Freelance Unbound

The news that Gap has scrapped TV ads for social media should come as no surprise. And it’s bad news for those who think that the media’s focus should be on getting readers to pay for online content.
The internet makes it easy for anyone to become a publisher of traditional-style media content at virtually no cost, which puts more pressure on media owners.
But it also makes it easy for brands to bypass traditional content vehicles altogether, and interact directly with consumers.
In the Gap’s case, this does mean still using existing channels – cinema, print and outdoor ads – to drive consumers to a Facebook page. But that ad spend will be shrinking. And even if brands still need to reach consumers via advertising – whether online or offline – that advertising won’t necessarily be going to newspapers or newspaper web sites.
Instead, brands can place ads into games, social media sites and Twitter streams, and reach their target audience through a whole range of niche interest web sites (some of which they might set up themselves).
And don’t forget the increasing importance of live events in this. The effect of digital reproduction of music on the music industry has been to reduce the importance of the music track and increase the importance of the live relationship between music act and audience.
This effect will also play out in newspapers and magazines. People will stop seeing printed magazines as being as culturally important as they have been. Instead, I predict, they will respond better to brands that interact with them in the real world.
So look for brands doing more live sponsorship and field marketing activity at the expense of plain old visual advertising.
A lot of the debate about whether or not newspapers will survive hinges on getting readers to pay for content – whether online or off.
But actually, single copy purchases and subscriptions have never been the core of newspaper revenues – that honour goes to advertising. And it’s the fact that advertisers are deserting newspapers in droves that has pushed the industry on to its knees.
Unless we can find a way to key advertisers paying for newspapers (and magazines, and television), there’s really no escape from the decline of printed news media. And it means that the traditional, resource-hungry newspaper web site is also in trouble.

It seems the cutting edge debate between old-style inky-fingered hacks and bright new multimeeja journalists has now been turned into cosy Radio 4 situation comedy.
I’ve only just caught up with Electric Ink, which is now on its third episode, but all the tension between old-skool journalism and the weberati is there in a handy half-hour format:

“Twitter? So that’s a source too, is it?”

Well. Kinda.
And please will somebody out there set up PoliticalTart.com…

Quite a few journalism bloggers have noted the news that London free evening paper The London Paper is to close. 
It’s not the one I would have picked. I always found it had significantly higher distribution – at about three-to-one against rival London Lite, so I figured it would crowd out its rival. But then I guess that would obviously have raised the costs significantly for owner News International at the same time. 
A while ago I did note in passing that I thought there’d be some attrition in the freebie press, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise – though to be honest I’d got so used to seeing it on the train that I thought of it as a bit of a fixture.
Also of some interest is the fact that, of the two free evenings, The London Paper is noticeably less trashy. London Lite is just that – not much more than celebrity photos and some gossip. The London Paper at least had pretensions to being a real newspaper. And  I did find its microblogging coverage of the London Mayoral elections last year surprisingly useful. 
Which all goes to show that readers don’t seem to be that interested in printed newspapers either – even when they’re free. Not sure how that’ll play for online news.
[HT Jon Slattery et al]

Thanks to Jessica for sending me the link to the new Journalism Online website – home of an effort to create a syndicate of paid-for newspaper content on the web [UPDATE: now rebranded].
This is the organisation that apparently has 170 daily papers on board already, though it hasn’t actually got around to telling us which ones they are.
It also features a page of quotes from sundry media sources under the banner “Why readers will pay for online news”.
None of these quotes is from a reader. I’m just saying…
[UPDATE June 2010: These quotes have been removed from the site. I wonder why…]

Via the indispensable Mark Potts, Bill Wyman has offered up a hefty slice of on-the-money analysis about why the newspaper industry is going belly up in Splice Today. 
Crucially, it answers a lot of the holier-than-thou criticism of internet content and punditry by purist journalists and academics. I like it when Wyman hits out at the idea that newspapers were ever anything much more than vehicles for advertising fluff:

Sure, an average newspaper did print some serious journalism. But is that most of what they did, or even anything more than a tiny part? Did newspapers crusade from early in the morning to late at night to right wrongs? Did the typical reporter spend the majority of her or her time ferreting out information that the local powers-that-be kept hidden? Did their critics focus a gimlet eye on all manner or art and pop culture, shoot from the hip, provoke dialogs about its meaning and import? Did the papers really afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted? Did each department, each day, have at least one story that took an extra step to find out some information that others didn’t want public, that didn’t come from a press release or a government official, that didn’t merely repeat warmed-over developments that had happened the day before? No on all counts.

