Tips on landing freelancing jobs at newspapers

(This post first appeared in The Independent Journalist, the freelancing blog of the Society for Professional Journalists.)

Thanks to the economy — or maybe no thanks to it — the market for freelance writers has grown exponentially this past year. America spent much of 2010 pulling itself out of recession, and though that offered hope for a broad rebound entering 2011 publications and corporations that once had large writing staffs still opted to downsize and turn to contract work to save money.

What many freelancers may not realize is that newspapers are among the top enterprises making this turn. Newspapers, of course, suffered through substantial layoffs in 2010 and may yet in the new year. Still, they have print and electronic pages to fill and the pressure is great on the few people remaining in the industry to continue doing that job. What's more, veteran print journalists are under other pressure from non-profit and "hyper local" journalism models to remain relevant, vibrant and competitive despite diminishing resources.So, while looking around for new markets, consider calling the local newspaper to ask if it's willing to farm out one or two or more writing assignments. But before calling or writing an editor, do a few things:

Expect to start small — Any aspirations of uncovering another Watergate-size scandal should stay in a drawer; rarely do first-time newspaper contributors receive a big investigative project to start, regardless of experience. The early assignments will be small — low-level government meetings, high school sporting events, etc. — to help editors determine a freelancer's dependability, writing skill and ability to accept criticism. Believe me, not even seasoned journalists shine in all of these areas, but being amenable is key to getting more assignments.

Expect the pay to be small, if at all — Typical pay ranges between $25 and $50 per story, with three-digit sums possible for feature pieces after a freelancer has a body of work under the newspaper's masthead. Sometimes, however, newspapers will propose first-time assignments without compensation but dangle a contract if they are impressed with the results. Keep in mind that assignments may not be frequent or fulsome enough to constitute steady income.

Know the value of deadlines — Newspaper and online journalism are a fast-paced, get-it-done-now businesses that do not suffer people who miss deadlines. If an editor says a story has to be completed and on his desk or in his e-mail inbox by a certain time, get it in well before that time if possible. And if that's not possible, stay in touch with the editor to explain the situation and ask for guidance; they can be understanding when the situation calls for it. But missing a deadline — just one, even — can undermine a writer's credibility and make it that much harder to receive additional assignments.

Read the newspaper — This may sound like a no-brainer, but in fact newspapers often hear from hopeful writers pitching ideas that lack a local story peg, ideas that already were printed in some form, or ideas that amount to writers talking about themselves instead of talking to other people. Take time to carefully read either the print or online version of the newspaper (preferably both) and study several editions. Newspapers, like magazines, have writing styles and subjects of particular interest to their audiences; know what these are to have intelligent conversations with assignment editors.

David Sheets is a sports editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com, and president of SPJ's St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dsheets@post-dispatch.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, or on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Crowdsourcing: What it is, how it works

(This entry first appeared on Net Worked, the digital media blog of the Society for Professional Journalists.)

Technology's impact on American society the past decade has been tremendous. We can communicate and interact with each other easier than ever — technically speaking. Amid this progress, however, is a heap of new terminology some of us are only now beginning to understand.

The burgeoning list of terms is too long to dwell on here in one post, but elements of that list are poised to become day-to-day jargon during the next decade, and one of them is "crowdsourcing," a word believed to have appeared first in Wired magazine almost five years ago and now readily on the lips of anyone who spends much time building social networks.

Crowdsourcing amounts to what's called a portmanteau — two distinct terms blended in form and meaning to create a third. In this case, the words "crowd" and "outsource" were combined to underscore the narrowing gap between amateurs and professionals due to shared, inexpensive technology. Now, thanks largely to the ubiquity of non-wired and portable networks, professionals in assorted fields can solicit answers to problems from whole groups of people at once and maybe tap a collective wisdom not easily discerned by questioning one person at a time.

A form of crowdsourcing has been used to try solving complex math problems, troubleshoot software, edit literature, search for missing persons, monitor international borders and fund a Broadway play. One blogger even tried it to drum up paint color selections for the inside of her mother's house.

Journalists, too, are warming to the idea of crowdsourcing to help them report the news. As reported in Editor & Publisher, the technique was applied by the Washington Post at the rally by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert last month by having rally participants connect through a beta website to share information. The nonprofit, Minnesota-based MinnPost.com has used crowdsourcing to sift for government fraud, among other things.

Meanwhile, the Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer and the online-only ProPublica and St. Louis Beacon are among the news-gathering organizations using something called the Public Insight Network, a sourcing service affiliated with American Public Media that maintains a large network of experts on a variety of subjects.

