Freelance Unbound

According to anecdotal evidence – it’s pretty bad. It’s not a good time for journalism students graduating this year, certainly. 
Tracking the job ads on Journalism.co.uk gives a rough indication of how the job market is going. 
Just before Christmas 2008, there were just over 100 jobs on the site – mainly journalism, but with some PR/corporate comms-type work as well.
In the new year, however, this plummeted to around 35 – a drop of nearly two-thirds. It was at that point that I got anxious about my future in journalism and went on a drive to pull in more work. 
Now, the number of jobs on the site has bounced back to 50-plus. Slightly healthier, but only half the level it was a few months ago. Even if some of the jobs are in the joke money bracket. I mean, £7 an hour? That’s Tesco checkout money. I’m sure I’d prefer to do the writing, but it’s not worth getting a degree for. 
No – none of this is seasonally adjusted or anything: there’s no statistical rigour in this. But it is indicative of how things are going. Frankly, I’d be happy if things didn’t get any worse from this point. Though there’s no guarantee.
So – is there still life in freelance journalism? Oh yes – but you have to graft that bit harder to make ends meet. Up next, a series of posts about surviving the recession…

I posted here about how knowledge on the web, and on digital media generally, disappears – risking the impoverishment of future historical research.

Just before I could post this follow-up, Jessica anticipated me and commented that I should try Archive.org. Well, guess what – this is all about that.

A recent interview with British Library chief Lynne Brindley in The Guardian discussed some positive efforts to archive the web, notably the San Francisco-based  Internet Archive.

In San Francisco, the non-profit Internet Archive automatically scrapes parts of the web and its Wayback Machine allows people to surf back in time to see what their favourites sites looked like as far back as 1996. It already contains three petabytes of data, which equates to more than three million gigabytes.

All well and good. But what it doesn’t mention is that the Internet Archive itself is losing its digital information.

Way back, I used to know someone called Tim Worman, who became better known as Tim Polecat – lead singer of the UK rockabilly band The Polecats. We lost touch, obviously (I don’t really move in pop star circles), but about 10 years ago, I thought I’d see if he was on the web. 

He was! He had a fun site with all the usual stuff about his interests and current news – which also benefited from the fact that he was also a good artist and designer, so it looked pretty cool. 

I checked back every so often, but then a few years later was disappointed to find it no longer seemed to exist. Aha – but no: there it was. Archived by the Internet Archive and accessible through its Wayback Machine (though sadly without some of the graphics and MP3 downloads).

I visited occasionally and then – guess what? Yes – his site had vanished from the Internet Archive too. 

The obvious question, then, is what use is an internet archive that just archives for a few years? If Tim Polecat’s site was valuable at all, surely it should be kept in perpetuity. If it’s not actually valuable, then why keep it at all – for any length of time? 

Maybe the Internet Archive scrapes the web automatically and then real people wade through the content it stores to decide what’s valuable and what isn’t – a process that would obviously take a while. So perhaps his site was only archived until someone got a chance to have a look at it and then decide it was of no use. 

But that undermines the very principle of archiving ephemera that the British Library is so concerned about. After all, it is from some of the most trivial material that we gain some of our most important insights into the lives of ancient peoples. What they considered important at the time is not necessarily what concerns historians today – and we have no idea what future historians will want to know about us.

I posted recently on how the internet destroys history – and gratifyingly it seems I am not alone in my fears.
Thanks to Unbound reader Lucian Hudson for alerting me to this story from Australia, in which the National Library of Australia warns of a “cultural black hole” for future historians if web material is not archived properly.
It’s a slightly different slant – the Library notes that web material simply isn’t archived, and the fact that so much of our cultural expression is put online instead of on paper now means that much of this gets lost.

Library manager of web archiving, Paul Koerbin, said that with everything from government documents to personal photos and video clips now being published exclusively online, the transient, dynamic nature of the web meant that much of this information would be lost over time.
 
“There is a serious issue regarding the loss of our digital cultural heritage,” he said.
 
