Freelance Unbound

Warning: intense WordPress geekery ahead

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WordPress has gone all version 3.0 recently, and plug-in authors have been busily updating their software.

This has been fine so far, but yesterday I updated the fine Query Posts plug-in by high-profile WordPress author Justin Tadlock. And it has screwed up.

Query Posts is a super useful and well-produced plug-in that allows you to call up posts from your database of content using a whole range of criteria – from date and category to keyword tag or author name.

But as soon as it had updated to version 0.3, my sidebar list of posts turned from an orderly list of post titles in a neat, widget-style box (above left) to giant H2 headlines with full-blown excerpts underneath (above right). And I’m blowed if I can find out how to make them revert to the way they were.

In fact, when I tried to change the giant H2 headline to a smaller typeface, it seemed to screw up the other sidebar headlines too, so I’ve had to deactivate it.

Has any other WordPress user had this trouble? I’d be interested to know if it’s just me being more stupid than usual…

Goodness, Freelance Unbound is suddenly all over the interweb thanks to yesterday’s get-your-own-back-on-tiresome-PR-departments post about Clinique.

It was picked up by Jim Romenesko of journalism university the Poynter Institute, who wrote a news brief about the story. Cue a tsunami of traffic (by Freelance Unbound’s modest standards) and a wealth of comments.

There are a few lessons here if you’d like to boost your own traffic and comment threads:

• Write about big brands (companies, celebrities)
• Have a nice, snarky story to tell
• Reveal yourself to be an incompetent fool (see the comments section)
• Get your post picked up by a bigger publication that will reach out to a much wider audience

Only the last is in the lap of the gods. I immediately suspected Twitter to be the prime mover, but couldn’t find an appropriately smoking gun in terms of retweets and inbound links. According to Jim Romenesko, the story was sent to Poynter.org by “a reader” – but where he or she picked it up remains a mystery.

So – out of curiosity, if you were that reader (and thanks!), where did you see the post? Was it via Twitter, or are you one of Freelance Unbound’s tiny legion of loyal readers? I’d love to know

The comments fell into two camps. One group was simply quite amused by the story; the other took me to task for, basically, not doing my job. “All you had to do was Google the company to find a phone number, you moron,” could roughly summarise this group’s view.

In response, I’d say you are absolutely right. I was totally rubbish in following up my 10pm press office registration and basically did nothing to track down the relevant contact. I am an abject failure as a journalist. I crawl in the dirt in front of my proper, professional peers. I, simply, suck.

Crucially though, this isn’t really the point of the story. I am just bewildered at the PR strategy of a big consumer brand, which apparently doesn’t want to reveal the phone number of its press office, nor the details of any of its media contacts, until it has pre-vetted the person who’s asking for it. And only gets around to it after two weeks.

It reminds me of a feature I wrote many years ago about the promotional use of electrical goods (I know, I know, how you envy my media life). I called up one of the big warehouse electrical retailers to get some information on the subject.

There was no press contact available anywhere I looked online, so I called the main consumer number and asked if the company had a press office. It had, apparently, but the person I spoke to at the call centre couldn’t give me, a member of the media, the number for the media centre because it was “confidential”. That sort of response is, frankly, bonkers.

As for my lack of follow-up to my Clinique endeavours, the answer is simple. I followed the characteristic decision tree of the freelance writer.

Do I have enough relevant information for my feature?

• [A] Yes – write the feature and put in your invoice
• [B] No – make more effort to find relevant contacts and ask them for input

The answer that week was “Yes” – which is why I forgot all about Clinique and got on with the rest of it. At least they didn’t seem that bothered…

Regular readers will know something of the trials of the freelance trade press journalist. Here’s another instalment, which gives an interesting insight into how some brands see the idea of “communication”.

The past couple of weeks of my scintillating media life have been taken up with writing a business-to-business (b2b) feature on male grooming for The Grocer – that fine trade press newspaper for the retail trade from William Reed Business Media.

