Twisted Ravings of an Unemployed Journalist

Nate Thayer, The Atlantic and the future

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 21:42:23 -0500

Over the past several days the nonfiction world has been in an uproar over The Atlantic, one of the largest and most succesful media operations out there, attempting to get Nate Thayer, a respected journalist, to contribute a piece for free, or rather for “exposure.”

Thayer’s response was a great big “Fuck you” and I love him for that.

As I keep saying, you cannot eat exposure or use it to the pay the rent. Exposure won’t get you in to a big networking conference. It might get you invited to some parties and it might result in people mailing their feces to you, but it’s not fungible.

While the initial response was entirely favorable for Thayer, some like economist Matt Yglesias and now Reuters’ Felix Salmon, are coming down on the side of the cheap bastards at The Atlantic (who do a good job putting out content that’s usually above average).

Well, Mr. Harvard-educated-economist and Reuters financial blogger, this may surprise you, but there is a huge world of difference between “writing” that’s links and block quotes, which can be done in an idle hour and requires only functional literacy skills, and actual journalism, which requires a substantial investment of time and at least a little bit of intellectual effort.

Unfortunately, the current publishing model for the digital age requires quantity over quality. It didn’t start with the internet — acres of old growth forest were clear cut for newsprint used for the banal, the trivial and the inconsequential — but for the newspapers, even the banal, the trivial and the inconsequential involved original reporting. Journalists were expect to go places and interview witnesses, experts and PR people, even if the article was about Old Man Howard’s brand new fence blowing down in the big wind storm.

Churning out posts for the sake of churning out posts isn’t the activity of a company publishing journalism, but of a content mill. Worst of all, the model fails to recognize that at the bottom of the inverted pyramid, someone’s still got to do the reporting.

WTF is Buzzfeed?

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:14:36 -0500

Beginning around the end of last month, when the “2012’s best” lists started coming out, one of them mentioned everywhere was Buzzfeed, which also just secured millions of dollars more in start-up funding.

I had never heard of Buzzfeed before. Not from Poynter, Romenesko, UMass Journalism, Nieman, HuffPo, The Daily Caller, The Atlantic or any other website or organization I read or follow and then, suddenly, it was everywhere. Everyone was talking about it “inventing social journalism” and all sorts of crap like that.

I find this hype very amusing because 1) Not a single thing originating from Buzzfeed has ever been shared across my entire social network and 2) As far as I could tell, it’s The Huffington Post with a more annoying interface.

The way they fly under the radar doesn’t bode well for them, I think.

Telecommuting

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:29:24 -0500

I really really really really really really hate telecommuting. Isolation is desolation and it is not splendid. I am starved for human contact on a daily basis. It’s as bad as it was in Rutland, but at least I’m not swamped by despair anymore.

I don’t get it. I don’t understand why people want to work from home.

DEAR GOD, WHY DOES MY LIFE SUCK SO MUCH?

Gah!

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 12:53:09 -0500

Last night I lost almost $20 playing Texas Hold ‘Em. It was a friendly game and I had fun, but it epitomized my experience of Boston: some good times, but all at a net loss.

Since coming here, whatever triumphs of reporting or writing have quickly given way to the reality that I’m still making absolutely fuck all, that I have had no success as a freelance writer — I can barely fucking find outlets that might just fucking condescend to pay writers, much less the fucking mythical opportunities pro’s talk about — and that I can’t fucking write anything longer than about 2,000 words.

Meanwhile I’m fucking cooped up all day in my apartment and as a result I don’t meet anyone and I’m paid such a fucking pittance that I can’t go out except to walk. The Bohemians of the Belle Epoque may not have had much either, but in those days a dollar went a lot fucking further.

I have never been the most social guy, but it would be nice to see friends more than once a month, or become a regular at a bar or meet a girl.

And you know something? I don’t have any other fucking skills worth a fucking damn. That’s not to say that I couldn’t do the jobs I’m not “qualified” for — a reasonably intelligent monkey could do some of them — it just means I can’t be considered for them because my BA is in journalism and I don’t have ten years of experience in marketing. Fuck ‘em.

“Other men sail through life, Biyalystock has struck a reef.”

Anger is good. Anger shows I’m passionate. I’ve just got to turn that passion into writing.

Thoughts from Hurricane Sandy

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 11:09:19 -0400

Having gone on for some time now about unbundling content and an iTunes-type model for journalism, Sandy’s unbridled fury that has, as my roommate put it, ended Western Civilization, also provided me with a good thought experiment. It is very important for any possible business model to be able to cope with emergencies and other forms of breaking news.

