Hi guys. Happy Monday!
Not today, not tomorrow, and not next week, but eventually we are going to be hiring around here. No, nobody’s getting fired, but we’re continuing to expand and we’ll be looking for great writers. And I know that this blog attracts a lot of freelance writers and/or people who would really like to be freelance writers.
After hiring, firing and working with freelance writers on a blog for some time now, I have come to the conclusion that I am no longer going to give any serious consideration to freelance applicants who don’t have their own personal regularly maintained blog or a long-established history as a primary writer on a blog. Nick Denton over at the Gawker empire laid down this rule years and years ago, and I continued to ignore his lead, and that was dumb of me. Because, you know, that music review that you wrote for your college’s newspaper three years ago? It doesn’t give me any insight into how you can write, without an editor, on a regular basis. It gives me no concept of how well you’ll be able to hold an audience day after day, when you have twenty minutes to write that piece and not three weeks, and when no one’s going to be there to fact-check. That newsprint piece comes with no warning on how many weeks it’s going to take me to teach you how to properly resize and upload a photograph or embed a video snippet. The seven pages of your short story are equally useless in this regard. So I’m putting my foot down on this issue, and I have a feeling other managing editors on blogs and websites will be doing the same.
So here’s the career advice: If you’re one of those journalism or writer-y types who wants to, you know, get paid to write in the foreseeable future, start a blog. Write in it more than once a month. Writing once a day, at least, would be ideal. Write about whatever you want, but try to use the tone and, to some extent, the subject matter that you’d like to be writing about professionally. If you can also do things like properly embed videos and photos of the correct size, create galleries, etc, that’s a GIANT, ENORMOUS plus to an editor like me.
If you’d like additional little gems of knowledge as to what you might want to touch upon here and there in your nascent blog if you maybe, in the future, want to write for one of my websites specifically, jump inside.
I’m disallowing comments on this particular post, because this isn’t open season on the existing writers, all of whom are still working here because they know how to do all the shit I just mentioned. If you have questions about the meat of the post, you can email me directly at evilbeet@gmail.com.
xoxo
Beet
Over the next 2-6 months, we will be looking for bloggers specifically in the following areas:
– celebrity gossip
– women’s issues (no particular partisanship required)
– sex, sexuality and sex education (We’re not looking for a “One D at a Time”-style blogger to talk about his/her sexual escapades, but rather an intelligent, witty and humorous discussion of the trends, fads and trip-ups in the growing world of human sexuality and sex research. A degree in sexology or human sexuality is preferred but not required)
– fashion (Industry experience is preferred but not required. An enormous familiarity with fashion blogging and fashion photography on the web is a must, as is an all-consuming love for fashion)
Again, we’re not hiring right now, but if you have these interests and you think you’d like to eventually apply for one of these freelance positions, maybe you should start an awesome blog now so that I can maybe hire you later on.