Interesting Source for Multimedia Training: YouTube

Clearly a business like YouTube thrives on the freely uploaded entries of people (though there are some sorts of revenue sharing deals available, as I understand). But instead of seeing it as a video equivalent of a writer mill, I'd suggest checking this link. It's the YouTube Reporters' Center. There's material clearly intended for the novice "citizen journalist," but if you're a word person who isn't used to the concept of moving cross medium, it's worth a stop. For example, you can get tips from TIME.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel giving examples of how they look at the different forms of media -- text, video, photos -- and when they choose one over the other. Or Tavis Smiley from PBS on using unscripted questions to get a conversation rather than an interview. Some of the snippets here (they seem to be in the 3 to 5 minute range) may be too elementary, but if you can pick up a tip or two on moving to new media for the cost of watching some clips, it's a great return on your investment.

Writing for a New Media

I had a post today on BNET called How the Media Can Save Itself. And I'm convinced that the Internet doesn't mean the end of journalism or story telling or a place for those who can do them. And even with the plethora of outlets for people who want to approach the topics as amateurs, and I mean nothing derogatory in using the term, that's not going to replace professionals any more than the mass of people who have learned to play instruments and sing has ever replaced professional musicians. Even King Henry VIII was an amateur musician and composer, but that hardly meant that he banned those who made their living creating music.

But it does mean that there's going to be a premium on ability, quality, and learning to use and mix new combinations of media in ways that no one ever considered. Text will have to call out to video to integrate it into the point someone is making. Video will need links to background and amplification that can't happen in that medium. Audio can provide an intimate narration as something looks as images and graphical devices that neither video nor text can provide. All of them will be glued together in new ways. Look at the links I mention in the BNET piece, or listen to NPR's Planet Money experiments in presenting financial information or how OpenSecrets.org illuminates campaign finance information. Not all the tries will work, but some will. Those who want a spot in the future must become part of the attempts to forge a new approach to what they've done in the past. Those new to the endeavor have one big advantage of not having the same number of fixed associations. But those with experience, if they can break free of even some of the assumptions, can add immense depth.

Maybe your efforts will involve merging analysis, opinion, reporting, and commentary in what I'm finding to be an exciting and liberating format in blogs. Or you might find yourself reaching for a video camera, or dusting off pens and drawing paper. Don't assume what technology you need to use or what the results might be. We all have time to ourselves, so invest some of it to try something different. As my drawing improves, I'm hoping to start incorporating it in various ways in my work. If you're a musician, consider composing something that supports the emotional mood of a report and running it in the background. Or create a photo essay loaded with linking hotspots that offer context for the image that someone is seeing. Maybe the old media won't be willing to shake loose, but it's the glory of working for yourself. Try something different. Who knows? You might end up creating a new genre.

Guardian "How to Write" Series

I just stumbled across an interesting series of articles in the Guardian about how to approach various types of writing. Some might be obvious to professional writers, and yet there is gold to be mined. For example, Catherine Tate, a funny and witty performer and writer in London, mentions a rule of three for jokes: if they don't work on three different audiences, then the problem is the joke, not the audience. There are articles on how to get a screenplay into the hands of a Hollywood producer and how to get a play read. There are sections on dialog, visual storytelling (important in multimedia work), character, honing a joke, developing and editing - quite a bit and all from people accomplished in the specific area. It looks as though they're at the beginning of a seven-part series as well, so enjoy.

Gawker Media Traffic Jumps with Page View Incentives

Blogger Simon Owens emailed me about a post he had on Gawker Media. Early in the year, the publisher of such popular sites as Gawker, Gizmodo, Valleywag, and Consumerist told its bloggers that they would receive a base amount of money and then bonuses based on the number of page views they got. He analyzed the change in page views since the announcement. The changes were anywhere from 23 percent to 83 percent. In thinking about the changes, a few things became apparent:

• It's impossible to say what caused the growth - general expansion of blog readers, Gawker Media marketing programs, or the work of the bloggers themselves.
• There's no way of knowing how much of the growth will stick with the blogs, or if it will churn, requiring ever more effort to attract people to maintain the numbers.
• From these figures, there is no way to translate between page views and unique audience members.
• People may come by periodically to read the sites, or they may be landing there after a search - and that would put a different interpretation on where exactly the efforts of the bloggers had been most effective. Do readers drop by because of the voice of the writers, are the writers doing their work in such a way that it comes up on popular search results, or are they breaking stories that drive interest?

Whatever the case, it looks like the Gawker sites would be worth some visits and analysis if you're writing a blog and want to get tips on how to help attract more audience.

