When "staff" writing really isn't

One of the Johnny Depp pirate movies.

AARRGGGGHH!!

It's the sound of my frustration and irritation, not my inner pirate, at the job listings I continue to see that devalue professional writers.

Take this one posted the other day on a LinkedIn writers' group under the headline "Staff Writing Positions Available." A weblink takes you to the Staff Writer Application, which lists these "minimum requirements":  "A journalism, writing or English degree is not required but is a plus. Alternatively, a year or more experience as a professional freelance writer or blogger will be considered. Professional experience or knowledge related to the topic area you're applying for will also be taken into consideration."

You know right then that it's a come-on for some low-paid content farm "job," and, indeed, the application states that the pay is "$25 upfront per post for full rights," which, admittedly, is better than what some well-known sites offer. (The application also asks for a lot of proof of writing ability, like links to writing samples and any websites you've written for, as well as URLs for your personal blog and Twitter accounts, and, of all things, your Skype ID.)

But let's get real here. If the website this application is attached to is looking for "paid Staff Writers," as it states, where's the benefits package? If I'm on staff, don't I get sick days and vacation days and health insurance and perhaps even occasional overtime pay?  C'mon!

Of course you know the answer.

And this site isn't alone, mind you. On the same day this posting slapped me in the face, the Yahoo! Contributor Network was advertising for "writers, bloggers and journalists," and Suite 101 was trying to rope in college kids.

It makes you want to shout a "Right on!" in solidarity with Jonathan Tasini and the freelancers looking to get a hunk of cash out of the Huffington Post-AOL merger for all their blogging.

One final irony of the "paid Staff Writers" posting is this mission statement offered by the website: "By being authentic in our writing and portrayal of real women facing real life every day, we encourage women to purposefully choose to create bliss in family life and home."

Except, that is, if you're a woman who wants to make a living as a writer.

Weekend read: Don't forget the journalism

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Time to squeeze in a quick end-of-weekend reading list:

"Product First!" ((Re)- Structuring Journalism): I like the caution flag waved here by longtime journalist Reg Chua at the new slogan "Digital First," as championed by John Paton of Journal Register Co.: If it's just shorthand "for posting news faster and faster to the Web," says Chua, "it doesn’t really fundamentally rethink what we do, except make it go faster, at lower cost, with more bells and whistles." Instead, he says, "Wouldn't it make more sense to talk about 'journalism first'? That would at least put the focus on the quality of what we do."

"Some Thoughts on the Social Distribution of Mass Media...(SoDOMM)" (Silicon Valley Watcher): In one of those it's-so-obvious-why-didn't-I-see-it? observations, Tom Foremski suggests that the so-called social media revolution hasn't lived up to its potential: "If you look at the links people are sharing through social media, much of it is links to the same newspapers and big media organizations that people were reading, listening to, and watching before the advent of social media." Ha! He says a better descriptor of the terrain is SoDOMM: Social Distribution Of Mass Media.

"The Guardian Newsblog and the Death of Journalism" (The Louse & the Flea): Is live-blogging or live-tweeting good or bad for journalism? Both are being used more often by media organizations in the name of alternative story-telling. As a result, as-it-happens posts are being compiled by a reporter who is at a press conference or product demonstration or public meeting. If you know of the event and are interested in what's transpiring, it's the next best thing to being there. But when the event is breaking news, the result can confuse more than enlighten. But the Editors Weblog, in "Are Live Blogs the Future of Journalism?", contends online running commentary may yet have a place.

Musical interlude.

Quick takes:

• "The NYT's Melting Iceberg Syndrome" (Monday Note): "Could the New York Times be viable as a digital-only operation?" is the provocative question posed in the opening sentence. Why this what-if game? See the next item. 
• "Top 10 Dying Industries" (Real Time Economics): Of course newspaper publishing is on the list, No. 3 behind wired telecommunications carriers and mills.
• "Losing Our Way" (New York Times): Bob Herbert's last column.

Video interlude: Was I the only one who didn't get the memo on the planned musical extravaganza by "Grey's Anatomy"? Imagine my surprise flipping it on in mid-episode.

Weekend reading: Can hyperlocal work?