It’s all to do with the way newspapers both exploited and were made vulnerable by their monopoly position. Well worth reading…

How has the past decade of technological and business change in print publishing changed freelance patterns of work?
A lot, as it turns out.
Here, for the sake of example, is a comparison between a representative week’s work for me as a freelance sub/writer in around 1999 and the work I have been doing this summer. In typical nutritional ingredients style, at the top of the list is the stuff I have been doing most of.

1999

• Sub-editing – often on a full subs’ desk with several people working on it. Reading copy, rewriting copy, proofing pages and arguing over spelling, grammar and punctuation. Oh those glory days…
• Feature writing – it was the dotcom bubble, but the web hadn’t come to eat into print content yet. So there was a bonanza of paid freelance writing available, at reasonable rates. And commissioned pieces were longer then, too.
• Print layout and production – monthly magazines, special reports, standalone advertising supplements – again, there was a lot of it about. And it involved scanning pictures, and putting things in envelopes for bike messengers. Weird…

2009

• Working with a CMS – Tagging online content and helping to create a web taxonomy with keywords. Uploading stories and formatting them. Making sure all the links work and creating the home page. Troubleshooting rogue HTML.
• Web banner ads – design and animation.
• Web building – creating sites in WordPress using HTML, CSS and some brutally hacked PHP.
• Print magazine production – a bit of layout, a bit of styling up, a bit of proofing, a bit of subbing.
• Blogging – writing online. Obvously.
• Feature writing – for magazines and books. When anyone has any budget for it.
• Teaching – blogging, web audio and video

The differences stand out a mile. Much more of my work is online, and much less of it is anything like the kind of journalism/publishing I used to do.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. New and different is interesting, even if many other journalists and print media folk seem terrified of it.
But although it uses some of the skills I had 10 years ago, it has demanded that I develop a whole lot more – and very quickly. Most of this change has only come about in the past year or so.
And, yes – some of this is, for want of a better term, career development. I wouldn’t have found myself teaching journalism students in 1999, that’s for sure.
But you’ll also notice that I’m not now teaching print sub-editing or feature writing to students. I did try to do that – but there’s actually no demand. What academia seems to want now is to beef up its online offering. Much like the rest of the media.
I certainly don’t expect this to end. In fact, I expect the pace of change to pick up. Which means probably yet another and quite different “typical” workweek in fairly short order…

It’s meme day on Freelance Unbound – mainly because it’s August and I think we all deserve to enjoy the Silly Season. (Though in the era of 24-hour rolling news, does that even exist any more?)
Here’s an interesting meme started by Linda Jones. (Well, she hopes it will become a meme, and I’m calling it that, even though it may not quite have achieved the stature of the crasher squirrel.)
This response is prompted by Sarah Hartley’s entry which, although it didn’t tag me, did invite anyone to participate. Which would really be the only way it could meme itself, I guess.
So – here we go:
Which words do you use too much in your writing?

”Really”, “Crucially”, “You know”, “Of course”.
Which words do you consider overused in stuff you read?
“Climate change”, which is used as a catch-all to explain almost anything bad that happens because of the weather, with almost no justification most of the time. 
“Celebrity”. I mean, really…
What’s your favourite piece of writing by you? 

A piece on the “House of Tomorrow”, published in the late lamented Internet Business. As it was a Haymarket magazine, and as it was all about the internet, there is no online archive to point to, of course. 
What blog post do you wish you’d written?
John Scalzi’s “Bacon Cat” – a traffic-generating triumph. 
Regrets, do you have a few? Is there anything you wish you hadn’t written?
Drifting into a “career” in journalism/publishing – an industry with a very uncertain future and no money in it. If I had my time again I’d do something orders of magnitude better paid, or else much more creatively fulfilling. But, you know, there’s still time.
How has your writing made a difference?
It’s helped to pay my mortgage over the years, so it’s made a difference to me. With luck, some pieces of advice from Freelance Unbound may have helped journalism students or graduates along the way. Perhaps to do something better paid… 
Name three favourite words
Vampires, zombies, time-travel.
…And three words you’re not so keen on
Impact (as a verb), holistic, synergy.
Do you have a writing mentor, role model or inspiration?

