Freelance Unbound

Here’s a good essay from Dan Tynan on the pressure faced by “real” journalists (ie those who spend time doing original research, rather than regurgitating other people’s material verbatim and claiming credit for it).
He contrasts the effort required to produced a thoroughly researched and well-written 2,500 word article with the instant traffic generated for bloggers who pick up on the material and repost it, sometimes with little or no attribution. 
Ultimately, he argues that most of the blogosphere is parasitic on the efforts of the professionals. Without the real thing, he says, the world of regurgitated news will have nothing left to feed on, and we will all be poorer for it. 

Unless you only care about one or two topics in your life, you need generalists who can give you the world in 60 seconds, or 6 pages, or however long you have time for. You need people like me. Whether you like it or not.

It’s not a new idea – back in 2006 Coyote Blog discussed the relationship between blogs and newspapers in some detail, and noted that “few bloggers would disagree with this view that we depend on the reporting of the [mainstream media] for a starting point of much of what we do”.
But Coyote isn’t generally a big fan of journalists – he thinks they are lazy, sloppy, partisan and ignorant, particularly when it comes to an understanding of statistics or science. And you know what? I often agree with him. Tellingly, he points out:

One of the mistakes newspaper-types make in comparing newspapers to blogs is that they compare the reality of blogs with the ideals of newspapers, particularly on things like sourcing and fact-checking.

So where could the media go in future? 
Coyote argues that the value of blogs is in a kind of “network or swarm”. Read enough of them and you get a much richer and deeper knowledge than if you skim the paper on the way to work:

No newspaper, for example, has even one tenth the economic firepower the combination of Cafe Hayek, Marginal Revolution, the Knowledge Problem, and the Mises Blog, among many others, bring to my desktop. 

Dan Tynan’s argument is that journalists perform a mediating role that information-seeking humans really need. Some may suggest that this role is now redundant. But Tynan argues: 

My response is, why shop at the grocery store? Why not hunt and kill your own food? […] Why rely on professionals for anything?

As I noted in the comments to the post, I think this misses the point. Although his argument is valid, the uncomfortable truth is that journalism isn’t as important to most people as journalists think it is. (I know, I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again soon too, probably.) 

The problem with the grocery store/hunt it yourself analogy is that we really do need to eat, but we really don’t need to read well-researched articles on whatever topic it may be. I mean, it’s nice, but it’s optional.

That’s also probably why very few of us will spend the time needed to read updates on 20 or 30 specialist blogs to learn about important issues. You have to be a real news junkie to do that. 

So, are we facing a future of more-or-less informed babble with little or no “real” investigative reporting?

Even if we are, there really isn’t much we, on the supply side of the equation, can do about it. 

But take heart – there is life after journalism. Your hard-won skills don’t have to go to waste…

HT: David Woodward

I suggested earlier that structural change is irrevocably changing the media model. 

Reader Bill Bennett is sceptical. He comments:

The acid test: Can an average 14-year-old create a TV network that anyone would consider worth watching? The answer is “probably not”.

Substitute ‘average 14-year-old’ with “team of experienced professional TV network executives” and ask the same question.

He’s absolutely right, of course – most of the time the end product becomes something vastly different from what we old-style media consumers consider to be professionally produced journalism and/or entertainment.

But does this undermine the core argument? I think not. 

Crucially the argument is an economic one. When even 14-year-olds have access to, in effect, global broadcasting technology, the effect is destabilising for old-style “professional” media. 

Sure, the quality will be amateurish. But remember that there is a vast amount of it available online. And we’re also changing the relationship between producers and consumers.

Media consumers are more likely to be media producers as well. They tend to have a more active relationship with content than older viewers and readers are used to. 

In effect, it’s a double whammy. Web users spend time looking at user-generated, web-based content, but they also spend time creating it. 

That’s time that they don’t spend passively consuming professionally produced content on TV. 

