It essentially boiled down to “teach yourself.” That’s nothing new for freelancers. But doing all the research to find out what we need to get started and where to find it – that can be a real time-suck, assuming you can even find this information. And that’s what was so valuable about Hernandez’ presentation. In one hour, he ticked off his recommendations of audio and video equipment as well as software programs we’d need to get started. All of it is geared for beginners and carries a price freelancers can afford – most of the equipment is under $200 and much of the software is free. He recommended websites where we could learn the basics. He pointed us to sources of audio, video and still images to illustrate our stories.

Many of us were amazed at how magnanimously he shared his knowledge. With Hernandez’ permission, I’ll continue in that spirit and “pay it forward” by passing on some of the golden nuggets.

Pocket video cam: Kodak Zi8

Low-cost tripod for video cam: Gorillapod

Digital audio recorder: Edirol R-09HR

Microphone: Sennheiser MD-42

Produce a slideshow with sound: Soundslides

Edit your sound files: Audacity

Edit your video: YouTube’s recently-launched online video editor

Illustrate your stories with maps: Umapper

Create timelines for your stories: Dipity or VuVox

Find public domain clips of audio, music, video or still images: Internet Archive, Audiojungle, Creative Commons

Create graphs, charts, word clouds and other types of visualizations: Many Eyes

Best site for online tutorials: Lynda.com

Get tips on online storytelling from Ira Glass on YouTube

Useful websites on digital journalism: 10,000 Words, Interactive Narratives and The Poynter Institute’s News University

That was the happy message at the “Future of Freelancing” conference held last week at Stanford University. Several sessions served to inspire the 120-plus mid-career freelancers in attendance, telling us to stay brave and persistent in pursuing our craft. I was heartened by a panel of assigning editors from Popular Science, The Washington Post, Wired and The New Yorker, as they talked about the wonders of long-form journalism, a “crying need for narrative” and their hunger for new ideas from freelancers.

Everything else, however, is changing fast: the platform on which we publish our stories, the tools we use to tell our stories, and who controls how we tell those stories and to whom. While the changes are daunting at best, for freelancers they can be an opportunity to become the vanguard of a new age of journalism.

It’s news to nobody that publishing platforms are changing. While paper isn’t going away, other platforms have proliferated. The Web is already as popular as paper, for reading short items at least. The e-reader and iPad are becoming increasingly popular as ways to deliver news and magazine stories. Writers need to be on all these platforms, or they’ll miss part of their potential audience.

As these platforms change, they open up new ways to tell our stories. Ways that we should all learn. Although the editors at most sessions wouldn’t go so far as to say they’d pick a freelancer with video and audio skills over one with just writing skills – all other things being equal – it was clear to me that writers without audio and video in their toolbox will limit their opportunities. The most practical and useful session of the conference was given by Richard Koci Hernandez, a Ford Foundation Multimedia Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, who inspired us with his belief that today “is the golden age of storytelling,” excited us with the prospect of “reaching a global audience with one click” and gave us practical advice on how to acquire audio and video skills.

Finally, the old gatekeepers of publishing are losing their grip on the creative product. Remember the term “disintermediation,” which was popular in the 1990s when the Web had just burst onto the scene? It’s gaining speed in publishing. Authors are publishing books themselves rather than going through traditional channels. Why can’t journalists publish their stories directly on the Kindle? Journalist Damon Brown recently published a guide to the iPad on the Kindle, for example. It’s priced at $1.99.

For those journalists with an entrepreneurial bent, in particular, the future could be interesting indeed. This conference was a one-time deal, the project of Christine Larson, a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. She deserves an award for having the idea and pulling it off. We freelancers – indeed all journalists – need more conferences like this. I hope the immense amount of positive feedback I heard at the conference turns into action by all attendees to make sure we get them.

I’m convinced it does. But it’s going to be so different from what we’re used to that we aren’t even capable of conceiving it yet. A source for one of my stories on digital publishing points out that when the automobile first came out, people called it the horseless carriage. The only way they could define these early cars was by relating them to a familiar mode of transportation. That’s the kind of disconnect we have in the publishing business. The whole world has changed, and we don’t understand the new world well enough yet to see where and how we’ll fit in. And many of us are terrified that we are selling buggy whips.

The terror has been building steadily this year. A couple of months ago, I participated in a lively LinkedIn discussion. The thread was started by a post by freelance colleague Polly Traylor, who lamented the state of the freelance business on her blog. It didn’t take long for many of us to chime in – and the opinions ranged from: it’s a brand new world and “those who learn to adapt and embrace the change may actually find a lot of opportunity in it” to “freelance journalism is dead” and all that’s left to do is “put fresh flowers on its grave.” (You can read the discussion here.)

