Questions on freelancing

dude, you've had a hard week. i'm not even going to answer your "i just hope they pay cash" thought.

 

Dude, I'm in the south and we're not like the rest of the country. Down here, you can work for cash. Established companies pay cash for a variety of services, even struggling independent newspaper publishers that are holding on by a thread.

At some of the many newspapers I've worked at, weeklies, I've even paid cash to stringers on orders to do so from the publisher.

And the south is great. People here can't read, and I can go to about 30 different restaurants and eat for free, provided I tip the waitstaff very well.

 

WTF?????

 

I've never heard of that. I worked at two weeklies and we had to turn everything into a the parent company's office and usually got our checks for stringers back 2-4 weeks later. I've never heard of the cash deal. I just wonder if your company doesn't have some questionable accounting practices.

 

wow dude, thanks for clearing that up. you'll go far.

and yeah, editors love blogs.

 

Kurt,

The bottom line is that paper's don't have much discretionary money for stringers. Most are not going to be in the market for a neat feature that someone is pitching.

You need to figure out what the paper's needs are -- covering events, a fantasy hockey column , a dedicated football blogger, etc -- and try to pitch your services that way.

So, no, you probably will not be able to sell your MLB teams and their relationship with blogs. But maybe the paper would be interested in a weekly/monthly "best of the blogs" column or maybe their online site needs a MLB blogger to get more voices in the paper.

Doesn't hurt to ask.

 

Well, right now I'm still on staff with a big city non daily publication, only temporary though. I've been laid off.

Usually, independent, one-owner, family publications in my neck of the woods have paid cash. And yeah, those papers have some questionable accounting practices in addition to some questionable reporting and editorial practices.

These publications are dinosaurs, of course, and then there's always the alt-weeklies or alt-twice-weeklies. There's some in my town, and these are one-owner start-ups hanging on by the skin of their teeth. The big city daily's parent company is trying to push them out of town (behind the scenes, of course) and in the meantime, the free alt papers' popularity shows in its ad content. But the "reporters" write whatever the hell they want to write. I mean there's some crazy sports stories in those papers, like a pre-game story that says Team A should abandon it's lackluster running game and adopt a Va. Tech or Philly Eagles type approach to spread the field and throw because the quarterback has an arm.

Unless a coach says he plans on doing that in a game, there's no way I'd ever write that. And most people who know anything about high school sports knows that running the football and strong defense wins championships.

Obviously, none of the coaches or players were quoted in this pregame story. I wonder why?