When the Ideas Dry Up

Some days, finding article ideas is like trying to put together dinner when you've run out of groceries. You might be able to make peanut butter and pickle sandwiches on stale hamburger buns, but you won't find many takers. It happens to all of us; the larder is bare, and every idea that floats through your mind seems stupid. You could blow off work for the day. Sometimes relaxing the mind leads to new inspiration the next day. But what if the rent is due and you can't afford to take time off?

That's when it pays to have a regular newspaper gig, a publication for which you write every issue. If you're lucky, the editor supplies you with ideas. All you have to do is set up the interviews, do the research and write the story. If you're really lucky, the editor has already done some of the legwork and listed sources for you to contact, along with a loose outline of what she wants. Nirvana, and a check in the mail soon.

How do you get a regular newspaper gig? Decide whom you want to write for, study the newspaper until you know what gets published, then send an irresistible query. Write a good story, turn it in error-free and on time in the requested format. Then do it again until the editor says, hey, this is a good writer and starts calling you with assignments. It happens. I've done it, both as the writer and as the editor.

That's one way. There are others.

Networking works. A former member of my writing group became editor of a community newspaper. Soon she was calling with assignments to write for their home and garden section. I never submitted a query. She kept me supplied with ideas. All I had to do was say yes. Likewise, I signed up for the job bank at a local writers' organization, and an editor called me with an assignment. Soon I was getting assignments from him, too.

Finally, don't overlook the classified section of papers that you read. Sometimes, you'll find an ad for freelance writers. In two cases, I followed up on such ads and wound up writing monthly articles. For one of the papers, the editor and contacts I developed doing my stories supplied most of the ideas. With the other, alas, all of the ideas were mine, and I had a hard time coming up with subjects that fit the limited parameters of my assignment, but I always found something in time to meet my deadline.

How did I get the idea for this blog item? I didn't have an idea. I sat out in the sun with the dogs, my most trusted advisors, and they told to write about that.

Happy writing to one and all.

May I quote the Internet in my story?

You're surfing the Internet and you find THE quote that will make your story. All you have to do is insert it right . . . there.

Wait. There's no question that the Internet is a gold mine of information, but beware. Some of that gold is fool's gold, and some of the gold has been already been claimed by someone else.

Let's talk about the fool's gold first. Any fool can put anything on the Internet. That does not mean it's accurate, legal or fair. Even Wikipedia, which sounds very official, is written by individuals who don't necessarily have any credentials. Before you go quoting the Net, check the source. Who put this information out there? Are they reliable? Can you trace the quote back to where it began? For example, I'm finding articles lately that cite various studies, books and other articles. The real gold is back at that original study or author. It's even better if I can get to an individual expert who will let me interview him myself and get some new quotes that might be more up-to-date.

As with books, newspapers, magazines, and journals, material on the Internet is considered a secondary source. Try to get to the people who are actually involved in whatever you're writing about. Use the Internet as a route to those people and as a source for background material.

Now about those claims. What people write on the Internet is just as copyrighted as anything else that gets published. Therefore, the copyright rules apply. You can't quote more than a few lines without violating their copyright, and you should never take information from anywhere without giving credit to the source. For a refresher on copyright law, check www.copyright.gov.

In addition to the legal rights, there's the question of privacy. The Net is loaded with forums, discussion groups and blog comments that might fit perfectly into your story. But how would you like it if you thought you were just chatting online and found your words in a newspaper article? You wouldn't. The fair thing to do is e-mail the person, explain what you're doing and ask if you can quote them, or, even better, interview them. Most of the time they'll say yes.

Google and its brethren can make a writer's life so much easier, but before you go quoting whatever you find online, consider the source and make sure you have permission. After all, what goes online stays online a long time, and the whole world has access to it.

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Speaking of the whole world having access, I've had a bit of trouble with spam lately. I apologize to those who have had to deal with people trying to sell them unrelated goods or services off this site. I still welcome your comments, but I've had to change settings so that I must approve them first in order to protect us all from spam. Don't let that scare you away. Your words don't have to be brilliant; they just have to be legitimate comments related to this blog.

Sue

Ever Try a Q and A?

Interviews published as question-and-answer pieces are popular these days. You see a lot of them in newspapers and magazines. As a writer, I feel they're a copout because they don't require you to put the whole picture together as a real story with setting, dialogue and beginning, middle and end, but as a reader, I enjoy them. Why? They're easy to read.

