Freelance Unbound

Having just installed the WordPress Broken Link Checker plug-in, I thought it would be a good idea to run it over the blog to see how disastrous my recent migration to a new web host has been.

So – how bad was it?

Actually, not so bad. Freelance Unbound has “975 unique URLs in 1,345 links”, apparently. How many were broken? A grand total of 17.

Most were mine – mainly from the migration to self-hosted WordPress, and mainly from my two longish series on surviving the media recession and keeping your blog going. These should now be fixed – but please feel free to let me know if any others go adrift.

One was a link to now defunct police blogger Nightjack – it seems appropriate to keep that in as a warning to other whistleblowers not to trust the mainstream media not to shaft your story for the sake of theirs.

But several were from sites that should know better. One linked to a Times opinion column, for example, that seems to have simply vanished from existence. It seems the paper has demoted Jane Shilling from a flagged-up columnist, and in the process lost some, though not all, of her columns. A bit sloppy.

Another was from a report on youth employment skills by government agency UKCES. I checked on a related government site, which also refers to the report, but that link is broken as well. That’s even more sloppy when you consider how often the government witters on about the importance of digital accessibility for citizenship.

Most annoying was the number of dead links to Haymarket Publishing stories. I’ve picked up on a few stories from Revolution magazine, as well as a piece from the Management Today editor’s blog. But after a few months the links had gone. Why is this?

The Revolution stories came from its email newsletter. I signed up for this for some reason a while ago, and it’s been interesting enough to keep subscribing and click through to regularly.

But if you link to a story that you’ve read via the newsletter, it tangles up a whole lot of extra newsletter reference code in the web address. Which then seems to expire. Thanks.

The Management Today site is even worse. I have written before about how Haymarket managed to lose the entire archive for Human Resources magazine, which is part of the Management Today group of magazines. Now it seems that some internal snafu has broken all the links for the editor’s blog.

Luckily, the stories are still there, and I finally managed to track down the one I needed again. But not by the site’s internal search engine. Oh no. That worked, yes. But for some reason the search results were linked to the old, outdated URL. (How is that even possible? Some kind of cache thing? Techie answers welcome.)

I understand that big sites are complicated, and links can get broken when you upgrade a CMS, say.

But links are the lifeblood of the web. It’s really important – especially if information is at the heart of your business – to make sure all your internal links keep working. It’s even more important for government agencies, which are starting to rely on the web to inform and educate citizens.

So – sorry to anyone who may have clicked on one of mine. I’m happy to spend an hour or so of an evening trying to fix them and will keep an eye on them in future.

Following up a post on Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog recently, I argued that journalism sits awkwardly in the higher education pantheon, and there are an awful of a lot of courses on the books – too many perhaps.

Steve Hill has weighed in to suggest, broadly, that journalism should indeed be the subject of academic study, and that we shouldn’t split hairs about defining our courses.

I just get lost with this debate about which courses are considered to be ‘academic’ and which are ‘practical/vocational’. Is medicine academic? Or is that practical? What about fine art? What about engineering?

It’s a good question – but crucially, in referring to medicine, fine art and engineering, it is not comparing like with like. A Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Engineering or Bachelor of Science qualification is very different from a Bachelor of Arts. 

I did a BA in English Literature, and I remember having no more than 10 hours of tuition a week. It was probably more like five hours, certainly in the second and third year. I had some lectures, the odd seminar and tutorials. The rest was research. Because that’s what a BA is, really. 

In the same way that it wouldn’t work for, say, engineering, that doesn’t work for journalism. (Well, it doesn’t work for journalism practice – a culture and media studies-type research degree would be very different.) You need to put in a lot of hours and you need a lot of, well, practical education to be able to do it.

It’s best to learn to do journalism in a newsroom-type environment – being given assignments and then editorial feedback on what’s wrong (and right) and how students can improve. Unfortunately, a BA course doesn’t really have the resources to be able to do that.