Of course, two heads, or for that matter 2,000, are not always better than one, what with the potential for inaccuracy or unreliability inherent in an uncontrolled group. Thus comes the distinction between "bounded" crowdsourcing and "unbounded" crowdsourcing. With the first kind, as exemplified by the Public Insight Network, the "crowd" possesses defined boundaries and its members have specific professional skills. The second kind relies mainly on opinion and the emotion of the moment — good for collecting random YouTube videos of a rally at the National Mall, for example.

Crowdsourcing, as a word and an approach to gathering news, gained considerable traction in 2010. Expect to hear it a lot more — and use it a lot more — in 2011.

My mother, my grandparents, and Pearl Harbor

On a bright Sunday morning 69 years ago, my mother looked out her parents' kitchen window and saw black smoke rising in the distance.

Then she saw planes soar out of the smoke, and the whole world was forever altered.

That morning, my mother watched the attack on Pearl Harbor from her home. She was a child, living across the harbor from the U.S. Navy yard. My grandparents' house sat on a hill slope, their back yard overlooking the battleships moored in port a couple miles away, and on this Sunday morning in December my mother and grandparents saw the smoke, heard loud bangs coming from the same direction, left their unfinished breakfast sitting on the kitchen table, and went outside for a better look.

They heard the planes before seeing them. A whining roar, as if from a million large, angry mosquitoes, echoed across the hillside, gaining in volume, until the planes appeared as black darts flung across the bright sky. My grandmother remarked how unusual it was to see military maneuvers on a Sunday. My grandfather noticed these planes were unlike any he had seen parked on the airfields.

The planes came closer at incredible speed, and there were more of them each passing moment. It occurred to my grandparents that they should move back closer to the house when one plane, so close now the Rising Sun emblem on its fuselage was clearly visible, wagged its wings on approach to the slope, pitched starboard and with the tip of one wing carried off my grandmother's clothes line.

My mother recalls seeing the pilot's face. She says that given enough artistic talent, she could draw it now, 69 years later, from memory.

Everybody ran back into the house to watch the black smoke and noise intensify across the harbor, and it was at about this point when they saw a bright flash followed by the swelling bubble of an intense shock wave envelop the harbor and race up the hillside to rattle the kitchen windows. The USS Arizona, already critically wounded, burst nearly in two as the ammunition magazine ignited.

At that, the event became profoundly personal: What should we do? Where should we go? Neighbors were walking out into the streets crying, shouting, comforting each other, even as the planes continued to zip overhead. My grandfather, who had joined an all-volunteer civilian defense corps a year earlier as tensions heightened between Japan and the United States, expected he would be called to do … something. But no word came; the few phone lines around the island were jammed.

Hours later, a Jeep came down the street. The military police officer behind the wheel was going around asking every able-bodied male, particularly those who had guns, to meet in the town center for further instructions. My grandfather expressed concern about leaving my grandmother and mother alone, to which the Jeep driver responded, "Look, we're expecting an invasion by the Japanese. If you don't get down to the beach now to try stopping them, we're all screwed anyway."

So, my grandfather packed his only gun, a small-caliber pistol, and boarded a truck en route to a long shallow beach a few miles past Honolulu where Japanese landing craft loaded with troops were expected to appear overnight. Dozens of civilians in several trucks made the trip with him, including one man who brought the only weapon at his disposal: a pitchfork.

Upon arrival, the men busied themselves initially by digging shallow trenches and building defensive positions behind rocks and trees. Then they waited, the only sounds coming from the surf, the only light from the moon. And waited.

And waited.

By daybreak, the threat of invasion had subsided, though the intensity wrought from the previous morning never did. Thereafter until the war ended, the Hawaiian islands, not yet one among the United States, were under U.S. martial law. The rationing and blackouts common elsewhere in the nation during this period were many times more constraining in Hawaii because of difficulty protecting the islands' supply line to the mainland. And the happiest times of my mother's childhood ended as the freedom she had to play with friends and roam was curtailed by stringent rules on civilian movement except for essential needs such as school, work and hospital visits.

The onset of war ended my grandfather's job, servicing the pineapple harvesting equipment owned by Dole foods, as many industries on the islands shuttered during wartime. About a year later, my grandparents and mother left for California, riding a cargo ship under destroyer escort.

There was one humorous moment out of it all. When my grandfather returned from his beach patrol early on the morning after the attack, he went to put his gun away and noticed a box of bullets sitting open on the bedroom dresser. That's when he remembered …

He had forgotten to load the gun.