How do you get into business writing?

A beginning writer asked me:

How do you get into business writing?

My rule of thumb is you're as good a writer as your last clip.

So find an editor, any editor, and start pitching business stories. If you're really starting out, and don't have *any* clips at all, go after the Pennysavers and the like -- do some profiles of local businesses. The pay is pennies per word. But write the stories well and you've got yourself a clip. Then you try local weeklies, regional business pubs, suburban dailies, trades, big city dailies, then national business mags, in that order.

Get a frank assessment from somebody cruel as to where you are on that foodchain, based on your writing and reporting ability. Then call the editor you want to write for, and ask for a few minutes to come in and show him/her your resume and clips and chat about what you can do for them. (This of it as your standard sales call.)

If you're wrong about where you are on the food chain, and you've aimed too high, ask the editor to recommend other markets that might be more appropriate for you. Ask the editor to name names, then recommend people to talk to at those publications. Then follow up.

You need a niche. The more specialized, the easier it is to sell the first article. (Then, once you've made the first sale to the pub, you can branch out to other topics.) For example, I write about financial services technology. Once I pitch a tech story to someone, I often find that I'm asked to write about other topics, as well, that the publication is interested in.

Do you need a degree in journalism to work as a journalist?

When I left college I had a handful of clips from the local alternative newsweekly, one of them a cover story on town-gown relations. That's it. No journalism degree, no internships, no other editing or writing experience.

I went to Chicago, and, within a couple of months was working as one of the "full-time freelancers" for the Chicago Tribune in the northern suburbs, covering about a dozen municipalities and all the associated government boards. One of my features ran on the front page of the Trib (not the front page of a section, the front page of the Trib itself). A harder story on the drug trade also got high placement.

From there, my career path would have been pretty straightforward at the Trib, except that I decided to go to Russia, and covered civil wars for Reuters after about a year. Again, nobody cared about the degree, the internships, or anything else. The only concern was whether I had the persistence to be able to report a story, and then write it despite constant editorial criticism (I have to admit, my writing started out kind of lame).

Here's my theory: the only thing you need to be a journalist is the ability to ask a question, and keep asking until you get an answer. You can't be taught persistence, but you can get good at it with practice. Everything else can be fixed on the copy desk.

If I'm hiring somebody, I'd rather spend half an hour teaching them the inverted pyramid, than months and months standing over them and making them follow through.

War reporting: advice for interviewing refugees

Refugees are scared, upset, mad at the other side -- they'll tell stories that happened to "a friend of a friend" as if they happened to them. Then the news media picks it up, and more refugees hear them, and tell the same stories.

Then you go to the other side to find the destroyed village etc... to find out that it's still there and, in fact, people still live there.

That's not to say that atrocities don't happen -- they do. And we, as journalists, have an obligation to make sure that stories of human rights abuses get out, so that the world community can act to stop it from happening. This is a hard job, but straightforward.

What's less straightforward is to learn to judge whether a particular story merits coverage or not. I myself have been caught up in hysteria more than once and my editors were often able to catch me before I got into trouble. But when you're far from home, editors are more likely to trust your judgment, and, I'm sorry to say, I've put overblown stories into print.

Many local journalists I met while reporting often bought into the atrocity stories -- in fact, some even came right out and said that their job was to support the war effort, even if it meant fudging the truth a little bit. "Even if this particular atrocity isn't true, others are, because we know what those people are like." And any criticism of the war effort was seen as a deep affront to the people who had died fighting it -- including their colleagues in the news media.

I can understand that. It was hard to me to maintain my objectivity about Chechnya when a Chechen death squad killed a good friend of mine, a journalist. (This was before the war with Russia broke out.) But that doesn't mean that I would then run every horror story I heard of that involved Chechens.

So what do you do? You go back to the basics. You get as many facts as you can -- who, what, where, when, how. You can often tell that someone is making a story up by the fact that they get really shifty or upset when you ask for details. In particular, you ask for facts that you can confirm. Names of other witnesses, officials, dates, locations.

As a foreign journalist you're often in a position where you're able to go to the other side of the conflict to check things out, whereas local reporters might not be able to. You can check to see whether that particular village really was destroyed, or if it's still there and people are living there. You can check for signs of shelling, or bullet holes. You can talk to local international observers and medical personnel. If you don't have medical training, for example, you might have trouble telling a birth defect from a shrapnel wound or from deliberate torture. So be wary of accepting stories at face value (especially when someone asks for money as well) and do some digging before putting uncorroborated victims' accounts into print.

Struggling to make a living

I recently got the following question from a beginning journalist:

I have reached the point where a job in journalism in any capacity seems a hopeless dream. I cannot get anyone to hire me in any field, despite my college degree and experience. I'm getting to the point where I can just barely eat and pay my rent. Do you have any advice?