This is compounded by the problem that school leavers nowadays don’t necessarily have a solid foundation in English language communications skills. But if you want to address this on a journalism course, you run into a problem.

Basic communications tuition – which is at the heart of journalism practice – will run into problems with course validation. There’s a good chance it won’t been seen as BA standard by whichever panel is approving your journalism course. 

So I guess my problem with journalism education isn’t so much about studying it at degree level as about it being lumped in with the BA qualification. 

Perhaps we should have a separate faculty for comms-type  education – with a BComms at the end of it. Or if we’re going to be really precious about it, perhaps we need a special Bachelor of Journalism qualification. 

Let’s face it – if students know they’ll be getting a BJ at the end of their studies, applications will soar…

If you thought editorial integrity was being undermined in the UK, take a look at the Times of India. 

Indian journalism blogger Sans Serif has an interesting post on an investigation by finance journalist Sucheta Delal on the way the Times of India not only sells news coverage in the paper, but also uses that coverage to boost companies that it has bought shares in. This is achieved by using what are known as private treaties (PT). 

Quoting Delal, he says:

“Journalists are being designated as ‘champions’ for PT clients to tailor editorial coverage to enhance the value of these companies and TOI’s investment.”

A note of warning: watch out for the lack of a link to the source. I’ve been trying to track down the original report without success. Nonetheless, It’s a sobering piece. In comparison, it makes the Daily Mirror City Clickers share tip scandal look like very small beer. And they ended up going to jail…

From your gardening correspondent:

Faced with the prospect of utter media meltdown earlier this year, I thought I might end up having to forage for food around the local area, given that a lot of the work I was banking on had fallen off a cliff.

I did actually scrump some apples from the lane running behind my house, and gathered blackberries, Darling Buds style, from Farnham Park. But I soon realised that the biggest boost I could give my weekly food budget was to sidestep the supermarket when feeding my other half’s addiction to vine-grown tomatoes.

With that in mind, and inspired by the heroic efforts of my fellow blogger Soilman, I invested a few quid in a do-it-yourself grow-your-own-tomatoes kit from the local Homebase. “This will save a bit of money,” I thought, smugly. “We can enjoy fresh tomatoes off the vine all summer, and it will cost just pennies.”

Oh, how you all laugh. And rightly so.

I thought my early theoretical training on BBC Gardener’s World magazine would give me a solid grounding in all this. But frankly all it really achieved for me was the ability to spot typos in Latin names. In itself, not an unworthy talent. But not that useful in practical horticulture.

Let’s just run through all the horrific errors.

1. Buying a kit from Homebase. I mean, really. Apart from the cheap nastiness of the black plastic propagator thing and the dubious quality of the compost, I had a packet of white label tomato seeds to plant that certainly weren’t Vittoria or Yellow Sungold (see how useful those days at the BBC were). I did wonder if I should ditch them and try some decent seeds from Mr Fothergill, but I was £7.50 in the hole already so I thought I’d save a bit of money.
2. Planting the seedlings in early May – about a month later than recommended on the instructions. I don’t know how much of a problem this was, actually. Probably much less than all the other heinous errors.
3. Leaving the propagator out in May’s torrential rain. Yeah. That was clever. And not checking it for a week. Unsurprisingly when I did finally look the soil was swimming in water. I did wonder why no little seedlings had appeared.
4. Crowding my plants like Japanese commuters on the Tokyo metro. At last, many weeks after sowing the seeds, and some time after blotting most of the excess water from the propagator, I got around to planting out the seedlings in my brand new Gro-bag. How proud I was of my nurturing skills. What a shame I planted all of the dozens of little seedlings in the same bag. Yes. It was only many weeks later that I looked at the instructions again to see that I should have planted only three plants per Gro-bag.
5. Not culling most of the plants when I had the chance. It’s just that I didn’t want any of those precious seedlings to go to waste. By the time I realised it might be a problem, the plants had achieved a thicket-like status that, I admit it, I was simply too scared to tackle.
6. Not feeding the plants regularly. Not sure if this was good or bad, given that they didn’t actually have any room to grow in. But I’m sure my sadistic regime of feast and famine didn’t do them much good.
7. Not staking up the plants. You may have noticed that my tomato plants are sprawling in indolent profusion all over the pathway. Forgetting that this was not a decorative border but a crop, I thought that looked rather charming and didn’t bother doing anything to support them at first. So they started sagging. And then pretty much collapsed.
8. Not pinching out my plants. I actually still don’t really know what this is, or how to do it. But I could hear the despair in Soilman’s voice when he realised I hadn’t.
9. Not harvesting when I finally got some fruit. It was well into September before I started to see little green tomatoes growing on the vines. Thinking “Oh, they’ll ripen”, I just left them there. To rot.

