Freelance Unbound

Here’s a nice exchange on this morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 between Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) chief executive Guy Parker and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband.
The ASA has ruled that Government advertisements on climate change were exaggerated – specifically that they made definitive predictions about future weather effects that could not yet be proved.
Ed Miliband defended the use of a strong advertising message to generate public support for carbon reduction, saying:

“These things will happen in 20 or 30 years’ time, so they’re not front of mind.”

I’m sure he meant to say “these things might happen in 20 or 30 years’ time”.
No one picked him up on it either. It’s a media thing…

Warning: intense WordPress stats geekery ahead

We’re coming up to the annual WordPress geekery blowout that is my full year web stats report.
Freelance Unbound’s half-yearly web stats geekery report came when the site was hosted on WordPress.com. This had its ups and downs.
The upside was that it was simple to understand – WordPress has created a very user-friendly set of Dashboard tools to help newbies get to grips with site traffic. The downside was that it wasn’t that detailed or accurate. As far as I could tell, it didn’t tell you who just visited the home page – as opposed to clicking on individual stories.
This seems to have been resolved on WordPress.com now. But it meant that at that time my traffic seems to have been under-reported. One of the motivations for switching to self-hosted WordPress was to install some more detailed analytics. I really wanted to get a deeper insight into my stats.
How did that go? A bit hit and miss, frankly.
Google Analytics
First off, I signed up to Google Analytics. Sign-up is easy enough – but figuring out how and where to paste in the analytics code into the right place in my web site was pretty confusing. Not, however, as confusing as figuring out where my site traffic information actually is on the Google Analytics site.
I was ready to give up on it, when, thankfully I discovered there was a Google Analytics dashboard plug-in. A shame it took me a while to find it, but it did simplify things a lot.
But there were still a couple of problems. First, its numbers were completely different from the old WP Stats. It meant I had no idea whether moving the site to a new domain name and host had boosted traffic, or if it was being measured in a different way.
WordPress Stats
Eventually, I found the WP-Stats plug-in, which gives you back your old WordPress.com-type stats. It showed visits more or less in line with the old WordPress.com site, which told me the traffic boost I had experienced was because Google Analytics measured visits differently.
But the other problem with Google Analytics is that it doesn’t really tell me what I want to know. It’s there in the dashboard, but doesn’t seem to break out the stats graph into greater detail about top posts and pages. I guess for that I have to go back into Google and find it there. Which leaves me back at square one.
StatPress Reloaded
Then I discovered the StatPress Reloaded plug-in, which seemed to be the answer to all my prayers. It breaks down my traffic into minute detail, but in easily understood visual format. At last, I thought, I have The Answer.
But on closer acquaintance, StatPress has been a bit of a let-down. Yes, it has fantastic detail (I even know all the IP addresses of my visitors’ ISPs. Which is, you know, the key to blogging success). But it doesn’t have any accessible archive that I can see.
There is supposed to be an export function that will let you export data for a specified period to Excel, say. But, frustratingly, it doesn’t seem to actually work. All I get is an empty file when I try it.
This has all left my stats a bit adrift. I’ve got inconsistent numbers, inconsistent formats and no track record of the most detailed figures.
Irritatingly, I didn’t realise that I had the option to integrate my WordPress.com blog stats with the WP-Stats plugin if I’d installed it straight away. At the least this would have meant I had a consistent year’s worth of at least some stats to share with my eager, geeky readership.
In short, I’ve made a bit of a hash of it all. So the annual blog stats geekery update won’t be quite as informative as I’d hoped. But as Soilman says, he’s been through the stats-obsessed stage and come out the other side. I often don’t bother looking at my stats from week to week and just focus on my content. Which is probably for the best…

Here’s a nice dissection on the Forbes web site of a Toyota Prius accelerator fault hoax that has hit US news media.
Apparently, James Sikes was driving a Toyota Prius in California when the accelerator jammed – the same fault that is said to have caused the death of a family in a Lexus and prompted the recall of a dozen Toyota models numbering more than a million vehicles.
After reaching 94mph and trying to prise the pedal off the floor with his hands, the deadly journey was only halted when a California Highway Patrol Car braked in front of him and the two cars slowed down together. Here’s one video report:

One big problem is that Sikes’s story was false. But the bigger problem, according to the Forbes story by Michael Fumento, is that the mainstream media simply took it at face value. At no point did any of the initial reports investigate any of Sikes’s claims:

Virtually every aspect of Sikes’s story as told to reporters makes no sense. His claim that he’d tried to yank up the accelerator could be falsified, with his help, in half a minute.

