London QualityStreet Freelancers check out commissions on US newspapers

qualitystreet, a cooperative of london freelancers with an online self-help group, recently turned their attention to freelancing in the States, and mentioned the McClatchy stalwart, The Sacramento Bee. This text is excerpted from one of their threads, and the paper's little mascot (right) was penned by Walt Disney himself.
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Hey, the Bee is a rather venerable newspaper, publishing non-stop
since 1857 and winner of five Pulitzer prizes. There's a Fresno Bee
and Modesto Bee, too, and all are owned now by the McClatchy
company. Disney designed their logo back in 1943. If you imagine
that a newspaper office is a hive of activity, meant to create buzz
and stinging commentary, it's not such a weird name. (I came from
California to the UK, hence the nostalgia for the Bee)

Consider these names: The Unterrified Democrat (Linn, Missouri), The
Daily Boomerang (Laramie, Wyoming), the Birmingham Eccentric, the
Bloomington-Normal (Illinois) Pantagraph , The New Orleans Times-
Picayune

Freelancing for smaller US papers can be problematical...section
editors of community papers sometimes commission outsiders, but most
recycle wire copy or increasingly get outsourced to India (where
content providers reportedly earn just $7.50 or three quid per 1000
words!) Not all are accustomed to wiring payments, and can be
daunted by exchange rates and time differences. Beware the pre-dawn calls from Yankee intern factcheckers!)
Syndication of previously published features or analysis is probably
more feasible, especially with a bridging site like "Featurewell".

As for these contract clauses... Marie Claire used to make
surrendering all your syndication rights part of endorsing the
payment cheque. They refused to wire money into an account for that
reason. One problem with this is if a writer wants to gather up
farflung articles and publish a collection, all the rights must be
sorted out first. Very aggravating!

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Roughedge Krap Policy
To: About the papers formerly known as broadsheets

1) Well there is the Sacramento Bee which is a weird name for a local
paper.

My favourite - though UK not US - is still the Keswick Reminder.

Glenda Slags transmute to Wednesday Witches

Carol Sarler of The Independent lays it all out.
They're the Wednesday witches, the queens of mean – the female columnists from whom no woman is safe. But they all operate under a strict code of conduct, says one leading exponent. The earliest incarnation was Jean Rook (above) of the Daily Mail, who turned vitriolic back in the 70s.

On Wednesday morning the model Saskia Porter took a hefty slapping from the columnist Sue Carroll in the Daily Mirror. Porter had been outed for knocking eight years off her real age and, according to Carroll, this was "a crime against women". Over at The Sun, Jane Moore picked on the self-absorbed Lily Allen for sending "yesterday I had a runny poo, too-much-information missives" across Facebook.

Both, this week at least, were splendidly outdone by Allison Pearson in the Daily Mail, who amused herself with speculatively casting a new Dr Who sidekick. Not Charlotte Church: "She doesn't do deep space – only deep fried." Lily Cole? "Already looks like an alien." Sienna Miller? "She could go out with several boyfriends at once in parallel dimensions. So, no acting needed at all."

(Oh, go on: smile. You know you want to.)

And so the wheels of the "Wednesday witches" – a sobriquet attributed to Diana, Princess of Wales – trundle nicely along as women, gloriously paid for their contribution to newspaper sales, are horrid to other women.

Waspish gossip has always been a staple of female intercourse: Bette Davis, Maria Callas and Edith Piaf were all fangs and claws at the sniff of a rival, and while Dorothy Parker could snipe at the best of men, she reserved her more memorable jibes for women, as in the famous review of Katharine Hepburn: "She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B."

What is newer is the harnessing of the bitch to the public prints, a whole page at a time, with spleen to the fore. Jean Rook, the Daily Express inspiration for Private Eye's "Glenda Slagg", kicked it off in the early Seventies, closely followed by Lynda Lee-Potter in the Daily Mail (both emerged, perhaps not coincidentally, during the infancy of contemporary feminism), and now there is not a newspaper that dares publish without.

The qualities like to pretend they are above it but they are not: Catherine Bennett (Observer), Libby Purves (Times), Vicki Woods (Telegraph), and India Knight (Sunday Times) are all perfectly capable of an elegant spear to a fellow breast, while brave is the woman who steps on the tetchy toes of Janet Street-Porter of this parish.

Courtesy of a greater directness of language, however, it is the tabloid queens of mean who tend to define the genre – one in which my own tour of duty, divided between the Sunday People and the Daily Express, lasted 12 years until 2005 and produced not a shred of remorse or regret.

When friends asked, how could you?, the answer was, "really rather easily". Furthermore: the misconceptions were, and continue to be, theirs not mine.

The first is that we are but puppets of editors, usually male, whom we seek to please by manufacturing the invective they demand. In fact, for invective to work it has to be real; fraudulent spite shows from a mile. So it is actually the other way around: editors hire those who are already choleric and simply seeking an outlet for it.

The second misconception is that we tip ordure only over women, when we are just as critical of erring men. The false impression is created because only we weigh in against women at all; male columnists know that for them to do so is a no-no across the political spectrum – to the right it is "unchivalrous", to the left it is "sexist". Almost entirely in our hands, therefore, girl-bashing becomes that for which we are noted.