Finally, after some sensible advice to gather the tomatoes and put them on a south-facing windowsill to ripen gently, I harvested everything I could and did just that. And waited to make a nice autumn salad with my lovely, glowing red, home-grown tomatoes.

It was with some disappointment, then, that I found myself faced with this. It’s still a mystery to me how the couple of dozen tomatoes I managed to salvage went from firm and green to wizened and diseased with absolutely no period of ripeness in between. Any ideas from the allotment brigade gratefully received.

But no! There was one lone tomato left. And after quickly quarantining it from the leprous mass it actually turned a healthy shade of red. I could retain some shred of self-respect through all this.

And so came the Evening of the Ceremonial Eating.

I could hardly make a salad with it, as it was so small it would have got lost among half a lettuce leaf and a bit of cucumber. It was more of an exquisite morsel – and should be presented as such, with a drizzle of oil and balsamic. A bit like this:

How was it? You may well ask. As tasteless as a forced own-brand supermarket Value tomato. But about 200 times more expensive.

Back to Waitrose. Sod the cost.

Iain Martin of the Wall Street Journal has written an interesting series of posts fisking the Financial Times.

Essentially he argues that the FT – which is typically perceived as a bastion of the pro-capitalist media, and also has a reputation for quality coverage – is biased and sloppy.

One post discusses an FT story on industry worries about a potential post-election Conservative planning regime. It quotes EDF Energy – whose communications director happens to be Gordon Brown’s brother – and also spins the headline to be much more dramatic than the story merits (well, that’s journalism for you).

Another refers to City hostility to Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne’s plans for bank bonuses, but fails to to back this up with relevant quotes. Then a third looked at how the FT bigged up an anti-Tory letter from Labour attack dog Alastair Campbell into another prominent anti-Conservative story. Which is hardly news, since that’s what Alastair Campbell exists to do.

As a long-time weekend FT reader, I had noticed what I took to be isolated bits of left-leaning writing, mainly in the Magazine. But I thought it was just the usual mis-match between left-leaning journos and the paper’s pro-business stance and which hadn’t been picked up and edited out.

But if Guido Fawkes is to be believed, this is a deliberate trend. He suggests that the paper’s falling circulation in its London City heartland means its focus is becoming more Europhile – and hence statist, if not socialist – as overseas sales become more important.

Which papers are benefitting? The relentlessly free market City AM, which is enjoying a healthy circulation boost and is apparently making money, and the resurgent Wall Street Journal, apparently.

It’s interesting stuff. It reminds me of the popular misconception that The Sun was still “a Labour paper” many years after it started vociferously supporting the Tories. Mention the FT to many people, including journalists, and they’d probably have no idea it was starting to lean leftwards.

But it’s also an interesting case study in whether or not it pays to stick to your journalistic guns. The key question is whether the long-term damage to the FT’s financial and business credibility outweighs any short-term gain from playing to a more anti-capitalist European sentiment.

