Examiner.com by the numbers

There are many different online publishers for the freelance writer. Many, but not all, accept news content. Some ask the writer to stay within a specific category, others hand out specific assignments, and some allow the writer a free hand to craft whatever content they wish.

Online freelance writers generally write for more than one publisher. If not, then it's likely that they've at least tried a number of others and settled on the one or ones, they like best. That means that any group of online writers represents a wealth of first hand experience about many different sites which accept and pay for content submitted by freelancers.
For what it's worth, then, here is my experience with and analysis of Examiner.com as an publisher.

I've been writing with Examiner for over two years. Examiner.com assigns each writer a specific category or topic in addition to a region. The writer can select the topic from a lengthy list on the Examiner application form, or even suggest a new topic. When I applied, I asked to write about Forests and submitted a sample article about listening to woodland bird songs. My region was the nearest listed city to my home, Manchester, New Hampshire. Examiner accepted my application, but asked me instead to write about bird watching within the recreation category.
I was initially attracted to Examiner by the page view bonus rate which, at the time, was about $9.50 per 1000 page views. (Currently, it's tracking about $6.65 per 1000 page views for me, but it varies depending upon a number of factors). Of course, higher page view rates only matter if their are enough page views to matter. Examiner has also announced a pay rate change beginning in May. The new rate will be tiered based upon quality of the articles, amount of promotion done by the author, and a handful of other criteria designed says Examiner to reward higher quality writers with higher payments. We'll see how that goes... I am cautiously optimistic.

One of the good things about Examiner, for me, is that it allows slide shows and videos to be directly appended to articles. If I am talking about a particular birdwatching location, I can include up to 20 photos of that location to add depth to the reader experience., for example. Bird watching, in particular lends itself to pictures and video.

As with Associated Content, it took a little while for my articles to start getting significant page views. Examiner does not currently track page views by article, so it is difficult to say how popular any particular article may be. New articles can be judged by the relative increase in daily page views when it is published, but it is difficult to judge the quality of specific evergreen articles.
I found that after a brief learning curve, I began getting decent page views. I'm sure much of it is built on the performance of my library of articles and photos. How much do I earn there? That's the bottom line question that everyone asks. Here's the answer:

For calendar year 2011, I am averaging $17.47 for every article that I have submitted this year in my local bird-watching topic. I also regularly receive free bird-related books for review from several publishers, and last year, I was invited by the Jamaica Tourist Board to spend a week bird-watching in Jamaica and staying at several eco-lodges on the island in order to allow me to write about the many bird-watching opportunities of Jamaica. That included free air travel, food, in country travel, and all expenses. I've also been contacted by local bird watching event organizers who have invited me to attend birding cruises and other outings in my official capacity to report on the events. While these extras don't put money in my pocket, they definitely merit entries on the plus side of the ledger when I tally the benefits of writing for Examiner. Theses extras also help provide me with a rich assortment of contacts and experiences to write about, making the job easier.

The fact that Examiner writers focus solely on a specific topic makes the writers more visible to event organizers and groups involved in that topic than sites that allow writers to be generalists, writing about a variety of topics, in my experience.

I have added two more categories to my Examiner account. I asked to write about Oceans at the national level and they invented the National Maritime Headlines Examiner title for me. national titles at Examiner focus more on news and are exposed to the national audience rather than a regional audience. Both appear on search engines with seemingly equal rankings, though. national titles seem to have a higher upside potential. I can hit more than 10,000-20,000 page views in a day with a good national topic, whereas local topics generally do not pull those kinds of quick numbers unless they happen to be of national interest on a popular news topic. However, the local articles detailing local birding venues, species profiles, and the like, have longer shelf-lives and will pull viewers over a much longer period of time than flash in the pan national news articles. The result is that for my Maritime Headlines Examiner position, I am averaging $10.71 for each article published in calendar 2011.

I also have a Manchester Green Living Examiner title that is relatively new and has little content thus far. For that title, I am only earning a non-viable $1.45 per article this year as an overall average (with only three articles submitted, year to date). That does not compare at all favorably to my Environmental Issues News beat at the Yahoo! Contributor Network which offers $15 guaranteed per article upfront, plus $1.15 per 1000 page views published at Yahoo! News. If it is a newsworthy topic, or fits within the Y!CN beat guidelines for allowable environmental issues evergreen content, I publish it there, instead of Examiner. If, however, I were to visit a wind farm and take a few dozen good photos, I might be more inclined to publish at Examiner, because of the, in my opinion, superior rich media options. I remain confident, however, that as I increase my library and following for this Examiner title, my earnings per article will grow.

Overall, page views at Examiner were lower than at Y!CN or Y! before the Google algorithm change. I haven't noticed a significant drop-off at Examiner since the change, but we all know what's happened to Y!CN and Y! page view numbers (although this differs for each individual).

Examiner requires writers to publish one new article each month in order to keep their accounts fully active and to continue earning page view royalties on existing content. Examiner also pays a generous bounty for referring new writers through a referral link. Here's my referral link if anyone is interested in signing up and giving it a try; Apply to write at Examiner.com.

Study Reveals Three Keys to Attracting Twitter Followers

There's little point in writing news for the web, if no one reads what you write. There are many ways for online readers to find your work. Let's take a look at Twitter. For most of what you post, only a small percentage of your Twitter followers will click through to read an article that you link. This can be influenced by eye-catching titles, your reputation for delivering on the promise of your Tweet (with relevant, high quality content), and a host of other factors. Even so, it is likely to be a small number.

Why does Twitter matter then? For those that do take an interest in your article, it is an easy way for them to share the article with their friends and followers who may share a similar interest. It is a way of amplifying your reach beyond the people to whom you have direct access. In best case scenarios, your article can go viral and be shared tens of thousands of times (or more).

It all starts, of course, with those people who choose to follow you on Twitter. With a few caveats, the more followers you have, the more likely you are to reach people who are interested enough to click through and read your article.

There are many theories on the best way to attract followers, but unless you're a highly visible celebrity willing to have a public meltdown in cyberspace, Georgia Tech researchers have identified three key Tweeting behaviors that lead to increased numbers of followers.

1. Don't worry, be happy.
2. Don't fill your Twitter stream with information about yourself, give your followers information that makes a difference to their lives.
3. Use fewer hashtags.

To expound upon that list a bit, the researchers found that users who more often posted with a positive message gained more followers than those who posted negativity. Hypothetically, then, a title like "Few will survive upcoming zombie apocalypse," a negative title, would attract fewer new followers than "You can be a zombie apocalypse survivor," a more positive spin on the same topic.

Second, although your family may want to keep up to date on your daily tribulations and successes, few strangers are that interested in you, unless you're one of the aforementioned self-destructing celebrities. Your followers will be less likely to share a Tweet that you've got luxury box tickets at Fenway Park for the Yankees- Red Sox game than, perhaps, a Tweet that provides useful information like "Fenway Park tickets, which seats offer the best value for your money?"

Finally, don't use too many hashtags. Use them to tie your tweets to larger events or breaking news stories, but don't crowd your posts with as many hashtags as you can fit in. For whatever reason, the Georgia Tech study showed that overuse of hashtags resulted in fewer new followers when compared to a more conservative usage.

Obviously, this is a brief overview of the findings of the Georgia Tech study on gaining Twitter followers. You can read the complete study and learn more details on building a Twitter following at this link.

 

Are you plagiarizing?