The third, and the most important, misconception is that no woman is safe from our scrutiny. The truth is that our targets are carefully selected and that there are many women granted immunity by unspoken consensus. But to understand how that works requires a recognition of the most defining characteristic shared by these women writers: their age.

This is not peculiar to the female of the trade. It is a rule of Fleet Street's thumb that a fully-rounded journalistic career is divided into two parts: one spent discovering the world, often by reporting, and the other spent, only later when thus armed, trying to make sense of it. This is why there is no worthwhile columnist of either sex under the age of at least 40 and often a good 20 years more.

So when you take that general rule and apply it specifically to a woman columnist of the early 21st century, you know exactly who you are up against: one who has, as Jean Rook proudly claimed, "clawed and scrambled" her way up, partly because her era decreed that she had to and partly because – maybe fancifully – she saw herself as a trailblazer.

The women she likes, not surprisingly, are those she perceives as comrades in pluck: the strong, the no-nonsense and the hard-working. You don't, therefore, often read her sniping at Dolly Parton or Princess Anne; even Joan Collins gets the "national treasure" treatment. And it is noteworthy that Charlotte Church went unscathed when she worked hard, but felt the barbs once she slacked and became silly.

Useless, mindless celebrity may be admired on other pages of the same newspaper but, within the dizzy pluralism that governs the tabloid press, it cuts no ice on ours.

My own bitch-fest was at its peak during the era of the Spice Girls and my venom was entirely genuine. I had a daughter and a serious, grave fear that her role model would not be her tough old boot of a working mother but some soppy, vapid dolt like Victoria Beckham, to whom – then as now – I have never given an inch.

As for Heather Bloody Mills McCartney: rich by dodgy men, famous by unwise marriage and no proven merit beyond, she was ripe for the picking on. Her "achievements" were a throwback to times from which we like to think we led the escape – which may be untrue, unfair and unkind, but nonetheless she never stood a chance. I do not recall ever discussing her with other women columnists, though most of us know each other; still, as one, without meeting her (certainly not!) we unleashed the savagery.

It is, I concede, a power open to abuse and mistake. Lynda Lee-Potter once had a pop at Mo Mowlam for "letting herself go" – although no hypocrite she; Lynda herself was immaculate – only to discover that the offending puffiness was due to treatment for a brain tumour. Mo forgave her; poor Lynda went to her grave, in 2004, never forgiving herself.

On balance, however, and still unrepentant for my own part in the vitriol, I would hugely miss it if it stopped. A world where women's behaviour is monitored, policed and judged by the values of Misses Carroll, Moore and Pearson might well be imperfect. But for the majority of women – better known here as readers – it could be an awful lot worse.

tales of commissioning editors..

Chris Wheal, UK freelancer extraordinaire, reminisces about Fleet Street's commissioning editors:

I honestly worked on Accountancy Age once with a Loveday Cumming.
There was another sub with the surname Knight-Rider and I was asked
to step in help sub (because I could and knew Quark) when the chief
sub phoned in sick. When they said it was because he had dislocated
her arm putting her bra on, I just assumed that, as the new
freelance, I was the butt of all the jokes and none of it was to be
believed. But sure enough she turned up the next day with her arm in
a sling and it had all been true.
Oh happy days.

Jemima Lewis on Brit hacks vs supine Yank journos

Journalists in this country are despised, and we know it. Indeed, we embrace our lowly status with a perverse, distinctly British pride: we call ourselves "hacks", lest anyone should think we take ourselves seriously, and delight in Fleet Street legends of debauchery and low cunning. British journalism - both the profession and the end product - is tough, unscrupulous and, at its best, riotously good fun.

In America, different standards prevail. When I went to work at a current affairs magazine in New York a couple of years ago, my editor warned me that I was in for a culture shock. "American journalists," he said, "believe they belong to a kind of priesthood. Ever since Watergate, we have seen ourselves as guardians of the truth. That," he added ruefully, "is why our newspapers are so boring."

Until you have tried ingesting The New York Times with your breakfast, you do not know the meaning of ennui. Nicknamed the Grey Lady - as a term of endearment - and boasting the priggish motto "All the news that's fit to print", it is the sine qua non of sober, morally upright journalism. And this respectability is its greatest weakness: it is far too polite to be subversive.

When President Bush was making the case for the invasion of Iraq, The New York Times - supposedly a fierce critic of this administration - swallowed the White House propaganda as if it were medicine from Mary Poppins. As it later admitted in a hand-wringing editorial, it simply accepted what it was told about WMD, because it came from "official" sources.

So did some in the British press - but there were at least plenty of sceptical, irreverent and downright belligerent voices making themselves heard. Our broadcast media, too, acquitted themselves dispassionately - at least by contrast with the feel-good patriotism that saturated the American TV news. There is a thin line between respectable and supine, and American journalism has settled on the wrong side. Our own press is no less obsessed with celebrities, but we specialise - too much so, you might think - in tearing them down. In America, to be famous is to be worshipped unquestioningly. Hollywood stars demand copy approval, and get it - which is why you will never read an interesting celebrity interview in an American magazine.
from the Independent