Maria Trombly: Freelance Business Writer

A: For most of the reporting I do, all I need is a telephone -- I haven't yet had anyone not believe I was who I said I was.

When I go out to interviews, I bring my business cards. They suffice for 95% of the stuff out there. Some publications and TV stations issue photo IDs to their employees. They can also be used for identification.

For special events, etc... I write an assignment letter on company letterhead for my editor to sign, and fax it or mail it to the appropriate agency, with a photograph if required. They issue me a press pass for that event.

For ongoing special coverage -- police, military affairs -- I need that assignment letter and photographs and get a more permanent press pass.

Some countries accredit foreign journalists -- again, you need a letter from the editor. When I worked in the ex-USSR I had to check in with the Ministries of Information and get accreditation.

There are also associations that issue press membership cards -- for example, the Society of Professional Journalists.

A: First of all, when I was first starting out, I would not have voluntarily picked either business, education or government reporting.

I got into this business to be Ernest Hemingway, and that meant going out to warzones, which I did. I wrote about business, education and government until then, at the Chicago Tribune, but it bored me senseless.

Then I had to retire from the fun stuff, and started looking around for a second-choice beat.

My criteria was pretty straightforward: at the end of the day, I want to feel like I accomplished something.

Then, no matter how awful the job gets day-to-day, it would have been worth it. I certainly felt that way covering civil conflicts -- in fact, my plans to write novels disappeared quickly as I realized that I could make a bigger (and better) impact on the world just by reporting the facts.

(Otherwise, if you just pick a job because it's fun, you wind up having to quit when it gets boring -- and you don't get far in any particular career if you keep switching jobs because they get dull.)

Here is how my thinking went:

1. There are huge problems facing the world today -- warfare, instability, hunger. Most of these problems aren't in the U.S., but in undeveloped countries. Obviously, one way to address these problems is to write about the abuses, the human rights violations, the genocides and, by bringing public attention to them, help end them. Another way to look at it is to go after the underlying causes of conflict. For me, one interesting (and solvable) cause of conflict is economic uncertainty and instability. People who are saving up money to send a kid to college and have their house mostly paid off aren't as likely to join extremist movements and start blowing things up. Young people with hope for the future will go out and get business and engineering degrees, not terrorist training.

2. So why are some countries developing economically and others aren't? How are societies transformed when rapid economic development starts taking off? And what beat is it that covers this, exactly?

3. The answer, for me, was international business journalism, focusing on economics and development issues. So I slowly started to get a business background, starting out in technology, then moving to the financial services.

It paid off. For theor the last year, I've been in Shanghai, China, as the Asia bureau chief for my newspaper -- exactly what I most wanted to do.

The "big issue" is different for each person. My husband, for example, thinks that the single biggest challenge facing humanity today is getting to Mars. Really. He's the president of the New England Mars Society and organized an international conference on the subject, bringing NASA and Russian scientists to MIT last year. He wants to be the Carl Sagan of Mars. To that end, he's writing about the manufacturing industry, then planning to move to writing about aerospace. He's in Shanghai now, and, since China just sent a guy into space and plans to send folks to the moon and Mars as well, it's a great place to start covering the new space race.

(You wouldn't believe how much negotiations it takes to make sure that his big issue and my big issue are, at least, located in the same country!)

So what's your big issue? Do you really really care about education reform or campaign finance or business as a driver of local economies?

Say you really care about educational reform. Then you'll be willing to put up with sitting through 200 school board meetings just to write one great narrative journalism piece about a charter school. (Or what have you.) I personally don't care that much, and I could live without sitting through another school board meeting ever again. I probably will have to, though, because I just jinxed myself by saying it. :-)

I also don't care that much about the U.S. political process -- it kind of seems to muddle along and things keep happening totally against expectations. Kennedy went to Vietnam. Nixon made peace with China. Reagan ended the Cold War. Clinton gutted welfare and balanced the budget. What the *&^*(> ? So I just give up. :-) Too much seems to hinge on the psychology of the individual politician -- and what can you really know about someone else, anyway?

Maybe another reporter can -- or I will, at some later point in my career. Who knows.

Meanwhile, I'm learning Chinese and figuring out how the Asian economies work. And see -- it proves my point. I would never learn another language and move to a different country to cover, say, school boards or town council meetings. Hell, I wouldn't even want to work through lunch.

And if you're not willing to put any kind of effort into your work because you really don't give a damn, well, then your career isn't going to get too far.

At the last job that I didn't care about, I used to rush through my work, then go off to lunch with a book. I'd read the book through, then come back to the desk. I took 3-4 hour lunches every day. They figured I was off doing something useful. God, I hated that job. At another job I used to get finished early, then sit and read the wires so I'd look busy. For hours. That's another thing about not caring about your work -- you don't care about doing it well, and you do the minimum you can get away with, so you get done faster. :-)

On the plus side, once you do care about your work, you can often do it no matter the job that you're in. While at Computerworld, doing boring work I hated, I talked my bosses into letting me go to Russia to write about the restructuring of the financial system there, and to write about technologists going off to other developing countries to help out, etc... I'd be the first one volunteering to go to conferences, so I'd meet all the movers and shakers. And I didn't mind doing a lot of scut work, because I knew I'd be building up brownie points to do the good stuff -- the more scut work I did, the more brownie points I got, the more I got to travel and do fun stuff.

It's all a matter of attitude. Hope that helps.

Q: I haven't done any interships. Will that hurt me when I look for my first job? Also, I haven't done as much networking as some of my classmates. Do you have to be really agressive to be a journalist?