Just because you're not copying someone else's work exactly as written, doesn't mean that you're not guilty of plagiarism. As writers who often rely on other sources for facts pertinent to our own news reporting, we must have an accurate understanding of exactly what is and what isn't plagiarism. Rather than relying on my own interpretation of the term plagiarism, let's look at a couple of independent sources.

The Instrument of Judicial Governance from the University of North Carolina defines plagiarism as "deliberate or reckless representation of another's words, thoughts, or ideas as one's own without attribution..." I added the bold for emphasis.

USLegal.com defines the term as follows:
"The intentional or unintentional use of another's words or ideas without acknowledging this use consitutes plagiarism..." Simply enough, right? As long as you, at some point in your article say what you've 'borrowed,' you're covered, right? Wrong.

USlegal.com goes on to say: "There are four common forms of plagiarism:

• Duplication of another author's words without quotation marks and accurate references or footnotes.
• The duplication of another author's words or phrases with footnotes or accurate references, but without quotation marks.
• The use of another author's ideas in paraphrase without accurate references or footnotes.
• Submitting a paper in which exact words are merely rearranged even though footnoted."

Again the bold is mine for emphasis of certain points. Let's go over these four forms of plagiarism, one by one. Then, I'll give four examples of published news articles reporting the same event to help understand how to follow these points in practice.

The first of these four, I think, is pretty clearly understood. Copying another person's work without crediting them is wrong and constitutes plagiarism. Few would have issue with that.

The second may be less widely known. Most might say, ok, I forgot quotation marks (or didn't know I needed them), but I correctly credited the source of the material I used, so it isn't plagiarism. Not quite, the purpose of the quotation marks is to set aside the borrowed material, so that readers know exactly what was borrowed from your cited source and what is your own creation. In the age of Internet, it may be permissible to use other forms to delineate exactly what was taken.

An indented bit of text, with a different background color, font, or size that is intentionally made to appear as though it were cut and pasted from another source, could, arguably substitute for quotation marks, so long as the source is properly attributed, for example.

The exact beginning and end of the quoted text should, however, be made unambiguously clear to the reader. Without quotation marks, the reader cannot tell what part of your writing is yours and what, exactly, is someone else's creation.

The third bullet point is where I, unfortunately, see either much ignorance, confusion or disregard for the definition of plagiarism. It is plagiarism to read an article written by someone else, and rewrite it in your own words, without fully, specifically, and properly citing that source, according to the USLegal.com definition. Reading a New York Times report that says:
"Among the more than 80 people that activist groups reported killed by rockets and bombs through the day, two were Western journalists, the veteran American war correspondent Marie Colvin, who had been working for The Sunday Times of London, and a young French photographer, Rémi Ochlik." Does not give you liberty to write in your article: "A French photographer and a Sunday Times of London reporter were killed during fighting in Syria," without directly citing the source of that specific piece of information. Furthermore, citing the NYT article once at the beginning of your piece does not give you leave to paraphrase the entire article or major sections of it, or to paraphrase it in multiple places throughout your article without further attribution. For example, on the first page of the above-referenced NYT piece, you'll find three specific references to information that the authors gleaned from one or more Reuters reports, as well as other citations for other facts and statements that they used.

Lastly, the fourth bullet of the USLegal.com definition tells us that we can't shirk our responibility to use quotation marks and specific attribution, just by rearraging the words. If some wrote "The police apprehended the suspect at 4:30 pm, on Saturday." You can't simply write "On Saturday, at 4:30 pm, police apprehended the suspect," without quotation marks and accurate references or footnotes. That still represents the original author's idea and words, not yours.

Here are examples of the same event reported by four separate sources.
1) WMUR report of a harp seal on a Hampton, New Hampshire beach published at 2:33 pm on February 19th
2) A report of the same event published at Patch.com published on February 20th
3) My own report of the event at Examiner.com published late in the day on February 19th 
4) A report from Foster's Daily Democrat published on February 21st

(Note: Go read them, but don't leave nasty comments accusing anyone of anything, please. My purpose in writing this isn't to call anybody out, but to educate based on some convenient examples that I had on hand.)

Of these four, the WMUR report was the first published. I was at the scene and have first-hand knowledge that residents attending the event contacted WMUR. From the wording of the WMUR report, it also appears that the author also contacted The New England Aquarium for additional information although they did not specify that source by name.

The second example needs a bit more scrutiny. The first paragraph, appears fine from a palgiarism perspective. There's a sentence containing two factual statements and a proper attribution to the WMUR article that I used as example #1. Note, however, that the Patch.com article says the seal "washed up" on the beach, which is a factually inaccurate assumption by the author based on the WMUR report that  the seal "was out of the water."

The first sentence of the next paragraph at Patch.com violates the second bullet point of the USLegal.com definition of plagiarism. It is a word for word copy of the statement made by WMUR without quotation marks, but properly referenced. This gives the impression that the Patch.com author created more of that sentence's wording than "the television station said." The rest of the Patch.com article's second paragraph is a combination of direct quotes and paraphrasing of the WMUR article's third paragraph. The Patch.com author has done nothing original here except to change one perfectly good WMUR sentence into a fragment, and change the source of the pronouncement of a healthy diagnosis that WMUR attributed to The New England Aquarium, to the volunteer (from the Blue Ocean Society) who never, in fact, spoke to WMUR before the WMUR article was initially published.

The first sentence of the third paragraph of the Patch.com article is lifted directly from the WMUR article's second paragraph although the Patch.com "author" changed the word "common" from WMUR's report to "not unusual" in his. He also dropped the words "when they want sleep or" from the WMUR report, otherwise copying their sentence verbatim. There is no attribution at all for the ideas or the copied words in the third paragraph of the Patch.com article. The next Patch.com "sentence," (I use the term lightly, since it is actually a sentence fragment) is another assumption by the author guessing at the emotional state of the onlookers that WMUR said were present. The remainining sentence and a half of the Patch.com article are original, linking two earlier articles by the same author on related topics (although I can't vouch for the originality of those two linked articles).

Plagiarism? According to the USLegal definition, unequivocably. Was the author aware that he was plagiarizing? Given the grammatical errors in the article, one could argue that he was unaware of his crime, which, given USLegal's "intentional or unintentional" verbiage, would make no difference in court, by the way.

The third example is one that I wrote published after the WMUR report. It however, contains much information not contained in the WMUR report, based on my personal knowledge and first-hand reporting, as I personally witnessed the events and spoke directly to the volunteer from the Blue Ocean Society who was alerted to the seal's presence by the New England Aquarium. There are no phrases or ideas lifted from the WMUR report. Paraphrased information from The New England Aquarium is properly cited. The facts in the final paragraph were written from my own knowledge, but since they may not be common knowledge to a majority of readers, in retrospect, they should have been cited from some independent source, to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

The fourth article, from Foster's Daily Democrat, was written by someone who was clearly not present at the location. It is quite possible that the author of this article was alerted to the situation by reading one of the previously published articles, but they contacted original sources, spoke to a named individual at The New England Aquarium extensively as well as the Blue Ocean Society volunteer. Although this article uses sources common to other articles, the New England Aquarium and Patty Adell, it is clearly original. The Foster's reporter may (or may not) have gotten the idea for the story from another published source, but he did his own reporting and did not simply rehash any existing articles that he may have read. 

You Don't Have to be On the Scene to Write About It

These examples consist two articles created by people involved directly at the time the reported event was occurring (one at the scene, one by telephone), and two created by people who apparently learned of the event afterward. You don't have to be at the scene to write about an event, but you do have to do more than repeat what someone else has already written, whether or not you paraphrase their exact words - even if you cite your source.

