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| Volume 46, Number 1, Spring/Summer 1998 |
by Tabitha M. Powledge
The NASW Freelance Committee's long dreamed-of member survey is beginning to look as if it's actually going to happen. In fact, to make it up to you for our late start, we're doing TWO surveys.
Plan 1 is for an association-wide census of what NASW members do for a living: how many are full time freelances, how many have day jobs and freelance on the side, what percentage of income comes from freelancing, what kinds of freelancing we do (corporate, PR, "real" journalism, and all the contentious permutations thereof). We haven't figured out the best way to do the survey as of this writing, but will have made progress, serious progress, by the time you read this. Serious. Progress.
We also plan to begin building a database that will describe
who pays what and how specific clients treat their freelances.
This idea is borrowed, flagrantly but respectfully, from the American
Society of Journalists and Authors, which for many years has gathered
and published data on how much a magazine pays, whether it's slow-pay
(or even no-pay), and the degree of
suffering freelances must endure during the editing process.
Joel Shurkin, who heads the NASW freelance committee, notes, "It
will take a few years to build up a useful database, but once
it gets going, every freelance in the association will benefit
greatly."
The freelance committee has recently added several members.
The full roster now comprises Joseph Alper, Beryl Lieff Benderly,
Eric Bobinsky, Kathryn S. Brown, Ira Flatow, Stephen Hart, Mary
Knudson, Brian Lavendel, Mary Nucci, Tabitha M. Powledge, James
Shreeve, and chair Joel N. Shurkin. We're trying to look after
your interests, so e-mail any of us to tell us
what they are.
Despite all you cynics and naysayers, it seems that a draft NASW constitution is finally in existence, well ahead of the millennium. It appears on p. 23 of this issue and of course on the web site, www.nasw.org.
The NASW board shared some earlier drafts with the freelance committee and asked for comment. Which we supplied with, ummm, gusto. The freelance committee's communal commentary on the penultimate draft was hammered out, and I do mean hammered, by the heroic, and I do mean heroic, struggles of Mary Knudson and Kathryn Brown. They merit a champagne toast from all freelances, but probably won't get it.
As I write I haven't seen the latest draft of the constitution, so for once have nothing to say about it. At this time. (Mystified? Catch up by consulting this column in the last issue of SW, Winter 1997-98, p. 18. Or on the web site.)
But as you ponder the draft, you might also reflect on these
significant stats, kindly supplied to the freelance committee
by the indispensable Keeper of the Seals, Diane McGurgan.
Of the 1950 members of NASW as of June, 1998, 724 (37%) are freelances,
active and associate. Of the 1027 active members, 523 (just
under 51%) are freelances. Of the 923 associate
members, 201 (almost 22%) are freelances.
Do you know any full-time freelances who make a living writing only books and articles? Probably not. Nor is it news that periodicals friendly to pieces on medicine and (particularly) science have been on the wane for some years. As I began to write this came the announcement that two more were headed for the Great Newsstand in the Sky: Byte, pioneer pub of the computer era, and Earth, specialist in rocky topics like geology and paleontology. I mourn Earth in particular, since a feature of mine died with it.
Yet another reminder that we all need to find other kinds of employers too. Freelance Kathryn S. Brown organized such an opportunity at the February NASW workshops in Philadelphia, bringing together several people who buy our services, sometimes for quite decent pay.
A last-minute addition to the program was freelance Stephen Hart, who conveyed amazing news of an authentic medical breakthrough: a web site startup that planned to pay a respectable $1 per word for articles that are, by web-site standards, long--up to 1000 words. Seattle-based OnHealth.com has since hired a more-than-respectable staff that includes our own David Ansley as medical editor, and is set for formal launch around the time you read this: www.onhealth.com.
"OnHealth.com is always looking for new ideas for short features and explainers about consumer health issues," David wrote in a June update. "We focus much more on current health choices than on current research, and we've got the usual journals pretty well covered. What will get our attention are stories we've never heard before, those great little gems that no one else has noticed, or insightful new angles on familiar topics. Go back and check those research breakthroughs you covered three years ago and see whether they've reached the bedside yet. We'll pay in the neighborhood of $1 a word for pieces that run 750 to 1000 words." David Ansley, dansley@onhealth.com.
We wish OnHealth.com well, but. The freelance committee learned that some of the contracts OnHealth was offering freelances in its early days contained some pernicious provisions. These included the ubiquitous (but objectionable) demand for all rights on a work-for-hire basis, and a couple of odd requirements, such as the right to use the writer's sobriquet--yes, apparently they teach that pretentious term in law school--for advertising. In perpetuity.
OnHealth has been willing to change provisions of its contract(s) for freelances savvy enough to ask for them, and the freelance committee is hoping the company will alter its practices more generally. By the time you read this, the ruckus may have been resolved.