“We are losing history … the fact is there will be ‘black holes’ that future researchers will have to deal with.”

The story is a follow-up to comments from Lynne Brindley, head of the British Library, who commented on this in January (OK, so I’m not as ahead of the curve as I thought – I just missed this at the time.)

If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics – perhaps exacerbated by the current economic climate that is killing companies – the memory of the nation disappears too. Historians and citizens of the future will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century.

The web [and other digital collaborative media] is fabulous for  interaction and networking – building up networks and sharing  information [or trivia, often]. But it’s less good for maintaining  archives of data. Digital information is the most  fragile of all. We think it lasts forever – but actually it has a very  short shelf life. All you need is for someone to stop paying their web  host and a lovingly developed archive of useful niche information can  vanish into the ether as if it never existed.

Even if it is backed up onto some other digital medium, it is very  likely that over time that becomes obsolete – Zip drives? Optical disks? In just a few years if you don’t keep updating your hardware, software  drivers and operating system all together, you end up with legacy  material that is completely inaccessible.

This happened to me with a short film I made in Director 1.0. Now I can’t find the software to play it – later versions of Director are too advanced.

In comparison, as a storage medium, paper  is ideal – it lasts for centuries if handled right. And all you need do to access it is turn the pages. [I do vaguely remember reading that the British Library is  now having to maintain a range of computer systems to access digital information in its various forms – though I can’t remember where I read  that, if it’s true].  

Ironically, of course, digitisation makes fragile ancient artefacts available to researchers in a way that was impossible before. The British Library has just digitised its collection of 17th and 18th century newspapers, bringing them truly into the wider public domain for the first time. But the newspapers themselves lasted more than 200 years – not something I anticipate the digital records doing necessarily.

The main problem is that everyone [me included to come extent] has  confused the one with the other. The internet is seen as a repository of  information that supersedes paper – rather than complementing it. And of  course, that’s because it is cheaper, easier and takes up less space.

All very interesting. I think digital media are fabulous in terms of  democratising access to publishing. *Anyone* can be a publisher now. But  it’s not so great in terms of assigning value to information and  archiving it.

I totally missed the news about the demise of Press Gazette. It’s kind of sad, given that it’s been around so long. And also because I worked a few shifts there back in the late ’90s. 
But does it matter? 
Many, many, journalists will, at this very moment, be jumping up and down, foaming gently at the mouth with rage and horror at the news. Not me though.
I always flipped through a print copy when I saw it, but it always seemed to talk about  newspapers – local, regional and national – as the be all and end all of journalism. I never saw much about my own side of publishing – the trade press – and not much about consumer magazines. So it never seemed that relevant to me. 
I know, I know. Loads of you will probably want to see me shot for that and claim it covered everything about journalism you could wish for. Sorry, I didn’t notice.
And it’s telling that I didn’t notice that the paper was even on its way out. That’s because I hardly ever went to its web site, and I haven’t seen a print copy for years now.
I’m currently working on a post about surviving the recession, and while I talk about the Guardian‘s media job site and Journalism.co.uk, it didn’t even occur to me to mention Press Gazette. 
Oh – did I mention Journalism.co.uk? Yes, that’s where I go to check up on what’s happening in the business and what jobs are on offer. It’s all part of the reason why print is on its way out – at least in the trade press. I don’t think Press Gazette will be the last trade title to pull the plug, by any means.  (HT: Dog Bites Dog)

