Month: November 2017

Guest Blogging: 5 tips on getting your freelance career rolling

Each week, we will strive to post content from a guest blogger with an expertise in an area of the field. This week, we are fortunate to have Erik Petersen, the editor of Fort Lauderdale Magazine. As an editor, Petersen often receives offers from freelancers to cover things that might be of interest to his magazine. These queries vary wildly in terms of tone, content and approach, so today Petersen is talking about what makes for a good pitch for a story, giving us an insider’s look at how best to get published. Interested in being our next guest blogger? Contact us here.

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As an editor of a city monthly magazine, I get lots of letters from freelance writers. They’re an interesting mixture. Some are one sentence long, others read like James Joyce after a few espresso shots. Some are clearly cut-and-paste jobs, some take a sort of free jazz approach to punctuation – and some make me want to learn more about this writer and what she or he might be able to do for our magazine.

Freelancing is a crowded, competitive field that includes many people who’ve built up relationships with editors over the years. But there are ways in – and a few things you can do to help yourself.

1) Get the basics right.

For example, I’ve got a great freelancer weed-out test built into my name. “Erik” and “Petersen” are not uncommon names, but my particular spellings of them typically get butchered anywhere outside of Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Nordic countries. If I get an email addressed to “Eric,” “Mr. Peterson” or (this has happened) “Peter Ericson,” the emailer has just been helpful enough to inform me that he will probably screw up something in a story, too. Delete.

Incidentally, if that advice sounds painfully obvious to you, that’s great. It should. It also means you’ve already got an advantage over a good chunk of the competition.

2) Make your email compelling but concise.

This might sound like another one that falls in the category “simple common sense” but again, not everybody does it. An introductory email/pitch letter should read like the journalism that will hopefully follow it – sharp, well-written and nailing a word count. Four solid paragraphs should tell me enough while making me want to know more.

3) Pitch stories – but know it’s not really about that.

When I hear from a potential freelancer, I want to know three main things: that she can write, that she has ideas and that she’s thought a bit about what my specific publication might need. One great way to do that is to pitch one or two good stories.

Stories that she most likely won’t write for me. At least not right away.

Publications vary, but here’s how it works at the one I edit. We’re a monthly, and we plan months in advance. Anything four months out has already been assigned; anything three months out is already being worked on. There are issues nearly a year away that we’ve got ideas about. Point being, there’s an excellent chance the issue you’re pitching for is already planned.

This isn’t always the case. If, for example, you’ve worked hard to get access to someone for a profile that’s relevant to the publication, that profile’s an impressive thing to pitch. (“Wow, Ol’ Jed the Reclusive Woodcarver never gives interviews.”)

But for the most part, with writers I haven’t worked with very much, I tend to assign. So by all means, pitch. But be ready to write something else.

Something else here also needs to be addressed. Are there unscrupulous editors who will take your good idea and give it to somebody else? Yes. In my experience it’s not overly common, but it can happen. Unfortunately, it’s just a risk you have to take. It’s one of the reasons, however, that I wouldn’t recommend writing a piece first and then shopping it around. Again, most editors won’t take a piece, give it to somebody else and say “Rewrite this.” But if one does, you don’t have much recourse.

4) Get face-to-face.

Editors get lots of email. Too much email. All the email. Seriously, I was just going to make a point about how much email we get by telling you how much is in my inbox, but I checked and it’s too embarrassing.

You want to make an impression, and that’s hard to do as one little subject line in a flooded inbox. In the email, or the follow-up email or phone call (don’t do too many, but a bit of persistence is good), ask to meet. Suggest coffee. Say you’d also appreciate career advice/a chat about the industry. (That last one’s good because A) useful career advice actually is helpful and, B) like most people, editors like to be flattered. And being treated like some Journalism Yoda who can help a young Jedi is flattering.) All those things you’ve perfected – a solid story pitch, knowledge of the editor’s publication – will be even more memorable in person.

5) Once you’re up the ladder, make sure you extend it down for somebody else.

Not long ago, a writer got in touch. He wrote concisely, pitched well, suggested coffee, got an assignment and became a regular. Then he emailed asking if I’d mind being put in touch with a former colleague who was also looking for freelance work. Somebody whose work comes recommended from a writer I like? Absolutely.