If you create even a properly attributed article based on other published sources and every sentence refers to another source, then, quite aside from issues of palgiarism, you should ask yourself exactly what you are bringing to the table. What are you offering the reader?

It might be a unique analysis of the events, a comparison of the event's coverage by several different sources, additional information not contained in previous reports, a more complete report than is found elsewhere by amalgamating information from a variety of sources, or anything else that makes your article uniquely your own and of unique value to the reader rather than a simple rewrite of someone else's work. Even if your editor allows simple rewrites to slide by, it's not your work and you have no business publishing it to steal traffic from the original source.

Yahoo.com Front Page Feature

Recently, I had an article of mine featured for several days on the front page of Yahoo.com. It was included in "Editor's Picks" and "Today on Yahoo!" The first appears at the bottom of every news page or article on Yahoo! and the second appears in multiple places including the top, featured position at the home page of Yahoo.com.

I get two questions most frequently from other writers about it. 1) How did you get featured? 2) How many views did it receive?

First, let me say that I've had editors from the Yahoo! Contributor Network (Y!CN) pitch articles of mine for the front page before. At least one made it there previously, but had a shorter run of just a few hours.

Getting featured can depend on luck to some extent. If you have just written about a topic that suddenly becomes very newsworthy and your article is relevant, editors may drop it in to take advantage of the timeliness of  the issue. Then there's always the other breaking news factor. If aliens land on the lawn of the White House, then your article about the National Collegiate Cheerleading Championships might get pushed aside for front page feature consideration.

In any case, it generally takes a body of high quality work that demonstrates your ability to write accurate, interesting and original material. In two of the four cases where my work was pitched to the front page, an editor at Y!CN contacted me in advance and offered a topic that he thought might be a good fit for the front page. For another, I had just submitted an article and it just happened to coincide with a planned press conference by President Obama on the same topic. Another was suggested to me for front page consideration, but missed because the angle I took was a bit too controversial.

Once, an article was suggested, but in doing the research, I found that the suggested premise, though widely accepted by media outlets and various web secondary sources, was inaccurate. I wrote it up as something of a myth-busting article which provided better sources for that real information. It wasn't the fun, human interest piece for which the front page decision makers were hoping.

In short, I don't know of any sure-fire way to get a piece featured on the front page at Yahoo.com except to write well consistently, attract the attention of editors with the quality of your work (and/or by becoming a Featured Contributor), and to be willing to accept difficult assignments that may or may not pan out despite an investment of research time and effort. Also be prepared for one or more title changes and additional editorial scrutiny of any article that is being considered for the front page. I think Editor's Picks, Today on Yahoo! and the text news listing all used different titles for my recent feature, none of which were passed by me before publication (which is fine by me).

As for the second question, my most recent featured article received about 1 million views in the first 24 hours, and about another million over the next 48 hours and during a repeat feature the following weekend. Those who write for Y!CN know the page view bonus rate for Y! News and can calculate that the earnings from that single article went into the thousands of dollars.

In addition to the 2 million page views, it was posted to Facebook by over 13,000 users, Tweeted over 1500 times resulting in more than 45,000 page views via Twitter, and shared by 245 people on Linked In. The article itself was also mentioned and linked by The Huffington Post, Forbes online, and a host of other sites. CNN did a feature piece on the same topic 3-4 days after mine appeared on Yahoo! all of which is helping the article gain about 1000 readers per day long after it passed out of the main stream's attention span.

I'll also note that it was copied in its entirety and otherwise plagiarized by more websites and blogs than I care to mention. That comes with the territory, so learn how to enforce your rights under the DMCA.

I've heard of other Yahoo! feature pieces from Y!CN freelancers getting even more page views than mine by a wide margin. I've also heard of others not doing as well.

Finally, I know some writers don't like to say which of their articles do very well for fear of copycats going after their topics, but I've always felt that the Internet is a very big place. It also helps that I tend to write current events type issues that have high, but fleeting popularity rather than evergreen material. At any rate, here's the article that received the front page feature position for a number of days at Yahoo.com. Feel free to share a link to the original on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, your blog, or anywhere else. I get paid by the page view and every one counts. ...and don't forget to follow this blog using one of the following option in the margins.

Good Journalistic Advice from the Howard 100 News Team

For those with satellite radio subscriptions who listen to the Howard Stern Show, the Howard 100 News team actually gives a solid piece of journalistic advice, albeit in a humorous fashion. The tag line they use in one of their promos is "If you mother says she loves you, check her sources."

While I take it on faith that my mother loves me, after all she is giving first hand testimony to that fact, when it comes to news-worthy leads, I check everything. Recently, for example, It was suggested that I write a news story about October 5th being the most popular birthday in the USA by the News Director of the Yahoo! Contributor Network. He generally provides me with pretty solid leads, sometimes offering me contact info. for specific news-worthy leads and suggesting article topics that he'd like to pitch to the Yahoo! News front page folks.

Sometimes they pan out and sometimes they don't (and sometimes they require extraordinary effort on my part: "If you can find someone who was present at 'X' event 60 years ago, we'd like to publish an interview with them."). That's great, I am thankful and lucky to have such a good relationship with the person who decides whether to pay me for an article. I pursue the leads offered to the best of my ability whether I think they are likely to be profitable to me or not, often investing many hours in research before I really know whether there is a story there or not.

The October 5th birthday story was no different. I accepted the challenge and went to work, assuming that the premise was true. Indeed, at first it seemed that every web reference agreed. October 5th is the most popular date for birthdays in the USA because it coincides with a New Year's Eve conception, they said. Hmmm. I was born on October 2nd, which is certainly within the big part of the bell curve for those babies conceived on the same date as those born on October 5th. So I asked my mother, "Is it likely that I was conceived on New Year's Eve?"

"Yes," she replied that she was almost certain of that.

I noticed, however, that one source was cited by most of the websites and news stations which were reporting October 5th as the most popular birthday. Those that didn't cite a specific source had specific language or numbers that were too similar to those cited by that same, singular source to be coincidental.

Furthermore, the data upon which that original source based its claim was unavailable. It would have been easy to cite the same source used by such news outlets as NBC4-TV out of Washington, D.C., and all the others, but one source without the backing evidence just doesn't pass my standard of reliability even though that was the storyline requested by the News Director. So I asked myself, who might have actual birth record data and statistics? The government, for one. So I did a search restricted to .gov  sites and came up with the CDC data contained in my report which was inconclusive but tended to cast further doubt on the October 5th meme.

Looking further, I found a 2006 study by a Harvard professor who listed all 366 days of the year (including leap year's February 29th) in order of popularity, based on a study of many years of birth records. His data was more in line with the CDC data and was quite different than the source used by almost every website that talked about the most popular birthday in the U.S. I could have, and should have, gone one step further and called the Harvard professor who did the study and asked to see his data for a solid answer to the question, but by this time, my deadline was fast approaching and it didn't seem possible to make the contact and review the details of the study in time to publish the story at all.

With three sources in hand, but without the raw data to confirm their findings, I cannot say definitively upon which date the most popular birthday falls. I can say, however, that the October 5th date is pretty doubtful, and that's the story I went with. You can read it in its entirety at Yahoo! News by clicking the link below.

• Is October 5th Really the most Popular Birthday in the United States?

Libel revisited

First, let me say for the record, that I am not a lawyer or legal expert, and this is not intended as legal advice, but as an example of and commentary on best (and worst) practices.