During last autumn’s climate of fear about a collapse in the publishing industry, I registered with People Per Hour – a freelance marketplace that allows you to bid on projects posted by a whole range of potential clients. I was curious to see how it worked, and also thought I might even get some paying work out of it.
The verdict? After receiving dozens of job notifications and bidding on several of them – no, it doesn’t really work. It’s not a scam, but it has limited use for established editorial freelancers.
At least, it didn’t work for me. I guess it works for the clients, as there seem to be plenty of bids on most projects. And I guess it worked for whoever put in those winning bids. So what went wrong?
In some ways, People Per Hour is a bit like eBay – you can build up feedback, or recommendations, from other clients on work you’ve done, so that you have a visible track record of competence. It’s what I do in the real world, with recommendations from people I know and have worked for.
But unlike eBay it’s a bit difficult to get started if no one will employ you and, therefore, no one will recommend you. A bit Catch-22.
You can also put samples of your work online and fill in lots of detail in the CV/resumé section – so maybe that’s where I’m going wrong. I haven’t really spent enough time on my online profile to attract clients.
But there are other problems with the site. The main one is the inability of clients to put together a meaningful brief. You’ll often get a brief that asks for “30 blog posts”, or “eight articles”, without specifying how many words they want. And as freelance writers tend to work on a word rate, that is fairly useless.
Or take this one for Web research & Content editing.

I am putting together a web-project that requires information-gathering about how to do business around the world. I need an educated writer who will research, gather information and compile 900-1200 word articles on how to do business in each country.

Er – how many countries exactly? Doesn’t say. I mean, there are nearly 200.
Another issue is the vagueness of the fees on offer. This project, for “Article writing”, is typical.

We require 5 quality, keyword targeted articles of approximately 400 – 500 words on a variety of topics relating to tyres / minibuses / general driving. Each article should be original, engaging and informative with accurate spelling and punctuation. Clarification will be given to the successful bidder to confirm article ideas / titles. The articles are required immediately. Longer term we will require 1 or 2 articles a week.

And the fee? “Less than £250”, it says. But £250 for what? The initial five articles? Or for an ongoing commitment to supply them indefinitely? Probably the former – but it’s all a bit vague.
If you want clarification you can post questions to the site, the way you can on eBay, but clients don’t seem to respond to them very often.
And, while one of the bids I saw accepted for a job I punted for was below above mine [sorry, proofreading slip],  a lot of the writing work also seems to require an awful lot of words for very little money.
A mental health website asking for three blog posts a week, at 350-400 words each, accepted a bid of £220 for the first 30 posts. That’s about £18 per thousand words, or ten times less than I would think of an acceptable, if pretty low, rate. Yes – there’s probably minimal research involved, but still. £220 is about a day and a half’s pay – which isn’t very long to write 12,000 words.
Which means, of course, that the quality of the work will be a bit slipshod. I was amused at a comment made by one company offering a Large Scale Copy Writing Project that:

“My previous Copy Writer completed around 200 articles per 10 days – his speed was adequate, however his quality was not.”

Well, given that he’s asking for 20 articles of 300-350 words each per day, I’m not really surprised.
Lessons learned about online markets. They:

• Open up the industry – This one allows me far greater access to potential clients than I could ever have achieved rootling around myself on Google. And clients wanting editorial services have access to a vastly increased pool of labour.
• Drive down costs – with 100 bids on that blogging project I mentioned above, you’re bound to get one that’s in your price range. Problem for the writer is, it also cuts your earnings down to the bone.
• Drive down quality – Well, that’s kind of a given. If you have to write 1,000 words an hour to get a half decent rate, then you’ll tend to produce hack work.
• Democratise writing – Anyone can bid on these jobs, so you don’t need a journalism degree, or NCTJ qualifications, or have worked in the publishing industry. If you can write at all, and want to pitch in, you can. Yes, this means quality can be an issue, but then I’ve met a lot of so-called “professional journalists” who can’t write to save their lives.
• Undermines the growing university stranglehold on journalism – as you may know, I’m not a big fan of the journalism BA. Markets like this at least level the playing field for writers who don’t want to spend £20,000 getting a degree in a subject that should be taught vocationally.

