Memoirs of a Freelance Journalist
Stability with three core clients: Money, The Journal of Commerce and The National Law Journal
My association with Money magazine began shortly after my departure from Ampersand and the transition to an office in my apartment. It occurred unexpectedly when I received a phone call from an editor there inviting me to become the magazine’s first contract correspondent in a decision borne from an internal Time-Life empire political dispute with Time magazine. Besides the namesakes Time and Life, the company published a number of sister magazines such as Fortune, People, Discover and Money. Each of those publications relied on the various Time news bureaus for reporting services like those I had been providing to Time since 1981.
By 1983, however, Money had ridden the growth of the Baby Boomer population into a prominent position within the empire. Launched in 1972 as a personal finance magazine, Money thrived from providing information about investments, spending, saving and anything that might affect its readers’ pocketbooks. As the boomer population aged into its more productive middle years when it sought that kind of information with more interest, circulation increases drove a growth in advertising revenue that provided Money’s editors more muscle to flex inside the Time-Life shelter. But correspondents at the various Time bureaus refused to pay Money the proper respect. When assignments arrived from Money editors, the Time correspondents routinely ignored them or provided only cursory effort at finding interview subjects to answer the questions—except in Houston, where the Time correspondent had an ambitious stringer named Gary Taylor willing to tackle any reporting assignments requested from New York.
Thus, I already had been handling the Money assignments in Houston almost by default when Susan called in 1983 with her job offer. Fed up with the routine rejections by Time correspondents around the country, she said she wanted to use me as a demonstration to show that Money needed its own slate of contract correspondents. Under her terms, I would continue to accept assignments for Time as well. She had no need to poach the bureau’s busiest stringer. But she wanted me to agree to accept all assignments from her in addition to those from Time. She could not guarantee any monthly income figure, but assured me there would be regular work with payment on an hourly basis for reporting files, just like I’d been doing for Time. She would bypass the Time correspondent in Houston and send the Money assignments directly to me. It sounded like the perfect way to fill the vacancy created by the failure of Southwest Racquetball while joining a more prominent and reliable alternative.
While assignments for Time covered a wide range of subjects on a weekly basis, the monthly Money assignments focused most often on finding individuals willing to share their personal investment information in what the magazine described as “model portfolios.” A typical Money assignment, for example, might ask me to find a single woman with two children starting to build their educational investment portfolio. When I found her, I would write a profile including all the details of her finances. Then the magazine would recruit a panel of top financial advisors to review it and provide specific recommendations on investment options.
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| This typical Money cover from November 1984 promoted my analysis on the investment portfolio of Houston TV anchor Shara Fryer. |
In the early 1980s, this type of assignment did not prove as difficult as it might sound. I began developing sources in the Houston financial planner community, contacting them for access to willing clients. The planners proved more than eager to assist because they could expect prominent attention if quoted in this magazine demonstrating their talents. I could always find individuals willing to share their details in exchange for free consultations with top planners or brokers. And I used my imagination to locate subjects outside the planning community, developing connections with all sorts of neighborhood organizations, school groups or anyone with access to a wide range of friends. Facebook would have been a perfect portal for recruiting regular folks to interview had it and the Internet been available back then.
In addition to the model portfolios, Money also had a wide variety of other assignments. The editors there believed that they could find a Money angle to any news event and they instructed me often to find financial experts in Houston to interview on a range of topics. A couple of times, Money assigned me to produce full freelance features that would include my byline. On one occasion, I researched and wrote an article on office football pools. Using the knowledge gained on that assignment, I even did a bit of recycling for a local magazine, giving it a version focused specifically on the Houston football pool activities.
On another assignment for a story titled “How to Divorce a Millionaire,” I interviewed several of Houston’s high-profile divorce lawyers asking the question: “What advice would you provide if a client approached in confidence with plans to divorce their millionaire spouse within the next six months?” One of them even connected me for interviews with a female client who actually had plotted out her six-month divorce strategy as directed, gathering all financial materials so she could ambush her husband at the courthouse.
Another time, Money sent me to spend a week in Mexico investigating whether Americans really could retire there on $300 per month. I discovered a colony of transplants from the U.S. and Canada living in Guadalajara in style, but complaining about access to medical care and devaluation of the peso. One had been forced to operate a secret illegal side-business making yogurt after losing half his retirement savings because he had placed it all in a Mexican bank account before devaluation.
