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Topic: best way to organize portfolio of clips?
| Author | Message |
| lissema11 | Posted – 8/18/2008 10:01:17 PM | show profile I was wondering if anyone could help me out with how to set up a portfolio of clips. I have the original clips of the articles I've written for my school newspaper, and I will have a few published clips from a magazine I'm interning with this summer. I'm thinking about assembling them in either a binder or a folder with those clear 3-ring page protectors, but I don't know if that's the most appropriate way. What do you guys think? Folder or binder? Is that compact enough, and when interviewing, are you supposed to give your portfolio without expecting it back at the end? |
| Blossom | Posted – 8/21/2008 7:43:39 PM | show profile | email poster Do tell I'd like to hear a pro's answer to this one too. I don't imagine we actually need a notebook of original paper clippings. I think they're just called clips but are often copies of clips or printouts from online versions. Still, I'd like to know what the standard is. What will look professional instead of screaming "newbie!"? |
| Chitownwritergal | Posted – 8/21/2008 9:40:36 PM | show profile Neatly Xeroxed copies of your newspaper clippings and/or computer printouts of your work, printed on clean paper and fastened together with a paper clip. Don't go pasting your cut-out clips in a scrapbook, unless you intend to keep it only for yourself and family to pore over. |
| HisGirlFriday | Posted – 8/21/2008 9:54:44 PM | show profile I've stopped photocopying clips totally, keeping either word copies of the printed version or pdfs. Every freelance job I've gotten has been through emailed clips as attachments. I'm not sure if this holds true for staff jobs. If it's paper copies, however, make a set of clips (photocopy the story neatly, include date and pub title if you can or put it on a separate sheet) for each prospective employer. That way you can leave the clips with them. They won't want to read them during the interview and give you back your binder. Of course, I have stacks and stacks of paper copies that are gathering dust in my closet, merely now monuments to felled trees. |
| chucho | Posted – 8/22/2008 5:17:03 AM | show profile PDFs! You can either scan the clips or just print out the web page. But previous poster is right, so much of this is done electronically. It's probably best to have the portfolio online. Many company email servers might hang up if you send unsolicited attachments. Sending a link (or links) is safer. |
| dribbledrive1 | Posted – 8/22/2008 11:25:11 AM | show profile If you are interviewing in person, just give them photocopies of your 5 best and most pertinent clips. Anymore than that and you just overwhelm people. You'll leave them behind. You can put them in a folder if you like. Or you can just use a big paper clip. Doesn't matter much. |
| gimmemags | Posted – 8/22/2008 11:38:23 AM | show profile I would do both I've assembled my clips, in a large binder with several good copies and will be scanning those clips electronically to put on a portable hard drive as PDFs. I think it's important to have good hard copies, for when you find out about a job and want to immediately put a portfolio together, especially if they only want your resume by email, but electronic copies are good to have too. I don't see anything wrong with doing both. |
| Linda F | Posted – 8/22/2008 4:03:49 PM | show profile When I was starting out in 1997, I created a beautiful binder with full-color copies of clips. Guess what? I never used it. Now, I do like some of the other posters here and have my virtual assistant turn my clips into PDF files. I save the original clips (which I cut out of the magazines with an Xacto knife) in alphabetical hanging files in a filing cabinet in case I need to copy them, but this rarely happens. Linda -- Renegade Writer E-Courses: http://therenegadewriter.com/new-renegade-writer-classes/ |
| lissema11 | Posted – 8/22/2008 4:17:18 PM | show profile Thank you all for the advice! |
| jkdscribe | Posted – 8/22/2008 11:09:51 PM | show profile Regarding PDFs I've never used them much except for receiving them. Can you create pdf documents with the free downloadable version of Adobe or do you have to buy a better version. Thanks. |
| chucho | Posted – 8/23/2008 9:19:26 AM | show profile jscribe: No, Adobe reader will not create PDFs but there are plenty of services online that do it. ---> I think it's important to have good hard copies, <--- Most definitely. In fact, I think it's a very good idea to mail hard copies in all circumstances. This gives you "two hits" on the target: you mail the clips, then you call to confirm reception of clips and/or send clips by email along with your pitch adn a note that says "I've mailed hard copies, too." I generally avoid sending PDFs as attachments. PDFs are easily "reduced" to images that can be embedded in web pages, and there you can provide a button as an option to download the PDF. You should alwasy be clear that a link will open a PDF -- some people don't like it because in some computers and networks, the PDF viewer can "hang up" or take a long time to open and display. You can reduce PDF images considerably by making them black and white and saving them as GIFs, by the way. They aren't as pretty, but they're readable and just as good as B&W photocopies, and they won't take 2 minutes to load on the web browser. So you can basically reproduce the look of a B&W photocopy in a large, readable single GIF image that appears in the viewer's browser pretty quickly. If you don't reduce the images, keep color and simply "save as JPG" without tweaking the image quality, the JPG image itself may be quite large -- over a meg or two in size, and in some connections will take a long time to view in-browser, increasing the likelihood of a reader giving up on viewing your clip -- also big images have a greater change of being interrupted halfway through the download to the browser. Some editors are surprisingly inept at computer things -- and they won't think to simply hit "refresh" to try to the image again. The most you can do to avoid the bugs and annoyances of web browsing your portfolio the better. There are solutions if you want a spectacularly clear full-color image of your clips in your browser, but it's just too much work (involves chopping up the image into chunks and adjusting the quality of each chunk to optimize the speed at which each chunk loads to display your vivid full-color scan). In fact, I think in most cases it's probably fine to simply link to the publication's website that has your clip, if available. Nevertheless, having all your clip scans in high-resolution PDF format (or high-resolution scans of you don't have the ability to save "press ready" PDFs, which may only be available by purchasing the extremely useful Adobe Acrobat application) is considerably better than a pile of newspaper clippings that get yellow and crappy-looking over time. |
