Paparazzi! v0.4.3 is a great little utility that lets you grab the whole of a web page, even it extends below the bottom of your screen. 
Saves a lot of time grabbing twice, then stitching together in Photoshop. Just type the URL in the space provided and hit the Capture button. You can also save the image as a jpeg or tiff.
Thanks to the author – make sure you donate if you use it regularly…
A sad day for me recently with the news that one of my very first freelance titles is closing its print edition. Haymarket has decided that Promotions and Incentives mag isn’t cost effective to print and distribute any more. 
I am genuinely sorry. Obviously that’s because I won’t get to write any more thrilling features about book promotions or vouchers – but also because P&I launched in the 60s and has a venerable history as a trade press title. Like many sentimentalists, I mourn the passing of old things. [Though someone who does it much better than me is my mate Peter Ashley, who writes the fine Unmitigated England blog.]
Of course, it’s still around on the web. But from the standard trade monthly team of two-and-a-few-halves (editor, senior reporter plus half an editorial assistant, part of an art editor and unclassified bits of a freelance sub), now just one person gets to write and upload material with, as far as I know, no freelance budget.
I really do understand why printed mags will go to the wall, and why the web is so much, MUCH better a vehicle for the information in the business press. But to slash the web resources to practically nothing does make me question Haymarket’s so-called web strategy.
Yes – the advertising revenue is probably a fraction of what it was in its heyday. But can you build a credible web offering with just one person uploading content?
Maybe the worry is that you can. It seems now the goal in web content is not really good, but just good enough…
One of the things I do when I’m not pretending to be a journalist is animation. I love stop-frame particularly (that’s Wallace & Gromit-style puppetry) and I managed to spend a very happy three months last summer on the Bristol Animation Course on a kind of sabbatical from work.
I didn’t manage to blog about this, of course. Which is a shame, as it was really fascinating and very rewarding. I also spent time with a whole group of people I had a lot in common with from all around Europe. Luckily my friend Jessica did blog about it, so you can get some idea of the flavour from her. And as she’s German, I won’t even comment on her spelling…
But next weekend it’s Animated Exeter – a regular animation festival in the South West. I went last year for the whole week, which was great fun, and I saw a load of great animation (and also some rubbish – always the way). Anyway, this time I’m doing the smart thing which is volunteering to help out, which means I get to meet even more cool people and see films for free, which is even better.
Animated Exeter also holds workshops on things like puppet-making, scriptwriting and life drawing. So part of the reason I’m interested in helping out is seeing how the workshops are put together and looking into whether I might be able to run one in future. Having spent some time recently running journalism training workshops and taking to students in Farnham, I’ve discovered that it’s more interesting than subbing shifts – with the benefit that, though not recession-proof, it can help keep the money coming in during difficult times.
So – naked opportunism and claymation. The perfect combination…
Recently a sub I know was made redundant by a trade magazine. The grand total of sub-editors it now employs is zero.
While we both found this shocking, he found it a lot more shocking than I did (and not just because it was his job that went belly up).
In fact, this a recurrent meme on the internet.
One report refers to the Telegraph outsourcing subbing to Australia.
Another notes the trend of asking junior staff with other jobs to do the subbing too.
So how can a respected trade publication of many years’ standing ditch its sub?
Several answers:
1] Subs used to just do subbing. ie they stroked copy all day – sometimes banging its head against a wall until it made sense. But then DTP happened and they all became typesetters and layout artists. This meant less time was spent actually, you know, sub-editing and more time doing interesting but different things, such as basic design.
Add in more technology and workflow changes and you get subs who spend most of their time working with digital images, page layout, making PDFs and talking to the repro house [while those still exist] and not really doing much with copy at all. They don’t have time, you see.
2] Now editors do it. When subs don’t have a clear function other folk, such as editors, forget why they’re there. So editors get more precious about copy, do all the micro-editing themselves and don’t let subs rewrite when they could and should.
3] No one learns grammar at school. Given the tendency for the publishing workforce to be young (they’re cheaper, for a start), fewer editors, and even sub-editors, have old-school sub-editing skills. They don’t really know proper grammar (and often spelling) and don’t appreciate its importance. (For those who are wondering, the ability to parse a sentence correctly is the cornerstone of civilisation). And because the reading public is assumed not to know or care, it isn’t seen as a problem.
4] The internet (obviously). The internet basically compounds all the reasons above. When you’re working online you have even more things to figure out, such as how the bloody CMS works and how to tag the story. And maybe these days you’ll be working out how to upload a podcast or video clip. And increasingly, journalists and editors get to upload stuff themselves, bypassing the subs’ desk entirely. Which gives them dangerous ideas like: maybe we don’t need these surly buggers cluttering up our offices and complaining about apostrophes any more.
More to come? Probably. Production journalism won’t die, but it will change more than you think possible…
According to Dictionary.com, this is the word that means “a person or thing that shows the existence or direction of a trend”.
But it’s nothing to do with the way the wind is blowing. So it’s nothing to do with the weather.
“Bellwether”: a sheep (wether: a castrated ram) with a bell around its neck that leads the flock and allows you to find it in the dark or mist.
