How to pitch a freelance story: Find connections, have a surprise

Great stories often have a surprise. Something unexpected. A plot twist you didn’t see coming.

Sometimes it’s just as simple as finding lost treasure beneath a bed.

I saw a post on Facebook a few years ago about a local group that had found old films documenting rural life in Virginia in the 1920s and ‘30s and showing the films. A woman literally found this treasure of old films moldering away underneath a bed. I was intrigued.

I thought it would be a great freelance story. So I did some digging to learn more about the background of the group, who made the films, and other details.

In my research I discovered that the filmmaker, James Wharton, graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1920. “Alumni magazine,” I thought.

I pitched the story to the Johns Hopkins alumni magazine’s editor, playing on the connection of the filmmaker to Johns Hopkins University, the uniqueness of the films, and how meaningful they are to people in the Northern Neck region of Virginia and beyond.

I got a contract to write the story. At the time, I was getting my Master’s in Communications from Purdue University, so a little extra money was nice. But the best part was how much fun I had researching and writing the story, titled “Documenting the Northern Neck.”

Use Short Words. Write simple sentences. Make Short Paragraphs. Repeat.

You talk using short words. You use second-person pronouns. You use lots of contractions. You speak in short sentences.

Then you start writing. You think you need to sound smart and intelligent. You think you need to impress people with your fancy words, like you did when you wrote your college papers.

Next thing you know you’ve got 40-word sentences that makes you look very intelligent.

Or do they?

That intelligent word salad you wrote that has all those 20-dollar, four- and five-syllable words? No one knows what you’re telling them.

That “leveraging” of your “utilization” of the English language for the “cascading messaging” you dropped on them drowned them in a waterfall of meaningless words.

Try this instead. Get in, get out and make things plain and simple. Make sure they know the “why” of what you’re telling them. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs in the active voice.

Prune your writing for vigor. Less is more. Always, less is more.

There's something bigger going on in your company

I worked with a company that was changing the way it operated. The strategy was interesting.

It was a huge company and their communications strategy was to send an email to all their employees telling them about this new way of doing things.

Here was the problem. The company told the employees to go read this very long, dense document that would explain everything. It literally read like an academic paper.

I read it many times. I’m still fuzzy on what it was all about.

That’s not a good approach.

It’s better to give employees an elevator speech.

Here’s why we’re doing this. This is where we’re going.

We’ll be great together. Now let’s get to work.

And hey, tell a story. People like stories.

The genius of renowned chef Jose Andres is this one thing. Do you have it?

When renowned chef Jose Andres arrived in Puerto Rico after the devastation of Hurricane Maria, he was driven to feed three million Puerto Ricans.

He had one major problem: He was stuck. Nothing in the devastated country worked.

He could have been overwhelmed. He could have thrown up his hands, or succumbed to what was likely a contagious discouragement in the face of the enormous humanitarian disaster.

But that’s not how he’s wired

He’s wired to get to work. That hurdle in front of him? Jump over it. Again and again if he must.

After landing in Puerto Rico and surveying the situation, Chef Andres made some calls. He put the word out. Got persuasive. Probably cajoled.

Whatever he said was working. Because amazing friends joined him.

They were driven. Frantic. Compassionate.

And united in one goal to feed a hurting, starving nation one meal at a time through ingenuity, creativity, and the sheer force of their will.

“So we began doing what we do best,” Andres said. “We began feeding the people of Puerto Rico.”

The genius of Andres is his calling card: He gets to work. He works relentlessly and creatively, persevering through every challenge.

I take Andres’ genius to heart in the projects I lead and work on. Do you?

Do you get to work? Get creative? How are you at persuading others to join you?

When I approach a project, I like to take action. For example, I might start writing, jotting down ideas, listening, gauging feedback. Who’s the audience? What’s in it for them?

I’ll tweak the messaging with my colleagues, getting it right and figuring out the best ways to reach stakeholders and audiences.

A chef is similar to a content strategist and writer in many ways. Both our audiences are hungry.

So how will you feed them?

The science that proves the power of strong leadership

Author’s note: I wrote this longform blog post for a client several years ago.

They are among the most prized handcrafted objects in the world.

They are precision instruments, highly specialized and known to produce refined sounds that resonate, alternately “velvety” and “stunningly brilliant,” according to experts.

They are also pure and powerful, projecting a sound that blossoms and radiates. They define their industry.

