How often do you read a newspaper, magazine or online story which at some point includes a boast along the lines of “as predicted by this publication two weeks ago”?

Are you impressed by this kind of message? I’m not.

It’s what I call self-congratulatory journalism and it’s the media version of self-abuse.

If you call yourself a journalist, stop the practice now.

Nobody cares how clever you are. Nobody turned to the story for information about your brilliance.

Readers want facts. OK, let’s get real and admit what all the research shows — they also want entertainment. “We predicted this would happen” maybe factually correct, but it’s irrelevant and it certainly isn’t entertaining.

The “we told you so” school of journalism is more likely to put people off.

If you want to preen. Go and do it somewhere else. Start a blog.

——

On a personal note: I may have done this in the past. That was a long time ago and before I grew up.

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After a recent house move, I decided there was far too much paper in my life. At a rough estimate, paper accounted for almost a third of the weight shifted between houses.

There are more details in Cutting down the paper mountain. I don’t think a 100 percent paperless office is possible or desirable, but reducing my paper use by 90 percent is plausible and recycling the bulk of my existing paper records is a reasonable goal. I call it paper-lite.

My career – I’ve been a journalist for 30 years – is part of the problem. I had many boxes full of my newspaper cuttings, magazines I’ve written and edited and other portfolio material. It runs to many filing cabinets.

I’ve also been writing material for online distribution since the late 1980s – remember Apple’s eWorld, Compuserve and Bix?

A journalist’s portfolio is an important work record. It’s invaluable when it comes to finding new work – particularly as I’m now a freelance for half the week.

The portfolio also has a wealth of useful information, story ideas and memory joggers.

I’ve been systematically scanning and storing my old clippings. Reducing the inevitable duplication that turns up in  this kind of collection and generally tidying up. The scanning process is slow – I expect it to take many more months yet.

One lesson I learnt early on is to not be over fussy about scan quality. It needs to be neat and tidy, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Another lesson I’ve learnt is to store scanned material as PDFs. They are more compact and easier to use than TIFF or other file formats.

Perhaps the hardest aspect of converting my portfolio to a digital format is sharing it with others. I can mail prospective clients examples of stories, but having material for casual browsers is difficult because my web host charges by the MB for storage and I’m only allowed so much traffic a month. Big PDFs quickly chew through my quota.

As an experiment, I’m storing some portfolio PDFs in a public folder on my Microsoft SkyDrive. As an example, here’s a piece I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald’s The Sydney Magazine in October 2004.

I’d be interested to hear of ways other journalists are storing their portfolios.

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I hate the term ‘platform’ in technology writing. The word is often used in a vague hand-waving way to refer to a piece of hardware or software, or even a combination of the two.

Like ‘thing’ the word comes in useful when the writer doesn’t want to be precise.

Platform is also used as padding to make whatever is being discussed sound more important. For example, there are people who think “the Windows platform” somehow trumps “the Windows operating system” or even plain old “Windows”.

Likewise “the Intel platform”, or any other bloody platform.

Environment too

The same can be said about ‘environment‘. To me an environment is a pond with frogs hopping around. A rain forest is an environment.

To describe an operating system as an environment is pompous, wordy and just poor communications.

I can accept Windows being described as ’software’, it’s accurate, if not precise. We can shorten operating system to OS when communicating with more tech-savvy readers.

There are people who think Apple’s tightly-knit combination of software and hardware qualifies as a platform or an environment (though frequently people who use one term will use both to mean exactly the same thing). It’s not. Software plus hardware adds up to a computer.

If you want to talk about what goes on in the world of Apple computers, say so, be precise, be accurate, call it an Apple computer.

Good writing is clear, concise and unambiguous. “Platform” and “environment” fail on all three counts.

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Writing in APC (Australian Personal Computer) David Flynn asks Will 2010 be ‘The Year of the e-Book’?. His report is based on material from tech analyst firm Gartner which says ebooks will boom next year so long as they; “overcome hurdles in price, availability and lack of popular mainstream content”.

All these points are valid, but for ebooks to begin displacing printed books, there also needs to be a great leap forward in display technology. The current crop of electronic books are tiring to read when compared with print.

Higher resolution, large format, non-flickering, non-backlit displays are available, but not in the quantities required and not, yet, at a realistic price. After years of looking at other forms of electronic books, I’d say once ebook makers overcome this hurdle, they’ll be mainstream.

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There’s nothing wrong with writing lists – they work well online where attention spans are shorter.

If the list items are short, you can use bullet points. Or, if the order is important, choose numbered bullets.

Both make text easy to scan and read quickly.

Another, more elegant, approach is to write a variation on the following theme:

First, something happened. Second, something else. Next, we used a little elegant variation to make things more interesting. Then, we did this. Last, we finished up.

Spell out the words from first to ninth* then write 10th, 15th, hundredth.

Some people use firstly, secondly, thirdly and so on. While strictly speaking both approaches are grammatically correct, I’d argue adding -ly is old-fashioned and unnecessarily fussy.

What’s more, you’ll end up looking silly if you want to deal with lots of items and reach eleventhly or even millionthly.

So, stick with the simpler format.

* or perhaps tenth. This depends on your taste or house style, but remember to stay consistent.

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“Real news is what somebody is trying to hide from you. All the rest is just advertising.” – Lord Beaverbrook.

Thanks to Gerry McCusker at PR disasters

What is real news? : PR Disasters.

According to overseas-based Kiwi blogger Cactus Kate a memo circulated to staff at the New Zealand Herald and other APN titles telling journalists to adopt a “more conservative editorial approach”. The memo, apparently sent to staff from the company’s Sydney headquarters follows a decision to cut the company’s budget for legal action and defence to zero.

According to Cactus Kate, APN instructed editors to spike any stories that could trigger legal action or are otherwise risky.

The New Zealand Herald has never been considered the nation’s hardest newspaper, but Cactus Kate’s APN Chicken Out says the company is no longer participating in ‘real media’.

This creates an enormous news gap in the nation’s largest city – one that television and radio seem equally unable to fill. Bloggers alone can’t fill the void left when a major newspaper decides not to do its job properly.

Update: If you are a journalist or have other relevant skills and would like to take part in a project to develop an online alternative to the Herald please get in touch.

You’ll find good backgrounders and explainers on knowledge management all over the web. But most assume the reader works in a large, or at least medium-sized company with plenty of resources.

On the other hand, Michela Ledwidge’s excellent Knowledge management 101 published by the Australian Nett magazine provides an overview for smaller businesses and entrepreneurs.

As Lewidge says;

Knowledge management is one of those terms you have probably heard but dismissed as something only big companies do.

She then goes on to explain why you should at least think about knowledge management and how you can get started.

I only read it 30 minutes ago and I’m already exploring Zoho CRM and looking up other tools.

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