Seek or Shout is a new -- so new that it's beta -- service from Cision, a company that helps PR professionals by offering databases of media contacts, media news and other support. According to the site:

Seek or Shout is a new community for anyone who creates or promotes content, including bloggers, journalists, freelance writers, public relations pros, marketers and students.

The idea is that bloggers and other writers can ask the community for sources, ideas, etc. and then promote the finished piece among their peers. Like other social networks, its success will not only depend on how well the site is designed, but whether anyone shows up.

EContent offers an article on how to find work on the Web -- and offers some good sources for hopeful freelance writers looking to avoid the content mills.

For freelancers looking to find work and support themselves through bid-based sites, the only answer is to raise their rates and hold out for the right job, a technique that often produces mixed results. Thursday Bram notes that "Oddly enough, while I started out pricing my work fairly low, every time I've raised my rates I've actually gotten more work. I'm not the only freelancer to experience this phenomenon. After conversations with clients, the reasoning is fairly simple to understand: a freelancer doesn't charge rates that she can't expect to get, generally speaking. As long as the freelancer in question has a good reputation, a raise in rates signals that there's demand for her work.

New York Times blogger David Bornstein wrote a follow-up to a piece reporting on the Freelancers Union's health plans for freelancers, including some of the reactions of readers, some of whom were grateful for the plans supplied by the Freelancers Union, but others of whom thought they were too expensive. And they're not cheap; according to Bornstein, they start at $225 a month. However, as Bornstein writes:

F.I.C.’s plans are substantially less expensive than most other options available to independent workers in New York, but they are not cheap. Individual plans range from $225 to $603 per month. (That’s the main reason that, like many others, I went without health insurance for the first decade of my writing career.) For 2012, many health insurance companies requested permission to enact huge premium increases. For example, Aetna made a request to hike the rates for its individual and small-group plans from 8.9 to 53.6 percent. Freelancers Union’s rates also went up, but only by 2.3 to 8.3 percent, well below the average. (In 2010, Aetna’s chief executive, Ronald A. Williams, also received $72 million in compensation.)

When/if the United States ever has the courage to get its act together and offer basic health care to its citizens -- whether they're employed by a company, self-employed or unemployed -- then plans such as those offered by the Freelancers Union will be unnecessarily. Until then, freelancers will still have to choose between paying a large proportion of their incomes for health insurance or taking the chance of having none at all.

According to MediaBistro, the National Writers Union, together with the Newspaper Guild, has decided to end its boycott of the Huffington Post -- a boycott which stemmed from the sale of the Huffington Post and the unhappiness of its unpaid writers. According to the article:

The Newspaper Guild has also stopped the boycott, writing: “We have asked, from the beginning, that Arianna Huffington and her staff meet with us to discuss the need for a model that compensates journalists for their efforts. Such meetings have now taken place, and the company has publicly pledged to work with us to resolve our differences. We are pleased to see HuffPost leaders stating so clearly the importance of paid journalism, not only to our society as a whole, but to their own business model.”