They are violins crafted by the famed Italian master Antonio Stradivari, who lived from about 1644 to 1737. His musical instruments are so treasured by musicians and collectors alike — the “Lady Blunt” Stradivarius sold in 2011 to a collector for a mind-boggling $15.9 million — you would almost think they could play themselves. 

Almost.

In the hands of a highly-skilled musician, one of the 650 surviving Stradivarius violins, or 55 cellos, or a dozen violas, produce beautiful music. Put one of them in my hands, however, and I can pretty much guarantee it won’t be beautiful music you’ll hear. 

It still takes talent, skill, expertise and 10,000 hours of practice to liberate the delightful sounds for which a Stradivarius is known around the world. Even someone who practices frequently and may be an accomplished violinist won’t make a Stradivarius sing.

It strikes me that running a business is like that. Certainly for any given business, there are plenty of talented, driven, smart and savvy people who could run it. But too often that’s not the case. 

Businesses are often left in the hands of people who don’t know how to truly coax all of the potential out of their company and its employees.

In an entrepreneurial nation where owning a business is a privilege and an honor, it’s a travesty.

Even then, though, a business can be in the hands of someone who appears to be skilled, but something’s not quite right. There’s something off.

The person might have the right pedigree, the proper degree from the right school and outwardly exhibit all the apparent qualities of a successful businessman or businesswoman.

But the company’s performance lags. It’s struggling.

It’s not making money, its customers aren’t happy, the employees who may be talented and sharp and skilled are frustrated … sound familiar? Could this be why our economy is stumbling along? Maybe this is why American businesses are dying faster now than ever before?

How could that be when by all appearances everything is in place for a business to succeed.

Let’s turn to the world of music and the science of something called “coordinated action” for the answer.

It’s a relative handful of people around the world who are privileged enough and skilled enough to coax magnificence out of a Stradivarius.

Yet put that extraordinary musician with the Stradivarius in a group, say an orchestra, and will they stand out? Or will the singular sound get lost in the accompanying strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and other instruments?

Have you ever heard an orchestra warming up? Each musician tunes their instrument; maybe they go through the scale or play some notes from the composition they’ll perform. 

When everyone in an orchestra does his or her own thing as they are warming up, it sounds horrible. It’s hardly music.

It reminds me of listening to my lovely daughters banging on pots and pans in the kitchen when they were toddlers. That wasn’t music. It was cute, but it wasn’t music. At least to me.

It’s the conductor’s responsibility to ensure that an orchestra reaches its peak performance. Yet when it comes to an orchestra, each musician is a virtuoso who performs at the very top of their craft.

They should be able to read the music in front of them and play the song they’ve practiced over and over to produce a harmonious, beautiful sound.

A conductor doesn’t seem necessary when it comes to professional musicians. These folks are already pros, right

How can a conductor make that much of a difference? To the layperson the conductor’s baton waving looks inconsequential, silly even.

It turns out, an experienced conductor can make all the difference. 

A 2012 study by University of Maryland professor Yiannis Aloimonos and several colleagues sought to answer the influence a conductor had on these highly skilled orchestral musicians. Alomoinos and his colleagues tracked and recorded the movements of violinists and conductors during the performance of Mozart pieces to find causal relationships.

In the big picture, Aloimonos and his colleagues were studying “coordinated action.” It’s a social interaction skill at the basis of “evolutionary relevant collective behaviors such as defense, reproduction, or hunting,” according to their study. Or, I might add, the relevant collective behavior of a successful business.

To measure coordinated action and to draw a conclusion, the researchers took a conductor’s baton and installed a tiny infrared light at the tip of it. They also placed tiny infrared lights on the bows of the violinists in the orchestra, composed of professional Italian musicians. Infrared cameras were then placed around the orchestra.

The cameras were able to capture the lights as they moved to follow the conductor’s baton and the bows of the violinists. Analysts fed the light patterns into computers. Researchers used mathematical techniques developed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Clive Granger to find links between the movements of the conductor and the violinists.

The question was whether the movement of the conductor was a predictor of the movements of the violinists. If so, then the conductor was obviously leading the players.

But if the infrared patterns showed that the conductor was not predicting the movements of the violinists, then it was the musicians who were in charge.

The researchers concluded by using the Granger Causality method applied to human kinematics the conductors were leading the violinists. The infrared light patterns clearly showed that the conductors predicted the movements of the violinists.

