Freelance Livin'

I was up at 6:30 this morning to attend an 8 am contributing writer meeting at the local, independent newspaper in the town just north of where I live. The commute to their office was no cake-walk, but finding work outside the city has proven to be a far more fruitful venture than my efforts within Boston. The staff met with the head bankers at the local Portuguese Credit Union. Being somewhat ignorant on the subject of Portuguese Credit Unions I dutifully took notes and struggled to follow the action like a first grader might while watching the State of the Union Address. And now my Editor has asked me to write a story about our meeting. I'll keep you posted on how that goes.

Despite the occasional, overwhelming *yikes* moment (such as the one I described above), freelance work suits me. My primary work right now is as a Production Intern with an emerging media group that produces "smart reality" television shows. This is my first experience with television work, aside from completing a semester-long fellowship my liberal arts college offered in documentary film. My hope is that through television work I'll become a more well-rounded journalist who can produce a variety of stories in different mediums. I've become awfully fond of news sites like newyorktimes.com and slate.com (one of my favorites) that are developing television channels on which their contributors can "perform" their written work. Slate's channel, Slate V, strikes me as being particularly adept at this. A portion of Dear Prudence, Slate's advice column, is recited each week with clever cartoons acting out the selected conundrum, while the Slate Explainer offers more traditional video content, pairing the author's narration of the article with photos and video clips. Even The Onion has its own (very clever) video site.

I hope you have time to enjoy some online video this weekend...when you're not outside enjoying the last few warm days of summer. In the meantime I'll be inside researching Portuguese Credit Unions :)