Freelance Unbound

Much excitement and pontification has greeted the surprise news that the London Evening Standard is going to become a freesheet and double its print run in 10 days’ time. So what the hell, why not add to it…
One thing that has surprised me is that there hasn’t been an immediate announcement that the London Lite will be axed.
It would make sense – I mean, the advertising market couldn’t sustain two evening freebies before, so why should it now? And, let’s face it, empty the market of the freebies and a paid-for evening paper might have a clearer run to profits.
To me it would have made a lot of sense to simply close the London Lite once it had succeeded in its mission to scupper The London Paper – after all, it had been launched as a spoiler, and had no real raison d’être beyond that.
But maybe its slightly complicated ownership arrangement stands in the way. London Lite is owned by Daily Mail & General Trust, which used to own the Standard, before it was largely bought by Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev.
Now DMGT owns a minority stake in the Standard, but has an agreement to get free content from the paper for the London Lite. Which must make for interesting editorial meetings.
It also means that what I imagine had been a simple arrangement in 2006 to spike The London Paper‘s guns in order to protect the Evening Standard has now turned into something a bit more complicated.
London Lite and the Standard could now end up as bitter rivals in the free evening sector. And now media pundits are making noises to suggest that the London Lite even has a real future – soaking up more ad revenue now its rival has been killed.
I find all this very strange, actually. During all of this, the one thing I took for granted was that the London Lite was essentially a worthless piece of wastepaper. Yet here’s Roy Greenslade in the Guardian saying that the paper “is cleverly targeted to achieve a more upscale audience profile”.
He also agrees with an opinion piece by Stephen Glover in the Independent, who said that Rupert Murdoch “should never have launched [The London Paper] in the first place. It was an expensive distraction that contributed little or nothing to good journalism”.
Yes, well. Though I was never that keen on either of them, if I had to read either I’d pick The London Paper. It might have been mainly about shagging, but at least it wasn’t entirely made up of papped celebrities I’d never heard of. And its mix of upfront columnists did make for entertaining reading. (Also, as I noted a while ago, it was the only source I could find for on the spot microblogging of the London mayoral election, which gives it some brownie points from me.)
One telling point is that it underlines the fact that its target audience of youngish London commuters now expect to be able to read a paper for nothing. Which means it’s not that likely they’ll want to pay any money for their news and trashy celeb photos online either. Think about that one Mr Murdoch, as you try to sell us News International’s online content…

So – spending on online advertising has just outstripped spending on TV advertising in the UK.
Figures from PricewaterhouseCoopers (one of the most irritating company names in consultancy, by the way), show online advertising now makes up 23.5% of UK ad spend, as opposed to TV’s 21.9%.
TV has been top dog for half a century now – but it’s kind of old hat. So although this is a landmark, it’s not the shock it might seem to be.
But although this seems to back everything that I and everyone else has been saying about online sucking the life out of “old media” such as TV and print, there’s a big problem.
No one is clicking on the online advertisements.
Yes – in the same day, comes the news that clickthrough rates for online ads have plummeted in the past couple of years.
Only 16% of US web users click through to the ads they see online. And most of that clicking comes from a hard core of 8% of web users. This is down from 32% clickthrough just two years ago.
So where does this leave us? Advertisers are deserting print and TV partly because they are so unaccountable. The internet promises a paradise of trackable usage – allowing brands to see exactly how users react to their advertising and putting a clear value on it.
But if no one is actually clicking through to the ads, that benefit disappears. Leaving online advertising in exactly the same place it was when 19th century Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker famously said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
It’s a thorny problem. After all, if the web doesn’t really deliver trackability, why use it? We’re back to trying to interpret consumer buying patterns from other data, just as we do in the offline world.
Before the printies get too excited though, my money is on things getting more difficult rather than less for traditional kinds of content such as newspapers and magazines – whether online or off.
I’m betting brands will keep moving into the kinds of web content that we don’t think of as journalism. It’s happened with Facebook and The Gap already, and this probably won’t be the last example.
And I reckon brands will also spend more money and time interacting with consumers directly – out in the real world where they can build a personal relationship.

Bit mixed really, it seems, if our poll results are to be believed.
In the end the votes were split pretty evenly among my slightly unscientific poll questions. Here they are:
How’s your media recession?