One reason that photographers, weathermen and other reporters are willing to go out in these storms, or war correspondents are willing to embed themselves with military units, is that they’re being paid a salary. Yes, I’m sure most of them love journalism and are very brave, but longevity favors the cautious.

Recent studies I’m too lazy to look up have even shown that traditional media are the go-to source for a lot of breaking stories. There are, of course, lots of reasons for that — a lot of new media and certainly smaller media simply don’t have access to press conferences and pools. I remember there was a bit of hoopla when The Huffington Post was granted a White House press room seat.

Traditional media also have better support resources — police scanners, multiple reporters covering a story and some larger companies, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, probably have back-up generators in their buildings, if not back-up newsrooms.

But all those resources are useless if the reporters aren’t going to brave storms or other dangers to get the story.

Trying to put it together

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 23:31:02 -0400

The Nieman Journalism Lab’s Week in Review from a few weeks ago had a very interesting bit about how British journalist David Leigh proposed that newspapers be subsidized with a tax on broadband. Writers at Nieman and other observers rightly shot down the idea as dangerous to editorial independence and Mark Coddington, who put together the week in review, quoted a post by Charlie Beckett at the London School of Economics:

” … it is vital not to equate ‘journalism’ with ‘existing news media organisations.’ Whenever an industry changes profoundly because of social and technological shifts, someone gets hurt.”

I left it in bold it’s so important. The horse-and-buggy industry passed quite unmourned when the automobile rose. Unfortunately the automobile industry isn’t as going so gently into that good night, with disastrous results for Detroit.

Coddington also mentioned that journalist Dominic Ponsford proposed an alternative: for news orgs to take themselves off Google and put together their own search engine.

Leigh’s proposal came because the paywalls aren’t working. Withdrawing from independent search engines like Google and Bing won’t help — especially since the cloud-based office tools being developed by Google are a huge boon to journalists.

It all comes down to what Paul Vidich said all those months ago: “Content wants to be unbundled.”

Putting up paywalls, blocking Google News and suing people for posting excerpts from stories or reposting video or audio clips is not only unhelpful, it’s actively counterproductive. You might as well quit smoking cold turkey — you succeed for a little while, but pretty soon you’re smoking more than you were before you quit. People want to be able to share fun or important stories on Facebook and Twitter. Blocking that is going to cut off readers and revenue.

The other counterproductive thing I see in journalism is the absence of an activity: there’s not really any innovation going on in the field, just at the front end. The content is the same, it’s just the packaging is different. Reporters have known for years that what is news-worthy for A1, above the fold status is just not what people want to read. They want to read the sports section, or about arts and entertainment. Some A1 stories are important enough that people will read them, but for the most part their newsworthiness is inversely correlated to their interestingness.

Similarly, newspapers are filled with stories that don’t tell you anything, like stories about gaffes or Politico on a Sunday. There are also stories in the business section, which are usually so full of jargon they can only be understood by workers in that sector.

Rather than confront this complacity and conservatism, it seems like most journalists would rather just prattle on about the importance of newspapers to democracy Walter Lippman-like.

But people want news; they just don’t want the product we’re putting out there.

It comes down to three things:

1) Content wants to be unbundled

2) Content wants to be shared

3) Content wants to be read

Boston, you sexy beast

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 21:26:50 -0400

I can’t say I’m more prosperous than I was in Rutland, but living in a city allows for a lot of interactions and observations you don’t get in a town and these interactions can mean lots more ideas. This is, in fact, more or less the point of the city.

One of the observations I’ve had in Boston is that just about everyone has a Kindle, tablet or smartphone that they use regularly. I see more people reading with those devices on the train than I see people reading any of the free papers — The Metro, The Phoenix, etc. And I almost never see anyone with The Globe or The Herald.

You can get a Kindle subscription to The Boston Globe for $11.99 a month. A regular online subscription is $3.99 a week, or about $16 a month. The New York Times, on Kindle, is about $20 a month, with the range going from $15 to $35.

Meanwhile an awful lot of magazines are available on Kindle for less than $2 a month.

This gets right to the heart of the matter: publications like The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post don’t really get it. They have been hurt the most by declining ad revenue for a long time, so they focused on building that revenue up by getting more expensive ads from higher-end stores and other things that appeal to the upper middle class, they also focused their coverage on things that appeal to the upper middle class, which is why travel sections will have articles about renting beach-front cottages in the Carribean or the best out-of-the-way restaurants in some Tuscan hill village with a $2000 a night B&B. Hell, it’s why New Yorkers think Vermont is a nigh-untouched utopia of craft breweries, farmer’s markets and “traditional” villages surrounding Stowe.

