Freelance Unbound

Iain Martin of the Wall Street Journal has written an interesting series of posts fisking the Financial Times.
Essentially he argues that the FT – which is typically perceived as a bastion of the pro-capitalist media, and also has a reputation for quality coverage – is biased and sloppy.
One post discusses an FT story on industry worries about a potential post-election Conservative planning regime. It quotes EDF Energy – whose communications director happens to be Gordon Brown’s brother – and also spins the headline to be much more dramatic than the story merits (well, that’s journalism for you).
Another refers to City hostility to Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne’s plans for bank bonuses, but fails to to back this up with relevant quotes. Then a third looked at how the FT bigged up an anti-Tory letter from Labour attack dog Alastair Campbell into another prominent anti-Conservative story. Which is hardly news, since that’s what Alastair Campbell exists to do.
As a long-time weekend FT reader, I had noticed what I took to be isolated bits of left-leaning writing, mainly in the Magazine. But I thought it was just the usual mis-match between left-leaning journos and the paper’s pro-business stance and which hadn’t been picked up and edited out.
But if Guido Fawkes is to be believed, this is a deliberate trend. He suggests that the paper’s falling circulation in its London City heartland means its focus is becoming more Europhile – and hence statist, if not socialist – as overseas sales become more important.
Which papers are benefitting? The relentlessly free market City AM, which is enjoying a healthy circulation boost and is apparently making money, and the resurgent Wall Street Journal, apparently.
It’s interesting stuff. It reminds me of the popular misconception that The Sun was still “a Labour paper” many years after it started vociferously supporting the Tories. Mention the FT to many people, including journalists, and they’d probably have no idea it was starting to lean leftwards.
But it’s also an interesting case study in whether or not it pays to stick to your journalistic guns. The key question is whether the long-term damage to the FT‘s financial and business credibility outweighs any short-term gain from playing to a more anti-capitalist European sentiment.

Thanks to Greg Watts and FleetStreetBlues for weighing in on my Beyond Journalism essay.
I used a comment by FleetStreetBlues on my media recession poll as a springboard for some ideas I have been developing on creativity and the way that we tend to put boundaries around the things we do in life.
Though they graciously conceded much of the main argument, the FleetStreetBlues crew made the point that, although I had survived the media recession doing interesting work, I hadn’t, crucially, survived it as a journalist.
Which, let’s face it, is strictly true. I’m not solely a journalist – nor do I want to be. The freelance is unbound, after all. And as things stand I’m getting less like a journalist (at least in those terms) as I move into other areas of creative work.
Greg Watts is coming from my side of the argument when he says:

“Journalism is one branch of the writing tree. Marketing copy is another.”

So, yes, like Greg, I see myself as a writer, rather than a journalist.
But does any of this matter? I certainly don’t disagree with FleetStreetBlues – they are, after all, literally correct. Are we just having a pointless “you say potato, I say po-tah-to” disagreement?
I’m not sure. There’s something else here bothering me that I’m trying to pin down.
It could be that I remember typesetting.
Anyone over the age of 45 probably does. It involved sending your laboriously typewritten copy to a different company (or different department, if you worked on a national paper) to be turned into galley proofs.
Teams of (largely) men sweated over hot metal type (well, actually some kind of phototypesetting by the time I got involved) and produced the raw material of media layouts. After you stuck your galleys down to dummy pages using hot wax (no, I’m not making this up), the typesetter would make up the pages for printing.
It was a pleasantly solid process. You felt you were somehow involved in a semi-industrial activity. Digital pre-press workflow just doesn’t have the same romance somehow. I just can’t get excited about PDFs.
But, as the song says, all things must pass. The arrival of the Apple Mac and desktop publishing eclipsed typesetting – provoking futile rearguard industrial action by typesetting union the NGA and causing the bulk of colour reprographics work to be sent to the Far East, which had quickly geared up to take advantage of the new technology.
What happened to typesetting? It ended. It ceased to be. It is an ex-industry – though I’m sure there are some craftspeople somewhere creating printed material using hot metal technology funded by an Arts Council grant.
So if you asked a typesetter how they survived the upheaval of the early 1990s, it’s almost certain that they wouldn’t have survived it as a typesetter.
I think this is important. Typesetters went into a whole range of other work to put food on the table, some of which was more or less related to typesetting.
Because as the cost of digital kit came down, a big chunk of that colour repro work that went to Hong Kong or Singapore came back to the UK. Where it was handled by a lot of the old typesetters who were now working in digital pre-press. Though not as typesetters. Not exactly.
I guess I have the same sense about journalism. It’s not going to vanish in the way that typesetting did. But it’s going to change radically. What were full-time jobs may become part-time hobbies, as redundant or under-employed journalists set up community-based news sites, but pay the bills writing marketing copy and doing consulting.
And if part of being a production journalist used to involve learning how to use QuarkXPress (after the hot wax thing), now it involves running what is effectively a pre-press workflow, up to and including the final digital files that produce the printing plates.
In future, it will involve being able to construct an online reader forum using CMS tools, as well as handling the Flash-based banner ads that need to be placed on the site. Oh, and write some halfway decent copy.
(I feel sorry for the typesetters in all of this too. They’ve almost been displaced from repro now. Heaven knows where they’ll go next.)
And as FleetStreetBlues quite rightly notes, that isn’t journalism. Not really. But I do wonder if what we have understood as journalism up to now will still be the model for this strange media activity we’re involved in forever.
I suspect that framing a question such as how we survived the media recession as journalists may make as much sense in the future as asking how we’ve managed to walk on land as fish.

