Freelance Unbound

Nine-year-old Anna Carnochan has been in the news today, taking the prime minister to task over a potential tax on toys.
She wasn’t happy with his reply, it seems, and is pursuing the matter with the tenacity of a young Jeremy Paxman. Apparently Anna “wants to be a news reporter” when she’s older. She’s currently drafting a new letter to press him for more focused and detailed answers.
Here’s my tip for getting more out of your interviewee: spell his name right. Then maybe “David Camron” will take your letter more seriously.
Yes, I know she’s only young. But this is why I have to deal with undergraduates who don’t understand why getting facts right is important. The rot has to stop…

#VOJ10 – I’ve no idea who or what “Topsy” is (or what this verdict actually means), but whoever’s behind it clearly has impeccable judgement – at last someone has recognised the pivotal importance of Freelance Unbound to the world of meejah commentary.
I’m still a bit behind Charlie Beckett, obviously – but I’m slowly clawing my way up the ladder of influence. I’ll be “highly influential” soon, don’t you worry…

Today has been a slightly more stressful day than it should, given the bucolic nature of my working environment this week. That’s because last night saw the total failure of my crappy LaCie 1TB external hard drive.
I say “crappy” – this is because I bought two identical versions of the hard drive last August, with a view to backing one up on the other, thus protecting all my data. However, within a few months of using the first as my main hard drive, it suffered some kind of malfunction. Only an emergency purchase of the very useful DiskWarrior utility saved my data that time.
LaCie fail
I duly switched to the other hard drive and used that until last night when, of course, it went and died on me – suddenly making strange beeping noises and refusing to mount. Not even DiskWarrior could save my bacon this time – the disk was too damaged to allow it to create a backup, and the otherwise invaluable Data Rescue couldn’t read it at all.
Regular readers of Freelance Unbound will know the slightly awkward relationship I have with technology. This is, in fact, only the latest in a series of unpleasant and inconvenient events involving hardware failure and data loss.
Iomega fail #1

The LaCie disks were bought to replace a pair of Iomega 160GB portable hard drives, which looked great and were really convenient, but weren’t terribly robust. I think the one I used for my main storage lasted about a year before it started the weird click-of-death® that meant I could no longer access my files.
How much data did I lose? Only about six weeks’ worth, I think. Certainly the only real loss was my Income Tax spreadsheet, which I had to put together from scratch as, stupidly, I hadn’t backed it up since I started compiling it. Most of the rest I could cobble together from email outboxes, stray flash memory sticks and Google Docs.
Iomega fail #2
In their turn, the Iomega portables were bought to replace my first Iomega external hard drive, which started playing up in about 2008. Luckily I managed to save all my data with Data Rescue and, before the whole thing went kaput, I bought the two shiny replacements
There’s a thread running through all this. I don’t have much luck with external hard drives – and that’s because I don’t treat them very well.
External hard drives are not robust. Well – certainly not when they’re in use. Don’t, for goodness sake, do as I do and actually move your hard drive when it’s up and running and attached to your laptop.
Portable does not mean movable
It’s a bit confusing, I know. I mean, they do say they are portable. But portable means you can carry them around in a handbag when they’re powered down. Not wave them around the house as you move from room to room with your sexy new MacBook thinking how cool it is to be connected to the internet everywhere.
My other problem is that my working environment is absolutely lethal for sensitive technology. As it happens, the flipside of my lovely view is that I live in a tiny cottage that is full to the brim with textiles and weaving equipment. The only space this leaves for me and my freelance work is an overflowing Ikea coffee table (or “filing cabinet”) and one corner of a two-seater sofa (or “office”), which generally contains my laptop and hard drive.
The other thing about external hard drives is that these days they never seem to have an “off” switch. The result is a delicate piece of electronic hardware, permanently powered up and sitting on an undulating surface, that keeps being moved off onto a stone floor when guests arrive.
My old hard drive does still work – but it’s kept upstairs on a bookshelf behind a mass of art portfolio folders, so I can never be bothered to unearth it, bring it downstairs and hook it up to the new one and do a backup. Which is why this last hard drive meltdown took not six weeks but six months’ worth of archive data with it.
So why am I not going on a psychotic rampage down Farnham high street?
My uncomfortable and chaotic working existence is actually an advantage here. The fact that I spend all my time working between different computers – in different rooms and on the train; at the university here and in a London office – means I’m never really organised enough to file my data properly.
The result is that I tend to put really important work where I can get hold of it anywhere – on Freelance Unbound for one, sometimes on Google Docs (though they’re a nightmare to actually use), occasionally on a memory stick. Mostly, when I’m working on the move, I’ll save a lot of stuff to the desktop of the laptop, and save it to archive on the external hard drive when I get around to it.
This is usually disastrous practice for data safety – but ironically it has worked in my favour. I’ve ended up with multiple copies of relevant files in a range of different locations – all I need to do is sort through them and pull out the ones that are really important and save them somewhere useful. And back them up. Oh yes.
So what have I lost this time?
Amazingly, in six whole months of data loss, there’s remarkably little to lose sleep about. Typically, the one real pain was to lose this year’s Income Tax spreadsheet as well – which I spent most of today reconstucting. I will so back this up in future – maybe somewhere online so I can be relatively sure I can always get hold of it.
Other than that, there are a few invoices that I’ll have to track down and some notes I started making on copyright for student teaching in the next academic year. Luckily I’ve been putting off working on my new teaching material until I had some time off in the summer, so I hadn’t got very far. Again, I’ll switch to making these notes online – at least Bluehost is competent enough to do regular backups.
There’ll probably be some other files that I’ve forgotten that will turn out to be inconvenient to have lost, but with luck the rest will be archived junk – just like all the stuff I’ve been keeping in a storage unit for the past four years waiting until I can finally move into a house big enough to hold it all.

