Tag Archives: magazine article writing

Posted on

Journo Portfolio for Writers

by

Here’s a Journo Portfolio review for freelance writers who’d like to quickly and easily create an online portfolio:

Authors wanting to create an online portfolio showcasing their writing may find this helpful. In my case, I needed one place to round up posts (from three different blogs), articles archived online at publishers’ websites, and magazine article clips (in PDF) from 32 years of writing! Journo Portfolio seems to do the trick.

You may also find this helpful if as a freelance writer you have written for a variety of publications, and on many topics. It can help literary agents or editors see the full scope of your writing career.

How to upload blog posts or articles archived at publisher websites to your own portfolio:

Since I just started my page at Journo Portfolio yesterday, so far I’ve only had a chance to upload my blog posts and a few magazine articles archived online. It was very fast and easy. I uploaded links to 35 posts in about 3 hours. It would have taken half that time (or less) if I hadn’t opted to tweak the post descriptions.

If you want to create your own, it’s free to start with 10 article links, then $5 for a month for unlimited. For a few other features you can go to the $10 month plan. (And no, I’m not a spokesperson for them, just a random author who found this site helpful so want to pass on a few things I learned so far about using it.)

As for starting your own: first create a login, choose a banner, upload your photo, and name your portfolio (you can start with the free version). Then you’ll see a giant plus sign, at the bottom left of your page. (See example below.)

Click that, and at the home button (picture of a house) you can see your dashboard.

When you click Articles + it’s simple: just copy and paste the link from the website and it will import the link with a photo and some text from the article. It will automatically import to your Home page unless you have already set up other pages.

NOTE: if you want to start out simple, you can just skip creating other pages for now, and all articles will automatically upload to your Home page. The upload will already include the article photo and the first few paragraphs in the description. Bam! Done!

But I do think it prettier to make link descriptions shorter, sort a lot of articles by tabs/pages, and add tags for Google to find your portfolio more easily. So here’s how to do that if you want to go deeper:

How to add pages to your portfolio to sort articles by topics or magazines:

If you want to create tabs (other pages) on your site for different article topics or names of publications you’ve written for, create a new Page. The tab is automatically auto-created. This bumped me at first because I expected it to be more difficult!

You can see in my first image the tabs are Home, 1920s Historical Memoir, Writing Tips, Parenting, and Books. I may change that as time goes along. I found it easiest to first upload links to my Home page, as that has links to all articles in chronological order.

After importing my history-related posts, then creating a new tab for those, I did have to designate they show on both the Home and 1920s History Memoir pages. (See below, “Blocks to display on”).

Note in the image below, where it says “Search blocks” it’s simply searching for the pages/tabs you created. (“Blocks” means pages in this case.) If you don’t indicate a page, it won’t show on any, so at least choose one block for your link to show in. (But as I said, if Home is your only page, you don’t have to mess with this.)

Note above the Text Excerpt field. Journo Portfolio with automatically grab the first few paragraphs, but I chose to shorten those, usually to the subheading in my original article. (The example above is from my post A Sure-footed Dhurzee & a Sly Cook.)

By the way, you can also set Journo Portfolio up to continuously import a feed or all articles from your own blog site. I can’t decide if this is a good option. When I elected that option after I uploaded some links, a few were duplicated.

Also, since a portfolio seems to be public from the time it’s created, I didn’t want a bunch of links posting without my handcrafting the descriptions first and checking the photos. Some photos at my old sites are not so great and I’d like to update those and possibly even the articles themselves before adding them to my new portfolio. (Some old articles contain now-irrelevant links.)

Also, a feed to automatically import new articles is not necessary; it’s a cinch to add the links yourself, and update the descriptions to be sure they looks good.

Also, in the settings area you can add tags. That will be a little additional work, but wise so that Google grabs the new portfolio when people do relevant searches.

By the way: to find website links to your old material, insert your author name in quotes in Google Search. (It’s quite revealing what Google does find. Do you know it shows your last three tweets, if you are on Twitter? Tweet conscientiously!) Google Search is how I found a few of my old archived articles.

Check, too, for alternate spellings of your name. Some sites may have listed your byline without your middle name, or with your middle initial, or using your maiden name (if that was formerly your author name).

Uploading scanned magazine article clips in PDF to your author portfolio:

Next up for me will be a bigger project: scanning my old articles (tearsheets from print magazines) into PDF. If you already have yours scanned, kudos to you! You can get rolling with that right away!

Some of the print magazines are still going strong, for example Writer’s Digest, but don’t have all articles digitally archived (that I could find yet). Other magazines I wrote for have gone entirely out of print or may have articles archived under a new company name with a digital website.

For example, I was formerly was a contributing editor (continuous writer) for Christian Parenting Today (CPT) print magazine (1989-2005), which had about 300,000 readers at its peak. CPT was a sister publication to Virtue and Today’s Christian Woman magazines. All were stellar print publications taken over by Christianity Today (founded by Billy Graham). A few of my parenting articles with them are archived now at the Christianity Today site.

Most of my CPT articles I’ll have to take a day to scan and upload. But I do want to include them in my portfolio, as it shows the range of topics I’ve written about, and most of the parenting articles offer perennial advice.