I wrote about jumping to conclusions when reporting about the actions of specific persons or companies. I said that you can report what someone else said about the person as long as you say that that person said it and don't do anything to validate the statement. I didn't mention, and I should have, an important exception to that rule. If you know or have reason to believe that the statement is false, but print it anyway without acknowledging that you know or suspect it to be false, then you can still be held responsible for any damage to a person's reputation (or business) resulting from the publication of those statements.

Here's a case where the NY Post is being sued for just such an action. In this case, the NY Post cited unnamed sources "close to the defense" who made very damaging statements about the woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault. The NY Post apparently accepted the word of people with every reason to lie in order to discredit the woman. If they did additional research to verify the claims, there was no  mention of that in their report.

Without any attempt to verify or qualify the statements, it could be argued that the NY Post is validating their credibility. In fact, as CNN points out in the linked story above, the NY Post article specifically said the woman was "doing double duty as a prostitute, collecting cash on the side from male guests, The Post has learned." That statement in particular shows that the NY Post believes the accusations and strongly implies that they have investigated to back them up. It adds validity to the allegations backed by the reputation of the NY Post.

Anyone can go out and find someone to make stuff up about someone else for the sake of getting a sensational headline. That doesn't absolve a reporter or a publisher of their responsiblity if there's good reason to doubt the veracity of the statements. In this case, the allegations made involved a number of third parties, who presumably could have been tracked down and questioned by the NY Post, but apparently weren't.

A paper can be wrong, but they need to show that they undertook reasonable precautions to make sure what they were printing was true. If you actually go a step farther and treat third party allegations as facts that you have verified, you'd better make very sure that you did verify them. Perhaps, the NY Post did that in this case and will be vindicated, who knows. Better reporting could have prevented the situation in the first place.

When to use your prior articles as primary source material

I've covered the difference between primary and secondary sources in previous posts and told you that you should always strive to use a primary source rather than someone else's reporting of that source material. Obviously, an original interview that you conduct is a primary source. Don't overlook that fact if you later write on a similar topic. You can cite the expert you interviewed with a link back to that interview as a primary source for future articles.

This is an exception to the rule. Ordinarily, I think linking back to one of your articles as a source of factual information for a news report is not a good idea if the information you're citing was originally drawn from another source. In other words, many articles (especially news articles) are themselves secondary or even tertiary sources.

If your previous article said, "The FBI, on their website, are asking for the public's aid in locating Whitey Bolger." That's a secondary source with the FBI website being the primary source. If you wrote "ABC News reported that the FBI Director asked for the public's help..." Your article becomes a tertiary source, ABC News is the secondary source for the primary source which was the FBI Director himself. These kinds of chain references where the reader who wishes to check your source has to go through several links to get to the source are damaging to the writer's credibility, in my opinion, and should be avoided.

However, articles in which you personally conducted the interview and are bearing witness to what the relevent source said to you, are fair primary source references. There is no extra link in the chain for the reader to chase down because you've done the original investigation and reporting and these articles can credibly be used as primary source references for future articles.

Note that this is for news source references. If you include links to other articles you've written as additional background material, further reading, related topics, or also of interest pieces, that's a separate thing altogether and I don't take issue with that at all.

PR firms, time commitments, and maximizing returns

Recently, I received a message from the PR firm that handles Ford Motor Company and who helped arrange a previous interview for me with Ford's Vice President of Manufacturing informing me that they also work with Coca-Cola. They wanted to know if I'd be interested in covering Northeast Coca-Cola's involvement in the NRRA's 30th Annual Recycling Conference and Expo in Manchester, NH. They would be featuring the plant-based PET bottle now being used for Dasani water.

While I didn't think this had the broad appeal to warrant use in my highest paying beat which is simply "newsworthy interviews," I did think it was relevant to both my New England Regional News and my Environmental Issues beats with the Yahoo! Contributor Network, and for my Manchester Green Living Examiner title.

I saw several article angles that I could write up and the PR firm offered to set-up interviews with both the event's executive organizer and the general manager of Northeast Coca-Cola. I was particularly interested in learning about the PlantBottle technology which uses plants to make 30 percent of the plastic in the bottles used for Dasani Water. However, whenever dealing with a company representative, a writer has to be sure they are not just receiving one side of the story, and has to do a a little extra fact-checking to keep them honest. So, instead of the usual Q&A format, I incorporated a "fact check" paragraph after a couple of the answers I received clarifying or correcting information fed to me by the Coke reps. (Read the PlantBottle technology article here.)

• Interview with the Northeast Recycling Conference and Expo's Executive Director
• Interview with GM of Seacoast Coca-Cola

Another interesting side note of this is that I actually went to the conference with a press pass provided by the event organizers and had the opportunity to not only interview the organizer and the Coke people directly at the show, but I walked the floor and picked up several serendipitous interviews with other vendors presenting at the expo. I'll be using these in future articles. I also noted that on the day I attended area schools were invited to attend the show, and awards were being given out to the top recycling schools, student, and staff. That seemed like a good local interest story, as well, so I wrote that up using a couple of relevant quotes from my much longer interview with the event's organizer and a list of award recipient's they provided to me under embargo terms (just until after the actual presentation so the winners would not read of their victories before they were announced). (Read the school awards announcement article here.)

In the end, this call from a PR firm will probably yield me six or more articles, maybe more, although not all of them will go up immediately as some are time independent. I spent about two hours driving to and from the event (recording mileage total as a business expense for tax purposes), about two and a half hours at the conference, and about 2-3 hours researching the NRRA and the Brazilian sugarcane industry, plus writing time.

For one article, even under the Interviews beat at Y!CN, it would have been hard to justify that amount of time investment, but for 6 most of which will go to Y!CN beats with good guaranteed upfront payments in addition to page view royalties, the math works better. The key here was keeping my eyes open for additional story opportunities. I also wanted to get some journalistic practice in covering live events and trolling crowds for interviews, so that figured into my equation as well.

Why use original interviews as source material?

As a journalist, non-fiction writer in a niche topic, or a generalist, your work can benefit greatly by interviewing others and using their knowledge and quotes in your articles. By asking questions and listening to the answers, you as a writer are acquiring original source information that is absolutely unique no matter how many other writers are working on the same topic. By going directly to the source, your article benefits from increased credibility.

A thousand people can write about the latest study linking the excessive eating of ice cream and unprecendented gains in longevity by using the original published research paper as a primary source. All one thousand of those writers will have access to the same facts, the same researcher comments, and will all see that original source material worded exactly the same way. Many of their reports, even those found at major outlets like Reuters, AP, and Yahoo! will be very, very similar in content and tone. By talking to the lead researcher directly, however, you can follow any angle of questioning that you think is interesting. You'll get original quotes that are different from those that appear in every other published report on the subject and you'll almost certainly get facts and insights to which no other writer has access.

In other words, you'll be able to turn out a better article than anyone who relied only on material that is presented in identical fashion to everyone. That's not to say good, or even great articles can't be written without original interview material. They are every day. It is ultimately a question of the writer's imagination, creativity, skill with words, discipline and experience that dictate the quality of any article. Starting out with higher quality, more unique source material such as an original interview, however, gives the artist a bigger pallette from which to fill the empty canvas.

As if that weren't enough of a reward, you may find yourself earning higher upfront payments for these highly original articles as well.

For some, finding the right people to interview can be difficult, though. On one of my other blogs (Interviews with Experts), I am launching into a series of posts about identifying, contacting  and securing interviews with original sources from many different walks of life from the everyday person, to the knowedgeable expert, to the celebrity.

