Tag Archive for Journalism

How a career started

February 16, 2011 Starting out One comment
How did you get started as a freelancer?
This is a guest post by David Hague, editor of AusCam Online. If you want your clients to remember you, this story will tell you what you need to do. You can follow David on Twitter  - he’s @vbthedog

How did you get started as a freelancer?

Like so many, my life as a journo initially started by accident. With a father and elder brother being pro photographers, it was inevitable I would follow this hobby, and allied with my passion for all things motor sport, this was a perfect pairing.

One weekend in the mid-70s, a mutual friend of my brother and I who happened to work at Agfa managed to get his hands on some early release and therefore very rare 1000 ASA black and white film. Perfect for low light, this coincided with the weekend of the Australian Rally Championships so we loaded up the trusty Torana hatchback and proceeded to bash through the scrub south west of Perth from checkpoint to checkpoint following the likes of Colin Bond, Ross Dunkerton and Greg Carr, rattling off as many shots as we could. Cameras used were a Leica M2, Pentax KX and a Minolta SRT 101! The flashes were Metz wet cell battery packs.

After we had run out of film, our mate, who had contacts in The West Australian newspaper, suggested we go back there and get the shots processed. It was about 2am. Back in Perth, the sports editor saw the photos, offered to buy them on the spot as his staff journo hadn’t been able to make it. We had the results of the rally in so there was now a story for the morning edition – except there were no words.

It was one of the moments like you see in the movies where I swear everyone was looking at me! One hundred people or more it seemed. So I picked up a small portable typewriter and bashed out 500 words or so, picked up $100 for my trouble (we already had $100 for the photos) and suddenly my name was in print.

Thinking this was a good lurk, I rewrote the story about five times and sold it to various motor sport magazines around the country and this ended up in me being the WA correspondent on motor sport for most of the major magazines for quite a few years.

Deciding some formal training might be apt, I applied for – and was accepted – as a trainee under Howard Sattler who at the time was the editor of a relatively short lived Saturday newspaper owned by Robert Holmes a Court.

My jump from motor sport to consumer IT based journalism (I still do motor sport as a hobby) is a little less convoluted, with my interest piqued when as a Tandy Computer Centre manager in the late 70s. The Sunday Independent newspaper was getting no coverage of the just starting home computer boom, and the Sunday Times had a full time person, so I volunteered as a freelancer.

The rest is history!

Free Course – The Practice of Online Journalism

January 31, 2011 Business Tips, Starting out, Tools, Working One comment
practice-of-journalism

One of the great untapped resources, in my view, is the iTunesU. This is Apple’s initiative to get further education into the hands of as many people as possible. One course that I recently saw featured is “The Practice of Online Journalism”. It’s presented by The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and features 15 video lectures of between 40 and 70 minutes each.

I’ve not watched them all but this course is just one of a series on the practice of journalism with visual journalism, leadership and ethics among the various topics also covered.

They’re all free to download and can be watched on a PC, iPad or any video-capable iPod. To find them, open iTunes, click the iTunesU link at the top of the screen and search for Poynter.

Persistence – key to getting published

January 24, 2011 Getting Paid, Starting out, Working 2 comments
Four firemen doing flood relief in Victoria's west. Image Credit: Alison Aphrys - www.shewrites.com.au

Respected freelancer Alison Aprhys, pictured right, tells this story of persistence and self-belief.

I wanted to cover the Victorian floods but could not get a media outlet to commit to buying my images / stories, so I just drove to Horsham / Warracknabeal as an independent freelancer. Took gumboots, camera, laptop, sleeping bag and loads of determination. Met some amazing people,worked 16 hour days, got some good material. The result is that a US firefighting website has now commissioned me to write an article and supply images!

So go for it. Believe in yourself.

What a fantastic story. On those days when inspiration strikes but you can’t find an editor or other client who’ll commission your story I hope you remember Alison’s story.

Let’s quickly look at the lessons we can learn from Alison’s short vignette.

  1. Have the idea
  2. Work your contacts and see if they’ll take the story
  3. If you believe in the story, trust your instincts and do the work
  4. Look at alternatives for selling the story
  5. Do a great job

Four firemen doing flood relief in Victoria's west. Image Credit: Alison Aprhys - www.shewrites.com.au

It’s one of the great challenges of the freelance journalist. You’ve think you’ve got a great story but you can’t find an editor who’s prepared to take a chance that your sense for a story is right. Or that they won’t get something from someone else.

Doing what Alison did is a huge leap of faith. Alison believed that she had a great story. So she went out, did the hard work and gambled that she’s be able to sell the story.

Have you got the guts to do what Alison did and invest time and money on the self belief that you have a story worth telling? Let us know in the comments.

Codes of Ethics for journalists

January 4, 2011 Business Tips, Starting out, Working One comment
Got ethics?

The question of what sorts of behaviour and actions are acceptable is governed by something called ethics. For journalists, there are several places they can go for guidance on what is and isn’t ethical behaviour.

It’s a great idea for journalists to keep a copy of the code of ethics they work to handy and ensure that prospective clients are aware that you aren’t just flying by the seat of your pants and follow a set of rules when it comes to how you work.

I think every journalist ought to establish a personal Code of Ethics. Most of the time it won’t be needed but there are moments, in the heat of a story, where emotions and excitement might get the better of us. Thinking about how that might happen and how we might best react in those moments before they happen can help us to react appropriately and not in a way that will harm one of our most curitical attributes – our reputation..

To help out with thinking about those situations and what you should do, here are links to the Codes of Ethics for some journalist’s associations.