I didn’t thoroughly explore any other portfolio creation sites, so have none to compare them to. I saw Journo Portfolio recommended by The Write Life blog, so I simply dived in I’m pleased so far.

Do feel free to comment if you have any questions or thoughts about this!

Write on!

Laurie

Posted on

One SWEET Magazine Article Writing Assignment

My fun interview with a Norwegian Olympic athlete

by

How in the world did I, a freelance writer in the USA, get the amazing opportunity to interview a Norwegian Olympic athlete? In her own home, about a sport I’d never heard of, in a country I had never visited?

Cover of 1994 Viking Magazine with magazine article written by Laurie Winslow Sargent on Lillehammer athlete Hildegunn Fossen

Think creatively about how to find your next freelance magazine article writing assignment:

In 1990’s, my husband’s company in the USA was bought by Norwegians, so he traveled there frequently on business. When I had an opportunity to visit Norway with him, and I was thrilled!

I wondered if I might be able to garner an article assignment related to the trip. A family member told me about Viking magazine, for Sons of Norway members (people interested in Norwegian heritage) so I called the editor. She was responsive to my experience writing for other national magazines.

The editor asked if I’d be open to interviewing a Lillehammer Olympic athlete. (Of course!) She suggested that I contact the Lillehammer Olympic Organizing Committee. That led me to Hildegunn Fossen, a 24-year-old female biathlon (ski shooting) champion. A dynamite skier and a crack shot with a rifle, she had won the 1993 Norwegian national biathlon competition and was preparing for the 1994 Winter Olympics.

Unbelievably, in Drammen Norway we dined with a coworker who knew Hildegunn. She had been born in his city! I was told exactly where she lived, on a farm several hours away in the mountains. Serendipitously (actually I call it a God-thing), our plans already included a train journey on the Bergen Railway across the country to see the fjords. Hildegunn lived along the way!  I was able to use our preexisting train ticket, but simply hop off for a few hours, then back on. She lived only 12 minutes away from Bromma train station and fetched me to take me to her home.

For those as uniformed as I was: the biathlon for the winter Olympics is combination of skate style skiing (skoyting) and target shooting. In Norwegian, ski shooting is called ski skyting, pronounced “shee sheeting.”

Hildegunn told me that as soon as she had began walking, her folks had put her on skis. At around age twelve she learned to use a rifle. At the time of our interview, she was spending ten days a month on the slopes, practicing or traveling with the national team to competitions in Austria, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Germany. Home training included  jogging, weight lifting, mountain biking, use of road skis (short skis on wheels) on pavement, and target practice.

Curious about ski shooting? Here’s what I learned:

During a 7 1/2 kilometer ski run, the athlete (with a rifle slung over her back) has two opportunities to stop and shoot at targets 50 meters away–once while standing, the other while laying flat on a pad on the snow. The rectangular target has five holes spaced evenly. The athlete, whose rifle is loaded with only five bullets, must shoot through the center of every hole in the target. For each miss a penalty loop of 150 meters must be skied. Finishing times vary from race to race depending on wind, snow and track conditions, and how well the skis are waxed. When it is snowing hard, the athletes wear goggles, raising them to shoot while peering through the swirling snow. A flag near each target helps alter sights on the gun to compensate for wind conditions.

Hildegunn demonstrated her shooting skills for me outside her home, then showed me various interesting awards she’d been given. Most were lovely but practical objects, including a carved clock and a lovely silver goblet from King Harald.

Before I left, I was also given a tour of the farm. Their sheep would graze throughout the summer, in the hills, until rounded up in the fall. The family would shear them, sell the wool, and birth the lambs. I was amused at how when Hildegunn approached the meadow and called out, some lambs came running like puppies, bleating excitedly. One mama had been lost to a lynx so Hildegunn had bottle-fed the weakest lamb.

Bromma NorwayAfter a wonderful visit,  I hopped back on the train to catch up with my husband.

As our journey continued, we got to see the incredible Hardanger Fjord, then traveled on down to Haugesund, Norway.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, we’d later live in Haugesund for two wonderful years and have the adventure of a lifetime.

I realize now how grateful I am that Hildegunn spoke English so well. When we moved to Norway I faced some challenge in not being able to communicate well — especially difficult for a word person! You can read  On Being an Illiterate Writer to see how that temporarily affected my identity as a writer, but it also highly sensitized me to how expats from other countries may feel when they come to the USA if English is not their native language! And they may be even be expert writers in their own language.

It’s so odd to think that I can now read news about Hildegunn in Norwegian, and understand a bit of it, something I never dreamed of when I first I picked up that phone to call Viking magazine!

Also, at the time I called to see about a magazine article assignment with Viking, I wasn’t aware of any Norwegian heritage in my own family. And then my youngest daughter was born there, beginning our own heritage there. And to top it off — she’s an athlete too, now heading off to a college in the mountains to run cross-country and looking forward to skiing too.

And of all things, here it is 22 years later and I and Hildegunn, now with her own family, are connected on Facebook. She posts her family news in Norwegian, and thankfully I can understand some.  You just never know where a magazine article assignment will lead you and the long-term connections you may make because of that!

This video from Rick Steves brings back memories of our Norway in a Nutshell train ride on the Bergen Railway! (Makes me crave that brown goat cheese that tastes like caramel–yum!) Enjoy the virtual ride.