FREELANCE WORK
Throughout my professional life, I have periodically been contracted for short and long-term freelance assignments. These have, nearly always, found me fulfilling one or more of the duties outlined throughout this site.
Below is a small assortment of items, created for gigs where the assignments/positions were unique. Each example provided demonstrates facets of my abilities not entirely represented elsewhere on this site.
Also below, I provide a brief summary of my two-year, part-time freelance gig with Sony Music’s Legacy Recordings (fulfilled while also working full-time for PeekYou, and then StatSocial— with the full knowledge and consent of all parties).
Also: If this has piqued your interest, and you’ve not yet done so, please check out some highlights from my time working for StatSocial.
WARBURG REALTY
In spring of 2017, I did some work for an upscale, NYC realtor, Warburg Realty. At the time, their site included a blog that highlighted unusual landmarks in, or historical facts about, the neighborhoods in which their agents specialized.
In addition to listings for properties, I also wrote for this blog.
This is a perky little piece about legendary East Village newsstand and soda fountain, Gem Spa (an approximately seven minute read).
*I’d be remiss to not include here that, unfortunately, despite the adaptability and indomitability celebrated in this piece—at the time I wrote it, the shop had stood on the same NYC street corner for 75 years—Gem Spa did not survive COVID, finally closing up in 2020.
THE BIG BY THE WAY
In spring of 2018 I was contracted to write about 20 pieces, in various styles, for a soon-to-be-launching “satirical humor site.”
I was asked to keep things topical. I honored this in indirect ways, hoping to forego hacky political commentary. I also elected to not employ the mock newspaper style you too often see on these sorts of sites.
While the piece shared here is, more or less, in keeping with my sense of humor, it is not something I’d ever have written on my own.
To be clear, this is a deliberately obnoxious and silly thing. I’ve included it here, because it is (as are the other items created during this assignment) unique among those things I’ve been contracted to write.
Man Loses Shirt, But Not Socks
Written in a mock-creative-non-fiction style.
PEOPLECHECKPRO
In 2016, I did work for a website called PeopleCheckPro. They were newcomers to the public record vendor space, and the work I did for them was featured on the site at the time of its launch.
It appears that the venture was discontinued, but it can be seen on Archive.org here (with the customary broken code, and formatting issues evident on many archived sites).
At the bottom of the site’s homepage was a side-scrolling navigation under the header, “Ways to Use PeopleCheckPro.”
Viewable below, you can see that it offered suggestions for the sorts of things people come to public records vendors hoping to find.
Each of the ten panels linked to a piece, composed by me, elaborating on these proposed ways to use the site. While, obviously, few coming to a site of this nature needed the convincing, these were created more for purposes of branding and SEO.
My instructions were to write entries—keeping things light and, wherever possible, positive—based on the 10 featured reasons to use PeopleCheckPro: Online dating, mailing addresses, reuniting with family, screening potential roommates, checking up on your neighbors, looking up court records, checking on a buyer or seller, looking up driving records, finding out who emailed you, and looking up birthdays.
I’ve included two of the pieces below (I will happily furnish the remainder to the curious):
Online Dating —Scope Out Your Next Potential Internet Romance
SONY MUSIC - LEGACY RECORDINGS
From July 2014 to July 2016, I worked for Sony Music’s dedicated back catalog label, Legacy Recordings.
I served as a social media content researcher and creator.
My unusual role tapped my extensive knowledge of 20th and 21st century popular musics—of virtually all genres and eras. I was brought in because some at the label felt that Legacy’s social media presence did not do justice to the world-class roster of artists on their watch (which includes such all-time titans as Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and AC/DC).
One of my favorite pastimes—then as now, but for years prior to Sony and I crossing paths—was hunting down media related to said musics, wherever online it could be ferreted out. Along with Sony paying me to continue my ferreting, I was also granted access to their enormous photo archives.
My innate understanding of the kinds of media to which each artists’ fans would respond most favorably—be they admirers of Tammy Wynette, Destiny’s Child, NSYNC, or Harry Nilsson—found me generating content for Legacy Recordings’ social pages (content that would then frequently be shared by the various artist’s official pages) that directly led to engagement more than tripling during my tenure.
