Freelance Unbound

Regional magazine Leeds Guide flags up a “major investigation” into the death of print newspapers. 
Well – it’s 1,250 words, which is hardly the Sunday Times Insight exposé of Israel’s secret nuclear programme we saw in 1986 (around 3,250 – and, you know, I think it probably took longer to research).
Also, while it’s nice to see author Simon O’Hare looked up his figures (profit, loss, chief executive payoff etc), his interview sources are a BBC Newsnight editor quoted on the NUJ web site, and a former Leeds Guide deputy editor – hardly pushing the boat out in terms of “investigative” sources.
This is the problem with journalism. It’s so expensive to do the investigative kind that no one can afford to do it any more. And many younger members of the media won’t even remember what real investigative journalism is like – which is why they might mistake this piece for it.
In conclusion, O’Hare argues:

People will continue to use the internet for social networking, but they will still want to obtain authoritative news.

Really? I wonder. Actually, I think people don’t care half as much about news as people in old media think they do. What they care about is entertainment and connectivity (a subject for a later post). 
In fairness, O’Hare is paraphrasing Rupert Murdoch, who he then goes on to quote (from a published speech in 2008, not a phone interview, of course): 

Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights. Readers want what they’ve always wanted: a source they can trust. That has always been the role of great newspapers in the past. And that role will make newspapers great in the future.

Guess what? On the evidence, I don’t believe him…

This burning question popped up in this morning’s blogging masterclass – an ideal topic for a blog post, coupled with a poll question (now added to the sidebar below. Will it work? Who knows. UPDATE: Yes it does. Fantastic).
So – voting in the seminar room seems to split along the lines of “Yes”, “No”, “Not now – only in the past”, and: “Only if his nose falls off”. (And “Michael Who?” for those more interested in the Premiership).
Voting is now open…
[polldaddy poll=1426978]

A last-minute booking to sit in on first-year undergrads at UCA Farnham’s journalism course means I get to wade through a pile of blogs in a professional capacity – as opposed to my usual practice of wading through a pile of blogs for geeky fun.
The students are doing the online module, which means they are supposed to be learning about blogging. All the highbrow blogging-as-social-commentary stuff should have been covered, which means I get to look at the fun stuff like How to Build Your Audience.
Fun? you say, incredulously.
Why, yes. Because then I get to talk about how John Scalzi taping bacon to his cat got the second highest traffic of any page on the web on September 15 2006.
Does life get any better?
Also, this means I may actually be able to carve out a tiny niche in the vast “bacon + cat” Google search rankings. Fame, fortune and 65,000 page visits beckon seductively…

A challenge from Twitter
Just up on the online journalism Twitter feed from Kari Rippetoe: 

What advice would you give a print journalism vet to transition into web content editing? Pls twt your advice & feel free to blog about it.

It’s an interesting question, and one I’m pretty much in the middle of, so OK Kari – I will. 

1. Start a blog. Do it regularly (ie every day if you can). This is the hardest thing, as it’s like keeping a diary. But if you manage it, it’s fantastic discipline. 
   Don’t fall into the trap of writing long op-ed think pieces. Post quickly and succinctly, with lots of links to other things.
   Add pictures and video. Respond to other bloggers and the news. Remember it’s a conversation, at least in theory. 
2. Understand web stats – web analytics are crucial now, for journos as well. Your blog is helpful for this. Join Technorati and BlogCatalog. Marvel at how far you are down the rankings. Work to boost your profile.
3. Chunk it. Break down your writing into brief chunks. Short sentences. Little paragraphs. I’d be doing this more here, but I’m trying to figure out how to make the list work with line breaks. Gah.
4. Did I mention links? Link out and try to get people to link in. Always think about adding value for readers and reaching out to other web content producers. It’s probably the single biggest difference between print and online. 
5. Learn about SEO. Search engine optimisation is the bees knees when it comes to web content, so learn it.
   Having a blog will be helpful, as you can play around with keywords and see how your traffic fluctuates.
   SEO is simple in concept (just Google it), the trick is in execution. But if you can blather about it convincingly, you’ll sound more like an online journalist. [UPDATE: don’t make this mistake though. Make sure your SEO is actually relevant to your intended audience].
6. Host your blog yourself. It might be worth buying hosting space (about £50 a year) and uploading the WordPress software instead of using the free service at WordPress.com. That way you’ll learn something of the back-end of web management. “But I’m a journalist, not a web developer!” you cry. Yes – but increasingly you will have to sort out this stuff yourself, especially if you are freelance. 
7. Learn about web audio and video. Make videos and upload them to the web using a host such as Youtube or Vimeo.
   Learn to edit video – FinalCut is great if you can get it, but something simple such as iMovie or Movie Maker is fine for the principles.
   Create podcasts using simple software such as Audacity. Then figure out how to post them on your blog.
   It doesn’t matter what about – your hobbies or interests are fine. But experience in both the creative and technical side of web audio and video is very valuable, and quite rare for now (as I found out when I was asked to teach it at Solent University). 

