Denise asks, “I’m starting to comb press releases from my local university to find story ideas. Is it ok to use the quotes from the release in your query to magazine editors? Isn’t that why the PR guys are sending out this information? I would of course do my own interview after landing an assignment.”
Denise, …
May 30, 2008 Advice, Public relations, Reporting, You Ask, We Answer
Career columnist Penelope Trunk wrote an interesting blog post last month about Twitter — specifically about why it’s good to jump into stuff like Twittering and blogging when you have no idea what you’re doing — or even if you don’t “get” it. On a grander scale, I believe in this advice, too. Writing a …
May 29, 2008 Advice, Ass, Blogging, Cool tools, Personal yammerings
Back when I started freelancing in the mid ’90s, I was lucky to get an ongoing gig with a tech magazine that paid me over $1 a word. I didn’t even have to pitch. My editor would call, give me the topic, suggest a couple sources, and I was off. Dream job, eh? Well the …
Let’s talk about kill fees, those profit-sucking vampires that deserve a good stake through their hearts. For those not in the know, a kill fee is the money you get when a magazine decides not to accept a contracted article for reasons ranging from poor quality of the finished piece (fair enough) to the editor …
For all you blog writers out there, Dustin, who blogs over at the Writer’s Technology Companion, wrote a terrific post today about how to build your blog’s traffic by writing resource posts.
He writes, “Also called ‘flagship posts’ and ‘pillar posts,’ resource posts are entries in your blog that act as resources for your readers—the kind …
