This week: A follow-up to Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV of this series. Keep your ideas coming. If you know of sites or services worth paying for, e-mail me at poynter@sree.net (and let me know if I can quote you). Next week, back to the free stuff.
Chris Jacobs of the the Michigan City News-Dispatch writes: I really like MediaBistro. You pay $49 per year, and they have lots of media news and a series called “How to Pitch…” that highlights how to pitch various magazines from insiders. You can look at the site for free but have to pay if you want to read the articles. It’s useful for freelancers looking to get into some of the more major magazines as well as those who just want good media news. They also offer regional cocktail parties for members and have some seminars (you get a discount on the fee if you’re a member).
Chris is right – mediabistro.com (a dot-com that hasn’t dropped its suffix) is an excellent site. You can get about 70 percent of the content without membership, but the best stuff is saved for members.
Opera Browser (free for basic version; $39 for pro)
Rafat Ali, who runs PaidContent.org — a must-read site — writes: Opera, the best browser there is, has a built password manager, form filler, and a great e-mail client. Very productive for a busy journalist. Also, tabbed browsing, intelligent pop-up stopper, notes taker (sticky notes, sort of), make it well worth the $39 it costs to take off the built-in ads. Also, searches like Google, Dictionary.com, Amazon, and others are built into the menu of the browser. Trust me, start with the free version, use it for a couple of days, and then try switching back to Internet Explorer or Mozilla. And the myth that some sites don’t look good in Opera is, well, a myth.
My friends who use Opera instead of Explorer or Netscape swear by it. It’s up to version 7.11 for Windows and version 6.02 for Mac. Pal A. Hvistendahl, communications director, says Opera has between one and two million downloads a month and has about 1 percent of the market. According to Hvistendahl, the company is going into new devices, such as so-called “smart” cell phones, which will enable users to access the entire Web on the go and bring Opera “tens of millions of new customers.” As with all things dealing with cell phones, the U.S. will bring up the rear in implementing the technology. All things interesting with mobile phones happen first in Europe and Asia.
Have a site you like? Let others know. Send your suggestions to poynter@sree.net.
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