As briefs go, it followed the usual path. Retail buyers (among the magazine’s core constituency) were not interested at all in talking to me. Male grooming brands (which all wanted to reach and inform the retail buyers) were falling over themselves to send me information and more-or-less relevant commentary.

Except one. When I tried to reach Clinique – arguably the brand that made skin care-type products acceptable to men in the first place back in the 1980s – I drew a blank.

Go to the media relations page on the Clinique web site and it asks you to register as a member of the press to get access to media contact information. Yes, that’s right, you must register as a member of the press before you can actually bother the super-busy and important media relations team with your media enquiry.

Well – it’s a big brand. Maybe they get inundated with time-wasters. No problem – I’ll fill out the form and wait for the, hopefully, quick and automated notification of my login details. There we go – an automated message saying:

Thank you for applying for a Press Pass. Your application is now being processed and you will be contacted shortly by a member of the team.

“Shortly”. That’s good, because my deadline is a week on Thursday and I don’t have as much time as I’d like to get all the information together. Let’s hope a member of Clinique’s “team” gets back to me in a day or two. I hope they’re not too busy.

That was two weeks ago. Yesterday morning – several days too late – I finally got an email from “Camilla”. Did she have confirmation of my registration with the press office? Was she full of apologies for taking bloody weeks to bother to reply to my enquiry? No. She wanted to know a bit more about me:

Thank you for your recent (sic) application to Clinique’s online press office.  It would be great to find out some more information about the publications that you work for.  We would just like to get a bit more information as I don’t believe we’ve worked together before.

No, Camilla, we haven’t. Gosh – that’s because this is my first time trying to write about your brand. Which you are making quite difficult. Especially as my deadline has already been and gone. So, you know, thanks for nothing.

And why is it that Clinique is so reluctant to embrace my press enquiry with open arms?

Our corporate policy is that we request a media pack or hard copy of any new publications that we haven’t worked with before, in order to gain brand approval. As you’re freelance, we require information on the publications that you work for.  We are more than happy to help out with your queries if you are happy to respond with this information.

Oh, gee – thanks. I’m so happy you need to vet me to even let me ask you a sodding question.

And “brand approval” to let a journalist talk to a press office? Get over yourselves. A press office exists to talk to journalists. If you are putting obstacles in their way, you’re just a waste of space.

And remember – journalists are consumers too. I think I won’t be putting any business Clinique’s way from now on…

[UPDATE: I've just had a lovely email from Amy in the Clinique press office, who is terribly apologetic and, more importantly, has updated the Clinique press office web site with a general contact number for journalists (and, presumably, time-wasters). Hurrah]

Just found out that Harvey Pekar – arguably the father of autobiographical comics – has died aged 70.

He wrote about his brush with lymphatic cancer in the award-winning graphic novel Our Cancer Year in 1994 and chronicled his everyday life in Cleveland from the 1980s onward in American Splendour. Inexplicably, given its un-Hollywood nature, he got a film made about his life in 2003, starring the great Paul Giamatti.

It’s a great shame – his work stands up with any of the best social reportage.

Tameside Council has declined to provide “Twitter accreditation” to bloggers and other citizens – thus supposedly preventing them from reporting via social media from council meetings.

It seems the council is much more comfortable with the idea of “professional journalists” covering its activities. Could this be that they are less of a threat?

The Daily Telegraph has reported on a classic waste-of-Council-Tax-payers’ money by Tameside Council.

It seems the trend-following IT geeks at Tameside spent £36,000 on setting up a Second Life environment to reach “hard-to-reach” groups, such as the disabled and the young.

As one might expect, the project was started in May 2008, just after the buzz about Second Life as the next big thing started to subside. The project, which only went live in January 2009, was finally killed in March this year.

So, which tenacious news reporter dug up this story? Apparently, local “blogger” (read: “not journalist”) Liam Billington, who reported it after getting the facts from a Freedom of Information request.

It’s actually nice of the Telegraph to credit him halfway down the story. But for the record, he’s technically a “microblogger”, as a search for the crusading blog only uncovers the Twitter page for Liam Billington. Which is presumably why the Council want to block him from their meetings.

