Freelance Unbound

Last semester on the Journalism BA course at UCA in Farnham saw an experiment in teaching first-year Online Journalism students. We created a group news site in WordPress that aims to replicate the processes and set-up of real-world online news publishing.

Needless to say, this has not gone as smoothly as it might.

The background

We recently had to rewrite the Online Journalism unit for the course, as it had got noticeably out of date. This is because it was all of four or five years old, which in internet time is aeons.

The old unit focused on blogging and creating static web sites using Dreamweaver. A lot of what it asked students to do was to repurpose content from print to web. When it was written, the syllabus assumed that “online journalism” meant archiving print content on to the web, with a bit of blogging thrown in as a specifically “online” thing to do.

Why Dreamweaver? The university had it installed on its computers, and it meant students could submit work on CD, saving all the hassle of sorting out web hosting, and running the risk of journalism students showing the university up by actually publishing content online for real – not to mention the (genuine) risk of defamation.

This is now, clearly, nonsense (except the defamation bit).

The solution

A group multimedia web site that aimed to mimic as closely as possible the kind of environment that students might encounter in a real online news publishing operation.

For this site, I decided to use a professionally developed WordPress theme framework rather than hack my own free theme into shape.

UCA bought the Canvas theme from WooThemes – mainly because it offers menu-based control over the positioning and number of the site’s sidebars, and also because it comes with less “design” than other themes (in theory it’s a blank canvas), so students can create something more or less from scratch.

There are downsides to working with professional themes (for some very interesting technical analysis, see this interesting post by Foliovision). Primarily, the coding that the developers add to make their themes user-friendly makes them very hard for amateurs to alter the structure.

Fancy adding a special category  box to the basic WordPress TwentyTen theme? It’s not that difficult – the WordPress Codex should give you enough information to try, and there are plenty of other tutorials on the web. Try this on a purchased theme framework, though, and you run into trouble.

It can even also be difficult to change the stylesheet – meaning you have to keep posting requests for help in the developer’s support forum to solve any problem you come up against (in fairness, WooThemes is quite good at responding). More about this in another post soon.

All the problems we had

Running a live group site using the university’s IT infrastructure had its issues.

Site access problems
The site was regularly inaccessible using the university’s IT on Monday mornings – just when we had our online journalism workshops. Why? No one knows – but everyone else in the world could visit UCA Journalism News – including other UCA campuses – except UCA journalism students in Farnham.

Solution: a panicky site rebuild on the freelanceunbound.com domain and a different web host.

The result – a functioning site but with the wrong URL. And the devil’s own job of reinstating the proper news.ucajournalism.com URL over the summer.

Also, because the URL kept changing, I never got around to setting up Google Analytics properly, so we have no web stats for the entire semester – a key omission that I am rightly ashamed of.

This was a rushed, foolish solution that you should never attempt. Of course I could have done something clever with a new URL and redirects or ARecord changes – or something – that didn’t require hours of unnecessary reconstruction and didn’t mess up our relationship with Google. You live and learn.

Getting students to work together
Did I mention this was a group site?

Anyone who has ever tried to get undergraduates to work in any kind of group environment will know how hard it is. Uniform editorial house style? The importance of categorising and tagging consistently? Forget it – it’s like herding cats.

This is an important lesson for lecturers – if you want students to use a group site consistently, make sure it is easy to use consistently. This means:

• A straightforward taxonomy without dozens of categories
• Automatic formatting of elements like thumbnail images so they can’t screw it up, even if they want to

Multi-platform projects need engagement
Alongside the group site, I thought how cool it would be to have a multi-strand social media presence, including a UCA Journalism News Facebook page, Twitter stream and Tumblr-type site (for that behind-the-scenes, scrapbook-type content).

I thought – stupidly – that students would be eager to play with different platforms and produce lots of content. I mean, they’ve all got camera- and video-phones, right? And surely they’ll be flocking to take part in Facebook content.

No.

Students like doing their own thing
If students are into Twitter, they’ll have their own account and will use that. Likewise with Facebook, and probably with Tumblr or anything else.

