Freelance Unbound

Bill Bennett’s Knowledge Workers blog is running an ongoing series of posts on better writing. Today’s offering suggests why short sentences are only best up to a point, and why you need variation in your writing to help it develop an engaging rhythm.
It follows others that cover journalistic staples such as the inverted pyramid, writing for the web and other worthwhile advice on style and substance.
This is the kind of thing that is always worth checking out, especially for journalism students and graduates.

Shocking though it is to say, as I’m not a huge Guardian fan, The Guardian‘s comment on the unmasking of a police blogger by The Times is spot on.
Crucially, Guardian digital content director Emily Bell recognised The Times‘s move was:

No surprise given that old publishing models benefit from restriction rather than spread of information.

Here is the core of the issue. Newspapers – those great bastions of democracy and human rights – are elitist at best and repressive at worst. 
The whole drive of digital publishing is towards free access to global media for almost everyone (at least in the industrialised world).
You don’t have to have money or influence in order to report or comment on your corner of the world – or anyone else’s. You can fire up a blog, or upload video, or simply Twitter what you want to whatever audience you can develop.
And the old-style media hates it. 
I was taken to task by journalism professor Tim Luckhurst for commenting “anonymously” on his university journalism site (ie in my web identity as Freelance Unbound).
Yet if I had come to him with a whistleblowing story, I would have relied on him to protect my anonymity as a source. 
But of course, the problem with the new digital media model is that people are increasingly both the source of stories and those who report them. 
So how do old-style newspapers respond?
In unmasking police blogger Nightjack, The Times caused two things to happen. First, his blog has been pulled. And, second, Nightjack himself was disciplined by his employer. That’s great – thanks old media. I’m really glad you’re on my side.
This isn’t a popular stance, of course. Even some fellow members of the blogging community seem to agree that blogging anonymously shouldn’t be protected by law. The good folk at FleetStreetBlues argued that “it is a decision which is good for journalism”, for example – though they blog anonymously themselves.
But the problem is that journalism is in the midst of dramatic technological change that is changing the relationship between the media, its consumers (let’s call them citizens) and government. 
The old idea that it’s the role of crusading newspapers to expose corruption and wrongdoing is largely a fantasy. MPs’ expenses aside, papers are mostly full of celebrities and entertainment. 
But now whistleblowing citizens can publish direct to the web, bypassing the media gatekeepers. And I think that’s great. 
Yes – you’ll get a whole load of prejudice, ill-informed ranting and bad writing. But you don’t have to go far in what used to be Fleet Street to find that, too.
The flip side is that, in a society that is increasingly watched, recorded, monitored and controlled by the government and its various agencies, the right to privacy is increasingly bound up with civil liberty. 
It’s a tough issue. One of the things that ubiquitous digital communication brings with it is ubiquitous exposure online. Just ask the people who live their lives on Facebook and Flickr. 
Which is why newspapers, rather than pursuing their old-style self-interest in exposing information for their own gain, might serve the public interest better by protecting our privacy – and our ability to publish anonymously – a bit more. 
[Hat tip: Bristol Editor]

There’s an interesting comment from Soilman on my post on whether a donation model can fund web content. It’s worth a closer look.
He argues that the three things users may pay for are:

1. Data
2. Services
3. Software/apps 

If you’re a business mag/website, you create a software programme that helps professionals in your industry do their job. Most of it is bespoke (ie it’s genuinely focused on solving a business problem, not on providing media services), but it happens to include some of the material you already produce. You do this with more and more little apps, aiming to create a global suite of specific industry software solutions that all have your existing content and brand publishing in common.

