understand this, and also may well need someone to do some work for them.

I picked up some corporate writing work recently, after I saw an old friend of mine after a few years. She’d moved into internal corporate communications and I asked, half-seriously, if she needed any corporate writing. The answer was yes – quite a bit of it. And that’s work I wouldn’t have come by unless I’d mentioned it. So be proactive.

The longer you’ve been in the media/journalism, the more people you’ll know in the business. Be thorough – run through everyone you’ve worked with. If they’ve moved on, that’s great, because it gives you a way into different companies. If they’ve been promoted it means they may have commissioning responsibility.

If no one has any work on offer, ask them to pass your name on to anyone they hear of who has. Remember – always ask (but don’t pester).

Contact others

Once you’ve run through your entire list of contacts, it’s time to start cold-emailing. But who to choose?

A good guide can be media job ads sites. I keep an eye on the jobs section of Journalism.co.uk, and there’s also the Guardian, obviously. (When I wrote this, I completely forgot about Press Gazette. Which may be an indication of why it’s now stopped publishing.)

You could also check out Fleet Street Blues – a journalism blog that cherry-picks journalism jobs from the web and posts them with some analysis of what they require in terms of skills, and also has some decent job hunters’ advice. They also pimp me, for some reason, which is nice.

But try to think laterally too. If you are in the market for corporate work, check out the web site of the British Association of Communicators in Business (CIB) – the professional association for corporate communications professionals – where there are a number of job listings. I’ve seen contract publishing jobs on the CIB site that haven’t been posted on other journalism job sites, for instance.

I don’t really want a job, but you can assume that if a publisher or internal communications department is hiring, it may be in the market for freelance help – especially if it’s finding it difficult to fill a position.

There’s often a few weeks’ production work on offer between the time a sub or production editor leaves and their replacement can join and get up to speed. It can work with writing too – sometimes a staff changeover can mean extra commissioning to smooth the transition.

And, yes, after that you can start trawling through general publishing company listings and sending out spec emails and CVs.

I did once buy a media yearbook with contacts for various publishing companies, but things like that date very quickly, and I found it wasn’t nearly comprehensive enough – it included almost none of the magazines I made my living from, for example.

So, use the web, and use your eyes. If a local magazine comes through your door each week or month, see who publishes it and if there’s some work there. Use Google to scour the web for publishers in different sectors. Search for your interests or specialist expertise and see who’s involved in publishing in that sector.

Draw up your list and start sending out your bespoke, tailored CVs and personalised covering letter according to whatever sector they’re in. Keep meticulous records. Note whom you sent it to and when, and keep careful track of replies. Most will be a “thanks but no thanks”, and many may not reply. Try one follow-up to them, then cross them off if they stay silent.

This kind of thing is a bit thankless and time-consuming, but can bear fruit. I contacted 14 journalism departments and training companies in the new year to try to get some teaching work. Of those, half a dozen responded with a polite “we’ll put you on file”, but two actually offered me some work – and these are organisations I’ve had nothing to do with up until now.

It tends to have best results with subbing/production shifts (a lot of production editors will try out a new sub at least once to boost their roster), less so with writing. But if you’re really stuck for work, where’s the harm? It beats daytime TV at least.

Advertise yourself

A recession is the time you actually need to spend time touting your wares most.

If you do have an online presence (and you should), make sure the address is part of your email signature.

Also consider joining the more business-focused social networking web sites. I know not everyone buys into Twitter, for example (Management Today’s editor thinks it’s “twaddle”), but enough people in the business world like it for it to be a possible route to new business.

I actually got a commission off the back of Twitter because I started following an ex-colleague, and simply managed to remind him of my existence. The investment was free in terms of money, and took very little time (once I’d figured out Twitter’s slightly minimalist instructions).

It may well also be worth spending some of your real, hard-earned money on paid advertising.

Journalism.co.uk charges £50 for a year’s listing in its freelance directory – which gives you something that looks like this. According to one freelance I know who tried it, the listing brought in enough work to pay for itself (though this was some time before the downturn).

I’m still considering doing this – but probably a bit later in the year, as I’m actually too busy right now to justify it. But £50 is just about low enough to punt in an ad just to see.

I’m also still weighing up the benefits of joining the CIB – the British Association for Communicators in Business.