Reporting on 'hints and allegations'

Ideally, every news reporter would adopt a Joe Friday approach, "All we know are the facts, ma'am." There's a place for commentary and opinion, but news reporting isn't that place. A well-written news article should present the facts and let the reader form their own opinions. Unfortunately, in my opinion, that doesn't happen much anymore.

Separating fact from opinion in news reports

There are certain instances where a writer must be especially careful about blurring facts and opinions, whether the opinions belong to her or to someone else. Generally, those instances involve cases where what is said could be damaging to someone's (or some company's) reputation. We can write about allegations, accusations, convictions and indictments as facts, but not the underlying actions unless we were personally witness to them and would be willing to testify to them under oath in a court of law. For example, "When I arrived on the scene, the fight was still in progress and Joe Smith was alternately shoving and being shoved by Sam Jones." I saw it, I would attest to it under oath, I can write it.
However, if, when I arrived, Joe and Sam were in handcuffs, all five people I asked said they saw the two shoving each other and described the altercation in detail, a police officer told me they were being arrested for disorderly conduct, public drunkenness and assault, and I heard Jones yell out, "Ness time I'll do more 'n jess shove you ta th' groun'," just before he vomitted onto the side of the police cruiser. I can not write a factual news article stating that Smith and Jones were shoving each other, that they were drunk, or anything about their specific actions (other than saying that Jones yelled out whatever I heard him yell).
I can write something like the following:

On Friday evening at approximately 11:45 p.m., the Rutland City Police arrested Joe Smith and Sam Jones outside of Notorious Nightclub on Main Street. The arresting officer, Detective Joe Friday, said the pair were being arrested for disorderly conduct, public drunkeness and assault.

Mike Jones, who said he was the brother of one of the accused, said "Sam wasn't doing nothing. Joe just walked up and hit him over the head with a beer bottle. Sam just turned around and pushed him away, you know, acting in self-defense." Four other bystanders, however, claimed to have seen Jones spit in Smith's face immediately prior to the altercation.

Bartenders could not say how many drinks were served to the pair prior to the trouble in the parking lot. Officers at the scene would not comment on the results of a breathalyzer test administered to Smith and Jones. 

John Baptiste, who was behind the bar at the time said that Jones had been asked to leave the premises on several previous occasions, but could not say why.

In this example, I am not reporting as fact anything I didn't see. Instead I am reporting that an officer told me this, four bystanders (whose names and phone numbers I jotted down for my file) told me that, and Mike Jones told me something else. In this case, I could testify that these people told me those things, but I can't say for certain whether any of what they said is actually true or not. I did not personally, in my article, accuse anyone of anything or make assumptions about anyne's guilt or innocence.

It would be entirely wrong to write: On Friday evening at approximately 11:45 p.m., Joe Smith and Sam Jones were carted away in handcuffs after brawling in the parking lot of Notorious Nightclub on Main Street. Jones, a known trouble-maker, started the fight by spitting in Smith's face. Smith retaliated by hitting the larger man in the head with a beer bottle, but was shoved to the ground and could have been in for much worse if police had not arrived to break up the fight. While the majority of onlookers provided consistent descriptions of the fight, Jones' brother Mike seemed to leave out key pieces of the story to protect his big brother. Both men were drunk when they left the club and even the bartenders lost track of how much alcohol the men had been served that evening. Notorious Nightclub lives up to its name as events like those of last night seem to happen on a regular basis there. Perhaps, if the hired help were trained well enough to recognize when someone has had enough to drink, they could keep their patrons out of jail.

In the latter example, I have personally accused two men, Smith and Jones, of specific criminal actions. I have make actionable statements against the management and staff of Notorious Nightclub, accused Mike Jones of lying, and personally accused Smith and Jones of being drunk. Both I and my publisher could be sued over each of these statements, since they are all based on hearsay or unsubstantiated assumptions and damaging to someone's reputation. I don't know if the two men were drunk, if Mike Jones was lying, or if the four other bystanders were cousins of Smith and were lying on his behalf. Any of them might have been mistaken. I have one bartender's assertion that Jones had been removed from Notorious on previous occasions, but have personally interpreted that by calling Jones a known trouble-maker, another potentially actionable allegation on my part. While I might be able to successfully defend against civil suits against some of these claims, if the results of the breathalyzer tests were admitted and showed the men over the legal limit, for example, my allegation of them being drunk might get dismissed, but some are indefensible - was Mike Jones lying or simply mistaken?

Let's assume several weeks go by. Jones died from a subdural hematoma the next day, Smith is going on trial for murder. I can say that Smith has been arraigned for murder, he is being tried for murder, he has been accused of murder by the prosecutor, but I cannot call him a murderer, or say that he killed Jones. I can say that the coroner stated that the autopsy revealed the cause of death was a blow to the head consistent with being struck by a beer bottle, as Smith was alleged to have done two days prior to the Jones' death.

If Smith is convicted of murder, I still cannot call him a murderer with absolute impunity. I can say he has been convicted of murder, found guilty of murder, or is serving a life sentence for murder, but if the conviction were overturned later, my calling him a murderer outright would be proven to be incorrect.

In short, a factual news article can report allegations or statements made by others who are cited in the text, but should never make claims, accusations, or assumptions about events to which the writer was not personally a witness.

Although personal allegations against individuals are the most common instances where this comes into play, it also applies in other areas. I can't say for sure, for example whether cell phones cause brain tumors or not. I can say that 17 independent studies have found no evidence that cell phones cause brain tumors or that Mike Jones, brother of Sam Jones who was  originally thought to have died of a subdural hematoma after being struck with a beer bottle, now claims that his brother's death was caused by a tumor triggered by his cellphone. "He never had no tumor before he got a cell phone," Jones shouted from the courthouse steps over the protests of his attorney.

The writer should let the reader know the source of every bit of information in the article that isn't widely known public knowledge. I don't need to provide a source for information like, "the President of the United States was born in Hawaii." If I wrote, however, "Hawaii remains the President's favorite vaction spot," I'd need to cite a source such as "he told Bill O'Reilly on The O'Reilly Show last night."

Related blog post: Interviews

I just wanted to drop a quick note here that I have another blog called "Interviews with Experts." It is mainly dedicated to collecting all the interviews I have done with experts on various topics, but it also includes posts which discuss issues that have come up in the course of conducting interviews and my experiences around the interviews themselves. Since interviews are a key news data gathering tool, I am mentioning it here for those that are interested, but I'm generally not going to cross-post every entry from there to here.

Establishing credibility part III: Quality control

Establishing credibility as I mentioned in previous posts is an important part of earning news writing opportunities, developing a following, and establishing your reputation as a writer and journalist. If readers don't have confidence in what you are writing, they won't come back. If editors don't have confidence in what you're saying they won't reward you with opportunities like recurring news beats or targeted requests.

Writing interesting articles that are well-sourced and informative is, obviously, the most important part of establishing credibility, but even those articles can be ruined by a lack of quality control. In every manufacturing plant in the United States, someone, or a group of someones, is assigned to check the finished product and make sure that it is coming off the end of the line the way it should. They may use Statistical Process Control or some other quality control methods, but they are checking. Your finished news article should be checked as well.

No matter how articulate your phrasing, or how well-reasoned your analysis may be, misspellings and poor grammar can sabotage your credibility. A great article that has several misspellings and grammatical errors is like a major league pitcher throwing a no-hitter, but walking in the winning run. It's a great effort, but a losing effort.

Proof-reading is a must for every writer. It isn't necessary to have someone else do it. The writer can do it themselves if they can slow down and concentrate on what they typed on the page rather than what they thought they wrote. For me, at least, it's natural to read at a fast clip, especially material with which I may be familiar. To proof-read effectively, however, it's often best to read much more slowly and deliberately that we would normally.

