#reporthers

REBECCA MOCK is an illustrator and comic artist in New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Medium and PCMag and it is gorgeous, full of bright colors, intimacy and layered scenes. They’re pretty cool.

News outlets have been using illustrations forever, of course, but Rebecca takes it to the next level: GIFs. Who knew you could grow up to make animated GIFs for a living? She even has an agent for such things. In addition to one-off illustrations, she also illustrates novels. Follow @RebeccaMock. 

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ReportHers: What percentage of your work is making illustrations for news organizations versus ad agencies and -- I’m afraid to ask it but -- are the rates really different? 

Rebecca Mock: I suppose it’s about half-and-half. Lately more ad work, but I think that’s just coincidence. Advertising work does tend to pay more, as I’m dealing more with big-name clients while editorial work is often for non-profit news publications or limited-run magazines. While the pay is less, the circulation is large, and the art directors are often savvy, and pair the illustrator with a subject they know they’ll like. It’s rewarding, in its own way. 

RH: That’s how they get you in journalism, right? The pay is less but it’s rewarding in some way. :) 

RM: Yes, that and publications use a LOT more illustrations per issue, so they’re splitting their budget between a handful of artists, every day/week/month. It’s good work for illustrators just starting out. Art directors are looking for new names. 

RH: Is this what you thought you’d be doing with your skills and talents? 

RM: I don’t think I expected to be working in so many different fields at once. My most concrete plan when I started was the comic books. I figured I would be working part-time somewhere to make a living, not doing freelance illustration. But I was lucky to get a few good jobs soon after graduating, which snowballed. 

RH: Is there more freelance illustration work now than there used to be, specifically in editorial/news?  

RM: It’s hard to say. I was a bit isolated when I was in school and didn’t pay much attention to freelance illustration since it didn’t interest me as much as book/comic book/concept art work, but now it’s a big focus for me. Also, since moving to New York I’ve become much more familiar with the people in my field. The importance of social media has certainly played a key role. If the amount of illustration work has not increased, there is certainly more attention being paid to it. It’s so easy to share great artwork online. 

RH: I found your work on a Tumblr roundup of GIF artists, so that’s the proof! 

RM: I owe Tumblr so much, oof. 

RH: What is the process for making a GIF for a news story, start to finish. 

RM: I can tell you about the job I’m working on as we speak. I’m doing a piece for the NYT Sunday Review, I’ve done a few for them before, too. Today I was asked to make an image for print and for the web, with animation. Tonight I’m doing the sketch, and tomorrow and the next day I’ll do the piece. The process is not really different from a regular non-animated illustration assignment, especially with the NYT because they know my work and process. I will include a description of what I plan to animate in my notes to the art director, and they will tell me which idea they like best. Then I’ll create the image for print, and take it back into Photoshop to animate it afterwards. 

RH: What are the rates for that kind of assignment? I imagine companies haven’t had standard rates set for GIFs, if they even do now? 

RM: Editorial work is often in the $250/quarter page range, sometimes less. But publications will sometimes have larger budgets and can pay $400/quarter page. Also a lot of editorial work is online now, and the rates vary--anything from $100-2,000 for a banner image. I will charge an extra 30 percent for animation, or a little more or less, depending on how complicated/time-consuming it will be. But the specifics vary a lot! 

RH: So I imagine something like the animated graphic you did for Medium would be a LOT more labor intensive? 

RM: Yes, good example. That image was like, all animation fee. I spent a few days on the animation, after maybe one day with the plain image (spread out over a long time, since I have to schedule my freelance work around comics). 

RH: Do you find it hard to set rates or negotiate with something a bit new to the digital news industry? Or are illustrations in news stories and editorial features not that new? 

RM: I don’t find it difficult now that I know what my process is, how long something will probably take to make, and how much money I need to live. I base my fees around that. Digital editorial illustration isn’t that new, it was already a healthy industry when I was still in college between 2007 and 2011, at least. The animated illustrations are a bit newer, or at least they’re a fad that’s only newly been re-invented. 

RH: What would you want editors who haven’t worked with animation artists, or even illustrators before, know about the process? 

RM: A good piece takes time. Especially animation; it’s time-consuming. That’s what the added fee is for. An editor should understand the artist requires a clear and manageable schedule, and enough detail that they don’t need to guess the important stuff. 

RH: What was the subject of the first illustration you remember making? 

RM: My first illustration job right out of school was doing background art for animations. The first one I did was horrible. It was a cityscape, Hollywood-esque. Lots of buildings, no subjects. I didn’t like images with lots of straight lines, hard edges, back then. But that’s a big part of my work now, so go figure. 