How do you do them? Record the interview, type it out and turn it in? Nope. I tried that the first time I got a Q and A assignment. The editor bounced it right back. She said: This is an educated man, but he doesn't sound like it here. I want you to smooth out the language, remove the excess verbiage, and generally edit it to read better. Gasp. Change what the man said? That's not kosher in other types of articles. But yes, that's what the editor wanted, and I suspect that's what most editors ask for in a Q and A. After all, few of us speak in perfect sentences unless we're reciting a memorized speech.

So, transcribe the recording, but then use it as the raw material for your piece, revising and rearranging to make it work. Usually you'll have pages more than you need, so you'll have to pick the quotes that offer the most value to the readers.

How do you get Q and A assignments? First, look for newspapers or sections of newspapers that use them. If they never publish a question-and-answer piece, they're not going to start a new trend for you. But if they do use them, come up with an appropriate subject and e-mail them a query. If time is short, say George Clooney is going to be in town for one day--and they cover things like visiting movie stars--telephone the editor. He'll probably still want to see a written query, but you can save yourself some time by asking if he'd be interested.

If you've never done a Q and A before, start looking for them and studying how they're put together. What kinds of questions are asked and how many questions are there? How much introduction precedes the questions? Try doing an interview and putting it into Q and A form just for practice. Who knows? You may be a natural at it.

SF Chronicle opportunities

Totally lacking inspiration, I went back to the Columbia Journalism Review list of what corporations own what newspapers and checked out the Hearst Corp. Remember William Randolph Hearst, Hearst Castle, Citizen Kane, Rosebud? In the old days, newspapering was a personal crusade by the publisher. But now, Hearst is yet another huge corporation, and although it still owns a dozen newspapers, it owns far more magazines, TV stations, and interactive media. Check out the list at the CJR site.

Once upon a time, I lived near San Francisco and read the Chronicle, one of the Hearst papers, so I thought I'd see what they've got for freelancers these days. Unlike many papers, they do have online guidelines that are easy to find and include examples of topics that have they have used. However, paid opportunities are a bit on the slim side. Writers are welcome to send letters, photos, and commentary for the glory of a clip in a major daily. Your best bet is the Sunday magazine, which does pay, although they don't say how much. As a columnist, I'm intrigued by "My Word," a 900-page back-page personal essay. This sounds like a good option. The one caution in every section is that there must be a Bay Area connection. As with most general-interest papers, the local link is essential.

If you don't live in the Bay Area, consider trying one of the other Hearst papers. They're spread across the country. I'm betting the guidelines are similar for all of them. I'm also thinking that if you study the paper, you'll find more possibilities in other sections that aren't listed in the official guidelines. Sometimes freelancers have to search beyond the obvious and boldly offer their services wherever they see a need.

Your story could end up in a museum

Sorry for blogging late this week, but we were traveling back from San Jose, where I sold a lot of books at the annual Dia de Portugal festival and packed in a record number of family visits (for a non-funeral trip). On the way home, the need for a break led us to the Douglas County History/Natural History Museum just south of Roseburg, OR. We have passed this building dozens of times on our Oregon-California commute but never stopped there before. Mistake.It's a great museum with everything from Native American artifacts to old cars to amazing animal dioramas filled with stuffed creatures of all types and sizes. There's a cozy kids' room with shelves full of easy-reading books and two fabulously comfortable chairs next to a real fireplace. I highly recommend a visit.

What does this have to do with newspapers? One of the exhibits focused on an explosion that destroyed a large portion of Roseburg in 1959. The main artifacts were pages from the local newspaper with photos and articles about the tragedy. I had never heard about this explosion, but here it was, laid out before me as if it had happened yesterday. I read the details of what happened, saw the results of the blast in amazingly clear photos, and followed the efforts to deal with the death and destruction in the days after. I found it fascinating.

It led me to think about the many times newspapers have been used as historical documents. Pages are still hanging in museums all over the country, probably all over the world. They're a wonderful source of information for researchers. Exposed to air and sunlight, newsprint turns yellow and disintegrates, but stored properly, it can last decades, even centuries. Libraries used to copy newspapers onto microfilm and now scan them into computer files, but they remain a daily account of what happens in our world. Newspapers are a tangible record. I wonder what will happen to our cyberspace reporting in the decades to come. Will people still be able to read our stories?