Susan’s “experiment” with me as Money’s first contract correspondent proved successful enough that she had added freelancers in at least a dozen more cities around the country within a couple of years. The magazine listed all of our names in its masthead every month, so my name appeared in every edition of Money published between 1983 and 1996. And several times the magazine brought us all to New York City to join the staff in its annual Christmas holiday party. Susan considered us family.
The Journal of Commerce (JOC) emerged as a primary revenue source about two years later through another unexpected turn of events. In fact, I had been unaware of the JOC’s existence until I encountered the newspaper’s Gulf of Mexico correspondent, Joseph Bonney, while attending a conference in Houston to cover a speaker for a Washington D.C.-based newsletter as a freelancer. Seated beside him, we struck a conversation that concluded with his invitation to accept some assignments in Houston under supervision from his office in New Orleans.
Headquartered in New York, the JOC boasted a rich and prominent history as a daily newspaper dating all the way back to 1827 when founded by Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. I would learn that the JOC represented a classic example of entrepreneurial journalism, filling a niche in the business information world that few realized existed. As a publication, it was a beast with a global reach and an enormous appetite for copy, particularly from a growth region like Texas and the Mexican border.
The JOC began as a vehicle to fill the void in information for ocean shippers in New York City. Before they could move cargo overseas, those shipping agents had to learn which ships were arriving and leaving, destined where and when. Morse realized he could gather that information in a news product he could sell to the city’s growing community of shippers more cheaply than they could gather that information on their own. The heart of the JOC was a section called “Shipcards” where all the shipping lines could post their schedules. Moreover, he learned he could charge the shipping lines for placement in the Shipcards as advertising while selling that information as a subscription to the agents in the port. The JOC would earn money on both ends of its operation.
As the publication grew from those basic shipping roots, it also developed another revenue stream with all manner of advertising around the shipcards. It had room for news stories, too, that would add value to the newspaper with coverage of the people and businesses related to the shipping community. By the turn of the Twentieth Century, the JOC ranked as a more viable publication than The Wall Street Journal, which would become the nation’s pre-eminent business paper. Of course, a century later, the age of the Internet would destroy the JOC’s reason for existence. Who needs to buy a newspaper for shipcards when shipping schedules post in real time on a computer screen? When I needed the JOC, however, from 1985 through 1996, it ranked as the Bible of shipping, commerce and any sort of business related to or dependent on those fields.
Excited to join the team, I learned that the JOC needed me primarily to cover the Port of Houston, including the politics of the port’s governing body as well as the organized labor activities there. The JOC paid primarily by the published column inch in its news sections. But it also produced special sections several times each week, paying freelancers set article fees—usually $300—for stories like the one I mentioned in Part One about the Mexican market for reinsurance.
In Joe Bonney, I had hitched my wagon to a rising star. Within a couple of years, the JOC had promoted him to editor, moving him to New York and adding New Orleans to my area
of focus. From September of 1985 until June of 1996, my byline would appear 338 times in the JOC on articles covering a wide range of subjects. In 1990, for example, the JOC would provide 28 percent of my annual freelancing revenue--$16,815 of $57,031.
Contrasting with the accidental nature of my connections to Money and the JOC, I secured my connection to The National Law Journal (NLJ) in 1986 through a concerted, targeted effort spawned by an analysis of what should have been my business strengths as a freelance journalist as well as my failure in 1985 to maximize one of those strengths. As a newspaper reporter from 1969 through 1980, I had spent the lion’s share of my time covering courts and legal affairs. As a freelancer, I had to consider my experience in legal affairs reporting to be a primary strength. Emphasizing that experience in 1983, I had added a publication called The Legal Times to my stable of clients after spotting a classified magazine ad from that weekly newspaper seeking a correspondent in Texas.
The editor there offered to pay me a monthly retainer of $400 to guarantee my availability for assignments in Texas with payment for published articles deducted from that retainer. Basically, he paid me in advance for work that later would be calculated on an hourly basis of $12 per hour. I quickly realized, however that the complex legal articles required more time than we had anticipated. But he needed to limit my monthly payments to $400. Instead of making bonus payments every month to cover the gap between my actual time and the $400 retainer I already had received, he added the excess payments into the budget for the following month. But he and his assistant editors continued to call me with requests for a wide range of stories, and I quickly reached a point where the paper owed me more than the total of my retainers for several months into the future.