The most telling comment came from one student who bemoaned the fact that she was being asked to produce content “to make someone else’s site look good, rather than making her own site better”. Don’t forget – we’re dealing with teenagers here.

Students tend to be a bit lazy
Harsh, but fair. It was very, very hard getting students to produce sufficient content for the main news web site, let alone producing lots of lovely multimedia content for a load of social media sites they don’t even own. Yes – I know that’s my fault for being a rubbish and uninspiring teacher. Really I mean “unmotivated”, rather than “lazy”.

However, my real failure was in not marketing it enough; getting everyone to like the UCA Journalism News Facebook page and so engaging with it from their own accounts.

You can’t do it alone
Any project like this needs coherent communication and management among a whole range of different units, tutors and student groups. It’s not something one person can make succeed on their own.

Our YouTube channel did succeed, but only because we managed to get a consistent message out to TV students to upload their video content whenever they produced it.

How? Not only by making sure the relevant lecturers were pushing the same message, but also by having an advocate in the group – a crossover student doing both online and TV units who worked hard to make sure material was uploaded with at least a relevant headline and reminded students of the appropriate logins and passwords
.

Maintaining content quality
Needless to say, many students can’t spell, or write grammatically. Nor can they proofread – spotting mistakes in copy is as alien to them as analogue recording. But the level of chaos in published content was a bit shocking.

Unfinished posts
Most worryingly was the tendency to publish a post but leave it looking like a dog’s dinner – with elements missing, a clearly draft headline and messy formatting.

Nothing on God’s earth could stop some students from doing this – even when it was clear that the site was real, live and capable of reaching a potentially global audience. Why? Why?

Simple rules
One solution was to try to draw up simple rules for house style and minimal quality standards for uploaded content. Still, this failed to really stick. It’s a tremendous problem that I still haven’t figured out how to solve. Advice welcome.

A good learning tool
But the experience hasn’t all been negative. The learning environment has been transformed to resemble much more closely a real online news environment, as one student who went on a work placement mid-semester realised. It’s not perfect, but it beats individual Blogger sites.

The site’s frustrations have also been very valuable. Students were asked to critique the site at the end of the unit, and their combined insights and criticisms will help them think about the problems of web design more deeply when they build their own sites. 

Even the problems of content quality have made some students realise the importance of accuracy and editorial consistency. Who knows – some may even start to proofread their work before they publish.

More to come soon (with luck) on the merits of commercial WordPress theme frameworks…

*[Not, clearly, on Monday or Tuesday. Too many undergraduates to deal with. Wednesday, probably]

It’s time to clear the tumbleweed from the streets of Freelance Unbound, so we’ll be back next week with some real content to celebrate the start of the university teaching term.

Look forward to a long, rambling essay on the lessons learned from creating a group news web site for online journalism teaching, plus, with luck, some insights from a very cool hyperlocal news media project that’s happening in Bath. And the usual nonsense about media shortcomings, probably.

Interestingly, though, while I assumed my traffic would drop to nothing while I was away, it ticked on reasonably steadily – but mostly the visitors went to one specific post reviewing online freelance marketplace People Per Hour. 

The message is clear – if you want to generate lots of traffic with commercial potential, create a blog reviewing freelance marketplace sites and pack it with affiliate links. Just don’t bother with discussions about journalism or higher education…

Unlike those organised folk at FleetStreetBlues, who actually bother to give their readers notice that they will be doing other things than blogging for a few weeks, I just stop posting anything and let people drift away in boredom and confusion. (Or is that what happens when I do post? Hmm.)

Anyway – the doldrums of August have defeated my usually relentless and dedicated posting schedule. This is odd, as August is my lightest working month, and I should have oceans of time to comment incisively about the media, freelancing and journalism teaching. 

But August is also the month that, pretty much, I don’t give much of a toss about all that. Instead, I am spending all my time (a) being manly indoors with power tools and (b) being manly outdoors with my dog and a big red squeaky ball.

Given that I also haven’t been organised enough to persuade my readers to write the blog for me (though some are gamely having a chat in the comments), you’ll have to make do with an apology and an explanatory photo.