1. Fine, thanks. I have plenty of work (21%)
2. It was a bit rough 9 months ago, but things have picked up (32%)
3. I’m finding it hard to pick up enough commissions or shifts to fill my week (26%)
4. Very bad – I’m verging on unemployed (21%)

The slight bias towards question #2 kind of backs up the news story that prompted this in the first place – a report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research that GDP rose by an estimated 0.2 per cent in the three months to August, thus signalling the official end to the recession.
Then again, the under-employed and unemployed responses did just edge out the smug “I’m doing OK” brigade. So things aren’t easy out there.
Of course, all this is anecdotal. The poll had too few votes to be statistically meaningful – and I now realise that the first two questions are not mutually exclusive (hey, I’m not a market researcher).
But it is interesting that there was no really clear swing to any one response. It has been a very mixed media recession – and some have been either better able to survive it than others, or simply luckier.
Fingers crossed things have stabilised a bit anyway.

I posted a while ago about the graduate journalism show at UCA in Farnham. I was impressed by several of the final year projects, and mentioned the F1-focused piece by Adam Leveridge.
As it happens, a little while after the show Adam landed a nice internship with a web content company called Adfero. It’s the company behind the inthenews.co.uk site, which covers the usual current affairs areas including, handily for Adam, Formula 1 racing.
But while Adam himself is delighted with his placement there, and he thinks he’s getting a lot out of it, there’s a down side. Yes – money. Or the lack of it.
He writes:

I’m getting so much experience  and I’ve gained so many new and important contacts within the F1 community. It’s exciting when I gain a new contact. For example, yesterday I interviewed one of my heroes Johnny Herbert about the Renault race-fixing scandal and it was amazing. I hope I don’t lose that buzz.

This is great: being able to make contact with top-flight people when you’re doing work experience is good news – certainly head and shoulders above making the tea – or reworking press releases into a news in brief column for example.
Adam tells me he’s already written some 200 news stories for the site, and is producing a feature a week, as well as running live commentary of races and writing race round-ups and reaction pieces.
Now, as he says, that’ll be good for his CV. And there’s nothing to beat the real production experience of producing volumes of work to real deadlines. (There’s a wealth of his work here, for anyone interested.)
But there’s a flip side to this, of course. Adfero is getting a lot of work for nothing here. In fact, at a casual glance it looks like Adam is responsible for the site’s entire F1 coverage.
At least Adam believes he’s getting valuable feedback from the editor and the rest of the team. As I’ve pointed out before, working for free initially is fine as long as you’re getting something – like feedback and experience – out of it. He thinks it’s improving his confidence and ability, and you can’t argue with that.
But as he himself admits, though he has worked for several different publishers now, and this particular placement sounds more like a real job than work experience, he’s seen no actual money from his work.

I’m lucky that I can afford to do unpaid internships like this, as a lot of my uni peers are desperate for work and would love to be doing something similar. The only thing stopping them is that they just can’t afford the travel expenses, which I completely understand […] it cost me over £250 to travel into London for my two-week placement with Arena in February and another £300 to travel to where Autosport are based in Teddington for three weeks.

Increasingly, it seems that journalism – particularly when it involves the kind of desirable sports and entertainment work that so many graduates want to get into – is a rich person’s hobby, rather than a viable career choice.
There’s nothing that we can do about it, either. For all the NUJ’s talk of sit-ins and journalists bemoaning the deskilling of their trade, there is so much demand from journalism entrants for placements (rather than the other way around), that employers simply don’t need to pay much – ar anything – for a lot of the work they demand.
As Adam admits himself: “It’s a real privilege to be involved in F1. In fact I’d probably pay for the privilege if I had to.”
That’s the underlying problem, of course. Sadly, it means he’ll probably keep having to – until either he makes enough of a name for himself (or gets enough privileged F1 access) to claw back some money. Or he’s forced into another area of journalism – or out of journalism entirely.
I certainly hope it’s the former…