John Scalzi has some very good writing advice on his blog. I especially liked his introduction to his novel Agent to the Stars, which outlines the least angsty way to write a novel I’ve come across. I also liked the advice given by crime writer Robert B Parker in a Telegraph interview:

“Dialogue is easy and it chews up a lot of pages,” he says. “Describing a room is hard and it slows everything down and it doesn’t chew up many pages” 


What’s your writing ambition?

To earn royalties.
Plug alert! List any work you would like to tell your readers about:

My friend the Wartime Housewife and her brand new blog. It’s packed with advice on surviving hard times – both in the family and in the economy. There doesn’t even have to be a war on…
Tag time:
Here are my nominations for journos/bloggers to take part:

Soilman

Hackney Hackette

FleetStreetBlues

Bristol Editor

Unmitigated England

The rules:

If you have time to do this meme, then please link to my original, then link to three to five other bloggers and pass it on, asking them to answer your questions and link to you. You can add, remove or change one question as you go. You absolutely do not have to be what you may think of as a “published” or “successful” writer to respond to this meme, I hope people can take the time to reflect on what their blogging has brought them and how it has been useful to others.

Spotted in today’s Metro – a travel piece on what looks like a delightful part of Sardinia. But I think the “gut-busting” lunch enjoyed by the writer has affected her English.

…courses of muscles and clams, fat prawns and melt-in-the-mouth hoops of calamari…

And I thought the Metro was supposed to be a subs’ paper…

There’s an impassioned rant on the Soilman blog about the general rudeness and disorganisation of journalists who send cold emails to try to get input for their copy, and then totally ignore any positive response they are given by the potential contact. 
It’s worth reading – both by newbie or student journalists and by those who have been in the trade a while. 
It’s happened to me too. I responded to a request on a journalism forum a few months ago by a student who wanted some advice and feedback on her blog from a blogging journalist. “Sure,” I said. “I do that. I’d be happy to help.” And got no reply at all. 
So, there you have it – if someone takes the trouble to reply to you, when they really don’t have to – acknowledge them.

In a rare free afternoon hour, I am goofing off and watching Moonlight, a kind-of crappy new vampire private eye series on Virgin1. I normally like this kind of thing, sadly, though this series seems to suck more than the average vampire show should. (Which is why it seems it may already have been cancelled.)
In fact, the most interesting thing about it is the vampire private eye’s journalist sidekick (Beth Nelson, played by Sophia Myles, who was also in Doctor Who. Which is cool. But I digress).

In the convention of such things, she is blonde, feisty and nosy. But in a break from the norm she doesn’t work for the local metro newspaper, nor the local metro TV station. No, indeed: she works for Buzzwire – an investigative web site!
Sample newsroom pep talk:

200,000 unique visitors on your vampire story and we posted less than 24 hours ago. The vampire angle was genius.

And:

Don’t think – go. Momma needs fresh content.

This is also actually kind of cool. Because it allows Beth to prowl around crime scenes taking photos for the site using what looks very like an iPhone.
I’m not the first to notice this – Reiter’s Camera Phone Report blog is all over it and he thinks the gadget in use is definitely an iPhone. Although it doesn’t make a big play of the branding, which is interesting.
So it seems that the phone was chosen not because Apple ponied up a whole wad of money for the privilege, but because the phone’s look and functions fitted in with the TV show’s idea of what modern, portable, wireless, journalistic technology should actually look like.
The show also conveys the idea that the news cycle has sped up dramatically – which is probably a function of rolling TV news as much as the web, but still.
And of course, we can’t actually rely on vampire murders to jazz up coverage and boost readership. Though it would be nice.
I’ve no idea whether the whole web-site-breaking-vampire-news angle carries on through the series, but it’s very interesting to see the notion moving into mainstream, if niche, entertainment…