Normal service to be resumed in due course…

Freelance media life is always a bit precarious – not least because we have to keep up with technology out of our own pockets, not relying on a friendly employer to provide all our hardware and software.
So, any freelancer looking to replace their creaking MacBook in the past few weeks will have realised, with a bit of a shock, that Apple has decided to phase out the sturdy, relatively inexpensive, entry-level laptop.
That’s “relatively inexpensive” in Apple Mac terms, obviously. £700 or more is twice the price of a Windows laptop. But then you’d have to use a Windows laptop – and no one should have to suffer that pain.
What replaces the MacBook? Well – technically nothing. You get to choose from the “entry-level” MacBook Air – all light and thin and lovely, but with an 11-inch screen (down from 13-inch) and a massive 64GB of storage. Mmm. Oh – and no disk drive or ethernet port, if you need that.
To prove that less is, or at least costs, more, the lovely MacBook Air starts at £849 – more than the entry-level MacBook used to. Fancy a real computer? One that does at least what your MacBook did? Then you need a MacBook Pro – the silvery version, with bells and whistles.
To replace my MacBook – 13-inch screen, 4GB of memory and 250GB of storage that cost £897 inc VAT in February 2010 – would now cost £999 for the entry-level Pro (the nearest specification). It’s a hike of more than 11% – and it can’t all be down to the more expensive dollar.
The machine is a bit better (Firewire and a useful audio input, which I’ve been missing), but that’s not the point. If you wanted and needed the next version of the same thing, you can’t have it – there’s only more expensive, or not as good.
But, wait – there’s more pain. Upgrade your machine, and you’ll be getting the new Mac OS X Lion operating system. Which is super fabulous, apparently, but doesn’t now include a really useful feature that allows you to run your creaking old software on it.
Up until Lion, Mac users running versions of Office that were designed for older versions of the Mac hardware could still use the software on newer Macs. Not now. Lion has quietly dispensed with a feature called Rosetta that allowed the older software to work, so if you upgrade your machine – at higher cost – you’ll have to upgrade your software too. Thanks for that.
So – to recap. Apple has pulled the plug on its excellent entry-level MacBook, with little warning; and pulled the plug on its useful retro-software compatibility, with little warning.
And yet – Apple is now the most valuable company in the US, with its stocks worth more than former number one Exxon, and is making record profits. Can anyone see a pattern here?
Yes – consumer usage is changing. People want smaller, lighter gadgets, and we have less use for disk drives. Cloud computing and online apps mean it is becoming less important to run legacy software from your hard drive. Apple is clearly moving in the right direction as a business.
But perhaps you could give us a bit more warning that this is happening – so we can, you know, plan ahead.
That’s another key element in being a good business, not just a rich one – not treating your customers as cattle to be milked of cash in the way that simply suits you. Apple – you are starting to suck…

Here’s a video from a talk by social media editor Chris Street to journalism students at UCA Farnham about the skills and role of a social media editor, and why traditional media need to develop social engagement.

Broadcast is over
If you think of yourselves as broadcasters, you’ve lost the battle – the broadcast days are over.

Look at job ads. A job advertised as “online community manager” is quite clearly a journalism job. But it has also clearly been changed by the effect of audience participation. What is social media doing to communication and to journalism? It’s not about going in as a trainee reporter and working your way up anymore. You need to be versatile and flexible to survive.

The audience is getting involved. You can’t ignore it and you can’t escape it.

An example from Facebook
Nestlé tried to hammer down comments that weren’t positive on its Facebook page. It caused a massive ruckus and was a great case study of how not to do social media. The “community manager” totally destroyed Nestlé’s reputation. All of the accusations were irrelevant, compared to the way that Nestlé reacted.

In the end, Nestlé had to suspend comments, because there was nothing they could say to save the situation. The story was all over Facebook, it made national news and caused the company’s stocks to fall.

There’s a direct financial impact from mis-engaging with your audience. It’s hugely powerful.

Broadcast doesn’t work. If you try broadcasting via social media platforms, the audience won’t like it; they won’t engage with you; they’ll stop following you.