A: You don't need interships, even a journalism degree to be a successful journalist -- if you have a good reason for it. However, at whatever point you find yourself, you do need to be making the most of it. So, why didn't you apply for summer interships when you knew you should have? Why aren't you making the contacts you need?

Are you shy? Are you uncertain about your career choice? Are you just uncommitted to journalism? Any of these factors will work against you much more than the lack of any particular summer intership.

If you're uncertain about your career choice, or uncommitted to it, an internship will help you decide if you want to do it or not.

If you're shy, or insecure, or have a hard time getting going or getting organized, you need to work on those areas. Being aggressive -- or, let's put it, self-starting, motivated and assertive -- is a great asset in any career, and especially in journalism where competition for jobs is high. If you don't have those character traits, you might be better off in another career, instead. You'll go farther and make more money and have better working conditions than in journalism.

Q: Pay for journalists is really low. How do you make a living in this profession?

A: I agree with what you say about the atrociously low pay in journalism. But I think the problem goes deeper than stingy bosses, etc...

I think that journalism is one of those jobs, like tending bar, that you don't really have to know much in order to be able to do well. You need to be able to write the inverted pyramid, and you need to be able to ask questions and keep coming back until you get some answers.

So the college graduates are always going to be compening against non-J-school grads for jobs. I myself was a math major and only graduated from college because I was the eldest in a (poor, starving) immigrant family and couldn't let everybody down. Otherwise, I would have gone into newspaper work right out of high school -- and, given how persistent I am, I would have probably done as well if not better as I did with a degree. In fact, I know folks who haven't graduated from college who did extremely well.

Journalism is a trade. You get better at it the more you practice it, but there's really no body of knowledge associated with it, as there is with engineering, or medicine, or law, or any other profession. And I think the pay reflects that.

Then, you combine it with the fact that a lot of people want to be journalists -- or, at least, journalism majors. It's an easy major compared to most others (not much math or science, nothing to memorize, no big books to read, no languages to learn). And the job itself is pretty easy, since you're just talking to people then writing it down in a very minimalistic, formulaic way. Finally, for others, it's a step towards a career as a writer (I personally, planned to become Hemingway). So there will always be more people than jobs, again driving down the wages.

Another reason for low wages -- part-time freelancers. In the National Writers Union, the average income of its members (ie., those writers who cared enough to join a professional organization) was $4,000 a year. In effect, people are writing magazine and newspaper articles as a hobby, or just to see their names in print. How can you possibly compete against someone willing to do the work for free?

I don't know what to do about it. There are plenty of obvious answers, of course -- you can seek out niches where difficult knowledge is required, such as economics writing or science writing or business writing. But you're already doing the latter.

You can start your own publication, and get on the profitable side of the supply-and-demand curve.

You can join the National Writers Union, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Newspaper Guild, or another organization and lobby for higher wages. Or go around to high schools and talk folks out of becoming journalists.

You can supplement your reporting income with books or speaking fees, or teaching. (Many journalists do this.)

And you can downgrade your lifestyle. My husband and I are moving to China to write about the economy there, and we're going to have to radically change the way we live -- instead of a house, a small apartment. Instead of cars, subway rides. Which, actually, sounds a lot like moving to New York. :-)

On the plus side, those of us who have fought our way to our journalism jobs know what it's like to work hard to go after something you want. I've found that, when competing against folks who've had things handed to them, I come out ahead a good proportion of the time. I've learned to do my research, to follow through, to be persistent, and to schooze harder than other folks. I think that's why the folks who make fortunes (as opposed to those who inherit and spend them) often came from working-class or immigrant backgrounds.

When worked in Russia, covering the post-Soviet civil wars for Reuters, I often came across folks living the good life. They basically hung out with each other, had a lot of parties, went skiing, hopped over to Europe on a regular basis. I hung out with local journalists, only went up into the mountains with guerilla fighters, learned the local languages because I couldn't afford to hire translators when I was just starting out (and then later, I didn't need to), instead of hiring drivers and cars I would hitch rides with soldiers -- on tanks, boats, armored personnel carriers, even one ride in the cargo hold of a military plane. Instead of staying in hotel rooms, I would stay with locals -- friends of friends, local journalists, or local police officials, politicians, or military units.

As you can imagine, I wasn't filing the rehashed press releases that everyone else was.

I see the fact that I can live for weeks on tea and bread as a competitive advantage. That I can talk on an equal level to a soldier or local businessman, without patronizing him. That I have no problem crashing on a couch, or pallet, or on a greatcoat in a trench, or sleeping with bedbugs.

Hopefully, I won't have to do that in China, especially now that I'm bringing my kids with me. But if I do, no big deal, and my kids can learn to deal the same way I did. You turn on the light, jerk back the blanket, swipe the little suckers onto the floor and wack them with a slipper. Then you fumigate, and go away for a couple of days to let everything air out.

Q: I want to be a foreign correspondent and I'm just starting out. How do I find places that will send a journalist overseas?

A: Looking for outlets is actually the *last* step of a going-overseas process.

The first thing is, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

What level of risk can you handle?
How willing are you to learn foreign languages/how many foreign languages do you already know?
Where can you get a free place to stay?

So if you have friends or relatives in a particular country in Latin America who can offer you a couch, and you already know Spanish, and you're comfortable with the level of stability (or instability in that country), then you go there.

