Tam Harbert

As every freelancer knows, working from home has its pros and its cons. Among the pros: spending all that extra time with family. Among the cons: having family assume that since you’re there, you’re always available to them. We’ve all had to manage this delicate balance.

I’ve adjusted to different types of interruptions as my son has grown. When he was a baby, his schedule ruled. Until he went to daycare, I crammed my work into the short slots of time between naps, feedings and play dates. As he grew, the types of interruptions changed. As a boy, he sometimes seemed to demand my uninterrupted attention just when I was in the thick of a conference call. But he gradually learned to refrain from interrupting me when I was on the phone, “unless there’s blood or fire involved.” (We later added water to that directive, after he shyly and sheepishly called down the steps to me one day that water was coming through the ceiling. The upstairs toilet had overflowed and he was trying to stem the tide by himself.)

Even now, at age 18, he sometimes bounds into the house – if he’s with with his cadre of friends, it sounds like a herd of elephants – and starts asking for money or the car before he even reaches my office, only to find me with the phone to my ear, glaring at him.

As kid interruptions subsided, pet interruptions escalated. There was always the dog, whimpering at the front door for a walk. As he reached middle age, my Yorkie developed seizures. Many times I conducted an interview while stroking and comforting his quivering five-pound body splayed out on the floor. He also had stomach problems. I became expert at discerning the distinctive retch in time to scoop him up off the carpet and onto the hardwood floor (for easier post-interview clean-up).

That dog now is also 18. He’s blind, deaf and arthritic, and sleeps most of the time. Still, when he wakes up and figures out I’m not in the same room, he goes hunting for me. He’ll sit at the top of the stairs whining until I come to carry him down to my first-floor office. And I’ve learned that I can’t ignore that whine for long – he’s tumbled down those stairs more than once.

Like an old man with Alzheimer’s, he sometimes wanders aimlessly around my office. He usually ends up ensnared in the nest of wires and cables behind my desk. I know he’s back there when my speakers start inching away from me.

Soon, both son and dog will leave – one for college and the other for the great beyond. It will be quiet around here. My work days will run more smoothly. Gone will be all those interruptions. And I’ll cry, missing them terribly.

Journalism is all about telling a great story. That hasn’t changed, and never will.

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.

Many of my stories are both printed in a magazine and posted on the Web. I’ve always asked editors to send me issues of the magazines, so I have hard-copy clips of my work to show potential clients. But as print disappears, more and more of my stories live solely on the Web. Rather than final, tangible pieces that can be permanently collected in order to show my best writing, my stories have become ethereal sets of ones and zeros that can disappear in an instant. Recently, that’s exactly what a bunch of them did.

A client of mine was bought by another publishing company early this year. My editor warned me a few weeks ago that the publication would be transitioning to a new Web platform and that my stories would be temporarily inaccessible. I thought it would take maybe a couple of days. It’s been at least two weeks now, and my stories – hundreds of them – are nowhere to be found. They aren’t on the client’s site; they aren’t on the Web. I wouldn’t be worried, except that this particular client has no “print edition.” My stories existed only on the Web. Now, when potential clients click these links on my website, they are sent to a page that says the story was not found.

My stories are gone. And I’m not sure when they’ll be back.

Meanwhile, another client gated its website and started charging a subscription for its online version. I’m not sure how long ago it did this – it didn’t tell me – so I don’t know how many of my potential customers clicked on a link, only to get a pitch to sign up for a subscription rather than my story.

A third client nearly disappeared entirely, taking my stories along with it. It was going out of business, but ended up being saved at the eleventh hour.

Of course, I’ve removed these bad links from my website. I’m hoping to have at least some of them back up soon. But the experience has taught me to grab a copy of my stories as soon as they are published on the Web, because their existence is tenuous. And yet, a copy pulled off the Web doesn’t seem as professional, or even legitimate, as a printed clip or a PDF of a magazine layout. The purpose of traditional clips was two-fold. They not only showed samples of the writer’s work, but also proved that the writer had been published by a reputable news or literary organization. A collection of clips was permanent; a collection of clicks is ephemeral. As the paper age of publishing disappears, writers need to figure out how to preserve their published work.