Learning What You Need to Know

If I talked about the freelance business and said, "writing aside," you might think that wouldn't leave much, other than the usual business activities. But there is at least one other thing: what you need to do the job. You might have experience in a half dozen or more different types of writing, in a few industries, and with a set of software tools. But what do you need tomorrow and next week, month, and year? Requirements of clients change over time, and the best way to keep the business coming in is to anticipate them:

• By the time most writers have heard of something, such as blogging or wikis, you start to face significant competition.


• When few people can provide a service that comes into demand, they can generally get a premium price, thanks to the law of supply and demand.


• Keeping ahead of trends gives you the appearance to clients and prospects of someone in-touch and knowledgeable.

That's all well and good, of course, but how are you supposed to get the inside line on what is coming up? Simple - you do some research, and here are some places to start by seeing what people are talking about early on:

• Job Sites Whether you choose Monster.com, Craigslist, or anything inbetween, you'll find at least some entries from technology adopters that mention things you've never heard of before. Do a web search for the terms, and pay attention to the ones that are a technology, particularly when mentioned only a handful of times in ads. That means they are past the curiosity stage but not yet in wide acceptance.


• Tech Blogs Forget magazines, as by the time they cover something, it's usually old hat. Slashdot.org is a great place to see what the technical literati are looking at, as are Ars Technica, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, and Techdirt.


• Industry Sites If you write about a given industry, whether as a corporate writer or doing consumer or trade journalism, check the online sites devoted to it. When you first start seeing mention of technologies, that's evidence of the beginning of the adoption curve, which means it's time to move into high learning gear.


• Conferences If you have a chance to hit a technology trade show, go and chat with people. Ask what they find interesting, even if there is little being done commercially with it yet. Also look at the exhibits and see who is touting cutting-edge technology, which may also be a clue.

Writing Memorable Phrases

Marketing expert Al Ries had an interesting piece in AdAge about some of the techniques that make for good marketing slogans. It seemed to me that the principles would not only apply to headlines and deks, but as ways of putting in the nuggets of memorable writing that can help make an article stick. (To say nothing of getting those doing corporate work to write better slogans.) Here are the techniques he mentioned (though read the article, because the examples are good):

• Rhyme and alliteration Used well, they can make language stick to the mind of the audience.


• Double entendre This is in the literal sense of a double meaning, and not necessarily a sexual double entendre. The tension between the two meanings helps cement the writing.


• Repetition This is a more sophisticated use than literally repeating the same thing. Instead, you use the concept two or three times in a row, underscoring it.


• Reversals This can be in the sense of chiasmus - the rhetorical structure where you use parallel construction but invert or reverse the latter ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country") - or a literal melding of opposite mental concepts, like sweet and sour.


• Pass-along phrasing Not only do you want the wording to be memorable - that is, lending itself to unconscious incorporation into memory - but you want it to contain words or concepts that one customer might use to pass on the message to another.

In addition to his strong list, I noticed three other points that I think bear consideration:

• Keep customers close Frame a concept with the customer in mind. Most of the winning slogans he mentioned communicate a vision of something the customer wants: a tractor that keeps running, non-messy chocolate, a newly cleaned drain, the promise of a job, getting your rear out of a sling by knowing the document you send will arrive by the deadline.


• Express big by talking small There is a specificity to the benefit or image that is important. For example, "You deserve a break today" speaks to a small benefit that people would like, and the delivery is an antidote for the larger disappointments of life.


• Specificity The more concrete the imagery, the more powerful the statement. I think that's why the "absolutely, positively" in the FedEx slogan works so well - because it conveys the real need of a member of the audience.

It would have been interesting to see some of the "bad" examples turned around. For instance, the EDS slogan "Expertise. Answers. Results." (which puts all the focus through the first two words on EDS, not their customers) could well have been changed to "Problems. Answers. Profits." or "Problems. Solutions. Pleasure." They aren't brilliant, but at least bring some sense of the customer in.

Technique: Another Blogger Trick

If you use Blogger.com for your blog and you've been writing pretty frequently, then I'd say the chances are good that you get tired waiting for an update to happen. Even when away from my rural dial-up access and settled in at a WiFi spot, I've found myself waiting for things to finish. But I realized a way around this. It uses Blogger's advance posting. When you're about to post your entry, treat it as something you want to post in the future - as in five minutes from now (I've experimented some and if the window is too short, like two minutes, it publishes as usual and makes you wait, as usual). The system saves your entry and says that it will post in a fraction of the time it takes to wait as it goes live.