There is only one question you need to ask yourself: Do you HAVE to be a journalist?

If you DON'T absolutely, no-doubt-about-it, can't-live-any-other-way have to be a journalist, then you should start considering other careers. Pound for pound, a journalism career is more work, more aggravation, and less pay than almost anything else you can do. Really.

I spent my fair share of time sleeping on folks' couches when I was starting out, as, I'm sure, have many others. I've slept on my grandmother's couch, on my mother's couch, on my dad's couch, and on the couches of three friends that I can remember. (Quite possibly more couches are buried in my past, possibly under an alcoholic haze.)

If you're one of those people who HAS to be a journalist, then the worse things get, the happier you are (in a sick, twisted kind of way). You think of everything as material for the novels you're someday going to write, or as seasoning for your writers' voice.

I know journalists who are proud to have been fired from every paper they've worked for. Journalists in the mid-30s who are still just one paycheck or car breakdown away from being out on the street (again).

I know journalists who spend most of their working lives with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Granted, they're in other countries -- most of the ones here have renounced their evil ways, joined AA, and got nicotine patches. But how are you going to renounce your evil ways if you never had any in the first place? Right, right?

Now, it is possible to be a journalist and not lead a life filled with misery and dispair. I can't think of anyone like that right off, but I'm sure such things happen. But if you want to avoid a life of misery and dispair, then switching careers would significantly increase your odds. For example, I know some pretty happy teachers, archivists, engineers, and librarians.

If you do HAVE to be a journalist, then you'll get through it. You'll get a job stuffing envelopes or manning the help line for an insurance company so you can cover school board meetings at night, or you'll get a job teaching English in China so you can freelance articles about the economic changes over there. As a journalist, you'll probably live the most interesting life it's possible to lead.

And that, of course, is the curse as well as the joy of the profession.

Advice for public relations people pitching stories to me

The biggest problem is inappropriate pitches. I didn't do consumer finance -- I work for a trade publication, not a consumer magazine! The PR folks who send me consumer-oriented press releases, and then call and try to talk to me about them, to use up my time even further, don't bother to check. That's really annoying and makes me think worse of their agencies.

The next biggest problem is incomprehensible pitches. If I can't figure out what you're selling, I'll just hit the delete key right off.

If an unintelligible press release *has* to go out, the best PR people would put a few paragraphs of explanation addressed to me personally before attaching the press release -- so I wouldn't have to wade through it to figure out what the story was.

They'd say something like, "Maria, here's hot trend in wireless for you -- ESP-based communication networks. They're fast and secure, and work through psychics. We've got some customers and analysts for you to talk to, if you're interested." And then the press release would go on to say, "ESP Networks, Inc. has announced the release of Gobbelty 2.0, an end-to-end, user-focused, communication solution for the enterprise networking marketplace." Argh! Please, folks, can you stop using the world "solution"?

Finally, my last pet peeve is PR folks who are either lazy or overworked (it can be hard to tell which). Either way, it makes the company look really bad.

Say, someone promises to get me in touch with customers, company spokesmen, and analysts. And then I wait while my deadline comes and goes and the PR guy only responds to messages to say "I'm working on it."

Well, I get pissed off, their company is left out of the story (and the competition gets to say nasty things about them unchallenged) and I have to scramble to fill that space with something else. Not fun.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I don't call the company for the next article, and I don't recommend them to colleagues as a good source. And that's the opposite of good PR.

Better to just tell me that you don't have the time to set it up, but that I can contact the parties involved directly.

How important is graduate school to new journalists?

I beginning journalist asked me this question:

I'm worried about getting a journalism job. Should I go to graduate school?

I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me on this, but, having been in a position to hire recent graduates in the past (and having faced this same question myself) I have to strongly vote against grad school.

I first left school in a similarly bad market, and I had to work my butt off to get started. But the experience you gain will be worth more than grad school ever will. Here's my advice: move to an area where you can get free or cheap rent, in a large metropolitan area if you can find it. Get a day job if you have to, doing whatever you can. And spend your evenings going out and covering every school board meeting, fire district gathering and library fundraiser you can get yourself assigned to. It doesn't matter how little they pay you, or how small the paper is. Keep pushing for meetings with area editors and keep asking for more assignments. Meanwhile, volunteer for the local journalism organizations. It gets your name out and lets you network, while at the same time improving your basic skills.

I can't stress this enough: the only requirement to be a journalist is persistence. Everything else can be fixed by the copy desk. Really. If you're ignorant, they can fix that (trust me, I've worked with plenty of ignorant reporters). The only thing they can't teach you on the job (or cover up for you) is persistence. With persistence, you'll get the quotes you need. You'll keep digging to get the meat of the story. When I was an editor, the worst reporters I had were the ones who gave up when a source didn't return the first phone call. I had reporters who didn't know what the inverted pyramid was. That takes a few minutes to fix, and a couple of assignments until they get the hang of it. I had reporters who didn't know you were supposed to write down quotes verbatim. They went back, and redid it. Problem solved.