I had a grandmother in Moscow, and the remnants of Russian from when I was a kid. (I only stayed with her for a couple of weeks, but it was nice to have her couch when I was getting started.) I was interested in warzones, and Chechnya was right there, and all the other post-Soviet wars.

My husband had a year of Chinese in college and a strong interest in their space program, so he picked China. He stayed in a cheap hostel when he first got there while he was looking for a job.

Then you buy a one-way plane ticket (I skipped on my last months' rent to pay for mine) to whereever you decide to go. These days, I would recommend Latin America, the Middle East, and China. (If you go there to teach English, they might even pay for your ticket.)

When choosing a country, you look for two major factors:

A lack of local English-language talent. (That way, you'll have less competition for the English-language jobs, which pay the most.)
Lots of changes. (Either military, political, economic, social or all of the above, which gives you lots of things to write about.)

Once you pick your country and find your free couch (or the reverse, as the case may be) then you call everyone you know who might know anyone in that country. You tell them that you'll be over there, and ask to meet with their contact.

Then you get to that country, go to all of those people, and all of the people those people recommend, and all of the people *those* people recommend and you ask them all for a writing job. In addition to meeting with all your contacts (you're a journalist, you should be good at that part) also go in and meet face-to-face with all the editors of local English-language papers, all the news agencies (AP, Reuters, AFP, etc...) and the bureaus of all the major papers -- LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, NY Times, Wall Street Journal. Many of them use freelancers.

It took me three days to get a fulltime job in Russia, proofreading a Russian human rights newsweekly that was translated into English by Russian translators. It needed a lot of style work! Working there, I got my Russian up to speed, and I met all their correspondents -- great people who were located throughout the former Soviet republics.

In my next job, I took them all on as freelancers.

Then you work your butt off -- and keep following up with all your contacts because, chance are, your first job is going to suck. (Mine had cockroaches in the computer keyboards, and banana slugs crawling on the ceiling that kept dropping down into my hair.)

A: There is only one question you need to ask yourself: Do you HAVE to be a journalist?

If you DON'T absolutely, no-doubt-about-it, can't-live-any-other-way have to be a journalist, then you should start considering other careers. Pound for pound, a journalism career is more work, more aggravation, and less pay than almost anything else you can do. Really.

I spent my fair share of time sleeping on folks' couches when I was starting out, as, I'm sure, have many others. I've slept on my grandmother's couch, on my mother's couch, on my dad's couch, and on the couches of three friends that I can remember. (Quite possibly more couches are buried in my past, possibly under an alcoholic haze.)

If you're one of those people who HAS to be a journalist, then the worse things get, the happier you are (in a sick, twisted kind of way). You think of everything as material for the novels you're someday going to write, or as seasoning for your writers' voice.

I know journalists who are proud to have been fired from every paper they've worked for. Journalists in the mid-30s who are still just one paycheck or car breakdown away from being out on the street (again).

I know journalists who spend most of their working lives with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Granted, they're in other countries -- most of the ones here have renounced their evil ways, joined AA, and got nicotine patches. But how are you going to renounce your evil ways if you never had any in the first place? Right, right?

Now, it is possible to be a journalist and not lead a life filled with misery and dispair. I can't think of anyone like that right off, but I'm sure such things happen. But if you want to avoid a life of misery and dispair, then switching careers would significantly increase your odds. For example, I know some pretty happy teachers, archivists, engineers, and librarians.

If you do HAVE to be a journalist, then you'll get through it. You'll get a job stuffing envelopes or manning the help line for an insurance company so you can cover school board meetings at night, or you'll get a job teaching English in China so you can freelance articles about the economic changes over there. As a journalist, you'll probably live the most interesting life it's possible to lead.

And that, of course, is the curse as well as the joy of the profession.

Q: Do you need a degree in journalism to work as a journalist?

A: When I left college I had a handful of clips from the local alternative newsweekly, one of them a cover story on town-gown relations. That's it. No journalism degree, no internships, no other editing or writing experience.

I went to Chicago, and, within a couple of months was working as one of the "full-time freelancers" for the Chicago Tribune in the northern suburbs, covering about a dozen municipalities and all the associated government boards. One of my features ran on the front page of the Trib (not the front page of a section, the front page of the Trib itself). A harder story on the drug trade also got high placement.

From there, my career path would have been pretty straightforward at the Trib, except that I decided to go to Russia, and covered civil wars for Reuters after about a year. Again, nobody cared about the degree, the internships, or anything else. The only concern was whether I had the persistence to be able to report a story, and then write it despite constant editorial criticism (I have to admit, my writing started out kind of lame).

Here's my theory: the only thing you need to be a journalist is the ability to ask a question, and keep asking until you get an aswer. You can't be taught persistence, but you can get good at it with practice. Everything else can be fixed on the copy desk.

If I'm hiring somebody, I'd rather spend half an hour teaching them the inverted pyramid, than months and months standing over them and making them follow through.

Q: I'm worried about getting a journalism job. Should I go to graduate school?

A: I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me on this, but, having been in a position to hire recent graduates in the past (and having faced this same question myself) I have to strongly vote against grad school.

I first left school in a similarly bad market, and I had to work my butt off to get started. But the experience you gain will be worth more than grad school ever will. Here's my advice: move to an area where you can get free or cheap rent, in a large metropolitan area if you can find it. Get a day job if you have to, doing whatever you can. And spend your evenings going out and covering every school board meeting, fire district gathering and library fundraiser you can get yourself assigned to. It doesn't matter how little they pay you, or how small the paper is. Keep pushing for meetings with area editors and keep asking for more assignments. Meanwhile, volunteer for the local journalism organizations. It gets your name out and lets you network, while at the same time improving your basic skills.