Although I produced eight memorable articles for The Legal Times, including a lengthy 3,865-word profile of Austin’s entire legal community in 1984, relations with the staff grew strained as I refused to accept some assignments in an attempt to let the paper catch up on its payments. Rather than attempt to renegotiate my retainer with an editor who seemed satisfied with my work, I started cutting corners to spend less time on assignments for him. The inevitable showdown occurred in the summer of 1985 when he rejected my manuscript previewing what was destined to become one of the most significant trials in U.S. history between oil giant Texaco and Houston oil independent Pennzoil. I eventually would cover the result of that trial for Time a year later, earning one of its precious bylines. But my initial effort for The Legal Times clearly lacked the effort, and I realized the editor was correct. When he rejected my story, I terminated our agreement in July of 1985 in a letter explaining I just couldn’t provide the complex service he needed for $400 per month.
Despite the loss of $400 per month and the shot to my self-esteem for getting fired for the first time in my life, I managed to salvage some positives from that experience. I feared that the paper had been abusing my services by paying just $12 per hour even if that amount equals $40 per hour in 2021. I also realized the difficulties facing my negotiations in the future assessing offers for service. I concluded I needed to become more creative in formulating compensation schemes. I also had delivered eight strong legal articles to enhance my portfolio of work samples, including one about the creation of a new Houston law firm that I managed to recycle into a more general interest version for Houston City magazine in 1985 for a $1,500 fee.
With Time, Money, JOC and the AAPG Explorer as regular clients by the start of 1986, I decided to make another attempt to land a publication in the legal field. Reviewing a large reference book of magazines and newspapers, I discovered a brief profile of a weekly newspaper in New York called The National Law Journal (NLJ). I did not know it at the time, but the NLJ ranked as an extremely successful national publication associated with The New York Law Journal, which enjoyed unique status as the official daily paper of legal record for New York. Lawyers were required to advertise all lawsuits in the daily paper. As a result, one of the NLJ’s editors would later explain to me, The New York Law Journal represented a license to “print money.” The publisher of the daily New York paper had launched NLJ as a national show horse for his stable of legal news. As a weekly newspaper, the NLJ appeared to fit my reporting talents perfectly.
After plotting my campaign, I mailed a proposal to the editor of the NLJ, inquiring about his interest in having a Texas correspondent. He called immediately to say he actually had been considering the addition of correspondents, particularly in Texas where he thought Dallas ranked as a more likely location. But he described himself as stumped about the most equitable way to compensate a freelancer for regular services.
“Funny you should ask,” I thought, then I proposed my plan. If the NLJ could pay me a monthly retainer of $275, I said, I could send a list of potential story ideas twice each month. Then he and the other editors could select from that list and assign articles based on the paper’s standard article fees: Front page features paid $700, inside news stories paid $100 to $200 depending on length, and shorter department articles paid as little as $25 to $50 each. Essentially, I explained, the NLJ would be paying me $275 each month to scout for news in Texas and feel confident the editors knew about every potential story in Texas. To myself, I thought: Can I really persuade a magazine to pay me just to pitch queries? He pondered my proposal for about a day, then agreed to give it a try.
For starters, he also assigned me one of his ideas as my first NLJ front page feature, analyzing the impact of the oil patch bankruptcy boom on Houston’s bankruptcy bar. I had to laugh because I had produced a story on the same subject just two years earlier for The Legal Times and already had a lot of the basic information and legal contacts in my files.
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| My NLJ Debut Feature |
To succeed with the NLJ, I realized I needed a more efficient means of scouting for legal news items. The paper covered all manner of legal news, from colorful lawsuit and court activity to inhouse gossip and politics at law firms. In addition, my focus area covered the entire state. That mission statement required a wider view of the state. So, I invested some money in additional subscriptions to publications within the state. Besides the two Houston dailies, I added subscriptions to the weekly business newspapers published in each of the five largest cities.
And I discovered a true fountain of news tips in a relatively new weekly publication called Texas Lawyer. Technically a rival for the NLJ, Texas Lawyer covered the same news territory with a focus only on Texas. It published stories with much greater detail than needed by the NLJ so I could always turn its stories into something unique without plagiarizing it. In those days before the Internet, the NLJ editors lacked real-time access to Texas Lawyer, but I’m sure they had a subscription and received their copy in the mail just like me. They never complained about my use of Texas Lawyer as a tip service as long as I developed the resulting stories on my own. Of course, Texas Lawyer was scooping me all the time, producing its in-depth articles several weeks before I could report a matching story. But even when I worked in daily newspapers, I had always believed I could respond to any scoop by writing a follow-up story with new and unique information.