And don’t underestimate the ability of ludicrously amateurish content to eat into viewing time. You only have to look at things like the Boxxy phenomenon or other fleeting me-me-me stars such as Australia’s Natalie Tran to see the numbers involved – there are millions of viewers here. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq6AZLy5oGk&hl=en&fs=1]

So why does this matter?

TV networks, and print media, rely on a certain density and quality of eyeballs to maintain their pull for high-paying advertising. Lose enough of those eyeballs and you start losing revenue. 

Crucially, if you drop below a certain threshold, you lose enough revenue to make your broadcast or publishing model fail – no matter that you still have many eager viewers or readers left. 

And it’s easier than you think to make this happen. If 25% of your potential audience spends just 25% of their time on YouTube instead of watching mainstream broadcast media, your audience drops significantly. 

Much of the decline in terrestrial TV viewing share has been down to channel fragmentation from digital broadcasting. But it’s notable that, according to reports from the BBC and the IPA, the 16-24 age group in particular is now being distracted by the internet and is watching TV less overall. 

Yes – maybe younger viewers will get bored with mobile phone video mashups and come back to ITV eventually (if it’s still broadcasting). But I suspect this won’t bring back the golden age of expensive, high-quality professional journalism that we in the media hanker after. 

The first in a no doubt ongoing series, (which also happens to combine my hobby and my day job).
A bout of insomnia had me watching Channel 4 at an ungodly hour this morning. I managed to catch the second half of Psyche and Eros – an animated retelling of the ancient Greek myth (god falls in love with mortal, other gods interfere, visit to the Underworld, everything turns out all right, basically).
I’d never seen it before and was curious about the director, the late – as it turns out – Alison De Vere. So I looked her up.
Alison De Vere started at Halas and Batchelor in the ’50s, apparently, and then worked, with every other animator in London, on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine (she animated the Blue Meanies, it seems). She went on to win the Grand Prix at Annecy in 1979 with Mr Pascal. Which makes her world famous in a low-key way.
Here’s where the subbing bit comes in.
In many of the references I found – Internet Movie Database, Answers.com –  her place of birth is listed as Pakistan. Which is odd, as she was born in 1927. Pakistan, as any sub (or indeed vaguely educated person) should know, didn’t exist then. 
Actually, as her obituary in the Guardian notes ( and I assume that is correct), she was born in Pashawar, which would then have been in the British Raj, to a British army officer. 
So whoever has taken this biographical detail and put it on the web in other reference sites has clearly thought: “Hmm – Peshawar. Where’s that? Oh, the Wikipedia says Pakistan.” and added it in for clarification. Without checking through the entry to look at its history and match the dates up. 
It’s a classic error that should be caught by a half decent sub-editor. And probably won’t be more and more often as subs are deemed a luxury we can’t afford in the media.  
More than that, as I’ve noted before, it’s as the process of subbing itself becomes devalued because subs end up doing everything on the production desk apart from actually sub-editing. 
More to come on this – especially stressing the importance of checking primary sources (which doesn’t include the BBC, for all neophyte journalists out there).

A very good piece by Bob Garfield in Advertising Age explains why not only print is dead, but the rest of the media as well. 
The key is this quote from Randall Rothenberg: 

“Today the average 14-year-old can create a global television network with applications that are built into her laptop. So from a very strict Econ 101 basis, you have the ability to create virtually unlimited supply against what has been historically relatively stable demand.”

