Spalpeen

burning paper from the last 10 years of my life by The Shifted Librarian on Flickr

Some commentary on David Carr’s article, United, Newspapers May (Could, Possibly, Might, Will Hopefully, With Crutches) Stand. I’d like to rename it “United, Newspapers Will (More Likely) Fall.”

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Back when I was a young media reporter fueled by indignation and suspicion, I often pictured the dark overlords of the newspaper industry gathering at a secret location to collude over cigars and Cognac, deciding how to set prices and the news agenda at the same time.

It probably never happened, but now that I fear for the future of the world that they made, I’m hoping that meeting takes place. I’ll even buy the cigars.

Got news for ya’ David, even the non-smoking newspaper men ain’t meeting anymore.

Even casual followers of the newspaper industry could rattle off the doomsday tick-tock: a digitally enabled free fall in ads and audience now has burly guys circling major daily newspapers with plywood and nail guns. The Rocky Mountain News is gone, The San Francisco Chronicle is on the bubble, and dozens of others are limping along on the endangered list.

Including the very paper that this column appears in.

Magazine and newspaper editors have canceled their annual conferences (good idea: let’s not talk to one another). But perhaps someone can blow a secret whistle and the publishers and editors could all meet at an undisclosed location.

Alright, so you saw that link about the newspaper people not meeting. My bad. Maybe for your proposed secret meeting they could try emailing each other?

My fantasy meeting goes something like this: a rump caucus could form where the newspaper industry would decide to hold hands and jump off the following cliffs together on the following actions.

No more free content. The Web has become the primary delivery mechanism for quality newsrooms across the country, and consumers will have to participate in financing the newsgathering process if it is to continue. Setting the price point at free — the newspaper analyst Alan D. Mutter called it the “original sin” — has brought the industry millions of eyeballs and a return that doesn’t cover the coffee budget of some newsrooms.

Unfortunately printing information on paper don’t seem to be selling either. And as far as I can tell, internet articles behind paywalls don’t seem to sell either.

The big threat would be that newspapers could lose the readers they have, lots of them. The mitigating factor is that a lot of those readers aren’t paying anyway. And keep in mind that people are already paying for quality content all over the Web: The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, The Arkansas Gazette. Tiered Web access — from a bare-bones free product to a rich, customized subscription — could be among the solutions.

Isn’t part of the problem that newspapers seem only want to churn out one-product-fits-all? Since when have newspapers cared about who the hell I am? This article doesn’t even allow comments. How are they going to customise anything to suit my needs? (by the way, any information that does get revealed through these “customized subscriptions” will end up being free anyway.) [insert something about the internet destroying boundaries to information/mp3s/movies]

No more free ride to aggregators. Google announced that it would begin selling ads against Google News, with almost no financial accommodation to the organizations that generate that news. The book industry — of all Luddites — has extracted cash from Google, as did the wire services. Google, The Huffington Post and Newser have built their audiences and brands on other people’s labors. Continue Reading »

Rebecca Elvin is a Print Journalism student at The University of Huddersfield, and she’s writing a dissertation on ‘the changing role of the freelancer.’ She contacted me to see if I could answer some questions about joining the NUJ as the first “full time blogger.” Here they are, along with my answers.

So you have had your application for membership at the NUJ approved as a full-time freelance professional blogger. What is the difference between you and the thousands of other people that blog?

I applied to join the NUJ as a full-time blogger for Engadget.com, a very popular consumer technology blog (public numbers put it at somewhere around 4 million unique users per month: during one conference last year the site got 6.4 million page views in one hour. That’s traffic that rivals national newspaper websites).

What most people don’t see with Engadget is the extremely tight editorial control on the site. Behind the scenes, you have a team of editors who are constantly maintaining the unique voice of the site, and making sure that the high ethical standards for the site are being met. That’s what sets Engadget and other professional blogs apart from the huge majority of blogs out there. The internal ethical guidelines for Engadget are as strict as The New York Times.

What made you apply to the NUJ?