I approached yesterday’s feedback session with journalism students with some trepidation. Although I wanted my criticism to be robust, I also wanted to avoid putting them off writing for life.
As it was, I needn’t have worried. It went pretty well. No one actually went for me with a sharp object, and some said they really wanted to get more feedback to improve. Which is great – because that’s exactly what it’s all about.
In the spirit of quid pro quo, it’s also important for lecturers to acknowledge the feedback of students. I’m very keen to ensure that whatever criticism I’m making of student writing [a] makes sense and [b] addresses the areas they want to improve.
So, journalism students. Don’t be afraid to give feedback as well. I’m happy to take on board suggestions about critiquing student work, shaping whatever guidance I give to address their concerns, be it style, structure, research or whatever.
Generally the problem is structure though. I’m just saying.

I’ve only just come across this recent study from the Pew Research Center in the US, which finds that public confidence in the accuracy of the news media is at a two-decade low.
Apparently only 29% of Americans polled trusted news organisations to be accurate, while only 26% thought they were unbiased.
It’s also interesting to see that, although TV retains its dominance for news consumption (71% of respondents), more people said they got their news from the web (42%) than from newspapers (33%).
These figures are pretty shameful. Journalism has never really been the shining beacon of truth its boosters claim, but 55% of people in 1985 thought you could believe the news.
Of course, this doesn’t establish whether news stories are genuinely less accurate, or that people are simply more cynical. But either way, this is hardly a good result for the media when it is trying to pitch itself as vital to the foundations of democracy.

I missed this on Tuesday (I’m not obsessed with the media you know), but it seems the London Lite is to close.
I’m kind of glad – but only because I now don’t look so stupid for predicting it prematurely.
Does this mean the London Evening Standard will get a free ride to success? In theory it should have a better chance of making money, given that it has no competition whatsoever.
But as Greg Watts points out in a comment here, the Standard is just not doing a very good job of representing Londoners and their lives. I hardly ever bother to pick it up on my commute – even fending off the desperate distributors at Waterloo Station.
It’s big, bulky – and just not very engaging as a paper. God help me, I sort of preferred The London Paper for a low-impact and cursory read on the train.

Paul Bradshaw on the Online Journalism Blog responds to a journalist’s query about whether there’s a glut of journalism courses by saying, essentially, that it’s the wrong question.
He argues that there are only too many journalism degrees or courses if you think a journalism degree is about training people to be journalists. Which, as we all know, is on a hiding to nothing since all the jobs started disappearing.
Instead, Bradshaw thinks a journalism degree is about education, not training. It’s all about research, conceptual knowledge and critical analysis, as well as learning communication skills.
The trouble is, most people in the real world don’t think like that. Undergraduates often see their degree course as “qualifying” them in journalism. It’s perceived as a practical, vocational course. Even if, as a BA, it really isn’t.
More to the point, it makes hammering home the more generic communication-type education much more difficult, as students can’t see the connection between research, conceptual knowledge and critical analysis and working on, say, Heat.
Bradshaw goes on to say that it doesn’t matter, because many other degree courses don’t lead on to employment.

I’m sure that most people studying drama hope to become actors; that most people studying art hope to work in the creative industries; even that many people studying English Literature hope to become writers.