So, some good, some bad. People Per Hour also reveals some other very interesting things about freelance writing.
Most obviously, that a lot of journalism/writing is not about the writing. Instead, many of these projects are for the web, and they tend to make a priority of search engine optimisation (SEO), web development and link-building (ie getting other sites to link to the one you’re writing).
What this means for freelancers is that being able to generate beautiful copy is just not that important anymore – at least for an awful lot of projects. The skills you actually need are more in the realm of web analytics, SEO, scanability, building links. Though, interestingly, a lot of the project listings do stress the need for correct spelling and grammar. Graduates take note.
So – online freelance marketplaces. Is it worth trying to get work through them?
I think yes, if you’re:

• A journalism student trying to get some experience
• Working in an English-literate low-wage economy wanting access to the western publishing industry
• Someone with no qualifications or experience wanting to break into writing

But if you’re already a jobbing freelance writer, not so much.
Will this change in time? I bet it will. I suspect that online marketplaces will steadily drive down the money publishers are prepared to pay for average copy. Though it may not affect the money they’ll pay for really good writing so much, as that may still be at a premium.
Do I think this is a disaster? Not really. I’ve never been a fan of restricted entry into a profession (or trade, really, when it comes to journalism) as a way of propping up wages.
Too many journalists get away with writing sloppy copy and earn money for it. If you’re good enough to make a living at something, the secret to success is to develop more skills and, basically, be better at writing. Much better.

There’s more to sub-editing than shuffling commas around and checking spelling (vital, obviously, though these things are). And it’s something that it seems the subs at the otherwise admirable Financial Times seem to have forgotten yesterday.
Bear with me – digression first.
I find these days there’s a tendency for people to use proverbs, idioms and metaphors without really knowing what they mean. It’s partly the result of the rich heritage of expression that we in the English-speaking world have inherited from authors such as Shakespeare and from the Bible.
One example is “hoist by his own petard” (an older proverb given longevity in Hamlet). A petard is a bomb, and being hoist by one means you are blown up by your own explosive. Metaphorically, it means your cunning scheme has blown up in your face.
More people (including cleverish subs) are familiar with the phrase than know what it actually means. Which is why you get sentences saying things like “he was hoist by his own petard and then left dangling in the wind”. (I paraphrase, but that was a real example from the Guardian years ago.) The confusion is that a petard is something like an old-style pike, on which you are hoisted up like a sack of potatoes.
So far, so obscure. Now we’re getting to the FT.
Yesterday’s Financial Times carried an interesting example of this in a story about how old manufacturing cities in the North, the West Midlands and Scotland are suffering the highest rise in unemployment in the current recession.
In it, Andrew Taylor, the paper’s employment correspondent, interviews Naomi Clayton at the Work Foundation. She says:

“In the eye of the storm as job losses mount are the UK’s core cities and areas associated with traditional manufacturing – places which in many cases had yet to recover fully from previous recessions . . . ”

Well. That’s interesting. Because the phrase “the eye of the storm” is a reference to the behaviour of tropical cyclones. A cyclone is like a fairground roundabout – the closer you are to the edge, the faster and more violently it travels. Go to the middle and it’s pretty calm and safe.
So Naomi Clayton is actually saying that the UK’s core cities are relatively protected from the effects of the recession. It’s not what she means. Oh no. But it’s what she says. (She probably meant that those cities were in the teeth of the storm, or somesuch.)
Why does this matter? Because words mean things, and if you get them wrong, it can have serious effects. A potential libel action for one (as one sub of my acquaintance discovered when he mistook the word “scam” [a fraud] for “wheeze” [a jolly jape]. You don’t want to get them mixed up in a headline, let me tell you.)
The Financial Times example is actually tricky for the subs’ desk to handle, as it is in a quote. The fault lies with employment correspondent Andrew Taylor, who either didn’t notice or didn’t understand that she was saying the wrong thing.
Of course, it’s a bit awkward to correct someone’s speech when you’re in mid-interview. But in a different case, if a slip of the tongue or ignorant expression turned out libellous or significantly distorted the meaning of the copy, it’s well worth double-checking to make sure they are saying what they think they are.
The moral? Don’t use expressions unless you are absolutely sure what they mean. Journalism can stand being stripped of its flowery metaphors better than it can stand being inaccurate.

