AvantGuild Member of the Week: Bill Becher
Age: 58
Location: Westlake Village, Calif.
What’s the latest thing you’ve worked on?
Interviewed the Fonz (Henry Winkler) for a story about Hollywood types going whitewater rafting for the new Daily Variety VLife Section.
What has been your most difficult project and how did you deal with its challenges?
Learning to lead rock climb on the soaring granite walls of Yosemite. I whimpered a lot.
What’s the best or most helpful thing that you’ve learned about writing, editing or publishing?
From David Hochman in a Mediabistro class: be sure that you create a comfort level with a new editor by showing that you can speak their language. Then under promise and over deliver.
What’s the worst writing or editing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Write about what you know. It’s more fun to try new things.
What advice would you give to writers looking to break into outdoor writing?
Have a great adventure, take some high-res digital photos, write it up then pitch it to a newspaper with an outdoor section – they’re easiest to break into. Having “art” to go with your story helps sell it. If you can’t shoot, team up with a photographer. Newspaper travel sections and even venerable pubs like Sunset Magazine are also looking for outdoor adventure stories – anything that you see people doing in an SUV commercial is fair game.
Bill wandered into a career as an outdoor journalist after paddling his kayak from the mainland of California to Anacapa and selling the story and photos to the Daily News of LA. Now he writes about and photographs adventures like whitewater kayaking, extreme mountain biking, fly-fishing in Belize, paragliding and scuba diving (sometimes with sharks). He writes for the LA Times Outdoors Section, Variety and specialty and regional magazines. He spent his 30th wedding anniversary hiking in 11 miles to the Bearpaw High Sierra Camp with his wife. He was on the winning team at the first Mediabistro LA softball game, where he went four for five, running out singles with a gimpy knee.
Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our 
