Freelance Unbound

There’s quite a heated exchange going on over at FleetStreetBlues on the NUJ’s Cashback for Interns campaign here, here and here.
I think we all need to go and clear our heads. Let’s go for a nice walk in the country. Let’s pretend it’s August.
I don’t know about you, but I fancy a few blackberries. All around us are hedgerows of brambles, bulging with ripe fruit – blackberry season is at its height. With a couple of minutes’ work, we could fill a container full of blackberries and eat our fill.
Then we come across a stall selling – blackberries. Should we fork out a couple of quid to get them from the stall, when all around us they are available for free?
That’s not to say the blackberries are of no value – they are very tasty and we really fancy eating some. But they have no price – they are too abundant, so competition (from the hedgerows) has forced the price to, effectively, zero.
There are two approaches the stall-holder could take.

1. Mount a campaign for the landowner to fence off the hedgerows so people would be unable to reach the blackberries, and so anyone wanting to eat some on their walk would have to buy them from the stall.
2. Switch from selling blackberries to selling added-value goods such as small disposable bowls, spoons and dollops of cream – which people might buy to enhance their blackberry-eating experience.

Substitute journalism graduates wanting work experience for blackberries and you have a workable analogy for what’s happening in the debate.
The NUJ, and many other commentators, are advocating the first approach – fence off the hedgerows (or, force all employers to pay for interns). On the Cashback for Interns web page, the NUJ says:

Have you worked as an unpaid intern within the past six years? You could be entitled to claim back the National Minimum Wage, regardless of the terms of your internship agreement.

The effect of this – as applied to our country walk – is likely to be that:

1. The blackberry stall-holder will sell a few more bowls of fruit, but most people will go without the blackberries they would otherwise eat.
2. The blackberries in the hedgerow will rot on the branch, or be eaten by wildlife.

Which I think pretty much sums up what would happen to journalism graduates (or anyone wanting to get media work experience).
The NUJ, naturally enough, denies that this is what it is aiming for. It says is targeting the long-term exploitation of interns who, in effect, do a full-time job for no wages.
But FleetStreetBlues makes an excellent point about the Law of Unintended Consequences (not their wording): one, unintended, result of any campaign to make employers pay for voluntarily undertaken unpaid work experience could be to make all work experience disappear. Faced by the threat (if not the reality) of retrospective legal action by interns, companies will fight shy of using them.
That’s not to say there is no problem with exploitation of interns, There certainly is – as some journalism graduates from UCA Farnham have found.
The trouble is, so many graduates are trying to get into the media that their willingness to work for nothing for months is taken for granted. That’s because they don’t have much value – there are so many of them that their price has dropped to pretty much nothing.
What’s happening here is that intern experience is a clear market signal. The market is telling us – all of us: publishers, commentators, unions and wannabe hacks – that the price of an intern is zero. Yes – you aren’t actually worth anything in monetary terms.
That’s not to say you aren’t useful – or that publishers don’t get a benefit from using (or abusing) you in the workplace. But that doesn’t mean you can necessarily charge for it in the market.
The solution? Do something more marketable as a degree – you won’t be able to bank on a media career. It’s brutal – but it is the truth.

Over at LinkedIn (the Facebook for suits), Dan Santy has opened up a forum question on whether it’s better to have a journalism or a marketing background if you want to go into copywriting.

While those well versed in marketing know how to sell, any good journalist should be able to turn anything that comes their way into clear, interesting copy, no matter how boring or complicated it may first seem. Any thoughts?

It’s certainly worth arguing. I’ve written about my brief foray into corporate writing, and I always urge journalists and journalism students to define the work they do as widely as possible – writing is writing, whether it’s an advertising feature, a press release or a hard news story. Mark Potts discusses it much better here.

But copywriting isn’t for everyone. As I note on LinkedIn, copywriting is a specific skill in itself, and having a facility in journalistic writing doesn’t mean you will necessarily be able to turn your hand to it. It has different rhythms and different goals.