Lessons learned:

• Listen to your tech’s cry for help
  As with my dodgy Apple PowerBook power connector, when your tech starts behaving in a flaky way replace or repair it immediately and back up your files (see below). My hard drive started giving error messages and disconnecting itself without warning a couple of weeks before it packed up. Did I listen? No – I thought it was a problem with the USB cable.
• Back up your files!
  I mean, obviously I don’t do this, and probably never will. But you should. It will make your life so much easier. Trust me – I know.
• Be organised – or be REALLY disorganised
  One or the other. My disorganisation has been a help – but it would have been better if I’d never got around to archiving anything on my hard drive.
• Live somewhere big enough to have office space
  That at least I can manage. By August I will have a real office space with an honest-to-god desk in it. And a proper system for managing my data…

The view from my desk on this sunny Wednesday afternoon…

Via the ever-dependable Soilman comes news that an Oxford academic has set up a prize for the most inaccurate reporting of a piece of academic work.
It sounds like a one-off joke – but the nominations process is outlined comprehensively enough, so it might take off. The project is the brainchild of Dorothy Bishop, a professor at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University.
Among her books is Understanding Developmental Language Disorders in Children: From Theory to Practice, which would have made her a good contact to sort out the terrible reporting last January on how modern children find it difficult to learn to talk. Or do they? We’ll never know because no journalist asked the right questions.
As Soilman says:

Here’s a fun one to watch out for in future. Journalists all over the UK should be quaking in their ill-informed, assumptive, Humanities-educated shoes

Harsh but, one suspects, fair…

In association with the Martin Cloake blog

So far we’ve covered a wealth of ground on editorial skills, the audience for journalism (and its shortcomings), the need for narrative in human experience and, most important of all, why sub-editors are the backbone of the media.

Today, my blogging colleague Martin Cloake rightly takes me to task for defeatism:

It’s our job to engage with people and make issues relevant. No one “wanted” to hear about Thalidomide or Agent Orange, but good journalism brought the issues to public attention and made them care.

This is true enough – though I wonder whether it will be the research efforts of the media that bring the 21st century version of these stories to our attention. As Soilman points out in one of the comment threads for this discussion:

Today, we discover that the CCTV system intended to improve road safety has grown to become a surveillance system. And only because of persistent, determined FOI work by what the Telegraph coyly calls ‘civil liberties campaigners’. Why doesn’t it say exactly who? Because it wants to give the impression that it got the story itself (which, of course, it didn’t).

Increasingly, I do believe that the value in 21st century journalism will be to give a voice to the discoveries and campaigns of others. Yes, to organise and express these coherently – but crucially to give them a platform and credibility.

It’s a kind of librarianship – but an active one. Not simply cataloguing and storing, but filtering and organising. It’s actually what editing is – figuring out which stories need telling, understanding how they fit in with the wider picture, and then telling them in a way that does capture the audience. So what if it means less investigation is being done by reporters? Investigation will still get done.

But as Soilman points out it will often tend to be by activist groups or political parties (in this case the Liberal Democrats). Given this, a key job for the media will be to try to understand the agenda behind the investigation. If needed, the editorial role will be to give it balance, to distill the facts from the activism and to rubbish meritless claims.

Actually, I’d be glad if the media did that today. I can only hope it’s something we can aspire to…