RH: What about the very first drawing you remember making? Did you draw as a kid? 

RM: I was a huge art nerd as a kid! I don’t remember my first, but I can remember a lot of early drawings of fairies, tracings of Archie Comics, dogs?? It’s a blur. When I got older I went to an arts middle school and high school. So I’ve been an art school kid since I was about 12. 

RH: The first piece of writing I remember doing was definitely about mermaids. I was in elementary school. 

RM: Yesssss. Fantasy and adventure stories! 

RH: For sure! I moved on to Pegasus-related stories. Then I wrote a piece about a city cat that had an adventure in the country. Big stuff. 

RM: Wow, you had a wide range of interests. Hitting all the big genres. I remember a short story I wrote about twin sisters who were fairies. And a few about a band of witches. 

RH: We would have been best friends, for sure. 

RM: Absolutely! You wrote the stories, I would draw the pictures for them. 

RH: Well, thank you so much for your time! Is there anything else you want people to know about illustrations or GIFs -- or fairy twins? 

RM: Thank you! This was quite fun for me. Everyone: read more comic books. Heck, draw more comics. They can teach you a lot about art and yourself. GIFs are fun to make and easy to learn, so try that, too. 

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KAT CHOW covers race, ethnicity and culture for NPR’s Code Switch in Washington, D.C. Her job description includes “sparking conversations online,” which she does with reporting and interactive projects. She has conceived of, produced and/or managed a number of such projects for Code Switch, including a Twitter account that followed the civil rights events of that year in real time, @Todayin1963, and a crowd-sourced reading list of books by and about people of color. Before working at NPR, she worked with WGBH in Boston and was a reporting fellow for The Cambodia Daily, an English-language newspaper in Phnom Penh. You can follow her at @KatChow.

(Note: This interview was conducted entirely in Google Docs. Is this an improvement on previous Q&As? Not really? Tweet at @glazerjessica.)

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ReportHers: You’ve done a lot of innovative discussion-based projects, like running the @Todayin1963 Twitter account. What kind of planning went into that project?

Kat Chow: So @TodayIn1963 was the product of a whole lot of planning! We knew that we wanted to tell the story of 1963 — it was really pivotal for the civil rights movement — and we had that loose idea that we wanted to live-tweet events from that summer/year with Twitter. Once we got the form solidified, we really had to step back and consider the scope of that year. What were the key events? What were the bits and pieces of history that we could “anticipate”?

One key example is the “re-telling” of Nov. 22, 1963 — when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Being, uh… in the present day… we knew this was going to happen. So in the months and weeks leading up to that date, we started tweeting little things: that Kennedy was heading to Texas to start his campaign there, that he was considering (or not considering) re-election in 1964, et cetera.

So we organized ALL THAT STUFF — tweets, links, more links to original documents/sources/et cetera — in one gigantic Google Doc. (You can see time codes there. I came across those time codes from reading CBS’ published transcripts of that coverage, which they have at the Library of Congress.) Lemme find a screen shot…

RD: Wow. How long did it take to plan out, and did you plan it out entirely before starting?

KC: For the President Kennedy assassination, we’d researched and written most of the tweets weeks in advance before the actual day everything was supposed to go live. So we fact checked, we copy edited — the whole nine yards. And the whole process of researching — and this is just for that couple of days of tweets surrounding his death — started late October.

But there were some tweets that just came about randomly because we learned this or that bit of information. For example! Right before Pres. Kennedy was shot, C.S. Lewis (‘member? Chronicles of Narnia) died. But back in 1963, the news of Lewis’ death was kind of buried by Pres. Kennedy’s assassination. So we were able to add that bit in, per a user’s suggestion. (And that was the cool thing: We were able to be really malleable and respond to our users.)

RH: Seems like a TON of planning and time went into this. How did you measure or decide whether it was worth the time, resources and manpower?

KC: Ah. Well. I kind of became obsessed with this project, so it’s really hard for me to measure if it was “worth it.” I’m the sort of person who can really easily get sucked into doing stuff that I find cool. (Luckily, I found this pretty cool.) I think that at the end of the day, it boils down to one thing: Did people learn from this project? And I hope — that yeah, they learned a helluva lot about all the small (and not-so-small) events that made 1963 so important. It was really neat: we had teachers and other people writing in, telling us that they'd used the Twitter account in this or that lesson.