The fact is, The Times and The Globe can’t compete anymore because they have so narrowed their target demographic that they lose all the gains that could be made from the fact that digital means decreased production costs.

They have moved away from the idea of mass media even as its potentials in the internet age are still being explored. They want to be Walter Lippmann — high-minded guardians of culture, taking a patrician interest in democracy, but they’ve forgotten that Walter Lippman’s work was made possible not by the quality of his journalism (I don’t know that he did anything other than speculate on democracy) but by his connections with the powerful and wealthy and by the fact that other reporters were working hard on writing news with the goal of selling newspapers.

This usually meant producing stories that appealed to everyone — sometimes by using sensationalism — but it also led to things like newspaper comics. Novels used to be serialized, poems were published. Anything publishers could do to attract customers they did. And once upon a time even small towns had more than one paper and some large papers put out morning, afternoon and evening editions.

Journalists can learn lots from musicians

Wed, 30 May 2012 09:51:50 -0400

“We’re going to continue doing it. We’re also going to continue all the contests, giveaways, pop-up shops, random mail orders, subscription services and manufacturing of insane new vinyl products and any other ridiculous idea that strikes our fancy. Why? Because we’re American. And Americans do crazy shit for capitalism. See you in hell.” — Third Man Records GM Ben Swank, in The Guardian via Pitchfork. H/t Lachlan Markay.

Journalists don’t do crazy shit anymore. I blame Walter Lippman. The man was the Jon Meacham of his time in that all his output seemed to consist of self-indulgent essays and books. I’m halfway there myself.

Anyways, while journalists had always been self-righteous, it was Lippman who elevated it into a professional quality. He wrote extensively on the journalist’s role in American society and democracy, believing that neither could function without them, and was especially influential in establishing “objectivity” as central to professional journalism. I use quotes because Lippmanian objectivity isn’t really that objective, it’s “he said, she said” stenography and it only works if everyone is telling the truth.

Before he professionalized the profession, crazy shit was the bread and butter of newspapermen because they understood that their jobs were to sell newspapers, not tell public interest stories that none of the public was actually interested in. Their prose was purple, their pens were poison and they were willing to go pretty far after a good story. From rooting through garbage to illicit surveillance to just plain fabricating stories, it may have been unethical by the standards of today (or even illegal), but they sold. Hell, it wouldn’t surprise me if at least one journalist in those days grusomely murdered a prostitute on a slow news day.

What’s some crazy shit journalists can do today?

Bands of bundles

Tue, 29 May 2012 20:55:49 -0400

My friend Pete Storey published his first book the other day, a collection of short stories entitled Human Nature. It’s really good — as an author, actor, adventurer and secret agent (probably), I wouldn’t be surprised to see him write, direct and star in his own biopic one day. You should go and buy it right now. Back? Good.

Anyways, he published it on Amazon for the Kindle and is selling it at the very reasonable price of $0.99. He didn’t need an agent or an advance. He just needed a publishing app and some friends to drum up some grassroots support. He also needed a day job to support himself until such time as he loses money from time spent not writing, but that’s not exactly unusual among authors.

Now, there are authors on Amazon who have made fortunes from selling 99-cent ebooks that never passed through a publisher’s hand. They probably aren’t the greatest authors ever, or even the most prolific, but if you’re trying to decide whether to read a novel or not, getting the 99-cent one instead of the $25.99 one or even the $8.99 is going to be more prudent.

These days, of course, it seems like you can barely give news away. My thoughts keep returning to iTunes, Netflix and Storyville co-founder Paul Vidich’s statement that “Content wants to be unbundled.”

All news is currently bundled content, except for breaking news tweets and Facebook shares. If you want to read about arts from the New York Times you have to buy the whole newspaper or an online subscription, which includes everything else, even the things you don’t want. This is like buying an album for one song or a DVD boxed set for one episode.

Currently news organizations are like record companies trying to sell albums. In many ways the extent of their digital transitions has been to selling CDs instead of vinyl. News organizations need to be more like bands, selling singles on iTunes and building a loyal audience.

Berkshire-Hathaway recently purchased a bunch of daily newspapers from Media General. In a letter to the publishers and editors, Warren Buffett wrote “I believe newspapers that intensively cover their communities will have a good future … a newspaper that reduces its coverage of the news important to its community is certain to reduce it’s readership … No one has ever stopped reading halfway through a story that was about them or their neighbors.”

