How to get published in print in an online age

Every now and then, students and aspiring journalists write to me for advice about entering the field. Here’s an email I sent recently, published with permission.

Yo, Lauren! I’ve been a somewhat of a longtime reader of your site Otaku Journalist, and every piece of advice you’ve written on there has helped me out a lot. I just got into otaku journalism a few months ago and now I run a blog, and work for two websites as a writer in their anime divisions.

I’ve just got into applying to magazines (which may be a bit too soon), and I wanted to know how writing for a magazine is compared to writing for a website. Are there specific programs you need? Different protocols and such? Can’t wait to hear back from you!

So glad to hear my site has been helpful. I hope I can give you an answer that’s equally of use!

If you check out my portfolio, it’s entirely Web work. But believe it or not, I got my MA in Print Journalism. Not Online Journalism, not Journalism in general. So I should be qualified to answer questions about writing in print.

Still, I haven’t had all that much experience writing for print. Here’s my short history:

  • My first ever internship was for Log Home Living when I was a rising junior in college. I spent most of my time researching for the editors and calling up vendors to give me high-quality photos for print, but I also got to write about cabin decor and even coined the term “antler fancy,” which my friends still reference in my presence.

  • As a college senior, I wrote for the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, a local newspaper where I covered everything from town hall meetings, to a local woman’s 104th birthday. Oh God, I just found a feature I wrote about gout—here is proof that professional writers don’t start out magically writing well. I loved the newsroom atmosphere, but I hated my low-tech computer (see this picture of my newsroom cubicle for explanation).

  • Also as a college senior, I interned as a reader for a local literary journal, Peeks and Valleys, which is no longer around but here’s proof it once existed. Basically I’d read 300 or so short story submissions a month and send along the best 10 to the editors. If you want to give an untalented college English major an undeservedly big ego, just give her the power to cast judgement over other people’s work for a bit.

  • And finally, Cosplay USA. This is probably the one you know about! Patrick  reached out to me as a one shot but I recently met with the publisher and I’m hoping to do more work for them. As it turns out, the publisher is the same person who publishers Log Home Living! It figures that the Washington, DC area publishing circle is pretty small.

So I haven’t done much, but my experience covers a variety of print publications, from a newspaper to a literary magazine to regular magazines. Here’s what I know for sure:

  • Magazines cost a lot more to produce. Online you can just put up a news site relatively cheaply with free templates even, but when it comes to sending something to print you have to work with a designer, printer, a distributor, etc. Also, since there are more people to pay, you can imagine what this does to your paycheck as a writer.

  • Related to cost, in a magazine or a paper, space is very limited. When I was interning for the Free Lance-Star, my stories would be measured not in words or characters, but INCHES. Really, they’d ask for a “five inch story” on a subject. And if it turned out to be longer, we’d run the longer story on the website since it didn’t cost anything to publish longer on the Web. This is pretty old-fashioned and I don’t know if papers still do this.

  • We talk sometimes about “active vs. passive” mediums of receiving information. The Internet is active, like a conversation. You can weigh in on the news on CNN.com by leaving comments under the article. Print is passive. That doesn’t mean everyone always agrees with you, though. But since it takes more effort to call or email, you’re only going to hear if you REALLY screwed up. Or not—I once got an angry phone call in the newsroom because I got the local pastor’s middle name wrong.

  • Print work is still valued more highly than online work. Perhaps its the permanency, perhaps its the slower news cycle, but readers still consider print media to be more “trustworthy” than anything they read online. Writers also consider print especially valuable, even if it doesn’t pay as well, because there’s still nothing like seeing your name in print. Dying or not, print still holds high esteem in the global psyche.

As a result, here’s what writing for print is like these days:

  • Pitching print is harder. If my experience is anything to compare to, you’re far more likely to find gigs online than in print. I’ve been pitching Wired for about a year (along with thousands of other writers, I’m sure), and still nothing yet. I can’t find it, but I remember a writer I admire, Gaby Dunn, saying, “People see the two articles I got in the New York Times Magazine. What they don’t see is the 15 pitches that got rejected.” Since print writers are competing for limited space, it takes a lot of effort to even get noticed. And it goes without saying, you do have to pitch. Don’t expect print editors to find you first.

  • Pitching print takes more time. The bigger the commitment on behalf of the publisher, the bigger the commitment she’ll expect out of you. It’s why people devote months simply to writing a book proposal to a publishing house, before even writing the actual book. With print, you want to write an in-depth, multi-paragraph description of the article you’d like to write for that publication. You may even want to do an interview or two just for the pitch! The more information an editor can get, the better she can tell if your story will be a good fit.

  • Word counts are stricter. This goes along with limited space. If a print editor says she wants 1,000 words, she means it! 1,200 would be acceptable on the Web and perhaps even welcomed if you went into more depth because of it, but not in print.

  • Check your style guide. If you’ve been writing online a lot, you’re probably used to writing more casually than most print publications would care to accept. Here’s Web journalism guru Jakob Nielsen’s explainer about the differences in style between writing for print and the Web. You’ll notice for example that in this article, I’m using a lot of links. If I were writing in print and couldn’t link, I’d simply have to be more descriptive.

In summary: print and online writing are certainly different, but print isn’t a closed club. I can’t think of any specific tools or programs you’d need that you wouldn’t need for any other type of writing. Your most important asset is a strong work ethic and the drive to push on even when acceptances are few and far between.

Do you have a question you’d like to ask? Drop me an email or visit my Tumblr Ask box.