But, ya know, we went into @Todayin1963 not really knowing how it was going to do. We didn’t really care if it didn’t get that many followers — at least, that wasn’t how we were measuring success. I remember talking with my editor, Matt Thompson, one day, and I was like, “Hey, wouldn’t that be neat if we got to, like, 2,000 followers?” And he told me that he didn’t have a target or a goal for the number of followers we should reach. (And then, boom. When we “live-tweeted” the March on Washington in August, and I got to talk about the project on Morning Edition, suddenly we had thousands and thousands of more followers. So that was pretty neat.)

RH: What is your favorite digital tool?

KC: Google Docs. Google Spreadsheets. I love how you can edit stuff real-time in them — like this! I love conducting interviews through this format. I love crowd-sourcing stuff using Google Docs. It’s so simple, but without that sort of collaborative workspace, I don’t know how easily I’d be able to do my job.

But another one of my favorite digital tools — and I kind of don’t want to admit this, because it’s so unsexy, and I feel like I need something reallllllly sexy to balance out that last Google-heavy example — is this chat system thingy called Slack. My editor has been trying to get my entire team to use Slack for weeks slash probably actually months, and we’ve all been like, “Ehhhhhh” with varying degrees of that apathetic “not another chat app” attitude… but, it’s pretty useful. You can search through your chats. You can share article links and it’ll pull out snippets of the story.

RH: You went back to speak at your alma mater, the University of Washington. What did you most want to communicate to the students?

KC: Oh, man. I feel strange about giving advice to people I don’t know. That comes about from my own uncertainty as a young journalist (the worst phrase ever, which I want to delete, but I’m going to leave it there, because it’s true). It’s always that whole, “Am I qualified to be dispensing advice to people?” idea, which I think a lot of people struggle with.

What I told these students was basically about my trajectory: I hustled because I was too scared not to. And reflecting back on it, I wish I’d just not worried so much. I took on internship after internship, not necessarily because I was terrified I wouldn’t get a job (I mean, that was like a cloud looming over my head, and every college senior majoring in journalism is probably scared shitless), but because I was terrified I wasn’t experiencing All The Things. You could call it FOMO.

RH: Have you had a mentor or someone who you’ve been able to bounce things off of, and be your advocate in matters of reporting, but also navigating things like negotiating for a raise or to be part of a project?

KC: Totally. I joined the Asian American Journalists Association when I was in college, and was paired up with an “official mentor” there. My AAJA mentor, Owen Lei, watched so many of my crappy TV stand-ups, coached me through networking situations, and read countless resumes and cover letters. I had no idea what I was doing then, but he was incredibly generous with his time, and still is. I also met a ton of other journalists through that organization and through my internships who’ve helped me figure out the job hunt, how to define my beat, and general job-related things.

RH: What do you want to learn that you haven’t had the time to yet? (Not to induce anxiety!)?

KC: HEART PALPITATIONS RIGHT NOW. Jay Kay.

RH: Sorry!

KC: Hmmmm. I want to become really, really proficient (more than proficient — good, even) at MTE, the audio editing system that NPR uses. Right now, it takes me five minutes to even figure out how to trim a clip. That’s an exaggeration, but yeah, it’s something I’m working on slowly.

RH: What was the scariest part about being a guest on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour radio program the first time, or first few times?

KC: I just recorded an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour today and a little part of me is still terrified that I’ll say something stupendously silly and that the whole world will be like, “Kat, stop. Just stop.” I don’t know if those sort of feelings will ever go away.

RH: What are you reading right now?

KC: Splitting my time between Yellow Peril (Jack Tchen) and Mambo in Chinatown (Jean Kwok). And also spending many late-night hours reading this teen series that’s pretty awful. RH: You have to name it. Please?

KC: (Checking the Kindle. It was free, in the lending library. I started reading it on a flight.) See, I don’t really know its name because it’s one of those quick reads where everything terrible happens to the main character, but she always seems to make the situations worse.

OK, it’s this (The Breathing series). I’m laughing right now. I hope my typing conveys this.

RH: We can call it research for Pop Culture Happy Hour. Ok! Lastly, is there a GIF that describes the way you work?

KC: Tough question. I feel like this is me. Unabashed excitement for a good idea or an awesome project. I get so giddy.

SARAH STILLMAN is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a visiting scholar at N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She won a National Magazine Award and Overseas Press Club Award for her reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan on labor abuses and human trafficking on U.S. military bases there. Her reporting on the high-risk use of young people as confidential informants in the war on drugs received a George Polk Award and the Molly National Journalism Prize.

She has written on topics ranging from civil forfeiture to amateur drone-builders, Mexico's drug cartels to Bangladesh's garment factory workers. Before joining The New Yorker, Stillman wrote about America’s wars overseas and the challenges facing soldiers at home for the Washington Post, The Nation, newrepublic.com, Slate.com, and theatlantic.com. She co-taught a seminar at Yale on the Iraq war, and also ran a creative-writing workshop for four years at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a maximum-security men’s prison in Connecticut.

