Freelance Unbound

Spotted twice yesterday in papers that should know better – two stories baring the writer’s ignorance of simple English.

The London Standard story This isn’t just a decline … it’s a Marks and Spencer decline noted:

The store front is fading and a little grotty. The shop sign seems left over from the Fifties, baring little resemblance to the designer logo that appears in the adverts and in the branches in sexier parts of town.

Meanwhile, here’s booming City free paper City A.M. on an impending shake-up of BBC Worldwide:

Analysts say the BBC is likely to maintain a strong editorial influence over the products, especially those baring the branding of its programming, over which it is fiercely protective.

So:

“Baring” is exposing something to public view – your soul, your body, your linguistic ineptitude.

“Bearing” is carrying the weight of something – a resemblance, a brand history, the burden of literacy.

Please, please, high-profile media – try to understand the meaning of basic English words.

Highlight of the weekend – chancing on the mass handlebars of the second annual Tweed Run, which took place on Saturday, April 10.

Kicking off at midday, several hundred tweed-clad riders pedalled from somewhere near Trafalgar Square to Bishopsgate, naturally taking in Saville Row on the way. Any proceeds go to the Bikes4Africa charity.

Frankly, this is the kind of thing we need to see much more of in this country. More tweed and more creative facial hair would be the ideal medicine for the budget deficit. (Well, that makes as much sense as most of the economic analysis you find in the media these days.)

I’m determined to take part next year. Now I just have to get hold of a bicycle (or possibly penny farthing); some stout riding tweeds; and a set of Edwardian whiskers…

According to most of the media today:

Malcolm McLaren dies at the age of 64 after a long battle with cancer

Apparently it was diagnosed six months ago. Six months is not a “long battle”. It’s actually quite short.

Also – what the hell cancer was it anyway? Every account I’ve read says “a rare form”. I’m curious no one has reported it.

I am shocked, by the way – I didn’t even know he was ill…

Not quite in the Modern Media is Rubbish league, but still an interesting example of how journalism, even when it’s mostly factually accurate, still manages to misrepresent the world it reports on.

From the Financial Times Weekend Magazine comes a photo essay on How modern Britain spends its Sundays, complete with a potted summary by Emily Cataneo of how its character has changed since the 1950s.

All of this is fine in its way. But the author is clearly either so young that the early 1990s is ancient history that she doesn’t remember actually living through, or, possibly, she’s not from these shores.

Here’s what she says:

The most significant liberalisation was the Sunday Trading Act of 1994, which decreed that small shops could open whenever they wanted and that large shops could open for up to six hours on a Sunday. On August 28 that year, three of the big chains – Marks and Spencer, House of Fraser and Waitrose – welcomed Sunday shoppers for the first time. Today, there is little you can’t buy as easily on the week’s seventh day as on any other.

Now – all this is accurate enough. But it completely ignores the reality of British retailing in the early 1990s. Anyone who was there will remember that by then shops were openly flouting UK Sunday trading laws – to the extent that you could shop from early to late on Sunday at almost any big chain store.

No one knew what to do. Some local authorities fined stores for opening, but many just let them be. After all, consumers voted with their feet, and it was clear that most enjoyed being able to shop all week with no restrictions.

Emily Cataneo’s point about Waitrose opening its doors for the first time on August 28 1994 is interesting, because it implies that this was part of a gradual wider retail access for consumers.

In fact, the John Lewis Partnership was one of the few holdouts in retail that actually obeyed the law and shut on a Sunday. I remember John Lewis being the only store that was shut in Brent Cross shopping centre in north London in the early 1990s, while the rest of the mall was heaving with consumers.

And while the FT article is factually correct in citing the 1994 Act as a legal liberalisation, in practice it restricted opening hours – as before this, big stores had opened for at least eight hours on a Sunday, and often more. Cutting that down to six hours was actually a step backwards in practical terms for the liberalisers.