In a business that happens so much over the phone and email, personal recommendations go a long way. If you know somebody and respect their work, you can help them by getting them in front of an editor with whom you’ve established a relationship.

Just make sure they’ll do the same for you.

 

“Exposing the truth is what mattered most.” Alex Crowe’s reflections on the Mayville police chief debacle

Mayville, Wisconsin’s interim Police Chief Ryan Vossekuil will have the “interim” tag removed and be sworn into the job full time on Thursday. This blip on the radar of small-town life was the result of many things, not the least of which was a radio journalist who had been in town only six months.

Alex Crowe’s work on the story of how leaked documents and shady deals brought to light the issue of what happens when a reporter digs into a story and won’t let go. We outlined the process and details of how he did it in yesterday’s post. Today, I asked him to reflect on why this matters and what he wanted to let student journalists know about this whole ordeal.

Q: How did it feel when you broke the news?

A: “It was kind of frightening to have someone in City Hall that consumed with me and my reporting, but I kept my bosses in the loop the entire time and continued to do my job. I had the documents, I knew my reporting was accurate, and figured it was common for someone backed into a corner to lash out.

If I want to be a reporter on a bigger scale in a bigger city, I know people of power will continue to attack the reporter and their reporting. He stopped short of calling it “Fake News,” but it was the same attack we see in the national media. Facts are facts, and as long as I had those documents to back up my work, I knew I would be fine…

I felt kind of awkward walking into the Public Safety and Information meeting, because I was new to town and had stirred up such a controversy within my first six months as a reporter there. But shortly thereafter, the Council voted to rescind its motion accepting Voeeskuil’s rejection, and agreed to re-open negotiations with him.”

Q: I have a lot of students who believe that “important” and “impactful” journalism can only happen at really big places in big cities, but this story really did change something important in Mayville. What would you want to tell students when it comes to taking a job or doing a job in an area like yours? How can they make a difference?

A: “You never know where or when important stories are going to come up. Never. I took a job doing news at a classic rock station in Mayville, hoping to use it as a springboard to a better job right away. But what I quickly found out was that you can’t always control what happens.

I had a station in Milwaukee pass me over for a job, and took a real shot to my pride when that happened. But this story kept me going, and made me want to not only prove that station wrong, but prove that good journalism and reporting can make a difference wherever you are. With small-town papers and TV stations being bought out by giant corporations and closed down, small-town government has gotten a free pass to do whatever they want behind closed doors, in my opinion.

I think every single journalism student should know that public servants work for the community and constituents that elected them, no matter how big or small the area. Nobody should get a free pass to do whatever they want just because they think no one is watching.”

Q: If you could tell students anything about anything associated with this story, journalism in general or anything else, what would it be?

A: “Wherever there is a person in power, no matter how big or small, there’s a potential for abuse and corruption. Always. And there should always be someone there keeping that person in power in check. This story started in the Mayville Police Department, then moved to City Hall. But I never would have been able to do this story without talking to people first, then getting hard documents to back it up.

Every journalism prof at UWO hammers home this point, and it couldn’t be more true. Each and every interview gave me more insight and information than the last. I took notes, highlighted and color coded important information, then used that information to convince someone to leak the documents to me.

It was really hard coming to a new town, calling and meeting with people I had never met before in my life, and accusing them of doing things that were shady and could threaten their seat on whatever council or committee they sat on. But in the end, exposing the truth is what mattered most, and it’s what made this whole thing right.”

“I saw what real journalism could do.” Alex Crowe, a small-town scandal and the power of the pen (Part I)

The goal of most good reporters is to “move the needle” a little bit when they produce a story or a column. The idea behind this phrase is that you want your work to yield some sort of tangible outcome for the people who read, hear or see it. The work might lead to something as complex as the downfall of a president or as simple as having people donate “coats for kids.” Either way, the journalism should do something for somebody.

Alex Crowe, the news and social media director for WMDC in Mayville, Wisconsin, spent the last six months weaving himself in and out of a local story that galvanized the area, had the mayor threatening him and led to an interim police chief getting a full-time job.

