Paid by the Word: Conversations with Writers and Editors

In this episode, I speak with award-winning author and teacher Cynthia Gregory. Her published short stories include Baby Blood, Melting at Both Ends, Use Me, and Rosalinda's Ambition.

Cynthia’s work has appeared in respected publications such as The Sun, Glimmer Train, the Briar Cliff Review, Santa Barbara Review, The Ear, and Central PA Magazine.  She took second place in the Writer's Digest annual fiction contest, first ...

In this episode, I’ll be chatting with radio personality Mike Bennett, the popular co-host of Mike & Kacey in the Morning on WHUD, the radio station serving New York State’s Mid-Hudson Valley, a region with seven counties and more than 1.1 million residents.

Many of those residents listen to WHUD, and Mike’s baritone voice has become a familiar part of their daily routines. If a snowstorm forces your local schools to close early...

Jackson Thompson is a sports writer for Insider. His articles tend to focus on the health – and the rights – of athletes. Jackson’s work has also been featured in The Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated.

Over the course of his career, he’s covered the NFL, college football, college basketball, horse racing and New Jersey high school sports. 

 In this episode of the podcast, Jackson shares some interesting tales of sports journalism, ...

Alfred Poor, PhD, is the founding Editor of Health Tech Insider, a website and weekly email newsletter that provides curated news and original analysis about mobile and wearable technology for health and medical applications. Alfred is known internationally as a speaker, writer, and analyst. 

Armed with a biology degree from Harvard, he’s spent the past 30 years reporting on a wide range of technology topics. For more than...

Door-to-door selling. If you’ve ever done it, you know it’s grueling work. Throughout most of its history, door-to-door selling was considered a man’s job. That was before Avon invented the Avon Lady, a concept that revolutionized selling and opened the door for generations of women who wanted to become independent entrepreneurs.

Katina Manko, an independent scholar, has written a thoroughly researched book about the history of Avon...

Edvige Jean-François is an award-winning global journalist and producer. At CNN, she served as Washington Bureau Producer, responsible for producing national and political news stories. She covered Capitol Hill, the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. State Department and the White House. She was a producer for CNN’s Jim Acosta, delivering reports for The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and other major network news franchises.  At CNN In...

Professor Phoebe S.K. Young teaches undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She is the recipient of the 2016 Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Distinction in Teaching and Pedagogy. She is also the author of two books, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place  and Camping Grounds: Public Nature in America from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement.  

In our c...

Joyce Garczynski is the Assistant University Librarian for Development & Communications at Towson University’s Albert S. Cook Library in Maryland. In this role she teaches journalism students about the research process and manages her library’s social media. She obtained her Master’s Degree in Library Science from the University of Maryland, College Park and has a Master’s in Communication from the Annenberg School at the Unive...

Can driving a truck help you become a better writer? Euan Semple is living proof that sometimes, at least, doing something that's not related to writing can result in ... better writing!

Euan has been a leader and an influencer in the ever-changing field of digital technology for two decades. An early adopter of social media he implemented one of the world's first enterprise social network systems inside the BBC....

In this episode of Paid by the Word, Mike interviews Clark Merrefield, a senior editor at The Journalist’s Resource, a project of Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative.

Clark  joined The Journalist’s Resource in 2019 after working as a reporter for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, as a researcher and editor on three books related to the Great Recession, and as a federal governmen...

Stephen Janis is a documentary filmmaker and award-winning journalist whose work has  earned praise in both video and print.  He's the director of the recently released feature length documentary, The Friendliest  Town,  a compelling story of the controversial firing of the first black police chief of a small town in Maryland.

He is the co-author of three books with former homicide detectives Why Do We Kill:  The Pathology of M...

Glenn Proctor's life reads like an adventure novel: a difficult childhood, family tragedy, alcoholism, six years in the U.S. Marine Corps (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), four decades in newspaper journalism, sharing in a Pulitzer Prize and judging five Pulitzer Prizes, becoming a peer support advocate and a life coach.  He is a cancer survivor and the author of five books. It's an honor and pleasure having Glenn as...

Ellen Horan is the author of 31 Bond Street, a historical novel published by HarperCollins.  Set against the backdrop of bustling, corrupt New York City four years before the Civil War, the book recounts the tale of a murdered doctor, a mysterious woman who may or may not have killed him … and the political forces at work in the city in the late 1850s … I genuinely enjoyed Ellen’s novel, and I found her descriptions of old New York...

Rachelle Dickerson began her career in print journalism, working as a copy editor at major American newspapers such as Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle and The Star-Ledger. In between, she taught language arts and journalism in the New York City public school system. 

After leaving the newspaper industry, she decided to become a lawyer, and earned her juris doctor from the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texa...

Do you have the skill and passion to be a sports journalist? Adam Hirshfield, a senior NFL editor at The Athletic, reflects on his career in the new episode of the Paid by the Word Podcast.

Over the course of his career, Adam has covered a wide range of sports – everything from high school football to the Olympics. Before joining The Athletic, Adam worked at USA TODAY, the NBA, Bleacher Report and The Palm Beach Post.  H...

Walter Middlebrook is the Foster Professor of Practice in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at The Pennsylvania State University. Middlebrook has worked in editing roles at the Minneapolis Star, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch, Newsday, New York Newsday, The New York Times, USA Today and The Detroit News.

At The Detroit News, he supervised an award-winning investigations team, while producing weekly entertai...

Joe Toplyn began his television career on the writing staff of Late Night with David Letterman. He later served as co-head writer of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, head writer of Late Show with David Letterman, and co-executive producer of the comedic detective show Monk. 

A four-time Emmy winner, Joe is the author of Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV: How to Write Monologue Jokes, Desk Pieces, Sketches, Parodies, Audience Pieces, R...