Just popped along to the otherwise excellent Shoe Lane Library in the City of London to see if I could find the latest Scarlett Thomas, or maybe something by Lauren Groff, whose story L. Debard and Aliette in The Atlantic‘s fiction issue a few years ago was just fantastic, I thought. 
Sadly, what I wanted wasn’t on the shelves – but what really bugged me was that the library is full of small display units marked “Quick Choice”, which are piled with books in no order whatsoever. Which means, of course, that if you can’t find your author on the alphabetised shelves you have to rifle through them all, charity shop-style, to see if the book you want is hidden under the latest Dan Brown. 
Which means, of course, that “Quick Choice” is not flaming quick at all – it just wastes time and adds frustration to your visit. 
So why do it? Someone, somewhere in library land must believe that people who go into a library (hmm – literate, book-reading people maybe?) are intimidated by the act of looking through, um, shelves of books for the author they want. Or maybe are so sheep-like that they don’t actually know what to read unless someone essentially chooses it for them (“Look, here are some books that won’t take long to choose!”).
The rot started at Waterstone’s in the ’80s of course – with their staff picks and groaning tables of three-for-two offers. The key difference is that Waterstone’s pays close attention to what it puts out on its tables – and also makes sure there’s at least one copy where it’s supposed to be: on the bookshelf, in case that’s where you, not unreasonably, look for it. 
Does anyone spend any time at all selecting the books for the “Quick Choice”® display at the library? Given that it looked more like some harassed staff member had just flung any old rubbish on them, I’m guessing not. Gah.

Apparently desk editors at the Independent are to take on subbing duties at the paper, according to a Guardian story from April 1. That’s the sort of thing that should be an April Fool’s Day joke – but I found out it wasn’t when I was unlucky enough to buy a copy of the Indie on Easter Saturday (I was in London and wanted to get a What’s On-style guide, and I hate the Guardian, so I figured it was the next best option).
Anyway, I ended up glancing through the paper as well, you know, to get my money’s worth. The paper featured a double page interview with Nick Fraser, editor of the BBC documentary series Storyville about economics. Apart from the fact that he’s a convinced Keynesian, which is difficult to correct as you can’t sub people’s misapprehensions, I was shocked – shocked I say – to see the piece had numerous glaring subbing errors and literals towards the end. It’s as if the subs started well, and then gave up halfway through the piece. For example:

I absorbed the work of Keynes on the Central Line between power cuts during the Three Days’ Week.

Um. I think that was the Three-Day Week. A historic event that was probably before the time of whoever “subbed” this piece. Later (errors in bold):

The kinds of fake debt or securities legitimately traded has allure, it’s equivalents today “zombie bank” and “vulture fund”, have rather less.

(The whole sentence is garbled, but if anyone wonders why “it’s” is wrong, please don’t seek a job in newspapers).
And then:

This is what Liaquat Ahamed told me. “Economics doesn’t always tell you about wehat really happens. There are too many theorirsts and paractitioners concoct them to order.”

There was also a US spelling of characterized, but I think we’re a bit beyond that in terms of proofing crapness. Jesus. Come on guys – this is a national newspaper we’re reading here. 
I know I’m a sad obsessive (I mean, strictly speaking, I would have changed the headline from “Do economists know any more than us?” to “Do economists know any more that we?”), but this goes beyond a slip of the keyboard.
Those of you who are eagle-eyed enough to have actually read the story online on the Independent web site will have seen, with relief I hope, that the paper has corrected a number of the typos (though not, tellingly, the non-possessive “it’s”). 
It’s just more evidence that the problems with print journalism (too costly, too inflexible) may be too much to bear. Online-only Independent before too long? Contrary to its protestations, I wouldn’t be so surprised. Might even be a better paper…