Drama, maybe. But the study of art can be part of a rich, personal, cultural life, just like the study of English Literature (disclosure: I am an English grad). Journalism just doesn’t have that resonance. It is a trade, after all, not an “opportunity for personal development”.
I’m all in favour of the non-vocational degree. But if you’re going to be teaching communication skills, call it communication, or cultural analysis or something that is not job-specific.
Why don’t we do that? Because parents – the ones who often have a say in whether their children’s degree course is a waste of time – think it sounds too woolly. Instead they want – you guessed it – a course with the prospect of some vocational-type qualification at the end of it.
And guess what? The government has an employability imperative in higher education. Which means we can’t just treat degrees as the pathway to personal growth anymore.
No, we shouldn’t always expect a degree to correspond to a vocational employment choice. But journalism sits awkwardly in the higher education pantheon. And there are a hell of a lot of those courses…

I have noted before that journalism students seem loath to actually write anything – as if creativity is a limited resource and they need to save it for when it’s really needed (ie when they have a hand-in).
But they also seem strangely reluctant to offer their work up for feedback from tutors.
It’s a puzzle. They certainly need feedback, as they have quite a task ahead of them on their course.
Journalism students need to pick up the specific skills of journalistic writing – which requires a number of different styles and qualities, from news to features to opinion. But in addition their English communication skills can be quite poor and they desperately need to improve those.
I don’t really blame them for this. These are core communication and language skills that aren’t really taught well enough at school.
But what also seems to be a hangover from school is inexperience in handling criticism. (That’s criticism in the sense of “your writing doesn’t  really work now because of a, b and c, and you need to do x, y and z to improve it”, by the way, rather than “you are crap”.)
One potential student on an Open Day recently summed it up by saying she was tired of teachers at school always saying her writing was “fine”. She wanted to know what was actually wrong with it so she could fix it and get better. The kind of positive reinforcement she was getting at school was actually holding her back.
But it takes a certain confidence to open yourself up to the Mallet of Loving Correction (©John Scalzi) when it’s not something you’re used to.
I aim to wield the mallet on Monday, so I’m hoping no one breaks down or takes it personally. But it’s a vital part of journalism and needs to be experienced on a regular basis.
Playing the Game was absolutely right in his post on work experience when he said:

Please don’t take it personally that you write for shit and someone dares to help you structure a story. Even the most seasoned hacks on the nationals have sat down next to their bosses and had their tale ripped to shreds.

Because that’s what’ll happen if you end up in a real job on a real publication somewhere. Some cranky editor or section chief will shred your work and may not be that tactful in doing it. I’ve seen it happen. It’s not pretty.
So embrace feedback. Seek feedback. Love feedback. Journalism lecturers love to be asked, because it shows you care about your work (and, OK, it feeds our ego). And we love to give it because we want you to improve.

I really enjoyed this post from Business Insider editor Henry Blodget (really – someone is actually called that). 
His argument:

1. The debate is not about journalism but change. 
2. The people moaning about the death of journalism are really moaning about the death of newspapers.  
3. These are the people who stand to lose out in whatever transition is upon us.
4. Some things are always lost in transitions. Deal with it. (There is overcapacity anyway.)
5. Those who embrace the change find they actually enjoy the new world.
6. The journalism it produces is quite effective actually.

It’s a nice, open and upbeat approach to the change that is upon us. And it’s also very positive about the continuing importance of journalism. (Which regular visitors may appreciate, as it’s not always something I’m able to be…)

I was happy to see the stalwart folk at FleetStreetBlues flag up my online how-is-your-media-recession poll a while ago. But a comment they made in their post begs for a little more attention. (Actually, it begged for it weeks ago, but I’ve been a bit preoccupied.)

Freelance Unbound reckons he’s survived the recession just about OK, with the worst of it a five month period starting in September 2008. But there’s a catch – in order to survive, he’s been forced to diversify. By which – by his own admission – he means turn to things other than journalism (marketing, web production work, brochure design).

It’s that “by his own admission” thing that caught my eye. It’s like it’s a guilty, shameful secret that I ought really to hide from my peers. I survived but (whisper it), I had to compromise myself.
Now, I know the FleetStreetBlues stance on journalism – it’s quite hard line:

The best thing about journalism isn’t blogging, or Twittering, or finding innovative multimeeja ways to tell a story, or even asking someone difficult questions Paxman-style. It’s about finding something out that no one knows, and telling people. Simple as that.

I respect this clarity of vision and purpose, and I wish them all the best with it. But, you know, it’s quite a limited view.
There’s more to journalism than news

