Cuttings.me: Portfolio for journalists, writters and bloggers
Having a portfolio to show off your best work is extremely important for artists, designers and web designers. Nowadays, the portfolio is often a website, and there are many ways to create those. If you know nothing about HTML and website, you could use Portfoliopen. If you have your own website, you could use a specific WordPress theme to show off your best work.
But what about writers, bloggers and jounalists? They, too, have created important pieces they might want to show to their editors and prospect clients, but how? Yes, you could have a collection of links on your website, but let’s face it – that is just not good enough. You could email them a bunch of links or attachments, but that is just messy.
Nicholas Holmes, a freelance journalist, decided he needed something better than that – so he created it. Cuttings.me is a platform that allows freelancers, journalists and bloggers to create an online portfolio with a simple, clean and effective layout. Holmes described how he came up with this idea for Journalism.co.uk blogs:
What I found is that I was always having to send different URL’s [sic] in emails. It all got a bit messy when I was trying to remember the best bits that I had done and found I had the need for a single place to put all of this stuff and wanted the ability to direct people to that single page.
There are lots of resources online where you can hook up your Twitter feed, your Facebook URL and your LinkedIn URL but there was nothing specifically designed for journalists and so I thought I’d have a bash at developing it.
American readers might be confused with the term “cuttings” – it is a British term for clippings from a newspaper or another publication. 😀
Setting it up
With registration, you will be able to choose your username, which will become your link: http://cuttings.me/yourusername and you will not be able to change it later, so choose wisely!
Settings are simple and easy, you will be able to share the links to your website, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and Youtube. You will have to edit your headline and biography on your profile, so don’t look for those options in settings. Adding your cuttings (clippings) and multimedia content happens on your profile as well.
You can add cutting, divider or multimedia and everything moves around with a simple drag and drop function. It is very easy and straightforward. This is what my Cuttings page looks like:
Personally, I would like to see a little bit more features. For example, it would be nice if the articles pulled up their photos from the link provided. One has to upload a picture for every single article and it seems like too much of a hassle for something that could happen automatically… or maybe Facebook spoiled me.
Also, I think having a photo next to your name would be a good option. Most websites show a small picture of the author of the article, our personal websites probably have a photo on them, Facebook and Twitter show pictures. I feel people are used to seeing not only our name, but our face as well, next to our articles and posts and having a picture on a portfolio website might help the audience remember you and your work better.
You can watch the promo video below or quickly register for your own Cuttings.me profile. If you have feedback and requests, you can tweet Nicholas about it at @cuttingsme.
[youtube width=”555″ height=”350″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q0mnbJzf84&context=C4ffb8feADvjVQa1PpcFO4Ng5gKwndLrlhwGwZaL_3FmmHH6ifOJ0=[/youtube]
