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Clips advice

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by toolsofignorance, Mar 11, 2009.

  1. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    Tools,

    I may be wrong, but in my mind there is a distinction drawn between sending in an unedited article that WAS published ... and, what Wonderlic said, sending in an unpublished work, which is acceptable in rare cases.

    If your work was published, and you want to use it as a clip, you should send in the published work, not the unedited work before it got chopped or had errors added into it or had a hed bust. Those things happen. (For instance, I had a story published in a scholarly magazine a couple years ago where they edited the freakin' LEDE to say "Shoeless" Jackson, instead of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. It didn't say that in the final galley they sent me, but it did when the magazine came out. I almost kicked a hole into my wall.)

    Nothing you can do about it -- but you can't act like it didn't happen and send in the original document as if it were published that way. That's not the way the process works, and it's unethical to do what Mark2010 suggested, no matter who made the error.

    It sucks that you can't use the clip, but them's the breaks. Work your ass off and produce another one. That's all you can do.
     
  2. Mark2010

    Mark2010 Active Member

    Feel free to disagree on any or all. Fine with me. I don't play the political correctness game.
     
  3. jps

    jps Active Member

    not a good batting average so far, to be sure.
     
  4. forever_town

    forever_town Well-Known Member

    Nope, no joy in Mudville for Casey.

    As far as sending clips is concerned, you send in what ran. If you or the desk didn't catch an error, don't send the clip in. If you or the desk included some kind of mistake, don't send the clip in.

    What you may find if you're getting a serious chance at a writing position is that the editor may give you a chance to write a test story. Whether it's watching tonight's ballgame and basing your story on what you saw and the quotes you saw from TV or something else, it would give the editor an opportunity to see your work live or "plausibly live." I've been involved in something like that twice, one as the interviewee, once as the editor.

    I went for a reporter position for a series of industry newsletters and was originally third in the competition for two jobs. One of the first two they chose didn't work out, so the editor sent me a series of attachments relating to AT&T's 2000 breakup. I had an hour to write a story based on the information provided in AP style. I sent my story in 53 minutes after I got the e-mail. About an hour and a half later, I got a job offer.

    The other time, a reporter I ultimately brought on board offered to write a story for my previous shop and mentioned he'd already made contacts for the story. He told me he'd have the story by Monday. He did, and I liked what I saw enough to both run it and hire him.

    Those are situations where published or unpublished work is OK. But if you have a story that was published, use what ran.
     
  5. Pete

    Pete Well-Known Member

    I have a few specific pdf-related questions I hoped folks could help me with.

    I hadn't been in the job market for some time and have learned that my "hard-copy" clips are no longer the way to go. Most folks want electronic copies, in part so they can forward them.

    My clips were primarily written for either a) the web; b) a national magazine; c) smaller newspapers going back to the late '90s.

    For the first two categories, I have been able to find them on the Web in some form. I have hit "print" and been able to save them as pdfs. So far, so good. As far the latter category of old newspapers that were never entered into an electronic form, I suspect I am out of luck. Is that accurate? They're so old I likely won't use them anyway, but I was curious.

    Here are my questions. Now that I have them saved as pdfs, how can I manipulate them? I've tried to tinker but without success. Would I actually need to buy Adobe Acrobat? Is there something I can do short of that (and not spending several hundred bucks)?

    The sort of things I would like to do are:

    a) some of the Web-based stories were published on a platform that did not include a printer-friendly format or print icon, so the pdf file includes several pages of "filler" at the end. I would like to cut this filler out, but they seem to be read-only files.

    b) Can I merge the various clips into one pdf file, so I could send it as a one-file attachment rather than a multi-file attachment? And could I manipulate this combined file further to, for example, attach an intro "explanation of the clips" as I have liked to do with my package of hard copies?

    c) The magazine I wrote for has turned its archive into something that can be accessed electronically, which is great, but in doing so apparently they had a small army of folks type the stories in manually. Mistakes that were not in the original, published document have thus been added. Sometimes quite a few mistakes. Can I fix these? We've spoken about not tampering with the original as an ethical matter, but in this case the transfer to an electronic form did the tampering. Beyond the ethical issues, I'm wondering how, in fact, I can make such changes as a practical matter.

    I know some of these questions have likely been answered before, but I searched and came up empty on these specific points.

    Thanks in advance for any advice.
     
  6. Stitch

    Stitch Active Member

    Pete,

    Are you using a Windows PC or a Mac? A Mac is pretty easy to combine multiple PDF's into one with the built-in software. That includes cutting extra pages as well.

    If you have a couple of great clips that you only have on paper, I would use a scanner and make PDF's from those.
     
  7. Pete

    Pete Well-Known Member

    I have a MacBook laptop. What built-in software are you referring to? I opened a pdf file, but I wasn't sure what to do from there.

    Thanks for the scanner tip. I don't have easy access to one these days, but imagine I can track one down (at Kinko's or the like) if necessary.
     
  8. Stitch

    Stitch Active Member

    http://www.ehow.com/how_2143015_pdfs-preview-mac-osx-leopard.html
     
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