Fumento dissects all the other claims, including the dramatic claim that the patrol car had to brake right in front of the Prius to bring it to a halt. In fact the patrolman just ordered Sikes to put on the brakes and that’s what did the job – something the media coverage reported he wasn’t able to do.
Why wasn’t the mainstream media more critical of this not-terribly sophisticated hoax? Mainly, it seems, because the media was in a “Toyota feeding frenzy”. The news agenda was to knock a big – foreign – car manufacturer and not let the truth get in the way.
In fact it fell to web sites like Gawker.com and Jalopnik.com to dig the dirt on Sikes and employ some real journalistic scepticism. Oh, and some of those despised and parasitical bloggers also started picking holes in the story.
The perpetual cry of beleaguered media types is that journalism is vital to hold power to account. But to do that it really needs to wield some kind of capacity for critical, sceptical analysis.

The BBC has caught up on the whole unpaid internship debate. The Your Money segment on BBC News 24 on Saturday March 13 featured a new web site set up by disgruntled former intern Alex Try.
Interns Anonymous is quite well done, actually – with video documentary material, surveys and resources for interns. It’s also a WordPress.com blog, which means it was absolutely free to set up, and is part of the reason why it’s so much more difficult to find paid work in the media now. You used to have to pay people to produce that kind of site. Now you don’t.
But the heart of the site is its forums, where other disgruntled interns bewail the state of the graduate jobs market. Here’s a typical example from “Matt H”:

I graduated last year, and I cannot believe that it is expected, demanded even, that I work unpaid before getting a ‘proper’ job. I’m not a naive graduate who expected to walk into any job, but I equally did not expect my degree to appear so worthless to employers.

Well, duh. No – in fairness, he really does understand why:

Unfortunately all this is the result of too many graduates chasing too few jobs. A badly managed education policy of successive governments. Keen to push kids off to university with no long term plan for us afterwards.

That’s spot on. Then, of course, he shifts the blame onto those nasty employers: “Employers know this and exploit the situation.”
Yeah, I guess.
But here’s the thing. As I’ve said before, be more valuable. This means really researching the employment prospects of your degree before you actually do it.
I understand why students don’t really do this research beforehand. When you’re 18, you aren’t really focused on your long-term career. And rightly so, in some ways. I mean, you’ve got to be young and carefree at some point.
But the rest of the adult world should come clean and spell out the dropping value of the degree as a career ticket. It just doesn’t mean as much as it used to, and young people going into higher education need to know that.
They also need to know that it’s now more-or-less an entry-level requirement to be considered for the non-manual job market. But it’s not a guarantee for success in that market.
And that means thinking beyond just doing your degree. It took Matt H to actually graduate before he realised employers don’t really value many degrees anymore. Know this before you start at college means you can do the extra-curricular work you need to stand out against the sea of nondescript graduates our university system churns out every year.