When you’ve done all this, you can confidently go to a job interview and say “web journalism? Yes – I do that already.”

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I posted here about the government report that finds young people leave school or college without being able to write in real English rather than SMS speak. As an old sub, of course, I find poor spelling and grammar are like nails down a blackboard to my delicate sensibilities. But maybe – just maybe – I’m wrong. 
Well, not wrong in thinking that the ability to parse a sentence is the cornerstone of civilisation, no. But clearly social networking technology is changing the way we communicate. Take the Twitter feed on this page. A lot of posts are slightly garbled – partly because they are written quickly, and partly because you have to pare down the character count to fit into Twitter’s SMS-style restrictions. 
Obviously, it helps not to leave out crucial words, so that you can actually understand what the post is trying to say (yes, you, Patrick Thornton, I’m talking about you). But the immediacy and brevity of text has its attractions. Instead of a worthy talk given to a politely highbrow audience in a lecture hall (think Economist op-ed piece), Twittering at its most lively feels more like an evening chatting in the pub – especially when the spelling and syntax goes.
You get the same effect in the Financial Times‘s Alphaville blog during its Markets Live feed. Set up as a live IM discussion, Markets Live is littered with spelling and grammatical errors, which reflects its immediacy and mostly adds to its charm. Would I like all my news to be delivered that way? Not so much. But in Alphaville’s case, market knowledge is clearly more important than the correct use of the semicolon.

The FT reports on the closure of the Rocky Mountain News, Colorado’s oldest newspaper. The story is picked up and aggregated with the rest of the weekend’s print news carnage by Recovering Journalist here in typically apocalyptic style:

This was the week that was–the beginning of the end. Newspapers, as we know them, are dead.

Mark Potts’s Recovering Journalist blog has been banging on about the death of print for a while, and to me it seems fairly clear that we are at something of an inflection point in the media. But it’s interesting that there’s still stiff resistance to the idea in the publishing/training/education field. Possibly the resistance is stiffer in education – which, as I’ve noted before, has a certain inbuilt resistance to rapid change. 
Perhaps it’s a bit like Woolworths – it’s been around for a century or more and somehow you can’t believe it’ll ever vanish. But if its commercial model goes, there’s no way it can stay in business…

Via the Communicators in Business web site – a link to a government report that finds young people leave school or college minus key everyday learnings such as how to write in real English rather than SMS speak, or how to take a phone message:

The report finds that although many schools, colleges and universities are preparing their students well for the workplace, provision is patchy and many employers have to spend time and money on new recruits to give them everyday skills, like answering a telephone correctly, or taking a message, how to write reports in English, rather than text-speak, or what a filing cabinet is for.

In fairness, I used to be a bit rubbish at effectively taking phone messages, partly because I suffered from a bad case of teenage for a number of years and also, oddly, because I am old enough to have missed out on the phone-as-my-entire-life stage that young people seem to go through in more modern times. Still, I imagine they’ll learn. The problem, as I have posted before, and will no doubt again, is that the later you leave it to try to instill this stuff as the basic rules of communication, the more difficult it will be to absorb…

Yes – just as I’ve sorted a Twitter feed, it is revealed in Revolution magazine that Twitter is, like, so five minutes ago.
Jeez, guys – can’t you give me a break here and let me catch up with the zeitgeist?
Now I’ve got to start Yammering or Spotifying, or maybe get all Seesmic on your asses.
Or I might just switch off the whole social networking thing and watch TV. Just for an evening…

The Twitter feed seems to have settled down and be updating regularly, thankfully. It’s interesting being able to get these two technologies to talk to each other.
Whether the content of the Tweets is actually worth anything is another matter of course. But I’ve already clicked through to an interesting piece on how an item of journalism wound up being republished by another publisher without links or enough attribution, thus killing its value for the originator. A hot topic, and one that will become more and more important as we web* more content.
*Using “web” in this case as a transitive verb. Is this a neologism? Probably not…