He does the job properly, you see…

[HT: Soilman]

[UPDATE: Liam Billington has emailed to note that he did have a blog – Tameside Eye – but it's on hiatus as he pursues other interests...]

Lots of meejah chat about the passing of Jonathan Ross from the BBC airwaves this week. Some decry him as “a tacky agent of unthinking self-harm” (Quentin Letts, unsurprisingly); others celebrate a “fresh, irreverent TV natural” (Mark Lawson). But all overlook the collateral damage from his fall.

No, I’m not talking about Russell Brand (he seems to be doing all right, anyway).

I’m worried about Ross’s overlooked sidekick – Andy Davies. Year after year, Davies jetted in from his home in Spain to fulfil his self-proclaimed role of “producer/sidekick/devil’s advocate/giggler” on Ross’s Saturday morning Radio 2 show. Now what’s he going to do?

I know he claims to have been a radio producer for over 10 years, with experience beyond the Jonathan Ross show. But has anyone actually heard Andy Davies anywhere other than at Ross’s side?

We can only hope that Ross takes pity and carries Davies with him to ITV. Otherwise that Spanish bolthole may become a bit of an albatross…

If this job ad is to be believed, the “World’s first iPad-only magazine” is set to hit early-adopter screens in September.

Katachi claims to be “an international selection of Design, People and Business” and is recruiting for freelance journalists with “a minimum of two years’ experience or genius equivalent.”

It’s an intriguing idea. Does this point to the future of online media? It’s taken newspapers a decade or more to get used to the idea of moving beyond the idea of the periodical to something more fluid and interactive.

Perhaps it’s time the old-school was leapfrogged by new publishing models tailored to the must-have gadgets that are starting to dominate consumers’ time. This year it’s the iPhone and iPad – next year it’ll doubtless be others.

Even if this publishing experiment fails (and to be honest it’s likely), it’s pointing in the direction that online media will probably have to go.

Normally, the Radio Times is the most rigorously proofread magazine on the newsstand, so it’s a shame that this bit of sloppiness slipped into print.

From Stuart Maconie’s “Maconie’s People” column of 3-9 July 2010 comes this:

Forget what they say about James Brown. Damon Albarn is surely the hardest working man in showbiz?

Whether you agree with the sentiment or not, there’s one thing that’s unquestionable about this statement – it’s not a question. So why the question mark at the end?

Probably because it’s a suggestion, rather than a demonstrable truth. It seems that, as with apostrophes, people are becoming less confident about how to use the question mark, and tack one on the end of any sentence that expresses an opinion that’s not a definite fact. The false question is becoming more and more apparent in modern writing. You’ll see it most frequently in student work, but it’s creeping into published journalism too.

How to tell when a sentence is a question:

• It starts with a verb (“Am I a journalist?”)
• The verb starts with one of the five ‘Ws’ of journalism (what, where, when, why, who). Or the ‘H’ (how)

These are the only ones that need a question mark. Full stop.

Bit of a glitch at the BBC web site this afternoon – either that or the viewing public has developed a fascination with “Unnamed pages”.

(Actually, it’s kind of fun – makes visiting the site a bit of a lucky dip… )

UPDATE: Oh, and it’s all over. Everything’s back to normal now. A shame in a way – I do like to see fallibility in a national institution.

Nine-year-old Anna Carnochan has been in the news today, taking the prime minister to task over a potential tax on toys.

She wasn’t happy with his reply, it seems, and is pursuing the matter with the tenacity of a young Jeremy Paxman. Apparently Anna “wants to be a news reporter” when she’s older. She’s currently drafting a new letter to press him for more focused and detailed answers.

Here’s my tip for getting more out of your interviewee: spell his name right. Then maybe “David Camron” will take your letter more seriously.

Yes, I know she’s only young. But this is why I have to deal with undergraduates who don’t understand why getting facts right is important. The rot has to stop…