While that is true, it’s also not the whole story. Communities are not geographic anymore. In some ways they never were, but technology wasn’t advanced enough to allow them to form over great distances. The news stories that get shared most often among my friends are rarely local pieces because we just don’t live near each other. We share national politics, viral stories, science and offbeat. I’ve lived in Somerville, MA since March and I don’t really have a damn clue what’s going on because Somerville really isn’t my community. I’m also part of communities of University of Massachusetts Amherst alumni, expatriate Vermonters, Red Sox fans, sci-fi/fantasy geeks, steampunks, journalists and others.

I’ve said before that it makes no sense for a lot of papers to carry national sports coverage and that division of labor is true for many other areas: a newsorg with a state-level focus only needs to worry about national, international or local news insofar as it affects the state, otherwise the media that covers those things best can handle it. Sure, there might be slightly less web traffic for a site like that, but scarce resources will be allocated more efficiently and thus be more valuable.

Despite my many exasperations over their content, Politico is one of the best examples of “band” journalism. Because they focus exclusively on national politics they’ve been able to build an audience of politics junkies and make enough money that you can get their print edition for free around Washington, DC and view their content for free online. They even make it easy to share.

The Problems of Journalism

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:59:05 -0400

Basically, the problems of journalism boil down to one: utilty. People are willing to pay for information that’s useful to them. This is why The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Reuters are still profitable and other media orgs are going through reorganization, restructuring or out of business.

If journalists published more relevant news, the other challenges would be easy. Instead, we get more of the same sensationalist bullshit where the local papers try to outdo each other in portraying the gruesomeness of some crime and you turn on the TV news and same stories appear every night: fire, weather, crime, vehicular accident and “special reports” about the remote possibility that a common domestic appliance or accessory is deadly/connected to Satanism/could make the neighborhood attractive to minorities.

I recently had to cover the arraignment of a man accused of murdering his mother and grandmother. All the TV stations and tabloids were there, along with the local papers. After the arraignment concluded, I went outside the courtroom into the hall, hoping to ask the attorneys some questions about evidence and motives, etc. Instead, I was caught up in a human riptide and carried out of the courthouse as the camera crews competed among themselves to stick their cameras in the face of the suspect’s sister as she left.

Not only is this behavior extremely insensitive, it’s completely pointless. It added no information, contributed nothing to understanding and maybe got a few extra seconds of B-roll or whatever those mindless neanderthalls on TV call it. Had I been able to fight off the tide I would have discovered that even covering the procedings was just as pointless because of the way criminal court in Massachusetts works.

All the criminal cases start in district court, but only misdeamoners are tried there. Felonies, such as murder, have to get bumped up to superior court — but only after an indictment has been made by a Grand Jury. So until the indictment comes through the prosecution has to shuttle the thing through district court procedings because otherwise they would have to let him go. Even better, when it does get up to superior court the process starts all over with a new arraignment.

Head. Desk. Ow.

What’s really shocking about this great parade of idiocy that even Baldrick would find unbelievably stupid is that the state of political journalism is even worse.

The recent Cracked.com article 5 Ways to Spot a BS Political Story in Under 10 Seconds by David Wong described the problem pretty well. According to Wong, only 17 percent of politics stories are about policy, while the rest are targeted at people who view politics as entertainment. He writes ” … virtually all political news coverage is written to appeal to those people. They’re the most rabid ‘consumers’ of news, and their traffic is the most reliable, so the news is tailored to appeal to them.”

I disagree. They may have been the most rabid consumers of news at one point, but they’re not any more, which is why so much news targeted at them is produced — it’s editors desperate to catch a small slice of a shrinking pie, like how American car companies continued to make gigantic cars with the gas milage of a few feet per gallon despite the fact that less and less people were buying them.

Unfortunately, as business strategies go, that’s one of the worst. It didn’t work in the auto industry (twice!) and it’s not working in journalism.

The fact is that thanks to the Bush administration’s nigh-fascistic response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the yet-unresolved problems of network neutrality on the internet and its concomitant issues of online privacy concerns surrounding Google and Facebook, the continued economic problems facing the world and the apparent failure of people in government to agree on what’s for lunch much less a response to the country’s problems politics is being taken seriously by more and more people. We are starting to recognize that the decisions of 535 senile octogenarians have real consequences on our lives.

But as long as journalists keep trying to feed the public the same bullshit we will continue to lose money, continue to lose audience share to propaganda outlets like Russia Today and continue to be accused of being stooges in some New World Order conspiracy to brainwash the public.

The failure to provide relevant political journalism is an even worse trend, I think, then the tendency of political journalists to be stenographers for officials. Reporting uncritically can be problematic, but it’s better than reporting on irrelevant frivolity.