I can't stress this enough: the only requirement to be a journalist is persistence. Everything else can be fixed by the copy desk. Really. If you're ignorant, they can fix that (trust me, I've worked with plenty of ignorant reporters and editors). The only thing they can't teach you on the job (or cover up for you) is persistence. With persistence, you'll get the quotes you need. You'll keep digging to get the meat of the story. When I was an editor, the worst reporters I had were the ones who gave up when a source didn't return the first phone call. I had reporters who didn't know what the inverted pyramid was. That takes a few minutes to fix, and a couple of assignments until they get the hang of it. I had reporters who didn't know you were supposed to write down quotes verbatim. They went back, and redid it. Problem solved. But the reporters who were afraid to go up and ask a follow-up question, or who'd sit and stare at the telephone because they didn't know what to do next, or who kept coming back to me and saying that they couldn't find anything out -- those were the ones I had the most problems with.

If you go to grad school simply because you couldn't find a job (as opposed to improving a particular skill, say) that's a big red warning flag to me. After all, finding a job requires good networking skills, the ability to go up to a stranger and ask them for help, and, of course, persistence. Do I want to hire a reporter who can't do any of that? No.

And if you really can't force yourself to do any of that, then, while it's possible to have a journalism career, it won't be as successful or fulfilling as if you pursued a different line of work.

So get out there and start calling people, start hounding editors. Really. Only a really idiot editor prefers a polite, shy journalist who takes the first "no" for an answer. You don't have to be obnoxious about it. But be firm. And follow up, and follow up, and follow up again.

Think of it this way. Someday, you are going to write a really ground-breaking, monumental piece of journalism. (Otherwise, why are you in this profession?) If you don't do it, nobody will and the world will suffer. So getting you your first job is the most important thing for everybody. If you can believe that, you'll get your job. It's the same way that, when you believe that whatever story you're working on is the most important thing in the world, people will drop what you're doing to help you.

Q: How do you get into business writing?

A: My rule of thumb is you're as good a writer as your last clip.

So find an editor, any editor, and start pitching business stories. If you're really starting out, and don't have *any* clips at all, go after the Pennysavers and the like -- do some profiles of local businesses. The pay is pennies per word. But write the stories well and you've got yourself a clip. Then you try local weeklies, regional business pubs, suburban dailies, trades, big city dailies, then national business mags, in that order.

Get a frank assessment from somebody cruel as to where you are on that foodchain, based on your writing and reporting ability. Then call the editor you want to write for, and ask for a few minutes to come in and show him/her your resume and clips and chat about what you can do for them. (This of it as your standard sales call.)

If you're wrong about where you are on the food chain, and you've aimed too high, ask the editor to recommend other markets that might be more appropriate for you. Ask the editor to name names, then recommend people to talk to at those publications. Then follow up.

You need a niche. The more specialized, the easier it is to sell the first article. (Then, once you've made the first sale to the pub, you can branch out to other topics.) For example, I write about financial services technology. Once I pitch a tech story to someone, I often find that I'm asked to write about other topics, as well, that the publication is interested in.

A: There's never a good time to get into journalism -- it's one of those professions, like writing, where more people want to do it then there are jobs, and, of course, the salaries reflect this.

You have to decide whether you really want to be a journalist or not, and if you're willing to do what it takes. (Think acting, for example.)

If you are, here's what you do:

Find a hot area to live in, and someone on whose couch you can crash. Find a day job doing anything. Washing toilets, whatever.

At night, cover every single school board meeting you can find for every single little dinky newspaper. You know, free weeklies, suburban papers, etc. It's easy to get those jobs -- ask to talk to the editor, walk in, say you're willing to do anything to get started as a journalist, and offer to do the things that they can't get people to do at wages no decent human being would accept.

Constantly push for bigger stories -- make bargains like, "I'll cover a bunch of your school board meetings, in return for a front-page story on school performance" or whatever. Keep agressively going after bigger stories, bigger papers.

I used this approach (without having a journalism degree, internships, or any writing experience) to go from covering school board meetings for the free weekly paper the Ithaca Times to a cover story for them on town-gown relations, to covering city council meetings for a suburban paper in Chicago, to covering suburban city council meetings and school boards for the Chicago Tribune, to a front-page story in the Trib on corporal punishment in the schools. In the course of a year. Sure, I answered the phone during the day for the first few months, but pretty soon I was able to quit and write full time.

Note that you have to be really agressive and really good. And if you're not, why do you want to be a journalist, anyway? It's not much of a profession for wallflowers. Instead, you might become a technical writer, or go into marketing communications, or teach high school English or something.

Next, if you want to really kick your career up a notch, go overseas. Find an English-language paper in some country where you speak the language (or have the inclination to work your butt off to learn the language), and where you know someone who knows someone who'll let you crash on their couch, and get a job there. There's always a lot of turnover at those places, so you should be able to use your investigative skills to find a job easily enough. (You do have investigative skills, right? If not, maybe you should go back to school and get some. If you can't find an editor who wants to hire you, how are you going to find a source willing to divulge sensitive information to you? Unfortunately, most schools don't really teach you how to do this. Check first before you apply.)

If all of this sounds like too much hard work, then you shouldn't be a journalist.

If it sounds fun, then this is the career for you, and I wish you luck.

Q: Do you have any advice for pitching freelance stories to editors?

