Via Reuben Abraham

We all want to make more than a buck, we want our work to mean something. But to connect with editors who make the final decisions on what will appear in their publications and who will produce that content is no easy feat. Laurel Touby of Mediabistro.com has begun a new service that proposes to connect freelancers to those editors. There is a fee, of course. But should it work, it could shake up the way the business of journalism is conducted. Perhaps now, the cream will indeed rise to the top.

Freelance journalism

Spike seeks copy
Aug 5th 2004 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

A journalistic problem solved?

BEING a staff journalist is bad enough, with its brutal deadlines and brutal editors. As for being a freelance hack-well, a lucky few may be famous enough to pick and choose the best assignments and file at leisure, but most freelancers live a lonely life of constantly rejected story pitches in which brutalised copy counts as a triumph. And while there is many a newspaper or magazine editor who dreams of unearthing that freelance gem he truly believes is out there, most of the young (and not so young) hopefuls that phone constantly and fill his inbox cannot tell one end of a story from the other.

Thankfully, a solution to this wretched problem may now be at hand, thanks, inevitably, to the internet. After all, if the web can help two isolated hearts find love, or connect the owner of an unwanted garden gnome with someone keen to buy it, surely it can help an editor find the freelancer of his dreams-and vice versa.

Officially launched this week in New York, the Freelance Marketplace is an online forum where freelance journalists, photographers, illustrators and graphic designers can, they hope, network with editors. For a fee of
$14-19 a month or $149-175 a year, a freelancer can post a bio, details of his experience, and clips and other work samples. The site is not unlike dating websites such as Friendster and match.com, as the bios can
have a distinctly personal flavour. Some users have posted pictures of themselves, and one seemingly serious journalist has posted a picture of her dog.

Freelancers are ranked in terms of recent clippings and relevant experience. Most seem to be highly qualified-many of them are presumably the victims of recent cullings of staff jobs. Editors can search for contributors by region, experience and specialty. Ellen Piligian, a Detroit-based reporter, was approached to write a regional piece “out of the blue” by Seventeen Magazine soon after signing up.

The marketplace is the latest creation of Laurel Touby, a former reporter and (still) compulsive networker who, in the dotcom boom, founded Mediabistro, a website for media folk that now has 270,000 members and a much-used jobs bulletin board. Ms Touby, who says that Mediabistro made its first profit last year, expects 100,000 freelancers to join the site (www.mediabistro.com/fm) within two years. Her big challenge will be to get those brutal editors to take a look.

Copyright 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Freelance photographers at the New York Times are getting hit really where it hurts – their wallets. According to a New York Post article, photographers who work with the New York Times but are not on staff will be required to sign a freelance contract that borders on the ridiculous.

One disgusted photographer said that the new contract “demands that photographers relinquish their copyright, resale opportunities and entire take, without any added compensation.”

The American Society of Media Photographers and Editorial Photographers are fighting hard to bring some parity to a moribund dialogue between management and freelancers.

Quite frankly, the Gray Lady is shooting herself in the foot (no pun intended). Lower wages and total control of images (from copyright to resale) means the paper will likely drive good (or even great photographers) out of business and attract low-ballers (those who choose to sell their work rather than license their images for a rate far lower than the competition or the market really demands). Unless the paper is hiring photojournalists, any work submitted to the paper will now be of lesser quality and the veracity and credibility of the images published in the paper, in my opinion, will be suspect. When you have seasoned photographers who have some sense of ethics being effectively fired from their jobs only to be replaced by hacks, well, you know American journalism can expect more troubles ahead.

As an immigrant of sorts [I was born in NYC but grew up in India], with strong leanings to both the East Indian culture and the American way of life, I didn't, however, want to live a hyphenated existence.

Earlier this year, I signed on as the Image Editor for InTheFray a website run entirely by volunteers from different walks of life and in different parts of the country. The site's core mission is to tackle issues of identity and community in a diasporic milieu. While we may ping pong between terms such as “tossed salad” or “cup of soup” to describe the immigrant experience in America today, InTheFray attempts to help me make some sense of the various interactions and social relationships we maintain.

InTheFray needs your input, however. It seeks your writing and photography. And I am sending this call out to anybody who is interested in getting their work exhibited on a nationally known web site. While we may not be able to compensate you financially, the site does attract at least 10,000 unique visitors each month. That's a lot of eye balls, folks!

If you are interested in sending your work in, please first read our contributor policies posted here. This page also describes the four channels of the magazine — IDENTIFY, IMAGINE, INTERACT, and IMAGE — that accept content from contributors.

Each of these channels needs art and/or photographs for the stories they feature (usually about 1 photo/image for every 1,000 words). The IMAGE Channel, which is our visual arts section, features photo essays and other visual essays.

Please let me know whether you are more interested in contributing a photo essay to IMAGE or whether you would like to contribute photos on an as-needed basis for the other channels. If you're interested in contributing to IMAGE, please e-mail me, about your specific story ideas. If you are interested in contributing art and/or photos for the rest of our site, please contact Laura Pohl, our Art Director with your specific questions and ideas.

Rest assured while we are based in the US, InTheFray isn't an American-centric project. Currently on display, in the IMAGE channel, is a interesting photo essay on Tibetan exiles in Dhamasala, India.

Here are a couple of CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS worthy of your attention:

Monsoon Magazine is looking for “artwork, autobiographical sketches, essays, fiction, interviews, photography, poetry, reviews, and translations ranging from earthy to experimental.“

Catamaran Magazine seeks your “submissions of plays, poetry, short fiction, book and film reviews, essays, travelogues and photography. “

Morningchai.com, a site targeted to the Ismaili Community, is looking for freelancers and students to write for them.  Journalists looking to establish themselves by having their work published will be considered first. However, morningchai.com is open to ideas on just about anything as long as it relates to the Ismaili Community.
 
The community is largely established in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Seattle. Our goal is to profile Ismaili high achievers – from 8 to 80 – as well as provide links to our readers to Ismaili's in the mainstream news.
 
If interested, please contact morningchai.com publisher Zahir Karim