Beyond the smidgen of in-depth articles published by Texas Lawyer, the standard news articles represented fair game. Court decisions or law firm mergers are events with the same details regardless of which reporter is reporting them. I considered Texas Lawyer to be an outstanding example of regional, industry-specific journalism and had great respect for its staffers, some of whom I had known from working with them in the Houston newspaper community a decade before. One of them joked on occasion that I probably couldn’t do my job at the NLJ if he wasn’t doing his for Texas Lawyer. I imagined him mumbling to himself: “It’s sketchy enough for Taylor to recycle his own stories, why does he have to recycle mine?” I accused him of exaggerating the threat. Had I been offered a staff position at Texas Lawyer in the 1980s, however, I likely would have accepted.
But the NLJ proved a match made in freelancer heaven for me. After faxing my initial list of story ideas to the NLJ’s desk, I received a call from an assignments editor named Anthony Paonita raving about the magic of having a dozen article suggestions just plop on his desk. He assigned several for me that first week and encouraged me to keep them coming. I would learn that Anthony, like most NLJ staffers, boasted a law degree but enjoyed journalism more than legal work. I also recognized quickly the need for accuracy, considering that lawyers comprised the majority of the NLJ’s reading audience and serious libel lawsuits loomed just one misquote away.
Just as with Money, the experiment with me at NLJ prompted it to duplicate my suggested compensation scheme, recruiting freelancers in various other cities from Miami to Chicago to supplement the production by the staff in New York and full-time correspondents in California. Within a couple of years, the paper was flying us all into New York annually for a staff meeting and party. During the decade from 1986 until 1996, the paper would carry my byline 705 times below headlines on a wide range of legal topics. A law professor in San Diego regularly used my front-page 1995 feature on the proliferation of fake evidence as a required reading assignment for her law students. I discovered I could earn a more efficient payment from the shorter $25 or $50 articles on humorous events. Employing the Rockford Rule, I could churn out those things in 30 minutes or less including the research, easily earning more than $25 per hour. In 1990 when the JOC generated 28 per cent of my income with $16,815, for example, the NLJ added 16 percent with $9,204—equivalent to about $18,000 in 2021.
If Time and Ampersand had represented a vegetable garden and chicken coop in 1981, by 1988 the combination of Money, JOC and NLJ had expanded my regular food sources into fields of corn and wheat with pigs and cattle always available. Around that agricultural bounty, I still could hunt big game from magazines and other publications as opportunities arose.
Rather than relying only on my three core contracts, I forced myself to keep three or four random magazine assignments circulating at all times, leaving me busy both mentally and physically. I continued to build my story ideas inventory files and practice my ability to pitch them as time would allow. This financial security prompted a new assessment about freelancing as a business. Where I once considered it synonymous with unemployment, I now saw the advantages.
Old friends from The Houston Post constantly worried aloud about losing their one job and source of income if rumors of that paper’s demise proved true—as it eventually would in 1995. In contrast, however, I would need five or six of my client publications to fail simultaneously before seriously affecting my earnings. I realized I enjoyed more security from a variety of employers than my old colleagues had from their sole source of income. In fact, I would grow a bit nervous upon noticing that any one of my publications represented more than 25 per cent of my income.
But I felt like I was running on an endless treadmill. I had four or five part-time jobs that equaled a couple of full-time positions. Luckily, I was still young enough to handle the pressure, and my personal life had taken a turn toward more stability as well.
That turn began emotionally for me after my ex-wife had relocated to central Texas in late 1981. Until then, she had shared a lot of the responsibilities for parenting despite my control of custody. With her gone, however, I had them all the time and had to adjust. I began thinking about more domestic permanence for us. The following year I had moved us out of the city and into the Southwest Houston suburbs. By 1983 I was expecting to have both girls attending the same Vanguard magnet school for the next school year with Erin in third grade and Shannon in first, traveling by bus every day. I wanted to keep them as busy as possible with activities that would stimulate friendships and growth.
In February of 1983, Erin came home with a flyer about joining a girls fastpitch softball league in our neighborhood. So, I signed her up at Southwest Houston Girls Softball
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| Mr. Ladybug with Shannon and Erin in 1985. |
Association (SWHGSA) in Bayland Park, where she joined the roster of the Ladybugs—a team for ages 7-9. A new team created to meet the demands of an expanding population, the Ladybugs were coached by a pair of young women in their twenties, who quickly realized they had volunteered for more trouble than they anticipated. They had underestimated the aberrant psychology of little league parents. Some day I will write a separate article about my years involved with fastpitch softball for girls and women and perhaps entitle it “Blood Along the Baseline.”