I suspect that most journalists and journalism students assume that the toughest feature assignments are for the nationals – hard-hitting investigative exposes of political corruption, say – or for dirt-digging celebrity magazines. All that hanging around in the pouring rain at 3am to catch Ashley Cole in a compromising SMS incident, maybe, or pretending to be from Interflora to get access to Simon Cowell’s hallway.
I know nothing of this. For I write feature articles for the trade press.
In the pantheon of hard-nosed journalism, my work is fairly soft. For a while I was known as the king of the show preview, as I grabbed hold of any opportunity to churn out (read: carefully craft) 2,000-word articles about promotional marketing exhibitions, or regional shows about outdoor event services. You probably don’t even know what those are, and your life is infinitely richer for it.
There’s a simple reason for my choice of journalistic path. In terms of pure money-for-time reward (a self-employed tradesman’s key calculation) they offered by far the most bang for my writing buck.
Show previews were great – especially after the arrival of email. I could call in a whole lot of information with a mailshot and then write the feature around my other shift-based commitments. And then send in my invoice – the best bit.
I also enjoyed writing features about promotional badges (yes, really) and direct mail. There was nothing so dull or trivial that I would not eagerly accept my £200-£240 per thousand word commission to write it.
Because one of the key attractions was that they were relatively easy to research. Aside from the odd case study about a brand owner, as opposed to an industry supplier, most of the people I tried to talk to for a quote or background information were happy enough to speak to me. We were part of the great trade press symbiosis – they threw me some crumbs of information in return for the oxygen of free editorial publicity.
Case studies were a bit trickier, as consumer brand-owners had much less incentive to play ball. But the suppliers who wanted their trade press publicity could often persuade one to cough up something I could use.
I know. It’s hardly the Washington Post breaking the Watergate scandal – but they were often fun to write and they did pay the rent.
Somehow, however, all that seems to have changed.
I’ve written before about how hard it’s been to prise information out of some recycling companies who really ought to have been falling over themselves to parade their green credentials to a member of the fourth estate.
I’m finding the same thing happening now in the top secret world of oral care.
It’s weird, frankly. I’m writing a harmless feature about the changing face of toothpaste tubes, but no company involved with making or selling toothpaste has seen fit to talk to me about it. Either they’re in mid-product launch, or revealing whether they use plastic laminate or aluminium laminate in their tubes is commercial suicide.
The suppliers aren’t much better. I’ve had a few responses (for which many thanks). But several are simply not bothering. Which is fine – but strange, when a few lines on an email, or a five-minute conversation could get free column inches.
It makes me wonder whether this kind of back-of-the-book ad-driven feature writing has much left in it for me. I still enjoy the writing – but the research can be like drawing teeth, and word rates are starting to come under intense pressure from cost-conscious publishers. And – let’s face it – it’s not like I’m bringing a corrupt government to its knees.
Any freelance writers have any experience with this? What’s been your hardest “soft” feature? I’d love to know…

Though it’s sad to see a likely closure verdict handed down to the excellent BBC 6 Music station, I was at least relieved that BBC 4 survived Auntie’s cull.

Because I’m a documentary kind of guy. Sad, highbrow and worthy, that’s me.

So why, oh why, oh why, BBC, do you insist on dumbing down your documentaries? Are you embarrassed to be thought (whisper) elitist? Or are you trying to prove that BBC 4’s tiny 0.5% audience share isn’t worth the £71 million it costs to run?

Whatever it is, I hate the result.

Take Matthew Collings’ December 2009 BBC2 documentary What Is Beauty?.

It aimed to define what makes beauty in art. So why did it feel the need to provide a relentless background of noise?

On top of that, the background music chosen was sometimes so banal as to be insulting. Like Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale to illustrate Collings’ point that modern art galleries tend to be painted, er, white.

And the contrast between prehistoric cave painting and the tranquility of a 17th century landscape was enhanced by some percussion-heavy, effects-laden instrumental that distracted from not only the narrative, but also the sentiments it was trying to convey.

The soundtrack got more and more intrusive as the programme went on – to the point that it became difficult to hear the voiceover. Or perhaps under, in this case.

This is sloppy, sloppy film-making. But worse that this, it is insulting film-making. It insults the viewer – who is assumed to be an attention-deficient moron. And it insults the subject of the documentary.

Because what the film-makers are saying, in effect, is that the topic of the documentary – art, science, history, whatever – is simply not interesting enough to stand up by itself. They don’t believe that just looking at a piece of art is enough to hold our attention.

But for god’s sake, that’s what art is for.

Next thing you know, we’ll be listening to piped muzak in the Tate Modern. In case the art is, you know, not interesting enough. (It happens in commerce, too. I have this in my local branch of HSBC. They’ve got rid of all the bank tellers, installed lots of automated paying-in machines and other gadgets, and play HSBC radio (god, whose idea was that?) too loud over a speaker system. Great for the brand guys. Really.)

