Mitch Lipka, editorial director, Contently.com
Mitch Lipka, Contently.com
Mitch Lipka | Editorial Director | Contently.com
Maya Payne Smart, freelance business journalist and founder of WritingCoach.com talks with Mitch Lipka, editorial director of Contently.com, an open marketplace for writers and publishers which its founders call “a platform where real journalists can manage their freelance careers.”
PODCAST: Smart asks Lipka about Contently.com.
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Maya Smart: Can you tell us a bit about Contently.com—what it is and when it launched?
Mitch Lipka: It’s a relatively new site that started earlier this year and the purpose of it is to provide content for companies that need writing on their websites and are not equipped or found themselves to be over-matched when they were trying to get it on their own. We get the writers for them, edit and provide them completed ready-to-use content.
Smart: As the editorial director for the site, what are you looking for in the writers that you hire? Do you have a preference for people with journalism experience or does any kind of writing experience help?
Lipka: It does not have to be a journalist. There are people who are perfectly qualified to do this who have been marketing writers or who have done a lot of things on their own. If you have published work and you can show that you understand the subject matter and you can write a good sentence, then you can be considered. Really the only people we don’t look at are people are people who provide no interest in any subject that’s relevant to anything that we’re writing about or who don’t take the time to show that they have the skills that are required.
Smart:What are some of the things that define the better applicants?
Lipka: The best applicants are those who take the time—and by time I mean 10 or 15 minutes—to say here are the subjects that I’m most comfortable writing about, which is part of the application, and include a few samples of their writing—just links—to say here’s what I’ve done. After that it’s the subjective question of do I think your writing matches up with what we are looking for. If you take the time to do it properly and show that you have skills then you are going to get noticed. If you fill out absolutely nothing or you take a flip approach and only have an interest in real niche things that have no mass market appeal then chances are you’re going to get passed over.
Smart: What opportunities do you have for business journalists?
Lipka: The bulk of what we do would fall under the business category. We have anything from a site that writes about Wall Street and the media to franchises, small business, a lot of personal finance sites. Probably two thirds of our content goes to something that you would consider to be a business writer’s function. There’s less in mergers and acquisition and more in personal finance and in the business of social media, technology and marketing.
Smart: Given your column for Reuters and The Boston Globe and your own site, The Consumer Chronicle, what advice would you have for fellow business journalists in terms of marketing and networking? What’s worked well for you?
Lipka: Most of my career was spent as a staff writer and an editor. My contacts in the time I spent building a reputation in a particular area helped carry over. The best advice I have is that if you develop a specialty make sure that everyone knows that that is your specialty and that you have it and you have skills that other people don’t and connections to people that give you access that other people don’t have. But you have got to spread the word. So if you have to keep it alive through your own website, blog, LinkedIn, anyway you can, keep sending the message.
This interview was part of a four-day Webinar, “Sales Strategies for Freelance Business Journalists,” that took place in August 2011.