The Leadership is REAL.

They didn’t stop there. In an interesting twist, Aloimonos and his team selected two conductors of vastly different abilities to lead the musicians:

—One was highly experienced who was a strong leader — NPR actually describes him as having an “iron grip.”

—The other was an amateur.

Aloimonos told NPR his team of researchers made a discovery.

“What we found is the more the influence of the conductor to the players, the more aesthetic — aesthetically pleasing the music was overall,” he said.

Even music experts noted a difference. Although they didn’t know which performance was led by which conductor, they unanimously concluded that the experienced conductor produced a superior orchestra.

Leadership MATTERS.

So what is all this telling us? Even the best employees with the best technology and tools (Stradivarius) need to be led by someone with the talent, experience, drive and inventiveness to coax greatness out of their subordinates.

In companies, all these employees can singularly produce good results. But pulling all the disparate parts together takes strong, determined leadership that’s decisive and visionary.

It’s the difference between good and great, or success and failure. It’s the difference between a finely tuned, expertly crafted instrument in the hands of an amateur or the Stradivarius singing for an expert.

And it’s the difference between a group led by an unaffected or inexperienced leader and one in the hands of an experienced master.

Links:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1972690

http://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2012/11/27/165677915/do-orchestras-really-need-conductors

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0035757

White space is your friend. Use it. Ok?

Your reaction is predictable when you come to a web page that’s all text.

It’s negative. You’re overwhelmed. I bet you pass it up.

Big blocks of text are barriers to the reader’s experience. That’s stating the obvious, I know. But making white space your friend when you write text isn’t used enough.

I see it over and over again that people write big blocks of text. Then they wonder why nobody reads what they wrote.

Here’s the simple solution. Break things up.

Think about little chunks. Bit-size morsels. A handful. It’s similar to how you eat, right?

However you want to think about it or put it, do us all a favor. Embrace the white space. Declutter.

I’m also hoping it will help you automatically start writing simpler, cleaner copy. Making it less dense and easier to read and understand.

I believe we call that a win-win.

Your audience wants writing that is easy to read. Make it clear. Simple. Painless. Effortless.

One thing matters the most to your audience. They want to read what you write just once and “get it.”

They don’t want to read something twice to understand it. Especially three or four times.

They don’t want their eyes to glaze over.

Don’t ever forget that. You may feel like a safe play is to repeat the jargon and clunky wording of your client, especially if you work for governments.

You don’t have to use the words “leverage” or “utilize.” Steer clear of writing “cascading messaging” and “value proposition” and “lean in.”

Don’t do it. It’s annoying and unnecessary.

There’s a reason governments are on “plain language” kicks.

The Atlantic magazine even had a March Madness-style playoff of worst corporate buzzwords. Funny stuff … in a sad sort of way.

Don’t try and sound intelligent when you write because chances are you will lose your audience with big words and lots of commas. There’s a reason you like reading “Good Night Moon” or “The Cat in the Hat” to your kids.

You want to help people. You want to make things easy for them.

Short words. Short sentences. Short paragraphs. White space.

Repeat that formula.

Don't ever be busy. Be efficient.

Busy looks like:

—Meetings for the sake of meetings

—Zoom calls to have Zoom calls

—A meeting instead of sending an email

—Sending a five-paragraph email when one paragraph would do

Don’t be busy.

Be efficient. It’s doing things well without waste.

We all have people at work who are professionals at being busy. We also have people who are efficient.

So tell me. Which one do you prefer working with?

Perseverance is a mindset. Just ask NASA's Perseverance.

persevere | pərsəˈvir 

continue in a course of action even in the face of difficulty or with little or no prospect of success

Americans aren’t wired—maybe not trained—to persevere. We want things now.

Immediate gratification. Instant. Drive-thru style. Fast food.

To persevere is a mindset. It’s seeing success when it doesn’t seem imminent. There’s a reason NASA named its Mars rover “Perseverance.” The 7th-grader from Virginia who won the naming contest for Perseverance talks about adapting and persevering through setbacks in why he chose the name.

“We … will not give up,” he says.

Maybe you’re like me. Over the last few months, I’ve had some professional setbacks. Actually, I’m sure you’re like me.

Honestly, it’s been humbling and really discouraging. You know the feeling, right?

Yet I also know one thing to be true: I can persevere.

I’ve done it before. You’ve done it before, right?