As noted above, the CIB is the professional association of corporate communications professionals. It also has a directory of freelancers, but you need to be a member to join. That costs a heftier £238.50 for your first year (including a slightly irritating £60 “joining fee”) – which is a bit off-putting. But given that the hourly rate for freelance corporate writing starts at £25-£35, the work is more lucrative, so it’s worth pursuing.

Final thoughts next time, with a bit of a round-up in a final post…

Part 1;   Part 2;   Part 3;   Part 4;   Part 5;

Part 1;   Part 2;   Part 3;   Part 4;   Part 5;

Now for your second slug of recession-busting (NB: slightly updated).

Earlier, I posted about my recent, slightly panicky drive to bring in more freelance work. In case anyone finds it of any use, here are some of the lessons I picked up from it. Here we go…

Assess your existing skills

You may believe you’re just a features writer, or a magazine designer, or whatever, but you probably have a wider skill base than you think.

A friend of mine, for example, is a skilled freelance magazine designer and that’s how she sees herself – so that’s the kind of work she looks for. But actually she’s spent many years doing production for the magazines she’s designed. So she has a whole load of print production/production editing skills that could get her related-but-different jobs. And because print magazines especially are cutting staffing back to the bone, the ability to handle multiple tasks is a big bonus.

This works for words-based journalists too. Can you spell? Do you have a grasp of grammar? Then you can sub-edit as well as write – and vice-versa. And don’t forget that writing doesn’t have to mean writing features. You may not be a news journalist, but if you’re an experienced writer you can also think about writing corporate copy, or PR stories.

Specialise in print? Think about branching out online. And, yes, that requires you to have a few different skills. Which brings us on to…

Learn new skills

If you are a skilled journalist or designer, it actually doesn’t take much to add to your abilities – certainly enough to make a big difference in employability. The usual big leap in the dim past when desktop publishing (DTP) was The New Thing was to learn QuarkXPress and try your hand at page layout. Now, however, the big new thing is the web.

The good news is that, if you’re a print journalist wanting to develop your online skills, you can learn enough initially from the pages and pages available on the web to do this without laying out any money for it. Try a search for “web usability” or “writing for the web” for a start. There’s a host of material available, especially from web usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Here’s a very comprehensive site to start you off.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a big draw for employers at the moment – and luckily the principles are pretty easy to grasp. Here’s an article from the Jakob Nielsen usability site that talks about SEO – it’s pretty good and gets the principle across well.

It’s also easy and pretty much cost-free to get started in online publishing. Try a blog out, or some other kind of online writing, just to prove you can. I posted about this here, and I still think it’s good advice.

The other big draw for employers is turning out to be an understanding of web analytics and audience building. These are business-type skills, and today it’s getting much more important for journalists to possess them.

Google Analytics offers this in a fairly easy – and free – package. If you set up your own web site or blog you can sign up for Google Analytics and use it to analyse your traffic. It doesn’t work for WordPress.com blogs – your site has to be hosted on your own web server space. But even a simple WordPress blog like Freelance Unbound has a stats page that shows you where your traffic comes from and where it goes once it gets to you.

If you’re a layout sub or a designer and you want to be able to work on the web, you’ll need to learn new software. Again, do it for minimal cost – download the Adobe Creative Suite, which includes Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks, for a 30-day free trial period and learn as much as you can during that time.

You don’t have to pay out for expensive training courses – but I’d suggest you do pay out a little bit to join Lynda.com for a month or so. It’s crammed with video tutorials for all the media and creative software you’ll ever need to use.

It’s $25 a month – which isn’t a huge amount – but if you want to cheat a bit you can download the tutorials to your hard drive to run through at your leisure. Which means you should be able to cancel after only one month’s subscription and then pretty much use the material for as long as you want offline [disclaimer: I actually haven’t tried this yet, though I am planning to when I have time to learn Flash this summer].

There’s also a load of free tutorials to try out before you subscribe so you can see if the site suits you. Am I a shill for the company? Sadly, no. But I’m open to offers.

It also helps to think laterally. Over the years I’ve spent time in bad bands and I’ve made animated films. This means I’m quite familiar with audio and video editing.

For years that didn’t look like it was any use at all, except as a hobby. But what’s happening right now? Yes – publishers are swarming onto the web and starting to produce podcasts and video interviews to upload to the web.

This video from Broadcast magazine is a perfect example. It’s very competent, but it’s also pretty simple. Broadcast sends its reporters out with a camcorder to record video interviews at the same time as they do an interview for the print edition, using a fairly basic DV video camera set-up.

