Hiya writers,
There’s something really freeing about taking a notebook, sitting by the lake, and just jotting down ideas for stories and essays. Which is why that’s exactly what I’ve been doing this week.
Enjoy the issue!
NEWS & VIEWS
Joy in journalism
Despite the challenges in our industry, 77% of journalists say they were proud of their work and would choose their career all over again.
The results are from an extensive new Pew Research Center study of nearly 12,000 working US-based journalists surveyed between February and March 2022. Of the respondents, 77% were white, 8% were Hispanic, 5% were Black, 3% were Asian, and a combined 6% identified as “other” or did not answer. Men and women made up 51% and 46% of the respondents, respectively, while 1% identified as “another gender identity.”
Some other interesting findings:
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Seven-in-ten journalists surveyed say they are “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with their job, and an identical share say they often feel excited about their work. About half of journalists say their job has a positive impact on their emotional well-being, higher than the 34% who say it is bad for their emotional well-being.
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When asked to describe their industry in a single word, nearly three-quarters of journalists surveyed (72%) use a word with negative connotations, with the most common responses being words that relate to “struggling” and “chaos.” Other, far less common negative words include “biased” and “partisan,” as well as “difficult” and “stressful.”
- A little over half of journalists surveyed (55%) say that in reporting the news, every side does not always deserve equal coverage, greater than the share who say journalists should always strive to give every side equal coverage (44%).
While there’s nothing entirely new or surprising in the study, it does provide useful insights into the state of US news media and where the industry as a whole is seeking to make changes moving forward. Read the full report here.
SEE ALSO:
How to write your first book as a journalist: VICE News senior news reporter Sophia Smith Galer has recently published her book “Losing it: Sex Education for the 21st Century” and gave some tips on her TikTok account on writing a book from idea conception through to publication. “The minute I looked at the market, I could see no-one had addressed sex education and sex misinformation [in] a journalistic way before. The books which covered adjacent subjects were quite academic,” she explained.
What to do when you’re overwhelmed by freelance work: It starts with a trickle. A few too many tasks, a little too much work on the to-do-list. Then, it all keeps piling up until the sink breaks. From time to time, every freelancer gets overwhelmed.
WRITERS WANTED
Some calls for submissions we found on Twitter this week:
Good Housekeeping UK is looking for Christmas feature ideas.
Future seeks pitches on topics that push forward our understanding of web3’s possibilities.
GQ is looking for unusual pitches on film/tv/music/book trends + opinions.
iNews Sports is looking for freelance reporters.
The Tribune is interested in features and opinion on all the usual: politics, labour, history, etc.
The National, Scotland, is looking for Scottish hooks to culture, history, society, politics, science + tech, travel features, and more, especially from female journalists.
Stylist, UK, is seeking ideas on sleep, gut health, sexual wellbeing, hormones, women’s health, energy, mood, etc.
The Bookseller is looking for article pitches by disabled authors, agents, editors, publishing employees and booksellers.
Metro, UK, wants first-person stories and opinion pieces.
Also for Metro, send along pitches about amazing people doing stereotype-defying things, at all stages of life.
Reader’s Digest, UK, is looking for pitches about music, books, sex and relationships for online, plus inspiring human interest, health & science stories for the print mag.
IJNET would love to know of a journalism tool, app, or resource that they haven’t covered.
WORDLING INSIGHT
I can’t control the results.
I can’t control how many people read this, how many of you like it, how many of you share it.
I can’t control whether my book will sell, for how much, and how long it will take. I can’t control whether the publisher will love it massively, be lukewarm to it, or buy it just to fill a spot.
I can’t control whether someone will love my stories or hate them, give me good reviews or trashy ones.
I can control, however, that I write the books and that I send them out. I can control that I write my daily words. And I can control how much I share, how honestly, and with what intent.
I can control how much I show up to do the work. And so I do.
GLOBAL REPORT
INDIA: “Since launching in 2002, Khabar Lahariya has trained and empowered women in India to report stories that shed light on issues not regularly covered by mainstream media outlets in the country. For two decades, the all-women news organization co-founded by journalist Shalini Joshi, a former ICFJ Fellow, has bravely continued to report amid challenges to India’s media landscape, such as technological disruption and turbulent national politics.”
BRAZIL: “Reporting on the Amazon has always been a hard, dangerous task, but it has become particularly lethal in recent years. In 2021, the number of deaths caused by conflict in local communities increased by over 1000% from the prior year. Eighty percent of the violent deaths in rural areas in Brazil take place in the Legal Amazon region. On June 15, 2022, ten days after the disappearance of Dom Philips and Bruno Pereira, the Federal Police of Brazil confirmed that the two were murdered and their bodies found.”
UKRAINE: “As Russia’s war on Ukraine rages on, women once again find themselves missing from news coverage. Fewer than one in four voices featured in reporting on the invasion belong to women, according to a recent evaluation of online news about the war in Ukraine. Moreover, war coverage of women was often found to portray them mostly as victims, masking their resilience.”
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s.”
– Stephen King
SHARE THE WORDLING
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