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1. Having a staff writer position for a major magazine is fairly rare these days. What has helped you get to where you are? I feel very lucky to have had great encouragement and access to resources along the route to becoming a staff writer -- and some very fortunate breaks, such as the help of an editor at The New Yorker, Henry Finder, who has supported me at every turn. Starting out as a freelancer, I think it helped that I was driven to report on America's wars overseas from an unconventional angle. I was passionate about covering the obvious elements of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (their daily impacts on civilians, the scourge of traumatic brain injuries faced by U.S. forces, etc.), but the war stories I was most eager to pursue were the ones that existed at the margins of traditional conflict correspondence.

My first piece for The New Yorker, for instance, dealt with the 70,000-some foreign logistics workers who were ubiquitous on most U.S. bases in both war zones, but whose stories rarely made headlines: the Indian cooks, Ugandan security guards and Fijian beauticians who performed the wars' service jobs, and who often faced human trafficking, indentured servitude, sexual assault and other abuses along the way. Other stories I've pursued for the magazine -- about young people killed as confidential informants and, more recently, about civil asset forfeiture -- also dealt with issues that were, in many ways, hiding in plain sight. We can be so harsh on ourselves, as reporters, by shooting down ideas with the thought, "It's been done," and yet, so often, revisiting what seems familiar or even well-trodden with a fresh eye can yield the most interesting, surprising stuff.

I'll also add that it's been invaluable to have good mentors along the way. For me, that continues to make a huge difference and I suspect it always will, not just having other writers and guides to admire in the abstract (or in a check-the-box sense), but really being willing to call upon and engage them.

2. Have you ever negotiated for a higher salary or a raise? As a freelancer, I lived the unsalaried life where negotiating to be paid at all was sometimes part of the equation. I remember doing an embed with an infantry unit in Iraq and then trying to publish the resulting story only to discover that the website where I'd submitted it didn't pay for most of the work it ran. I think situations like that have given way to an important set of conversations by journalists like Annie Murphy and Erin Siegal McIntyre, who recently gave a great talk at the Logan Symposium on how to manage the risks and realities of freelance reporting (financially, but also legally and physically).

Earlier in my career, I was also lucky to live, however meagerly, on journalism fellowships like NYU's Reporting Award, which they created to fund journalism projects in the public interest. That fellowship also came with office space and a whole community of colleagues, which turned out to matter every bit as much as the funding for the reporting did.

3. How do you go about structuring or ordering a longer piece? Every story seems to have its own unique demands. I'm one of those reporters who likes to cast a really wide net, research-wise, and who can veer towards the hyper-obsessive, so having decent tactics for organizing reporting materials acquired across a broad span of time, geographies, sources, and formats feels relevant. I often use a program called Scrivener to lend some order to my otherwise chaotic approach. Since I have a tendency to let my reporting sprawl, I find the most useful way for me to cut it back down to size and organize a longer piece is very simple: to read through all of my material, all of my files, and then to make a very crude list of my top five "here's what's essential" elements, at which point I try to figure out how they're connected. Often, that means starting with what I'm told is the classic Sy Hersh command, "Do the chron," as in, map the chronology.

4. Do you see yourself as more of a writer or a reporter? Reporting, for me, is an incredible joy -- or, at least, a rush of fascination and adrenaline and a sense of how lucky I am to get to do what I do (by that I mean listening to and learning from new people in new places). On the flip-side, I can't really deny that I'm the stereotypical tearing-my-hair-out, thrashing-and-flailing type at the keyboard. I like writing best when it's done. As a reader, of course, I endlessly admire the people who are seamlessly both: Katherine Boo, for instance, who reports fiendishly and writes with vast beauty and imagination.

5. What surprised you about teaching in a correctional facility? For about four years, I facilitated a weekly creative writing workshop at Cheshire Correctional, a maximum security men's prison in Connecticut, and the relationships I built there continue to be some of the most rewarding ones I've had. I learned a lot about what it means to use literature and personal narrative as a means of building trust, across time, in environments built to disassemble it. I learned a lot about politics and the conspiracies that often surround it, since most of the guys in the class spent their days closely following every blip in the news. And I learned a huge amount in the waiting room at Cheshire, too -- about how, for instance, children bear many of incarceration's largest burdens.

