Leif Dahleen
Michigan
As seen in:
MSN Canada,
Wealth of Geeks,
Bluefield Daily Telegraph,
MediaFeed.org,
Radical FIRE,
TimesDaily,
Decatur Daily,
KDOW-AM (Palo Alto, CA),
Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce,
Wealthy Nickel
and
Covers:
financial independence
early retirement
investing
taxes
charitable giving
travel
parenting
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Interview
What was your first job as a journalist?
Blogging
Have you ever used a typewriter?
Yes. I was born in 1975.
How is social media changing news?
Anyone can journal anything and be seen by the masses.
Who's your favorite fictional journalist?
Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes
What does it mean to be a journalist?
To document history as you see it.
What's the funniest news-related #hashtag you've seen?
How do you prefer to be pitched on stories?
emails that show you are familiar with my story or my site.
What tools and software do you use to do your job?
Wordpress, Tweetdeck, Moz, Slack, Zoom
What's your favorite social network?
Twitter
Who do you wish followed you?
Joel Stein
Why did you become a journalist?
Anesthesia became tiring (pun intended), and I realized that I enjoy writing.
Did you work for your high school newspaper? If so, what did you do there?
No.
What story are you most proud of writing or working on?
The story of my early retirement. https://www.physicianonfire.com/retired-from-medicine/
What advice can you offer to aspiring journalists?
Read Stephen King's "On Writing."
When's the best time to pitch you?
Email works day and night.
What's the best pitch you ever got?
When the USA Today contacted me for a story on FIRE & health insurance.
What's the worst pitch you ever got?
The generic pitches to put a spammy blog post on my site -- I get several of these per day.
What's your favorite drink?
IPA
When you're not at a computer, where are you most likely to be?
Outdoors with my kids.
Aside from your own, what's your favorite publication to read?
The White Coat Investor
What's the most common misperception about your beat?
That I have a team of people running the website. It's just me for the most part.
Would you like to take the Muck Rack Interview?
Create a Muck Rack profile.