Mad propz to Craig McGill over at Cluttered desk for spotting this brilliant vision of a zombie outbreak as seen through Twitter. Key quote: “Rigged the house with explosives. This may be my last tweet, people.”
And that’s a sentiment I share as I find myself overwhelmed by social media: this blog, podcasts, my work blog, Twitter, Facebook, Dopplerz, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Flickr. And that’s without the daily grind of reading through my Yahoo Pipes and Google Reader. When’s a net professional supposed to get any work done?
Treehouse Media Project has unveiled a manifesto for embittered journos everywhere. (Thanks to Irish-Swedish internet guru Mark Comerford for flagging this up.) Let me give you a flavour with this superbly passionate line:
Laid off? Bought out? Pissed off? Or just overworked because you’re one of the “lucky” ones still working for the walking corpse that is the daily newspaper? Join us, the diaspora, as we work to recapture the joy and passion of our noble profession.
The project has a noble aim: equipping journalists with the entrepreneurial skills to survive in a Web 2.0 world. It’s right: we should go it alone. But it strikes a bum note for me by starting off its homepage with “F*** Google. F*** Craig’s List.”
Even if this is just a come-hither to embittered hacks, it’s a mistake. Google, Craig’s List and other changes to online advertising give us the tools to be free.
Message to journalists everywhere: The internet is not the enemy, your employer’s business model is.
The internet will last. Big newspaper companies that screw profits out of cowed staff and unsophisticated advertisers are doomed.
Good.
F*** ‘em. Not Google. Not Craig’s List. F*** big media. They deserve to die. They have betrayed our sacred calling. And everyone who’s really a journalist in their hearts, guts and gonads will water their graves in the only way we know how – on the way home from the pub.
I’m inspired by Treehouse’s manifesto. And its prompted me to begin my own. But it’s not a manifesto. It’s a business plan. And while its mired in the net up to its oxters it still has that sickly sweet smell of printer’s ink.
Oh yes, print.
Print’s not dead. It’s just going through a painful adolescence.
Like all true hacks, that ink’s in my blood. Before I moved to the web in 2000, I’d experienced the joy-cum-terror of the “hold the front page” call. Until I became a husband and father, the proudest moment of my life was my first byline (The Scotsman, 1988). I’ll never forget my first splash (The Sunday Mail, 1994) or my first interview (Joe Strummer for The List, 1988.) On my wall I have three copper printer’s plates of The Scotsman from 1972 and 1999 – as well as a framed picture of the first edition of that paper not to carry ads on the front page (1956). And I know that for the consumption of some information print is the best answer.
But it’s only part of the whole picture – and the whole business plan. As I have said many times before, I believe that the net has brought us to the verge of a golden age of journalism. In fact, there has never been a better time to be a journalist. It’s just that there’s never been a worse time to work for a newspaper.
So don’t work for a newspaper. Work for a news organisation which understands the 21st century and isn’t relying on a business model that started looking dated after the invention of radio.
As for Scotland, it has one world-class newsroom in it. One which would stick the heid on the Times, Guardian, BBC and tediously navel-gazing US papers. Sadly, this talented newsroom is spread across dying titles, desperate news agencies and PR-land.
But it doesn’t need to be that way.
Let me paint you a picture of a world of direct communication with the reader. A world that rewarded the best in journalism with the greatest readership. A world of untainted revenue, without advertising department twats in ties with overlarge knots. Imagine a life without 30% profit margins taken out of your pocket. Dream of a life free from megalomaniac proprietors and muppet editors who exist only to trim costs and wouldn’t recognise a story if it kicked them in the old Niagaras with steel-toed boots embroidered with the words: “I AM A STORY, YOU STUPID, PAPERCLIP-COUNTING CHOOB.”
I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you … but only because I’m going there on a motorbike.
Anyone coming for the ride?
MORE FOLLOWS
Former Scotsman editor John McGurk has produced a fascintating investigation for the BBC on the future of the indigenous Scottish quality press. His conclusion is that it’s fucked.
When I was editor of scotsman.com (seven years, ten-fold increase in readerts, ahtankyew) John and I had our differences insofar as he would joyfully have strangled the online edition in its cot. But he has hit the nail on the head with this piece.
As well as exposing the guilty secret of plummeting sales at the Horrid and Hootsmon, John reveals that public sector advertising worth £47m will no longer be placed in the Scottish nationals. To put that the effects of that in layman’s terms: game over, man, game over.