Which means that the last sentence in that pullquote is misconstrued. Strictly speaking, it’s somewhat more difficult to shop today than it used to be 16 years ago, because Sunday trading hours are more strictly enforced.

The problem with the FT article is not so much a lack of research – Emily seems to have done some of this – but lack of knowledge. This looks like basic paper or online research – but she clearly hasn’t asked anyone over the age of 35 what it was actually like back then, or gone back to see how the debates played out in the media of the time.

Which doesn’t surprise me, because the early 1990s was before the media internet – so it’s unlikely any of that information was available via a search engine. Which means that, as I’ve noted before, it effectively doesn’t exist.

I normally have more time for the FT as a paper than most of the rest, but it’s becoming infected with the same short-termist amnesia suffered by the rest of Fleet Street. And that’s probably a result of cost-cutting – getting rid of old hacks and subs who actually remember stuff from long, long ago (like Britpop).

We’ll see how this goes as time moves on. I’m not betting for any greater accuracy and insight from the nationals, frankly…

I just got my notification of the rollout of the shiny new NHS health record database. It also kindly offered me the chance to opt out (only because it was required to by our pesky data protection laws, I suspect).

Hmm. What to do.

Well, it sounds like a great idea that will save me aggravation and make it easier for the NHS to treat me. And the government will take good care of my personal information. It says so in the letter:

“Strict security measures will be in place at all times”

So that’s alright. Let’s just double check how secure government data is generally.

UK’s families put on fraud alert
Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing.

Government’s record year of data loss
A record 37 million items of personal data went missing last year, new research reveals.

Another UK Government Data Breach
Britain’s Ministry of Defence has announced that a stolen laptop has put the personal details of 600,000 at risk.

Yet another major UK Government data loss
A contractor, PA Consulting, working for the UK’s Home Office lost a memory stick that contained the unencrypted confidential records of 130,000 UK criminals.

British Government computer system shut down after data breach
The latest data breach saw a memory stick containing details of 12 million people found outside a pub.

Personal details sent to the wrong family in data security breach
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has found The Highland Council to be in breach of the Data Protection Act after personal data relating to several members of one family was inadvertently disclosed to another unrelated individual.

Gosh, I don’t know – what do you think?

Apparently the Tories have considered getting either Google or Microsoft to host the files instead. It’s a mark of how incompetent governments are generally that I’m almost persuaded this is a good thing…

Given the turmoil in professional media at the moment, there’s been a fair amount of talk about entrepreneurial journalism recently (ie if no one else is going to pay you for being a journalist, maybe you’ll have to figure out a way of making it work as a business yourself).
As it happens, I’ve been teaching a course at Solent University about online strategy, which is also very much focused on understanding the business models of the web and how journalism students can exploit them.
We’ve covered a whole range of the usual monetisation options – from banner ads to paywalls. But one of the most interesting research topics has been internet marketing.
I love internet marketers. And I think internet marketing has a ton of stuff to teach journalism. Here’s why:
Internet marketers have clear goals

• Make money
• Build a database of customers
• Use targeted blogs, microsites and email newsletters to reach them

Immediately you can see where this starts to diverge from journalism. Journalism has a tendency to say “we know what we want to do, we know what’s good for you, that’s what we’re going to give you”. And then get all upset and cross when people don’t rush to buy their product.
Focus on the audience
Internet marketers don’t do this. They focus immediately and unstintingly on figuring out what needs an audience has and meeting them. And then figuring out the best way to encourage that audience to buy whatever it is they’re offering. It’s a completely different approach that journalism could learn a lot from.
I know, I know. It’s not journalism. These people are just trying to sell stuff. It’s not the same at all.
But actually, there are important parallels.
Internet marketers are selling information
That is, actually, what journalists do. It’s not such a leap to start thinking in terms of making that information valuable to readers.
There are plenty of other useful lessons:

• There’s a total focus on SEO
• Content matters and is valuable
• They find out what the reader really values
• They offer the reader something they will want to pay for
• They use every effort to find readers and make them want to read

I’m particularly struck by the second point. Sure, there’s a lot of spam bloggery and rubbish available in the murky world of e-marketing. But basically this is a world of information products – articles and e-b00ks.
Content matters
From the appropriately titled YouCanWriteArticles.com sales site comes this lesson:

You already know that writing articles is the single most effective way of building an online business. How do I know that you know? Because everyone says so. All the big name gurus, all the small-time forum junkies, all the bloggers, all the SEO experts, even the people in the know at the search engines. They all agree that articles are the big secret to online success.