But the reporters who were afraid to go up and ask a follow-up question, or who'd sit and stare at the telephone because they didn't know what to do next, or who kept coming back to me and saying that they couldn't find anything out -- those were the ones I had the most problems with.

If you go to grad school simply because you couldn't find a job (as opposed to improving a particular skill, say) that's a big red warning flag to me. After all, finding a job requires good networking skills, the ability to go up to a stranger and ask them for help, and, of course, persistence. Do I want to hire a reporter who can't do any of that? No.

And if you really can't force yourself to do any of that, then, while it's possible to have a journalism career, it won't be as successful or fulfilling as if you pursued a different line of work.

So get out there and start calling people, start hounding editors. Really. Only a really idiot editor prefers a polite, shy journalist who takes the first "no" for an answer. You don't have to be obnoxious about it. But be firm. And follow up, and follow up, and follow up again.

Think of it this way. Someday, you are going to write a really ground-breaking, monumental piece of journalism. (Otherwise, why are you in this profession?) If you don't do it, nobody will and the world will suffer. So getting you your first job is the most important thing for everybody. If you can believe that, you'll get your job. It's the same way that, when you believe that whatever story you're working on is the most important thing in the world, people will drop what you're doing to help you.

How do you sell articles to trade magazines where most other contributors write for free?

Many trade publications -- as well as academic publications -- don't pay contributors.

The reason is that the people who contribute are getting something other than money in return: free advertising. For a lawyer, CPA, engineer, or other professional, the exposure may well be worth quite a bit.

However, editors have to spend quite a bit of time recruiting these experts and holding their hands through the writing and revision process. While writing is a joy to some people, for many people it's an odious chore and a reminder of bad old school days and essay assignments.

Finally, the results are often unreadable and editors have to spend quite a bit of time getting the pieces into shape, or risk alienating readers. In effect, the publication is padding its pages with advertorials. And if a reader has a choice between a well-written piece that quotes an expert, and a barely-readable piece from that expert himself, readers will often choose the piece written by a real writer.

As a result, expert-written publications often have limited markets, or are distributed free to readers.

Moreover, experts -- while they are able to write a column here or there on their areas of expertise -- are rarely able to consistently produce work. They are also notoriously bad at meeting deadlines -- after all, if they have other, paying, work to do, the free articles will go to the bottom of their lists.

As a result, some publications do a combo approach -- use experts for occasional columns and writers for the material that just has to be in, and just has to be readable.

I occasionally write for publications that are partly expert-written and enjoy high word rates (probably the editors appreciate what they're getting).

If you're just starting out, how do you come up with story ideas?

If you're new to freelancing or new to the area, you might not have a lot of story ideas handy, and you need a LOT to be a freelancer.

Once you have contacts in an area, of course, you can mine them for story ideas -- chambers of commerce, local artists' guilds, politicians, etc... are all happy to showcase their members and accomplishments.

If you don't, here's two easy ways to generate stories: GENERALIZE, and NARROW.

For example, say you're pitching stories to a regional daily. Look at national pubs -- newspapers, magazines, etc... and localize them. If there's a national obesity trend, how does that affect your area? Are local schools changing their menus? Does a local nutritionist plan to hold a seminar?

You can also look at more narrow publications -- those same church bulletins, library newsletters, and free weeklies that you've moved up from. Take a story and generalize it or expand on it. If a clown came to the local library, does that clown travel to other area libraries as well? What kind of a life is that? If there's a paragraph about a business getting a new contract, what does that mean for the local economy? How did its owner accomplish that? Is there a management lesson in there for other businesses?

Finally, you can call potential news sources out of the blue and ask them for ideas. Make the questions specific. Call the chamber of commerce and ask if any new businesses have opened that haven't been profiled yet in the local press. Find out if there have been any senior management changes recently, or mergers or acquisitions. Call the arts council and find out if any local artists have won awards. Call the schools superintendent's office and find out if any teachers have innovative programs, or if any student groups have travelled overseas or won competitions.

Ask for free subscriptions to their newsletters.

How to get started as a foreign correspondent

Looking for outlets to send you abroad is actually the *last* step of a going-overseas process.

• The first thing is, you need to ask yourself a few questions:
• What level of risk can you handle?
• How willing are you to learn foreign languages/how many foreign languages do you already know?
• Where can you get a free place to stay?

So if you have friends or relatives in a particular country in Latin America who can offer you a couch, and you already know Spanish, and you're comfortable with the level of stability (or instability in that country), then you go there.