Distinguishing Between a Story and an Idea

At times I've spoken with colleagues about a common problem for writers: you send a pitch to an editor and get the response, "It's an interesting idea, but there doesn't seem to be a story here." If you've been writing for any length of time, you've heard it. In fact, a friend and I were discussing the very topic the other day, as a newer writer had brought it up in a discussion.

It's a fine point to make, but what, exactly, does it mean? At first glance, this seems to be one of those distinctions that you can't exactly define, but you know it when you see it. However, that helps little when such a comment hits your inbox and you're absolutely convinced that anyone would wait in line to read your opus. A little analytic thought can come in handy at such times:

• There's a difference between something interesting and a story. The latter must encompass the former, certainly; if it's not interesting, who would bother to read it, and what editor would make an assignment?


• Think from the audience viewpoint, not your own. You want to write about things that you find interesting - nothing wrong with that. But unless the topic is interesting to enough people, there is no story that others will read. When considering your idea, ask yourself if you find it interesting because of a personal experience, and then ask how many other people might have had that experience. The question becomes crucial when considering a profile. When relatively few could have the same experience with the subject, then either a) the person must be well enough known to attract curiosity, or b) what you have could only be a personal essay. Yes, you can think of some counter examples, but their number is like unto zero when considering the enormous number of profile pitches that have no relevance to anyone other than the writer.


• A story is compelling. I might be stating the obvious, but a story much have the ability to force the reader - and, by extension, the editor - to care. That means the audience must have either the basic information, the insight, or the emotional experience. A good news story falls completely into the information nook; a tear-jerker narrative is definite an emotional ride. A good philosophical essay must offer the insight, but might bring in an emotional connection. Having at least one factor is a must, and more would be better. People have to give a damn about the read.


• Be specific. Many pitches fail not for lack of a good concept, but because of generality. What is more interesting, noting that children can feel disaffected from step parents, or Hansel and Gretel trying to follow a breadcrumb trail back to the cottage only to find that birds ate their market?


• Have a beginning, middle, and end. No editor worth a drop of ink (or byte of pixels) wants shapeless writing showing up. That means a story must come from one place and have another as its destination, with a clear path leading from A to Z. That's clearly true in a narrative, as tales that go "Someone wandered around and then eventually wandered more" have limited attraction. But there are equivalents for any type of story. Even if you're writing a service piece, with lots of bulleted advice, the writing has to move from a problem, though approaches to solve it, to at least the promise of resolution and aid. Your query should show (not tell) that you address the stages.

Like everyone else in the business, you'll still come up with the occasional commercial clunker, but if you keep these principles in mind, that should happen less often, and you'll also get to the heart of your reporting and writing more naturally and easily.

Using Information to Leverage Negotiations

Sometimes negotiation seems like a big hole that you have to fill, but you don't know with what. But a little bit of research, or even something you already know, can give you the edge you need. Here's a recent example I had. Although most of my work is in non-fiction, I write plays and had submitted a short one to a publisher that I knew was looking for material to go into a new anthology for actors. Six months ago I sent in some work, as it literally wasn't going to hurt anything I was doing, and might be an opportunity.

The other day I received an email from the editor of the book, saying that she wanted to include my play. Payment would be either $30 or five copies of the book. It sounds like an iffy deal, but I did some research, calling a playwright I know and asking if he knew the publisher and what he thought of the rates. He's put together at least one anthology in conjunction with the Kennedy Center in D.C. and said that they paid about the same, noted that the publisher was reputable, and echoed my own thought: it can't hurt, and it might help. He also suggested taking the money, because it could offer proof to the IRS that I actually am doing work in the dramatic field. A very smart suggestion.

But I still wanted copies of the book. I checked at Amazon.com and found that these books pretty much sell for list price wherever you find them. The publisher obviously was valuing the five copies as the equivalent of $30. However, I've done research into book publishing in the past and know that the actual unit cost of the book is probably going to be in the $1 to $1.50 range. So I made a counter offer: $25 and two copies of the book, indicating that I knew the marginal cost. Their answer? Sounds good. So I get a couple of copies and I also get the $25 to help establish a track record as a paid dramatist.

Had I not done the research into the offer, I would probably have agree anyway and picked either the money or the books. But I knew that the worst that could happen was the editor said, "Sorry, it's one or the other." But with the facts backing me, I also knew that they were still saving money over the straight cash payment. Although this is a small example, it shows the important principle that the more you know going into a negotiation, the smarter you can negotiate.

Opting for the Long Open-Ended Interview

During the fall, I was interviewed a number of times regarding my cookbook. Each time, the reporter seemed to have a strict list of questions. It's not that they were close-ended, which is the death of interviewing, but more close-scoped. The writer had a structure already in mind and was looking to fill in the appropriate blanks. Another way of looking at this is that the writer had already written the article, and just needed the requisite finishing details.