There’s one group missing from this list, of course. Journalists are conspicuous by their absence. Because I suspect most journalists don’t, in their heart of hearts, actually believe this. Otherwise why are they talking about getting the government to subsidise their work?
This is a world where the people involved are looking into every aspect of communication to figure out how to make money.
I’ve signed up to a few email newsletters to see how they work and what’s on offer. One is Kickstart by Martin Avis, which has quite a few interesting links and pointers to this strange new world. [NB: I’m not actually making any money from this, don’t fret that your pure, journalistic heart will be sullied by reading this. Although I really should be.]
As far as I can tell, Martin Avis really does make his living from internet marketing, so it’s interesting to see what he does. And what he does is use an email list to generate sales leads for information products – both his own, and other people’s (getting an affiliate cut in the process).
His content, bless his heart, is a bit rubbish – he mixes reviews of some of the latest products with inspirational quotes and anecdotes from his life in Sidcup. But you know, that could be deliberate – part of his “I’m not slick, I’m a really normal bloke” brand image.
Internet marketers are multimedia to the core
Interestingly, however, he, and the others, are exploring all the things that journalism should – multimedia, for instance.
Avis has started a series of ten-minute audio interviews with other emarketing gurus on his blog – using his iPhone and the iProRecorder app. Other marketers are running online TV channels to sell their products and strategies, or selling video instruction courses.
As for social media – I thought journalists were are all over Twitter like a rash, but emarketers have them beaten, using paid-for services such as the appallingly named Twitollower to generate followers and traffic to their other sites.
Internet marketers integrate their communications
Most importantly, internet marketers are integrating their different communications platforms. They make their blogs talk to Twitter, use Twitter to generate email leads and channel all their traffic to tailored, SEO-heavy sales material. They use audio, video, images and good old text in whatever combination they think will work best to meet their goals.
And while these goals are pretty much “making money”, the best of them also have an ethos of value that shouldn’t be ignored.

What works is to provide real, useful, naturally-written information. What works is to put the reader first and your profits second.

Which wouldn’t go amiss in the editorial office of a national newspaper.
Five key questions
Let’s finish by looking at five key marketing questions that should actually be five key journalism questions.

1. Are there people out there who want to know what you know?
2. Are there lots of them?
3. Are they hungry for your information or just casually 
interested?
4. Will what you have to say satisfy one of the basic human needs
 that drive us all: money, health, love, security, self-esteem,
 entertainment?
5. Are they already proven to be prepared to spend money on 
information products?

If the answer’s no, you’re not doing your job – whether as a marketer or as a journalist.

It turns out that my friend and regular Freelance Unbound commenter Mel is at more-or-less the cutting edge of publishing.

Apart from the time she spends as a welcome gadfly here, it turns out she is a secret novelist. In fact, I’ve just received her latest (well, first) outing through the post after ordering it online.

It’s kind of chick-lit (tagline: “Never date a celebrity with a drink problem” – not normally one of the things that concerns me much), but it’s an impressive achievement. Not least because, like many in the media field, I have been not managing to write a novel for about 15 years now.

It seems that life in rural Wiltshire – and possibly the media recession – is kind to creativity. I mean, when there’s nowhere to go in the evening, and the day job is quiet, what else are you going to do? Watch daytime TV?

