Daily Grind

Matthew Inman of the Oatmeal has chronicled the most egregious of email sins. All guaranteed to lose you friends and IT department support, so cut it out.

Freelancers know better than anyone that as liberating as working from home can, things can turn ugly quick. Web designer Matthew Inman has done enough freelancing to demonstrate the highs and lows in this comic from his website TheOatmeal.com:

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By Alex Noriega from his blog Stuff No-One Told Me.

Via Gary Scott.

The Awl has posted a sampling of online submissions they’ve received from freelancers – and it illustrates a strong contrast between how men and women often pitch their work:

The emails from men are pretty direct. The emails from women are often kind of… apologetic!

Inquiry letter from a man:

“Do you take pitches? Should I just write something and send it? Do I have to tickle the balls? I want to write for the awl, dammit.”

Inquiry letter from a woman:

“As an long-time admirer of your site (and non-too-frequent registered commenter), I’ve been too shy to pitch as I’ve never felt like my work measured up to your fine standards.”

Inquiry letter from a man:

“Can you offer a word of advice regarding how submissions work, desired timetables, what you like the pitches to look like, and so forth?”

Inquiry letter from a woman:

“I’m sure I’m going about this all wrong, but I couldn’t find any sort of submission area on the site. What I’m wondering is, how does one go about becoming a contributor to The Awl?”

Offers of sexual favors excluded, we’re pretty sure being direct and confident sells a story better than being apologetic and self-deprecating. Journalism is very much a male-dominated field. Are we ladies helping to keep it that way by selling ourselves short?

In this era of media downsizing, layoffs, and outsourcing, it’s nice to know someone is still paying attention.

Download your own Visual Enforcement Kit here.

Shannon Wheeler‘s cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker, The Onion, and an assortment of college newspapers. View more of Wheeler’s work at his official website.

The Oatmeal has done it again. The full illustrated guide to semicolons is here.

Previously on FBLA:
How To Use An Apostrophe

Our sister blog MediaJobsDaily tipped us off to this report by CareerCast.com of 200 jobs from best to wort. The ranking was determined by five criteria: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. Newspaper Reporter is waaaay down on the list at #184, just above a Stevedore – someone who loads and unloads cargo from vessels and routes cargo to proper locations.

Photojournalists were all the way down at #189, just above butchers and mail carriers. Publication Editor made it to #65, but the site notes the hiring outlook for this job is very poor.

Have a nice day!

A much-needed break from the news of layoffs and paywall debates and faltering circulation numbers…

Is this thing on? Our blog network has been having technical difficulties, and we were offline for most of Wednesday. But it seems to be better now. And we missed you too.