That, to me, is an almost unthinkable way of conducting an interview. I don't mean unthinkable in the judgmental and disapproving sense, but unthinkable, as in such an approach rarely occurs to me. Perhaps it's my rambling nature, but I prefer longer interviews - 45 minutes to an hour being a usual amount for me. While that increases the research time of an article, I find that the payoff is immense, which keeps me going back to the same method.

A bit part of what I can offer to editors - and what they specifically have said they like - are the details and unexpected views and insights that they often find in my work. Although having a large dose of ego, I don't mean that as backhanded bragging. I often enter intricacies in subjects that don't often get coverage. I only get those because I don't decide ahead of time what I "need" and let the interview dictate that. It may be that the nature of the stories I do lend themselves to this, but I've also done at least 30 minute interviews, and often longer, even for stories that will only run several hundred words.

Not only do editors like the result, but so do I. the available material is deeper and richer, giving me many more options in structuring and writing the piece, which makes the writing process more enjoyable. I get other story ideas, a lot more information in case I'm doing another take or slant on the story, and I seldom get questions from editors that I can't answer directly from my notes.

Finally, when you provide clients with what they like but seldom get from others, you increase the value you offer and, accordingly, what you can command in compensation. Here are some tips from my time in long interviews:

• Avoid pointed and specific questions. At least early in the interview, skip the particular questions that will net you the information you think you will need for the story. There is always time for those later into the interview. Start by asking about the topic in question. Encourage people to just start talking and see what is important to them. You don't need to make a direct assault on the topic. Use this time to get a lay of the land - a topicgraphic map, if you'll pardon the pun.


• Use what you just learned. Once you've spent some time letting people talk about the topic, you'll realize that you've provided the psychological tool and opportunity for them to show you what they consider most important. Take note, because it can explain what they know best or see as the heart of the issue. Some people will use this as a chance o dictate their own spin, which is fine. Use it as an opportunity to let them get that out. Until they do, you probably won't get anything else.


• Begin exploring. Now that you've figured out the person's relationship to the topic and their interests, you can start to investigate the topic. Continuing with an open-ended interview technique, enter into some of these areas and keep digging. Let them define and describe, even if you think you know what they are saying. There might be an alternative vocabulary that will be important to understand, or you might find that you know squat. That's fine, as you need to know the limits of your knowledge.


• Keep pushing. Remember the basics of who, what, when, where, why, which, and how (WWWWWWH) in reporting? here's where you can use them in a natural and investigative way. Let each be part of the foundation of your being able to describe something that the interview subject says. Don't just repeat, but be sure you know the importance of what they say, its relationship to other parts of your topic, the mechanics of its operation. The questions help you structure a whole picture that you'll then integrate into the other pictures from the other interviews. In doing this, you move from the information-based world of traditional news reporting to the understand-based world of modern journalism.


• Use a topic list, not a question list. Of course there are things you'll need to learn to write the story, and you want to ask those questions. But treat them as topics you need to discuss. Rather than create a topically close-ended question - When did you first start cooking? - you now have a topic of the person's introduction to cooking. You'd start by asking them to talk about their early times cooking, and then move into additional WWWWWWH questions (Who introduced you to cooking? Do you remember the first dish you cooked? Did other people you knew show any interest?) about those early times.


• Ask for help. You've just shown evidence that you're interested in what the person has to say, and not just look for a series of stock answers to plug into your "process." So ask who else might be helpful. You can get some great sources that way.


• Honor the subject. In most articles, you cannot use everything the person said. But you can use things in context, mine the conversation for the points that the interviewee thought were important, and present, as much as possible, the essentials of the person's views. When you do that, you reduce the subject's feelings of having wasted time on just "a quote or two" and increase the sense of having participated in something substantial.

Try these techniques in non-critical situations at first, and see how you can make use of them. Then, as you gain experience, you can bring more depth to your reporting and differentiate yourself from all those "other" writers.

Keeping a Standard

I was talking with a friend and colleague the other day, and we were both shaking our heads at some writers we've heard boast of knocking off a thousand word piece in a very few hours, including interviews and research. Apparently the clients didn't mind, and the results were high hourly rates and, in the case of one, a high annual gross.

I'm all for making money, and I'm all for being efficient. But there is something about the take-two-interviews-and-write-a-thousand-words-by-morning approach that bothers me. I could put it off to jealousy, and yet I don't get that way about some colleagues who I know pull down far more than I do, and yet still undertake what I'd see as a reasonable number of interviews for a single article. (For those doing corporate work, feel free to substitute a lot of interviewing of people in the company and researching the product or service.)