The first proof-reading pass may be for content. Did you say what you wanted to say? Are your arguments laid out in the best logical order? Are statements of fact properly sourced? You may find that the article says exactly what you want it to say in the manner in which you want to say it, or you may make a few changes. Either way, it is then time for a second, more detailed proof-reading.

The second pass should be very slow and deliberate, focusing on the individual words, letters and punctuation rather than the content. Even after you've run a spelling and grammar checker (which we should all do), there may still be errors. Run-on sentences, incorrect words, and other errors will  generally not show up with the checkers built into your word-processing software. If you are using a web site's editor, even fewer errors will be caught mechanically.

As you read through your work and discover errors, either before or after publishing it, make a mental note of each one. Most of us have habits that we repeat over and over again. Whether these are typing pattern errors that our fingers make without any help from our brains, or mental habits that we fall into even though we know the difference between its and it's, we often repeat mistakes from article to article.

By identifying our error patterns, we can train ourselves to pay extra attention every time we use a word or phrase that tends to cause us problems. It'll make your proof-reading easier and eventually it will help you eliminate your most common errors because they'll look like red flags every time you use the problem word or phrase.

There is no worse feeling for me, at least, than publishing an article with content of which I am proud, and then finding one or more silly errors that I didn't catch because I was in too much of a hurry to share my brilliant creation with the virtual world. Unfortunately, this happens far too frequently.

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Interviews: PR versus News

As journalists, we benefit when an expert agrees to discuss some newsworthy topic with us. Whether it is a complete interview, some expert commentary, or filling in some background information to help our readers better understand some difficult subject, the addition of credible, original, third-party quotes almost always makes for a better article. What we have to also realize, is that, these experts, also have a purpose in giving us the interview.

Sometimes that purpose is simply to gain name recognition or to keep the name of their organization in the public eye. Sometimes, though, especially with people representing commercial operations, the sole purpose for granting an interview is to paint their company in a positive light for a free commercial. That's certainly their right. As journalists, though, we are not in the business of writing commercials for publication on news channels.

When the interview is giving a company a direct opportunity to refute some allegation against the company, then these PR statements can be of direct use as the official company response to some accusation or situation which casts them in a negative light. When we are asking for their expertise on a matter either not related or only peripherally related to the company in question, however, such scripted responses are of marginal use.

It is our job to cut through the company line to find real information that is of value to readers. For example, I recently had the opportunity to interview the Vice President of North American Manufacturing from the Ford Motor Company for a news article about the state of American manufacturing. He was certainly qualified to speak on the subject as the head of manufacturing for a major American company, however, his goal in agreeing to the interview was to promote the Ford Motor Company.

In arranging the interview, I was very up-front about the nature of the article for which the interview would be used. I wanted to examine the health of manufacturing in America, including the outsourcing of American jobs, the general direction of the economy, and issues relating to those topics.  The first sign that I was not going to get a truly candid interview, was that the VP, James Tetreault, had another Ford "spokesperson" on the line as well. This person was more of a PR expert along to make sure that Tetreault did not say anything of which Ford would not approve. Indeed, this person did jump in a couple of times to answer for Tetreault when I challenged his initial response.

I had initially intended the interview to be published as a Q&A piece with my questions and the relevant pieces of the interviewee's answers (edited for clarity and brevity) printed directly with a brief introduction, similar to this Q&A news article. Because of the high level of PR content, some of which was, at best, borderline in terms of being "factually accurate statements," I had to rethink my approach.

I wrote the article on the topic I originally intended, but included a couple of other credible third-party sources to refute one point made by Tetreault, and to buttress the independence of the article. However, I wrote the article in a more narrative form, using direct quotes from Tetreault, but not in a strict Q&A format. Much of the interview content turned out to be unusable for my purposes.

It is not always necessary to portray the interviewee or their company in a positive light. For example, if you happened to get an interview with the former BP CEO on the golf course shortly after the BP gulf oil well disaster, as a journalist, "You have to go beyond his statements that everything is under control and it's just a little bit of oil leaking out right now. Nothing to worry about." However, portraying an interviewee negatively may have repercussions as well.

In the case of the Ford interview I conducted, I researched some basic facts before the interview. When the VP said Ford's success in the first part of the year was due more to Ford's product assortment than to a more broad based upturn in economic conditions, I was able to counter with the fact that Ford's competitors had at least equal, and in many cases better overall sales increases during the same period. I pointed this out to him directly in the interview and included it in the article.

The use of qualified third-party experts can add significant credibility to a news article, but if you act as a shill for the interviewee's company, it can have the opposite effect.

Establishing credibility part II: Commentary

Even commentary pieces must be built on a firm foundation of unassailable facts. To convince a reader that your opinion has merit, you must have a higher amount of stored credibility because you are risking drawing down on it with every subjective or opinionated statement you make. Your credibility is taxed in direct proportion to the degree of outlandishness that each such statement contains.

For example, each of the following statements puts more of a strain on the author's credibility because of the increasing deviation from mainstream opinion. 1) We should subject anyone coming into the United States from a country of special concern to a more thorough search when boarding an airplane. 2) We should apply a more thorough search to anyone who fits the physical and behavioral profile of previously identified members of a terrorist group. 3) We should subject anyone of Arabian descent to an extended search. 4) We should deny U.S. entry to all foreigners. 5) We should nuke 'em all.

Each of those statements requires the writer to make a much stronger case built on a foundation of facts strong enough to support the authors' opinion, until you get to a statement like the fifth one that is entirely unsupportable and transforms the commentary article into a rant regardless of how much credibility the author has banked with the rest of the article. Carl Sagan may have said it best when he said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." That applies not only to scientific endeavors, but also to news commentary.

Readers understand that news commentary contains subjective statements based on the author's opinion. Good commentary leads a reader down a logical path. At first, the path should seem like familiar territory to the reader. They should feel as if they are walking on a firm grounding of familiar facts. The author can place plausible opinions in among the facts, like a will-o-wisp drawing the unwary reader deeper and deeper into the writer's forest of logic. The best commentary will take a reader to an unfamiliar destination, sympathizing with the commentary writer's opinion, without them ever realizing they left their old familiar path.

Establishing credibility Part I

I remember when the evening television news anchor was the most trusted man in America. When Walter Cronkite said "...and that's the way it is," we knew that that was indeed, the way it is. It wasn't his opinion. It wasn't his spin, or his interpretation of the a situation. It was the News with a capital N and that meant facts, just the facts, and nothing but the facts.

Cronkite had that trust because he had developed a reputation and his credibility was beyond reproach. Honestly, that's the way I prefer my news. Give me the facts, and let me decide what I feel about the situation on my own. I don't need a triumvirate of morning show hosts to shake their heads and pass judgment on the news as if their opinion is more valid than that of anyone else.

Unfortunately, though, as Walter might have said that's the way it is these days. Commentary, opinion and facts are all ingredients in today's news recipe. Some recipes may call for more of one ingredient than the others. The net result, however, is that hardly any of us would volunteer the name of a modern day news anchor as the most trusted person in America these days.

As news writers, however, it is our jobs to present the news in a credible fashion. If the reader doesn't believe what we write, then we are wasting their time with our words. Simply saying something that's true doesn't always automatically translate into believability. As professional writers it is our jobs to choose words carefully. We can choose words for their emotional connotations, and that's fine, as long as we are also careful to use words and write with a credible voice, using solid logic applied to verifiable facts.