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Here's the latest installment of things worth reading:

"Hyperlocal Heartbreak: Why Haven't Neighborhood News Technologies Worked Out?" (ReadWriteWeb): With Aol's deal to acquire neighborhood news aggregator Outside.in as a backdrop, author Marshall Kirkpatrick tries to figure out why various attempts to develop sites in this niche have yet to work. Is it an idea ahead of its time? Don't enough people care about what's happening down the street? Is the revenue model too elusive? "I care about what's happening in the neighborhood around me," he writes, "and I want to see the fabulous new technologies of open government data, online news syndication, social networking and data mining all put to service to fulfill hyperlocal news wishes and dreams I didn't even know I had yet."

"Q&A: Jim Brady on the Death of TBD" (Columbia Journalism Review): Brady was one of the brains behind TBD, the online-only local news site in Washington, D.C., that saw the rug pulled out from under it by parent Allbritton Communications just six months after launch. Here he offers an extended post-mortem on the rise and fall of the site, which he says has been wrongly characterized as a hyperlocal effort.

Musical interlude.

"Memo to Newspapers: Incremental Change Is Not Helping" (GigaOM): Check out the graphic in this post by Mathew Ingram, which originally accompanied an analysis by Frederic Filloux of the disruptive changes now facing traditional media. It shows how rapidly print advertising revenue has declined -- with the Washington Post as a model -- vs. the slow rise in online revenue: there's no intersection of the lines as "digital pennies" are no match for "print dollars." For the Post, it means in real terms the loss of $5 in print revenue for every $1 gained in online revenue.

"Journal Register's Localized Video News Strategy Is Driving Profitability: CEO John Paton" (Beet.TV): In a video interview, Journal Register Co.'s John Paton explains the technology his "digital first, print last" company uses to get video to the web quickly -- including eliminating the bottleneck (emphasis added) of central editing.

Bonus reads:

"A Day in the Life of a Liveblogger" (MobileCrunch): This is a delightful, insightful tale of live-blogging, as one reporter psyches himself and syncs his mobile "office" to cover the folderol of new tech-product releases.

"So Long Again, Chicago Daily News" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Newsosaur Alan Mutter reminisces about the 1978 closing of the afternoon paper in Chicago. "But this isn't just ancient history," he offers. "It is a valuable reminder to today's media companies of what happens when you run out of readers, revenues and ideas all at the same time."

Ready! Set! Read!

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For your rest-of-the-weekend reading pleasure:

"The Newsonomics of Journalist Headcounts" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Ken Doctor supplies an exhaustive rundown of journalism jobs lost in the last decade and those being created today. Bottom line: We've lost more than we've gained, even as "technologies and growing audiences have built out a huge capacity for news."

"When Campaigns Manipulate Social Media" (The Atlantic): Here's some food for thought post-midterm election: 140-character attack campaigns may be more worrisome in the future than deep-pocketed interest groups.

Creative video interlude: "A Life on Facebook."

"Rusbridger: Openness, Collaboration Key to New Information Ecosystem" (Poynter Online): Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian newspaper in London, writes about the "mutualisation" it employs that embraces Web attributes of openness (linking) and collaboration (working with readers and others). Be sure to follow the link to one example he gives, "Comment is Free," a cool comment website.

"U.S. Mobile Data Traffic to Top 1 Exabyte" (GigaOM): An exabyte, you'll learn here, is "a unit of information equal to 1000 petabytes or a billion gigabytes" -- which I still can't fathom, but the short of it is that our appetite for access to data whenever and wherever we want it is growing rapidly. Hello smartphones.

An appropriate music video interlude.

"I Am a Blogger No Longer" (The Atlantic): Marc Ambinder bids adieu to his gig as blogger for The Atlantic, saying he missed the rigor of print and found the 24/7 nature of online exhausting. "What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called 'Marc Ambinder' that people read because it's 'Marc Ambinder,' rather than because it's good or interesting."

The post got folks talking on Twitter, and also spawned this: "Escape from Thunderdome" (Snarkmarket), a three-fer that dissects Ambinder. One interesting comment to the dissection, though, raises this point: maybe Ambinder got tired of being a brand, a supposed goal of all journalists going forward. Sacrilege!

