If you didn’t attend the RSA conference this year, you might have missed this presentation about a rather interesting application of codes and ciphers. I call it the Goldberg variations, and those of you that are musically inclined might get the references in my post’s title.

RSA conference usually has one of these sessions, where the organizers like to highlight a moment in history where people played an important role in cryptography. This year’s moment was a presentation by Merryl Goldberg, who in 1985 was part of a Klezmer band that toured the former Soviet Union. (Today she is a music professor at CalArts,) In reality, they were spies on a mission to help identify Jews and get them out of the country. Her hosts were fellow musicians that were part of the Phantom Orchestra, so named because it was composed of dissidents who were being watched and harassed by the KGB. At the end of this blog, I will link to another presentation that highlighted another code-breaking pioneer of the past.

The band members knew that their bags would be searched, because let’s face it, in 1985 the USSR wasn’t high on the tourist trail and travel blogging hadn’t yet been invented as a profession. Goldberg came up with a very clever coding scheme that used musical notation to document her efforts, and smuggle information out of the country to help the dissidents eventually escape. Musical note names span the letters A to G, so Goldberg assigned the remaining letters of the alphabet to notes in the 12-tone chromatic scale using sharps and flats. She used other notations to make her music look more like music to pass casual inspection.

When the band arrived in Moscow, they were detained. Goldberg describes how one customs official went through her music book sheet by sheet. The coded messages were disguised as separate compositions. If you could sight-read music, you would very quickly figure out that the notes didn’t make much sense — perhaps if you were a Philip Glass fan you might think this is more modern music. Anyway, her steganography worked and the band was able to enter the country, play their music, and identify the dissidents and complete their mission. The trip wasn’t without drama: the Americans were tailed by the KGB and eventually expelled, as documented in this news clipping:

Music “is a way to find space when you’re dealing with bad guys and bad things gives you that energy inside your brain,” she said at the conference. I find it an interesting story, and glad Goldberg was around to remind us that EGBDF is an important acronym for more than musical notation.

If you enjoyed this little moment of history, you might want to take in a documentary that will air next month on PBS about the life of Elizebeth Friedman. She literally paved the way for the modern era of codes and ciphers nearly 100 years ago, and a skit featuring actors portraying her and her husband I believe was presented at RSA’s 2005 conference.

(revised 6/28/24) This post originated with some online discussions with my freelancer peers on keeping track of your clips or portfolio spurred me to do further research. There are six major providers that I know of, broken into two rough categories. I have provided links to my own sites in the case of the free providers, and showcase those who have paid for their sites.

Those that are mostly about the clips:

• authory.com/davidstrom  ($8/mo if paid annually, $10/mo if not, limited portfolio of ten clips for free) 
• muckrack.com/dstrom  free 
• https://www.clippings.me/users/davidstrom (10 free clips, $100/year if you want more. Note: This is NOT clippings.com, which is for furniture pictures.)

How each site maintains the clips is important. Authory actually scraps the original website and archives your piece in its own database, where it claims it maintains it forever, or at least at long as they will be in business, as long as you pay your monthly fee. If you want a free site, you get 10 clips max. The other two sites just have a link to the original site, which means if the site changes its links or goes dark, you have nothing to show for it. 

Those that offer a bunch of other features besides tracking your clips: 

• https://davidstrom.contently.com/  Free

I went overboard with my page in Contently, putting more than 500 article links together.  I think they have the best of the three systems. Not sure that after you have more than 25 stories in your portfolio if it really matters and then you still have to weed out the dead links manually.  I was into them early on, when they offered a decent wage (defined as >$1/word). They mostly offer much, much less. An inquiry from an assignment editor for this rate resulted in no real response back from the actual client, so consider that before you invest much time here.

• http://davidstrom.skyword.com  Free

I was also early into Skyword, and they have suffered much the same fate as Contently, including moving to the cheap side of the fee structure. So steer clear if you can. It also deleted my portfolio. You are paid exclusively via PayPal, (and paid with a two or three-week delay) which is an issue for me since I deleted my account years ago and don’t want to start a new one now.

• https://www.mediabistro.com/freelance-connect/  ($10/mo if paid annually, $15 if not) 

MB has a bunch of different services, including a database of FL opps, a page of links to your published work (which you have to manually construct), links to various editorial mastheads and edit cals, tons of online courses (such as fact checking for journalists, essential digital journalism skills, and building your brand voice), and ways to build your career. You can sign up for a 14-day trial. Here is Esther Shein’s site. She told me that like Contently and Skyword, she got a lot of business early on but now uses it mostly for maintaining her clips. 

My recommendations? First, if you haven’t built a portfolio page somewhere online, now is the time to get started. Take a couple of days, find 10 (or whatever) of your best pieces, and just collect the URLs (if they are still online) or construct a page of PDFs (if not, if you can reconstruct them somehow). Find some images that would be relevant to attach each piece, and decide how you are going to present yourself. Dan Dern has a lot of comments about different ways to do this that could be helpful if not overwhelming.

Besides the vendors mentioned above, you have a few other choices. I still recommend you set up your own clips website outside of these systems for complete control (I use my own hosted WordPress for this:  blog.strom.com, and a mailing list hosted using mailman.) You also can construct various LinkedIn pages that showcase your work. 

Second, if you want to maintain a historical and automatic archive of your work, look at either MuckRack or Authory. The other four require you to manually enter your piece, which wears thin after the initial effort to get things setup. MuckRack is free, it mostly will find your bylined pieces (there doesn’t seem to be any method to what gets found and what doesn’t), and you don’t have to do anything once you set up your page. Authority will cost you, and you have to tell them what pub to look for your stuff, but then they collect the piece and preserve it forever, even if the pub moves or deletes your cheese (that is a problem for the other four providers, where you have to manually maintain the links). Todd Weiss’ Authority page can be found here for reference. I found it erred on the side of including things that weren’t my bylines, so there is a fair amount of editing involved after it collects your clips. Also, both Authory and MuckRack will connect to your social feeds and display what you post there. Here is the analytics from Authory as an example.

 Another use for these providers is to track who views your purple prose. Contently, Skyword, and MediaBistro don’t have any. The other three have some — MuckRack has the best analytics, Clippings.me integrates with Google Analytics, and Authory has some data as shown above. 

Finally, and I can’t emphasize enough, this effort for building a portfolio should be complemented by constructing and regularly writing an email newsletter. (Authory has a built-in newsletter feature that I didn’t test.) That is the single best thing that I ever did to build my business, and continues to pay dividends 30 or so years later.