The Stages of Grief

Wed, 02 May 2012 22:57:23 -0400

I love print media. I think it’s genetic because I am descended from a long line of serious bibliophiles (I believe we have a 17th century bible somewhere) and if there’s one commodity Robares always need it’s shelf space (God, how I love my Kindle). There’s a used bookstore in my hometown of Rutland, Vermont called Annie’s Bookstop and they’re going out of business in June. My Mom says the owners want to retire, but I think it’s really because they know I moved out and my parents now have a Kindle they share.

But it’s not just books — I’ve been reading newspapers and magazines since I was old enough to read, if not before.

But I think it’s time everyone realized that paper is done. It has passed on to the big publishing house in the sky, never again to stain our fingers with ink or become home to the hallucinogenic fungus that makes old books smell so great. But I think a lot of people in publishing know paper is done, they just haven’t accepted it yet. Yes, the newspaper industry is going through the five stages of grief.

If you look at the past 20 years of newspaper history, you start to see it. The 90s and the eary 2000s were the first stage: denial. Subscriptions were down, newsstand sales were down, young people weren’t reading them and attempts to make them attractive to younger readers were alienating the subscribers. The internet was already a thing — Knight-Ridder predicted the iPad, for God’s sake!

Next came anger in the early 2000s as ad revenue started declining as advertisers started noticing how cheap and succesful it was to advertise to growing numbers of people online instead of the shrinking number of newspaper subscribers. The lead to layoffs and and the third and fourth stages: bargaining and depression. While certainly a lot of journalists are depressed about being laid off or being unable to get a decently paying job — or a job of any kind at all that involves journalism — the depression is best epitomized by the sorts of pinings for print I’ve been seeing recently, like the Neal Gabler op-ed I blogged about last year, that idolize print media as being more worthwhile for the sole reason that it is printed on paper. (Linguistically, westerners have never gotten over stone tablet media, which is why we still say things like “It’s not set in stone” to denote impermanence.)

The bargaining is happening at the same time as the depression. It describes the current measures the traditional media is taken to preserve the newspaper by not changing anything except that it’s online. This has ranged from putting a pdf of each day’s paper online to designing UIs that look like pages of newsprint and publishing everything in Times New Roman even though people read sans serif fonts better online. There is, of course, no reason for The New York Times’ homepage to look exactly like The Times’ frontpage, or for any of these papers to be trying to boost their print subscription rates.

Acceptance is the last stage and, although it will probably be followed by a bonfire, what acceptance entails is at the heart of all the questions about the future of journalism. To put it another way, if you had to get written news to someone, but weren’t allowed to use paper, what would it look like?

To answer that question, I’m going to turn to the music world again. For much of the 20th century the music industry was about selling albums. It’s distinctions are still based around it, but the album really peaked in the 70s when bands started making concept albums — unified works, where all the songs are tied together by a central theme. Some songs were occasionally released as singles, usually because they were the one from the album the band was hoping to get played on the radio a lot, thus promoting the album. This stayed true even as music technology moved from vinyl to 8-track, cassette and finally CD.

About the time casettes were at their peak the technology for copying songs from one cassette to another became more widely available, permitting the first mix tapes. But with CDs it was even easier, especially since you didn’t have to find the right spot on the tape to get the song on CD. As technology improved and early music sharing sites like Napster appeared, the album became superfluous.

This was codified by music executive Paul Vidich and Apple leader Steve Jobs through iTunes. Vidich recently talked to Alan Meckler of mediabistroTV’s “Elevator Pitch” about his most recent project, Storyville (interestingly, Storyville was the name of New Orleans’ red light district. I am not making this up).

“Content wants to be unbundled,” Vidich said about halfway through.

Bingo bango bongo.

I believe that those five words contain everything we will ever need for the future of journalism. Newspapers and magazines are albums — methods of packaging unrelated articles together that have been rendered superfluous by the digital age.

The next day AppNewser featured an Android application called “Next Issue” on its AppSlap feature. Next Issue bills itself as the “Netflix of magazines” because for a monthly subscription of $10 or $15 you can read all of any magazine from the publishers they’ve recruited. It’s a step in the right direction, but notice the drawbacks — most notably you can save individual articles and the UI is attempting to be a magazine page in a tablet screen. It’s still bargaining.

What I see in the future is more “The iTunes of News” instead of “The Netflix of Newspapers.” Imagine it: you don’t pay for the whole newspaper if you don’t want to, you pay for a few articles a day, the articles you want (one of the problems with journalism today, which I won’t get into here, but will save for another day, is that we aren’t producing very many articles that are either useful or interesting) from whatever source you want anytime, anywhere, any platform.

The really odd thing is that this business model already exists in journalism — it’s basically how newspapers get their stories from wire services.