What bothered me, I think, was the process of cutting corners. Writing has to be about more than just making money. If you're interested only in the monetary world, there are many occupations and businesses that can deliver in greater abundance. I've found myself similarly bristling when hearing, "Because I'm only getting paid X, there's only so hard I'm going to work on the assignment."

I really don't get that attitude. If you have a connection to the craft of writing, then you have respect for the process and what it can do. Good writing requires putting the needs of the story and the craft first - while ensuring that you've made arrangements for sufficient remuneration to keep your life from rising up and revolting. (Or so your life isn't revolting, for a different view.) If I've taken a shot at an assignment and it legitimately needs a rewrite, I rewrite. It comes with the territory, and if you're going to spend the time doing something, you might as well be proud of what you have done.

There are secondary business benefits. For example, if you keep hacking through assignments, then your clips will read like hack work, and you'll find it more difficult to land assignments at top publications, or even to muster the writing muscle to tackle various types of articles to your satisfaction. Given the large amounts of snow that have fallen in the last two weeks where I live, I'll use a winter analogy told to me by a pastor. He and his wife lived for years in northern Maine. He remembered their first snow fall there, and he was perplexed to see people plowing not only their driveways, but their entire yards. "I soon learned why," he said. So much snow fell annually that residents had to clear room so by the end of the season, they could still remove the snow from their sidewalks and driveways and have somewhere to put it.

Throughout your career, you need to make room for new techniques and approaches to story telling. When a writer takes the easy way out, he or she is actually only plowing the driveway and not the lawn in those first snowfalls. You become fixed in your approach, because you're now focusing on speed and efficiency, not on quality.

If you care at all about the writing craft, you have to keep reaching to do better, research more deeply, understand more thoroughly. All of this increases your ability to tell a story. To do that, you push aside the old tricks and concepts and keep turning into a wide-eyed student, always trying to grasp what it possible. That way, what you write becomes better and has more substance to it. You may make fewer dollars, but I've found that people who rely on their income as a measure of their self-worth always sound a little hollow. At least in my opinion, that's no way to go through life.

Technique: Getting Outlook to Display All Email in Text Form

I really dislike reading HTML-formatted email, because it tends to take longer to load and rarely does the layout do anything for me. The other day I stumbled on a way to have it all display as text:

1. Click on Tools->Options.


2. Click on the Preferences tab, if it isn't on display.


3. Click the E-mail Options button.


4. Check box next to "Read all standard mail in plain text."


5. Check box next to "Read all digitally signed mail in plain text."


6. Click OK.


7. Click OK.

Now everything should display as plain text.

Review: Docupen Handheld Scanner - Gift Suggestion

If you're a journalist that travels, the idea of having a portable scanner is enticing. Instead of shelling out for photocopies, you could move information from pages right into a laptop and cut the weight of dragging paper around. You could also email the files back home so should something happen to the computer, you have the information you need. (When on the road, I do this with interview files and any material I've written.) And the Docupen offers a good deal of promise.

I've used handheld scanners years ago, and the results were terrible. You'd have to practice a lot to get even scans and keep from having erratic hand motion stretch images and text in some cases and squash them in another. And then they took up some space. But when I received the test unit of the Docupen, I found these problems largely vanishing. Oh, you need some practice with it, but not much more than a few minutes. At that point I could get a fairly good scan. The unit itself is just over 11 inches long, as it lets you scan a full page, yet it's only a bit thicker than a pen. It comes with 8MB of memory onboard, which is completely inadequate if you're scanning in color (which the pen does). The company claims "up to 200 pages," but one page would take up at least a third of the memory. You can buy a small type of standard flash memory to greatly boost the amount, and I'd strongly suggest it. You connect the Docupen through a USB cable to your PC to charge it.

At $349 for the current special price, it's not cheap, but it's the best potential solution I've seen for the writer who needs to keep research without making his or her arms any longer from carrying a lot of paper.

If you don't want to spend the money but have a digital camera with high resolution, you can try bringing along a page-sized sheet of clear plastic. Put it on top of a page you need and, making sure no lights are reflecting off it, take a high resolution picture of the page. It's clumsier, but probably better than carrying paper.

Technique: Eleven Types of Endings for Non-Fiction Articles

I know many writers, including myself, who spend conspicuous time working on the opening for a given piece of writing. But almost as important, if not as obvious, is the ending. For the readers who make it through the piece, the ending ties things up, helps create a sense of having read something substantial, and helps satisfy the need to hear the entire story. They are also as difficult, if not more so, to write well than ledes. Here are 11 types types - along with some strengths and weaknesses - to inspire some experimentation:

• Kicker - An ironic transition out of the last point or two in the piece. Can be humorous and even make an interesting point, but is more clever than profound.