But you can't follow the OnHealth.com story--and many other topics that affect your work and your income--unless you subscribe to NASW's freelance mailing list. Yes, mailing lists can drive you bananas, and they eat up time even when you delete the vapid chit-chat unread. But e-mail has given freelances a completely new kind of power. We can very quickly spread the word about the latest publishing indignity, and we can respond in numbers--effectively--to an issue. Mailing lists work.
The freelance list is not voluminous (except in a crisis, and then you won't mind). And since we're all self-employed, it's relatively prattle-free. Unlike the NASW Talk mailing list, which is open to anyone, the freelance list is available only to NASW members. It's not completely private because no e-mail is completely private. But because the freelance mailing list archives are also open only to members, and are not indexed by any of the search engines, we have a fair amount of freedom to exchange information about the Bad Guys--and even the occasional Good Guy--in our professional lives. If you're not on the list, you're crippling your business. To subscribe, send a message to majordomo@nasw.org with the following as the text: subscribe nasw-freelance.
Meanwhile, back at the February workshop:
The other Washington--DC--is a terrific locale for science
writers. One of the reasons is the National Academy of Sciences
and its associated organizations, which issue a steady stream
of reports, conference summaries, press releases, and studies,
most of them written by freelances. Barbara Rice, deputy director
of NAS's Office of News and Public Information, described a huge
range of NAS opportunities that include copyediting, proofreading,
substantive editing and writing, turning meeting
transcripts into summaries, even writing for children. Most
of these require quick turnaround, so NAS prefers to work with
freelances in and around Washington.
Of course you know all about what NAS does because you're a science writer, right? But it would still be useful to poke around its web site before making your approach: www.nas.edu. Then send her TWO sets of the following: a cover letter describing how you'll fit in, three professional references, your r‚sum‚, and some writing samples. Barbara Rice, 202-334-2138 (news office), 202-334-1577 (her line), brice@nas.edu.
Susan Bro, senior vice president and director of Health Care Practice at Cohn & Wolfe, a Chicago public relations agency, said her company's writing needs are very diverse. They range from technical material for researchers to words-of-one-syllable for consumers, and include press kit material, coverage of medical symposia, and writing white papers and trade journal articles. Writing pays $35-$50 per hour, sometimes more, copyediting $20-$35 per hour, and proofreading $1.50 per page.
Cohn & Wolfe clients include pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and companies in the diagnostics, biotech, and food and nutrition industries, plus some Washington assignments involving regulatory work in connection with the Food & Drug Administration. Susan Bro, 1 E. Wacker Dr., Chicago, IL, 60601, 312-329-7654, susan_bro@cohnwolfe.com.
If you harbor the hope that the book business is less of a shambles than it has recently seemed, get in touch with Michelle Julet, acquisitions editor at W.H. Freeman. Freeman is sister company to Scientific American and publisher of the Scientific American Library and other books. For its textbooks, it uses freelance embellishments--vignettes, profiles, and other sidebars--to give the text more immediacy for students. It also needs freelance developmental editors and copyeditors, and for its trade books uses co-authors and freelances to massage manuscripts and help authors shape and plan their works. Pay ranges between $35-$50 per hour. Send her your resume‚ and writing samples.
Julet said Freeman is also expanding its trade book list so
it's looking for books about science, about the discovery process,
and about how scientific discoveries have shaped the world.
She wants writers to come up with their own ideas, and emphasized
that most of their books now include multimedia components.
Proposals should contain a vision statement
(including information on competitive books), an annotated table
of contents, sample chapters, and your resume. Michelle
Julet, mrjulet@whfreeman.com.
ScienceNOW--Science
magazine's acronym for News on the Web--uses about 30 briefs per
week, 80% of them written by freelances, according to editor Erik
Stokstad. Topics are the usual: research news, funding,
policy, legislation, and scientific events. He is saturated
with molecular biology and genetics; wants physics, geology, and
organismal biology. ScienceNOW
can be sampled free for a week at www.sciencenow.org/sample.
Stokstad acknowledged that it's formula writing with lead time of just a day or two, fast turnaround, and payment of only $150 for the usual brief of 350 words. If you'd like to give it a try anyway, snailmail clips and your resume, e-mail him that they are on the way, and he will assign a tryout brief. Or pitch an original idea by e-mail; a likely source for a successful pitch is the current or forthcoming issue of a second-tier journal. The pitch should include the first graph, and "make that first sentence really interesting." Oh pooh. You'll have to peddle those humdrum first sentences elsewhere. Erik Stokstad, 202-326-6714 between 10 and 12 (Eastern), estoksta@aaas.org.
Yes, there are treasures on the Internet. If you could just find them. Even swell search tools like Yahoo and Alta Vista provide only partialcoverage of web sites.
Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles, of the NEC Research Institute
in Princeton, assigned some numbers to this frustrating reality
in a Science article published April 3, 1998 (280:98-100)
"No single engine indexes more than about one-third of the
'indexable Web,' the coverage of the six engines investigated
varies by an order of magnitude, and combining the results of
the six engines yields about 3.5 times as many documents on average
as compared with the results from only one engine," they
said. In hundreds of trial searches conducted in December
1997, Lawrence and Giles estimated that HotBot provided the most
coverage, but even it captured only 57.5%. Much-praised Alta Vista
was second with 46.5% coverage, and poor Lycos
limped in last with 4.4%. (The others were Northern Light,
32.9; Excite, 23.1; and Infoseek, 16.5.)
What you need are search engines that collect the findings
of several search engines at once. What you need are metasearchers.
For a year or so I've been using Metacrawler (www.metacrawler.com)
and regularly turning up sites missed by individual engines.
But I recently took a look at a few of the other metasearchers.
Any one of them will probably do a better job of finding sites
containing your keyword(s) than a single search engine will.
(If top-ranked HotBot is your fav, however, you're on your own;
none of them can use it.)
Whether the additional sites you find will be worthwhile is another matter; metasearching naturally takes more time than a single search engine, and the additional sites may not always be relevant. But sometimes they're close to brilliant.
www.inference.com Inference FIND ("the Intelligent Fast Parallel Web Search") lets you limit your search time (I chose 30 seconds), which helps keep the number of hits manageable. And it organizes the results geographically (US first, then Europe and Australia) and by type of sponsoring organization: commercial, educational institutions, non-profits, etc. That's a help when seeking information that is both technical and trustworthy, because .edu sites are often the best place to start. Each hit lists only the first line of a site, often a single uninformative word--Health, Finance, mao, and INFATUATION! are examples from my search--and gives no URL, so there's little point in printing the search for later study.
www.profusion.com I haven't see their review, but ProFusion proudly proclaims that it was an Editor's Choice at PC Magazine. ProFusion's strength is the options it gives you, especially the option of choosing from among several search engines (Alta Vista, InfoSeek, Open Text, Excite, Lycos, WebCrawler, Magellan, and Yahoo) or letting the program chose, for example the best three or the fastest three. (How does it know? Got me.) It also permits Boolean searches with the engines that can handle them. ProFusion eliminates duplicate results and assigns the remainder a numerical ranking. For each hit it lists the first line/headline, the URL, and a one-line "summary" that in most cases appears to be the first line of text.
www.dogpile.com Whoever named Dogpile presumably didn't esteem its abilities. But I do. Dogpile found several unique sites containing my keywords, ones the other metasearchers had ignored. Many of these were New Age and alternative medicine web sites, but for my topic a few were quite useful. I suspect that's because in addition to using several of the major search engines, Dogpile also employs more obscure ones. Ever heard of Thunderstone?
There are several other metasearch engines; I'll explore some
one of these days and maybe write about them here. What
the world needs is a complete directory of metasearchers, with
links. I haven't found one yet; if you have, PLEASE e-mail
the URL. In addition to subject guides and single search
engines, the first page of the New York Times Navigator (a directory
of 'Net resources) links to a few metasearchers: www.nytimes.com/library/tech/reference/cynavi.html,
or use the link on the
Technology section home page, which you can get to via the Contents
page.
And BTW, the Times now keeps its Tuesday science section posted for a week. What a relief; now you can go back to SCUBA diving on Tuesdays.
A metasearcher will probably yield more hits on your keywords than a single search engine, but it also takes a lot more time to use one and sort through its finds. What the world truly needs are inexpensive electronic assistants that will do some of this scut work while you're polishing that really interesting first sentence for Erik Stokstad. We've been hearing about such intelligent agents for years; now some actually exist.
To use a search engine or a metasearcher, you must go to its site to enter your queries. By contrast, the robot searchers are programs that live on your computer and take their orders only from you.
Or so they claim. I have yet to try any. Further investigations are on my ToDo list, but at the moment I have neither the time nor the fortitude to face the task: a survey of what's available, downloading my choice through the several tries it usually takes with a dialup connection, figuring out how the program works despite the wretched documentation, coping with the havoc it wreaks on other programs--you know, the usual process of installing any new program.
You are doubtless made of sterner stuff. So here are a couple of places to start:
www.botspot.com is a compendium of lore on intelligent agents, much of it pretty basic and intelligible to nongeeks. It describes differences among kinds of agents and reviews several of them.
PC World, July 1998 contains brief reviews of
a few search agents beginning on p. 178, part of a large feature
about web browser add-ons that begins on p. 171. The search
agents described (which PC World, muddlingly, calls metasearchers)
are all shareware (free trial and then if you like it, you pay,
usually about $25 or $30). It is said that all the programs
can be downloaded (yeah, right) from www.fileworld.com.
Let us know how you fare.
Still More Tools: Back To Basics
The artificial intelligence people appear to have a few problems
left to solve before they duplicate the human brain, so at the
moment metasearchers and robot agents still need us to tell them
what to do. Which means we all should brush up our search
techniques from time to time. One easy way is The Mining
Co.'s web search guide, which has recently begun a series of
features on searching: websearch.miningco.com.