If I write that the most popular car color is red, I need to support and qualify that statement. Without that support it is not a credible statement and it detracts from any point I want to make in whatever I'm writing. After all, if I am caught in an error one time, the reader can only assume that the rest of my article is questionable as well.

To support the fact that the most popular car color is red, for example, There are several ways to go. I can remove my credibility from the equation altogether by attributing the statement to someone else. If I say "Joe Smith, the owner of Joe Smith's Fine Used Cars in Hoboken, New Jersey, told me that the most popular car color is red," then the reader can make a judgement about the validity of the information based upon their opinion of Joe Smith's credibility and his qualifications to make such as judgement.

Whatever the reader decides about Joe Smith, I, as the author, cannot be judged on the relative merit of that statement unless, in the rest of my article I assign it some credibility that differs from the reader's assumption. If I say "therefore, my recommendation for car companies to save money is to only make red cars because it is the most popular color," then I have added my reputation and credibility on top of Joe Smith's by personally validating his statement. Now again, my credibility is on the line with the reader.

Every fact or statement in a news piece either builds on the writer's credibility because it is explicitly sourced, or it relies on the credibility capital the writer has already built with the reader. A news writer's credibility balance sheet cannot go into negative territory or readers (and editors) will decide that your article has no real worth to them.

Finding news topics and sources

There are many ways to find original sources for news stories. often, these sources will also provide breaking news tips that let you get information at the same time as it becomes available to newspaper and television news reporters.

If you have a particular news niche in which you write regularly, think about the organizations that generate news in that area. For example, if you like to write about the latest medical breakthroughs, epidemics, food poisoning outbreaks, and other health news, there are a variety of very authoritative original sources available to you as a reporter.

You can start with the Centers for Disease Control's Press Room page. This page provides in-depth and authoritative information on current outbreaks of things like salmonella, bird flu, measles, and other public health concerns. You can find symptoms, statistics, prevention, and loads of other relevant information. Perhaps, just as important for some publishers is the availability of high quality, public domain images for use by journalists. These images fall into the category of an online press kit and include pictures not only specific to individual news stories, but images suitable for general medical news use. Don't forget that each one must be properly credited. The image below is an example of a CDC microbiologist inoculating an embryonic chicken egg against the bird flu.

Photo credit: Greg Knobloch, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Another useful source for medical news stories is the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). By registering for media access, you can get a weekly email summary of available news releases, including many that are embargoed to the general public. Here you'll find the latest medical studies, research, and other breaking medical news. Whereas you might use CDC for background information or general statistics, the JAMA releases might be the focus of your news article.

For example, on this page there's a summary and link to a full article which might lend itself to this title: "Study lists controlling behaviors linked to domestic violence." That's hard news which is of interest to a large segment of the population and which has some evergreen potential depending upon your specific angle and title. This story could be written up in a variety of ways to match the preferences of your intended publisher. If you have first hand experience with domestic violence, can call and interview a staff member at a local women's shelter, or add a brief list of domestic violence resources in your area, the story can be very effectively personalized and/or localized. It can even be written as a non-news article with an angle like "Controlling behaviors linked to spousal abuse, what to watch for." (That's not a great title, but I wanted to communicate the angle for the purposes of this example.)

By adding statistics on domestic violence from the CDC and other sources, you can strengthen your story and make it more than a simple recap of the JAMA release. Furthermore, because this story was embargoed when first made available, you have time to get all that background information in order, write and proofread your article and still be among the very first to get the story online as soon as the embargo is lifted.

Embargoed means that the organization is releasing information only to authorized journalists so that they can write their story in advance and be ready to publish the instant the embargo is lifted. Be careful to always follow the terms of the embargo and do not submit your story for publication before the time and date stated in the embargo. These kinds of restricted access sources can put the online news writer on an equal footing with any news agency in the world in terms of being first to print.

Government agencies with many different areas of interest make information available to the public and reporters regularly. The Department of Health and Human Services covers a wide range of health issues. A partial list of the web sites on which they make information available is found here. Most government agencies will also allow members of the media to subscribe for email alerts for timely press releases. Often you can sign up very selectively by region or specific topic, depending upon the agency involved. Many have public domain photos available for journalistic use, too. Just be sure to check and follow the terms of use outlined at each site.

More general information sources like PR Newswire or Newswise have sections dedicated to medical topics and registered journalists can received daily email updates of breaking news from those sources as well. It is up to you as a working journalist to separate PR hype from objective news and to treat each accordingly. That's not to say you can't report on Best Pharmaceutical's high expectations for a new drug undergoing preliminary clinical trials, but examine in-depth their claims and make clear the source of the information. If possible, call up a third party expert and get an objective and knowledgeable opinion  on the specific claims.

Other sources might be the press pages of major research hospitals and medical schools. These are primary sources which often include contact information for the actual researcher who wrote and conducted the study who may be available for a telephone interview or to answer a few emailed questions. When you can get original quotes directly from a source, you are further separating your article from the pack and adding a higher layer of quality.

A reporter may or may not be an expert in the field about which they write. It certainly helps. For example, a doctor writing about breaking medical news can use their own expertise to dissect claims, talk about  risks, and provide other detailed analysis. On the other hand, a good journalist investigates the topics about which they write. They report facts and rely on qualified third party opinions to verify those facts or provide explanations, implications, and other pertinent expert analysis. In cases where the reporter is not an expert in the field, they rely on some other source to make sure they fully understand what they are writing about.

In general, if you don't understand a press release and can't find someone to explain it fully, you shouldn't write about it.  Some publishers require the writer to be an expert in certain fields before allowing them to publish on specific topics. Medical news is often one such category. To be a Yahoo! Contributor Network (Y!CN) Featured Contributor, for example, writers are expected to either be a qualified health professional or have some other quantifiable expertise on the topic and must undergo an exacting approval process before excepted in that category.

If you start using these types of sources for your online news articles, and especially if you use several of them for each story to provide richer background detail and demonstrate a thorough understanding of the issue at hand, you'll be among the top tier of news writers. Try it and then compare your articles to those of traditional, respected news outlets. You'll find yourself noticing the deficiencies in many standard news articles which are little more than restatements of publicly available press releases. You'll also start to notice when the reporter didn't understand the nature of the topic. The difference between and association and causation in medical studies, for example, is often misreported by mainstream reporters and can be another angle for your news comparison article.

By using multiple primary sources, online news writers can write with a level of quality that is competitive with, and in some cases, better than any other breaking news publication.

Writing better and earning more

The purpose of this post is two-fold, although I'll keep it short and to the point. I want to answer two simple questions.

• How can I earn more with my writing?
• How can I get better at writing?

The answer to both questions is: write.

Whether you're trying to earn a full time wage, help stay ahead of the bills, or just earn a few extra bucks each week, writing should be viewed just like any other job. It may be a job you love, but it is a job nevertheless. That means you have to show up for work regularly and get the job done. I strongly advocate setting up specific work hours each day (or each week) and sticking to them religiously.

During these work hours, you should be wholly focused on writing. I understand that you may also be taking care of young children and there's no pause button that lets you take a break from that during the day, but other than that, when you're at work, consider yourself "at work." Sit down at your keyboard and write. Whatever you earn with your writing will go up in proportionally to the amount of hours you spend writing (although it may not be a linear relationship).

Like any job, showing up and doing the work isn't a question of whether you feel like it at any particular time, but whether the clock tells you it's time to go to work. If you feel particularly inspired and want o work some overtime, that's fine, but skipping out early should not be an option unless you've already doubled your monetary goal for the month, then and only then, have you earned a vacation day.