TANZINA VEGA is a national correspondent who writes about race and ethnicity at The New York Times. As multi-platform journalist, she was listed as one of NPR’s "Top Journalists of Color to Watch in 2014." She has covered digital media, advertising and online privacy for the Times and before that, she managed and produced large-scale multimedia projects for the business desk. Part of her multimedia work includes the award winning One in 8 Million series. She joined the Times as a stringer and news clerk, where she covered breaking news and crime. Tanzina has been recognized by the National Press Photographers Association and for her multimedia work in the business section of the Times. Tanzina has a Master’s in Urban Reporting from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Follow her at @tanzinavega.

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1. Is America more race-conscious now than in the 1960s, as Clarence Thomas recently suggested? How does this affect your reporting? I’m not sure if we are more or less race conscious, but I can say our consciousness about race has changed. Young people in particular are grappling with race in new ways. In a recent article I wrote about racial incidents on college campuses around the country, we examined the notion of a colorblind or “post-racial” society and found that young people largely rejected that concept. Telling someone you don’t “see color” makes them feel invalidated, particularly when their identity is intimately tied to their racial or ethnic background. There is a growing activist movement among young people of color around the country who are using social media, photos and video in addition to art and more traditional forms of protest to speak out against the racial tensions they say they experience.

The way people define and experience racism has also evolved. Most people I’ve interviewed say that more obvious forms of racism–like supporting the Ku Klux Klan or using racial epithets–are largely considered socially unacceptable, but newer forms of racism are more subtle–like expecting someone to speak for all members of their race or, as one black student described, having their work checked more closely than other classmates because of a perceived, sometimes even unconscious, bias. Those same subtleties can make reporting on race a challenge but infinitely more rewarding when you get it right.

2. What little things do you do that help you gain a source’s trust? What’s an example of when this worked (or didn’t work)? I always say the best compliment a reporter can get is that they were fair and accurate. When you establish that kind of credibility with sources, they tend to trust you more. When I was a business and technology reporter, I dealt with people who were very comfortable with the way media works. They knew how to position and prepare themselves for an interview, so getting past canned responses was sometimes a result of knowing the right questions to ask, which depends on how much you know about your subject matter. When you deal with people who are not as media savvy and don’t have public relations professionals preparing them, often it’s a question of spending time with your subjects and establishing a rapport. Regardless of who the source is, don’t lie about what your story is about. No one wants to be blindsided when they read your piece the next day.

There are as many paths to becoming a journalist today as there are jobs in journalism.

3. How has being a reporter changed your view of the world around you? I see the potential for stories everywhere I go. I constantly jot down notes on scraps of paper, on my cell phone or on my computer. I’m lucky to have a job where I can actually try to get answers to the many questions I have about how and why things work the way they do.

4. What are some stories that were particularly difficult and why? I’ve never had to report in a war zone nor have I feared for my life, so I feel like answering this question is almost quaint, considering the difficult situations many of my journalism colleagues around the world have faced. That said, I did have one grizzly reporting phase when I was a freelance reporter for the Metro section of The New York Times. I often got called to cover breaking news, which included murders, fires and bizarre deaths, people falling in the elevator shaft or getting hit by trains. Sometimes I found myself in the home of a family that had just lost a loved one. The wounds were still fresh, the tears still flowing. Sometimes a photographer was there and two or three other papers. Maybe even local television. So you’re competing with all of that and at the same time you have to tread lightly and be sensitive to the very raw and very real feelings the family is dealing with while under a looming deadline.

Another example was when I was one of the few business reporters on duty during a slow news Friday in July. Just as I was about to head home, at about five in the evening, a story from a competitor crossed the wire reporting that two of the largest advertising agencies in the world had merged, effectively creating the world’s biggest advertising agency. The competitor’s story was very short and was attributed to a single source, something The Times could not do, so we had to be careful and make sure we were able to confirm the news through multiple sources. I spent the next 48 hours pressing every single source I had and working with Times colleagues from Paris to San Francisco. By Sunday afternoon I had already written two 1,000 word articles when I got the call from my editor to write an additional 1,100 words, the “what does this all mean” piece that would eventually land on the front page on Monday. Wrangling sources is tough on stories like these, but doing it on a tight deadline, with a competitive story when most people are on vacation adds to the excitement.

5. What tips do you have for people applying to journalism jobs, at a time when newsrooms are evolving and restructuring? Be nimble. If you’re a writer, that’s great, but also make sure you are comfortable in front of a camera, or at least shooting video on your phone. Be open to experimenting with new technologies. If you like to code, make sure you also know how to tell good stories. Stay open to jobs that may not at first appear to be the job you want. There are as many paths to becoming a journalist today as there are jobs in journalism.

