Freelance Unbound

Well, kinda.
From the Paleofuture blog: a 1925 newspaper interview entitled “Expect Movies to be Produced in Every Home” in which legendary Hollywood producer/director Cecil B DeMille predicts that:

“Within the next 20 years some householder with absolutely no studio training will produce a screen masterpiece, with no stage except that of his own parlor, dining room or bedroom.”

What he doesn’t predict is that these will be about two minutes long and mainly feature cats.
Nor is the headline “Expect Movies to be Downloaded Illegally from BitTorrent in Every Home”, which would really be impressive.
Other than that, he was right on the money (give or take a few decades). It’s interesting how bad the movie industry has become about keeping ahead of technological change…

As they say, prediction is hard – especially about the future.
Many years ago – sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s – I started to take note of the technological change revamping the journalism business, and I started to make some fanciful predictions about the direction it would take.
Anyone who takes an interest in futurology – the prediction of future technological and social change extrapolated from present day conditions – knows how hard it is to get it right.
Paleofuture is a great site that collects past predictions about the shape of things to come.
Appropriately, for the current debate on the future of media, one prediction from 1939 (as shown above) is for a “Radio-newspaper receiver for home use”.
I had similar problems.
For example. I was a printy. That is, my whole view of how publishing worked was skewed towards the print model.
So I thought the biggest threat to my job might be clever software that automatically formatted pages using clever templates without the need for layout subs.
I also pondered the possibility that trade press news stories could be created using algorithms that put together facts in a more or less coherent way without the need for writers or sub-editors – instead it would just use raw research.
And,  in that era of offshore outsourcing, I fretted that this work would be sent out to India, or South Africa, to be done for a pittance, with the files sent over the phone line.
Looking back, these ideas seem nonsensical. But at the time, though slightly far-fetched, they were reasonable extrapolations of the current trend of smarter software producing print content.
How things change.
Yes, the template model is here – but it’s here for blogging and other creative sites (Flickr, YouTube etc). And it’s not that software is allowing publishers to cut jobs while producing their print magazines. The web is allowing any user to be a publisher online, and is starting to destroy the print publishing model.
If you want proof of my incomprehension, it’s there is the lack of any blog entry about this from me from 1997. Because if I had grasped the web at all, I would have been publishing then. And I wouldn’t have been writing about clever layout software. Unless I was stupid.
Even the outsourcing thing hasn’t worked out in the way I thought.
True – online market places allow anyone from any part of the world to bid for any creative media work anywhere. But actually, timezone differences still matter.
Instead, the sheer accessibility of the web and its publishing tools means that prices are driven down low enough so that you don’t need to go abroad to find your cheap creative labour. Instead, it’s available right here in the UK, or US, in the form of the tide of journalism graduates that flood out of our journalism courses with little chance of a real job to go to.
It’s a paradigm shift. One that I could not foresee.
Yes, we had the internet then. But I just couldn’t see that it would eclipse push-style print publishing.
And though even relatively early adopters back in the mid-90s got web space for free with their ISP account, I was even less able to predict the effect of the web’s later creative tools. Create a web site? Uh – why? Isn’t that a bit… geeky?
It was only when the web’s networking capability became clear that I realised its power.
Yes – I’m a bit slow on the uptake.
But that’s because I didn’t come to the internet as many of its early adopters did – through bulletin boards and chat forums. They were all about the web as communication. I was all about the web as content.
I grasped this a lot later, and I have posted about the tendency of the web to be about connectivity over content. And it’s something an awful lot of journalists and academics still underestimate the importance of.
So. Let’s be clear. No one has a clue what will happen to journalism over the next decade or so. Not even Clay Shirky, who’s actually been pretty much ahead of the curve on a lot of this. He even says so in his essay, Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable, and makes the point that, historically:

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.

Which experiment will work for journalism? If any?
I have no idea. And, I promise, nor do you. We simply don’t know yet.

