Freelance Unbound

Just got my first sessional lecturing gig at Southampton Solent – teaching first-year journalism students about web audio and video. I’m pretty pleased about this, as it was the result of a spec email I sent to the course leader. Which goes to show it’s always worth punting for work – you never know who’ll take you up on it.
It’s also interesting because, of all the many, many things they could have asked me to teach – writing, subbing, layout, software etc etc – they went straight for Web 2.0 skills. Luckily I know Final Cut and Audacity through making animated films. Audacity – the standard low-end podcasting program – is free. But you don’t need to invest in high-end software when Macs come with iMovie as standard. Any journalist with their own machine can learn the basics of sound and movie editing easily. And given what appears to be a lack of suitable web A/V tutors at Southampton at least, it looks like it’s a worthwhile investment of time.
The moral? Get up to speed with everything interactive. It means learning a whole lot of new software tricks, made trickier by the fact that whether something works on the web or not can be affected by your browser, your software, the site you are dealing with and what the weather’s like.
Already I’ve learned that embedding video into a blog is really easy if it’s hosted on YouTube, and really tricky if it’s hosted somewhere else – such as Vimeo, when you have to work around using a site called VodPod. Why? I have no idea. All I know is I’ve been registering to join a hell of a lot of social networking/social media-type sites recently…

Things I learned at Animated Exeter:

• When small boys create animation, they invariably make things explode.

Don’t know why – it’s a DNA thing. Much evidence for this at the Animarathon workshop, where I acted as camera operator and assistant animator for a series of boys aged around 8-10 who opted for the “inventions that fly” strand of the workshop. The other strand – “inventions that help around the home” – was less attractive to them, strangely. I think the girls went for that. Feminists – your efforts have largely failed. The boys moved war planes around on our lovingly detailed sky background and dropped bombs on cars. Flying cars maybe. It was difficult to tell. Lots of explosions though, which was good.

• I really enjoy animation workshops

Another key learning. The 2.5 hours sped by and I was surprised, and disappointed, to find it was lunchtime. I’m definitely going to try to go back next year and try to lead a workshop or drop-in session for the week. Not least because you can actually get paid a decent rate. But also because it beats subbing features about hedge funds. I get to help out during a whole day’s Stop Motion Magic workshop on Saturday and I’m looking forward to it a lot. [UPDATE: I did – see here]

• Kids don’t want to do it “properly”

An important point. I was all for telling them to make their planes and cars move “realistically” across the screen, instead of doing aerodynamically implausible manoeuvres. Remember – they’re eight years old. It doesn’t work. One 10-year-old was pretty good though – he did some cool flying with a nice-looking cut-out rocket that had real personality. I think it’s an age thing. Which gives me some hope that I might be able to do it properly in time…

Just discovered this post about how a journalist reworked her Google ranking to make her online presence better reflect her work.
Very interesting. The blogger – Susan Mernit – has done a good job filling her post with useful links and actually giving a clearer precis of what the journalist – Julia Angwin – actually did.
I see my first error has been not to call this blog ‘Simon Clarke Unbound’, as having your own name as top billing is crucial to me-me-me SEO. But then people might have got the wrong idea about the content and I wouldn’t be able to access it in the office.
I plan to give this a go, and see if it makes a difference to my [strangely negligible] web presence. Part of my problem is that a lot of my written content has been published by Haymarket’s trade titles and actually not been uploaded to its web sites. Or uploaded and then lost – hat tip HR Magazine.
Also, I love the web. I arrived at this post via a blog about surviving redundancy from AOL, that was linked to by a post in the Whatever. Just how does anyone get any work done these days?

Of the blogs I read, I enjoy one from a blogger called Coyote in Arizona who periodically fisks journalists for being innumerate, with a very poor understanding of economics. One of his posts from last year took the local media to task for not questioning the dubious economic benefits of a publicly funded new sports stadium.
I’m with him 100% actually. And because the author is a local business owner, rather than a “trained” journalist, I forgive him his usually pretty ropey spelling.
You don’t have to look far to find generally economically illiterate copy. Though as it happens I’m going to dip back in the Daily Mail’s archives to look at a piece it did on the immorality of eBay in December 2006. In it, Lorraine Fisher, who clearly sidestepped the basics of the supply and demand curve, argues that speculators buying up scarce Nintendo Wii computer games consoles in the run-up to Christmas push the price on by selling them on eBay.