The BBC’s Horizon series is especially guilty. Chunks of a Horizon doc on gravity a couple of years ago were rendered almost unwatchable by the insistence of the director and editor of showing repeated slow-motion bouncing apples instead of letting chirpy physicist and ex-D-Ream keyboard player Brian Cox present simply to camera.

No subject is immune. A 2006 history doc about post-Roman barbarians? According to the BBC press office,“Terry Jones’s Barbarians takes a completely fresh approach to Roman history”.

That’s “completely fresh” in the sense of “trying to make it look as unlike history as possible”.

Terry Jones actually writes approachable and provocative history. But it still generally looks like real history.

Barbarians, on the other hand, pulled all the tricks of modern TV to make it look anything but. We had the obligatory shaky-cam, handheld filming technique – complete with random quick zoom – that is the staple of modern film-making. Which looked a bit weird when the screen was showing two middle-aged academics looking at some pottery.

Worst of all were the relentless cutaways to a group of dejected looking extras representing the downtrodden peasantry. For some reason they were shot in what looked like a public toilet, complete with grimy, once-white tiled walls and a bare light bulb swinging somewhere off-camera to create sinister, wildly oscillating shadows. Now that’s what I call atmosphere.

Am I just being an old curmudgeon? Someone who can’t deal with new ways of telling stories and conveying information? Sure, there’s probably something of that going on here.

But actually I think there’s a deeper, cultural problem. For all our bleating about the problems we face in our schools, we are simply uncomfortable with education in its own right – especially when it involves concentration and focus. And we believe that making education interesting must involve turning it into entertainment, or else no one will pay attention.

But this it utterly wrong. Because this kind of hyperactive nonsense is actually more difficult to take in than a carefully constructed narrative, told sensibly.

There’s been a recent flurry of condemnation in the J-blogs over the question of whether employers should charge interns for work experience (“No!” is the answer).
Emily Fraser Voigt [Update: original blog post deleted] asks “isn’t it hard enough already for new graduates?” and adds:

It seems to me like a callous way to exploit young people who don’t have much leverage and are just desperate to start their careers. Don’t they deserve a break?

Well – her point about leverage is right – and it’s the key to this issue (I’ve commented on this over there, but I’m going to reiterate it here).
Young people trying to get their first job don’t have much leverage when they aren’t that valuable – ie valuable to the people who will be paying the salary. And they aren’t valuable [a] in a recession, like now, and [b] when they pursue a career path that is oversubscribed.
Graduates can’t do much about [a], but they certainly can about [b]. Journalism never paid brilliantly, but now it’s getting hard to make it pay at all, as media publishers wither in the face of digital creation and distribution and the loss of advertising.
So don’t be surprised if a journalism degree doesn’t get you into paid work. In fact, don’t be surprised when months of unpaid internship doesn’t get you a job either – especially if you’re determined to break into one of the media’s sexier areas, like sports or entertainment.
Students really need to realise that if they want real job opportunities they need to develop skills and experience that are actually valuable to employers in a sector that actually has a future.
The trouble is that these are also often areas that don’t seem glamorous, and are also harder work – in science or technology for example.
It’s not down to employers to give graduates a break – if those graduates have skills that simply aren’t worth enough.
But if you are really determined to make a go of this underpaid and oversubscribed journalistic trade, here are a few suggestions:

• Do more than your coursework. Employers don’t care about your laboriously crafted 12-week magazine spread project. They really want to see consistent output in a real published arena. Could be the student paper; could be a music web site; could be a special interest magazine. But consistent output is professional output.
• You are your contacts. Your ability to find people to talk to and then talk to them is what will mark you out from 99% of your fellow journalism students (more of which in a subsequent post). The ability to track down good, relevant interview subjects puts you head and shoulders about the opposition.
• Bring an audience. Becoming a journalist doesn’t magically deliver you a ready audience, hanging on your every careless, yet brilliant, word. You actually have to put a lot of spadework in to attract those readers, to develop and nurture them and to keep them reading week in and week out.