Crowe arrived in Mayville in March after spending two years doing radio in Sisseton, South Dakota, a town of 2,000 people. Just before he came to Wisconsin, Mayville’s police chief, Christopher MacNeill was placed on administrative leave before abruptly signing shortly after that. A Wisconsin Department of Justice criminal complaint later surfaced that charged MacNeill with misconduct in office and obstruction in connection with the falsification of a police report. (That report pertained to the son of another police officer in Mayville, who also left department around that time to take a job in the Cudahy Police Department.)

“I thought the big story was there, so I did a lot of investigative research, but the Cudahy chief had his attorney threaten me and my station, and since we don’t have the funds to do battle in court, I was forced to drop the investigation,” Crowe said.

In an interview shortly after MacNeill resigned, Mayville Mayor Rob Boelk told Crowe he hoped the Police and Fire Commission would “Do the right thing and hire the next Chief from outside the department.” This didn’t sit well with the interim chief, Ryan Vossekuil, who released a statement to Crowe saying he planned to serve as interim chief until the PFC told him not to. It seemed all very pedestrian until Crowe said he heard from a source that things were getting weird.

“I was eventually contacted by someone in the know, who told me the mayor had placed a gag-order on the entire Mayville PD, stating that they could no longer talk to the media, and mentioned me specifically by name,” Crowe said. “The department took exception to this, because they felt all discipline should be handed out by the PFC, as outlined in Wisconsin State Statute. The tensions between the mayor and interim chief continued to fester.”

The whole thing seemed likely to end when the PFC interviewed about a dozen candidates and picked Vossekuil for the full-time chief. When Crowe called Vossekuil for a simple congratulations and follow up story, he found out Vossekuil was rejecting the offer. He showed Crowe a swath of documents that included the gag order, the contract and some email chains between him and the mayor, but to fully understand them Crowe needed copies of the documents.

“I filed an open records request with the city, but they told me no, and once again with no legal funds we were at a dead end,” he said. “Then, that person in the know who had contacted me earlier about the gag-order, asked why I had not reported on the matter yet. I said I couldn’t report without documents and solid evidence in my possession to back up my reporting. Lo and behold, the documents were leaked to me, and I began writing.”

Crowe found a contract that was filled with terms he described as “unbelievable.” It required Vossekuil to agree to a 12-month probation period, during which he could be fired any time and for any reason. He would have to waive his ability to avail himself of Wisconsin’s “Police Officer’s Bill of Rights,” which meant he couldn’t appeal his firing and he would lose any benefits he built up over his 15 years on the job. After he fully understood what it was the interim chief faced in this contract, Crowe said he went to work on the rest of the story.

“The main thing I did was talk to people,” he said. “Once I talked to one council member with details of the offer, they would offer me more information. All chats were off the record, but I took notes and then called the next council member with what I knew, and so on. Eventually I had an entire notebook full of names, details and information. By the time I wrote my first rough draft, I had talked with multiple members of the common council, Police and Fire Commission, the chief himself and others in law enforcement and City Hall. The only one who refused to meet was the mayor. I finally sent him a long email, telling him that I had the documents and information, and the story was going live no matter what, and that I truly wanted and needed his side before publishing. We met, and after that I thought I finally had enough information to publish my story.”

Once the story hit the air and the web, it went viral.

“It was read by over 20,000 people, more than twice the population of Mayville,” Crowe said. “The citizens mobilized, and organized a group called “Voices for Vossekuil.” They gathered at a Public Safety and Information meeting, and one citizen after another hounded the council and mayor. Finally, after an hour and a half, the mayor took the podium to speak. He trashed me and my reporting, and said it was full on inaccuracies and ‘misinformation.’ He later called my boss’ boss at Radio Plus Inc, and asked them to retract the story. After he refused, the mayor showed up at my station, unannounced to ‘apologize.’ He asked me and my boss three times to reveal my source. I did not. He called me a week later and asked me to retract my story, which I again did not. It was kind of frightening to have someone in City Hall that consumed with me and my reporting, but I kept my bosses in the loop the entire time and continued to do my job.”

After the story broke, the city council agreed to reopen negotiations with the Vossekuil on a reworked contract that didn’t contain the probationary period and added several benefits. Vossekuil accepted the new contract and is slated to be sworn in later this month.