Yes – this is a radically different way of approaching “journalism”. In fact, I suspect many – if not most – people in the trade would say it wasn’t journalism at all. 
But I think that attitude is wrong. The changing face of technology makes this inevitable. Digital content is being presented and used in radically new ways. Users are no longer simply consumers of content, but producers and collaborators as well. 
It’s one reason why I am trying to start paying attention to relevant blogs by software developers and techies. 
Matt Bowen’s M.odul.us blog has a post on The Next Web that looks at the way new technologies will converge to help us communicate. 
His bullet-point list includes:

• universal, persistent identification
• fragmented and then reunified social networks
• reputation management
• real, easy metadata
• location aware content
• significantly increased usability
• increasingly, more AI involvement in searching, navigating, and selecting

It’s not journalism as we know it – in the sense of worthy (and wordy) comment and investigation. But he is looking at the very heart of information – what it does, how to structure it, and why people will need it.
In fact, some forward-thinking media observers agree.
Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog has already applauded The Guardian’s crowdsourcing MPs’ expenses tool for allowing readers to act as their own investigative journalists.
And there are commercial benefits. He notes:

When you treat news as a platform rather than a destination, then people tend to spend more time on your site, so there’s an advertising win there. 

So the idea that software development and journalism could be part of the same discipline is not crazy. 
From the same blog comes news of a service by online document annotation service A.nnotate that allows users to annotate PDFs of MPs’ expenses forms. 
Again, this is a software app that works to let people analyse and comment on things in the news. So we’re still in journalism territory. 
And while annotations on MPs’ expense forms were offered free as a promotion, A.nnotate usually charges for its service. Which is monetisation of web content, for anyone who wonders. The Holy Grail of media today.
And if you think about it, the whole point of web content is to do a different job from old-style, static media.
Maps and charts can be interactive. Surveys can be real-time. Databases can be interrogated. 
Figure out what readers value for their own business and you have a shot at levering some money from them to supply it. 
Is this journalism?
Certainly not as the old guard of printies and their noble-but-elitist goal of public betterment would have it.
But as an example of how we can work with information and think of ways to deliver it and make it useful, it is nothing but journalism.

Ever since I got an email from social bookmark site StumbleUpon I’ve been trying to figure out how on earth the site works and where to find myself on it.
Just for the hell of it, I tried emailing StumbleUpon’s technical support. I was pretty terse initially, as I was fairly ticked off with what seems to be a pretty ineptly structured site.
But all credit to Julie Baker – who seems to be the face of tech support as far as my enquiry goes. She’s been consistently and promptly responding to my tetchy emails and trying to explain how I can access my own references on the site.
Anyway – for anyone at all interested – the Freelance Unbound bookmark on StumbleUpon is here.
Sadly, although I got the link from the helpful Ms Baker, I still can’t track the bookmark down myself. I won’t bother her anymore though.
Go. Stumble it. Tell the world how wonderful I am and bring me an M25 worth of traffic…

I didn’t manage to get this cutting into the blog until today, but this item from the June 17 edition of London financial free paper City A.M. is a stark warning about the perils of doing without a sub-editor.
I like City A.M. – for a freebie it’s a well-put-together paper for the financial/business world and it maintains an appealingly contrarian free market view, in the face of the new Keynsian orthodoxy.
But they really should add a sub-editor to the roster. Mistaking a big picture of US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke for US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is a howler of epic proportions for a financial newspaper.
I’m available for shifts, by the way…

In the course of my series on how to survive the media recession, I talked about investigating membership professional organisations in order to boost your profile.
I also mentioned that I had written a free piece for the member magazine of Communicators in Business, the organisation for corporate communications writers and editors. The idea was to try to boost my profile in the world of corporate comms.
It’s about how businesses and public sector organisations often seem very frightened of actually having a personality – as if being somehow identifiable risked harming their brand image.
But this misses a crucial point – squeezing out any personality from an organization risks damaging its brand just as much, if not more so.
For anyone who’s interested in how the piece worked out, here’s a link to the feature. (Unfortunately it’s a PDF, as the magazine doesn’t get uploaded to the CiB web site.)
As and when I dig deep and take out membership, I’ll report back on how effective it is as a marketing tool.