• Summation - Provide a summary of the article's main point. This offers reinforcement of the most important thing you're trying to convey, but it can seem repetitive and pedantic.


• Take-away - One last point (not the main one) that you want the reader should consider. It provides additional emphasis, but only for those who read to the end. If the point is that important, make it earlier in the piece.


• Circular - You return to the theme of the opening for a sense of thematic closure. It ties things up nicely and delivers a solid feeling of completion, and yet if used badly can leave the reader feeling that nothing has changed.


• Quotation - Uses a quote from an interviewee as a final commentary. Generally carries an emotional weight of a problem that is ongoing. It's a sneaky way of doing a "time will tell" ending without saying that time will tell. Unfortunately, it's over used and may (but not always) leave an editor feeling that you've indulged in cliche.


• Inconclusive - Although popular in modern fiction, this approach leaves things hanging and you guessing as to what happens next. It's similar to the quotation in that it can create the feeling of a situation that is ongoing, with resolution in the distance at best.


• Surprise - More a fictional tool, you might still be able to use it in non-fiction. At the end, something completely unexpected happens. But this is a tough balancing act, because it has to be logical and conclusive at the same time.


• Chronological - If you're writing narrative, you can have the end of the article be the chronological finish of the event or subject. Be aware that you can choose slightly different ending points to create different emotional responses in the reader: irony, disappointment, elation, satisfaction, and so on.


• Abrupt - You would use this in a newspaper, not a magazine, and generally it would be in an inverted pyramid structure, where you make points from opening to closing in their order of perceived importance to the reader. This is fine for the recitation of facts that a hard news article can be, but is not a good fit for anything even slightly more literary.


• Poetic - If you've used rich imagery and a literary tone, you can sometimes go out on an image that becomes a metaphor or visual association you leave with the reader. It's easy to become the "artiste" and call too much attention to your writing style with this one.


• Tagline - Just like it sounds, the tagline is a fixed phrase that you always use. Although it has worked well for some in audio (like Paul Harvey's "Good ... day!"), it has no place in the average article and would often seem strange even in a column.

Re-Placing an Article

There are times that publishers will kill an article or, more often, turn down a pitch that you swear is perfect. You might send the idea out again to similar publications, but eventually you might find that you run out of "more of the same." But you may not be ready to retire the idea. here are some ways you can take a fresh look at where to send your query:

• Category Analogies You can get locked into thinking that a certain type of article has to go into a publication dedicated to that subject. But often, magazines with other focuses will still be interested. For example, an article on a parenting issue might have a home in a women's magazine with an appropriate demographic. A piece on a new audio technology for a home audiophile title might find a home in a men's magazine or something like Popular Science or Popular Mechanics.


• Change Focus Don't get stuck on your original focus. You can always consider changing the specific subject of a narrative, the problem or solution approach for a service piece, or the entry point of a think piece.


• Turn it Inside Out This is a more extreme version of changing focus. You might be able to take an article that you thought was one type and completely transform it into another. What you might have originally conceived as a reported article might actually work as a personal essay. Your experience, that was the center of an essay, might also spark ideas for bullet points in a service article. If you can't sell it one way, try another.


• The Consumer/Trade Shift You can get unnecessarily stuck if you think of yourself strictly as a "consumer" or "trade" writer. They often have different styles, but the gulf isn't that large. If something is old news for a trade, it might be the first time the consumer mag has heard of it. If the latter finds a topic too "inside baseball," the former might think it right up their ally (to mix the metaphors). Or you might find, as I have at times, that both trades and consumer pubs have similar tastes at times.

And here's the bonus: you don't have to use these techniques only to find a first home for a story. You can use them to get new spins and markets for work you've already done.

Challenging Interviewees and Tossing the Question List

Many reporters subscribe to the Dragnet school of interviews: have a list of questions and ask for "just the facts, Ma'am." I can't fault doing homework or listening. But I've found that some of my best interviewing comes when I challenge the person on the other end of the conversation. I don't mean jumping in and getting verbally ugly for the sake of conflict, but more having a lot of background research done and questioning people's answers when they don't make sense. It may be that you're not really getting the point, or it could be that the person is saying something off-base - or a combination of the two. But in that case, don't simply take down what the person says. Leave stenography to PR representatives.

In the same vein, be ready to toss out your list of questions. Certainly get the who, what, when, where, why, how, and which out of the way, but also be ready to ask what whim suggests. If you lock yourself too tightly to a preconceived agenda, then, in your own way, you're approaching the interview no differently than a PR person might, knowing what you want to get out of it in advance. Give yourself and your subject a chance to be surprised, and you will be happy with the results.