As a professional journalist, I write about specific topics. Sometimes it’s a topic I’ve chosen and pitched to a publication. Sometimes it’s assigned by an editor. But either way, I have to follow that particular publication’s model, in terms of the angle on the topic as well as the tone and style of the writing. I also have to follow the directions of that particular editor, from which aspects of the story to emphasize to little copy-editing nits like whether to use the serial comma.

But with a blog, there is no editor. One of the joys of blogging is that I can write about anything I want, in any way I want to. No one tells me how to dot my I’s, cross my T’s or place my commas. That’s a great freedom. Freedom to show what a great writer I am. And freedom to display to the world my stupid mistakes.

We writers tend to be egotistical. That means we almost always think we have something worthwhile to say and know the best way to say it. We’re also rather solitary, introspective creatures, so we live in our heads to a large extent. We can easily convince ourselves that our way of looking at something is the only way or the best way, that everyone knows what we know, or for that matter that our readers care about what we care about. When I write about that little white house down the road, for example, it’s easy to forget that most of my readers don’t know I live in the D.C. area and am thus alluding to the residence of the president of the United States.

Of course, blogging is supposed to be a two-way channel, so readers can politely point out my errors, or loudly disagree with my point of view, or heckle me and throw rotten fruit. But at least initially I’d like to walk onto the stage without my slip showing.

I was feeling a little naked out here until a colleague of mine suggested we edit each other’s blogs. It’s a great arrangement. I can still write whatever I want, in any way I want. But my editor points out what works and what doesn’t, at least from his point of view. He helps make my blog better, because he gives me a second perspective that doesn’t come from inside my head (and sometimes even catches my spelling errors). The best part is I can still do things my way, if I insist (no serial commas), but the edit process stops me long enough to check myself in the mirror to make sure I’m not going to make a complete fool of myself.

A couple of years ago I was approached by a woman who was looking for freelancers for a new magazine. We talked at length about the magazine’s target reader and the tone it was going to take. I even ventured a couple of story ideas, which she liked. Then we finally got around to talking about money. She told me what she was paying and asked me if that was in my ballpark.

I was so surprised that I blurted out: “Not only is that not in my ballpark, it’s not even in my state!”

Needless to say, she never called again.

I’ve learned to broach the subject of fees a lot earlier in discussions with potential clients, to avoid wasting my time and theirs. This has become even more important with the proliferation of websites that pay would-be writers nil or pennies per hit just to blather on about a given topic. This has given some inexperienced publishers the impression that writers are, quite literally, a dime a dozen. Would-be, novice writers are. Professional journalists are not.

Freelance pay rates have always been a tricky equation for both editor and writer. I know because I’ve spent more than half of my career as an editor. I know how hard it is to find and hire good, reliable writers but stay within a limited (and these days continually shrinking) budget. I also know how valuable a good freelancer can be.

Most editors need freelancers who can do more than just write well, although that’s the first prerequisite. Writers must be able to follow specific directions. They also need to be able to do the opposite: work with vague, general assignments from editors who either don’t know what they want or are not very good at communicating it. Freelancers need the background and experience to know how to report a story and to be able to shift gears (in consultation with the editor, of course) if the information doesn’t fit with the original notion (if there was one). Finally, freelance writers must be able to meet deadlines, take criticism (constructive or not) and be willing to revise a story if it doesn’t hit the mark.

Editors that try to get by with paying the lowest fees won’t get all, or any, of the above. They will typically spend so much time trying to manage the writer and then editing, revising and even rewriting the article that it costs them twice what it would have if they paid a good writer a fair wage. Most editors, including myself, know this. And that’s why good writers, including myself, will want to know upfront if the assignment is going to pay enough to be worth their time.

As I work on a story about new ways that managers are monitoring employees, I’m reminded of and increasingly grateful for one of the biggest advantages of the freelance life: my time is my own.

When I worked for a company, I generally had to be in the office by 9 in the morning. During the course of the day, I was expected to sit at my desk, work on a computer, talk on the phone, and attend meetings. If I left before 5 p.m., I had to have a good reason. (They never seemed to mind, however, if I stayed late.)

I’ve always struggled with traditional 9-to-5 hours. I have never been a morning person. I may be awake and at my desk by 9 a.m., but I’m not fully conscious until about 10 a.m. Being able to set my own hours has been a huge blessing. I can structure my day according to my own circadian rhythms. I try to start at 9 a.m., but I do undemanding work, like going through e-mails or reading my daily news sites, until 10 a.m. when my brain is up. I’ll work steadily until about 12:30, then break to go to the gym, run errands or do some housework. My energy peaks in late afternoon, so 2 till about 7 is my most productive time. I try to reserve my heaviest mental lifting for then. I’ll break for dinner and evening activities, but often go back to my computer to wrap up loose ends between 10 and midnight.