It’s not high-end television – but it does mean you need to know one end of a camcorder from another, understand the basics of lighting and visual story-telling and, if you’re back on the production desk, how to use FinalCut Pro to cut the whole thing together.

One thing’s for sure, just being familiar with InDesign doesn’t really cut it any more for long-term survival.

What do you do with all your new-found skillage? This:

Update your CV (resumé)

Revisit that old CV (resumé, for our transatlantic visitors) and freshen it up. Don’t just give a list of the jobs or commissions you’ve done, break it down into your different skills and different publishing/media sectors. This could include feature writing, corporate writing, sub-editing, page layout, web design and, in my case at least, teaching/training.

When you’ve done that, make a few copies of the document and start tailoring each one to a specific sector or skill. You should end up with dedicated CVs for each application or enquiry you make. For feature writing, stick all the feature writing skills and commissions you have at the top. Same for sub-editing. Same for corporate writing.

“But they’re the basically same thing!” you cry. No – not from the point of view of the people who may give you work. Show you understand the differences between different kinds of work and it’ll make you look better.

What’s that you’re saying? You don’t have enough skills to have multiple CVs? Go back to points 1 and 2 and start again…

More to come in part 3.

Part 1;   Part 2;   Part 3;   Part 4;   Part 5;

Today I spent an hour in a vast lecture theatre giving a talk about freelance journalism to first-year students at Kingston University. 
It was great fun, actually, and I got to use their super high-tech AV equipment (which luckily didn’t break down on me). That’s me on the right looking suitably dorky in front of a huge screen shot of this blog. Oh yes – I never miss an opportunity to pimp Freelance Unbound in public. 
Apart from the fact that I should really wear a jacket (invaluable style advice from my personal grooming consultant), it went quite well.
What did I blather about? My own erratic freelance career path through business publishing; the relentless need to skill up in order to stay employable; and, well, money – or the lack of it in journalism. There’s no use leaving the kids starry-eyed and thinking it’s a way to easy cash, frankly. 
I was deliberately a bit jaded and cynical about it all – but I should stress that this is a better way to earn a living than anything involving, say, heavy lifting. 
The audience was pretty quiet for the most part – partly because they were first years. I think the third years had essay deadline issues. Or maybe the glorious sunshine outside proved a stronger draw than me. Difficult though that is to believe.
But a tip for future student audiences – don’t be shy; ask more questions. Visiting lecturers love questions. Seriously. That’s what we’re here for.

Part 1;   Part 2;   Part 3;   Part 4;   Part 5;

Sometime between September and Christmas last year, my business plan fell apart and I was faced with the grim prospect of actually having not enough money coming in this year.

It happened to a lot of freelancers I know, all at the same time. I started to get a lot of emails along the lines of “I’m going to get a job stacking shelves at Tesco if things don’t improve”.

I say “business plan”. Actually it was a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how things looked for the next six-to-eight months or so. And you know what? It looked pretty good last summer.

I had a six-month stint doing maternity cover on the production desk at a financial publisher working on mags about hedge funds, plus some regular writing work that I could fit in around it. There were steady monthly features for two Haymarket titles, plus some country report-type articles for the kind of advertising supplements that fall out of the Sunday papers straight into the bin.

And then Lehman Brothers collapsed and everything changed.

As I noted before, Haymarket stopped printing one of the titles I wrote for entirely. Promotions & Incentives is still a “web brand” – but there’s no budget for freelance writing anymore.

And while Packaging News is still going strong (well, still going, certainly), it suddenly took all its feature-writing in-house. And the advertising supplement work mysteriously vanished along with the world’s supply of credit.

Which left the production work (and my enjoyable 3.25 hour daily commute into London). But if anyone has been following the financial pages at all, you’ll know that hedge funds have been getting a hammering over the past six months. So much so, in fact, that I was convinced the publisher was in imminent danger of shutting up shop along with the hedge fund industry.

Which left me with only one option – I had to start hustling for work.

It’s not something I’ve had to do a lot of over the past 15 years. Mainly by luck and with a bit of judgement I’ve generally been in the right place at the right time to pick up new work when I needed to. Not this time though.

So I decided to get organised and figure out a plan to bring the work in. And now, because it worked better than I had anticipated, I thought I’d try to boil it down into some general tips for handling recession as a jobbing freelancer in publishing. Because it’s turned out very long, I’m going to break it down into several parts. Stay tuned, as they say…

Part 1;   Part 2;   Part 3;   Part 4;   Part 5;