It’s clear that no one – including the biggest media companies – has a clue. Consider these two news reports from just this week. First, News Corp. announced strategic moves toward its promised strategy of charging readers for online content. It bought Skiff LLC , which makes an e-reader and a digital publishing platform. News Corp. also invested in Journalism Online, a startup by Steven Brill and other media executives that aims to offer a way for publishers to charge readers for online news.

In contrast, Forbes.com is going in the other direction, apparently planning to use thousands of unpaid contributors instead of professional journalists, according to a report by Paul Carr on TechCrunch. At a recent staff meeting Lewis Dvorkin, who oversees Forbes editorial, said that “Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent,” according to Carr. As my colleague Howard Baldwin has pointed out, that comment makes us freelancers feel like we belong in a museum. (Getting old is a theme for Howard. See his blog, “Middle-Age Cranky.”)

Meanwhile, social media consultant Paul Gillin recently passed along this trailer to an upcoming documentary, “Fit to Print,” on the dying news business. While melodramatic, what this clip does not exaggerate is the level of fear among professional journalists.

It’s the end of the journalism world as we know it. The big question is: what’s next? I hope this conference gives me at least some possible answers. Tune in next week to find out.

The fact that manufacturing jobs are moving offshore is old news. On close examination, however, the BLS statistics indicate a flight of high-level jobs. Not only research and design engineering, but also top management functions, are leaving the country. In fact, in the management category of semiconductor and electronic component manufacturing, the BLS projects a 35-percent loss in the number of jobs. For chief executive officers in particular, the projection is 41 percent.

Some will quibble about how the BLS arrives at this forecast, but anecdotal information from a few executive recruiters backs up the trend. Tim O’Shea, group leader for the semiconductor industry practice at Heidrick & Struggles, has clients asking him to find executives willing to move offshore. “Management is being displaced,” agrees Al Delattre, global market managing director of technology at Korn/Ferry International.

The recruiters are alarmed about the trend. The semiconductor industry warns that the United States is losing its competitiveness. My livelihood is threatened. The industry that I’ve covered for 25 years might disappear from this country, taking with it a lot of the trade and technical publications that are my customers.

But if you take out the jingoism and think in terms of pure capitalism, it all makes perfect sense. Twenty years ago, manufacturing jobs moved to places where costs were lower and labor plentiful. Now, it looks like knowledge workers are going through the same transition. Anyone who’s read Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat” shouldn’t be surprised. The Internet and telecommunications technology make it possible to do many types of knowledge work from anywhere, so knowledge workers in low-cost areas are going to get a good portion of these jobs. Recognizing this, companies are starting to shift their knowledge workforce, not only by hiring offshore workers, but also by moving their current workers to low-cost regions. Last April, for example, I reported on IBM’s Project Match, whereby the company offered to hire laid-off North American workers for jobs in India and other low-cost countries.

The flight of U.S. executives will continue. After all, how many good reasons can you think of for keeping these executives in the United States? Most of the semiconductor industry’s customers are in Asia. Even if the CEO lives in the States, he spends most of his time traveling to visit customers, business partners and suppliers. Thanks to Wall Street’s meltdown, American finance is increasingly owned by foreigners. Plus, as semiconductor industry lobbyists love to point out, U.S. tax law and regulations make this country a less and less attractive place for business. In fact, one recruiter tells me that the executives of at least one chip company are thinking about moving its headquarters to Singapore because of the high costs of being a U.S.-based public corporation.

Maybe I should move, too. From a business point of view, there’s no reason to stay in this country. It’s not like I have to report to some green-eye-shaded editor wielding a pencil and shouting at the typesetter. I already work with all my clients via the phone, e-mail and Internet. Less and less of my work is actually printed on paper in a factory. It’s all online. U.S. newspapers and news agencies already outsource some of their journalism work to India. To remain competitive, I should move to a low-tax nation in a good climate with excellent Internet and telecommunications service.

The world is changing – quickly and dramatically. I don’t think there’s any stopping this. Businesses are recognizing this. Journalists, accountants and x-ray technicians are recognizing this. Government and industry leaders around the world would do well to recognize these forces and work with them, rather than raising fears and fomenting unrest about the offshoring of American jobs.

That’s the deductible on the health insurance plan that I buy through the State of Maryland. You see, I have personal experience with a “public option,” and not by choice. When I went out on my own as a freelance writer, I could not buy private health insurance. It’s not that I could not afford it. It’s that no private insurer would sell me a policy. At any price.

No, I don’t have a terminal disease. I’ve never had cancer. Don’t have HIV. Or a heart condition. Or even high blood pressure. (For some reason, it’s incredibly low. A nurse once asked me if I was dead.) However, like anyone who’s been on the planet awhile, I do have a few conditions, none of which I consider particularly serious. But apparently the arthritis that I was diagnosed with in my mid 40s – just a few months before I left my job to freelance full time – is enough to make me a leper in the world of private health insurance. No one would touch me.