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| Coaching in 1990. |
For this article, however, I only need note that I became intricately involved with SWHGSA to a point where I even served one year as president and spent the next twelve years coaching girls as they aged through high school. Besides keeping us busy in the neighborhood, the softball league also provided the opportunity for my next long-term domestic relationship when I recruited one of the single mothers with a daughter on the Ladybugs to serve as their team mother in 1984, after I had become the coach. Before the end of that season, we had decided to rent a house together so her two daughters and mine could have a better living environment.
“Taylor will do anything to get a pitcher,” cracked one of my rival coaches when he heard about our new arrangement. Of course, we found a house near the park and set about to create our own little version of “The Brady Bunch.” Two years later we would buy a house in the area. Even with the four girls grown up and gone by 1995, we continued our arrangement through the present time.
Beyond the impact on my family, the relocation of my freelance business into a house provided significant benefits for stability. Moving August of 1986 into a house where I would live until 2013, I sequestered the dining room and adjoining living room for office space. I installed my desk, computer, fax and printer in the dining room and filled the living room wall-to-wall with four-drawer filing cabinets to hold my ever-growing morgue of magazine and newspaper clippings. By this time, I had my stable of regular clients in place with Money, JOC, NLJ and the AAPG Explorer.
But I also supplemented that income stream with assignments from a wide variety of additional publications, some of which became fairly regular as well, even if they did not last throughout my freelancing career to 1996. My records list annual freelance revenues for the rest of that decade as $54,210 in 1987, $50,116 in 1988 and $47,732 in 1989.
Among the various publications, two stand out in particular as regular contributors; Southwest Airlines’ Spirit in-flight magazine and the two city magazines for Houston in this period, Houston City and Houston Metropolitan. From 1984 into 1988, Spirit had assigned me to produce a monthly column summarizing all significant business news in the southwestern United States. Since magazine production lagged copy submission by about two months, this feature made absolutely no sense to me. Everything in my columns had occurred more than two months earlier than passengers could read about it. I assumed the editor just wanted to present her magazine as some sort of official publication of record for the Southwest region.
I researched these columns by subscribing to the weekly city business journals across the area, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Denver. And I collected $300 per month plus telephone expenses to provide a summary. Added to the fees for feature articles in 1986, Spirit ranked as my most important client that year with 17 percent of my income, just barely beating JOC with 16 percent and Money with 15 percent from a total of $36,512 (or about $92,142 equivalent in 2021). A new Spirit editor in 1988 decided he didn’t need this feature any more and terminated my contract. I responded by immediately canceling my subscriptions to most of the weekly business newspapers I had been reading just to produce the column and wondering how I could make up the missing $300/month.
The previous editor answered that question a year later, calling to introduce herself as the new editor for Houston Metropolitan and recruit me for another monthly business column for her at that magazine. Instead of summarizing old news, however, she wanted me to provide original reporting. I could write about anything in the business sector without a query for $500 per month.
“Of all the nerve,” I laughed: “You want original reporting?”
Besides recycling wherever feasible, I actually did produce a lot of original magazine reporting in those years. In addition to the column for Metropolitan, I sold her some of my most interesting feature ideas. One in particular I had wanted to do for some time about what I called “windfall psychology.” I wanted to locate several individuals who had suddenly received a large sum of money and find out how it affected them. That feature ran in Metropolitan’s December 1991 editions under the title: “Be Careful of What You Wish For.” I republished that article as a blog post in 2019.
In a bid to expand my opportunities with national publications, I joined the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA)—a well-respected organization that required applicants to qualify for membership while also paying annual dues of $160. The ASJA published an annual membership directory listing freelancers available for assignments by geography and areas of expertise. I stood out as one of the few freelancers available in Houston boasting expertise in many subject areas from business and general interest to sports and legal affairs.
With overlapping assignments from so many different publications, explaining my business to outsiders proved a bit like presenting a jigsaw puzzle. On one resume in 1996, I divided my historical client list into three groups: contract assignments; books; and, publications with occasional assignments and byline credits. Beyond my work for the regular contract publications already discussed, here is a quick look at the publications that provided extra income between 1981 and 1996:
The New York Times, USA Today, Newsday, Fortune, Compute, Wireless Week, Guest Informant, Discover, Vacations, PC Today, NG Magazine, Healthweek, International Business, Cuisine, Genetic Engineering News, Computerland, On Patrol, Business Month, Institutional Investor, Plants Sites & Parks, Southern Living and The Houston Press.
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