Good point by Daniel Radosh on being a successful freelancer:
what really worked to my advantage is that nobody stays in one job for very long in this business, so if you start out knowing three editors at one magazine, pretty soon you know three editors at three different magazines, plus a new one at the first magazine. And with each move, they get more power to assign stories. My career has been helped immensely by sitting around waiting for people I know to land better jobs.
Actually, I don't really know if that's a good point, as I'm not a successful freelancer, but it certainly seems right. My freelancing jobs have tended to emerge through people who knew me in real life or folks who read my blog, cold-calling never amounted to much. Daniel Radosh, incidentally, was very helpful with a bad idea I had for an article on Garden State, but, mercifully for both our reputations, I never followed up.