That’s my typical schedule, but it’s not set in stone. If I have a lot of work, I’m at my desk at 7 a.m. (with a huge mug of coffee) and work till midnight. If the workload is light, I take the day off. If it stays light, I spend my days marketing myself to new publications and editors. Or teaching myself new skills like how to do more with Wordpress or how to search for sources on Twitter. If the workload is medium and it’s Opening Day, I go to the ballpark.

The point is, I’m free to use my time in the most productive ways. In traditional jobs, employers are in charge of time and they decide what’s productive. They watch not only when employees are in the office, but increasingly what employees do on the computer. They use technology that blocks websites, and not just the pornographic ones or the shopping sites, but also social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Network administrators keep logs of what websites employees frequent. Some employers even install software that records every key stroke and captures screenshots.

If I waste two hours socializing on Facebook, nobody cares, but I may pay the price in lost productivity and lost revenue. On the other hand, I may spend an hour figuring out how to do specific searches on Twitter, which may lead me to the perfect source for a particular story. That’s productive.

As a freelancer, I have the constant pressure of meeting deadlines and earning enough income to live. But I’ll take that any day over a rigid schedule set by others and ruled by their judgments about how I should spend the most precious thing I own: my time.

Sometimes, when I’m on a deadline, my head hurts. And I think I know why. There’s a war going on in there, a war between my left brain and my right brain.

When I’m reporting a story, it’s all very logical. My left brain is in full control of the situation. I conduct research. I talk to people. I ask questions. I gather answers. If something doesn’t make sense, I ask for an explanation. Most of the time, my emotions don’t play much of a part in this process. I’m cool and efficient.

I’m nothing if not thorough in reporting. I usually gather too much information for any given story. That means when I finally sit down to write, I’m overwhelmed. Where to start? How to make sense of all this?

My left brain is nearly always the one to dig in first. The left brain is logical, analytical, objective. It looks at each snippet of information and tries to build a linear sequence. That becomes my rough outline. Often this works. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the parts just don’t fit together logically.

That’s when my right brain steps in. And that’s when the trouble begins.

The right brain is intuitive, random, subjective. It likes to synthesize parts into a big picture. My left brain bats it back, saying, “Hey, I’m in control. If I just try harder with this outline, I’ll get everything to hang together and it’ll be a great story.” My left brain insists on handling each tidbit of information like a piece of colored glass. It reviews my notes and my outline, sorts the pieces into piles, by shape, by color, over and over.

My right brain usually stands back and lets my left brain bang itself against the wall for awhile. Then, after ol’ Lefty is battered, bruised and hopelessly confused, Ms. Right will step in and sigh. “Take it easy,” she says. “Go for a walk. Take a nap.”

Researchers who study the brain are finding that daydreaming is actually an important thought process. New brain-scanning studies suggest that our brain may be most actively engaged when we just let go and let our mind wander. “Solving a problem with insight is fundamentally different from solving a problem analytically,” one researcher told The Wall Street Journal. “There really are different brain mechanisms involved.”

When I come back from my walk or wake up refreshed from my nap, I often find that my right brain has taken those bits of colored glass and created a beautiful mosaic. I sit down and start writing, and everything flows together into a nicely packaged story, sometimes with an insight or conclusion that I never knew was there.

Chalk one up for the right brain. At least until the next story, when the battle begins anew.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of journalism is the opportunity to talk to a broad spectrum of people. Not only talk, but ask them questions. And hear them answer. Or not.

It can be fascinating – and frustrating – when a source either can’t or won’t answer your questions. Rarely will he outright admit that – although I have been hung up on a few times. More typical is that he agrees to the interview but then engages you in a game of rhetorical gymnastics. It doesn’t take long into the interview before any good journalist can smell the rat. Here are a variety of ways people I’ve interviewed have avoided answering my questions:

The one-track mind: There’s the source that agrees to the interview, but ignores your questions and launches into promoting his agenda. Regardless of what question you ask, he’ll somehow bring it back around to the idea he wants to promote.