I had a grandmother in Moscow, and the remnants of Russian from when I was a kid. (I only stayed with her for a couple of weeks, but it was nice to have her couch when I was getting started.) I was interested in warzones, and Chechnya was right there, and all the other post-Soviet wars.

My husband had a year of Chinese in college and a strong interest in their space program, so he picked China. He stayed in a cheap hostel when he first got there while he was looking for a job.

Then you buy a one-way plane ticket (I skipped on my last months' rent to pay for mine) to whereever you decide to go. These days, I would recommend Latin America, the Middle East, and China. (If you go there to teach English, they might even pay for your ticket.)

When choosing a country, you look for two major factors:

• A lack of local English-language talent. (That way, you'll have less competition for the English-language jobs, which pay the most.)
• Lots of changes. (Either military, political, economic, social or all of the above, which gives you lots of things to write about.)

Once you pick your country and find your free couch (or the reverse, as the case may be) then you call everyone you know who might know anyone in that country. You tell them that you'll be over there, and ask to meet with their contact.

Then you get to that country, go to all of those people, and all of the people those people recommend, and all of the people *those* people recommend and you ask them all for a writing job. In addition to meeting with all your contacts (you're a journalist, you should be good at that part) also go in and meet face-to-face with all the editors of local English-language papers, all the news agencies (AP, Reuters, AFP, etc...) and the bureaus of all the major papers -- LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, NY Times, Wall Street Journal. Many of them use freelancers.

It took me three days to get a fulltime job in Russia, proofreading a Russian human rights newsweekly that was translated into English by Russian translators. It needed a lot of style work! Working there, I got my Russian up to speed, and I met all their correspondents -- great people who were located throughout the former Soviet republics.

In my next job, I took them all on as freelancers.

Then you work your butt off -- and keep following up with all your contacts because, chance are, your first job is going to suck. (Mine had cockroaches in the computer keyboards, and banana slugs crawling on the ceiling that kept dropping down into my hair.)

How to get into freelancing

I've been a freelancer for most of the past ten years, and have also edited the work of many freelancers in various editing jobs.

Here's my advice:

First, collect all your information: clips (everything from college papers to "sample" articles that were never published to printed stories), resume, bio, information on relevant experience (paramedical training, what have you).

Identify possible featury-type areas you'd like to cover: medical issues, local arts and culture, personal profiles, business profiles (the business profiles generally bring in the most money).

Track down all the publications within a comfortable driving area -- free weeklies, major dailies, wire service bureaus -- and rank them by which ones are the most important to you (by pay, prestige, etc...).

If there's more than one editor, call the publication's switchboard and find out who is the person who deals with freelancers. Now call them.

Ask for an opportunity to come in and introduce yourself, and to bring in your clips, resume, references, etc...

At the interview (I always made time to talk to potential freelancers -- you never know when you need one, and it's nice to meet them ahead of time), explain who you are and what your background is, then ask what sorts of freelance material the editor is looking for. Encourage them to go into detail -- what kinds of stories, what length, etc... If they tell you straight out that you're not qualified to work for them, ask for referrals to other editors in the area who will work with less experienced freelancers. And DON'T FORGET -- ask whether you can come back once you have more experience. Be nice, professional, and insistent. Any editor will be happy to see that you're persistent, in fact -- it's the major job requirement for a journalist!

If the editor was positive about the idea of you writing for them, go home and come up with story ideas that were in line with what the editor wanted. Keep pitching until they like something -- after all, they've already indicated that they want to work with you, now all you have to do is find the right topic.

Otherwise, go to the next editor at the list. Eventually, you'll find one who'll take your work, even if it's just the local free paper, a church bulletin, or the library newsletter.

Once you have three clips from the this publication, mail copies to the next-better publication on the list, show that editor how much you've improved, and tell him that you'll give a call soon to talk about pitching some stories.

On the value of interships

A beginning journalist asked me about the value of interships and networking.

I haven't done any interships. Will that hurt me when I look for my first job? Also, I haven't done as much networking as some of my classmates. Do you have to be really aggressive to be a journalist?

You don't need interships, even a journalism degree to be a successful journalist -- if you have a good reason for it. However, at whatever point you find yourself, you do need to be making the most of it. So, why didn't you apply for summer interships when you knew you should have? Why aren't you making the contacts you need?

Are you shy? Are you uncertain about your career choice? Are you just uncommitted to journalism? Any of these factors will work against you much more than the lack of any particular summer intership.

If you're uncertain about your career choice, or uncommitted to it, an internship will help you decide if you want to do it or not.

If you're shy, or insecure, or have a hard time getting going or getting organized, you need to work on those areas. Being aggressive -- or, let's put it, self-starting, motivated and assertive -- is a great asset in any career, and especially in journalism where competition for jobs is high. If you don't have those character traits, you might be better off in another career, instead. You'll go farther and make more money and have better working conditions than in journalism.