Yes, I know I bang on about it. But this is at the core of the whole debate.
A lot of journalists and media folk get very upset about the decline of newspapers, magazines or TV news. They tend to blame it on quality issues, or the stupidity of media owners not charging for content, or the lack of investment in content, or whatever.
But, really, it’s a supply and demand thing. The barriers of entry to publishing have collapsed almost utterly over the past few years. In many ways it’s as easy to be a content producer as it is to be a content consumer. And more interesting. So it’s little wonder that the media is facing a perfect storm.
It’s well worth reading. And, seriously, this is a structural problem that won’t go away when the recession is over, and won’t be solved by tweaking the present model. The media landscape is changing irrevocably. Be ready…

Regular readers of this blog will know that I can get a bit cranky and irritable about the generally poor literacy of undergraduates. 
Happily, however, there is still some very good work being produced by journalism graduates, as I discovered yesterday evening at the private view of UCA Farnham’s graduate show. 
Adam Leveridge – who I persuaded to pose, probably against his better judgement, next to his final year project here – produced a nice piece on the competitive psychology of Formula 1 racing. 
As well as phoning New Zealand to interview Formula 1 neuroscientist Kerry Spackman, Adam also snagged some quotes from UK racing legend Stirling Moss and made the most of his work experience at Autosport to blag some live action shots from an official F1 photographer.
It’s a sound basis for a feature, it’s well-written and has a nice solid layout. I was also pleased to see that, like several of the other strong pieces here, the copy was pretty clean. (Yes – a good sub would have had something to work on to clean up the style, but I’ve seen worse – even on the published page). 
I also really liked this footie-based feature on Newcastle United manager Alan Shearer by Matt Burton. Now, I have absolutely zero interest in football as a sport, but Matt’s piece was well-written with a sense of authority – and he also made the layout work really well. It’s a solid, commercial piece of work, and he clearly has a strong eye for design and detail. 
When I first encountered UCA’s journalism course, I was a bit suspicious of its stress on students completing a project that required them to, in effect, act as everything from art director to sub editor. I thought there was a danger that undergraduate journalism students would spend too much time finicking with things like typography and not spend enough time worrying about things like, well, writing clear prose. 
I still think that’s worth being aware of. It’s far too easy for students to get bogged down in the minutiae of choosing background colours and forget about the big picture of their work. 
But in the context of today’s rapidly changing and consolidating media, journalism graduates will be forced to widen their skills base. Just being able to write, even well, isn’t enough these days. Layout, sub-editing, and now digital skills are all vital to ensure they are in with a chance to earn a reasonable living in the media’s increasingly cut-throat world. 
F1 fan Adam Leveridge has already got his business cards printed. On them he claims to be a journalist already. On this basis I’d say he wasn’t far wrong…

With one bound, this blog has gone viral. (Well, kind of).
I’ve always been curious about social bookmarking, but never really explored it very much. Aside from signing up to StumbleUpon to see how it worked, I haven’t really used sites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us to steer or filter my web use. Or indeed used them to try to boost traffic on Freelance Unbound.
This is probably a mistake, of course. One reader was amused enough by one of my posts on local newspaper headlines to send it to Reddit. And guess what? My traffic spiked dramatically (albeit from a lowish base). 
As this blog has limited plug-in capability, I don’t have an automatic “Share this”-type widget attached to every post.
There is a long-winded workaround that allows me to add social bookmarking links to the bottom of a post, but I have to do this individually for each post, and it’s a pain, frankly. 
So I’ve run “share this” links on only a few posts – the ones I thought might capture a reader’s attention and go, for want of a better term, viral. Needless to say, I’ve been completely wrong about the ones I chose, none of which has been shared. 
It’s fascinating to see how this works. I’ve mentioned before that this blog is partly a tool for learning about blogging – building an audience, understanding web metrics and seeing how it’s possible to make connections online that it would be difficult or impossible to achieve otherwise. This offers some valuable lessons about generating traffic – especially for student bloggers. 

1. Be brief: Your posts don’t have to be long and/or worthy essays. Suddenly my 43-word post with illustration is the top viewed content here of the month. 
2. Be amusing: People tend to spread light-hearted material around. There’s a lot of gloom in the world as it is. 
3. Be open-minded: As mentioned above, I had no idea what would trigger the sharing response. Assume any post might do this. 
4. Be wide-ranging: As a result, don’t restrict yourself to one style of post or topic. Sure – stick to a basic theme or two, but feel free to be creative within that. 