A Lot of Little Ideas

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:45:31 -0400

I sincerely doubt that the salvation of my profession will be an underpaid journalist traveling by bus or train to cover a story and having a eureka moment to become the salvation of the industry. Or, if it does happen, I’d like that journalist to be me.

Similarly, I doubt that the the eureka moment of journalism is going to come from a professor musing in the pages of AJR or CJR. Or from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with an extra billion to spend. Especially not those.

You see, there probably won’t be a eureka moment at all, because that’s not how innovation happens. It’s not how anything happens. Humans tend to think it does because it fits the stories we create for ourselves — like the old cartoon where Thomas Edison invents the incandescent light bulb by grabbing on to the cliched light bulb that has gone on over his head when he has the idea for it. We forget that electric lights already existed, that Edison was essentially project manager of a team of inventors working for months on the project because it doesn’t fit the narrative. The first people to fly weren’t the Wright Brothers but the Montgolfier Brothers, who flew in a hot air balloon in 18th century France. The Wright Brothers didn’t even invent heavier-than-air flight, they were just the first to accomplish it. I don’t believe any great work of literature was ever purely a first draft.

Innovation happens piecemeal, as people have different ideas about how to accomplish something and eventually someone comes along to puts the best parts of each idea together — or sometimes several people do that — and you get the innovation. It’s a lot of little ideas — the next little thing — instead of big ideas. It’s like Isaac Newton said: “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”

For my next post, I’ll talk about some of those little ideas, but until then I have to go for a bus ride.

Still twisted, still raving

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:26:25 -0400

A lot has happened since the last time I blogged anything. Firstly, I got a job as a stringer Saugus, Massachusetts for a weekly paper called The Saugus Advocate. I did my first reporting since late April of 2011 in early February and it was awesome. Secondly, I moved from Rutland, Vermont to Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. So now this will be more like the twisted ravings of an underemployed journalist.

Anyways, it’s been great living in the Boston area, although the freelance opportunities haven’t been as great as I expected. It may have something to do with the time of year — I spent all of March looking for an apartment and had to settle for an adequate one, but now Craigslist is full of possibilities. I’ve tried to submit a few things, but I don’t have a lot of connections in the markets I’m looking at, which have mainly been the “alternative” media.

I put “alternative” in quotes like that because it’s not really any different from the other media in the Boston area, except that it’s free. Maybe The Phoenix, etc used to offer an alternative to the other papers, but these days they’re mainly distinguished by a focus on the arts, which means they get ad revenue from venues and performers.

The most recent issue of The Boston Phoenix contained a story called “Money for Nothing,” part of an issue proclaimed with a brain wearing headphones entitled “Rethinking Music: Five Big Ideas for a Broken Industry.”

Yes, it’s a print weekly. Let the irony sink in.

Getting back on topic, the gist of the article is that a Washington, DC-based organization called the Future of Music Coalition is doing research on how musicians are adapting to the decline of the traditional album-based model and the ability of artists to produce professional-style recordings from their own homes and sell them via iTunes and everything. According to the article “FMC conducted in-person interviews and financial record reviews with artists as well, ultimately establishing 42 different musical revenue streams.”

Forty two different revenue streams! Journalists have been dealing with the distruption of the industry for just as long and we still have two: ads and subscriptions. That’s less than the number of revenue streams James Gordon Bennett had in 1835 and Benjamin Day had in 1833, since they sold their papers to newsboys! In fact, Bennett invented the sensational story, the newspaper interview, the irrelevant political story and all the other mainstays of the industry.

I’m pleased to note that early partisan journalists invented the “holy vocation” attitude we have. That at least has been there since the beginning.

If we don’t start overhauling a business model that’s been around for 179 years, there won’t be a business left to overhaul.

Putting my money where my typing is

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:13:58 -0500

I’ve previously complained about the costs and challenges of starting an enterprise and about how I hate not doing any journalism and how much I loathe being stuck in my hometown of Rutland, Vt.

Well, after a particularly uninspiring week of dreary, non-paying, non-journalism jobs, I decided to take the bull by the horns: I’m starting a hyperlocal journalism website. I’ll add skills and real world experience to my resume and hopefully shake things up at that notorious broadsheet, The Rutland Herald — the straw that broke the camel’s back was reading a story wherein “mores,” as in the social standards, was spelled “morays,” as in more than one eel. Oddly, the reporter who wrote that story is probably their most competant and professional. If I’m really lucky I’ll be able to help effect some changes that will make this place a more decent place to live.

If all goes to plan I’ll be able to get out of here.

So I’ve started The Rutland Advocate. It’s not live yet, but I’m blogging about the experience here.