“I felt a lot of pride, but not because I got a chief a job, but I felt pride because for the first time, I saw what real journalism could do,” Crowe said. “I saw that by investigating and reporting and continuing to simply do my job, I was able to get the truth out there and let the process work itself out. The attacks on journalism and reporting are so prevalent in our society today, and I really can’t describe the feeling of knowing I had made a difference in this community simply by reporting facts, staying opinionated and doing my job. It’s something that I’ll never forget, and something that makes me want to do this every single day for the rest of my life.”

4 Self-Serving Reasons Not to Cheat in a Journalism Course

At the beginning of each semester, most professors I know give some version of the “Don’t Cheat” lecture. We explain the university policies about cheating and how we can make your life so miserable that you will wish you had never been born. We outline the logical reasoning behind avoiding unethical behavior and try to guilt you into acting right.

And right about now is where we start to notice that none of that really sunk in for some of our students.

Somewhere between midterms and finals week is where I tend to find whatever cheating I’m likely to notice over the span of a semester. It’s always the same: The student who couldn’t write a sentence with a subject and a verb is suddenly putting Bob Woodward to shame. The kid who spent the last two weeks in our “draft” sessions with nothing done suddenly produces a magnum opus in two days. The story I get from a student that seems shockingly familiar for some reason, mainly because his roommate turned in the same thing last semester.

It’s also the same when the students are confronted. They go through all five stages of grief in about three minutes: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. (Or, in at least one case, a note from a parent that told me “The family lawyer will be in touch.) It’s gotten so bad that I keep tissues hidden in my office for that exact moment when a student suddenly realizes there is no way out and tears begin flowing. (For the record, men cry as much or more than women do when the stuff hits the fan like this.)

Since journalism is always about telling people “What’s in it for me?”, consider these four self-serving reasons why you shouldn’t cheat, least of all in a journalism course:

  1. You have much worse odds of getting away with it: Students have come up with so many great ways of cheating on various tests, projects, quizzes and assignments, it gives me hope for the future in terms of innovation. There are the water bottle labels with the answers printed on them. There is the “phone/texting” thing that students have developed over the years. There are “cheat sheets” and “crib notes” written in places that defy logic.
    Many journalism classes, however, are performance based and skill structured, so it’s not about memorizing things and regurgitating them, so those tricks don’t always apply. Instead, students tend to plagiarize from published material, use stuff from sources that don’t exist or otherwise “improvise” their ways around their writing assignments and tests.
    Here’s the problem with that: Journalists and journalism professors (a.k.a. former journalists) are naturally suspicious, so they have a harder time believing that you managed to track down the governor for a sit-down interview on deadline. They are trained researchers, so they know how to fact check and verify stuff through a number of platforms beyond “TurnItIn.” They usually have connections with sources in the area, so it’s not a stretch to imagine them calling up a city council rep, a high school football coach or an administrator and asking, “Hey, did you have an interview with someone in my course and say XYZ?”
    The whole purpose of being a journalist is to dig past the BS veneer that people show us and get to the heart of the truth.
    We live for this. And trust me, our ability to dig is better than your ability to hide at this point in your career.
  2. You really piss us off and trust us, you don’t want that: When journalists dig into something, we are like a dog with a Frisbee: We just don’t let go. Most of the time, when someone lies to us, we are desperate to dig even deeper to determine how bad this is and what else that person might be lying about.
    We will be bound and determined to dig into EVERY, SINGLE, OTHER thing you have EVER written for us and see if there is ANYTHING you did that fits this pattern of plagiarism. We will talk to colleagues about you to see if you were in their classes and see if they had any inclination that you might not be producing work that is on the level. We will look to see what penalties are available and how far this can all go.
    The reason is that we operate in a field where trust is earned and all you have is your reputation. If you throw that all away over a crappy assignment in a single college course, what’s going to happen when you get out in the field? Even more, if you go out there with a degree from our institution and people know you had us as professors, how will that reflect on us when you do something this pathologically stupid on the job? Those kinds of thoughts keep a lot of us up at night, not out of fear but out of anger. We are not about to let our field slide into the Dumpster (or further into the Dumpster) because you cheated when you felt “overwhelmed” by your six extracurricular activities and the death of your goldfish. In most cases, professors will be far more forgiving if you essentially tell them everything up front when you can’t complete an assignment. If you cheat, we have a burning desire to make sure you don’t get away with it.
  3. Two degrees of separation: The concept of “Six Degrees of Separation” explains that we are all somehow connected to every other person on Earth through no more than six links. In the field of journalism, however, that linkage is a lot shorter.
    I have done no definitive work on this, but if I had to guess, I’d say those of us in journalism are probably operating within two or three degrees. Case in point happened this weekend at the college media convention I attended: I was reviewing a student newspaper from Florida when I mentioned that I had a number of former students working in the state. One of the students said that she was in frequent contact with an editor of a particular newspaper. I recognized the name immediately as one of my former students and did the old “humblebrag” thing about it. “Really?” the student asked, her eyes lighting up. “Could you tell her you met me and that I’m really interested in the paper?” She was a smart kid and I liked what I had read in her stories I was critiquing, so I said sure. I dashed off a simple email to my former student about this woman and moved on with life. Today, I got this message back:

    Vince, 

    Small world!

    We are considering her for a spring internship. Your recommendation just put her at the top of list.

    Hope you are doing well.

    I honestly don’t know if my email helped or if maybe the editor was trying to make me feel good about myself, but the underlying point remains: In the most random place and set of circumstances possible in journalism, I was linked to two people in the field like that. This kind of connection is invaluable in our field if the word on the street about you is good. If you plagiarize and get caught, the word on the street spreads as well and, simply put, everybody in this field seems to know everybody else somehow. The “A” you got on that plagiarized assignment better be worth knowing that you will never get a job because everywhere you go, someone will know someone who knows about it.

  4. You will never really recover: My dad was fond of telling me that if I ever planned to steal something, I shouldn’t steal a candy bar from a store. Instead, I should steal the whole store, as in when the owner came back the next day, all that was left would be a basement and some wires sticking out of the ground. The reason Dad had for this was simple: If you steal something, no matter how big or small, you’re a thief. If you’re going to steal and ruin your life, you might as well do it for something that matters.
    Obviously, his point wasn’t that I should go big or go home, but rather that if I took that path of thievery, I’d never be able to recover everything I lost because of the stupid choice I made. The same is true in plagiarism, cheating and more.
    The famous cases are always the ones your professors roll out for you during the semester: Stephen Glass, the wunderkind of the New Republic, who falsified dozens of stories before being forced out in disgrace. He is now a graduate of law school who still can’t practice law because of his prior transgressions. Jayson Blair, the rising star at the New York Times, who supposedly broke stories about the D.C. sniper case, turned out to be a serial liar. He now lives in Virginia and said he knows he could never go back to journalism because of the trust he broke. Janet Cooke, who wrote a compelling tale of an 8-year-old heroin addict name Jimmy, returned the Pulitzer Prize she won after it turned out she made him up. Today, as the story linked above notes, she lives in the U.S. and works in a field not associated with writing.
    Beyond those “big names” are the day-in, day-out foul ups that cost people everything. I was on an ethics panel last week when one of my fellow panelists told a story of a student who made things up or plagiarized content. His name was so clearly bad in the field, he ended up legally changing it.
    I still have the “ethical agreement” one of our writers signed at the student paper shortly before he made up an entire softball story. We only caught him because someone on the sports desk was roommates with a guy who was dating a softball player and she mentioned it in passing. I have no idea what ever happened to that guy after we fired him, but I do pull out that agreement from time to time and show students. His name is etched in their minds as a cautionary tale.

Interestingly for me, I find that this kind of stuff happens most with my upper-level classes. Freshmen and sophomores screw up occasionally by bumping into a problem when they don’t know any better. However, it’s the seniors who are getting ready to graduate that actively cheat. Why? My theories vary.
Look, we all get it. Everyone in journalism has felt the pressure at one point in time. Deadline is approaching, we get caught short and we figure, “If I can just cut this corner this one time, I’ll survive.” The truth is, it’s not worth it. If you screw up that assignment, the worst that happens to you is that you fail that one piece or that one test. If you cheat on that assignment, everything gets so much worse.