It’s quite a limited view of journalism, for a start, which has a kind of sprawling, amorphous, uncontrollable life of its own. It encompasses soft magazine features, hard investigative reporting, specialist trade writing, photography (yes, photo-journalism has the word journalism in it), celebrity nonsense and a whole range of production work, including my beloved, and dying, sub-editing.
But beyond this, it’s quite a limited view of what could, or should, make up a creative working life.
This came to me in a moment of more or less blinding clarity one grey afternoon in between feature pages on a trade magazine shift in west London, some two or three years ago.
For years, I had that nagging sense that I just wasn’t amounting to anything in my media career. Hacking out show previews and features on promotional vouchers – no matter how wittily put together – didn’t really seem to satisfy my need to be somehow – creative.
I felt trapped. I had to pay the mortgage and all the bills that come with more-or-less adult life. And what was left at the end of the month had to go towards feeding Gordon Brown’s taxation addiction.
Spare time? Not so much. And what there was didn’t feel like enough time to achieve anything very much. Certainly not the great unwritten novel or film script – or whatever else I wasn’t managing to get around to writing.
But then it all changed.
John Scalzi, writing slut
For some reason lost to history, I found myself on the Whatever – a long-running blog by science fiction author John Scalzi. But here’s the thing. He didn’t start out being a science fiction author. Oh no. He started out by writing for AOL’s web site. Then when he was made redundant, he freelanced doing anything from games reviews to marketing copy. As he says in his post on utterly useless writing advice:

I’m not a writing snob. I won’t just write certain types of writing — I’m a slut, I’ll write anything if you pay me. This is related to being flexible, quite obviously, and it’s also rooted in my desire to try different things. For example, some of my most profitable writing gigs involve writing marketing materials.
A fair number of writers get snippy about writing marketing stuff, but you know what? I actually think it’s kind of fun. It’s fun to try a new medium of writing, it’s fun to set a goal and try to hit it, it’s fun to learn how this stuff works. And of course, writing marketing material pays really well, so it’s also fun to spend the money I make off it. Some writers may hold up their noses at my largely indiscriminate writing proclivities, but that’s fine. More work for me, more money for my family.

Frankly, this was a revelation. Here was someone who had trodden similar ground to me and, instead of being cranky and unfulfilled, positively revelled in it.
A six-figure writing income
This attitude didn’t hurt his earning power, either. In a post on writing and money, Scalzi talks at illuminating length about how his writing income breaks down and what he’s made over the years. Which has been in the six-figures (in US dollars), on average, from 1998 to 2006. One year it hit $150,000 – a staggering amount of cash for freelance writing – thanks to a healthy amount of juicy corporate work.
Don’t get me wrong, the money’s a big draw. But it was the attitude that went with it that really changed my perspective. OK, so you’re producing 1,500 words on some promotional marketing show at the NEC. Should you be all tormented by the futility of it all? Not Scalzi:

Writing professionally, even at its worst, still beats the hell out of lifting heavy objects off the back of a loading dock for $10 an hour.

Which, in that moment of epiphany, I saw was true. I also realised that my idea that spending my time writing marketing-driven feature copy was standing in the way of my creativity was utterly false. Writing brochure copy and writing cool short stories are not two entirely different things. They are two related things at different ends of the same spectrum.
How the freelance became unbound
From this insight has come a range of positive things. Freelance Unbound is one of them – it’s a tool to help me write and learn about web publishing. It’s a useful space for me to organise my thoughts on meeja and suchlike. And it’s really good practice and discipline for regular writing. I value that tremendously.
I was also prompted to cast my net a bit wider in writing terms. The thought of all that boring, back-of-the-book ad-get feature copy I was writing meant I didn’t see the need to branch out at all. I mean, none of it was creative, right? So I might as well just do the same old thing.
This year, however, I’ve written a load of CEO profiles for a Dorling Kindersley book and dipped my toe into corporate writing. And it’s all quite different stuff that has helped shape up my writing skills in valuable ways.
But if this is true of writing, it’s also true of other creative endeavours. From this insight, and driven by savage publishing recession, came the realisation that there’s no point in being precious about design and layout, either.
Which is why I’m more than happy to spend some of my working hours lovingly crafting web banner ads and marketing materials for various business events. Journalism? Nah. Interesting? Actually yes – especially given that I am being paid in effect to pick up a whole new set of skills that will undoubtedly be valuable in future.
So when I read accounts of redundant journalists signing on and bemoaning the demise of the old-style newsroom, I do get a bit tetchy if they don’t seem prepared to branch out even a little from their comfort zone.
If you aren’t convinced, I’ll have to link again to a great post from Recovering Journalist Mark Potts about life after journalism. He makes the case much better than I do and it’s well worth another read.
There’s a great big interesting world out there beyond journalism. I admit it…

The excellent and sweary Playing The Game blog has some top, on-the-money advice for journalism students going on work experience.
I particularly agreed with:

Please don’t take it personally that you write for shit and someone dares to help you structure a story.

Because, actually, journalism students, you can’t write. Not for the most part. And even if you are pleasingly literate and can write the Queen’s English, you can’t really write journalism. Not yet. (Though it will, given effort, come in time.)
Please bear this in mind when I gently dismantle your work over the coming weeks.
Read and learn, read and learn…