I applied to the NUJ for two reasons:

1) I read an editorial by The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade responding to an article by the NUJ’s Donnacha DeLong about how he had decided to leave the NUJ because in his view, it had failed to represent him as a journalist. Seeing that, I thought that leaving the NUJ was hardly going to help the situation. So I decided to join partially out of the principle that it’s easier to improve something if you get directly involved with its operation.

2) Because I felt that my compensation at Engadget wasn’t satisfactory. I was being paid in dollars (while living in the UK, when the currency rate was $2:£1), and although these matters were known by the editor at the time (Ryan Block) and he had offered to increase my pay to offset this, and had mentioned the possibility of a full-time salaried position at the site, I felt that I needed to get some advice. Engadget.com is owned by Weblogs, Inc., which is in turned by AOL, which should have been paying its writers a lot more than it did at the time. Note that was mid-2007. I have no idea how much writers get paid at Weblogs, Inc. now. 

What do you think the benefits on joining the NUJ will be?

So far the main benefit I’ve received has come from the publicity around my application. It’s also quite something to be able to put on your CV that you were the first blogger to join one of the most established unions for journalists. In the future, I consider my NUJ membership as a form of insurance policy. Hopefully I won’t have any trouble with employers in the future, but I take comfort from the fact that I’ll have someone to call in case an employer is late sending a freelance cheque, or worse.

What direction do you think the future of online journalism is heading?

More collaboration between writers and readers. More and better quality video. More and larger images. A greater number of smaller, faster and more flexible publications beating bigger, slower and inflexible publications to the punch. New technologies that push out the old technologies, and the publications that continue to cling to them. I’d like to think that mainstream media sites will learn how to link properly (i.e. often, and to the sources they cite), and that the process of journalism carried out by the MSM will become a little bit more transparent.

Do you think there could be any conflicting factors between the traditional media and bloggers?

The real conflict is between traditional methods of presenting information on the web, and newer methods of presenting information on the web. I see no reason to read Ben Goldacre’s column at Guardian.co.uk, because his blog, Bad Science, gives me the same content, plus a whole lot more (it’s easier to find, it features all his other posts in one location, it features the stuff The Guardian edited out). There’s no reason for me to read his column (traditional media) because the blog (newer media) gives me more. It really is as simple as that.

Pitting “bloggers” in conflict against mainstream media is misguided, because as you see in the example above, Ben Goldacre is both a producer of traditional media *and* a blogger. The same person publishing content on newer online publishing formats beats the same person publishing content on traditional online publishing formats. It’s time that newspapers figured this out!

What does your job involve?

Currently I’m a student in my final year at Hull University, studying History and Politics. I’m soon to start working for Catch21 Productions, which produces online video and arranges events across the country on a theme of getting young people involved with politics. It was founded by ex-Hull students, and I’m very excited about helping out there!

My work at Engadget primarily involved writing ~200-word blog posts on consumer technology topics. Secondary to that was finding things to write about, which involves searching through a ridiculously huge index of RSS feeds, a rapidly updated tips box for readers to send in news, and live coverage of news events (keynotes, product reviews). The second task was shared out amongst the writers of the site, so at some point during your shift you’d be “on duty” and singly devoted to finding and dishing out news items to other writers.

Have you trained as a journalist?

I’ve had no formal training as a journalist. Everything I know about journalism comes from looking at how established journalists and news organisations do things, and attempting to do it better.

How do make a living out of blogging?

Currently I don’t earn a living from blogging, but through Weblogs, Inc. I received a cheque every month for writing a certain number of blog posts every month. In my case, I wouldn’t call it a living, but it was enough for me to justify spending time on something I enjoyed doing.

Would there be an option to work as a staffed blogger or have you actively chosen to be freelance? If so, why.

Yes, I had been offered the option of potentially becoming a staff blogger at Engadget. The harder I worked, the quicker I could have achieved that. I never achieved it due to other pressures (being a full time student) and the fact that I enjoyed the level I was working at. I did it primarily for fun, to make contacts and to hone my skills as a writer/reporter. I eventually left to go work on Mahalo Daily for a year, which was also about having fun and honing my skills - in that case through producing video.