It sold out days after it launched on December 8. And yet it’s readily available on eBay – at nearly double the price. In fact, yesterday nearly 2,000 Wiis were available on the site. The Wii is so sought-after that many of those who pre-ordered it were left disappointed because Nintendo did not manufacture enough to meet demand. Just over 100,000 consoles were put on sale in Britain – yet just under 1,000 are being sold every day on eBay.

So, pretty clear then – there is a shortage, and scarcity drives prices up. But no. The writer quotes one of the so-called eBay profiteers, who says:

“I do feel a bit guilty about doing it because if nobody did things like this there would be plenty left in stores for people to buy at reasonable prices.”

Hmm – but surely if there is a shortage, what will happen is that the shops will sell out quickly at the recommended retail price, leaving empty shelves for the latecomer shoppers. Stick eBay in the middle and what happens is that your advantage stops being getting to the shop early and becomes paying the market price – which happens to be inflated by scarcity. It really depends on your definition of fairness.
Typically, the journalist doesn’t take issue with this at all. Then, blissfully ignorant of the irony, she ends the piece by crowing at the misfortune of the eBay entrepreneurs who have judged the market wrongly and bought up goods that turned out not to be the must-buy they thought.

Similarly, the £29.99 Dr Who Cyberman voice changer was also tipped to be a big hit – and it is. But the manufacturers made enough to ensure that just days before Christmas stores still had plenty on the shelves. And the eBay entrepreneurs have been lucky to get £12.50 for theirs.

Which of course means that consumers who hadn’t rushed to the shops early to buy the toy at full price were also lucky – they got a steep discount. Ah markets – you’ve got to love them.
So what’s her problem? It makes me wonder what the author really wants – fixed prices and government control of shopping outlets to make sure no one is profiteering? They tried that in Zimbabwe I believe…

I posted here about Paul Bradshaw’s interesting video touching on the inflexibility of journalism education.
I was surprised about this – until I started having more to do with journalism colleges. You’d think colleges and universities would be falling over themselves to offer what employers wanted. But it’s not quite so. Why should this be?
I think there are several reasons:

• Students pay for courses, not employers. It’s a very competitive education market, and colleges need to keep student numbers up. This means teaching what students enjoy and are interested in [nice layouts, cool web sites], rather than tough, boring things like, say, how to sub-edit rigorously, or learning proof-reading marks.
• Course format. Courses are taught in units, so whatever you teach has to fit into this. Units also need to produce something called a “learning artefact” that can be assessed. So a workshop on sub-editing skills might be useful, but it’s difficult to assess. It’s better for the college for students to produce a home page in Dreamweaver that can be handed in on CD. [A bit useless for employers though – no journalist I know has ever used Dreamweaver professionally.]
• Academic inertia. Courses have to go through an academic approval process before they can go on the syllabus. You don’t want to endure this too often I suspect if you are a course leader. And of course journalism degrees last three years, so colleges don’t want to chop and change if they can help it.
• Cultural differences. With the best will in the world, full-time academics get out of the loop about industry – what it needs and how fast it’s changing. For academia, six months may be a close deadline – in publishing it could be six hours.

Upshot: the interests of the media industry and colleges/universities are not aligned. Of course, the industry has itself to blame to some extent, as it used to train its new recruits internally [note: that would be training, not education, as journalism is a trade, not a profession. Much more appropriate]. But cost-cutting over the years has pushed it out to higher education, with all that this entails.
And you have to blame the government for thinking that one-size-fits-all degree-based education is what the UK needs to produce a skilled workforce. It isn’t of course – and making a degree the de facto qualification for journalists means young people have to spend something like £20,000 going through three years of college to enter a profession where the pay is generally pretty low, compared to real professions such as law or accountancy.

Just back from Animated Exeter, where I spent the weekend helping kids do cut-out animation in the Animarathon workshop and generally stood around in a fetching light blue T-shirt being “young and animated” as they put it, wandered around with a clipboard and helped out with ushering and taking tickets.
Of the two, the workshop was by far the more successful. I felt a bit of a spare part doing the standing around thing, and always seemed to be in the wrong place when something actually needed doing. Much better to be involved with a workshop where you have a specific job to do.
There was lots of interesting stuff on – even though I was so tired by the afternoon that I fell asleep in the cinema during the worthy but slightly dull schools award showing. Still I only missed a lot of animation about cleaning up litter and saving the planet, which is all right. Except I was sorry to have zoned out on Electrobugs – a cool looking individual entry using silicon chips and computer circuitry.
More on all of this when I’ve uploaded the pictures from the camera.

