Understand the publications for which you wish to write and understand yourself, Illinois Woman’s Press Association members learned Feb. 19 from three editors, a freelance writer, and a marketing specialist.

Speakers included Jim Slusher, assistant managing editor for training and staff development at the Daily Herald; Pat Arden, managing editor of The Reader; Cary Silver, managing editor of The Rotarian; Kari Lydersen, a stringer and researcher for the Chicago bureau of the Washington Post; and Marion Gold, president of Marion Gold & Co., which provides publicity, public relations, and editorial services to businesses, executives, and entrepreneurs.

The Daily Herald needs "an army of freelance help," Slusher said, for its 23 zoned editions—the secret of its increased circulation. Its mission, he said, is to be two papers in one: a local paper, with news of schools and village boards as well as a paper that can compete with the Chicago Tribune by telling about bands performing in Chicago, about the Bulls and other sporting events as well as other local and national news.

Stringers—"people with their fingers on the pulse of what’s happening"—fill the ranks when two or three events are going on at one time in one locale, he said. High school basketball is particularly labor-intensive, with 25-30 stringers. School board meeting coverage starts at $25, while a travel feature with photos might net $175. For ethical reasons, Slusher said travel writers should have paid their own expenses.

The Reader also relies heavily on freelancers—up to 80%—but, as a weekly newspaper, it favors more of a magazine feature approach, Arden said. Distributed heavily downtown as well as north and south along the lakefront, and to Beverly and Chatham, its average reader is age 33.

Arden told how he had been pitched a story about privatization of janitorial jobs in Chicago public schools. The writer described a man in Pilsen who lived across the street from a school, and who rose each morning at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. to make sure it was warmed up for the students, a man who knew if the school had been vandalized, and who remembered generations of kids.

"Every story is really about people," Arden said. "Find the human element and bring it forward." Average people, not celebrities, are the ‘heroes’ The Reader favors. Narrative is important. Much of the paper is devoted to arts and entertainment. Here, Arden suggested proving a thesis. As an example, he cited a review of the movie, "The Thin red Line," which compared its visual treatment and cursory dialogue to silent movies and early talking pictures, when actors clustered around fixed microphones.

Payment ranges from $250-$350 for Our Town features, $50-$175 for calendar features (which can be tied to events but still should be able to stand alone). Cover stories of 4,000 words pay an average $1,200-$1,500. Prospective writers needn’t query Arden, but should call him (312-828-0350, ext. 333) preferably on Thursdays or Fridays. "We usually say write it up and let it fly," Arden said.

Compare The Rotarian to an upscale airline in-flight magazine, said Silver. As the publication of Rotary International, one of the largest international service organizations, its average reader is 50-60 years old and the head of a company. One-fifth of its 500,000 monthly circulation is overseas, so its focus is global: street children across the world, not just in Chicago; soccer’s World Cup, not just the Chicago Bulls. Do not pitch political stories, celebrity profiles, fiction, or poetry.

Silver has profiled a Rotarian environmentalist in the Venezuelan rainforests and covered polio immunization projects in Nigeria and Ethiopia. Half of the magazine’s newshole tends to be Rotary-related, half general interest. Business management, world health, are the environment are its milieu: global Y2K preparedness or the effect of the Euro dollar on foreign markets, for example.

Once an assignment is made, an informal letter of contract would offer either full rights or the more usual one-time rights, which allows the writer to sell the same article to another publication. Payment ranges from $600 for a story that runs two pages in the magazine to $1,500 for a story on gambling that ran six pages and discussed various religion’s views on the subject, the dollars gambling pumps into an economy, and treatment for gambling addicts.

IWPA member Chris Baum, senior editor at Security magazine, a Cahners’ publication, sent guidelines for its 129 titles. Each has a narrow focus. Security, for example, targets users of visitor and employee identification cards, surveillance cameras, and other safeguards against corporate profit loss; Security Distributing and Marketing, meanwhile, talks to the producers of those goods. With each periodical having such a precise market, Baum wrote, "Cahners' editors want writers to be equally focused."

Thus, Cahners tends to use writers it knows—people in public relations firms who already submit work to its periodicals—and wants to see resumes and clips.

Kari Lydersen describes her writing career like a "branching tree." It was her mother, however, who rooted the recent Medill School of Journalism-Northwestern University graduate by faxing her resume to the Washington Post at the deadline.

Write about any hobby or interest you have and pitch to its relevant trade magazine, said Lydersen, who applies this advice as a contributor to Splash! The Official Magazine of U.S. Swimming. Get to know your locale, follow every story lead possible, and pitch variations to a broad range of editors, she suggested.

As a writer for StreetWise, for example, Lydersen developed expertise on politics and personalities in the Mexican-American neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago. It led to her first story in The Reader. Other StreetWise stories on blues music and historic preservation on Chicago’s Maxwell Street inspired a bylined piece in the Style section of the Washington Post.

Market yourself through job performance, augmented by an image cultivated via the proper exposure, said author-consultant Marion E. Gold. "Target your market: Who do I know and what do I want them to know about me," said Gold, author of Personal Publicity Planner, a former executive vice president and general manager of a Chicago health care communications company, and board member of the Arizona Women’s Town Hall.

Pick the service organizations you join by the people you can meet there and by their "bridging" potential, nationally or to a new phase of your career.

Gold advised one audience member that starting a local arts council would be a wonderful way to make contacts and could bridge into a public relations firm of her own down the road. Ditto for the person who gained entrée to the local paper after submitting her church’s news there.