What advice would you give to a journalist with little experience in the journalism market.
I used to write for my college newspaper, and I’ve published an article in a crappy magazine for "CO-ED"s as well as my local newspaper back home. Add to that one beginners journalism class.
There are ideas that have been fermenting for quite some time, and I want to take some time during spring break to send some off.
To be clear, I’m not looking to get into daily news about events like riots or political squabbles. Rather, I’d like to give texture and humanity to it – if that makes sense – and with a focus on globalisation. For example, I don’t want to talk about Taiwan-China relations so much as I want to talk about eating dinner with a group of Taiwanese and Chinese students.
Now, this isn’t to say that I want to start a New York Times dear-diary column or something. It simply means that I would like to present the information from a different angle or in a different context.
I think that people would be interested in reading about things like that (I hope). I’m kind of just wondering if the use of personal experience and the implementation the word “I” are honors only to be bestowed upon Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, not little nobodies like myself.
Any general suggestions would be nice…
Have a good one.
Learn to really like rice and beans. They are really cheap and easy to cook.
In addition to **Homebrew’s ** advice (there’s very little money in journalism, at least at the beginning of your career, and the opportunities to make a good living are very few and far between), I can only suggest that you make yourself available to as many outlets as possible. To get started, unless you’ve got a good-sized clip file or URLs from articles you’ve published, I’d focus on community-based newspapers so that you can at least get some good experience and something to show to bigger potential customers.
Even larger papers, like the two dailies here in Denver (or rather, the entity that controls the two dailies), are making re-entries into community-based journalism by publishing neighborhood-specific inserted sections.
You’re getting into a profession that has nearly unlimited growth because of Internet-based publishing; that growth, of course, doesn’t always pay very well (or at all).
Articles such as the ones you described are the ones I would read (and write myself) – good luck.
Shit…I hate beans.
Thanks. That is encouraging.
Freelance reporting is quite tough. I couldn’t do it when I was starting out in this field, and I don’t think I’d want to do it now. Doesn’t mean you can’t do it – just that you should know it’s quite tough.
You’ve got to come up with a story idea, then submit to as many outlets as you can think of. You don’t want to send the same story to all those places, but the more mileage you can eke out of one bout of research, the better. For instance, say you sit down with a bunch of Chinese students for dinner. You may want to write a food article for some paper’s style section, write about their experiences with immigration/parents/1st generation as a feature, and then try to spin longer pieces for use in magazines.
If you want to write and have pretty good odds of making a sale, I suggest you build relationships with as many newspaper chiefs as you can. Submit story pitches and insist on feedback – and if they can recommend other contacts.
I don’t think you’ll be able to earn your daily bread doing freelance globalisation community articles – the market’s just not there – but you can earn a living by freelance writing as long as you’re willing to bust your balls.