And don’t you remember how the success of perseverance tastes sweeter than anything and erases the bitterness of setbacks?

After all, more than a decade after starting the project, Perseverance sends back to Earth stunning photos of Mars.

5 quick tips on how to write a press release

I have 30 years of press release experience. Most of that was as a newspaper reporter reading them so I know good from bad.

The last eight years I’ve spent as a strategic communications pro writing press releases for clients. Here’s what I know to be true about writing a press release.

These are easy five easy tips to follow and will help you write a high-quality press release that your target audience will read.

1) Make news — Tell me quickly why I should care about your product. How does it help me? How does it help my company?

2) Make it short — Think short and to the point. It’s like getting your coffee in the drive-thru. You want it fast and hassle-free. Quickly give the who, what, why, where, when and how of something. The why is huge, as in why it’s important, why it matters, why you should care. Reporters don’t want to wade through a bunch of words to figure it out. It drove me nuts when I was a reporter. Five-word sentences are totally legit.

3) Make a catchy headline — People do a quick scan to see if they want to read it. Take what Microsoft says in its style guide to heart: “We’re to the point. We write for scanning first, reading second. We make it simple above all.” Make it short and catchy. Make a headline that will make me care.

4) Make a link — Write a blog post with more details about your product and put it on your website. Include a 15-second video and professional photos. Link to it in your press release so the journalist can get more information if that’s what they want.

5) Make a good quote — Don’t say blah, blah, blah that no one ever says in conversation. Tell me something amazing about your product and why it’s so valuable. Give me the WHY! In words I understand, please.

Need some help writing and editing your press release?

I’m at jmatthewsabo | at | gmail.com

The reporter's life: A wildfire, an exploding juniper tree, and a life-saving sprint

Behind me, down a dirt road snaking into an eastern Oregon desert canyon, flames feasted on tinder-dry sagebrush and juniper.

Ahead of me, a cowboy tumbled off a flatbed truck when a big juniper full of berries exploded like a Roman candle.

To my right, a steep canyon wall in the Oregon desert. No way I could climb up that.

To my left, a descent into a wildfire creeping up the canyon.

Maybe this is what hell feels like, I thought.

How exactly, I wondered, did I get here?

My editors at the daily newspaper I was writing for in Oregon had sent me out in the morning on what I considered a plum assignment: Cover a wildfire in remote rangeland.

I had a camera, a notebook, and a pen. I wore Air Jordans, faded denim Levis the color of the sky, a t-shirt and flannel shirt and a ball cap.

Thought I would blend in covering a heroic bid by a determined group of ranchers and cowboys to halt a wildfire racing across the dry grass, sagebrush, and juniper they grazed their cattle on.

I was miles off the nearest highway, traversing dirt roads through canyons and hills. I followed the smoke and terse directions from a rancher’s wife to the canyon where I found a smattering of pickups parked at the top.

I walked down the road until I came to the crowd of “firefighters.” The ranchers and cowboys lit backfires on one side of the dirt road in hopes that the fire climbing up the canyon wouldn’t jump the road and keep heading east uphill.

I knew I had amazing photos of the rancher on the back of the flatbed spraying down the backfires to keep them from flaming up. He looked like an Old West gunfighter, but with a hose squirting water connected to a water tank with hundreds of gallons of water in it.

The thing about junipers is that those berries are full of alcohol. It’s how you make gin. Thousands of berries in big clumps hung on the huge juniper in front of us.

Alcohol and fire … not a good mix.

Especially on a roasting hot day in a canyon surrounded by brush and grass sucked dry of any moisture.

The juniper tree exploded in flames. Behind me, flames. Ahead of me, a flaming juniper tree. To my left, a burning canyon. To my right, a canyon wall.

My only option was to sprint ahead, hug the canyon wall, and hope I didn’t go up in flames with the tree.

I made it, to state the obvious. Probably never sprinted that fast in my life. My sprint came with with painful light burns to my exposed skin on my left arm where I tried to shield my face and the left side of my face.

I remember driving the hour or so back to the newspaper office, my arm and face throbbing.

When I walked into the office, my fellow reporters and editors looked at my beet red arm and face and asked, “What happened to you?”

This was back in the pre-digital age. I handed the film from my camera to a photographer for him to process. “It’s all right there,” I said.

Then I plopped down and started writing, telling the story.