A: To be a successful freelancer, you really have to focus on networking and marketing. I met my primary editor at a financial services convention, and saw her again at other industry events, and when I had quit Computerworld she called me right up and offered me a regular column.

I also do cold-calls and cold-emails to editors to round out the number of articles I do. I haven't had reason to complain about the volume of work I have -- only that, in my experience, the articles I freelance tend to be very formulaic. Editors want to know what they're getting, and they want something very predictable and reliable. They also only want to see the stuff that you've done a lot of, whereas when you're on staff, you write on a wider variety of topics.

So, for example, I write about web services on Wall Street, Web services as a technology, Web services in corporate finance departments, and now I'm pitching Web services in the insurance industry. Same exact story each time, except with a slightly different focus. So the more often I do an article, the easier it is to sell another one just like it.

As you can imagine, the rut wears pretty deep pretty fast. Doing all my interviews by phone doesn't help either.

Anyway, I've been freelancing for three years now, and was freelancing for about four years before going to Computerworld. My advice? First of all, set up a website. If you do, it means you can email pitch letters without having to put your resume and clips into attachments -- you can just put in links to all the materials you want the editors to see.

Then, for pitching, I use a "T-shaped" approach (think of a bunch of capital T's, stacked one on top of the other in a tall, and vaguely unsteady column).

You take your starting point. Say, you've got a story about a sick horse that was published somewhere. Now you try to sell a variation of that story to as many places as you can find -- parenting mags, kid mags, outdoor mags, horse mags. That's the tall part of the T -- you're writing sick horse stories over and over again.

But, now that you know those editors, you can pitch a wider variety of horse stories to them. Horses and kids, horses and vets, horses and transportation, what have you. You're on the outstretched wings of the T.

Now, let's say that the vet story rang a bell with you. So you can go up that vertical, selling horse vet stories to a bunch of different magazines. Then you go out horizontally again -- doing a variety of stories about vets. And then you repeat the cycle, each time adding more columns to your tree of T's.

At least, that's the theory. I'm actually too lazy to put everything in practice. (Visualize me kicking myself in my own butt.)

Q: How important is networking to getting a job?

A: When circumstances brought me back to the U.S. after living abroad, I found myself on a farm in western Massachusetts, disconnected from all my former editors, friends, and colleagues.

I quickly found temporary low-paying freelance work just by knocking on doors, but it was networking that really helped open up the world to me again. Other people don't just help you find work, they help you think about work in new ways. In my case, that led me to considering different kinds of markets, not local, whereas previously I had always met my editors in person. They also taught me about the importance of running your freelance work like a business -- with good record keeping, marketing, and sales strategies, continual training, specialization, and diversification.

First of all, I'm greatful for the local NWU Local 5, and I recommend to all and sundry that get they involved in their local writer's union. Other local alternatives include business groups, chambers of commerce, andvolunteer organizations. The key is to do more than just come to meetings -- help edit the newsletters, co-chair a conference, organize a mentoring program, set up a website. I have a theory that all the effort you put into an organization will come back to you, one way or another. A karmic circle, if you will.

As a result of my work, I was invited to join a local writers' group. I have been meeting with these five other experienced and successful writers now for almost six years, and I am immensely greatful to them for their support and kind advice.

If you can't find a group in your area to join, start one. It's a great way to keep on track, and share your experiences with people who've been there -- or who are just starting out.

Then, think regionally and nationally. I joined the Society of Professional Journalists, and did some work on their International Journalism Committee. There are also a number of other national and regional organizations for writers -- the Society for Technical Communicators, for example, and Boston's Society of Documentation Professionals (where I was a board member for a year). You might have to drive a ways to get to a meeting, or do everything by phone and email, but they broaden your horizons, give you increased visibility in your profession, and force you to measure yourself against a higher standard than you perhaps might have working only locally.

Finally, on the issue of hiring someone who's good on paper versus someone's who's recommended:

I've been in a hiring position a few times in my life, and given my choice, I'd pick the latter over the former. Why? First of all, because what looks good on paper isn't always what works out in real life, and references are handpicked -- if a writer has 97 bad experiences and three good ones, it's the three good ones who'll end up as references. Whereas if I know the writer personally, and have seen him or work work in a professional capacity for an organization in which we're both members, or have friends who'll tell me the truth, I can form a much better opinion of his or her abilities.

There's also another side -- a writer who comes recommended has an obligation to the person who recommended him to do a good job. If he lets me down, he's not only making himself look bad but the recommender as well. I've often assigned stories to freelance writers who swore up and down that they were on track and everything was coming together, only to ask for an extension at the last minute and then -- once it was too late to assign the story to some else -- come back and explain that their aunt was sick and they couldn't finish the project. (You can imagine the hair pulling that goes on when that happens!) And what can you do? If I had known them personally, I could have said, "Bob, I know you don't have an aunt. Get off your butt and file that article!" With an unknown writer, the best you can do is cross them off your list -- and then try to find another writer to replace them.

The main differentiator between the reliable writers and the not-so-reliable ones (and we're not talking writing talent here -- if they can just get the quotes and turn the piece in on time, that's enough to put them on my good list) was their committment to the profession. Is their writing secondary? Something they do between other projects? A hobby? A way to pay a couple of bills under a better job comes along? Or are they firmly committed to writing as a career? It's not a question of how many hours they put in a week -- I've freelanced with two kids, I know sometimes you can only do so much. It's a question of how seriously you take those hours. And involvement in professional organizations and regular attendance at professional events shows that you're someone who's in it for the long haul.

Q: Can you sell articles to trade magazines where most other contributors write for free?

