Education: On researching, writing and publishing columns
By Dave Lieber www.WatchdogNation.com By now, as a columnist, writer, information entrepreneur, whatever you call yourself these days, you have figured out that the chief currency in this stage of the information age is the keyword search in a search engine of your name. Borrowing from Microsoft’s search engine, when someone looks you…
By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram NSNCEF Secretary You’re Kelly Kazek, managing editor of the Athens (Alabama) News Courier, and you just enjoyed one of the biggest days of your life. Your first book was published, and you shared the party with everyone at the town square. As a 5-year member…
By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist WatchdogNation.com [The following is an abridged version of Dave’s talk at the 2009 Ventura conference.] Originally, this workshop was going to be called “How to have the best writing year of your life.” Then as the economy crashed, we billed this as “Keeping your columnist…
By Dave Lieber http://www.YankeeCowboy.com Fort Worth Star-Telegram Do you think about your karma? I think about it every day. I don’t worry about deadlines. I worry that I’m not putting enough good karma out there so it comes back. So I go overboard, dumping karma over the side of my life boat as if…
Dave Lieber By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram NSNCEF Secretary Hey, bloggers. Welcome to the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, where, finally, you are invited to join and also enter our annual contest. After a long battle – I started my fight to let you in more than a decade ago…
By Laura Snyder Nationally Self-Syndicated Humor Columnist Southern Pines, NC Recently, I was reading the responses to Marshall Dean’s request for advice in the December newsletter. The responses that were given didn’t seem helpful to any new columnist except to reassure Marshall that the entire industry is in the same boat. It seems I have…
By Bill Tammeus For a newspaper-related blog to be effective, it must give readers something useful they can’t get elsewhere and it must do that consistently. So it can’t be just another column full of words. Rather, it must offer links to related Web sites, helpful graphics, an opportunity to correspond with the blogger and…
By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist www.yankeecowboy.com My first journalistic mentor was noted writer H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger. While in high school, I read his columns in the University of Pennsylvania student newspaper and decided I wanted to be like him. I enrolled at Penn, and in my first week as a freshman…
By Terry Marotta Columnist, The Citizen of Laconia (N.H.) Last Tuesday a seventh grader named Danielle wrote to the National Society of Newspaper Columnists with some questions about our work. She needed the answers by Friday and was sorry this was so last-minute, but she did hope someone could help her. As a proud member…
Paula LaRocque: Some tips for clear and graceful writing Noted writing coach Paula LaRocque brought her years of experience to the 2007 Will Rogers Writers’ Workshop in Oklahoma City where she shared some of her ideas about writing. Here are a few of her tips to improve your writing: Keep sentences short. The…
By Suzette Martinez Standring Past President, NSNC Can writers learn to be funny? To go from giggles to guffaws, is there a formula? On June 22 in Philadelphia, Dave Barry shared humor writing “secrets” before the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Robert Benchley once wrote, “Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless…
By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist Secretary, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Education Foundation www.yankeecowboy.com Listen up! If you write a newspaper column that appears three times a week, once a week or once a month, and that’s all you do related to that work, then you, my friend, are dead in the…
How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep By Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D. Forget taking pills or counting sheep. Just make sure you can answer yes to five simple questions. Do you have trouble sleeping? If so, you’re not alone—and the price you pay can be significant. Think about how irritable you can be and how…
Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist Secretary, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Education Foundation www.yankeecowboy.com By Dave Lieber [Editor’s Note: Dave Lieber’s longstanding “Really Bad Column” is changing its name to “you, the columnist.” In a reflection of changes in our industry, the old title was a mirror image of the author’s own definition of his work,…
A Way to Build Name Recognition By Monica McCabe Cardoza Entering a contest says a lot about your devotion to your craft. It proves that you take column writing seriously enough to want to be recognized for it. But before you say, “Oh, I never win those things,” consider this: Winning a top prize…
By Robert Haught Getting yourself syndicated is an achievable goal, but it doesn’t come easy. It takes a lot of hard work. That’s the primary advice offered by Jim Miller, a model of success in self-syndication. Miller, a member of the faculty for the 2007 Will Rogers Writers’ Workshop, syndicates his “Savvy Senior” column to 400 newspapers and…
Latest roundup of columnists’ foibles, triumphs, embarrassments and other weirdness By Dave Lieber Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist Special to www.columnists.com I apologize. When was the last time you started a column with those words? Actually, I’m not apologizing for anything. I just want to get your attention. But the first part of this month’s Really…