The Power of Silence in Negotiations: Part 2

Yesterday I mentioned the theory of keeping quite in negotiations. Here's an example based on a negotiation I recently did; the details are changed, but the essence of the conversation remains the same. Background: the client had talked about a starter rate, which I remembered. I had just completed a second assignment, and had been paid for the first but found that the company was messing up the second. Also, after my simple statements, I kept quiet and let the pressure build:

Erik: "I do need to get this pay issue straighted out."

Client: (embarrassed) "Yes, I know, I'll get to work on it - you did a good job on it."

Erik: "Oh, and I was also remembering that you had mentioned $1.50 as a starting rate."

Client: "Oh, right, I did. What do you usually get?"

Erik: "For this sort of work, it's a bit over the map, but $2 a word and more is hardly unheard of."

Client: "Usually I only pay $2 a word to subject experts who also happen to be able to write clearly. It makes life a lot easier on me. I see that as kind of the top of what I can do..."

Erik: "Tell you what, let's go to $1.75 for now. But I am providing some pretty good topics and solid stories to you, right?"

Client: "Yes, you are."

Erik: "So I want to keep the option open to return to the topic at a later date."

Client: "Ok, so the new assignment you're about to start will be at $1.75 a word."

I had the sense that she was putting her back against the wall on the $2/word, which is why I went to what I did. But I left the negotiation controlling the future and will be able, in another few stories, when she's really hooked on what I'm doing, to emphasize what I bring that the technical experts don't and push for more. Also, by making statements and then keeping quite, I added pressure to her and took the upper hand.

You do have to keep yourself under check and be willing to let the pressure sit on the client. If you let the tension get to you and start talking to let the person off the hook, you could find that you talk your way out of whatever you were hoping to gain.

The Power of Silence in Negotiations: Part 1

One trick that many practiced negotiators use will sound familiar to any journalist: keep quite and let the other person talk. In an interview, the practice often results in the interviewee becoming uncomfortable and beginning to say all sorts of things to fill the dreaded quiet. In that rush of words, you can pick up gold.

In negotiations, the gold you pick up can be more the folding currency type. Although a good negotiator won't get rattled by this, you'd be surprised at the number of people in corporations and pubications who really are poor negotiators. That is one reason you'll hear things like "the lawyers make us do this," because they really are sweating bullets. In negotiating, though, you go one step further. You want the other person not just to talk, but to talk first, at least in terms of substantial issues. When it comes to discussing rates, for example, speak up long enough to ask, "What is your budget for this project?" or "How much do you typically pay for this sort of project?"

You might get someone pushing back, asking "What would you charge?" or "What do you usually get?" But usually the person will start spilling inforation that is useful. You might learn that the rate is absurdly low from your view, which means you'll have to structure the conversation one way. Or it might be that they're open to larger fees than you realized, and then you continue the negotiation another.

There is a great story about how this technique can work. Thomas Edison and his advisor had brought the inventor's latest device - the ticker tape - to a famous banker. They asked how he might be able to use such a machine, but they already knew what the answer would be. The information would let the banker react more quickly and beat out competitors.

The banker offered something like $5,000, a considerable amount of money at the time. Edison and advisor kept quite. The banker - and mind you, this person would normally be an expert negotiator - immediately offered more and was greeted by more silence. This happened a few times until the guy offered something like $150,000 and said it was his final offer. They accepted and signed and the banker gloated becaue he had been willing to go as high as $175,000 or so. Edison told him, "I would have settled for $10,000."

When it comes to negotiations, silence is your friend. Tomorrow, I'll show an example from my own recent experience.

The En Passant Quote

In chess, en passant (in passing) is a specific circumstance under which one pawn can capture another while moving by it. But a few years ago I found a way of using a quote in passing.

I was writing an article for Newsweek, which meant a lot of information in a small amount of space. In this case, I had about800 words and 10 sources. Normally that would be overkill and you wouldn't use all of the material, but in this case I really wanted to, so I had to find a way to fit it in without being too obvious in the reading.

So I experimented with using a quote as both a way of delivering additional information and acting as a transition between paragraphs at the same time. Here's an example:

..."Many of the people running dot coms have never run a business before. All they're doing is spending a lot of money and getting very little return." Experience is key, because there are no hard and fast rules about exactly how to value intangible services like consulting. As Marty Winston, an old time technology PR expert, puts it, "PR pricing always has been a bit of voodoo."

More often, though, the real source of trouble is "Internet time," the frenzy that arises when the impossible is expected and service providers have to lavish staff and other resources on projects simply to keep up. ...

