Be a Stringer!

From the blog of a friend, Dave Fessenden. This is an excerpt--to read the entire entry, click here.

What do Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and Sherwood Eliot Wirt (the founding editor of Decision Magazine) all have in common?

Well, besides being amazingly accomplished writers, they all began their careers working on a newspaper. And therein lies a lesson. Newspaper experience is a valuable education for any writer.

I hated my first job with the editor’s recurring comment, “This stinks; rewrite it” had something to do with it. But I learned a lot. Having to write on a deadline and making sure I got the facts straight were good disciplines.

I know what you’re thinking — hasn’t the Internet put most newspapers out of business?

Well, it hasn’t helped, but there are still a lot of newspapers out there—well over a hundred dailies and weeklies in Pennsylvania, for example. And many of them have both a print and an online edition.

Your chances of landing a full-time job as a reporter may be slim to none, unless you have a journalism degree and experience, or your favorite uncle owns the paper. Far better to try for a position as a part-time reporter, otherwise known as a stringer. (I don’t know what the origin of that word is, but at one newspaper I worked at, it meant they would “string you along” for months and months with a vague promise of full-time employment.)

You may also find it difficult to get an assignment at a daily paper; the competition is surprisingly fierce. So if you’re having no luck with a daily, try a weekly. And if you can’t get hired as a stringer, perhaps you can write individual feature articles.