Maryland is one of 35 states that maintain “high-risk pools” for people who are denied private coverage. The premiums are typically higher than private insurance, unless you fall below a certain income, at which point the rates are partially subsidized. The system has worked well for me so far. I pay my premiums and also contribute regularly to a health savings account, which I can tap into to pay for my own healthcare costs up to the amount of the deductible. Because I pay out of my own pocket, I make more careful choices about what healthcare services to use. I’ve found some helpful sites on the Web (like http://www.healthcarebluebook.com) that tell me what the going rate is for certain services, like x-rays.

I’m grateful, and lucky, that Maryland has such a plan. Freelancers in states without high-risk pools have tough choices. They could become a part-time barista at Starbucks, a company that provides insurance even to part-time employees. They could change their marital or dependency status. (Recently, a friend’s 23-year-old daughter left a job and thought she would buy private insurance, only to find that – because of a melanoma removed from her leg 10 years ago – she was denied. She and her boyfriend moved up the wedding by a year so she could get onto his policy.) They could return to the full-time, traditional workforce.  Or, if they are healthy and feel lucky, they could risk going without insurance.

Whether through a state-run program or by manipulating the private system, people like us are getting by, at least some of us are. Anti-reform zealots complain about the government rationing healthcare. The fact is, healthcare is already rationed – by big companies whose obligation is to make profits, not protect the health of citizens. If we don’t get meaningful reform now, we will in a few years, as a larger percent of the population experiences the arbitrariness and unfairness of the current system in America.

How does a freelancer plan for disasters? For years, I simply prayed they wouldn’t happen and scrambled when they did. But as I’ve wrestled with the wrath of nature, spotty utility service and just plain rotten luck, I’ve taped together a few safety nets. They won’t impress the experts, but they don’t cost much and so far have been reasonably effective.

Power outages. I’m on a weak part of the grid, so my power goes out on a regular basis, sometimes for no apparent reason. I have my PC and office equipment on an APC surge-protected uninterruptible power supply that cost less than $100. It protects my PC when the power flicks on and off. It provides backup power to keep everything running for 20 minutes after the electricity stops, then shuts everything down in an orderly way – so no data is lost nor sensitive electronics damaged. If my power stays off for longer than it takes to walk the dog, I have a couple of options. I can devote the time to phone work, placing voice mails or doing interviews. If I’m on deadline to write a story, I can move to my battery-powered laptop. (I keep current projects on a USB drive so I can plug it into the laptop when needed.) When battery juice is gone, or if I must have e-mail and Web access, I move to the nearest Starbucks or to a nearby friend or relative’s house.

Phone problems. If I depended on Verizon to fix phone problems promptly, I would have been out of business a long time ago. I have two phone lines, so if I have problems with one I can usually use the other. But my two-line phone can get fried by a power surge, despite the fact that it’s plugged into the surge protector. It seems to happen during thunderstorms and I suspect the surge is coming through the phone wiring itself rather than the electrical connection. I go through two to three phones a year because of this. So I’m prepared by having a back-up new two-line phone – brand new and still in the box –in my storage closet.

Hard drive crashes. For me, backing up data was like dieting. I could stick with it for a week or two, but that was about it. After years of dodging this particular disaster, I finally found a painless way to safeguard my data. Mozy is a service that for $5 a month automatically backs up my PC every night, or whenever I want. It’s also handy when I’m on the move with my laptop, because I can log into Mozy and grab any files that I might need.

Illness. Here’s where I’m most vulnerable. My latest disaster recovery story covered how IT departments can prepare for the swine flu pandemic. But there was little advice that I could use. In a company of one, I’m in deep trouble if the one falls ill. Good thing I’m healthy and tough. When I had an emergency appendectomy a few years ago, I took my files to the ER and worked while waiting to see a doctor. I was a little late on the story, but got it done.

Until the computer breaks, or the phone goes on the fritz, or the power goes out. One of the few negatives about being a freelancer is that I have no IT department. When something goes wrong with one of the machines that I rely on to make my living, it’s up to me to fix it or to hire the right person to fix it.

It’s ironic that I write about IT and electronics, but I can’t fix my own technical problems. That always amazes people. But it shouldn’t. Do you expect the health reporter of your local TV station to be able to diagnose and cure your illness?

I have been blessed in that I have a good friend who runs an IT consulting business. When I have a major problem with my PC, Dave is usually available to come to the rescue. (Thanks, Dave!) However, Dave is spending more and more of his time at his beach house, which is four hours away. Good for Dave. Bad for me.

I’ve developed a few coping strategies over the years, which I will share over the next few weeks. I ask that you add your comments and tips as well. Maybe we can develop a “Freelancers Technical Survival Guide” of sorts. Meanwhile, may your power stay on and the black screen of death never darken your desk.