You need to be thinking about how can I best communicate as a journalist with my audience on social media platforms in a collaborative way. Engagement, collaboration – they aren’t going to stop happening.

If you aren’t engaged with your audience, if you’re not enriching your audience’s life, there’s very little purpose for you as a journalist in this world.

Related post: Chris Street writes on the Bristol Editor blog about how to engage your audience via social media

If you saw the fascinating Stanford University data visualisation of US newspaper expansion and contraction over 300 years or so, and thought “hey, I’d really like to see an animation of that,” this video is for you. 

The original visualisation took the directory of US newspaper titles compiled by the Library of Congress and plotted them over time and space. But although it’s packed with insight about the development of newspapers geographically and linguistically since the earliest settler days, it doesn’t quite convey the full impression of history’s ebb and flow.

Seeing the data actually move, however, gives quite a stark sense of how newspaper publishing is receding in the US. Where will we be in a decade’s time? Will there just be a few lights left in the darkness of a newspaperless land? Never mind – we’ll all doubtless be subscribing online via the iPad du jour…

[UPDATE: it seems someone from Stanford has done their own animated version of the infographic – but it’s r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w. So I still like mine more…]

In the spirit of full disclosure – here’s an irresistible offer just received by the Freelance Unbound bribery and corruption department.

Hello! I was wondering if you took paid guest posts on Feelance Unbound? Not a traditional “guest post” but one you’d be compensated for and have complete editorial control over.

Wow – fantastic. This is better than those lame press releases for worthy museum exhibitions (sorry, Gemma).

I’m part of a business that does high-end brand placements worked into guest posts on a variety of subjects. Our posts don’t advocate or review our clients, they are informational and/or newsy. We include a reference link to our clients amongst other topical links inside the content. We’d provide the article, written by a domain expert, and pay you a bit of money for you to review and post it upon your approval.

High end brand placements? Are we talking Louis Vuitton? Or Porsche? Sounds great! Sign me up.

(If you don’t take guest posts, we also have arrangements where we discuss your upcoming post and find one in which a link makes sense and pay you to include it.)

Even better – I’ll work it into something to do with higher education, no problem. That’s probably what higher education will have to do, anyway.

Is that something that you would be interested in and if so, how much would you want us to pay?
Susan Daniels at 43a.com

I should say so! How about an even five grand? I think that should cover it. My highly targeted (read: small) audience of influential opinion formers (read: shabby and jaded journalists and academics) will be well worth reaching with whatever “high end brand placement” content you supply.
Or not. I suspect “Susan Daniels” at 43a.com isn’t really in the market to pay me money to publish her guest posts. Given that 43a.com is an internet marketing company (read: spammer), probably they just want to reel me in as a potential customer for whatever barely legal pyramid marketing scheme they are selling this week.
Oh well – back to the day job.
 

A bit late, but here’s a few problems with that really great human interest amnesia story from last week: when 34-year-old Naomi Jacobs (or 35-year-old, depending which version you read) woke up in 2008 convinced she was 15.

Naomi Jacobs, of Manchester, recalled nothing after 1992, did not know she had a son and thought she was sitting her GCSEs.

The story featured prominently in The Sun the Daily Mail and the Metro– and the details and the way the story was told were spookily similar. Naomi falls asleep dreaming of her teenage schoolboy crush, then wakes up in a scary world of computer games, mobile phones, a weird old lady looking out at her from the mirror and – worst of all – an 11-year-old boy who claims to be her son.

Apparently, Naomi was suffering from Transient Global Amnesia – a condition brought on by stress. A visit to the doctor, some TLC and time spent with her diaries helped her “piece together her memories”, which started to return after eight weeks, but which have taken her three years to recover fully.

So, what’s wrong with this story? Apart from the fact that the coverage is innumerate – Naomi is either 34 or 35, and she fell asleep in 1992 and woke up in 2008, which the Mail counts as 17 years, but many others might count as 16. Where can those one in three pupils leaving primary school struggling with the three Rs look for a career? Try journalism!

