Blogs as steady income earners: how it’s done
Freelancers maintain personal blogs for all sorts of reasons: to have an all-in-one-place online portfolio, to increase their profile in a particular community or gain a reputation as an authority on a particular topic, to experiment with different types of writing than they get to do in their freelance work, or, often, to post photos […]
A too-familiar story: one freelancer’s run-in with plagiarism
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but not when your work isn’t credited — or compensated. Earlier this month, freelance writer Luigi Benetton received a message from an editor who had come across one of his articles online. The only problem was that it was posted under someone else’s byline and it was […]
Au revoir, Rue Frontenac?
Rue Frontenac launched in winter 2009 as website for locked-out workers at the Journal de Montreal, offering union information on the conflict between the paper and its unionized workers that began in January 2009. The site also posts general news, offering those locked-out journalists an outlet for their work. A print edition of Rue […]
Breaking news, and breaking even (sometimes)
By guest contributor Karen Wirsig It used to be that the capitalists who owned newspapers took care of the money and hired fleets of journalists mostly focused on covering the news. Sure, there were conflicts in this scenario. Lots of them. But it was a generally workable model for reporting to a mass audience and […]
Journalists need to brush up on business knowledge, report says
Freelancers have perhaps always known more about the business of journalism than their permanently employed counterparts. But now, at least according to an extensive report from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, all journalists need to educate themselves about where their pay cheques are coming from. This story about the report in the […]
Final decision handed down in latest Robertson class action suit
For better or worse, the ongoing series of “Robertson v. _____” cases continues. On May 2, a final decision was handed down in the case of “Robertson v. Proquest, Cedrom, Toronto Star Newspapers, Rogers and Canwest.” (This decision comes after a tentative settlement reached this January.) Heather Robertson and Kirk Baert of the firm Koskie […]
Survey of HuffPo bloggers finds they want to be paid
In a shocking revelation, a study of Huffington Post bloggers by researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center—which included analyzing 500 press clippings about AOL’s $315-million acquisition of HuffPo and a survey of HuffPo’s most frequent contributors—found that they think they deserve to be paid for their labour, which requires their time, effort, and numerous […]
Demand Media demands quality, attention with new Feature Writer role
Notorious content farmers Demand Media (read up on them here) issued a press release recently, announcing they are creating new roles for feature writers, through their “content creation studio,” that will provide content for their online properties eHow.com, typeF.com and Livestrong.com. These features will “incorporate original reporting, exclusive quotes, side bars, and have word counts […]
Long form’s digital trailblazers
Not long ago, Mark Danner and Gerry Marzorati had an exciting conversation at the Berkeley School of Journalism, in which they tossed around the idea of creating a “hive” for long-form journalists. Now, a short time later, that call is being taken up by digital-publishing innovators, both in the U.S. and in Canada, who are […]
What can Storify do for freelancers?
In this post on tech blog GigaOM, Mathew Ingram discusses the recently launched application Storify, which gives users a simple way to collect content from their various social media feeds (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.) and turn them into a single news feed. Ingram’s post focuses on the threat that services like Storify pose to mainstream […]