…much more than real people do
For some reason journalists have grabbed hold of Twitter as a starving man does a ham sandwich. But why? What is it about this slightly clunky, limited, and frankly difficult to negotiate web tool that we love so much?
Here are a few thoughts…

1. You can build up a seemingly huge following – as if you’ve got a big audience and are tweeting to thousands (Paul Bradshaw has 6733!). But the reality is relatively few are likely to be reading any one post. Just like newspapers!
   
2. It makes us feel all cutting edge –sending 140-character messages is just like SMS! Which the kids use! And using Twitpic turns it into picture messaging!
   
3. It’s really quick and easy – spot a link while you’re web-surfing during a five-minute break and you can post it to Twitter in about 30 seconds. Do this two or three times an hour and you can look like a productive communications machine, while putting in less effort than going to make a cup of tea. Ooh – I just did one!
   
4. It requires almost no effort or thought – look at all those Tweets with a more or less pithy comment and a link to someone else’s hard work and research. Now that’s the journalistic ideal –leaving much more time to go to the bar.
   
5. The media loves it – which means if you Twitter on about the media, you be followed by loads of people in the media, who will Twitter about you Twittering about them. It’s the ultimate in networking!
   
6. It’s the ultimate low-effort research tool – journalists these days seem to think research begins and ends with a Google search, which is why Twitter is a godsend for us. Use a search tool like TweetFeed and you can create your own Twitter stream of themed posts. Just pick your topic: Iranian election; Afghanistan; banking bailout, or – best of all – Twitter itself. It’s like instant research, but you don’t have to do any work!
   
7. It’s totally open – unlike, say, Facebook, where you have to actually ask to get in touch each time you want to stalk research people. Unless it’s the wife of “C”. Which was a bit weird.
8. It’s HUGE – excitingly leaked documents published by Techcrunch reveal that Twitter will have 1 billion users by 2013! That’s nearly everyone in the world [subs: pls chk]. In fact, no one will be doing anything else by then, so journalists have to get in on the ground floor!

In short, Twitter is like real journalism – but without the work. Now let me get out of this long-form blogging hell and Tweet something…

A little while ago I posted about a strange invitation I received to join LivingScoop. This was, apparently, a video-sharing vehicle aimed specifically at journalists, citizen or otherwise:

A very good place for training, improving and to promote and value your creativity, skills and audaciousness whether you are a journalist (student, rookie or experienced), a reporter or a simple witness of what is happening in everyday life whatever the country you are in.

Desite having something of the flavour of a 419 scam, I duly signed up to see what would happen.
Nothing, it turned out, for a month or so.  
But now – ooh, look. Here’s a shiny new web site to play with. Doesn’t seem to be much in the way of content here, though – and what there is is not from the US or the UK. Which is kind of interesting.
But I love the mission statement:

One of our characteristics is to enjoy the daily immersion in the rustlings and silences of the world, and taste its fevers or inhale the discreet scent of its hashes.

Whatever they’re on, I’d like to try some. Jeez – there’s more:

We like the idea that the world is an experience: the Adventure of Mankind throughout the countries, of which Homer offered us a brilliant fresco in his epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Well, I like that idea too – but, given this, it’s a shame that, so far, the material on offer is mainly test shots of computer monitors and random street scenes. 
Mind you, I also like the way the videos are linked to a global map, bringing back a bit of a sense of location against the anonymity of YouTube – though I wonder how well that will work when there are a lot more than eight videos on offer.
No confirmation email from our poetic webmasters as yet, but I’ll update as I try the site. Unless it really is a convoluted 419 scam…

Very interesting piece by Stan Schroeder on Mashable on the different implications of free online content.

• “Free” is not just about price – it’s also about simplicity and ease of use. 
• Some content will be difficult to charge anything for. Unfortunately for journalists, it’s news.
• Forcing charges down people’s throats is a bad way to go. So that broadband tax to pay for content is a bit of a loser.

For once this is a piece whose author really seems to understand the nuances of online monetarisation. Well worth a read…
[HT: HyperwriterUK]

It’s a tough world out there in the media – what with grinding recession, a skillset that needs updating by the hour and a revenue model that’s been turned upside down by the web.

It doesn’t help that more students than ever before are being turned out by the UK’s journalism courses. That makes it even more difficult for journalism graduates to get a toehold in our industry.

