Freelance Unbound

There are more journalism jobs around these days by the looks of the classified ads on sites such as Journalism.co.uk. But what is the jobs market actually like?
Journalism students are generally obsessed with sport, celebrity and music as topics of interest. How will they fare in the media jobs market?
And most journalism commentators seem obsessed with general news reporting as the yardstick of the industry. What are the opportunities like in that most archetypal of roles – the news reporter?
Here is a recent set of Journalism.co.uk jobs, with the numbers crunched to show what kind of work is available, in which kinds of publication, and where they are based.

First off, are these real jobs? There is already a trend for not-real-jobs to be advertised as if they are proper paid employment. This set of ads is not bad – there are only 4 out of 72 that are not paid. Three of those are internships, and one is that weird advertising commission model used by Suite 101.

Second, are these in the business or consumer media? There’s a slight edge to business (b2b), but a more or less even split. Note that the business press barely registers with most journalism students, so that’s a little over half the jobs on offer that will be off their radar.

How about job titles? This one is a bit tricky to process, as many of the jobs on offer are veering off from the traditional journalism demarcation that has defined the industry.
What is an “online community manager”, for example? There were three of those on offer from Yelp that week. I’ve defined them as “editor”, but they could be part of an entirely different category. We’re at the start of big change in how we define our roles.
Top of the list is writing – or variants of it (I’ve also counted some section editor jobs as “writing”, as that’s what you end up doing a lot of). We’re still big on content production, it seems. Then there are a lot of fully fledged editor jobs, and then a much smaller slice of production roles. Like it or not, the old subbing/production desk career is being squeezed dramatically. Or at least changed…

Where is the media based these days? Unsurprisingly, London is still the place to be if you want to work in journalism. There’s also a surprisingly resilient niche in the United Arab Emirates, despite Dubai’s recent financial woes.
Apart from that, the biggest slice of UK regional jobs is taken up by Bath-based Future Publishing (which is nice, as that’s where I am), and those remote Yelp online community management roles. (I counted Crawley and Luton as “London”, as they’re kind of in the catchment.)
Which means that, if you want to start in journalism there’s only one place to be. And, given how expensive it is to live in London, and how rubbish journalism-type salaries are, that really sucks.

Finally, what kind of publication is hiring these days? This is the toughest to define and readers may take issue with my categorisation.
As a guide, Your Horse and the Official Nintendo Magazine are “special interest”, while travel editing for AOL counts as general “consumer interest”. “Financial” is separate from “specialist business” partly because it is a big sub-niche of the business media, and partly because journalism students need to understand why they should not ignore economics and finance. “Specialist business” is all other business type media, from The Grocer to reporting on the pharmacy sector. “Trade/professional” covers media aimed at professional groups, such as lawyers and architects. Yes, I know – you would have done it differently. And you would probably have been right.
The most telling items in the chart are the tiny slices for lifestyle and celebrity – the most popular media choices for J-students – and for general news reporting. Very few jobs are advertised in these areas (at least here).
There is life in the media jobs market, it seems – but you need to be prepared to take that job on Meat Trades Journal if there’s nothing available on Heat magazine right now…
(Jobs sourced from Journalism.co.uk on Friday October 22, 2010)

A few days ago I wrote, perhaps optimistically, that if “i” follows the Metro model, it’ll rely heavily on sub-editors to put the paper out, which should offer the benefit at least of raising standards of proofreading accuracy.

How did that work out?

Well, I didn’t catch the paper on its first day, but a skim through today’s offering revealed the paper will prove fertile ground for subbing bloggers.

It seems Apple users are “upgarding” to iPhoto 11. A story about geographic patterns of smoking among pregnant women in the UK is headlined “Pregnant drinking”. And a slightly mangled pullquote from a feature about a Spanish TV show on Spain’s royal family reads:

“The show portrays the prince as grappling between love and responsibility”.

Which, let’s face it, isn’t something you’d really be able to do.

Yes, I know I’m nit-picking. And actually the rest of it doesn’t look too bad. But it’s just that I’m so disappointed in the missed opportunity. If nothing else, demanding higher standards could have given some of the nation’s many unemployed sub-editors a slice of much-needed work…

As regular visitors may be aware, I spend a lot of time with web content management systems (CMS). Having spent some time involved in a biggish web site relaunch this year, I can now reliably draft some of the Laws of CMS that anyone in this field should expect to apply.