Having said all that, don’t restrict yourself to 50-word jokey posts. Those worthy and serious essays may well be what get your visitors to stick around to see what you have to say once they StumbleUpon your witty one-liner. 
As John Scalzi found on his venerable Whatever blog, his post about sticking bacon to his cat has generated an astonishing amount of traffic and become a meme. But it’s his long, impassioned and serious essay on Being Poor in the US that has been the single most important post on his site and ended up being syndicated in national news media…

Good writers read. They read a lot. And they read widely. 
If you’re a journalism student, the best advice I could give you would be exactly that – to read, and read widely. Most importantly, it would be to read not just journalism.
I imagine that’s probably difficult when you’re doing a journalism course – you’ll be spending most of your time reading examples of good (and bad) journalism, lots of critical theory stuff that you can’t see the point of (there is one, don’t worry), and learning other vital-yet-kind-of-dull things such as media law and, shudder, shorthand. 
So why spend your valuable partying time reading yet more books?
Simply because it’ll make you a better writer. 
Sure, it’s important to read the best journalism. But to make your writing richer – to give you a range of different ways to bring colour and style to your writing – look beyond the news media. 
So, why should journalism students read Raymond Chandler particularly?
For one, it happens to be the 50th anniversary of his death this year, so it’s kind of appropriate. But mainly because he had a way of making language work for him that was both very inventive, but also accessible and accurate. (Although, ironically, he was a failure when he got a job as a reporter.)
For those who don’t know him, Chandler created private detective Philip Marlowe – played most notably by Humphrey Bogart in the movie adaptation of The Big Sleep. Though he didn’t invent modern wise-cracking detective fiction (that was probably Dashiell Hammett), he certainly turned it into an art form. 
I’m not such a big fan of his plots – they tend t0 be a bit convoluted and sometimes contrived. But the dialogue, description and atmosphere are superb. 
Here’s Marlowe sitting waiting to meet a potential client in the rarified atmosphere of the Gillerlain perfume company in The Lady in the Lake:

“I lit a cigarette and dragged a smoking stand beside the chair. The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.”

Chandler is also very good at conveying the ugliness of moneyed Los Angeles:

“This room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead.” (The Big Sleep)

Not to mention the ugliness of his characters:

“Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made suit. Her eyes were shiny black shoe buttons, her cheeks were as soft as suet and about the same colour.” (Trouble is my Business)

Yes – some of his work has become cliched. Probably his best-known line is the classic “a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window”. And it’s true he had a tendency to overdo it in some of his novels. 
But if Chandler used unexpected imagery to create simile and metaphor in really new and imaginative ways, can you do the same in journalism? 
I’d say yes – as long as you remember that you’re not actually writing hard-boiled detective fiction. 
Think laterally about language. Expand your vocabulary – and also the way you use words. 
Crucially, though, don’t just fling words together. A lot of mediocre magazine-style journalism (think local papers, London freebies and giveaway magazines) involves using colourful adjectives and idioms without really thinking about them or knowing what they mean. (I posted about this here – it infects even the Financial Times.)
Instead, think carefully about what words mean and how you can play with them for effect. 
The best response I got to a feature on data accuracy in direct marketing was for a line about how databases of personal information become less accurate over time:

“Like flesh, data decays…”

It was just different enough to snag the attention and the imagination of the editor – but still relevant and accurate enough not to be cut or rewritten. And zombie movie fans liked it a lot.
Also, it’s short. You don’t need to go on for paragraphs to prove what an imaginative writer you are. In fact, do that and you tend to reveal quite the opposite.
In brief:

• Read a lot
• Read widely
• Enjoy words
• Use them imaginatively
• But be precise

Coming up: It’s important to read beyond journalism – but are there any journalists who are really worth reading for their prose style? Why, yes. A forthcoming post will take a look at some business writing and other journalists who really know what they’re doing…

