After lunch, I attended a conference panel on writing for newspapers and magazines. Among the speakers were Neil Amdur of the New York Times

and Fran Carpentier of Parade.

Neil talked about newspaper writing in general. His tips?

1) Take a notebook and tape recorder with you wherever you go, even on vacation. You never know when you'll come across a timely idea, and good stories are everywhere.

2)Be on the front end of a story. Look ahead.

3) Deliver on time. Give the editor time to edit. And, yes, former sports editors like Neil Amdur get edited.

4) Newspapers need so much content, that they are more accessible for freelancers than magazines. The downside? Lower pay.

5) Newspaper editors work in a negative world right now, and staff writers are unhappy. They welcome happy freelancers, or at least freelancers who do not complain. These people are fresh and fun, at least relatively speaking.

After the jump, ideas on pitching Parade:

The first thing you want to know about pitching Parade is that EVERYONE wants to pitch Parade. It pays really well, it runs 52 times a year, but many of the writers are big celebrity types. (I'll bet it's harder to break in there than to break into the Conde Nast publications that it subsidizes.) But Fran Carpentier says that she never met a writer she didn't like, so she shared some advice:

1) Don't query a publication like Parade until you have the credentials, know the story, and know that the story will work for the publication. Even then, it will be tough to get in.

2) The key to a Parade story, by the way, is to take an incidental event and make it universal.

3) Never submit a finished manuscript unless you have already sent a query and the query was assigned.

4) If you are a new-to-Parade writer, pitch through snail mail.

5) And if you are one of the lucky writers who breaks in, be prepared for rewrites. It's hard work to make a story that reads easy like Sunday morning.