So, here are 11 top tips for journalism students and graduates – and even those thinking about their UCAS application – to ensure you have the best chance to get some kind of journalism job.

It may not be the one you want – you know, the one that involves you interviewing J-Lo in a rooftop pool in LA, or drinking in Chinawhite with the F1 team. But this advice is aimed at helping open up the widest possible range of media options to journalism students, with a corresponding boost to their potential earning power.

Admittedly, this has a bias towards print and web. But a lot of the tips should be generic enough to be relevant if you want to specialise in TV or radio.

Any comments are welcome to add to the roster…

1] Don’t do your BA in Journalism

Yes – a bit of a curve ball, but it’s one I’ve talked about before. I’m a firm believer that gaining a specialism outside journalism as well as getting some journalism training has big benefits.

Reason: The more well-rounded your education and qualifications, the more desirable you are to media employers. Journalists generally create content about the wider world, not about journalism, unless you are working for the media section. So do yourself a favour and do your BA in something other than journalism. Yes, I know that if you’re a journalism graduate already, this piece of advice may be a bit late. But UCAS applicants take note. And for the rest, there’s always the Open University.

2] Get a BSc in life sciences

Are there other degrees that might work? Possibly – but science is the one that gets asked for most in job ads.

Reason: It’s really useful to do a science degree because it opens your media career up to include things that otherwise you would be excluded from. You may have a fascination with biology, you may read popular science books about cosmology, but unless you have that piece of paper, you will simply be excluded from writing jobs and freelance subbing shifts on titles such as Nature and New Scientist and also from editorial work for scientific book publishers. Not interested in science? Fair enough – but this post is about maximising your employability. Science will do that. It will also help you gain credibility in the mainstream media.

3] Work on the student newspaper/web site/TV station/radio show

Reason: A no-brainer really. Your work will suck for at least a year or so, whatever you do – so make it suck when it doesn’t matter so much. Make all your most egregious mistakes at college and by the time you apply for a real job you might well have developed a decent style and learned some production chops. You get free access to all sorts of facilities and equipment and you’ll hopefully learn some production discipline. If you end up as editor of something, you also get to see that student journalism work can be utterly terrible – which will put you in a potential employer’s shoes and give you some valuable perspective.

4] Gain a post-graduate journalism qualification

Finally – journalism.

Reason: Unfortunately, HR box-ticking means you probably will have to have some kind of journalism certificate (though science graduates without a journalism qualification will probably find it easier to get a job in science-related journalism than a journalism graduate without a science qualification). But don’t spend three years getting it – an MA, or even a ten-week accredited course should be enough on top of your other superb skills to take you far.

5] Learn languages

I mean, as well as English. In my day the education system was against me, as I spent years learning French, of all things, in a range of different subjects, including geography and history. This has been totally useless, professionally speaking. But extra languages can be a big bonus for journalism jobs.

Reason: It will help you work abroad; it will help you work for foreign publications; it will help you with freelance assignments that involve contacting non-English speakers. Seriously, this is another no-brainer. Which ones should you learn? Think of [a] the news flashpoints in the world (so, Arabic might be worth a shot, or Russian) [b] where the jobs are (recently Dubai, so Arabic again, also German, according to the current job ads on Journalism.co.uk) and [c] what the rest of the world speaks (so Chinese and Spanish might be worth a punt).

6] Learn English

Seriously.

Reason: Your schooldays probably made you think correct spelling and grammar just isn’t that important. But for some people – weird old people who might employ you – it can be very important. So if you make an effort to polish your grammar and spelling it can really pay off. Top tip: Focus on apostrophes. You will gain a distinct advantage over nearly all other graduates…

7] Keep a blog (or other web site) and update it regularly

Reason: You’re a wannabe journalist. Writing is your life. So write. As I’ve said before, I can filter out 95% of all journalism students and graduates based on the fact that they just can’t be bothered to actually create content. Bonus points for making your blog nice-looking and adding plug-in-style functionality.