A: Many trade publications -- as well as academic publications -- don't pay contributors.

The reason is that the people who contribute are getting something other than money in return: free advertising. For a lawyer, CPA, engineer, or other professional, the exposure may well be worth quite a bit.

However, editors have to spend quite a bit of time recruiting these experts and holding their hands through the writing and revision process. While writing is a joy to some people, for many people it's an odious chore and a reminder of bad old school days and essay assignments.

Finally, the results are often unreadable and editors have to spend quite a bit of time getting the pieces into shape, or risk alienating readers. In effect, the publication is padding its pages with advertorials. And if a reader has a choice between a well-written piece that quotes an expert, and a barely-readable piece from that expert himself, readers will often choose the piece written by a real writer.

As a result, expert-written publications often have limited markets, or are distributed free to readers.

Moreover, experts -- while they are able to write a column here or there on their areas of expertise -- are rarely able to consistently produce work. They are also notoriously bad at meeting deadlines -- after all, if they have other, paying, work to do, the free articles will go to the bottom of their lists.

As a result, some publications do a combo approach -- use experts for occasional columns and writers for the material that just has to be in, and just has to be readable.

I occasionally write for publications that are partly expert-written and enjoy high word rates (probably the editors appreciate what they're getting).

Q: How do you go from writing for local business publications to national ones?

A: I find that the transition from local business to national business pubs is very straightforward -- my husband did it in a few months.

Here's my advice:

• Hire a cheap college student to set up a web site for you. Feel free to have him steal mine. A low-cost way of doing it is to take the free webspace that you get with your email account (which has a nasty-looking URL, I'm sure), pay $10 bucks to register a domain with mydomains.com, and have the new domain forwarded to your free but ugly one (but visitors will only see the nice clear url you registered.). For example, Mattbam.com is available. So is matt.bam.name.

• Get a list of pubs who might be interested in business or technology writers (go to google and type in -- "managing editor" "business editor" -- or "business editor" "technology editor" -- to get newspaper and magazine mastheads. I've done that, and am currently working with a database of about 500 editors at target pubs (and I've hired my brother to keep the database current and expand on it) because I use it a lot for marketing and it's a pain to do it from scratch each time you want to send out some queries.

• Pick a general story topic that could be of interest to many different kinds of pubs -- for example, is it time to upgrade to Windows XP? All the bugs are now discovered, support for Windows 2000 and Win 98 is about to expire soon, there are patches for major vulnerabilities, drivers are in place, etc... Any business (or consumer!) publication could use a story like this -- if they haven't run one already. For example, you might want to target local newspapers, write basically the same story for each one, but quote a local business owner (easy enough to find -- call the local chamber) instead of the one you had.

• Write a query letter titled "freelancer introduction", say you're an experienced business and technology writer in the first paragraph, mention Windows as a particular area of expertise, give links to a couple of clips on the topic, a link to your website, and suggest a possible story topic. (I find that I've had a good response to this approach, but editors usually assign me something different from what I suggested!)

• Now send this same letter to a whole bunch of different editors. Except in the story topic, you would customize it for their publication -- when hotel managers are planning to upgrade, or Houston businesses are planning to upgrade, etc... If you have particular industry sector expertise, it's even better -- when small shop owners in Houston are planning to upgrade, for example.

• If you come across a particularly interesting story topic, don't hesistate to pitch it to national publications the same way -- start with trades, they pay well and are easy to break into to ($.50 to $2.25 a word) as well as computer mags like Computerworld, eWeek, InfoWorld, Business 2.0.

Q: How do you get into freelancing?

A: I've been a freelancer for most of the past ten years, and have also edited
the work of many freelancers in various editing jobs.

Here's my advice:

First, collect all your information: clips (everything from college papers to "sample" articles that were never published to printed stories), resume, bio, information on relevant experience (paramedical training, what have you)
Identify possible featury-type areas you'd like to cover: medical issues, local arts and culture, personal profiles, business profiles (the business profiles generally bring in the most money)
Track down all the publications within a comfortable driving area -- free weeklies, major dailies, wire service bureaus -- and rank them by which ones are the most important to you (by pay, prestige, etc...)
If there's more than one editor, call the publication's switchboard and find out who is the person who deals with freelancers. Now call them.
Ask for an opportunity to come in and introduce yourself, and to bring in your clips, resume, references, etc...
At the interview (I always made time to talk to potential freelancers -- you never know when you need one, and it's nice to meet them ahead of time), explain who you are and what your background, then ask what sorts of freelance material the editor is looking for. Encourage them to go into detail -- what kinds of stories, what length, etc... If they tell you straight out that you're not qualified to work for them, ask for referrals
to other editors in the area who will work with less experienced freelancers. And DON'T FORGET -- ask whether you can come back once you have more experience!! Be nice, professional, and insistent. Any editor will be happy to see that you're persistent, in fact -- it's the major job requirement for a journalist!
If the editor was positive about the idea of you writing for them, go home and come up with story ideas that were in line with what the editor wanted. Keep pitching until they like something -- after all, they've already indicated that they want to work with you, now all you have to do is find the right topic.
Otherwise, go to the next editor at the list. Eventually, you'll find one who'll take your work, even if its just the local free paper, a church bulletin, or the library newsletter.
Once you have three clips from the this publication, mail copies to the next-better publication on the list, show that editor how much you've improved, and tell him that you'll give a call soon to talk about pitching some stories.

Q: If you're just starting out, how do you come up with story ideas?