A quick look at this blog’s stats shows a bit of a nosedive of views over the past few days. Yes – we’re coming into Easter, and I’ve noticed that people tend to look at blogs during the working week rather than at weekends or holidays. But it’s clear that traffic has some kind of correlation to posting frequency.
I always stress the importance of keeping a blog going if you’re going to do it. The longer you leave it between posts, the less likely you are to start again, and you lose whatever audience you have pretty quickly. Basically, I’ve been ignoring my own advice on blogging these past two weeks and not updating frequently enough.
Reasons? Yes, indeedy. I was pretty ill for a week and couldn’t really face the computer – I had outpourings of a different sort to deal with, frankly. And, to be honest, there are times when I get fed up to the back teeth with journalism and the media, so I just didn’t really have anything to add to the general industry chatter. I’ve had so much work on in the past couple of weeks that I’ve pretty much burned out.
That in itself is interesting in the current climate of course. I was very worried about freelance work drying up completely before Christmas (which was something of a consensus view among freelancers I know, and was backed up by a commissioning freeze at the companies we generally work for). So I went hell for leather to pull work in in the new year – and succeeded all too well, as the overload was partly why I got ill.
So upcoming will be a post pulling together some advice on what to do in a recession to boost your employability and workload. I’m also going to write up my experiences last summer at the Bristol Animation Course and probably do a breakdown of how I made my first short animated film at the start of last year. It’ll make a nice change from this journalism malarkey, that’s for sure…

I see my friend Jessica highly recommends Maureen Furniss’s Animation Bible on her animation blog. It got me thinking about the most useful and/or inspirational animation books and resources available. So – here’s my first ‘best of’ blog list. It’s biased somewhat towards stopframe animation – even where the book is really aimed at drawn 2D animation, it’s heavy on principles. But this stuff is useful whatever kind of you do [even though computer animation newbies seem to think if it doesn’t tell you how to use Maya, it’s not actually about animation].
I personally hate a lot of the books that get written by academics, mainly to sell to their own animation students. They tend to offer a bit of tutorial, a bit of animation history and a bit of animation principles, but do none of it very well (though I won’t point the finger here). What you want is solid information about how to do a walk cycle, or a lavishly illustrated insight into how the greats did it back in the day. So here we go…

The Animation Survival Kit – Richard Williams.

• Every animator has this, and rightly so. Richard Williams (director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit) spent the 1970s diligently siphoning off the animation knowledge of the greats who worked at Disney, such as Milt Kahl and Art Babbitt, and some of the knowledge is distilled in this book. Lots and lots of stuff about walk cycles that you really need to know. He turned it into a series of lectures, and if you have a few hundred pounds to spare, splash out on The Animator’s Survival Kit Animated – a 16-DVD collection of the lectures, plus loads of animated exercises and examples. Expensive? Yes, but not as much as an animation degree will set you back, and probably more useful. Click through to see lots of clips – great stuff.

The Human Figure in Motion/Animals in Motion – Edweard Muybridge.

• Yes – it’s that Victorian bloke who can’t spell his own name right. To answer the hotly debated question of whether all four of a horse’s hooves left the ground at the same time during a gallop, photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge (pr: Edward Mybridge) figured out a way to capture horses in freeze frame as they galloped round a race track and the rest is history. These volumes collect a whole series of men and women doing various things, from hitting baseballs to climbing stairs, and animals walking, galloping and jumping. Absolutely invaluable.

The Do-it-yourself Film Animation Book – Bob Godfrey

• A classic from the early 1970s, this book, which accompanied the BBC TV show, was a fantastic beginner’s guide to animation. And, yes, it was what got me started, which is why it’s here. No – I haven’t seen a copy for 30 years (though you can still pick them up on Amazon), but its 5-star Amazon review is a good guide to its value for kids.

The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation – Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston

• Exhaustive, lavish evocation of the early years of Disney, full of insight into how the studio achieved its creative dominance in the 1930s and 1940s. Not a manual of animation techniques as such, more a rich slice of history crammed full of beauty and wisdom. Ask for it for Christmas – you won’t be disappointed.

A Century of Model Animation – Ray Harryhausen

• Glossy, image-packed collection that should be a must for stopframe fans. Worth getting [or ordering from the library, given the combined price] with Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life and The Art of Ray Harryhausen – the two more-or-less companion volumes.