8] Understand the back-end of web publishing

Reason: Journalism is shading into web development and site maintenance. The more you know about this area, the more employable you’ll be. At the moment, this means being familiar with, probably, HTML/XHTML, CSS, and maybe PHP. If you have no idea what these are, take a course or, as I’m doing, plough through a heavy book until your eyes bleed. Crucially, this is not computer programming. But it is increasingly necessary for both web-layout and design. And don’t think that tools such as Dreamweaver or content management systems will allow you to work just with graphics and content. Understanding the code that lies beneath lets you troubleshoot why pages won’t load as you thought they would, and makes you indispensable around the production desk.

9] Learn to make compelling videos

Reason: If you understand the impact that YouTube and citizen journalism has had on the media, it should be obvious why video skills are vital. But while it’s important to understand all the technical side of video formats and uploading to the web, it’s also vital to make good, com
pelling video content. As well as learning the software you need, such as Final Cut Pro, also learn how to tell stories visually. Learn about storyboarding and planning. Understand visual language. And learn to tell compelling stories. Which is at the heart of journalism. Kind of works for audio too, but I think simple audio podcasting is on its way out (discuss).

10] Network, network, network

Reason: People give jobs to people. Never forget this. In my advice on successful freelancing on the FleetStreetBlues blog, I stressed the first key attribute for professional success was the ability to get on with people. For journalism students and graduates, This means getting to know media professionals, being friendly (though not pushy), asking about opportunities and generally trying to be helpful when you can. And you’d be surprised how willing many media folk can be to help if you approach them in the right way. Crucially though, be realistic about what, and who, you ask. There’s a lot more to say on this, so I’m going to expand on it in a later post.

11] Have a backup plan

Reason: You may not be able to land a proper reporter-style journalism job, no matter how hard you try, even if you’re pretty good. Because, as discussed, things are tough in the media world. But don’t despair. You can still work with words, pictures, audio and video in a creative way and get paid. Sometimes even more than the pittance that journalists normally get.

How? Think laterally. Recovering Journalist Mark Potts has an excellent post here on life after journalism – but at a pinch it can equally apply to life instead of journalism. Your journalism skills – ie your creative writing, editing and research skills – can be applied in many different jobs. Closely related fields include PR and corporate writing (but brush up on your spelling and grammar).

And that’s it for today. Other suggestions (and courteous disagreements) are welcome via the comments column…

Inspired by the thoughts of blogger Soilman, my post on Why journalism may become software development struck a chord with a few readers.
I’m now pleased to say it seems to be coming true (though not because of me, you understand).
Media Industry Newsletter web site Min Online suggests 5 online content models worth watching – among them one that seems to work precisely because it tries to hide the fact that it’s an online magazine.  

One of the smartest things People did with its $1.99 iPhone app is not to call it a mobile magazine. 

But the Min site argues that’s exactly what it is – though “the ‘Tracker’ label gives it the patina of utility”.
Whether people will be prepared to pay hard cash for just a “patina” of utility once the shiny, shiny iPhone buzz wears off is another matter. But this clearly points the way forward for content if you want people to shell out for it. 
Maybe the key thing is to focus on making it really useful. (It also doesn’t hurt that the platform has a captive audience and proprietary barriers to entry…)
[HT: Bristol Editor]

As a coda to my post on why journalists can’t afford to be purist about their trade anymore, Eat Sleep Publish sums up exactly why the paid journalism model is in such trouble.

Former P-I staffer Curt Milton runs theEastlake Ave blog. He keeps a part time job, makes tons of local connections, writes his posts, edits them, and shoots and edits and uploads video and pictures.

It’s simple economics. When one-person publishing costs virtually nothing and can achieve much of what the news dinosaurs can, it’s much harder to make the economics of journalism add up.
And don’t start on how a one-person, part-time neighbourhood blog just can’t offer what a professionally staffed newsroom can. At the local level that simply isn’t true any more. And even nationally, the quality of journalistic output can be pretty ropey. 
Crucially, when you’re at the level of the hyper-local, I suspect a local neighbourhood blog actually does a much better job of reporting than a local paper.

There’s a nice rant over at Fleet Street Blues decrying the media’s current seeming obsession with the delivery of media content over its practice.