A: If you're new to freelancing or new to the area, you might not have a lot of story ideas handy, and you need a LOT to be a freelancer.

Once you have contacts in an area, of course, you can mine them for story ideas -- chambers of commerce, local artists' guilds, politicians, etc... are all happy to showcase their members and accomplishments.

If you don't, here's two easy ways to generate stories: GENERALIZE, and NARROW.

For example, say you're pitching stories to a regional daily. Look at national pubs -- newspapers, magazines, etc... and localize them. If there's a national obesity trend, how does that affect your area? Are local schools changing their menus? Does a local nutritionist plan to hold a seminar?

You can also look at more narrow publications -- those same church bulletins, library newsletters, and free weeklies that you've moved up from. Take a story and generalize it or expand on it. If a clown came to the local library, does that clown travel to other area libraries as well? What kind of a life is that? If there's a paragraph about a business getting a new contract, what does that mean for the local economy? How did its owner accomplish that? Is there a management lesson in there for other businesses?

Finally, you can call potential news sources out of the blue and ask them for ideas. Make the questions specific. Call the chamber of commerce and ask if any new businesses have opened that haven't been profiled yet in the local press. Find out if there have been any senior management changes recently, or mergers or acquisitions. Call the arts council and find out if any local artists have won awards. Call the schools superintendent's office
and find out if any teachers have innovative programs, or if any student groups have travelled overseas or won competitions. Ask for free subscriptions to their newsletters.

Q: Freelance writers don't get paid much. How do you make a living doing this?

Freelancing is not an easy life, but it is possible to make decent money doing it. Unlike fiction writing, whether you either hit it big or barely struggle along, it's possible to make a good living, say, $50-100K, by just doing a good job.

The trick is to move "upmarket" -- to the higher-paying pubs -- as quickly as you can. That means collecting a lot of clips and immediately presenting them to the next editor up in the food chain. In general, business writing pays more -- and business features are just as easy to write as any other feature. Don't overlook business-to-business publications -- regional
business magazines, trade publications, and newsletters.

They pay well and generally (though not always) have lower writing standards, so you don't have to be quite as polished to earn the same amount of money when you're just starting out and don't have your writing style down yet.

Although you probably think you do. The longer I've been a writer, the more I've come to be aware of the deficiencies in my own work. And when I started out, I thought I was Hemingway!

Q: My editors keep messing up my stories. How can I keep that from happening?

If your skin is the least bit sensitive DON'T READ YOUR CLIPS AFTER THEY COME OUT.

Don't. Really.

All sorts of awful things are in there, and if you don't know about them, you won't get upset.

If a source calls you up about a factual mistake, just apologize to the source, take the blame, promise to try to get it fixed, and pass the request for a correction up to the editor.

If a reader calls you up and says that the article doesn't have any factual mistakes, but misses an important part of the story, tell the reader she's absolutely right --then pitch it as a follow-up article to the editor.

But, you might say: "I know that there are mistakes in there, even if no else is bothered by it. I can't just let it go! What if another editor sees the article? I'll never work anywhere again."

Now, if you're writing about a topic that requires specialized knowledge, you can ask your editor to let you see the final proofs before they go to print, just to double-check that everything is accurate. And you can also train copy editors to not retype certain things, like numbers or names, because typos can creep in.

But, admit it -- you're probably less concerned about factual mistakes than about stylistic changes. Factual mistakes you just fix. Style, you can argue about for days with no results.

So don't do it. Really. Just don't do it.

But what if you can't help it? What if the editor is one of those sadists who makes you look over the final proofs for mistakes before publication, and you can't help noticing that all your best metaphors are gone and the structure is rearranged to the point of silliness?

Here's what you do: first, glance over the words in quotation marks and make sure that they are true to the original (some cleaning-up permitted, but nothing that makes the source look as if he said the opposite from what he really intended). Then scan over the statistics, and the spelling of names and places.

Finally, check the chronologies -- mistakes sometimes creep in here during editing.

If you happen to come across a grammar mistake or typo, that's fine too -- but it's not really part of your job at this point. The copy editor should have caught that, you're just doing him a favor.

Your *only* job is to make sure the facts are still correct.

Do NOT read over for style. It's the newspaper's or magazine's style now. Don't read for structure.

And don't ask them to put back your original words -- if they liked them in the first place, they would have left them in. Remember that the customer is always right, and the customer is the editor.

Eventually, if it's important to you, you'll get good enough and famous enough to be able to dictate style terms. By then, though, you'll probably also be wise enough to know that an editor is the writer's best friend. As a general rule, it's the stuff that you like the most in an article, those fancy turns of phrase and lofty comparisons, that are really the worst and distract the reader from the content. Just let it go.

And when you cut out your clip, don't read it over for a few years. When you finally do, after getting a bit of distance, you might be amazed at how good you sound.

Q: Do you have any advice for public relations people pitching stories to you?

A: The biggest problem is inappropriate pitches. I didn't do consumer finance -- I work for a trade publication, not a consumer magazine! The PR folks who send me consumer-oriented press releases, and then call and try to talk to me about them, to use up my time even further, don't bother to check. That's really annoying and makes me think worse of their agencies.

The next biggest problem is incomprehensible pitches. If I can't figure out what you're selling, I'll just hit the delete key right off.

If an unintelligible press release *has* to go out, the best PR people would put a few paragraphs of explanation addressed to me personally before attaching the press release -- so I wouldn't have to wade through it to figure out what the story was.