• Law 1: It only exists when it’s live
  No matter how far in advance you distribute the URL for the test site so people can field test it to see if it has any problems, they will only really look at the site on the day that you go live. They will also not realise that the test site has real archive content in it. Prepare to get lots of emails saying “Something’s gone wrong with [X piece of content] – it’s suddenly got a typo”, when this is the same story that’s been on the old site for two months with the same errors in it.
• Law 2: Nobody’s fault – but yours
  When something goes wrong, IT will blame web development and web development will blame IT. And everyone in the editorial office will blame you, because you work on CMS admin.
• Law 3: No one has thought about selling the advertising
  Weirdly, because advertising actually makes the business press go round, no one in the ad department will have thought about how to organise the selling of online ads. There will be no scheduling tool to ensure no one books the same space at the same time; no one will have been given responsibility for coordinating the online ads, and no one will have consulted with web development about what formats work or not. As an added bonus, the tracking codes provided by the client for their banner ads may clash with the tracking codes used by the publisher. Trail fail.
• Law 4: The production desk is the last to know
  There will be a comprehensive, jargon-filled document called something like a Statement of Requirements (SOR) which will, at some point in its depths, call for a complete change in the way the editorial production desk produces some of its output. At no point will anyone in web development or management call a meeting with the production team to discuss how these changes will affect their work. About three months down the line, production will get an irate email from some other department asking why [X piece of content] is not available in the correct format “as agreed in the SOR”.
• Law 5: Things you want to change are always hard-coded – and vice versa
  Inevitably, templates will have unchangeable text, images and functionality in exactly the places you want to be able to edit, and will be a quagmire of freedom where you want rigid rules (leading, for example, to no restrictions on the size of a thumbnail image, which can throw a whole template out of whack).
• Law 6: No matter how thoroughly you update your CMS, it will always be out of date
  Because many publishing companies have invested too much in a bespoke CMS that was written for them at the dawn of the internet, they are unable – or unwilling – to move to open-source CMS technology. This means they will take years to rework their clunky, unsuitable CMS for the latest web innovations (video, scheduling posts by time, not just day etc) – and once this has been done, it will take years to rework the CMS again. Meanwhile, you will work on WordPress or Drupal and weep…

[UPDATE: Niksilver.com has observed that the Laws can actually be applied to any big technology project, and he offers a more positive spin on how to avoid their worst effects…]

I know, I know – you thought the Lib-Dems had finally graduated to the big leagues in politics. They’ve got nice suits, seats in Cabinet and a highly sophisticated communications machine.
But it was not ever thus. Unpacking boxes in Freelance Unbound’s spacious new South-West headquarters reveals this local election leaflet from just a few short years ago.
The shame of it is that local Herefordshire Lib-Dem election candidate Doug Lawson “is a journalist” – which makes it doubly sad that he’s broken a cardinal rule of sub-editing: make sure your caption matches your picture.
As for the reverse of the leaflet, I don’t know about you, but I for one am sold by the image of Doug “at home with his pet cat”. That’s a team I would want representing me on my local council, let me tell you.
I’m wondering if it was the cat that was in charge of the campaign communications. Or is that being a bit harsh? (To the cat, obviously…)
[UPDATE: Sadly it seems Doug failed in his bid to take the Golden Valley North seat in 2007 – he was pipped by just four votes by the Green candidate, Edi Hamilton…]

