Redundancy: the art form of the freelancer

“Redundancy” by Will Pate.

I wrote a story for Philadelphia Weekly on theatrical performance commissioned by the Village of Arts and Humanities. I also blogged it for uwishunu and pitched it to friends at KYW News Radio and the Inquirer.

Though KYW covered it on its own, and the Inqy will do the same for another round of the performances, I took a single story and group of interviews and sent out different pitches with separate angles on the same subject.

With a little more effort, I got more pay, clips and contacts — without needing fresh sources.

In the increasingly difficult game of freelance writing, redundancy is a skill you need to know and we all need to improve.

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Down with cover letters: Why journalists don't need them

Don’t ask me to write a cover letter for a journalism job.

Right now reporting gigs are nearly impossible to come upon for the talented peers of mine looking for industry work – some have already moved on.

Some jobs may still be available, but really, despite their struggles and job loss, one newspaper department is as powerful as ever: human resources.

Below see how I think the job-hiring process should go.

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Why all journalists should use syndicated feeds

What do you use for syndicated RSS or atom feeds?

If you are a journalist, blogger or news gatherer of any kind, you ought to have an answer.

Abandoning your browser and instead using a Web-based news aggregator can help you more efficiently consume the Internet. So, instead of chasing down top news, have the latest headlines immediately update in one place, right to you.

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Required reading to own your name in a Web search

christopher-wink-googlesearch

I don’t want to repeat this anymore, so let me direct you elsewhere.

I got an e-mail from a young aspiring journalist, still in high school and already coming to the questions I just started coming upon late in college. Her question:

how do you buy spaces on a google seerch?

Hey, even she will tell you that I told her to work on her grammar and spelling. (Oh, word processors, what have you done to us?).

But more importantly, it made me realize I never wrote the obligatory “own your name in Google” post. I have surely touched on it in previous posts, but rather than repurpose that information or rewrite what has been written so many times, I say to young reporter or fresh-on-the-web journalist, find out why branding your name online matters, and then read the following – because they’ve already done the job.

My elevator pitch: what's yours?

Has anyone ever successfully used an elevator pitch?

I don’t know if I believe preparing a 15-second statement about myself in preparation for when a professional idol, mentor or potential employer-of-my-dream-job asks for it, perhaps in an elevator, is really anything more than HR lingo.

But I took three minutes to make one anyway. Why don’t you?
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Full-text feeds, Partial feeds: What's a blogger to do?

We had a good conversation on the merit of full-text or partial feeds on a post recently that I never got to address.

I got a few e-mails on the matter, too, actually. (No surprise they were as conflicted as the comments)

What we all seemed to agree on is that newspapers (or any RSS feed for that matter) are fools to offer no excerpt in an RSS post.

The debate came on how much content should be provided in a feed, though.

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Why MySpace sucks, is lame: its shortcomings and possibilities

I got a comment from “Mike” on a post early last month.

Interesting post. Curious on why you say “MySpace is lame.” I read recently that MySpace is among the most-visited Web sites with over 1b visits per month…

Of course he is right. MySpace remains one of the most popular Web sites in the world. I have a MySpace profile page, too. So why do  I still contend it’s one of the lamest sites on the Internet?

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My problems with Google applications: holes in these journalism tools

AP file photo from 05 June 2005
Getty Images file photo from 05 June 2005

Updated 6/27/10 @ 8:50 p.m.: Added additional Gmail improvement suggestions

Yeah, we’re all on Google’s bird. It may be a phenomenon, financially and socially, but I still have my complaints. I’m sure you do too (even if you just blame them for killing newspapers, like the French do.)

As Google applications have grown in popularity during the past few years, journalists have taken to see Google aps as a way to better unite newsrooms.

The advantages are clear, but having only used Google aps for a couple years, and a couple for half that, but I have already found a number of faults with these free Web-based services, particularly for journalists.

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Tell a metro columnist where his blog should go

Dan Rubin is asking for your advice.

The metro columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, a big urban daily newspaper, wants you to tell him what direction Blinq, his blog, should go.

Rubin is crowdsourcing advice on Web 2.0 and, unfortunately, is getting mostly garbage comments from Philly.com’s noted crowd of bottom-feeders – the reasons why are for a different post.

So tell him yourself. I did.

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A German nod to ChristopherWink dot com for young journalists

Courtesy of Marcus Bösch.

I’m always surprised and really proud to see my unique visitors and subscriptions increasing and love nothing more than a fresh comment to help create a dialogue I try to highlight on this site.

Now, that has happily been a fairly regular occurrence for a good portion of this site’s one-year plus existence. Still, sometimes something happens that makes me smile, and, really, helps me to remain appreciative and in awe of the power of the Internet.

As I first Tweeted last week, a German blogger named Marcus Bösch linked to this site (danke!), suggesting aspiring young journalists – who speak some English – should check out my feed.

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