They'd say something like, "Maria, here's hot trend in wireless for you -- ESP-based communication networks. They're fast and secure, and work through psychics. We've got some customers and analysts for you to talk to, if you're interested." And then the press release would go on to say, "ESP Networks, Inc. has announced the release of Gobbelty 2.0, an end-to-end, user-focused, communication solution for the enterprise networking marketplace." Argh! Please, folks, can you stop using the world "solution"?

Finally, my last pet peeve is PR folks who are either lazy or overworked (it can be hard to tell which). Either way, it makes the company look really bad.

Say, someone promises to get me in touch with customers, company spokesmen, and analysts. And then I wait while my deadline comes and goes and the PR guy only responds to messages to say "I'm working on it."

Well, I get pissed off, their company is left out of the story (and the competition gets to say nasty things about them unchallenged) and I have to scramble to fill that space with something else. Not fun.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I don't call the company for the next article, and I don't recommend them to colleagues as a good source. And that's the opposite of good PR.

Better to just tell me that you don't have the time to set it up, but that I can contact the parties involved directly.

Q: Can you give your career a boost by going overseas?

A: I definitely gave my career a big jump start -- I went from covering local school board meetings in the Chicago suburbs to covering international conflicts within a few months.

This was in Moscow, where there were, at the time, two competing English language dailies.

One friend came to Moscow straight out of college, without a word of Russian. He did have a textbook that he picked up somewhere, though. He got a job at the Moscow Tribune helping the wire editor, looking for interesting stories in the mountain of paper the AP -- and UPI, Reuters, Itar-Tass, and all the other wires we subscribed to -- spewed out every day. After an exciting day of battling paper cuts, he would retire down to some Russian bar, get a newspaper and a dictionary, pick out words, translate them, and memorize them. Then try out his pronounciation on the Russian staffers the next day. He also picked up a Russian girlfriend along the way.

A year later he was working as a producer for Sky TV (Murdoch's answer to CNN, big in Europe and Asia).

Other acquaintances have gone on to NBC (after covering the Moscow crime beat), U.S. News and World Report, the AP, and other international organizations. And why shouldn't they get hired -- they've proved they can work in Russia and that they're willing to work dirt cheap. :-)

There's always a high turnover at the Moscow papers -- staffers get snapped up by the big media organizations, or get tired of living in Russia and go home. Others are there because they're spouses of diplomatic staff, or of business people temporarily posted in Moscow. Either way, they move on.

As an American journalist abroad, you're on top of a journalism foodchain where the local press is concerned, and you're almost immune from reprisals. You can still get in trouble with the local government but whereas the locals might be killed or jailed the worst that usually happens is that your visa is revoked. Again, this shouldn't be taken as a license to act with impunity, but I was able to run stories that the local media often couldn't do -- our paper wasn't censored and rarely read by petty local bureaucrats.

However, it was read by the foreign media that parachuted in -- the big shots from New York, etc... who didn't speak the local language or have a clue as to what was going on would read the English-language dailies to get up to speed -- meaning we got great exposure. And we were rubbing shoulders with the top journalists in the world whenever we went out on assignment...

When Yeltsin sent tanks against the White House, and bullets were flying overhead, I was crouched behind a concrete barrier with a photographer from Time.

So, definitely I recommend going overseas to any young, ambitious, unattached reporter.

Q: I heard a horrible story from a refugee. How do I know it's true?

A: Refugees are scared, upset, mad at the other side -- they'll tell stories that happened to "a friend of a friend" as if they happened to them. Then the news media picks it up, and more refugees hear them, and tell the same stories.

Then you go to the other side to find the destroyed village etc... to find out that it's still there and, in fact, people still live there.

That's not to say that atrocities don't happen -- they do. And we, as journalists, have an obligation to make sure that stories of human rights abuses get out, so that the world community can act to stop it from happening. This is a hard job, but straightforward.

What's less straightforward is to learn to judge whether a particular story merits coverage or not. I myself have been caught up in hysteria more than once and my editors were often able to catch me before I got into trouble. But when you're far from home, editors are more likely to trust your judgement, and, I'm sorry to say, I've put overblown stories into print.

Many local journalists I met while reporting often bought into the atrocity stories -- in fact, some even came right out and said that their job was to support the war effort, even if it meant fudging the truth a little bit. "Even if this particular atrocity isn't true, others are, because we know what those people are like." And any criticism of the war effort was seen as a deep affront to the people who had died fighting it -- including their colleagues in the news media.

I can understand that. It was hard to me to maintain my objectivity about Chechnya when a Chechen death squad killed a good friend of mine, a journalist. (This was before the war with Russia broke out.) But that doesn't mean that I would then run every horror story I heard of that involved Chechens.

So what do you do? You go back to the basics. You get as many facts as you can -- who, what, where, when, how. You can often tell that someone is making a story up by the fact that they get really shifty or upset when you ask for details. In particular, you ask for facts that you can confirm. Names of other witnesses, officials, dates, locations.

As a foreign journalist you're often in a position where you're able to go to the other side of the conflict to check things out, whereas local reporters might not be able to. You can check to see whether that particular village really was destroyed, or if it's still there and people are living there. You can check for signs of shelling, or bullet holes. You can talk to local international observers and medical personnel. If you don't have medical training, for example, you might have trouble telling a birth defect from a shrapnel wound or from deliberate torture. So be wary of accepting stories at face value (especially when someone asks for money as well) and do some digging before putting uncorroborated victims' acccounts into print.

Maria Trombly can be reached at 011-86-21-6387-7243 or by email at maria@trombly.com