The Question That Told Me Everything About A Writing Job Candidate

The answer to my question told us everything we needed to know about our job candidate.

We were hiring for a writer and this person was a referral. The company leadership really wanted to hire this person.

A person for a demanding writing job in our company with no professional writing or editing experience. Didn’t major in journalism, communication, writing, or English in college.

The writing examples the person sent us were college papers. Not very good ones at that. Who doesn’t have college papers to send for writing samples?

But the candidate was a “good culture fit” in the words of company leadership. I liked this person. I could see the person is thoughtful, works hard, and is someone I would say is a high-achiever.

Does all that make them a writer? Let alone a good writer?

No.

In the interview, I asked the candidate if they have a blog, have freelance writing gigs, or do their own writing. Maybe a journal or something like that.

Nope. Nothing. Doesn’t do any writing.

That’s all I needed to know

If you want to be a writer, then write. Read good writers. Learn about the craft.

Write to develop your voice and style.

Blog. Journal. Seek out freelance opportunities for local magazines or other publications.

Find out if you really love writing.

Because that’s what the candidate’s answer really revealed to me.

Why hire someone for a position if it wasn’t something they enjoyed doing on their own?

I have to write. It’s a big part of who I am. It’s why I have two personal blogs and regularly write freelance articles for magazines.

I need to write. Want to write. Love to write.

What’s writing to you?

Tell a good story. Write simply. Connect with audiences.

The goal of writing isn’t to sound smart. Don’t try and impress people with big words and fancy sentences.

Tell a story. Make it simple. Write like you talk.

The goal is connecting. You want people to read what you write.

Maybe you entertain them, or inform them and persuade them through humor or a tender story or tap into another emotion.

I learned about these things as a journalist when I developed my own brand of writing. Writing with style or flair. My editor called it “Matt Sabo style” and would ask me to write a “Sabo style” article.

I’ll give you an example. This is a story I wrote about a raid on a motorcycle repair shop in a rural Virginia community that got, well, interesting. I took an ordinary story and had fun with it.

A Virginia moonshine operation

Take the ordinary and give it your own style.

The best ideas are crowdsourced. So crowdsource them.

A CEO I worked for some time ago used to chat me up fairly regularly. I remember he just filled up the room.

By that I mean he did all the talking. Never did any listening. Had all the answers. Had all the gut feelings.

There wasn’t room for anything other than his voice. His thoughts. His direction.

That sums it up. It’s frustrating. It was for me and many of my co-workers. We’re not alone.

Great organizations have leaders who listen. Not every idea that filters up to them will be great.

Some ideas will be amazing. Others should marinate, evolve, get tossed around, go through a brainstorming session.

Some simply won’t be so great.

But the strength of an organization is its voice.

It’s not just one voice. It’s not the CEO’s voice.

It’s not the loudest voice in the room. Or the voice of experience that “has all the answers.”

It’s the organization’s collective voice.

Leaders, do you hear that?

I knew I was in trouble when ... (And lessons learned along the way).

I knew I was in trouble when …

I hit send on that email to a faraway corporate boss, even though something inside me said don’t. (I learned not to do stupid things like that anymore.)

As a young reporter, my editor who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize told me not to write an article like that anymore. (I studied his writing style and technique.)

As a new writer, I asked my manager what kind of style we use in writing our content and she said they don’t follow any particular style in the company. (I got our writing team to adopt AP style and also made a style guide.)

At a small company, my bosses gathered our team, told us how hard things had been financially in the firm and cut everyone’s hours. Then they booked a vacation to the Caribbean. (I left that company shortly afterward for a better gig.)

I was the newspaper’s Saturday reporter and got an eyebrow-raising assignment to go to an inner-city apartment complex for a story about a recent murder victim. Fortunately, I called the regular crime beat reporter—who was incredulous someone would send me there—who referred me to a police sergeant to make sure I had company. (My instincts were right to call our crime writer and double-check the assignment.)

I was sitting in an Oregon coast funeral home covering the death of a fishing boat captain whose chartered boat went down in rough water, costing the lives of several of his passengers. The fisherman sitting next to me stared intently at me and told me twice he was going to break my nose, probably because he didn’t like the stories he read about his friend.. I walked briskly out. He followed me. My photographer across the street saw the fisherman closing in on me and turned his camera on the guy, stopping him in his tracks. I’m forever grateful to the great photographer and my friend Sol Neelman. (Always make good friends with your photographer.)