Yesterday saw confirmation that the Independent is to launch a 20p news-digest style paper to target “lapsed readers of quality newspapers”.
But will “i” succeed in stemming the flow of readers away from newsprint? The inclusion of an iPad app format indicates that Russian owner Alexander Lebedev has his eye on the young, digital-savvy market.
But a cursory glance at the market for digest-style newspapers does reveal a market-leading heavyweight that it may be difficult to prise off its perch. The Metro does seem to have the casual news-digest market sewn up – it’s both free (crucial when it comes to instant pick-up distribution at the station/bus stop) and available in many locations where people commute (crucial when it comes to having time to read a news digest).
I, like others, had thought that Lebedev’s strategy might be to follow the Evening Standard down the free distribution route. But, apart from a brief experiment in London with a cut-down version of the paper, that didn’t happen. Instead, we have the prospect of an addition to the newspaper ranks – possibly from next Tuesday.
It’s certainly nice to see a proprietor investing money into a newspaper. The one downside will be that the new digest might cannibalise sales of the Independent itself (though Independent editor Simon Kelner swears it won’t). Let’s face it, if you’re trying to reach lapsed readers of quality newspapers, Independent readers are a prime target – the paper’s circulation fell more than 4% over the past year, according to the latest ABC figures.
Whatever happens, it’ll be nice to see a boost to quality. If “i” follows the Metro model, it’ll rely heavily on sub-editors to put the paper out. Given the results of the Independent‘s own experiment with sub-editor free news production, that can only be a good thing…

It’s always fun for smug media professionals to flag up the illiteracy of local councils, so here’s a nice example from a road sign currently on display in Bath.
Given the parlous state of the nation’s finances, I suspect it won’t be replaced for a while. But, I mean, it’s not as if you don’t what it’s saying.
Mind you, on the plus side, though it looks wrong,  the Holburne Museum is actually correct…

In the first of what may turn out to be an occasional series, here’s the result of some Popbitch-inspired web trawling: Amateur.org.uk.

With posts titled “On Numinosity“, “Tender Buttons” and “Milk“, this is clearly a site designed for those with a most discerning intellectual curiosity.

Sample text:

Objects proliferate as never before, but they are mostly dead husks, the shells of things, wherein no daemon [1]. resides. We own them merely, or covet them, we are not nourished.

It looks like it may be an archive site for an old New York art-school magazine, and also seems to have had something to do with avant-garde muso and cartoonist Peter Blegvad – which is nice. This is what the internet should be all about.

You’ll need Shockwave for the graphics. It’s worth the download…

Having posted previously about Technorati’s annual state of the blogosphere survey, I am pleased to actually take part this year.

Tellingly, one question asks me “Which best describes how frequently you blog now versus when you first launched your blog?”. To which the answer is a shameful “I blog a lot less now”. But I’ve been so busy.

There are a few problems with the survey. It’s skewed towards the usual blogging interests, so my themes of further education, journalism and digital media are not included in the checkbox list. But there’s only one “Other” field to fill in. Should I list them all? How is the information processed? I don’t know, which is a bit frustrating.

Other than that, it’s a useful nudge to get me to start posting more regularly. Any other bloggers who fancy losing 15 minutes of their life squeezing their uniquely square blog into Technorati’s somewhat round survey hole should visit The 2010 State of the Blogosphere Survey [UPDATE: survey over, check out the results here].

If the new leader of the Labour Party runs into serious trouble over the next few years, maybe he can carve out a new career in situation comedy. Or has he already?

Maybe the reason Ed Miliband has never been seen in the same room as Italian-American TV comedy actor Ray Romano is because they are one and the same person. I’m just saying…

Ed Miliband…                                           …Ray Romano

My bid for scientific credibility has finally got off the ground with my very first Open University science experiment.
You can see the high-precision, high-tech equipment I’ve been devising to help me undertake Activity 2.1: Measuring Precipitation – part 1. It’s all a bit primary school – but actually quite instructive. After cutting down the water bottles and levelling off the bases with cement (whose weight will also help stabilise the gauges), I realise that I haven’t left a whole lot of room for the actual rain (or, technically, “precipitation”).
Luckily, I started measuring rainfall the day after a torrential downpour, so the measurements so far have been a straightforward, if unexciting, 0mm. If the weather gets a bit more iffy, though, things may get more complicated. Though obviously as I haven’t had any rain to measure yet, I could just make a couple of new and better ones and pretend I was using them all along (falsifying results already!).
The first course book has settled down a bit after a shaky start, when it more resembled a Green Party pamphlet than a science text. By chapter 3, though, it has largely morphed into what it really should have been all along – Measurement and Uncertainty, rather than the more crowd-pleasing Global Warming.
Rather unsettlingly, I’m getting much more of the basic maths wrong than I thought I would. Scientific notation and significant figures are rather dim memories from my schooldays – must try harder…