Oh – and that the Wikipedia description of Transient Global Amnesia claims it lasts less than 24 hours, and anything over that means the condition is something else. Yes, I know Wikipedia is not a proper, authoritative source. But it at least raises a question that might be worth investigating further.

I’m not saying the story isn’t true. I don’t have enough information to do that. And that’s the problem. The only source for this story is Naomi Jacobs herself. And she has a book to publicise – a novel (interestingly) based on the experience she says she had in 2008. 

Come on – where is the supporting evidence? Where is the comment from a medical source confirming her diagnosis and explaining the effects it had? (I do like the Metro’s last line: “doctors believe that over time she should fully recover” – oh yeah? Doctors you’ve actually spoken to? I don’t think so.)

This smells of a book launch PR campaign – hence the identikit coverage – and no one in the media can be bothered to actually stand the story up. Presumably because whichever PR company that supplied the material is seen as reliable (if anyone actually cares).

This just isn’t good enough. The whole point about “professional” journalism is that it is supposed to fact check and corroborate stories – not just parrot whatever someone says who has something to sell. I mean – that’s what all the rubbishy bloggers are supposed to do.

This is a great piece of PR – but it’s lousy journalism. Have we simply forgotten how to do it?

Journalists need to get to grips with social media – and especially the world’s inexplicably most-popular site, Facebook.
But Facebook sucks. It’s not just its hateful approach to individual privacy. It’s the fact that it’s such a complete pig to use – if you want to have some control over what you are doing and achieve anything useful.
Here are the top 10 things I hate about Facebook. What are yours?

1. Apps require you to let them have access to every bit of your personal information, including your friends, before they’ll let you even see what they do
2. You can’t favourite a page to more than one Facebook page at a time
3. Managing updates. It’s a pain switching from profile to page – especially in third-party sites. It’s very easy to post the wrong content in the wrong place, often twice
4. Lots of services won’t let you post content to a page (eg iPhoto)
5. You can sign in to Facebook as your page, which should make things easier. But if you are using Facebook as your page, it screws up your sidebar widgets in WordPress, which think you aren’t logged in. Or something
6. Order, order! The list of tools and apps on your Facebook page sidebar shuffles randomly. The one I use most – pages – won’t stay still, or at the top
7. How hard is it to import an RSS feed? It’s buried somewhere in “Notes” – completely unintuitive
8. Facebook’s Help pages suck. I have to find people’s Squidoo tutorials via Google to get any real information. Facebook’s tutorials assume you have never heard of the site (“Click the ‘Like’ button to ‘Like’ something'”) or know exactly how everything works in the first place
9. Which gallery am I uploading pictures to? Am I commenting on my image? Or captioning it? Jesus – counter-intuitive much
10. Apps, again – uh, where are they? Isn’t there some kind of listing somewhere? And why can I only get to Apps from my personal profile, not my page? Facebook – you suck…