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.

When it comes to learning your trade, they say, don’t get sidetracked with all that web technology malarkey:

If you want to be a specialist, don’t learn Dreamweaver or podcasting or how to put together Google map. Be a police reporter or an education reporter or a health reporter, and learn your field. 

My comment on the post hasn’t been approved yet (what – don’t they trust me?). But essentially, while I admire the sentiments, I think there are some fundamental problems with it. 
The post actually recognises some of them. At the end it says: 

If you want to be a journalist, then forget payment models, multimedia development and how to drive traffic. That’s not your job. Your job is to be a damn fine reporter and let the chips fall as they may. If they – the editors, publishers and readers – can’t figure out a way to pay for us, then so be it. They’ll miss us.

It’s that tiny detail – finding someone to actually pay for this stuff – that is at the crux of this whole “where is journalism going” debate. And, of course, if you’re one of the thousands of journalism graduates being spewed out of the higher education system every year, that’s not much comfort when you can’t find a job. 
I look on all that multimeeja nonsense as basically a tool. It’s a bit like saying if you want to be a specialist, don’t learn to type, or don’t learn to use InDesign. 
The tools of the trade are changing – and we need to keep up. The problem we face at the moment is that the tools of the trade are changing really fast. And the trade itself is also changing really fast, thanks to the double whammy of recession and technology change. 
That’s why I think the idea of the old-style investigative reporter, armed with just a notebook and the knowledge of his or her beat, is now a bit of a luxury. In order to be anything resembling a journalist, you’ll probably have to be able to set up and maintain a web site, know how to drive traffic and have some idea of payment models as well as being a damn fine reporter.
Hey, I never said it would be easy. But I don’t think there’ll be a choice for a lot of us…

Much media kerfuffle about the news that teenagers aren’t interested in Twitter. Well – crucially, that they’re not interested in using it from their mobile phone, which costs money.
The piece in question, from the Financial Times, reports on a research note from Morgan Stanley written by 15-year-old intern Matthew Robson. (The note is available via the FT’s Long Room site, which requires registration and vetting before you can get to it, sadly.)
Among other things, Matthew Ronson indicates that teenage media users hate advertising, finding it  “extremely annoying and pointless”.
They also can’t be bothered to read pages and pages of text, which is bad news for newspapers but, really, which we kind of knew already.
I was particularly interested by this:

Their time and money is spent instead on cinema, concerts and video game consoles which, he said, now double as a more attractive vehicle for chatting with friends than the phone.

This is another piece of, admittedly unscientific, evidence confirming my own suspicion that journalists are far behind the curve when it comes to understanding the rapidly evolving media world. 
These are teenagers. And they don’t use the phone. 
Well, actually teenagers still use the phone a lot. I know this. But I suspect that they are not wedded to the phone. Give them something else to use to chat to their mates – games consoles, Facebook, hyper-intelligent sunglasses – and they’ll use that. If it’s free. And convenient.
Not only does that make it difficult for us as journalist to reach teenagers with digital media when they are consumers, but it also makes it difficult for us to reach them as the subject of journalism.
I have taken issue before with the view that the only way to do your job as a journalist is to pick up the phone and call people. I’ll probably do it again.
But, really – it sounds so archaic to make prescriptions for journalism students like this when a whole generation is growing up for whom the old-style pick-up-a-receiver-and-chat phone conversation is just one in a range of communication options they choose. And not necessarily the most obvious, especially in future.
As for Twitter – it’s also important to realise that Twitter is beloved by journalists above all else – but doesn’t have so much traction with real people. 
It’s a great research tool, and is kind of useful for professional networking – and it’s kind of fun and easier to do than long-form blogging.
But Facebook, say, has much richer content and is much better for social networking. Which is why it’s more popular.
The blow for journalists is that, unlike Twitter, it’s a closed network. You only become someone’s Facebook friend by invitation (unless the network belongs to someone who works for MI5). 
This means Twitter is much more like old-style broadcast journalism. Which is why you read and hear so much about it from journalists, when its traction in the real world is probably much less.
[HT: Judith Townend]