Irreverent approach to freelancing explains the need to break the rules

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, May/Jun 2004 by Weinberg, Steve

Irreverent approach to freelancing explains the need to break the rules

The year that I began my newspaper career as a salaried staff writer, I also began freelancing in earnest for magazines. Later in my newspaper reporting career, I also began writing books on the side. Eventually I left staff writing to freelance full time, selling a combination of magazine features, newspaper op-ed pieces, reviews for magazines and newspapers, fulllength books and even occasional story treatments for television documentaries.

While IRE has done its best to address freelancing skills in its publications, Web services and conference panels in the 25-plus years I have been involved with the organization, IRE cannot be all things to all journalists. Some groups exist solely to serve freelance writers, although without the investigative resources and training offered by IRE. For some of you, multiple memberships might be in order.

For those of you who are already part-time or full-time freelance journalists; those thinking about the possibility, wanting to grow as reporters/writers to supplement their income, or both; or those merely curious about the freelance life, I offer "The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success" by Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell. The publisher is Marion Street Press (www.marionstreetpress.com).

Neither Formichelli nor Burrell received a journalism school education, and neither is primarily an investigative reporter - making the usefulness of their book to IRE Journal readers all the more impressive.

[This review will not offer direction to readers hoping to publish a book. Although future articles will revisit this topic, for now, the best recent guides about breaking into bigtime book publishing are "The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers," by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead Books, 2000) and "Thinking Like Your Editor," by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunate (Norton, 2002).]

Formichelli and Burrell are not only informative, but also humorous and irreverent. Because so many investigative journalists are irreverent, the book's approach ought to be especially appealing. The approach is this: Formichelli and Burrell posit rule after rule, each of those rules representing the conventional wisdom. Then they explain why each rule ought to be broken more often than observed.

One piece of conventional wisdom they debunk early is especially important for readers of this review: It is not necessary to live in New York City to succeed as a freelancer.

Here is a small selection of additional advice from Formichelli and Burrell of special relevance to a significant portion of the IRE Journal readership:

* Magazine editors will be impressed by newspaper clips, as long as the pieces are well-reported and well-written. Ignore the conventional wisdom that magazine writers will automatically throw newspaper clips in the trash and fail to respond.

* It is not necessary to have connections to land an assignment at a first-rate magazine. Assigning editors are seeking compelling, appropriate ideas that are well-presented. Freelancing in many ways is the ultimate democracy; assigning editors care little, if at all, about whether the potential writer is white or black, female or male, young or old.

* It is not always wise to start at the bottom. Winning assignments from little-known or regional magazines is fine. But if a story idea is worthy of Esquire, send it to an appropriate editor there. just be prepared for a rejection because the odds are long for everybody who queries a magazine like Esquire with such high visibility and relatively good pay.

* Query letters (the sales pitch) can exceed one page as long as the topic is compelling. There is no such thing as an overly long query if every sentence is compelling.

* Follow up on queries if there is no reply within a reasonable time. Put another way, do not assume that silence means rejection. No journalist, freelancer or staff writer, should ever assume anything.

* If offered an assignment, suggest changing any unfair provisions in the contract. Contracts are not set in stone. If an editor replies that no previous writer has raised such objections, Formichelli and Burrell say, "You're probably not the first writer to stand up to him. second, if you are the first writer to ask him for contract changes, then he probably hasn't been an editor for very long."

Chapters on interviewing, using the Web and conducting original research will contain little that is new for experienced journalists. They are written largely for relative novices. Still, those chapters are excellent, and at the least might offer useful reminders.

Lots of books on the business of freelancing are dreadful, filled with warmed-over advice and/or clichés and/or information that violates my 35 years of experience with newspaper, magazine and book editors. Other than the Formichelli-Burrell book, the best recent publication I have seen is "The Freelance Success Book: Insider secrets for Selling Every Word You Write," by David Taylor (Peak Writing Press, 2003). Because Taylor has spent much of his career as an editor on the receiving end of queries, his perspective is different, in valuable ways, from that of Formichelli-Burrell. But he does not write as entertainingly, and is not as irreverent.