From the Twitter feed: 

do journ educators misunderstand level of students’ web skills?advanced online journalism module set up at Sunderland-only 4 signed up

From my observations – yes, I think we do.
As I’ve noted before, journalism (and other) students live their lives on Facebook, but when it comes to actually using the web more, well, journalistically, they are pretty inexperienced. They’re also often not that interested, which puzzles me a bit. 
Their research is also woefully limited, in my experience. I love the Wikipedia as a quick-and-dirty tool for getting the gist about something I know nothing about – but I wouldn’t rely on it for core research. I always go to another, primary, source for definitive facts.
But, from what I’ve seen of their portfolios,  journalism students tend to use it exclusively – and cite it as the ultimate arbiter of truth. 
That means those of us working on journalism courses have our work cut out – not just in teaching students advanced technical skills, such as how to design a CMS, but also why it’s important to explore and understand the web more. 
The key is to understand the nature of the way the web changes the way we communicate.
We’ve moved from the ‘push’ supply model of media owner/publisher > journalist > consumer to one of facilitating (hopefully informed and intelligent) communication. 
But the trouble is that a lot of old-style journalism still hasn’t caught up this this. 
And apart from some high-profile exceptions, a lot of old-style academia hasn’t caught up with this either. Or if they have, then their academic framework won’t let them adapt to the changes in the media quick enough. 
Part of the trouble is that the new media landscape simply hasn’t settled down enough for us to know what it will look like. Let alone whether we’ll be able to make enough money from it to justify passing thousands of new journalists through college every year. 
But unless we, as journalists and educators, are clear about its importance and the need to communicate that to students, they will keep avoiding it.
(HT: journalism_live)

Media owners and publishers are, to say the least, anxious about the financial viability of journalism, given the web’s capacity for undermining the usual business model for content (buying stuff) by, basically, giving it away free.

The UK government is even thinking about annexing part of the BBC licence fee to support regional news on commercial broadcasters.

Last month saw a high-level newspaper industry meeting in Chicago to address the issue. It was a get-together that seemed to underline how clueless they really are about how to tackle the problem, according to the usual cloud of not-really-journalist-bloggers who comment on these things and are parasitic on the real thing.

But we’re not interested in problems today on Freelance Unbound. Oh no. We’re interested in solutions.

By coincidence, two supposed solutions have been sent to me within the space of days.

The first comes via the always interesting Editor and Publisher journal. The author, Steve Outing, accepts that micropayments, as lambasted convincingly here by web pundit Clay Shirky, are a non-starter.

Instead, he is very taken with a donation model being touted by a California start-up called, slightly unappealingly, Kachingle.

Outing’s article is actually way too wordy. So I’ll precis the idea here:

• Readers who want to pay for web content as a matter of principle, but don’t want to use micropayments for individual slices of content, can pay a monthly subscription (in this case to Kachingle).
• Publishers can sign up to the scheme and put a “medallion”, or button, on their site.
• While they’re happily surfing the web, readers click on the Kachingle medallion for each site they enjoy visiting.
• At the end of the month, a subscriber’s reading habits are analysed and each site they visit gets a share of the monthly subscription. The share is based on the proportion of visits each site gets.

It’s quite a neat model. The metric used (site visits) means large sites with lots of content actually do worse than, say, a blog like this. But this could be adjusted for by having a sign-up medallion on different sections of a bigger site, for example.

But will it work?

Tellingly, Kachingle isn’t actually up and running yet – it’s just a beautiful Silicon Valley idea.

Nor is it unique. Within days of receiving the link to the Kachingle story (Hat tip: Jessica), I got a notification that some company called Contenture (what’s with these ghastly names?) had started to follow me on Twitter.

Like Kachingle, Contenture also lets readers sign up and donate money to be spread around the sites they nominate and visit. The main difference is that it seems to actually be up and running (I know this because I registered. This ought to mean that eager readers who have paid their $5.99 monthly sub will be filling my bank account with cash. Except the Javascript won’t work on WordPress. Curses.)

The key question, of course, is just how eager readers will be to fork over their cash.

One problem is that, as yet, I can’t see that any sites I know are registered with one of these providers. It’s all very well signing up and handing over my cash, but unless I can see it going to sites I actually visit, it seems a bit of a waste.