Some thoughts occurred to me:
- If the Scottish public sector (and the politicians who run it) want native Scottish journalism they should continue to advertise with the Scottish nationals.
- They are under absolutely no obligation to do so, any more than readers are obliged to buy the papers.
- This is a lesson that the Scotsman and Herald have not learned. They are owned by companies (Gannet and Johnston Press) that insist on obscenely large profit margins and sacrifice quality to achieve them. Both papers are produced on a shoestring. It shows. The quality of journalism in both papers has fallen drastically. That’s why people don’t buy them. Why should they?
- At no point did John mention the Metro. On the 26 bus to the centre of Edinburgh people used to read the Scotsman but they now read the Metro – a low quality tabloid packed with wire copy. As that’s what Scotsman has become why should people bother paying money for it? (Oh and Johnston Press does not understand The Scotsman and their much-lauded digital strategy is deeply flawed – no matter how much Tim Bowdler clings to it when the share price falls. Again.)
- While Andrew Neil and John spoke movingly about the decline of Scottish papers they were strangely reticent about their own contribution. Brillo in particular has been loud in his condemnation of JP’s record at the Scotsman (correctly, by the way). However, the wirily coiffed one is not so hot on his own record. A listener phoning in to BBC Scotland’s Morning Extra to discuss John’s report had this to say: “These two were handed a quality paper and handed back the Beano at the end of their tenure.” McGurk had no answer to that but a joke about how healthy the Beano’s sales were. For years, I tried in vain at the Scotsman to discover the exact decline in sales when Neil was in charge but no-one could ever tell me. I do know that his stewardship was a wasted opportunity. He had the backing and the ambition to take the paper forward but his bloody true believer Thatcherite ideology got in the way and he alienated the readers and lost many, many fine journalists – mostly to Business AM.
- The Herald and Scotsman will merge soon. Both titles will survive as west and east coast editions of one product. I don’t think either Gannet or JP have the vision (or cash) to do that. As John said in his piece, PLCs are a bad bet for newspapers. I believe the future lies with trusts and family firms. My money’s on DC Thomson or the Guardian to buy and merge them. I have no reason for thinking this other than a feeling in my water.
Finally, readers still care. One lady on the phone-in lamented the demise of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. But despite feedback from readers, Charles McGhee of the Herald did not seem to take on board any of their criticisms. And that’s part of the problem too.
Over at the site of my new business, we’ve been having fun with the seven deadly sins. Nothing sordid, mind, all very tasteful. We’ve been listing the various downfalls we’ve seen befall sites and matching them up against the classical vices. (Of course, being a business, we then offer ourselves as the solution.) It’s part of our radical strategy of making clients’ content interesting.
It’s not always easy being a hack. You throw your creativity out into an uncaring world and think nobody’s watching.
But they are, especially when you screw up, as BBC Scotland’s Judith Tonner demonstrates.
What’s even more surprising is the extent to which even the smallest (albeit very flashy) gesture gets analysed over and over again, as with David Robertson’s pen trick.
Posted on w00tonomy:
Stewart Kirkpatrick, our Content Marketing Director, has induced a bout of vomiting at w00tonomy with this self-serving communique:
“I have been elected to the New Media Industry Council of the National Union of Journalists (in a jobshare with Euan Williamson of Imagineering). Like nearly every large body, the NUJ has struggled with what the web means for today and tomorrow. I am delighted to have this opportunity to help guide its thinking.”
Stewart will also be speaking at the Sunday Herald’s Shaping Scotland’s Digital Future event – at 9am on 24 April at The Teacher Building, St Enoch Square, Glasgow – where he will be tarred and feathered by the rest of w00tonomy if he comes out with anything similar in tone to the above statement.
Well played, Sir Robert of McNeil, who has apparently seen off a wealthy person who was offended at his comment that “the rich are leaving and good ruddy riddance to them”.
Carol Høgel – who hails from a place called Chicago in one of the former colonies – also referred to The Scotsman columnist as a “destructively spiteful philistine“. This is a plainly untrue as Rab is a devotee of the poet-warriors in green and white who grace this Earth under the name Hibernian Football Club. He thus demonstrates delicate artistic sensibilities that make Ovid look like Stephen Frail.