For the second question, your writing will improve with practice. The more you write on a regular basis, the better you'll get over time. That improvement will take several forms. First, setting regular hours habituates you to writing. For most writers I know, the hardest part of any composition is the first sentence, and often the very first word. Regular writing hours doesn't give you the option of being uninspired. It's time to write, so you write. You can write whatever you want, but there must be measurable and consistent output.

Separate other "work" activities from actual writing. Not all your work time is actual writing. There's research, promotion, opportunity-seeking, skill development and probably a couple of other things that may vary for each individual. However, all too often, those activities tend to consume far too much of our writng time. Set specific limits for these activities that leave the bulk of your work time for just writing.

Secondly, the quality of your work will improve as you continue to write and publish. Practice, all by itself will make yo better, as will reading and comparing your work to that of others. If you're writing news, read traditional news reports (Reuters, AP, AFP, CNN, and/or all the others), but also read the news articles that get featured by your publisher whether it is Yahoo!, Examiner, or any other outlet. Make mental notes of what you liked about each of those reports, and work on improving in areas where you think any of them were better than yours.

That's not to say copy someone else's style. Develop your own style from an amalgamation of what you consider the best aspects of everything you read.  If you like the straightforward, fact-based style of Reuters, but also enjoy the friendly flavor of Yahoo!'s Shine and the compelling first-person story-telling of Reader's Digest, combine the three styles and see what happens.

Feedback from editors, category managers, private clients, or whomever you write for makes you better. They don't all give feedback, but when they do, pay attention. Don't be afraid to ask for examples or clarification from time to time if you're not clear about the feedback they provide. Don't be a pest, but do make sure you understand the feedback you receive.

If you feel you have made a major improvement or change in your writing, or are unsure of the quality of something you published, ask others in your writing peer group for feedback. Most good writers are happy to help.

Who says to avoid weasel words?

As news writers, we must be careful to distinguish between fact and opinion. When we offer our own opinion, it should be clearly identified as such. When we offer someone else's opinion, we must say whose opinion it is. That, of course, means that we have to know to whom the opinion belongs in the first place.
One of the most obvious and most widely used non-attributable attributions used in everyday speech is "they say." In a news article that means absolutely nothing. The sentence "they say that the economy is getting better," gives the reader no information at all unless you have clearly identified who the word "they" represents. For example, "I asked three professors of economics from the Harvard School of Business, and they say..." identifies the people whose opinion or expertise is being cited and is a perfectly acceptable phrasing, especially if the names of the individuals are included or at least available via a source link.

The word "they" is pretty nebulous and is an easy one to catch, but sometimes, we might sound like we're giving source information when we're not. "Four out of five dentists agree that for patients who chew gum, sugarless gum is better." That statement is somewhat misleading because it seems to give the source of some bit of information, but does it? Did the writer only ask five dentists? That might make it a statistically unreliable sample. Did the writer ask twenty-six dentists until he got four within a five dentist sample that agreed with the premise? Did the writer ask 2000 dentists and get agreement from 1600 of them? Unless the detail of the survey is given, the reader doesn't know how much weight or credibility lies behind the statement.

As independent news writers, we need to work harder than someone who writes under the mantle of traditional news services like Reuters or the Associated Press to establish and maintain our credibility. So when a Reuters news writer uses the phrase "Economists say job growth between 250,000 and 300,000 is needed..." hardly anyone bats an eye or asks, "which economists? All of them? was it the economist cited in the previous paragraph and some unspecified others? Is it four out of five economists asked?" Strictly speaking, we, as readers, don't know whether that group of economists is employed by a biased entity, have any particular credentials, or even if they exist in any way more substantially than some guys in business suits overheard in a Starbucks near Wall Street.We need to be better than that. News writers should always give the reader the source of that information. If it is the consensus ascertained from a reputable poll or survey of economists, then we need to properly cite the polling organization and even the date of the poll, preferably with a link back to the actual data.

Here's an example of a vague source reference that is acceptable, because the specific information is given later on: "A government report says..." By itself that would not pass muster because it is unverifiable. There are too many government agencies and reports to allow the reader to judge the quality of the information provided. While I recommend providing the best information at the first use of the source's information, in this case the Associated Press writer does fill in the blank in the next paragraph when he says "The Department of Transportation's inspector general says in a report posted online Friday..."

That qualification gives the reader enough information to make a judgement about the information's credibility. Ideally, in the internet age, he would have included a link to the original report so the reader has access to the full set of information and the context from which the quotes were drawn. This wasn't possible when newspapers were the primary news outlet, but it is now and we should take advantage of linking to source material to enhance our news reports whenever possible, and not just when it is required in the citation guidelines of a particular news publisher.

In short, for any information which we attribute to the opinion or expertise any group of experts, we must say who those experts are and how we know the group believes it in order for our work to be credible. That applies whether the group is they, previous generations, veterans, Republicans, liberals, economists, or four out of five dentists.

Quick example: original sources, personalization

This is just a quick post to link to a real life example of things that I talked about earlier. This news story, published at Yahoo! News, reflects the use of original sources and using a personal perspective on a broader story. This article is about the weather, but I wrote it in first person using myself as an individual who is concerned about contaminated precipation being reported in my area, linking that to an upcoming storm, and then investigating those concerns to provide answers not only to myself but to the reader, as well. It also reflects my personality in what I think is my "authentic voice" for those of you who are writing for the various Yahoo! sites that list that as a desired component of featured articles.

Keywords and titles revisited

I've discussed my thoughts on keyword density and the importance of a news article's title, but I haven't discussed the two together, so here goes. I don't use any particular goal for keyword density, but if I am writing about a popular topic, I do pay attention to what the popular keywords being used by readers to find information about that topic are.


If I were writing about Donald Trump taking two tries to produce his actual birth certifcate, I'd look on Google and see that "Donald Trump birth certificate" is a popular choice for people searching for this topic. based on that, and because it is precisely related to the content I'm writing, I'd make sure that Donald Trump and Birth Certificate were in my title. At Yahoo!, Yahoo! Contributor Network, Examiner and many other sites, the first part of your title ends up in your article's URL which can help with search engine placement as well.


I would also make sure that the first paragraph of my article clearly tells the reader what the article is about, and I'd include those words early in the paragraph. There would likely be words in between "Donald Trump" and "Birth Certificate" because that's not a natural phrasing.


The first sentence might be something like "Real estate mogul, reality TV star and presidential candidate Donald Trump was able to produce an official birth certificate a day after mistakenly attempting to pass off a hospital issued document to reporters at a press event."


Thereafter, however, I would tend not to use the full name Donald Trump. Instead, I'd use Trump as in "Trump displayed the erroneous document while proclaiming the ease with which anyone can get their official birth certificate." I'd also use descriptors such as "The flamboyant Atlantic City casino owner has publicly considered presidential runs in previous election cycles as well."


Under the old keyword density paradigm, a writer might use Trump's full name every time they referred to him throughout the article. That would have an unnatural sound and seem awkward to readers. Furthermore, the term "birth certificate" would be used for every reference to the document. This repetition would detract from the writer's credibility.


When I read an article like that, even ones that I wrote, it sounds as though the writer's primary goal is search engine ranking and that conveying information is, at best, a secondary consideration. It certainly doesn't induce me to subscribe to that author's writings or to share the article with others.


With the tremendous influence of social media these days, by over-using keywords, you may be missing out the potential for your article to go viral and giving up more page views than you gain with top search engine placement. Don't ignore keywords and search engine placement, but don't let them ruin the reader's experience.