Hi Nala, thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview. You are a freelance writer with plenty of experience, and you encountered an issue that I think others come across as well: the publication you wrote for took down your articles. Could you explain what happened?

I worked for six years as a staff writer and editor at Inside Science, a nonprofit news outlet published by the American Institute of Physics.

AIP shut the publication down in 2022. Recently, I found out that AIP had moved the Inside Science archive off its old server. None of the links to Inside Science articles work anymore, and search engines can't find them. In theory the articles still exist online, but they're virtually impossible to find. I spent several hours trying to access my old articles by clicking "view more" over and over again, and eventually gave up.

"None of the links to Inside Science articles work anymore, and search engines can't find them."

Is this something that happens regularly to you or your colleagues, and if so, what problems does that pose for you?

I think this does happen pretty routinely. We'd all like to think we're creating things that last, but the internet is a constantly changing place, and you can't count on anything in it staying put.

It's a problem because I use my portfolio to show new clients what I can do. I link to it in pitches to convince editors they should assign stories to me. I don't want those people finding a bunch of dead links.

It's also a problem for personal reasons; that's my life's work! I don't want to lose it because I failed to download a PDF.

You are a longtime Authory customer with your portfolio there (thanks for that!). How did you use Authory to mitigate those issues?

Authory automatically creates backups of everything in your portfolio as soon as it's added. There's a setting that lets you toggle what visitors see when they click a link: either the article on its original publication website, or the backup. It took me about 20 seconds to switch the setting so that every Inside Science link opens to the Authory backup rather than the defunct Inside Science website.

It just requires a single setting to make sure that the previews on Nala's portfolio link to the backup copies that Authory has created for her.


Besides the option to make your private backups publicly available, are there any other features that you particularly like?

I like the simplicity and ease-of-use. Authory has all the features I need to make an attractive website where my articles can live, and it's customizable in the ways I need.

I can rearrange what visitors see first based on what kinds of pitches I'm sending out, for example. But I really don't want to be spending a lot of my time building and maintaining the perfect website, and with Authory, I don't have to. The defaults work fine, and it will keep doing its thing even if I forget about it for a while.

One of my favorite features is how it automatically plucks new articles from publications I've written for before, so I don't even have to add them manually.

"I really don't want to be spending a lot of my time building and maintaining the perfect website, and with Authory, I don't have to."

Do you have any additional recommendations or suggestions for your freelance colleagues out there?

If you want to spend your time and energy actually writing articles rather than curating your portfolio, I recommend Authory.

Thanks so much for your time, Nala!

You can find Nala at authory.com/NalaRogers, and her articles from Inside Science can be found here.

And if you want to give it a try for yourself, simply create an Authory account for free. It takes 3 minutes only!