This last point is probably the most difficult to grasp. But just as the key question from a music promoter will be “how many people will the band bring in”, publishers are starting to ask the same thing of bloggers in job ads. Do you have a niche audience? Can you bring them to a publication? Then you’ll be more valuable.
And then you have the leverage to avoid paying for your internship. Because you’ll actually be worth paying.

Yes, I finally cracked and bought this. My Samsung N140 has been cast aside in favour of the sleek, white sexiness of the new Apple MacBook. And don’t forget usability. Oh yes.
As many readers will know, I am not all that fond of my Samsung N140 netbook. Now I don’t have to use it as my main computer, which probably means I’ll start liking it more for certain limited things (keeping up with email on holiday, say, which is a bit sad).
In comparison, how has the MacBook been? A delight, frankly. Easy to set up, easy to use, nice to look at and, crucially, with a magnetic clip-on power adaptor, which means I won’t ever have to take this one apart, please god.
Unsurprisingly, the one heart-stopping glitch happened when I tried to install Windows XP using Apple’s BootCamp thing, so I can use my MacBook as a Windows laptop (something I have to do occasionally when I work on some badly written content management systems).
The CD stuck in the drive and suddenly I faced the notorious Apple “White Screen of Death™”. Luckily a quick call to Teja somewhere in Mumbai sorted it out (just zap the PRAM – hold down the Command, Alt and “p” and “r” keys while you boot up, then let the machine chime three times before you let go. Worked like a dream).
It’s like sinking into a nice warm, comfortable bath. The big question is whether coming home to Mac will help me boost posting frequency on Freelance Unbound…

It’s time to turn my Typekit code off. Typekit offers an online library of fonts you can use in your blog or web site without relying on it being installed on your visitor’s computer.
Though it’s been exciting to see Freelance Unbound with a headline font that isn’t either Georgia or Verdana (the web’s two default typefaces), It’s time to return to sober normality.
The audience reaction has been overwhelming – you hate it. Well, if my sample of one is representative. “It is a horrible font and makes your entries look like you’re trying to appeal to 6 year olds”, apparently.
Well, I kind of liked it, but what do I know. Also, if you were using an old browser, it appeared as some kind of Zapf Chancery-like scrolly typeface that looked a bit rubbish, so maybe it’s for the best. 
So, farewell then, quirky Edding 780. Welcome back, responsible Georgia.

We’re coming up to about halfway on several student journalism units I’m teaching – and already the prospect of student assessments is looming threateningly over the class.
So – a few words of advice to J-students faced with writing assessment deadlines.
Relax
One strange phenomenon I’ve noticed about student writing is that it’s much better when it’s not being assessed. That is, when students send me email about their project, they tend to communicate much better than they do in the stories they write for their project. It’s a performance anxiety thing. Students often get quite self-conscious about their writing style. They start using long words they don’t really understand and can’t spell, alongside tortured syntax that makes no sense. If you’re a journalism student (or, indeed, journalist), don’t do this.
Write short sentences
Instead, keep sentences short and organised. Make your points simply and logically. Don’t get all high-falutin’ about your prose.
Pretend you’re telling your story to a friend
If you freeze up in front of your web site’s content creation window, one good piece of advice is to draft your story as an email to someone you know. Imagine they’ve asked you what the story’s about – your job is to explain it to them clearly so they understand it. Which is, basically, what journalism does.
Record an audio draft
Some people are fine about telling a story verbally, but then get tied up trying to put it down on paper. This can affect journalism students (and even working journalists), especially at the start. So make verbal notes into an audio recorder and work on the story from them.
Find your voice
There’s no real mystery to writing – but it comes easiest when it comes naturally. Key to this is tone of voice, or style. Style isn’t about being fancy, it’s about saying whatever you have to say fluently and clearly – as you would in conversation with people you know. Be comfortable with your writing. Yes, you need to adapt your style to your material – a serious piece on a train crash will read differently from a celebrity gossip story. But it needs to be your voice each time.
Practice
Finally, as I’ve written before, the key to developing your own voice and becoming comfortable with writing is to keep doing it – regularly and often. Write every day – don’t save it all up for the assessment and do it the week beforehand. Though obviously many students will – and they will wonder why it seems so difficult to do.