Just been sent a link to Roy Greenslade’s blog in today’s Grauniad [sorry – knee-jerk old sub’s joke on the notoriously badly typeset 1980s style Guardian. Just the sort of SEO unfriendly copy we must now stamp out].
He is part justifying the decimation of the subbing function in many publications – possibly to be farmed out to “subbing pods” in India or Australia.
All good stuff – and I don’t disagree with him. But I do have to take issue with this:

There are other things to take on board too, such as the inflow of a “new wave” of highly-educated, well-trained young journalists with digital knowledge.
I might be idealistic, but I do believe their work – on camera, on video and in text form – will need less scrutiny than used to be the case.

If by “highly educated and well-trained”, he means with a BA or MA in journalism, plus all the internet savvy of a generation with social networking in their veins, maybe. But this is a generation that hasn’t been taught grammar at school, and sees correct spelling as an option, rather than a necessity.
My friend Jess, an editorial training manager by trade, says young journalists look on him with a mixture of pity, bewilderment and scorn when he tries to teach them the basics of grammar. And the students I encounter on journalism colleges simply don’t seem to be bothered by the idea that incorrect spelling is a real problem in their work – even in headlines.
Of course, nor was Shakespeare. Maybe we’ll see the flowering of a new age of linguistic creativity as a result…
(Hat tip: Phil Heard)

Saw this on the excellent Online Journalism Blog – a video taken at the Society of Editors 08 conference about the skills seen as desirable by media employers and by training and education providers.

There’s a very interesting statistic at about 3m:30s in the video, which is the willingness of the different groups to compromise about their requirements. Guess who’s more flexible. Yep – employers. The education providers are noticeably more rigid about what they can and/or want to train. It’s another reason I think journalism training is not best handled in a university environment.
Why should this be so? Some thoughts here.

Painful though it is to admit it (and I’m only just allowing myself to), I did possibly the most stupid thing I have ever done in what passes for a career last summer. After, that is, not doing a law degree and becoming a corporate lawyer on a six-figure salary. Obviously.
For only last August I was offered the job of lecturer in online journalism at UCA in Farnham. Yes – a real lecturing job , the kind that would-be academics fight over like piranha. And the college is two minutes’ walk from my house. And you get weeks and weeks off over the summer… I can’t go on, it’s too painful.
There were, of course, reasons for not taking it. Like it was only three days a week and not quite enough money, and I was stressed at moving house to Farnham while living in Bristol and trying to do animation. And the prospect of teaching journalism just wasn’t as exciting back as making puppet films at the time. Of course, when I moved back to Farnham and then started to commute the 1.5 hours to London to work on newsletters about hedge funds – that’s when it seemed suddenly exciting. Oh yes.
But the bottom line was I was a bit scared – it was too new and different. And I’ve been freelance for 15 years, so the idea of a full-time job, with a medical exam no less, was strangely unnerving. Of course, after three hours of sessional teaching there in the autumn, it wasn’t scary at all. I realised I really should have taken the leap.
Back before Christmas it looked like the worst mistake ever, especially when all the freelance writing gigs I had suddenly evaporated. Luckily the past few weeks have seen a whole lot of new and quite interesting work appear, including some freelance lecturing at Southampton Solent, so I’m getting over it.
The moral of the story? Take more risks. Which is what I’ll be doing when I go to teach first-years in Southampton all about web audio and video…

Just as Haymarket canned Promotions & Incentive‘s print edition, it also made Marketing Direct web-only. I’m not as sad about this, though I did work on its launch about 10 years ago and have written and subbed on it over the years, so it does affect me.
And like P&I, the web-only move means just one person uploading content, with little or no freelance input, which scuppers all those fascinating features I used to write about database cleansing back in the day.
But is this a real loss? Not for the readers maybe – by moving online, the magazine will probably be able to track and analyse what it is they want much more accurately.
It’s the journalists who are facing the real challenge. Their worry is that there simply won’t be enough work to sustain them if a whole swathe of the business press follows suit.
Of course there are still scads of written content on direct marketing on the web. The big question for traditional magazine journalists is how they can make money from it. More thoughts on this in a later post…