Yes – it aims to communicate. But there are many forms of communication, with many different goals. And even if the core skill is transferrable, not everyone will be able to make the transfer work.

There are also different levels of copywriting – from longer formats (sponsored features, case studies) which are much more like feature journalism, to what is really advertising copywriting (“Go to work on an egg”).

The longer-form type is probably easiest to adapt to – but you do need to lose a lot of that journalistic attitude that says that any change the marketing department wants to make is, by definition, wrong.

In theory, a strong background in sub-editing should make it easier to move into shorter-form copywriting, as the ability to write punchy headlines and captions etc lends itself to that. But you still have to realign the focus of your writing, in a way that I suspect a lot of journalists would balk at.

Does being a journalist help you get work as a copywriter? I wonder if the reverse is true – maybe being a copywriter would help you become a better journalist.

Anyone with a view on this should get over to LinkedIn and join the discussion. You’ll sort of be networking while you do, so that might be an incentive…

Find your niche

No one needs another student web site with random, shallow content about celebrities or the World Cup. It’s just not possible for most journalism students to get the kind of access and insider knowledge to make these worthwhile.
However, it’s entirely possible for a journalism student to develop a reputation for expertise in a specialist niche. The trick is to choose it.
If you are into cinema, focus on a niche interest. Not general release blockbusters, but niche world cinema. Or obscure sci-fi. Or 40s romance. If you are into football, try to avoid the World Cup or Manchester United. Go local instead – it’s not as glamorous, but it is easier to make your mark.
Pick a small enough niche and you will be able to make more contacts in that world.

• People in it will tend not be so famous that you can’t get a response from them
• Your expertise will open more doors
• You may even become a source for other journalists

It’s easy to learn a software program – but it doesn’t make you a journalist. I reckon these five skills (or character traits) are the foundation of great journalism. What do you think?

Hmm – probably not. Via Happenupon comes this fantastic (in all senses) infographic of someone’s working life. I guess this might be effective if you are going for a job creating infographics. Otherwise – don’t go there…

Warning: intense web stats geekery ahead

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It’s been a long time coming from the last stats outing – so much so that it’s not exactly an annual round-up, as I’m several months late. But here, for your geeky pleasure, is a run-through of what I’ve learned from Google Analytics about the past 12 months’ traffic.

Traffic has dropped from last year

And here I was thinking how influential and important Freelance Unbound was getting. Oh well. Many reasons for this – but in the main, here’s how I’ve screwed up:

1. I’ve stopped updating so often
2. I’ve stopped engaging with my peer group (other bloggers/journalists)
3. The focus shifted to a more serious, long-form academic blog – when it wasn’t being trivial
4. The posts became less immediately helpful

1) Ironically, being more successful (busier, moving house, new exciting teaching work) means I have less time for blogging – how I miss the recession. Also, getting a dog has hit my blogging output (but I do get out more).
Key lesson: it’s a slog, but you have to keep it high on your priority list.
2) I spent the first year of serious blogging getting very involved with the “community” – reading, commenting, arguing. You really do need to keep up with the others in your field. Ignore them and they’ll start to forget about you.
Key lesson: spend at least a chunk of your time commenting and reacting to other people online, as well as working on your own material.
3) As Freelance Unbound began to get a higher profile, I started taking myself more seriously. Big mistake. I felt I had to make each post a serious and substantial addition to the media debate, which is frankly intimidating (for me, and probably for readers).
Key lesson: shorter, punchier material tends to be more immediately attractive. And if you start to write much longer, in-depth posts, the chances are you’ll get intimidated at trying to match them every day and your posting schedule will start to drift. Even if you produce long, reflective pieces, try to mix them up with shorter items that are easier to read (and to write)
4) Adam Westbrook has an excellent piece here about how the mistakes he’s made and how he turned his blog into the undoubted professional powerhouse it is. Mainly by not publishing anything that would not be useful or valuable to his audience. Do I do this? Clearly not.
Key lesson: From my own freelance success advice – be useful.