At the risk of being “spiteful”, I note that Ms Høgel is an heiress. Perhaps if she had had to make her money herself she wouldn’t have so thin a skin. In the hope that Rab can keep this up, I have sent him a list of people that I think Scotland would be better off without. Sadly, he has not replied to my pleas.
More seriously, Rab is one of the very, very few writers in Scotland who is provocative. I’m sure that rich people prefer paeons of praise – such as they might hear from desperate fundraisers after some dough – but that is not what real journalism is about. Too much of what fills our papers is tepid, timid, predictable and corporately approved.
Thank God for the Rabs of this world who remind us that proper journalism jars, surprises and – yes – offends. Let’s hope the Carol Høgels of this world see the art in that.
For eight years I plied my trade as an online journalist. My mission, should I have no choice but to accept it, was to attract readers to pages where adverts were served. For every 1,000 page impression a piece of content received we could expect something like £10 (plus any sponsorship for the relevant section).
That’s a lot of work to get a lot of traffic for not much cash. That’s a key problem for commercial publishers online. Another key problem is the way that online has moved in the past two years or so.
Thanks to the phenomenon known as Web 2.0, the focus has shifted to individual items of content not to where they are displayed. Blogs, RSS feeds, widgets, wikis, social network and umpteen other phenomena take content out of its context and share, manipulate and distribute it in more ways than seem possible. If the content is interesting enough, that is.
This presents a bijout problemette for commercial content producers. While it’s great to have lots of people reading their stories or watching their videos it’s hard to generate revenue unless you can drag those users under an advertising banner or beside a sponsor’s logo. This mission is not impossible but it is damn hard.
But this is all great news if your aim is not to make money from attracting people but simply getting a message to them. And this is where the public sector wins big, especially when it comes to delivering public service messages.
Online is now about distribution and content. If you can embed your message in interesting content then the natural flow of the web will take it to the people for you.
For those of you who are still struggling with what this Web 2.0 thing is, I’ve some bad news (though really it’s great news): Web 3.0 is just around the corner, according to the man who invented these tangled Webs.
Tim Berners-Lee says in an interview with Paul Miller that the Semantic Web – a crucial part of the Web 3.0 vision – is open for business.
“Wow,” I hear you say. “Web 3.0. The Semantic Web. Great … Err, what the **** does that actually mean?”
Well, the sainted Sir TBL puts it this way:
Web 2.0 is a stovepipe system. It’s a set of stovepipes where each site has got its data and it’s not sharing it. What people are sometimes calling a Web 3.0 vision [is] where you’ve got lots of different data out there on the Web and you’ve got lots of different applications, but they’re independent. A given application can use different data. An application can run on a desktop or in my browser, it’s my agent. It can access all the data, which I can use and everything’s much more seamless and much more powerful because you get this integration. The same application has access to data from all over the place.
Now in my view all data is content. What we are looking at is a future where you will be able to access all data (or content) from any device or any application anywhere. But that does not mean that the Facebook Vampires application will stalk you to the toilet or “private personal enhancement medication” emails will start tumbling out of your iPod. One of the key characteristics of what’s known as Web 2.0 has been the organising of data (content) to enhance relevance. As technology allows the universal sharing of data this trend towards completely targeted relevance will become even more pronounced.
It’s good to know that TBL believes William Gibson’s oft-quoted dictum: “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
(Also posted on w00tonomy.com.)
I am very proud to be a journalist and, coincidentally, have long admired the late great Bill Hicks. I especially enjoyed his assessment of those trod “the other side” of the media line:
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root. I don’t know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there’s no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan’s little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You’re the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. “There’s gonna be a joke coming…” There’s no fucking joke coming, you are Satan’s spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show.
So part of me is bewildered to find that I have set up a “content marketing” agency called w00tonomy. Yup, I now work in marketing, though I still consider myself a journalist. A journalist who is hibernating until the current great winnowing is past and the good times come back.
In the meantime, sorry Bill.
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My tweets- calgacus: How women are rewriting the future of Sierra Leone http://t.co/McCnvJgL #caweek #africa
- calgacus: Ruud boy who rejected Rangers: van Nistelrooy retires at 35 http://t.co/TgIAsweS
- calgacus: Five defence myths that must be scotched over independence http://t.co/ZJn2Yg8w #indyref #ukpolitics #scotland
