* The moon, eh? If you've got high-quality jpegs of your house, we could probably make a feature out of it. (Pictures are generally worth a lot more than words.)
* What's the pay like? I'm not exactly sure how freelancers are dealt with on a by-story basis, since that mostly takes place at the WWN. Dayrates used to be $150 but they have to more than that now. Let me ask....
My counterpart at WWN says dayrates (if you come in and work for a day) are generally between $150 and $175. Most freelancers for them, however, just do individual stories.
The way that works is for a main page story (say between 275 and 475 words), they pay $50 for the lead (the story idea) and then $100 for writing it. For shorts (the little stories in boxes), it's half - $25 lead fee and $50 for writing it. I believe Sun will be the same.
In practice, for both papers, lead fees are much more common than writing fees, but we're going to be boosting our total pages per issue soon, which is why we're looking around for extra content. (Don't be surprised if you send in a story and it gets accepted, but treated as a lead and totally rewritten... especially at first.)
Some freelancers actually just send in leads all the time.
Lead ideas for WWN can be pretty out there (although they do their share of real news), but the lead ideas Sun accepts are more often actual clips from local papers -- outrageous, unusual, or heartwarming stories that we haven't already read in major papers/internet services.
If it's on Yahoo's "Oddly Enough" Reuters feed, we've already read it. If it's in "Inexplicata: The World of the Strange" newsletter, we've already read it. If it's in the San Jose Mercury-Star, we've already read it. But if it's in the Rochester, Vermont Daily News, chances are we haven't read it.
If it's in any of the London papers, not only have we already read it, but they've probably copied it from us after we copied it from them. |