Top posts

Aside from the home page (and discounting bio pages and pages with student notes), which content gets the bulk of my pitifully small traffic?

1. Tales from the trade press: Clinique’s press office hell
2. Is People Per Hour any use?
3. Andy Davies, the unseen casualty of the Jonathan Ross affair
4. Facebook obsession murder
5. UK student riots – a different perspective
6. 6 Laws of CMS: Lessons from a web site launch
7. Looking for a Delicious replacement?
8. UK journalism jobs – a graphical guide
9. Writing style: advice to journalism students
10. Why is “I” the most important letter in journalism?

Items 1, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 get their traffic largely from referral – the Poynter Institute web site picked up on Clinique and gave me an instant traffic spike, the lovely FleetStreetBlues flagged up the pieces about journalism jobs, student riots and student writing style, and the essay about the “I” of journalism. And NikSilver.com (the Guardian’s head of tech, no less) referred kindly to the Laws of CMS. Journalism.co.uk also picked up the piece on jobs (mainly, I suspect, because I used their classified ads as my data source).
Key lesson: make and keep friends in the online world (oh, yes – see lesson [2], above).
The others are in the top rankings because of my carefully crafted SEO. Andy Davies, People Per Hour, Delicious and Facebook are all awesome traffic generators.
Key lesson: pimp my headlines with celebs and hot tech companies. No matter what the content is.
Another key lesson is something I discovered last time I looked carefully at my stats – a big post with a tsunami of referred visitors will give you a traffic spike that disappears almost immediately. But search optimised content will give you a steady flow of visitors, day in, day out – and that’s a much better in the long run.

Traffic sources

At the top, a roughly even split between people who know where they’re going and come here anyway and organic Google search.
For the rest, FleetStreetBlues is still far and away my most important single referring site – and they even went and voted me 9th best UK journalism blog at the end of last year. Bless.
Still useful are Twitter and Journalism.co.uk (though Journalism.co.uk isn’t nearly as powerful as a traffic source as I thought it would be, interestingly. Maybe its readers aren’t that interested in blogs, or maybe the site itself is too rich in content.)
That one mention on Poynter puts the site in my top 10 referrers, but that will only be for this year – I won’t see any of this traffic recognised in 12 months’ time.
My friend the Wartime Housewife, on the other hand, will probably still be up there in the rankings, even though her content is light years away from mine. It just goes to show that an intelligent, curious readership can be transferrable.
There’s also some feed reader traffic, which means it still isn’t dead as a means of distribution, as some suggest it will be, but then I’m dealing with journalists, who are probably the last holdouts on RSS.

Search engine source

Is Google under threat? Let’s have a look.

So – no. No matter what Microsoft has to say, Google is search. Until the whole online model changes again and we only care what our Facebook friends read. SEO is GEO.
Not sure what that generic “Search” slice is – probably it’s search from within Freelance Unbound itself, which means it’s probably me looking for relevant posts while I’m lecturing and not logged in.

New visitor vs old friend

1. New Visitor  – 60.22%
2. Returning Visitor – 39.78%

Is this good or bad? I have no idea. What is the ideal breakdown between new visitors and regular readers? How do you convert one to the other? Suggestions welcome. And a project for 2011…

Loyal vs disloyal

1. 60.22% have only ever visited once
2. 6.55% have visited twice
3. 5.31% have visited 201+ times

Apart from the last, which is probably me obsessively checking my posts without logging in, a whole lot of visitors only see one or two posts. So – those one-off visitors don’t stick around. I’m clearly not as sticky as I’d like to be. Another project for 2011…

Length of visit

67.59% – 0-10 secs (oops, wrong site)
7.38% spend 10 minutes or more on the site. (Again, some will be me, obsessively reading my own posts. Some will be students staying on a tutorial page while I rant about grammar)
In between is where you want to be, and there’s less of that than I’d like. But is most of the web like this? According to Jakob Nielsen, yes – you have a very short space of time to grab your reader and get them reading – and even then they often bounce away quickly. Watch out for more usability experiments on Freelance Unbound.