Hilarious video interlude: The Washington Post generates a lot of chatter for a video -- featuring a befuddled Bob Woodward -- that introduces its new iPad app. (It even earns a jab from Washington City Paper.) But I want to know about the hole in the sole of Ben Bradlee's shoe -- real or a prop?

The weekend? Don't relax; read!

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Another weekend, another reading list:

"Meaty News Topics Are Popular -- And More Profitable" (Journalism 2.0):  This is encouraging: The top news topics over the summer involved serious issues -- unemployment, the Gulf oil spill, mortgage rates, egg recall -- as opposed to celebrity fluff. That's according to a company that works with publishers to monetize content, as measured by website traffic and ad revenue per thousand page views. Huzzah!

"The Newsonomics of the Ad Recovery" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Not so encouraging is this: Advertising is coming back, but newspapers aren't getting as much of it as their TV and magazine peers, says media analyst Ken Doctor. What's more, the pace of online ads is up, too, but newspapers haven't gotten digital as quickly as they should, so they aren't in a position to take best advantage of that trend. Sigh!

"This Is Not a Blog Post" (Slate): Did you know that blogs were morphing into Web magazines and 'zines were becoming blogs? Don't care? Well, some people do, and this piece in Slate explains why the descriptor "article" will bestow gravitas whereas "post" won't.

"How Free Can It Be?" (The Fiscal Times): More on paying or not paying interns -- from a writer who uses unpaid assistants to write a story about using unpaid assistants.

Dazed and Confused yet? Time for a video interlude with bonus music backup.

"New York Times to Launch Texas Regional Edition by Month's End" (PoynterOnline): Three of anything makes a trend, right? (Ask any newspaper assigning editor.) So that must be what we have with the New York Times partnering again with a new online operation to produce specialized pages for its national edition in select U.S. cities. The Times already set up such arrangements in San Francisco with the new (2010) Bay Citizen and in Chicago with the new (2009) Chicago News Cooperative. Now it's Texas's turn. I wonder what metro is next?

The big FAIL in international coverage

Ethan Zuckerman called it his big FAIL, but in reality the failure is mainstream media's, not GlobalVoices, a website that posts news from bloggers in the world's developing countries.

Ethan Zuckerman

Zuckerman, co-founder and board chair of the site, and a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., was a panelist at one session on the second day of the two-day International Symposium on Online Journalism held at the University of Texas at Austin.

The panel, which was webcast this morning, focused on so-called participatory journalism, sometimes known as civic journalism or community journalism -- news reported by interested citizens who blog on their own, on nascent hyperlocal sites, or in conjunction with established media outlets.

GlobalVoices, founded in 2004, describes itself as "a community of 200 bloggers ... who work together to bring you translations and reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media."

And that, said Zuckerman, tongue firmly in cheek, is the fail: In 5½ years, mainstream media hasn't paid attention.

You wouldn't think that would be the case: Here's a site offering its news to anyone under a Creative Commons license (essentially free with attribution) just as many of the developed world's newspapers eliminate costly foreign news bureaus.

Sure, Zuckerman said, traffic spikes for an earthquake in Haiti or Chile, but not after a military coup in Fiji or a rise in "economic vegetarians" in Egypt. Mainstream media tend to stay focused on what they already know, he said.

Indeed, a map of the world colored to show frequency of mainstream media stories by country hasn't changed much in the near-decade he has been graphically charting the coverage, Zuckerman said.

A catastrophic FAIL? Yes, but not for lack of trying.

Hear ye, hear ye

I'm laughing out loud at the coincidence:

Amazon.com says the book Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters was published by Crown on July 7 -- the same date I was laid off from my newspaper job.

I don't blame blogging for what happened to me, but author Scott Rosenberg, a former journalist and entrepreneur turned blogger, has a terrific chapter in the book titled "Journalists vs. Bloggers" that sums up the marketplace events that have led to big layoffs at U.S. newspapers this year. The chapter is free for the reading here.

Rosenberg is on YouTube with a look at blogging's roots (and a pitch for his book):



His conclusion is that blogging, ever evolving, is here to stay as "our culture’s indispensable public square." And rather than shun or belittle it, legacy journalists need to embrace it.