You can't eat internships even if you can eat interns

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:06:57 -0500

For every actual journalism job posted to job boards — i.e. a job that involves reporting news according to the best available information as opposed to public relations or marketing — maybe four are unpaid. Two of those are undergraduate internships and two of them are “new media organizations” like The Huffington Post that want cheap content.

The unpaid internship is understandable, with the purpose of giving sophomores and juniors professional experience. A lot of college newspapers are weeklies and more relaxed than professional papers. The Huffington-esque “jobs,” however, are not understandable. They convince people to contribute content — good, quality content — to their website and then turn around and sell it without any renumeration for the people who wrote it. They also aggregate a huge amount of content on their site, possibly without paying whoever produced that, either.

I worked hard for my BA, I worked hard reporting, writing and editing for The Collegian and I took a lot of crap from people who didn’t like what I wrote or who thought that being too poor to have a car was an “excuse” for not covering a story, among other things. But I sure as hell didn’t do any of it because I wanted to do a lot of hard work for bubkis. I knew that I wouldn’t get rich as a journalist, but I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be able to receive the most basic renumeration from my skilled labor.

Location, location, location

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:40:39 -0500

I’m in my seventh month of unemployment in my hometown of Rutland, Vermont (town motto: We’re not a ghost town yet, it just feels and looks that way; state motto: Proudly hosting retired New York leftists with adult children who don’t give a flying fuck about the natives’ futures since 1970) and if I wasn’t crazy when I got here I am now.

When I graduated, I was willing to take some risks because I knew the job market wasn’t good. I was willing to move to Boston or Chicago or New York or Philadelphia and enter the freelance market, although I’d keep looking for . I knew that it would be a struggle, that I wouldn’t live a life of luxury, but I also knew that those are four of the biggest media markets in the country and they have a healthy freelance market.

Did I move to those four cities? No. I was brought home, essentially against my will, to a small, dying town in a small, dying state and home to no media market, no freelancing opportunities and no transportation out of here. We are the northern terminus of the Ethan Allen Express, which is renowned in song and story for the vast swathes of Maine forest that were cut down to service all the complaints Amtrak has received about it.

So for seven months my skills have deteriorated, my portfolio has stagnated and the logistics of leaving Rutland would frustrate even Patton’s Third Army and has probably cost me plenty of jobs. Any number of jobs I’ve applied to give preference to people who already live in the area, one freelance job I was planning to take was at a newspaper that ended up looking to hire a reporter. The lack of any clips or any thing post-College has also hurt my chances.

I did not want to come to Rutland. My parents made that choice for me. My mother actually said that they wouldn’t be able to support me if I went to Boston. I can support myself, I am not a child. But I cannot rent a van until I’m 25, so I’m basically a prisoner in this foetid, Hellish nightmare of a sorry excuse for a town. I have no friends here, no future here, no present here and practically no reason to leave the damn house.

In short, for absolutely no reason I have been imprisoned and in solitary confinement for the past seven months in a place that only needs a weird robot and numbers instead of names to be The Village from The Prisoner.

'Fear and Loathing' in Puerto Rico

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:45:36 -0400

The Rum Diary, directed by Bruce Robinson and starring Johnny Depp and Aaron Eckhart, is the third movie to be adapted from a book by Hunter S. Thompson and after seeing what the Hollywood crack-whores did with this, it’s not damn surprising that they waited until he was dead and buried six years to rape his worm-eaten corpse. I kid, of course, but writing about Thompson always makes me want to imitate his style.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get that worked up about this movie. The production values are stunning and as far as I can tell the props, clothes, technology and set-dressing is period-correct for 1960. The acting is quality, but not spectacular. It all falls apart, though, with what the actors and screenwriter (Bruce Robinson, again) do with it.

You see, there’s almost no plot and what there is divided into a highly episodic narrative that jumps around like you’re watching TV, channel surfing, but each channel has the same actors and setting.

There are four channels, each involving journalist and novelist Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp): one involves Kemp and two other journalists from the newspaper he went down to Puerto Rico to work for, the mildly alcoholic photographer Sala (Michael Rispoli) and his roommate, the heavily alcoholic reporter Moberg. Channel Two has Kemp and the paper’s editor, Lotterman (Richard Jenkins). Channel Three is Kemp and public relations person Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart) and Channel Four is the fling Kemp has with Sanderson’s girlfriend Chenault (Amber Heard). The characters all interact with each other and Channels Three and Four come close to merging at times, but they all stay seperate.

Moreover the themes are left undeveloped and unexplored: Paul Kemp (an alter ego of Thompson, like Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) talks about the American Dream, while the poverty of Puerto Rico and the extreme inequality between the Puerto Ricans and the mainlanders is largely left to the camera.