The weak-in-the-knees source: He’ll answer your questions, not with a yes or a no, but with a “maybe” or “it depends.” He doesn’t want to express any strong opinion or ultimate truth, for fear of offending somebody.

The motor-mouth:  After your first question, the source is off on his soapbox, talking his agenda, and you can’t get another question in before your time is up.

The down-the-rabbit-hole source:  These are sources who won’t or can’t dumb it down enough for the average Jane to understand. You ask how something works, and before you know it you’re deep in a PowerPoint presentation with complicated graphs and acronyms that make your head spin. I sometimes suspect that engineers secretly relish subjecting journalists to this treatment.

The back-asswords source: This is the guy who will not say something outright, but backs into it with a lot of double-negatives and passive construction. When you rephrase what he’s essentially saying in direct, active language, what he’s said becomes too bold and blatant, and he won’t admit that’s what he means. He can truthfully say, “that’s not what I said,” even if parsing through the meandering construction would show that’s what he means.

This recent exchange with the head of a technology industry trade association illustrates several of the above methods:

Journalist:  “The employment numbers look bad. This industry has lost 100,000 jobs in the last five years, and the government predicts that it will lose another 146,000 in the next decade. Do you agree with those government numbers?”

Source:  Assuming that the U.S. government takes some action that allows this industry to be competitive, then we’ll maintain our position, we won’t lose any more jobs.

Journalist:  So you’re saying that you disagree with those government statistics?

Source:  No, I’m saying that we can remain competitive.

Journalist:  But that’s assuming that the government will change its policies. Is there any evidence that the government is going to change its policies?

Source:  There’s always hope.

Journalist:  But given a lack of any changes, then you would agree that the industry will lose 146,000 jobs?

Source:  Assuming that the government has its statistics right.

Journalist:  Do you think the statistics are wrong?

Source:  I’m saying that this industry will not lose those jobs if we have the right policies in place so we can remain competitive.

Journalist :  Aaargh . . . . . !

Frustrating, and fascinating.

I have to admit that I haven’t been following the evolution of the health insurance reform legislation in Congress. That’s because it was making me sick. When I saw old people whipped into a frenzy by Republican extremists circulating misleading information about government death panels, I simply tuned out. It’s just not worth raising my blood pressure over. Literally. If I get sick, or even if I go to the doctor for my annual checkup, I pay out of my own pocket. At least, the first $2,600 of it every year.

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.

As we packed for our Thanksgiving trek to the family homestead last week, my son was stuffing his laptop into the suitcase when I pointed out that his aunt might not have WiFi access at her house. At first, he looked at me like I was speaking Russian. Then, as he grokked the concept, he looked at me as if he were being consigned to Siberia.

Age 17, he barely remembers a time when he couldn’t access the Internet from anywhere. Even I, who remembers dialing a rotary phone, have a hard time recalling how many phone calls and how much legwork was required when I first started working as a reporter in the 1980s. I couldn’t google a company to find the exact spelling of its corporate name, its location and a description of its product or service. I used to spend hours chasing down such basic information.

During our holiday, we drove through the sparse Kansas farmland in search of the town where my mother was born and raised. Ost, Kansas, consists of a handful of buildings dominated by St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and the parish school, which houses a total of 94 students in grades 1 through 12. We couldn’t remember exactly where Ost was, but trusted that if we got within a few miles we’d be able to spot the church steeple. No hills and very few trees make this wonderfully possible in the Sunflower State. Instead, my son whipped out his iPhone with GPS.

Problem solved. Adventure cut short.

I wonder what we are giving up when answers come so easily. In the past, it took discipline, planning, imagination and determination to track down a piece of information or to find a tiny town in the vast prairie. Today, it’s literally at our fingertips. There was courage, adventure, challenge and reward in the struggle to uncover a fact or solve a problem. Now, it’s tempting to give up if we can’t find an answer quickly and easily. Like the proverbial tree in the woods that makes no sound if no one’s there to hear it fall, what happens to information that’s not on Google? Will anyone be willing to hunt for answers? I fear we may just stop asking the questions. What an ironic side effect of the Information Age.

Postscript: Even if we are willing to hunt for answers, they may no longer be there because apparently no one’s preserving the archives of dying newspapers: http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/01/05/archives-in-peril-generations-of-history-gone-with-the-flip-of/