CountryOrganisationLink to Code of Ethics
AustraliaMedia, Entertainment and Arts Alliancewww.alliance.org.au/code-of-ethics.html
United States of AmericaSociety of Professional Journalistswww.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
EnglandNational Union of Journalistsmedia.gn.apc.org/nujcode.html

A journalist’s toolkit

December 23, 2010 Tools No comments

One topic of conversation that keeps coming up, over and over, between journalists is “what equipment do you use?”. Now remember, I mainly work as a technology writer so my kit is heavily titled in that direction.

Here’s my list.

Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch: This machine is over a year old now but I recently swapped the original hard drive out for an OWC solid state disk. This has given it a huge speed boost. I use the MacBook Pro when I’m travelling for more than two or three days.

iPad: I bought the iPad before its local release as I was able to sell a bunch of stories about it to publishers before all the other local writers had theirs. I wasn’t expecting it become a regular part of my kit but for business trips where I’m away for only a day or two it’s far lighter than the MacBook Pro and just as capable for writing a story, blogging, keeping up with email and the like. If I’m on a plane, I use to to watch movies and TV shows and read books using both iBooks and Kindle. I’ve also accessorised with the Rubata Keyboard Case from PADACS and Apple’s Camera Connection Kit.

iPhone: In case you’d missed it – I’m an Apple user. The iPhone is my phone, mobile diary and email system and entertainment system. When I’m in the car, it’s my GPS as I’ve stopped using my old TomTom unit as it was just another gadget. And the sound recorder, camera and video camera are great for when you need to capture a moment and don;t have the entire kit on hand.

Zoom H2: Zoom’s audio recorders are simply brilliant. It’s able to record to an SD card, making it a snap to import content into iTunes. The H2 can record using two separate microphones in either mono or stereo.

VoIP: As my office is separate to the rest of the house, getting a second phone line connected with Telstra was simply too hard and was going to cost too much. I was fortunate enough to win a VoIP package from MyNetFone and am very happy (easy to say when it’s free but the service really is very good). I’ve got a Cisco IP phone and pay as I go. I rarely spend more than $10 per month for all my calls.

Canon MP640 printer: When I last needed a printer my requirements were simple. I needed a multifunction that could print to CDs and DVDs, duplex, had two paper feeds and WiFi. The MP640 ticked all those boxes. It hasn’t missed a beat in over a year.

iMac 27-inch and Magic Trackpad: When I’m in my office, I like to have a big screen so that I can have my current work and a web browser open side by side. The iMac is perfect for this. I used to use a mouse but find the Magic Trackpad far more comfortable. It also uses less space on the desk and makes it easier to drag the mouse from one end of the large display to the other.

My office network: As my house and office are separate buildings, I had to set my network up woth two routers. One’s an older Linksys WRT310N and the other is a Netgear N600 that I modded with DD-WRT. I’ll post the full story of the LAN set up shortly but if you plan to move files between machones on your LAN you need to make sure you get a router thay supports 802.11n for wireless and Gigabit ethernet for cabled connections.

Storage: With the increasing storage capability of computers and the vast quantities of data it’s simply too risky to not have a properly considered storage and backup strategy. In lieu of that, I’ve cobbled together something that works for me. I have a Thecus N5200 NAS (network accessible storage) that can hold 4TB of data. That’s the main data repository. I also have a second NAS, a smaller DLink DNS-323. I have a scheduled task on my Thecus NAS that copies my iTunes library to the DNS-323 so that if one NAS dies i don;t lose my iTunes library as that represents a significant investment.

The iMac and MacBook Pro each have an external drive connected to them for Time Machine backups.

I also keep my current working files synced to Dropbox and iDisk. Yes – I’m paranoid about data loss.

Cameras:  I have three cameras I use regularly. For “serious” photography I have a Nikon D80 with 18-55 and 70-300 lenses and a SB-600 flash. Most of the time I use a Panasonic TZ10 as it can shoot great photos, has a manual mode and can capture excellent HD video. Camera number three is the iPhone.

Hardware I’ve stopped using: As a tech journalist, I often buy gear that I’ve reviewed that i think would fit my working life. Occasionally I buy something that I use for a while but falls out of use. One is my netbook. The iPad has replaced it.

The other is my video camera. It’s a great unit that shoots great video to tape but it’s not HD. I could replace it but the iPhone and TZ10 fill its purpose for me. If I was shooting professional video I might change my mind but that’s not something I currently do.

Software: Software is a very personal thing. What one person loves, another can loathe. But these are the apps I use just about every day.

Bean is a word processor for the Mac. Its free and gets rid of all the clutter that larger, commercial products include. As I file stories as plain text I like that it provides me with a word count and basic find/replace and spell check.

Saasu is a cloud-based accounts system. I use it for all my expensing, account managements, tax statements and invoicing.

Microsoft Office – I don’t use it often but as I often receive files in the Office formats I have to have it. Also, I sometimes do corporate work and I have to work with other Office users. I know Apple has iWork but I really can’t be bothered with the iWork to Office export process.

Parallels and VMware – From time to time I have to run Windows apps on my Macs. These programs let me run Windows within a virtual machine so I can run Windows on my Mac easily.

For FTP I have Filezilla on my MacBook Pro and Cyberduck on the iMac. I could use the same program on both but I like to share the love!

Evernote is the bomb for note taking and sharing. I can take notes on my iMac, MacBook Pro, iPad or iPhone and have them magically sync between devices over the cloud. It’s a must have application.

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