Thanks to Greg Watts and FleetStreetBlues for weighing in on my Beyond Journalism essay.

I used a comment by FleetStreetBlues on my media recession poll as a springboard for some ideas I have been developing on creativity and the way that we tend to put boundaries around the things we do in life.

Though they graciously conceded much of the main argument, the FleetStreetBlues crew made the point that, although I had survived the media recession doing interesting work, I hadn’t, crucially, survived it as a journalist.

Which, let’s face it, is strictly true. I’m not solely a journalist – nor do I want to be. The freelance is unbound, after all. And as things stand I’m getting less like a journalist (at least in those terms) as I move into other areas of creative work.

Greg Watts is coming from my side of the argument when he says:

“Journalism is one branch of the writing tree. Marketing copy is another.”

So, yes, like Greg, I see myself as a writer, rather than a journalist.

But does any of this matter? I certainly don’t disagree with FleetStreetBlues – they are, after all, literally correct. Are we just having a pointless “you say potato, I say po-tah-to” disagreement?

I’m not sure. There’s something else here bothering me that I’m trying to pin down.

It could be that I remember typesetting.

Anyone over the age of 45 probably does. It involved sending your laboriously typewritten copy to a different company (or different department, if you worked on a national paper) to be turned into galley proofs.

Teams of (largely) men sweated over hot metal type (well, actually some kind of phototypesetting by the time I got involved) and produced the raw material of media layouts. After you stuck your galleys down to dummy pages using hot wax (no, I’m not making this up), the typesetter would make up the pages for printing.

It was a pleasantly solid process. You felt you were somehow involved in a semi-industrial activity. Digital pre-press workflow just doesn’t have the same romance somehow. I just can’t get excited about PDFs.

But, as the song says, all things must pass. The arrival of the Apple Mac and desktop publishing eclipsed typesetting – provoking futile rearguard industrial action by typesetting union the NGA and causing the bulk of colour reprographics work to be sent to the Far East, which had quickly geared up to take advantage of the new technology.

What happened to typesetting? It ended. It ceased to be. It is an ex-industry – though I’m sure there are some craftspeople somewhere creating printed material using hot metal technology funded by an Arts Council grant.

So if you asked a typesetter how they survived the upheaval of the early 1990s, it’s almost certain that they wouldn’t have survived it as a typesetter.

I think this is important. Typesetters went into a whole range of other work to put food on the table, some of which was more or less related to typesetting.

Because as the cost of digital kit came down, a big chunk of that colour repro work that went to Hong Kong or Singapore came back to the UK. Where it was handled by a lot of the old typesetters who were now working in digital pre-press. Though not as typesetters. Not exactly.

I guess I have the same sense about journalism. It’s not going to vanish in the way that typesetting did. But it’s going to change radically. What were full-time jobs may become part-time hobbies, as redundant or under-employed journalists set up community-based news sites, but pay the bills writing marketing copy and doing consulting.

And if part of being a production journalist used to involve learning how to use QuarkXPress (after the hot wax thing), now it involves running what is effectively a pre-press workflow, up to and including the final digital files that produce the printing plates.

In future, it will involve being able to construct an online reader forum using CMS tools, as well as handling the Flash-based banner ads that need to be placed on the site. Oh, and write some halfway decent copy.

(I feel sorry for the typesetters in all of this too. They’ve almost been displaced from repro now. Heaven knows where they’ll go next.)

And as FleetStreetBlues quite rightly notes, that isn’t journalism. Not really. But I do wonder if what we have understood as journalism up to now will still be the model for this strange media activity we’re involved in forever.

I suspect that framing a question such as how we survived the media recession as journalists may make as much sense in the future as asking how we’ve managed to walk on land as fish.

I approached yesterday’s feedback session with journalism students with some trepidation. Although I wanted my criticism to be robust, I also wanted to avoid putting them off writing for life.