In association with the Martin Cloake blog

If journalism is about telling stories to make sense of human experience, my blogging colleague Martin Cloake argues that our most pressing task is to tell them better and “not fall into the trap of disregarding the accumulated knowledge of the trade”. Our key task is to focus on a sharper definition of the skills required.
But I think that, even if we have a lovingly and carefully thought-out definition of the skills required by the ideal journalist, the problem is that journalism simply isn’t as important to its intended audience as it thinks it is.
This concern was voiced at the Value of Journalism event by Emily Bell of the Guardian. As reported by Polis director Charlie Beckett, her argument is that the mainstream media is “losing the attention of the public. In summary, ‘We are moving from an age of representation to the age of participation’.”
Let’s face it, if the entire industry collapsed tomorrow, and no professional journalism existed in the west, the whole edifice of western civilisation would not simply collapse. Indeed, an awful lot of people would hardly notice – according to the National Readership Survey, only about 52% of adults read a daily newspaper, for example.
Journalism is most needed where it’s not allowed – the Middle East, North Korea, increasingly Russia. But is it true to say that our freedom and democracy will wither away, if journalism as we have known it disappears because its consumers don’t really want it?
This presupposes that the media actually does the job that journalists say it does – to shine a light on corruption and hold power to account.
I’m always flummoxed by the spectacle of the media focusing vast resources and energy on celebrity exposes, sexual stings and an ocean of puffery, while the government of the day chips away at civil liberties and builds a giant surveillance state – illuminated by barely a glimmer of light from the media’s searchlight of truth.
Nobody cares about this stuff. Certainly very few of my journalism students. They believe (not unreasonably, in some ways) that journalism is all about celebrity, sport and music, with possibly a bit of tech and gaming in the mix. Crusading journalism is as alien to them as grammar and punctuation.
And, increasingly, they aren’t that interested in the qualities that you flag up as our key USP – scepticism, inquisitiveness, balance and distinguishing opinion from fact.
Of course, our argument is that they should be. But if that’s true, we need to sell the importance of journalism more effectively than we currently do.
(Continued on the Martin Cloake blog tomorrow morning)

Via @KarlSchneider comes the news that venerable HR/personnel trade publication Personnel Today is to ditch its print edition.

As a result, 12 print jobs are to go – though in part compensation there will be four – count them – new online positions.

This is a trend we’ll see much more of, especially in the business press. The 66% drop in headcount is in line with other examples of print-to-web publishing, but interestingly not as terrible as one apocalyptic estimate would have us believe, which suggested 87% of journalism jobs would go in the shift online.

And don’t forget there’s a fair number of start-ups in online publishing that have no legacy in print publishing at all. Many are tiny, but the barriers to entry are so low that there are at least plenty of them.

In association with the Martin Cloake blog

So far, we’ve covered the need for a coherent set of standards for journalism, the question of whether the audience actually cares, or appreciates those standards, and the difference between literacy and communication skills. And, crucially, why sub-editors are the cornerstone of the media.

Now I’d like to look at this in a wider cultural sense. The recent Cumbria shootings underlined the importance answer to the question: ‘what is the value of journalism?’. In an interview, a local GP told the Radio 4 Today programme that “people need stories” to make sense of events that otherwise might overwhelm them, or that are too far out of normal experience to process easily.

Telling stories is essentially what journalism is. And that’s something that, as a species, I suspect we will never stop doing – bearing witness to things that happen, and then trying to make sense of them in a wider context (social, political, economic, whatever).

So I think the very question “is there still such a thing as journalism” reveals more about the anxiety of the industry than anything else.

The problem for journalists is that it used to be much harder to take part. You needed a printing press, or privileged access to someone else’s. Then you needed a way to distribute your work.

Such restricted access leads inevitably to guild-like rules for entry – not least of which was competence (though nepotism and luck doubtless played their part).

Ironically, just as publishing is democratising as never before thanks to an abundance of low-cost and pervasive technology, journalism, which claims it is speaking for its readers, is trying to prevent them from speaking for themselves.

As you say, it’s about access to the means of publication. What can journalism do when the people who need the stories can tell them too?

It’s a big mistake to demonise the tools that let readers bypass information’s former gatekeepers. It’s a bigger mistake to demonise people for producing content (even if it’s inane YouTube videos of kittens). Journalists have produced enough unmitigated crap over the years to be in no position to judge others too harshly.

Instead, I think we have to accept that our role is changing. We are no longer the gatekeepers of information. The best role for us now is probably managers of information. There is so much content flowing around the world that the best service we can offer readers is to understand it and filter it. And thinking of ways we can do that, and developing tools to let us do it, should be much higher on the agenda than shoring up the old model of journalism.

(Continued on the Martin Cloake blog tomorrow morning)

In association with the Martin Cloake blog

Yesterday, media blogger Martin Cloake argued for a definition of standards to separate “journalism” from simply sounding off. My view is that it’s all very well going on about the importance of quality in journalism practice, but the audience (arguably the most important component of the media process) isn’t really that bothered.
Quite rightly, Martin followed up by pointing out the difference between literacy and expertise and communication. Some of the best communicators in journalism aren’t necessarily known for the beauty of their prose (though you do need sub-editors to rectify that).

The media is losing sight of its communication role
Your horse-racing friend certainly illustrates the difference between expertise and communication. Journalism, when it works, manages to distill knowledge into communication and convey it to the reader. But it so often fails, because journalists are often not good at it (especially when there’s a science/finance angle).
And your other point – that there is an editorial machine capable of turning the straw of rough reporting into the gold of finished journalism – is proving increasingly problematic.
Sadly, the trend of thinking that subs are superfluous and that publications don’t need them is starting to reveal the cracks in that old-style editorial model (just take a look at the Independent). At best, subs are the people who upload content to the web and handle the prepress, but who have little say in the way that stories are communicated.
(Continued on the Martin Cloake blog tomorrow morning)