Because marking student worked is tiring, my goodness yes.
Yesterday’s all-day marking bonanza was certainly interesting (it was my first time, but they were gentle with me). 
There were some shockers. Some of the spelling and grammar was pretty weak, and there was at least one example of a student writing submitted assessment work using SMS-speak (“u” for “you”, for example). Well, it was in the first-year. But still.
This is by no means confined to one university – it’s a reflection of general undergraduate ability when it comes to English grammar.
It does seem as if higher education – and also some work-based training –  is having to take on the responsibility for what should be basic literacy. This is a problem I’ve found with journalism students in general, as well as recent graduates, and it’s one that is echoed by publishing companies I work with.
What’s the answer? Stop spending millions trying to push more young people through university when you haven’t sorted out your primary education. And make young children believe literacy is a rule they have to obey.
No, it’s not the modern way. But I’ve seen the consequences. U no it makes sen5e…

…fear my judgement – yeay, fear it!
Yes – today I enjoy actually marking the work of online journalism students in Farnham. After blathering to them about blogging and web video, among other things, I get to look at the end of year assessment work. 
But fear? Really? No. Actually I will stand as impartial as the Statue of Justice on the Old Bailey. Only without the toga thing she wears. 
I’ll have the sword, though, just in case – you have no idea of the passions stirred by Dreamweaver…

Steve Hill’s New Journalism Review blog has a note about the comparison of Quark 8 and InDesign CS4 in MacUser (which isn’t yet online, apparently). 
My take is that the debate on software features misses the point a little. The question of which to buy normally doesn’t depend on which is the best product. It’s pretty much the same decision as whether to buy VHS or Betamax back in the early 80s (and other similar technology quandaries subsequently) – which kind do your friends have?
For Quark v InDesign, of course, it’s which kind do your clients/employers have, if you’re a freelancer like me. Or which kind is the cheapest/easiest to run for a company, if you are a bigger publisher.
One company I worked for hung on to Mac OS9 for years after OSX came in, because it didn’t want to have to upgrade from Quark 4. Then, eventually, it upgraded all its IT at once – and switched the whole company to InDesign at the same time.
Why? Money, primarily. But even though InDesign was cheaper and made more sense to use, it took years to make the switch. That’s why it’s taken years for InDesign to become the dominant player.
I remember tech reviews from a decade ago, like this one, predicting that Adobe had created a Quark killer – but that took forever to come true. By the same token, it will take a long time for an InDesign killer to gain any traction in the market. Remember, Pagemaker was the dominant player back in the dawn of time of the mid-80s, and that limped on for decades before Adobe largely pulled the plug in 2004. You can even still buy it (though I suspect very few do). 
Quality isn’t really the key issue. InDesign is kind of better (though you do need to spend some time, effort and money on training support if you switch). But ultimately it all comes down to economics. Sure, Quark will retain a diminishing base. But even making Quark 8 fantastic will probably not help it regain the lead.
The review suggests this:

There are now fewer reasons for Quark users to make the transition to switch to InDesign, although it’s unlikely many users will make the transition the other way

Steve Hill argues that “It’s good to have competition in DTP” – which is true enough (competition is good in any market). But it will only make it more of a close call in choosing to switch to Adobe.
I wonder if framing the debate as Quark 8 versus InDesign CS4 is even relevant. I suspect the big threat to both will come from an open source model – maybe as Drupal/Joomla are driving in terms of CMS on the web. And also the big threat will be from the web, as more content bypasses the traditional DTP stage.
Given that InDesign is integrated with Adobe’s web design tools, that’s another disadvantage for Quark. I’ve never been aware that Quark’s web integration was much to write home about (even if it’s better now).
Perhaps in a few years’ time we’ll be using some Google app to lay out our pages. Or whatever has taken Google’s place as the tech behemoth du jour…