As it was, I needn’t have worried. It went pretty well. No one actually went for me with a sharp object, and some said they really wanted to get more feedback to improve. Which is great – because that’s exactly what it’s all about.

In the spirit of quid pro quo, it’s also important for lecturers to acknowledge the feedback of students. I’m very keen to ensure that whatever criticism I’m making of student writing [a] makes sense and [b] addresses the areas they want to improve.

So, journalism students. Don’t be afraid to give feedback as well. I’m happy to take on board suggestions about critiquing student work, shaping whatever guidance I give to address their concerns, be it style, structure, research or whatever.

Generally the problem is structure though. I’m just saying.

I’ve only just come across this recent study from the Pew Research Center in the US, which finds that public confidence in the accuracy of the news media is at a two-decade low.

Apparently only 29% of Americans polled trusted news organisations to be accurate, while only 26% thought they were unbiased.

It’s also interesting to see that, although TV retains its dominance for news consumption (71% of respondents), more people said they got their news from the web (42%) than from newspapers (33%).

These figures are pretty shameful. Journalism has never really been the shining beacon of truth its boosters claim, but 55% of people in 1985 thought you could believe the news.

Of course, this doesn’t establish whether news stories are genuinely less accurate, or that people are simply more cynical. But either way, this is hardly a good result for the media when it is trying to pitch itself as vital to the foundations of democracy.

I missed this on Tuesday (I’m not obsessed with the media you know), but it seems the London Lite is to close.

I’m kind of glad – but only because I now don’t look so stupid for predicting it prematurely.

Does this mean the London Evening Standard will get a free ride to success? In theory it should have a better chance of making money, given that it has no competition whatsoever.

But as Greg Watts points out in a comment here, the Standard is just not doing a very good job of representing Londoners and their lives. I hardly ever bother to pick it up on my commute – even fending off the desperate distributors at Waterloo Station.

It’s big, bulky – and just not very engaging as a paper. God help me, I sort of preferred The London Paper for a low-impact and cursory read on the train.

Paul Bradshaw on the Online Journalism Blog responds to a journalist’s query about whether there’s a glut of journalism courses by saying, essentially, that it’s the wrong question.

He argues that there are only too many journalism degrees or courses if you think a journalism degree is about training people to be journalists. Which, as we all know, is on a hiding to nothing since all the jobs started disappearing.

Instead, Bradshaw thinks a journalism degree is about education, not training. It’s all about research, conceptual knowledge and critical analysis, as well as learning communication skills.

The trouble is, most people in the real world don’t think like that. Undergraduates often see their degree course as “qualifying” them in journalism. It’s perceived as a practical, vocational course. Even if, as a BA, it really isn’t.

More to the point, it makes hammering home the more generic communication-type education much more difficult, as students can’t see the connection between research, conceptual knowledge and critical analysis and working on, say, Heat.

Bradshaw goes on to say that it doesn’t matter, because many other degree courses don’t lead on to employment.

I’m sure that most people studying drama hope to become actors; that most people studying art hope to work in the creative industries; even that many people studying English Literature hope to become writers.

Drama, maybe. But the study of art can be part of a rich, personal, cultural life, just like the study of English Literature (disclosure: I am an English grad). Journalism just doesn’t have that resonance. It is a trade, after all, not an “opportunity for personal development”.

I’m all in favour of the non-vocational degree. But if you’re going to be teaching communication skills, call it communication, or cultural analysis or something that is not job-specific.

Why don’t we do that? Because parents – the ones who often have a say in whether their children’s degree course is a waste of time – think it sounds too woolly. Instead they want – you guessed it – a course with the prospect of some vocational-type qualification at the end of it.

And guess what? The government has an employability imperative in higher education. Which means we can’t just treat degrees as the pathway to personal growth anymore.

No, we shouldn’t always expect a degree to correspond to a vocational employment choice. But journalism sits awkwardly in the higher education pantheon. And there are a hell of a lot of those courses…