As many of you know, like many editors and journalists in 2009, I was the victim of this "Great Recession" in January and am now only partially employed and freelancing. And if you're a writer, you know that you can't just stop writing or else your head might pop off and your fingers cramp into unsightly claws until you shrivel up and die.
Thus, I started this blog as an online portfolio, a way to keep my skills keen, and, for the most part, as an outlet for that driving need to write. For the last eight months, I've sort of just been waiting for the economy to bounce back so that advertisers will once again get into bed with publishers and I can go back to doing what I do. However, I think we're all getting the picture that many things in publishing have changed for good, including our role as journalists.
What's an Editor to Do?
For one thing, I now see that, without an abundance of editing jobs available, it's my responsibility to find a way to apply my pretty specific skill set to another industry. Let's see: I can craft sentences and string them together to tell a story; I'm pretty handy with the Adobe suite of editing tools, including InDesign, InCopy and Photoshop; I can get people to talk to me and tell me their story...it's not exactly surgery or rocket science, but that's stuff I can work with, right?
As long as I can remain flexible and learn new skills, skills like simple HTML code, and SEO tactics, and marketing using social media--that's the key. Because one of the industries that is doing okay, and that demands my skill set is marketing. Marketing is one of the reasons why publishing is actually languishing. Marketers are rendering publishing redundant as they more often create content in-house rather than partner with the bloated publishing industry.
What marketers often lack, however, is the ability to create compelling content in a story form--custom content that holds a reader's attention. Go to
PR Newswire and check out how many press releases read like advertising copy and lose you after the third sentence. That's how many marketers write. What a journalist can do is suck a reader into a story and, before they know it, they've read a promo for Brand X.
Crossing over to the Dark Side? Maybe. But, times are tough.
How We Do
This is all food for thought, but I thought it may be helpful to share some of the free or inexpensive open source tools available online that I use every day because, even if you're not an out-of-work journalist, or struggling marketer--even if you're a professor, paid blogger, or beer rep--the world we live in is virtual.So I wake up in the morning and, like most of us, make some coffee, fire up my beloved netbook,
Lil Bit, and check out the news. (I first go to
BBC News-Americas because I strongly believe in reading about the country you're in via a news source from another country.)
Invariably, I'm inspired to share my thoughts on current events, so I log onto my blog account at
Typepad. Typepad is a simple and elegant blog service with outstanding customer service that costs less than $10 per month. I don't need a lot of bells and whistles, so it is perfect for my purposes.
Now that I've spouted off and my fingers are nice and limber, I need to make my copy compelling with a visual. Since I don't want to be slapped with an
IP infringement, I suck it up and go to
iStockphoto. There, I can purchase
a la carte photos for as little as $1 each. There are fantastic, high quality royalty-free image options submitted and sold by artists from all over the world, and even better, I can afford them. Within minutes, I've chosen an image, downloaded it, uploaded it to my story, and life is good.
Now, maybe I only want to use part of that image, or want to alter it in some way. Photoshop is pricey and takes up more memory than Lil Bit wants to surrender, so my absolute favorite photo editing site is
Picnik. With Picnik, I can't do layers and crazy-fancy stuff like with Photoshop, but I can do the basics, plus some really fun creative. Picnik is free (an upgrade to more options is only about $25 per
year) so check it out and play around. I'm obsessed with it and probably use it way more than necessary for even my personal photos.
Excuse Me While I Climb up on My Soapbox
So now I'm convinced I've written something brilliant that the world needs to see, and I want to draw attention to it.
Twitter is the fastest and simplest way to do that, but lo, the
URL that Typepad has assigned to my story involves its entire headline. That's often too long when Twitter limits me to 140 characters and I also want to include an explanation of what I'm sharing.
I need to somehow shorten the URL to make everything fit. Forget
TinyURL, the new kid in town is
Bit.ly. Bit.ly is magical. From a Web page, I simply click on the Bit.ly bookmark I have saved and, without having to cut and paste, Bit.ly automatically imports that Web page's headline and provides it along with the shortened URL.
Then, I have my Twitter account hooked up to my Bit.ly account (both free services) and all I have to do is click the "post" button, and Bit.ly pushes the headline and shortened URL to my Twitter account for me.
But What About the Visual?
Of course, I also have my Twitter account hooked up to my
Facebook account and anything I post to Twitter automatically updates my Facebook status. That doesn't include my sweet image that I painstakingly chose, legally purchased, and lovingly edited. So, my last step in self-promotion is I log onto Facebook and additionally post my Bit.ly-shortened URL to the "share links" option at the top of my profile, which allows me to include my image as a thumbnail and posts the whole shebang to my Wall to draw eyeballs.
Shazam!
Sure, this is all a bit narcissistic, but publishers, marketers, professors, bloggers, beer reps, and the rest of you out there playing Scrabble on Facebook, this all took me maybe 30 minutes, and can be applied to each and every one of your businesses and endeavors. Have fun with it!
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