Writers’ Marketing
As well as this system works, especially when it comes to driving freelance writers into public relations, there’s always room for improvement. Jill Sherer and Kathryn Taylor have opened that room. You’ll find it at 401 N. Franklin, a start-up space five floors up.
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“Kathryn and I are freelance writers. We’ve been out there. We know what it’s like to live that lifestyle,” Sherer says. (They also know PR and the monotony of steady employment.) “Sometimes the writer gets a little devalued in the process, and we’d like to change that.”
“We always want new writers, but we don’t want thousands of them,” said Sherer.
A “very few” writers who have turned to the CopyDesk have full-time jobs but want extra work, Sherer said. Some want a taste of the future before it’s shoved down their throats. “They’re concerned about industry trends to downsizing.”
Domingo would strike preemptively at Exito, the free Spanish weekly the Tribune Company was about to introduce, and it would rejuvenate the Sun-Times’s slipping Sunday edition.
“It’s like a child was born and got killed,” Rossi told me. He points out that the Sun-Times executives who signed the deal weren’t the ones who scrubbed it. In early ’94 the Sun-Times was sold, and a few months later publisher Sam McKeel resigned. The original agreement “was a commitment to the Spanish community in the long term. They recognized my community,” said Rossi. And the new owners from the American Publishing Company? “I think they look at the bottom line, that’s all.”