This week sees the undergraduate journalism timetable crank back into gear – and this year I’m getting more involved.
As luck would have it, I get to be lead tutor on a second-year online journalism unit at UCA, and I’m also having quite a bit of input into the third-year unit.
The big change has been a move away from Dreamweaver as the software tool of choice for the unit. I have been badgering the college to get rid of Dreamweaver as its prime online teaching environment pretty since I first walked through its doors. (Luckily, students are pretty much four-square behind me on this one.)
Instead, I’ve got the students working with self-hosted WordPress software. Although it’s a fairly user-friendly environment, there’s plenty of scope for stretching them – including working with the CSS to change the look and feel of their site, adding plug-ins; even to the extent of encouraging them to understand how the code at the heart of WordPress generates the structured content.
The third-year project is, naturally enough, the most ambitious. The aim is to set up a group magazine web site with each student acting as a section editor. The key benefit of using WordPress is that it will help students understand web site design in terms of content management rather than simply what it looks like.
One of the key problems I found when marking student work at the start of the summer was that students on the online units spent far too much time playing around with front page web design, say, than actually being journalists – generating stories and writing copy, or making audio and video content.
Working with WordPress should help prevent that. And with the availability of magazine-type themes, we should be able to get the students thinking much more about their web project as a CMS rather than a pretty front page.
For anyone interested, we’ll be working with Hybrid News – a pretty sophisticated magazine-style theme by Justin Tadlock. I had thought about using Wynton Magazine, but although the theme looks good, the image handling is impossible to get a grip on and there’s no real documentation. In contrast, Hybrid News is easy enough to set up with a bit of research, and there’s extensive premium help available if you pay a $25 annual site membership.
I had thought of getting to grips with Drupal as a CMS, but realised quite quickly that this would be a bit ambitious. And it doesn’t really make sense to throw students in the deep end with a CMS they might be able to use, but which they would probably struggle to develop. Maybe next year…

I think one or two votes have trickled in over the past week or so, but it’s pretty much time to wind up my informal recession poll.
I’m going to take it down on Wednesday night – at the end of the month. If anyone fancies adding their tuppenyworth before then, please do. I’ll pontificate on the unscientific findings on Thursday.
There have also been some interesting comments in response – thanks to these readers too…

TheRecruitingSargeant

I have been asking readers about how their media recession has been going. From the Big Apple, NYBlues writes in (anonymously, so I can’t link, but he or she does exist) to sketch the ghastly reality of media life across the Atlantic.

Not sure about UK market, but over here all that’s left are specializations which are not as easy as old school newsroom stuff. Most of the easy jobs are gone or free. Even easy jobs aren’t easy, as the volume of work is up. This is a secular trend exacerbated by a cyclical downturn in print advertising. It’s such a bad idea to count on journalism. Good to know how to write and communicate for any profession, but still necessary to have a real skill set! I’m lucky to not be scrubbing pots and pans right now.

I have also mentioned that I spend some time trying to teach journalism undergraduates the basics of the trade. NYBlues has a pithy response:

Teach them to find another career. This one sucks.

Yes, well. We kind of know that – although for now it still beats anything involving heavy lifting.
Alongside Bill Bennett’s downbeat comments from New Zealand and Star’s feedback about the debasement of professional writing, I can’t help but feel my freelance life may be set to change even more drastically than I had anticipated.
Anyone with any other national or international media experiences, please feel free to get in touch…

For some reason the poll on the right has lost its questions – at least in Safari. No idea why – maybe it’s a WordPress glitch. I planned to keep it running to the end of the month, but if I can’t get it fixed I’ll have to close it early…
UPDATE: Must just have been the janky machine I was using this morning. All seems fine now…

Moving to my own hosting space and unleashing me on the world of WordPress has been a bit like letting a small, excitable dog loose in a butcher’s shop.
For my world is suddenly chock full of plugins. Plugins to do virtually everything, it seems, bar the washing up. (And I understand someone somewhere is working on a PHP script for that, too.)
Of course, in my plugin installation frenzy, I managed to break the website – generating a “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted” message and losing my Tag Cloud in the process.
Thus it was that, barely 24 hours after signing up for hosting space (BlueHost if you’re interested – mainly because WordPress recommended them, though I know it’s only for the affiliate kickback), I had to wrestle with my PHP admin console. Have you ever had to edit your php.ini file? Try to avoid it.
It was straightforward enough in the end, but the stress of worrying that I would actually make Freelance Unbound vanish off the face of the earth and never, NEVER be able to open it again was hellish.
Back to normal service soon – once I finish working out how to set up my shiny new podcasting plugin…