And just how altruistic are web users? The one-off donation to keep a favourite site going through a crisis is one thing, but regular monthly payments are another. I can only assume the rate is set low enough so that people may sign up and not really notice the financial drain.

Yes, there are some good things about the idea.

The automatic way it parcels out your cash to the sites you visit according to how much you use them is clever, and avoids you worrying about paying for stuff you don’t read.

And the one-off, one-click mechanism is a hell of a lot simpler than clicking a payment link on every piece of content or web site you visit, or subscribing individually to endless blogs or newspaper sites.

But really, for the life of me I can’t see that this will be anything other than a gimmick.

Remember the kids who wouldn’t pay for Facebook even though they live on it? People think most content is free. And if it isn’t, they won’t, as a rule, use it.

Over at Editor and Publisher, Steve Outing loves the idea – he thinks it’s the model we’ve all been waiting for:

I think that if Google used this same model […] its size and power could in time get Internet users paying billions of dollars for online content.

I’m not so sure. If a media presence as big and ubiquitous as Google got involved then, yes, a whole chunk of the web could become part of a donation scheme. Something like the donation medallion mechanism could be included in Google’s statistics function, for example.

But it’s the consumers who are the sticking point. At some point you have to prise the money out of their clenched hands. How would that happen?

Could the government’s slightly desperate plan to, essentially, skim money from the taxpayer’s often grudging support for the BBC point the way?

Some kind of centralised taxation redistributed according to reader usage might be possible I guess. But would you be happy to get a deduction from your wages to fund web publishing?

And what about people who don’t use the web for news or content, but for email and shopping? Or who use mainly the BBC, which we paid for anyway? Or who don’t actually use the web at all?

It’s a bit of a minefield. And it just doesn’t get over the core problem – that there is an almost unlimited supply of journalism content vying for a finite amount of reader time, let alone money.

[UPDATE 17/02/10: It seems this model didn’t work for one hopeful player. Contenture has shut up shop. I don’t like to say I told you so…]

I’ve just come across this simple start-up tutorial to cascading style sheets (CSS), which is ideal for the absolute beginner.
Much like style sheets in QuarkXPress and InDesign, CSS is at the heart of the look-and-feel of content management systems (CMS). But unlike style sheets in QuarkXPress and InDesign, CSS code looks like, well, code. So it can be a bit daunting for novices (like me). 
It’s heartening that the author even made a mess of his own code, so the example doesn’t quite work. Instead, you’ll need to download the updated zip files he’s provided. 
Once you do, however, you can spend many happy minutes changing font style, colour and size. Before getting bored and wondering if that’s all there is to CSS.
It isn’t! Follow up with the CSS tutorial on w3schools.com and wet Sunday afternoons will never be the same….

Regular, geeky readers of Freelance Unbound will know that I am striving hard to become literate in the ways of CMS – that is in actually constructing a CMS-based site, not just using one.
This stuff is pretty hard to get to grips with for a non-techie journalist, so I’ve been trawling the web for as much user-friendly information as possible. 
Thanks, therefore, to Matt Bowen’s really excellent M.odul.us blog for some comprehensive, readable and knowledgeable (if dense) content. 
I came on M.odul.us when I was looking into the relative merits of Drupal and Plone (yet another open-source CMS technology). I’m trying to figure out which is the best investment of my time and energy to learn, given that life is, well, short.
It turns out that each has its merits and, scarily, it might be worth learning both. Except that Plone is even harder to get my non-programmer’s head around. 
Matt’s blog has a very comprehensive and balanced assessment of the two programs, which is also very clearly written, though the material is still quite difficult for non-specialists. 
More than that, he also has some really solid material on writing and communicating for the web, and a tech-based view on where the web is going, to pick just two posts. 
Why should non-tech-minded journalists even care what a programmer is writing?
Because we need to understand much more about the context in which we are plying our slightly grubby trade.
And because, in this case, a programmer is communicating very tough material in a very clear way. 
A lot of this material does go over my head – but a lot is worth reading. This is certainly one for the blogroll and for repeat visiting in order to understand what goes on under the hood of the web…