ANAHEED ALANI is the editorial director and story editor at Rookie magazine, a monthly-themed site for teenage girls. Previously, she was a fact-checker for The New York Times Magazine and an editor at the Chicago Reader.

1. What are the benefits and limitations to posting just three times daily? There are SO MANY benefits. First and foremost, it gives us the time to edit and fact-check everything, so there's some quality control there. Even with our schedule, I don't have enough time to make each piece as good as I want it to be, but I can't even imagine trying to pump out 15-30 posts a day (which is, I think, the general range for a biggish general-interest site aimed at adults). Unless you have a massive editorial staff, which requires a massive amount of money, I think it's impossible to produce work you can be proud of at that kind of volume. I mean, it's hard for one person to write five good tweets in one day and those are 140 characters long at most.

Another benefit: Our posting schedule is designed to work with our readers' schedules. I don't know if you know any high school students, but the ones I know are SO busy. Our readers are in school all day, then they have tons of homework, after-school sports and other activities and family obligations. To ask for their attention 10-15 times a day would be unreasonable, not to mention disrespectful. The fact that teenagers are so busy gives us even more reason to make each post as good as we can, because I don't want to waste their time.

The biggest disadvantage to concentrating on three hefty (for the internet) posts a day is financial: Advertisers always want websites to do sponsored posts and we like doing those when we're working with a company that's on our wavelength creatively and that trusts us to know what our readers want and like. But a lot of companies just want you to do a whole post on, like, their new lip gloss and we don't do those kinds of posts because (a) that's a really boring post and (b) we just can't waste 1/3 of a day's content on discussing the merits of one particular brand of lip gloss. (Lip gloss is just a hypothetical here; no one has actually asked for such a post, but we have gotten pitches along those lines.) If we did 15 posts a day, it would be easier to justify doing that kind of sponsored content. We end up losing a lot of potential advertisers because we just can't do it.

Another limitation: Because each post needs to feel substantial, we can't really run super-short pieces unless we can group them together or tie them to some kind of video or audio element.

2. How can a publication cultivate and maintain a devoted audience? I personally find myself returning to websites or buying magazines for the content, and I can only guess it's the same for most people. I think having consistently great content builds trust and loyalty.

It’s so hard to build and maintain a website on your own on a shoestring, but the freedom is so, so worth it.

3. Which factors would help a site owner decide whether to go for a big publisher or remain independent?

Can you scrape together enough money to launch the site and run it for at least six months on your own? That means, for anything bigger than a personal blog, buying a domain name and paying for site hosting and maintenance, and possibly hiring someone to help you design it. If you plan to have other people working for or contributing work to the site, factor in how much you'll pay them, too.

Do you have time to deal with your website (approving and/or responding to comments, fixing glitches, adding and updating content, being available to respond to emergencies) all day?

Do you like figuring stuff out on your own?

You OK working from home?

Can you afford not to make any money--in fact, to probably lose money--from this website for at least the first year?

Are you kind of a control freak?

Are you comfortable with not sleeping for approximately two years of your life?

If you answered yes to all of those questions, you can and should be independent. It's pretty invaluable to have total creative control of a site and not have a parent company making any decisions for you or forcing you to do embarrassing shit. It's also a relief not to have to worry about the way some big company will package and market you, or what kinds of tacky licensing deals they'll make in your name.

But if you answered no to a few of them, you might be more comfortable being owned by a big publisher. They will pay your startup costs, sell ads, pay salaries and possibly give you an office. Your life will be SO much easier this way.

We decided, about six weeks before launching, that we wanted to stay independent, which means we had to defer payments to our contributors for six months, we all work out of our apartments, we can't afford to do a lot of things that other sites can (like send people to other cities to cover stories, hire editorial help, provide health insurance, etc. etc. etc.), we still can't pay contributors anywhere near what their work is worth, we don't have a publicist and none of us is making much money. But no question, it's so much better this way. We can publish whatever we want, whenever we want and we can reject any ideas or advertisers we want, for any reason. It is so, so hard to build and maintain a website on your own on a shoestring–I haven't really gotten a good night's sleep for two years–but freedom is so, so worth it.

4. What has surprised you about working at Rookie? I am pleasantly surprised at the ideological diversity of our readers. We don't really talk about this kind of thing, so I can't say for sure, but I'd guess that almost all of our staff are liberals. But we have a healthy percentage of Republican/conservative readers who read the site regularly and comment a lot, and they are so smart and funny and respectful and open-minded. They are a great reminder to me not to judge people who fall outside my insular little New York City bubble.

