For long stretches of his half-century journalism career my mentor Edwin Diamond was a freelancer. He told me to do what he did: slice the baloney. If you do a lot of research on a subject, he said, use it for the assignment, and then be creative and use the same research to create several more stories that were sufficiently different to avoid detection. Slice the baloney of research until it’s so thin you can read through it.

It might seem like he was getting away with something, but it worked for him and it worked for me. The most I ever got out of one story was three re-sales, but that was two more than most freelancers get, and for much less work.

And Edwin, in his years as media critic of New York Magazine did the ultimate. He created book length collections of his columns, which means he made money from them twice without having the change anything at all.