“Bellweather”: the word that should describe ideal conditions for campanology. If it existed…
“Lose” is a verb that describes how one may mislay something – like punctuation.
“Loose” is an adjective that describes something that is not tight – like much writing. (Though sometimes, but not often, it’s a verb that means “to set free”.)
“Free rein” is when you give something considerable freedom of movement, like loosening the reins on your horse.
“Free reign” might be something to do with the monarch if it even existed as an expression.
It doesn’t – ditch that “g” people…
“Just deserts” are the justice that someone richly deserves.
“Just desserts” is a restaurant that someone should open that only serves pudding.
Only one “s”, people!
A “wrack” is a very old-fashioned shipwreck.
A “rack” is an old-fashioned torture device.
If you are “racked with pain” you are in pain as if you were being tortured on a rack.
Remember – no “w”!
Jane Shilling in the Times yesterday [UPDATE 11/11/2009: the link is broken because the Times seems to have lost some of its content] did what a lot of columnists do, particularly in what we might describe as the more upmarket broadsheets. She spent a thousand words or so moaning about how tough life is financially in the beleaguered middle class.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into some kind of class warrior-style rant about middle class journalists. That’s of pretty much no interest to me at all – especially in the context of a blog about freelancing and the nature of publishing.
But what did strike me was how very poorly thought-through it was. Shilling basically bemoans the fact that she can’t afford to do the nice things that middle class people ought to be able to do – have nice holidays, buy nice clothes and eat out – and also the things she really does need to do – fix the roof, have a cataract operation.
“Like many of the respondents to the Times Online poll, reported on Tuesday, I stopped eating out and buying books or clothes, except in sales or charity shops”
I’m sure that’s true, and she has my sympathy. Neither can I. But she also says this:
“I’m not proud to be the generation that undoes the remarkable achievement of my foundling grandfather, who dragged himself from destitution into the middle class by sheer hard work and determination.”
The trouble is, Shilling has achieved this almost entirely by her choice of career. She doesn’t say what her foundling grandfather did to drag himself out of destitution, but I suspect it wasn’t to become a journalist. My guess would be something like the law or medicine, or possibly teaching, if he went the professional route, or cut-throat commerce if not (if anyone knows, I’d be interested to find out).
That’s what my grandfather (though no foundling) did after he came back from the Great War minus a leg. He became an accountant. Similarly, my father, who sadly never lived to qualify for his comfortable final salary pension, didn’t come back from D-Day and muck about with illustration or woodwork – his interests – but stuck into the law, eventually becoming a company solicitor.
So when I’m stuck here earning reasonable, but not really life-changing, money as a freelance journalist and sub-editor, it’s entirely because I decided I didn’t really want to follow in their footsteps. There was something about the idea of being chained to a career and wearing suits and being stuck in an office that I couldn’t really stomach. Instead, I sort of drifted into publishing, partly because I had a certain raw aptitude for it, and partly through chance. It’s not a bad way to make a living. But it won’t make me rich.
Of course, there are ways to make more money at this game. More of which in later posts. But for now, back to the Times. What irritates me about this piece is the lack of understanding it reveals about the realities of the world. Writers don’t make much money unless they’re very focused, lucky and hard-working. And even then they don’t make that much.
Take a look at the excellent ‘Whatever’ blog by jobbing author John Scalzi, who makes the point that writing for a living makes crap money, but adds: “Writing professionally, even at its worst, still beats the hell out of lifting heavy objects off the back of a loading dock for $10 an hour.” Scalzi himself makes between about £60,000 and £80,000 a year from writing, which is a mix of fiction and non-fiction and which is quite impressive. But he could also do a lot better in a different line of work.
So just why does writing for a living, which includes journalism in all its forms, pay so badly? Basically because, unlike becoming a doctor or a financial analyst or a corporate lawyer, which takes years of study and/or ability, any fool can write. Look at me – I’m doing it. And any fool can get published. Again, the evidence is here before your eyes. Thanks to the miracle of the new, social networking interweb, anyone can be a writer, photographer or filmmaker and publish their material without going through the old-fashioned hoops of getting a publisher of some kind to do it for them.
Another pressure comes from the legions of eager young things all working their way through media-related further education in a bid to become the next Big Brother presenter or celebrity journalist. The simple rules of supply and demand mean that loads of eager young candidates for publishing work depress the market a lot. And given that now a lot of people consume published content for free on the web, it all adds up to much less cash in the professional writer’s pocket.
Does it matter that much of the writing available is a bit rubbish? Not really, as there are bloggers producing material that is often better written, argued and researched than many ‘proper’ journalists. And certainly there is so much available online that pretty much any niche interest is catered to – which you can’t say about newsstand publishing.
And while Shilling hangs her piece on some current news hooks (the Budget, that Times Online poll, a couple of recent headlines) it’s really just a ‘look how tough my life is’ session. And we know what to call someone who fills a web page with their thoughts and complaints about life. Yes, her copy – and that of a lot of columnists’ for that matter – is really just blogging in print form. Only in her case she has actually been paid for it, for which she should count her blessings.
But if she really wants to pay to have those cataracts done, she should probably do an accountancy qualification…