Why is it at sort-of the cutting edge of publishing? Because I bought it from Lulu.com. Lulu.com is one of a few sites now that allows you to publish work yourself, entirely digitally, and then prints it on demand for anyone who wants a copy enough to pay the £8.62 plus P&P it costs. Delivery is in three or four days – and the total cost is about as much as a premium price paperback in a real shop.

It’s a fascinating model – and one that is only possible thanks to both digital creation and distribution of media files, and one-off digital print that has very small set-up costs.

After uploading your digital files (it takes Word, PostScript or PDF among others), you can specify a range of different print sizes, in either paperback or hardback. You can also set your own price – whether just enough to cover the costs (if you’re just aiming it at your Mum), or higher to give you a larger royalty. Lulu also takes a 20% commission on each order, if you price it so you make a profit.

This used to be the kind of thing that was the domain of vanity publishing. You fork out several thousand pounds to publish a limited edition of your beloved history of Hertfordshire railway stations, for example. But instead of having boxes of unwanted copies mouldering in your attic, now you can print one-offs as they’re needed. Yes, the unit price is much higher, but you don’t have to lay out any money at all up front, as all the cost is borne by the customer.

It’s not the sort of thing that will make an author rich – self-publishing rarely does. If you want to make a living out of writing books, you’ll still need to find a publisher with the marketing and distribution clout to sell enough copies to make larger print-runs viable.

But services like this do open up book publishing to almost anyone with the creativity to write, whether fiction or non-fiction. And the results are professional enough. The cover is clearly a bit thinner than a normal paperback, and there’s no printing on the inner covers, but otherwise it’s the same format as a paperback you’ll buy in Waterstone’s.

Is this kind of thing a threat to conventional publishers? Probably not in the way the surfeit of free online content is helping to undermine traditional newspaper publishing. I suspect anyone willing to invest the time to buy and read a full-length novel will also have higher expectations of its quality than casual web visitors.

I did join Lulu.com a while ago, thinking it might be a good vehicle for my own attempt at fiction that I could then promote excessively on Freelance Unbound. But given my lack of progress on that front, I’m more than happy to pimp Mel’s achievement here. Go, visit and buy…

It seems Rupert Murdoch is actually going to start locking away his online newspaper content behind paywalls. From June he’s going to charge for access to the loss-making Times and Sunday Times.

Will the gamble work? More informed commentators than I have argued strongly that it won’t (though that hasn’t stopped me doing the same).

At £2 a week, access is not that expensive, but I suspect News International will have to make it smooth and easy for users to pay if they want to get much take-up.

Will the increase in revenue from committed readers make up for the loss in advertising revenue if his traffic drops sharply? It’ll be fascinating to see. The fact that the papers lose money at the moment makes me wonder how compelling the content actually is – and if it is so compelling, why can’t he make a profit on it anyway?

But given my place in the media, on this one I guess I could stand to be proved wrong…

Caught yesterday in the Metro – a brief news report on a social networking survey by InSites (ugh) Consulting.
As reported in Metro:

• 77% of UK internet users use social networking sites
• 42% of UK internet users use Twitter
• 50% of UK internet users use Facebook

Let’s look at those numbers, shall we?

First – 77% of UK internet users use social networking sites. Great – that seems fine. There’s even a graphic (right).
But what about that 42% of UK internet users who use Twitter?
This is clearly nonsense. Twitter is a minority service used regularly by relatively few internet users (and dominated, I contend, by media users).
So, in the spirit of old-fashioned fact-checking, which seems to be beyond most reporting these days, I thought I’d take a look at the survey itself. (Which is here, if you’re interested.)
First, how many people actually use Twitter at all. Mashable says about 18 million. That’s “use” in the sense of log in once a month.
Apparently 79.4% of the UK population are internet users (seems to be out of everyone, not just the adult population). Out of a total population of 61,393,000 (2008), that makes 48,746,042 (you know, roughly).
So – 18 million Twitter users worldwide and fewer than 49 million internet users in the UK. That’s 36.9%, if anyone’s counting. So even if all the Twitter users in the world were in the UK, they still wouldn’t make up 42% of UK internet users.
So where does that rubbish 42% statistic come from?
One possibility is the 42% of users who use Twitter less than they did when they first joined (right). But a more likely candidate is the 42% of internet users who are “aware” of Twitter. That’s aware as in “I think I’ve heard of that”, rather than actually using it.

