My Associated Content Testimonial

Associated Content has been a lifesaver, both for my self-worth and for my family's budget. The impact was sort of slow upon my enlistment in August 2007, but it has grown like a rolling snowball.

Self-worth? Like so many middle- and older-aged newspaper reporters across the nation, I was jettisoned from my hometown Saginaw (Mich.) News in March 2006 after 33 years. Buyout: Take it or leave it. Nobody said my work was lousy. Once even I was voted most popular journalist in town, ahead of the cutie local TV anchoress, although some prankish buddies may have had something to do with stuffing the ballot box. But even when we know that economics are behind the ruination of newspapers, being tossed to the curb still can erode self-worth. AC allowed a window to reopen, and now the view has expanded into a panorama.

Family budget? Somehow, it seems that ultimately it will be other AC scribes who will rack up those huge page views through SEO techniques and so forth. Maybe the fault is personal lack of effort, but that aspect hasn't worked out too well. My Associated Content success has been mainly through connections with partners, who of course are partners made available only via AC's hard work in unearthing them. This income has helped with house payments, property taxes, and most recently when a reckless motorist skidded all the way across an icy main street and totaled my old but reliable 1994 vintage beater, which I had been driving 20 mph in the right hand lane.

My main advice is patience. Any of us who skips around the Associated Content landscape from time to time, reading and usually enjoying other people's works, will encounter enrollees who submitted maybe a dozen writeups and then bowed out. My experience with AC is that if a writer sticks with it and submits good work, even if it's not ultra-high PV content such as in my case, somehow the AC staff will encourage us and will help us find a way.

Of course, it's okay as well to simply write as a hobbyist, when inspiration arrives. In my case, there's a family to help support.

The Partner Content Team, mainly Leah Franklin, helped me work through some missteps, including one bonehead case early in 2009 in which I didn't follow instructions and screwed up a bunch of assignments. Looking back, it would have been fantastic to have positive editors such as Leah and Tim Skillern in the Saginaw News newsroom back during those final years, when morale had become so awful. Both Leah and Tim have dealt with me in a highly supportive manner.

Yes, this new world of working via computer sometimes still seems strange to an older scolder like me who began on an IBM Selectric (how did we ever write without being able to move phrases and paragraphs on a word processor?), but this doesn't preclude a human touch. A "thank you/good job" that pops up on a terminal screen still has meaning.

In terms of participating in the AC Community, I haven't been very good at that. To start, I'm not strong at multi-tasking and after maybe a half-hour spent reading other contributors, it's like OMG, it's time to get back to my own tasks. Same with the forums. Plus, there's something about going through contributor pages that sometimes backs up my old Dell clunker and brings forth that danged (not my exact adjective) frozen hourglass on the screen. So, my tiny community contribution has been that in spotting an occasional new writer, especially someone who shares my areas of interest, my role is to try to encourage that person. The AC community leaders who do so much to support others, such as Lyn Lomasi in my case, are beyond my belief in all they give.

It was personal good fortune to discover Associated Content, and I'm one who will stick and stay.