From freelancer to start-up maven

Laura Baverman has been a business journalist since starting her career at the Cincinnati Business Courier in 2005 as a real estate and technology reporter.

There she cultivated her love for covering entrepreneurs and start-ups as part of her beat reporting. In 2009 she moved to the Cincinnati Enquirer where she continued to write about real estate and entrepreneurship. After moving to Raleigh in October 2012, she began freelancing for publications such as American City Business Journals, The (Raleigh) News & Observer, USA Today and Raleigh Public Record.

In the last month, she became the editor of ExitEvent, which works to develop the start-up community in the Triangle.

She spoke with Talking Biz News about her journalism career and her move to her new role. What follows is an edited transcript.

Talking Biz News: When you were freelancing, how did you find and pitch stories? What was the most challenging part?

Laura Baverman: I had several months before I moved to make connections and I asked everyone I knew about who might need freelance work. My editor at the Enquirer knew the editor at USA Today. I saw they weren’t really covering start-ups and I told them how I could fill in the gaps.

It was important to leverage my networks. A lot of this comes back to relationships. You have to keep them up over time even when you move on to another position. A few other publications reached out to me about writing for them after finding me on social media. I also did some content marketing – blogging and ghost writing – for some clients. Leveraging my network was the key thing to being successful.

Once I began to pitch stories, I would consume as much news as possible. I would scan Twitter to find topics. I also used Google trends, or BuzzFeed pages and Yahoo to see what people were talking about. I would look at what those I admired were writing about and then figure out an angle that wasn’t being told.

To find local stories, I started to network and talk to the people I met in the community to source stories. That was a little harder because I was new and I had to work to build my connections.

TBN: What was the hardest part about working for yourself?

LB: The hardest thing was having multiple bosses. Even though I was working for myself, I had a lot of different bosses. It was hard to manage expectations because everyone wants the same thing at the same time. At the paper, I could ask my editor to prioritize what needed to get done. Working for myself, I tended to take on everything.

I was constantly trying to exceed expectations, but sometimes it was a struggle just to meet them. The balance of reporting and editing was hard.

TBN: How did you get involved in ExitEvent? What excited you about the opportunity?

LB: Connections. I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s important to have good relationships and make impressions in a positive way. The person running the site reached out to me. ExitEvent was started by a local entrepreneur who wanted to fill a gap in the region for early-stage companies and wanted a network for entrepreneurs. It was about sharing information with the community.

It started out as planned monthly events for entrepreneurs and investors. I really liked that the company was a family-owned businesses and cared about employees.

I also love entrepreneurs and their stories. I like to think I have a critical eye. After covering the beat nationally, I know what it takes to succeed.

TBN: Where do you see journalism heading in the next five years?

LB: It’s interesting. Content marketing is evolving a lot. What we’ll see happen is companies trying to do content marking will end up sponsoring work done by journalists. What has to be clear is that journalists have complete editorial control and companies have control over where to put their names. Companies like to control the message, but to be authentic and effective they need journalists to write content without the oversight of a company.

I also thing there will be more sharing of content between local and national sources. For example, the New York Times won’t be able to staff every community. If I can bring an advertiser to the table and work out a revenue sharing agreement along with providing content, that creates value for everyone. The sponsor gets more than just quality content from someone who knows the community and we get national press. A lot of community building is going on within the start-up community. Many companies want to support that and they will be interested in sponsoring ads and content.

There will also need to be a movement toward more authenticity in content and more transparency. Most contributors we have write for us on a monthly basis and have a viewpoint. There’s a place for that content. It helps us with the challenge of staffing. People also want to hear from those who aren’t writers. They want to get thought leadership from people who aren’t journalists.

In terms of making money, I think there will be more syndication of content agreements tied to advertising. We also plan a lot of events, which is not going away as a strategy for journalists to make money. We try to stay away from a panel or straight networking event. ExitEvent was built around sponsored networking events, but now we strive to do those in a creative way.