For a movie with the tagline “Absolutely nothing in moderation,” the debauchery is about as mild as a stoner comedy — Paul Kemp even swears off alcohol for a day! Besides alcohol and tobacco, the only drug in evidence was one taken from an eyedropper (in the eyes) from an unlabled brown bottle and billed by Moberg (Giovanni Ribisi) as “The most powerful drug in the history of narcotics.” All it does is make Kemp hallucinate that Sala’s (Michael Rispoli) tongue has grown very long.

I can’t blame the actors, or writer-director Robinson for why the movie doesn’t come together. I think the problem lies with the fact that The Rum Diary was written in the early 1960s and not published until 1999, which meant that Thompson continued to think about the themes he had started to explore in Puerto Rico as the 1960s gave him better material to absorb: the assasinations and protests and wars and lies and urban decay and “marihuana” and LSD and all the rest until it was all distilled into Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: you see, I think that The Rum Diary is a rough draft of that other book.

Rough drafts shouldn’t be made into movies. Now Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 — that could be a good movie. Unfortunately, all the real people who appear in that book will have to die before filming could begin.

The Washington Post has it right

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 17:27:15 -0400

As the year has gone on I’ve come to like The Washington Post more and more. I think they’re doing the best job at responding to market signals and more importantly, anticipating what people want.

Where The New York Times and The Boston Globe websites went behind paywalls this year, The Post is leaving its website free as a bird. They’re also embracing social media better than competitors. It’s one thing to post links to stories on Facebook, but The Post has built an app called The Washington Post Social Reader, which allows one to read a story without leaving Facebook and share it as you read it. More importantly, you can customize it and select the types of stories you come across.

It’s brilliant. It’s almost exactly what I would have done. As I’ve said before, I would integrate the stories into the news feed instead of having to access them through an app. Also, Social Reader shares the stories you read regardless of whether you want it to or not.

It’s a step in the right direction, though. I expect to see similar apps in the near future.

The Experience Bar

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 21:54:18 -0400

One number has come up more than any other in my job search: five. Specifically, almost every job I’ve come across requires applicants to have at least five years of experience. Some of them restrict it even further to five years of professional experience. Some of the papers that cover Congress even want only people who have at least five years of experience covering Congress.

Intellectually, I understand that it’s because the economy sucks and they don’t want to have to waste the man-hours showing somebody the ropes of their beat, no matter how good a writer they are. This is especially true for covering the federal government, one of the most important beats. Some companies take it more seriously than others — I only know of one person who was not a member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family who started at The New York Times out of college: Jayson Blair, who was later found to have plagiarized and fabricated stories.

But it’s still annoying because if I can’t start in professional journalism now than in five years I still won’t have the neccesarry experience required to apply for some of these jobs. In fact, it means that there will be a continually shrinking body of journalists until Google is forced to write an algorithim that will just rewrite AP stories of the last sixty years by inserting new names as needed.

Beyond the Pale

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:28:35 -0400

Another journalism conference, ONA 11, was held this past week in Boston and I was once again treated to the spectacle of people talking about entrepreneurship and not addressing how to pay for it. We libertarians have a saying, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” — it doesn’t matter that two roommates started a company in their dorm room their junior year of college and never got paid for it, somebody paid for the computers, for food, for dorm rooms and classes. If you’re living on your own room and board, not to mention the capital investment in the business itself is much harder, especially with rising prices. So it really annoys me that nobody seems to be talking about money.

This ONA conference, though, interests me: it seems pretty cool, there are panel discussions and even a job fair. A number of my professors and myriads of job advice people on sites like MediaJobsDaily say that attending conferences and similar events is good for your job search/Next Big Thing promotion. MediaBistro even has semi-regular cocktail parties in some cities.

And all that leaves me completely cut off from networking, of all human interaction and indeed all possibility of doing anything to mitigate my circumstances. You see, I live in Rutland, Vt, which is beyond the pale of civilization.

I can’t afford a car and we have no intercity bus service. There’s the Amtrak train, but it only goes to New York and is slow, incredibly expensive, slow, uncomfortable, slow, lacks wi-fi and did I mention it moves at such a desperately, unbelievably dawdling, sluggish pace? It’s like being cut off from civilization.

The end result is that it is impossible for a hip, young, sophisticated multimedia journalist like yours truely to network with like-minded people. More than that, because in Vermont the present is a foreign country and the future is a dirty word.

Even worse, there’s next to no media in Vermont, denying me the option of freelancing. So I’m a little miffed with conferences and job fairs because of the difficulty and expense involved in getting to them. This sense of being cut-off is why exile is such a harsh punishment.