5. If someone has a blog or site idea, what should they consider as they move forward? All of the stuff I mentioned in question #3, plus what they want to say (that no one else is saying the way they will), and what the site's mission/purpose will be. Also: What are you gonna call your site? What do you want it to look like? WHAT FONT ARE YOU GONNA USE???? These kinds of decisions are the fun part, so enjoy it.

MAGGIE JONES is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She writes about social issues including immigration, poverty, race, gender, education and families. She has also written articles and book reviews for The Washington Post, Slate, Salon, Elle, Mother Jones and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Maggie has been a guest lecturer at Boston College and Harvard University on topics ranging from immigration to narrative journalism.

She has received fellowships from The Japan Society, The International Reporting Project and The Journalism Fellowships in Child and Family Policy, as well as from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. She was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. In addition to Maggie’s work throughout the United States, she has reported from Japan, Thailand, Burma and Guatemala.

Born and raised in Louisville, KY, she graduated from Vassar College and has lived in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston and Los Angeles. She recently moved with her family to Pittsburgh, PA. You can find her writings at bymaggiejones.com and follow her @maggiepjones.

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1. What is the difference between what a freelancer and a contributing writer does? What tips do you have for building relationships with editors? There is nothing I do as a reporter that is different as a contributing writer than as a freelancer. Being a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine simply means that I have a yearly contract that guarantees I’m paid a certain amount per story. I also get 50% of my fee at the time of the assignment, which is a big plus in freelancing. But typically a writer isn't offered a contract like that until she had been writing for a publication for a while. And then it's up to my editor and me how many stories I do a year. I pitch my editor or my editor gives me ideas. For instance, among my stories over the last couple of years, I pitched an idea on an immigration raid in Postville, Iowa, and its aftermath, while my editor asked me to write an article on the latest sleep research for a special health issue of the magazine.

Overall, between The New York Times and other publications I write for (I also do some teaching and public speaking about narrative writing and reporting), I write about half a dozen long-form stories a year. 

As far as tips for building relationships, the most important thing is to find editors whose editorial guidance you really trust and then be a go-to person for them, giving them good, well-developed story pitches and being willing to do a wide variety of stories and on short notice. Especially if you are starting out, don’t expect to do long articles immediately.

2. Can you talk about the experience of balancing family and work? What advice or thoughts can you share on balancing these two? I don’t think there is any perfect balance and expecting to “do it all” is a set-up for extreme frustration. Most women and men I know do the best they can and, frankly, in my experience both family and work suffer to some extent. That’s just the reality of it. For me, personal time is the first thing to fly out the window. Traveling is the hardest part of my work in terms of my family. It takes a lot more organization to get out of town for reporting trips than in the years before I had kids. But I have a hugely supportive spouse, which makes a big difference in juggling it all.

Expecting to “do it all” is a set-up for extreme frustration. Frankly, both family and work suffer.

3. What is the most challenging story you’ve had to report and why? Reporting my article on young men who are “shut-ins” (known as hikikomori) in Japan for the New York Times Magazine. I was coming in as an outsider and had to earn the trust of these guys (some were teens, other much older)–and often their parents–who had been highly criticized in the Japanese media. I had a limited amount of time and yet earning their trust required time, patience and a sympathetic ear. I spent many weeks just trying to get organizations to allow me to talk to the men and then, with little time in Japan left, I needed to report like crazy in the remaining days. The article is one of my favorites because the men who talked to me had amazing stories and were so thoughtful in how they conveyed their experiences to me.

4. What does the future look like for journalists who want to write magazine narratives? I am an optimist on this issue. The venues are changing but the hunger for narrative is part of what makes us human. We are never going to lose our love for stories. So yes, staff positions are scarcer than when I started out and no one is going to get rich on a freelancer’s salary, but if you love it and have at least a semi-thick skin (to be a writer you have to be able to handle rejection), it’s worth it.

5. What elements contribute to the best narrative journalism? What are your favorite pieces? Exhaustive reporting, a writing style that reads like the best of fiction with detailed scenes, nuanced characters and an ability to be a ruthless editor of one’s own writing. Overall, I’m drawn to stories that have much more gray than black and white. I love pieces that take me to places and to subcultures to which I don’t normally have access. Rather than favorite pieces, I’ll name some of my favorite female (since this is ReportHers, after all) long-form narrative writers: Katherine Boo, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Anne Hull, Sara Corbett. I could go on and on, but that’s a start. Read any of these writers’ articles and you’ll find some of the best elements of narrative writing.

LAKSHMI GANDHI is co-founder and editor of The Aerogram, a new South Asian web magazine that focuses on news and pop culture. She began the site with her colleagues Pavani Yalamanchili and Kishwer Vikaas to create a place where second generation South Asians can read news they can relate to. 