Depth of visit

Most people look at a couple of pages (55.79%)
A decent chunk looks at four pages (11.32%)
A few weird obsessives (or keen students, possibly) look at 20 or more pages a visit (1.68%)
This chimes with the findings above – I clearly have a few “real” readers and a lot of transient traffic that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Or not. Whatever.

Commenters

Again – a few stalwarts (Soilman, early reader Bill Bennett) vs many lone comments from ships passing in the night. And many from me giving lovingly crafted personal answers to my valued readers (community building in action!).
Of most interest and concern is the drop in total comments from 282 in 2009 to 229 in 2010. Fewer readers, fewer comments; less engagement, fewer comments. Come back – I miss you already.

Search engine terms

What do people look for to find me? Some expected search terms – and some weird things that you’d never expect.

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Mostly, the search terms drive traffic to the most-read posts – but not always, as that stray Raymond Chandler search term proves. Which just goes to show that all content has value, even if it’s not the busiest.

Weirdest search

Finally, for reasons best known to themselves, someone searched for amateur cumshots.org at http://search.alot.com/ and found my post about art magazine site Amateur.org. Which has nothing to do with sex, honestly. But there’s a thought for boosting my profile online…

The web is all about storytelling using multimedia: words, pictures, video and audio – and, of course, cool infographics.

I love an infographic, but lest we fail to shine the same critical spotlight on the form as we do written journalism, here’s an excellent infographic by Think Brilliant that debunks the whole “just because it’s a graphic, it must be really authoritative” mystique.

[HT: Infographics for Dummies]

It seems The Daily’s walled garden of iPad content has been opened up almost as soon as the publication is launched.
Via German newspaper site SpiegelOnline comes the news that The Daily content is now available via a Tumblr site. Now it seems anyone can access the latest content from The Daily free of charge, and on any platform.
Well – on closer inspection it seems this is just the free, web-friendly content simply packaged up for your convenience. Los Angeles programmer Andy Baio has cunningly filtered The Daily’s shared content via Twitter and Facebook and collected it together again – in effect replicating much of the content of the walled-off publication.
It’s not the full package, and it lacks the multi-meejah glitz – but it does kind of indicate the difficulties Murdoch faces in trying to suppress the sharing of online information…
[HT: Jessica]