You can see this in a nice chart (left), helpfully provided by the people who carried out the survey. But you have to actually scroll through as many as 32 slides out of 93 in a really long slideshow, so I guess that’s a bit hard.
This leads us on to the third statistic in our list – the UK’s 50% of Facebook users.
The same graphic that shows 42% of people have heard of Twitter indicates that 51% of internet users are active Facebook members. I assume this is where the Metro stat comes from. But that’s worldwide users. UK Facebook users actually make up 72% of the online population – which is shown in yet another helpful and easy-to-understand chart from the survey slideshow (below).

The upshot is that Metro got two out of three key facts wrong in its tiny (100 word) story. How is that even possible? How hard can it be to look through a sodding slideshow and note down the numbers correctly? And why on earth can’t the writer remember that this is a global survey, not a UK one?
It’s not simply the lack of checking and understanding. If you think about it for just a moment, the Twitter statistic just has to be wrong. How many Twitter users do you know? Is it nearly half of everyone you know who’s online? Of course not – and that’s what the writer of this should have thought. Don’t just parrot figures (especially if you get them wrong). Actually think about what you’re writing, for heaven’s sake.
More from the illiterate and innumerate world of journalism real soon…

I’ve been rewriting some undergraduate course descriptions for online journalism and I’ve realised I have one big problem with them. I can’t think how to update the recommended student book lists.
One problem is that whatever I choose has to have longevity. Every time a course is rewritten, it has to be validated by an academic panel, and you don’t get to do that very often. So everything from the core texts to the assessment criteria have to be set in stone for a few years. Which is ironic as that’s the one thing that online journalism isn’t.
Online journalism, and digital media in general, is so fast moving that it’s very difficult to predict which technology or techniques will last. The course descriptions I’m revising were written about four or five years ago – an aeon in web time – so there’s an emphasis on repurposing already published print material for the web, as well as a focus on blogging.
But, as Paul Boutin wrote in Wired, blogging is “so 2004”. That’s not to say that it’s unimportant – just that it’s lost a lot of ground to social networking as a disruptive social and communications force.
As for repurposing – that presupposed a model of print-then-upload to the web. But many publications have switched to online only, operate a web-first, then print, model, or were never published physically in the first place.
Over at New Journalism Review, Steve Hill recommends Producing for Web 2.0 (Media Skills), by Jason Whittaker as a good (if not perfect) general textbook.
But this highlights my other problem. Though I am happy to take on his recommendation, I haven’t actually read it. In fact, I haven’t read any books on online journalism.
Shocking though this may seem, it’s not really surprising. I’ve spent much of my time working in journalism, rather than reading books about it. And because the discipline is changing so fast and so much, I tend to find the most interesting and up-to-date thinking and writing is actually online.
But it’s no good recommending a series of web links on a course description. Given the internet’s transience, there’s every chance they will be dead between one student intake and the next (which happened to an interesting account of process journalism on Techcrunch that I linked to a little while ago). [UPDATE: This seems to have been fixed at last – perhaps my email to the IT team at Techcrunch got through…]
But also, I can’t see a series of web links carrying much weight at an academic board meeting. They like books, you see. It’s a university thing.
So I’m stuck. I’m reluctant to swap my reading list of books about blogging and the now-archaic cutting edge of digital media practice in the early 2000s for books about Facebook and Twitter, because I know for sure they will seem equally outdated in a few years’ time. And though I’m not convinced books are the most effective way of teaching online journalism, I can’t rely on the web. What to do?
Aha – the solution is obvious. Put out a call on Twitter for suggestions. I knew it had to have its uses…