It may be only July, but online journalism lecturers are eagerly preparing for the next intake of wide-eyed undergraduates in October.
There has been a lot of change on the online journalism course at UCA in Farnham. For example, we’ve started using a group news site based on WordPress for first year students in semester 2. Look out for a more extensive write-up about the pitfalls and lessons learned from this (as well as its successes) in a future post.
However, there’s more change to come in our first semester unit – an introduction to multi-platform journalism.
This unit is only two or three years old and aims to introduce students to the idea of publishing and repurposing content in different ways on different platforms – ie video, radio, print and online. So far, so unexceptional.
However, the speed of change of online communication means we have to continually tweak the tools and focus of the unit to keep up with current practice.
Up to now, students have used Blogger as a publishing tool for this unit. It’s a perfectly good tool – easy enough to use, free (usefully), able to handle multimedia (video directly, audio via a Soundcloud embed) and customisable, so students can enjoy designing their web sites.
However, it has its problems. It’s still too much of a standalone web site. Students often noodle around with their site as a personal project, not really using it to engage with the wider world. Given that blogging is well past its sell-by date as an interactive communications tool, students need to think about social media as part of their professional web conversation.
This is why next semester we are planning to use Posterous instead of Blogger as the first web publishing tool used by our first-years. Here’s why:
Posting by email
The fact that you can post to your site via email is useful. The fact that you can do it from any email device is more useful. So the plan is to encourage students to upload photos or video direct from their phone via email. Will it encourage mobile journalism and reportage? I really hope so.
Group posting via email
Because Posterous can accept contributions from anyone via email – either with pre-approval, or using post-submission moderation – the aim is to encourage group working, maybe by covering a live event simultaneously by different participants. Getting journalism students to report live – and to work together – can be tough. If the technology doesn’t stand in their way, so much the better.
Multimedia
Like Blogger, Posterous can accept video directly. Unlike Blogger, it can also accept audio directly. And you can embed from other sites. This is an excellent feature. There is also good photo handling, with automatic gallery creation of multiple photo uploads. (It’s also easy to subscribe to Posterous audio content via iTunes – another excellent feature.)
Syndication
But the killer app of Posterous is its controllable automatic reposting to a wide range of services, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogging platforms. One of the key abilities for journalists now is to communicate to different audiences on different platforms, and Posterous allows this easily.
Crucially, students have historically been weak at understanding the connection between their own social media activity (wittering constantly on Facebook about their workload and the parties they go to) and their journalism studies and practice (rushing out a few “newsy” blog posts at the last minute on their Blogger site for assessment). Now they will use Posterous to autopost their journalism work to their Facebook profile and start to think of it as a professional communications tool as well.
It’s true that some of our students are beginning to use their Facebook networks for research and story-gathering. With luck we will be able to make this second-nature.
Students will also be able to set up Posterous to post updates to Twitter and even an existing blog or Tumblr site if they have one. One problem students can face is that they are active online publishers with an existing blog, but we ask them to set up a rival for their class work. As a result, they sometimes fail to keep up either. Now, with luck, we can enable students to keep a personal site ticking along with syndicated content while they are getting to grips with class assignments.
Workflow simplicity
Let’s face it, keeping up with a multitude of online platforms is tiring. Tools like Tweetdeck and Seesmic can help with social media – but Posterous offers a very useful springboard to a nice combination of long-form and social media platforms, and looks to be a good publishing tool in its own right.
One click reblogging from Google Reader and the web
Google Reader is a very useful tool to let students gather research material and keep up with current debates. Posterous allows you to reblog material from Reader easily, allowing students to use their site as a note-taking environment. A simple browser bookmarklet also does this for web sites, including video – and does it well. 
It’s new
Importantly, Posterous is new and niche enough that students will probably not have come across it before. This is more important than you’d think. Some students come to university having used Blogger or Tumblr before, so they think they know it all. With luck, Posterous will be a new adventure for everyone. They will also have fewer pre-conceptions of its capabilities.
All in all, Posterous is a very strong candidate for an online teaching tool. However it does have its downsides.
Lack of easy design/theme customisation
Posterous sites do look a bit boring, and there isn’t much you can do with the sidebars. Although journalism shouldn’t really be about fancy web design, students often really want it to be, so they may get discouraged.
On the plus side, you can customise Posterous using real HTML and CSS, so adventurous and capable first-years may get a head start with these techniques. I’m actually hoping Posterous’s simplicity is a feature, not a bug. Students get obsessed with how web sites look and don’t focus on content or audience – Posterous is a good antidote to this, if they can grasp the key message.
Lack of widgets and plugins
As above – you can’t do a great deal with your Posterous site beyond posting and syndicating content. This is a good thing – but students will probably not recognise it.
Does not accept RSS feeds
Posterous is great at feeding content out – not so hot on feeding content in. It’s the one thing I’d ask of it – how hard is it to import an RSS feed?
Basically, however, Posterous looks like an ideal tool to prepare journalism students for the reality of online communication. Online journalism these days is about sharing, collaboration, conversation and multi-purpose communication to different networks and interest groups. It’s getting more difficult to demonstrate that with Blogger – I’m hoping Posterous will help.
[This thinking was inspired by Paul Bradshaw’s very useful post on blogging platforms on the Online Journalism Blog – which is well worth reading]