I have saved my own newspaper pages from covering floods, mudslides, elections, new businesses, festivals, performances and so many people doing their everyday jobs. Every one captures what was happening at that place and time.

Certainly freelancers don't get as many front-page stories as staff reporters, but if they are on the scene with a camera when news breaks, editors welcome their contributions.

Whatever you write about, consider its place in history. You too could end up with your work in a museum.

Meanwhile, if you're traveling this summer, take time to see what's off the side of the road.

"You Should Publish Your Own Newspaper"

Back in the old days, people used to ask me why I didn't start my own newspaper. It was tempting, but all I had to do was think about the business end, and I let that idea go. I did not want to sell ads or worry about the budget. I just wanted to write. Actually I had my own little newspaper as a child. Someone had given me a toy printing press with rubber type you set letter by letter. I put out a couple issues, but I'd run out of letters, especially e's and s's, and it's hard to spell things without them. Plus I'd get ink all over myself, and nobody cared what I wrote anyway. Lesson: don't start a newspaper unless you know who's going to read it.

These days, people don't start newspapers; they start e-zines, online publications, like blogs in fancier clothes. We can all be freelance publishers if we want to. You can do it without advertising, without a lot of money, and without getting ink on your fingers. Your Internet service provider probably offers free space. However, you still have to think about who's going to read it. If you're just writing for your own enjoyment, why put it online for free? If you're writing to inform, enlighten and entertain, you need to attract readers to your site. To do that, you'll have to advertise the zine's existence wherever you can, and you'll have to keep coming up with fascinating content. If you build up a big readership, soon you're dealing with constant correspondence and technical issues. Certainly many zines have been quite successful, but the publishers thereof always have the same complaint: they no longer have time to do their own writing.

The Internet offers so many temptations to publish in myriad ways. It sounds so much easier than creating queries and writing articles to fit editors' requirements, but if you want to build a career as a writer, you're going to have to do the work, send out the queries, write the stories, build up the clip file, and move up the ladder.

If you want to publish your own paper or zine for fun, go for it. I have a monthly newsletter that I truly enjoy putting together, but don't forget to keep sending out those queries.

Corporate owners dominate the field

Over the years when asked about offering freelance articles or reprints to more than one newspaper, I have offhandedly mentioned that writers should try not to offer the same piece to papers owned by the same companies. Well, that's getting pretty hard these days. A quick Google search landed me at a very useful site from the Columbia Journalism Review that tells who owns what. You can find it at http://www.cjr.org/resources.

The situation is even worse than I thought. Let's just look at three companies out of about 30 listed. The MediaNews Group has purchased every single one of the general interest newspapers I worked for back in California. They now own the San Jose Mercury News, all of the community newspapers that used to be part of the Metro group in Silicon Valley, the Pacifica Tribune, the Milpitas Post, where I did my internship, and lots more. In fact, they boast 57 newspapers nationwide, far too many to list here, plus other types of media.

The Tribune Company owns a long list of radio stations, plus the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Hartford Courant, three Spanish-language papers and more.

Lee Enterprises lists eight single-spaced pages of newspapers. Those include the Newport News-Times, where I worked for a year, and several other Oregon papers.

What does this mean for freelancers? It's not good news. First, these companies share staff-written stories to the extent that they need far fewer freelancers. To take one example, the weekly community newspapers in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara County, CA) and the big metro daily, the San Jose Mercury News, are all owned by the same company. Therefore, whenever the Merc wants a local story, it can just grab it from the weeklies. Looking at its website, it clearly makes great use of this option. I'm told the writers don't make any extra money, just extra exposure.

Second, when you're looking to market a story to multiple papers, the fact that so few owners run so many of them shortens the list of places you can offer that story.
It may be that in some cases papers clear across the country rarely share or even commnicate with each other, but you can't know that for sure.

This also means, for journalism in general, that papers are being standardized, losing their local personalities. When I started, I worked for local publishers who were part of the community and independent as hell. Now far too many publishers are just employees of the bigger corporation, and independents find it hard to compete.

That said, don't give up. There are still a lot of papers covering a lot of territory. But do make use of the CJR list to see who owns what before you go offering the same piece to papers in the same family. The list includes links to the individual newspapers, giving you access to editors' contact information and, in some cases, guidelines for writers.

This entry got longer than I intended, but it's an important subject.