The Aerogram gets its name from the blue airmail letters many immigrants used to send to their families in the 1970s and 1980s. Since its launch on Valentine's Day of this year, The Aerogram's posts have been referenced in The Hollywood Reporter, Jezebel, Racialicious, Colorlines, and India Abroad among other publications.

Lakshmi has worked extensively in both online and broadcast media as a researcher and writer. Her work has appeared in Gawker, Time.com, Newsweek.com and CNN.com among other publications. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. 

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1. What do you do for The Aerogram and how have your responsibilities evolved since you co-founded the site in February? All three of The Aerogram’s editors wear several hats. We each take turns managing the site’s social media, talking to potential contributors and reading and editing submissions. While I like doing all of those things. especially the social media-related things, my primary focus is writing and reporting. I’m the only editor based in New York, so I’m usually the one that covers Bollywood movie screenings and press conferences and the like. As for how we’ve evolved, back when we first launched we featured a lot more personal essays than we do now. We recently made a conscious decision to focus more on original reporting, news analysis and pop culture and I think the site has been much more dynamic because of that.

2. Can you talk about incorporating social media into The Aerogram, such as publishing articles that include 100 words of text and a series of tweets? When we were planning the site last winter, my co-founders Kishwer Vikaas, Pavani Yalamanchili and I knew right away that we wanted to treat our Twitter and Facebook feeds as an extension of the site. Twitter in particular has been a goldmine for us–I’ve discovered so many amazing stories and contributors through it. Our Twitter roundups, in which I basically just write a brief intro and then embed 7-10 related tweets, have been one of our most popular features. For example, our roundup featuring advice for Huma Abedin (Anthony Weiner’s South Asian American wife) got a lot of attention, as did all of our coverage last week on Kal Penn’s tweets about the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk policy.

For every hour we spend writing we should spend an hour promoting our content.

3. What information do you know now that you wish you knew when you were starting The Aerogram? I can’t stress enough how important it is to market your product and really sell yourself. Because there are so many news websites out there, it’s up to you as an editor to convince your readers that your site is worth their time. My co-editor Kishwer and I had coffee with Anil Dash earlier this summer and he told us that for every hour we spend writing we should spend an hour promoting our content and we’ve definitely seen a difference in our mentions and reader responses since we’ve started doing this. Great content isn’t always enough (to paraphrase A Field of Dreams “If you build it they don’t always come”), so we are trying to make sure that people know where to find us and to really communicate what our voice is all about.

4. What articles have been the most popular and why? How do you measure this? Our celebrity and pop culture coverage has always been popular. I think it’s because there really isn’t anyone else that approaches South Asian topics the way that we do–that is, from a progressive, feminist perspective. I mentioned the popularity of our coverage of the Kal Penn Stop and Frisk controversy earlier, we’ve also written about Lena Dunham’s disastrous trip to India, Joyce Carol Oates’ tweets on Islam and rape, and the culturally insensitive coverage of Huma Abedin’s ethnic background. We pay close attention to our Google Analytics stats, the number of retweets and Facebook shares a particular item gets, and check our newsletter open rate as ways to measure our audience response. We’ve been very pleased so far.

5. What have you learned about freelancing, and what tips can you share with others? I’ve discovered so much about freelancing over the past couple of months. Here are some tips:

Be realistic about how long a project will take. How much research do you need to do? Do you have enough time to transcribe your interviews, format your photos, etc? If you have a tendency to get writer’s block, budget time for that as well. Finishing up an article at 3am in never fun.

Meticulously document everything. I have a gigantic spreadsheet where I track all of my projects. It lists the date, the name of the project and the rate I’m receiving and any other important information. 

Plan ahead. At The Aerogram, we try to plan out our posting schedule 2-3 weeks ahead of time so that we always know when a piece of content is going to run. Breaking news events will of course always alter things a bit, but it’s always good to have a general outline that you can follow. There’s no reason to constantly reinvent the wheel. 

Here are three great Tumblrs that focus on women and people of color in the media that we started following this week:

Reporthers features Q & As with "editors, producers, reporters and other cool people who have something to do with journalism and nonfiction storytelling." Founder Jessica Glazer focuses on women in the media and chose the name because "it’s a fun word that connotes ownership of the job by women."

Journos of Color showcases work by journalists of color. They accept submissions. 

Flip the News "takes articles and posts that are in the news and online and flips the gender or race." Each post has a brief intro that provides context on why the article was chosen, the stereotypes implied in the story, and a link to the original article.