In this case, the Winston quote adds an insight into a business issue - PR pricing - while creating a natural transition to the next paragraph. It's not a technique that always works, and overuse can look clumsy, because you might well be using quotes from two different sources in one paragraph after another. But when you need to squeeze a bit more into limited space, this reduces the need for separate transitions, and the words they require.

Wrestling with Stories, Ideas, and Mental Burnout

I recently saw a discussion on the FreelanceSuccess.com forum of what to do when your idea well is running dry. The major schools of thought were to stop thinking about the problem - taking a break, basically - or to find sources of inspiration in a given topic.

That made sense to me in the light of my own experience - we all get that drained sense at one time or another - but I kept wondering why. What is it about getting away that helps? Why does seeing more on the same subject spark new ideas? The greater a grasp writers have of this issue, the more efficiently they might find a way out of the problem when it happens.

Then I saw some connections, literally. For a moment, consider the difference between an idea and a story. The former is a notion or concept that grabs your attention and interest. A story is when you take the initial idea and develop it - consider the questions it raises, understand its implications, find one facet (a story angle) on which you will focus, decide on what types of information and resources you'll need to explore the angle, and develop an expression of what is now a story that you can pitch to an editor. Development depends as much on the specific writer as it does on the idea. That's why two writers can take an identical angle on the same story and still come up with two entirely different treatments.

When writers feel that they are coming up dry, it's generally not in the story development. There you can run into barriers or difficulties - where to get this statistic or who might offer a cogent view and expertise on a specific area of knowledge. You're not going to fall into that desperate emptiness of feeling that you're out of ideas and nothing new comes to mind.

That is a problem whether you're doing editorial or corporate work, because in both cases you need to tell the story, and to do that you need the initial idea. Either you face economic problems by not being able to generate enough work, or your craft suffers as everything you write starts sounding the same.

Generally I've found that one of two things spark an idea - either a piece of information new to you raises questions or captures your interest, or you see a new potential relationship among things you knew before. But there's something common here. An "idea" for a writer seems to be an incomplete new path of association. The new information starts a chain of associations or a new developing chain suddenly links at least two things for the writer that weren't connected in that way before. You start with certain groups of information, and suddenly you wonder what the nature of something is, or what ramifications it has on the way people normally perceive or understand the world. A previously unconsidered new set of associations between information you may have had before suddenly presents a brand new picture.

That gives a way of looking at going dry. Nothing seems new because you are not experiencing a new set of associations - learning, if you will. You're effectively in a literal intellectual and emotional rut. Your wheels are stuck in those tracks and you keep running along the same thoughts and feelings. No wonder you can't get a new idea; every time you want to take a turn, it's as though you're on one of those kid's amusement rights where a fake antique car goes around a track guided by a rail. Steer as much as you want, you won't go in a new direction.

The reason it's necessary to understand this is practical. No technique for creating new associations will work every time, and if you don't understand what you're trying to do, one day you'll find that method doesn't give you the jolt you needed. To jump the tracks, you need new ideas, and if I'm right about the nature of ideas for writers, this could happen either on the side of what you know or on the side of how you associate things. From that, you can guess at some things that might help:

• take a course (an area that might help you write or something completely different from what you've done before)


• read a book (learn about a topic you know little about, gain exposure to good writing, read deeply about something where you have surface knowledge)


• get away from your desk and go someplace different (a "mini-vacation" or maybe the Starbucks phenomenon of working elsewhere)


• go to a source about a topic you cover where you're likely to learn new information or associations (attend a trade show, do a background interview of an expert)


• look differently at what you do know (draw as many connections as you can between things you have never looked at as related, ask new questions about topics you've covered, assume that something you think you know is wrong and see what logical conclusions that would create)


• take a topic and consider what it would be like in another place or time or with a different set of people or circumstances

These are only examples, but I'm sure you can see where it's going: when you know the two main factors that make up ideas, you can start consciously planning how to change them to break your old associations and free yourself up for a new idea. It becomes a way to methodically think and feel differently to create new associations - about how to new associations as a path to new ideas.

Going After Work You Know You Won't Get

Years ago when I was more active on the acting end of theater, a voice teacher said, "Always audition, even if you aren't right for the part or don't want it." Auditioning well is critical in acting, and the more you do, the more comfortable you get in the process. Selling is like that as well. You don't want to waste too much time, but you also want to be practiced. If there is work you're sure you won't get, then you have the perfect chance to practice your technique. In the worst case, you don't lose anything by messing up because you didn't want it. And there's always that chance that it might come in. Just make sure it's not one of those assignments that you shouldn't take.