There’s been lots of hype about Murdoch’s new iPad-tastic digital news “paper” The Daily. Mainly by itself (Wired refers to its claim that it is “the newspaper of the 21st Century”.)
And that link is one indication of the problem with TheDaily. I can’t actually link to the paper itself, because it’s not online – you have to download it to your iPad. Which is cool and all – but not if you live in the UK, as it’s not available to us in the UK iTunes store. In fact, whatever comments can be made have to be based on its promotional video, as I couldn’t, as a consumer, actually buy it, even if I wanted to. Now there’s a revenue model.
There’s a good analysis of the problems with The Daily over at Recovering Journalist, but for what it’s worth here are some more early impressions in conversation with media commentator (and keen allotment gardener) Soilman.
Soilman: So it’s here. Not as bad as I expected… but still pretty unimaginative. It’s more like a newspaper than a website, as feared. The Twitter integration is OK, but that looks to be about it. They seem to think a 360 photograph is terribly exciting. Jeez: estate agents have been using them for years. And they’re NOT exciting. They come to the end of the ‘new, imaginative’ features awfully quickly. It’s a newspaper pasted on an iPad. With Twitter integration.
Would you pay for it? ‘Fraid I wouldn’t. If this is the future of journalism, it’s going to be an awfully impoverished one.
Freelance Unbound: Basically, it’s a beefed up Issuu or PageSuite product. Publishers love this – and a year or so ago Adobe was trying to sell it hard as the solution to the “problem” of the web – controllable, billable rich multimedia that mimics print structures.
The key issue is that publishers are looking at format and delivery, and not restructuring the revenue/content model. Any time you go and talk to a web-only publisher who has started from scratch, you see that the key to their success has been ditching newspaper structure and thinking.
“What do people need that will generate revenue” is the key question they ask. Sometimes it’s journalistic style content – sometimes it’s something else, such as reviews or user-generated content.
A good example is Broadband Genie – a product comparison site that does have a journalistic element to it – but would not really be seen as journalism by the mainstream media. But it is getting the web right, and providing content that is seen as valuable by its users, not just its producers.
Soilman: Couldn’t agree more: the old news people just seem incapable of starting from that simple question: “What do people need?” rather than “How can we give them pretty much what we’ve always done?”
You could almost mention Flipboard and Pulse. Not brilliant, either of them, but they at least offer something genuinely new that attempts to use the web properly. Both started by tech people, not old news people. And it shows.
All of media is excited about the Daily idea because it offers, again, that gorgeously elusive hope of the return to the walled garden where the wretched punters have to pay you – the only model we’ve ever found where people actually pay for newspaper content. Reason? Newspaper content just ain’t as good – and never has been – as newspaper publishers and trad journalists believe it to be.
Freelance Unbound: Tellingly, the promotional video says: “just flip the way you would a newspaper or magazine” – because obviously we don’t want people accessing content in radically different ways. It’s a bit like Pink Floyd not wanting people to download individual tracks from an album.
Will it survive? Clearly I can live with being wrong on this, and it may have a niche (commuters especially) – but I suspect it won’t be the dominant future of journalistic media…

Or: “Survey predicts in boom in freelance social media jobs”

Monday morning nonsense from the world of office surveys: OfficeCavalry.com says that social media is set to boom for UK businesses this year, and freelance workers will benefit:

• 15% of businesses will look at creating specific roles e.g. ‘social media manager’ or ‘online reputation manager’
• 65% of UK businesses would consider hiring freelancers for  social media roles

Well – “would consider hiring” is not the same thing as “will hire”. But weirdly, there may well be truth here. Bristol Editor is one journalist who has changed direction from traditional print media journalism to agency-based social media communications.

One point though: when you send out a press release about a survey, do try to include an actual link to it…

Incisive Media has published a PDF document on its company intranet of sub-editors’ contact details on the web. However, the document link is freely accessible to anyone without any login protection.
The document contains names, email addresses and phone numbers of 67 freelance sub-editors. In addition, some entries include a home address and professional history, which some subs may want to keep confidential. It seems that some, certainly, on the list did not give any permission for this to occur and were unaware of its existence.
A telephone call by one sub-editor to Incisive to request removal has so far been not been met. However, a call and email to David Worsfold, Incisive Media’s group editorial services director, received a categorical assurance that the free publication of this data was unintentional and would be looked into straight away to block it off from public view.
Worsfold said that the publication should not be available to the wider public, as it was on the company intranet, without being aware that the intranet seemed to have no login barrier to casual visitors. He stressed that prompt steps would be taken to change this.
According to the Office of the Information Commissioner, anyone concerned about their data being revealed in this way by Incisive Media, or any other company, should approach the company in writing (email will do) to request removal.
If Incisive Media should fail to accede to the request (or considers it has legitimate reason to publish the data), then any concerned subs should make a formal complaint to the Office of the Information Commissioner. The Office will investigate and rule if the data is being used illegitimately.
However, any potential complainant should give the company sufficient time to investigate and remedy the problem before doing so.
According to the Office of the Information Commissioner, in a case like this, dealing with personal information that is published online in a straightforward document, a company could be expected to solve the problem promptly – within 24-48 hours. [UPDATE: the data is unavailable as of 7pm the same day]
This is a tricky subject, as clearly freelance sub-editors will also want to publicise their services. However, any online publication must be with the informed consent of the person whose data is being used – specifically to avoid revealing information that might put people at risk, such as a home address.