bill bennett

journalism + new media

The National Business Review reports  Self-employment can be "a life of misery".

I wish I knew this before embarking on my new life as a freelance journalist. Apart from dealing with taxes – the word misery doesn’t capture the nightmare – my experience is more of loneliness than anything else. I miss being able to bounce ideas around with co-workers.

Microsoft continues to develop Word and add features. The software is mature and stable.

I use it every day in work as a writer, but I'm frustrated I can’t use it to create professional, high-end output.

You couldn’t produce a great-looking printed book with Word. There’s little point sending Word manuscripts to professional book printers. And Word is not much better when it comes to top-flight on-line layouts or creating classy PDFs.

Word does basic page layout well enough. It seems designed for people who still print documents using laser printers and ink-jets. And it’s fine for emailed documents.

Word’s new fonts are gorgeous. Calibri works particularly well on-screen. However, fonts are part of the problem, you never know which fonts Word will use when you send a document to another computer. Things can go badly wrong when you send Word documents to commercial printers or pre-press companies.

Colour is also a Word danger-zone. You never know what colour you'll see at the other end.

I’ve found if I’m just doing low-resolution work, Word is good enough.

When I’m creating high-end documents or working with professional printers, I still have to use Adobe InDesign. At around NZ$1,500 that’s an expensive sledgehammer cracking my layout nuts.

Writing ‘good morning’ at the start of emails seems a good idea. The words sound friendly and upbeat.

But you don’t know when the message arrives at the other end. Nor do you know when the reader opens it.

So, at best ‘good morning’ doesn’t make sense. At worst, it looks rude. It says the writer hasn’t thought about the person at the other end.

This matters if you are in business. An out-of-place ‘good morning’ might be read as “I’m happy to take your money, but I’m too lazy to think about how you might read my email”.

Writers have no control over when people read their emails, so it is best not to start communications that way even when you're in the same time zone as the reader.

If you want to seem polite or friendly, just start the email with hi or hello followed by the person's name.

New Zealanders have two better options. Kia ora is a Māori phrase everyone should know. Strictly speaking it means “good health” but it is widely used as an alternative to “hi”.

The other possibility is g’day – which we share with Australia. It’s a little old-fashioned these days, but serviceable.

Students and academics assume people will think they’re dumb and won’t take their ideas seriously if their writing isn't complex, dense and difficult to read.

The problem is real. As Rachel Toor writes, bad writing and bad thinking go hand in hand.

I prefer to turn this idea on its head: Crisp writing is a sign of neatly ordered thinking. Or as I said in a previous post: Good writing is direct, clear and precise. It is also unambiguous.

Much of Toor’s piece is about passive language – which she rightly condemns. Scientists and engineers sometimes need to use the passive voice, but for the most part the active voice is best.

She pulled much of the remainder or her piece from an  essay by George Orwell.

Academics need to read this. For the rest of us it is a wake up call.

See Bad Writing and Bad Thinking – Do Your Job Better – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Why pay for antivirus software?

Microsoft Security Essentials has protected my desktop computer from viruses, spyware and other malicious software for more than nine months. I’ve had no security problems in that time – and I’m a heavy-duty internet user spending hours online each day working in my freelance writing business.

It does the job so well, I barely notice the application. There have been a few occasions when I’ve seen warning messages, but dealing with them means a simply click or two and the problems go away.

Microsoft Security Essentials is free, but that’s not the only reason I think it beats paid-for security applications from companies like Symantec.

When I first looked at Microsoft Security Essentials in October 2009, I described it as "barely there" saying the software sips system resources so sparingly there was no noticeable effect on the computer’s performance. This contrasts with  Norton Internet Security which slowed my computer down from the moment I installed the application – then proceeded to get worse over time.

Better still, Security Essentials is unobtrusive. It never gets in my way. There’s no work full stop, no set-up, no tweaking and no worrying.

In my earlier report I said I wasn’t yet certain if Security Essentials was better than Avast. Since then, I’d say the results are in, and Microsoft Security Essentials has the edge.

We’ve run Avast over the same period on one of the family computers and the applications works just fine – although there is an annoying database update message. However, I’m planning to install Security Essentials on that machine too because independent tests show the Microsoft tool beats Avast on detection.

I’m still running Panda Cloud Antivirus on my laptops – it is at least as good as Microsoft Security Essentials – more about that later.

Print publishers make money from copy sales and advertising. Some publishers rely mainly on advertising, others on copy sales, but most newspapers and magazines make money from a mix of the two.

The balance between advertising and copy sales revenue is important. Advertising driven publishers approach their business in a different way to copy sales driven publishers.

Copy Sales

Publishers rarely keep all copy sales revenue. Newspapers, magazines and books usually sell through newsagents, bookstores and other retailers. Retailers keep between 30 and 40 percent of the cover price.

Sometimes distributors take a slice of copy sales revenue. Usually distributors charge a fixed fee per copy delivered.

Sell-through rates

Retailers rarely sell all the copies they get of a title. Publishers talk of sell-through rates – the percentage sold.

Most publishers, particularly those chasing advertising sales regard a sell-out as failure. It means they didn’t maximise their circulation – which is what they sell to advertisers.

Long established, popular, frequently published titles often have better sell through rates than new or irregular publications.

Revenue lags sales

Publishers have to wait weeks or months to get copy sales revenue as it trickles back from the reader, through the retailer and distributor.

Printers often require payment – or a guarantee of payment before they print. So a publisher needs to carry the costs of at least three editions of a monthly title before seeing a penny of sales revenue. The investment is more in the case of weeklies, less in the case of bi-monthlies and quarterly publications.

Subscriptions

Revenue lag explains why publishers like selling direct to readers through subscription sales.

With subscriptions, publishers get their money upfront – usually a year in advance. Some publications offer two-year and even three-year subscriptions.

Publisher keep all the revenue – there’s no retailer cut, although they pay the cost of mailing out subscriptions.

Advertising

Publishers make Advertising sales revenue by selling ‘space’ in their titles.

Most publishers set aside a number of pages or parts of pages for advertisers. They have an advertising ratio.

Paid for publications usually have a lower advertising ratio than free publications – although this is not always true.

There are different types of advertising. Display advertising means larger and more colourful ads – often with creative text and images. Classified advertising is often text-only with a minimum of graphics.

Magazines typically sell advertising by the page, although they offer double page spreads, half pages and other formats. Newspapers will sell pages, but they also sell column centimetres (or column inches).

The more you buy the cheaper it gets

The more an advertiser buys, the cheaper the rate per column centimetre (or page if they are buying magazine advertising).

A full-page is cheaper than two half pages and so on. Publishers offer advertisers discounts if they commit to buying a series of advertising over a longer time. So, booking a year’s worth of advertisements in a monthly magazine is cheaper than buying 12 single advertisements.

Some advertising positions attract a premium rate. On newspapers this is the front page and maybe the front pages of sections such as business.

Magazines typically charge extra for the back cover and possibly the inside front cover. Successful titles can charge a premium for early right hand pages or other attractive sites.

Agencies and commission

Specialist media buying companies buy most advertising. They develop strategies for their clients and negotiate with publishers. Publishers pay media buyers a commission. Typically this is 10 to 20 percent of the booking’s value. In return for commission, media buyer agree to pay invoices on a set date.

Advertisers who buy their own space are known as direct clients. They often haggle over prices, but unless they are large-scale buyers, they have less clout than agencies. It's often harder to collect money from direct clients.

Rate cards

Publishers issue rate cards. Historically they used card, but now they are usually available online. Rate card prices are often negotiable.

Advertorial

Advertorial is when publishers offer advertising linked to editorial features. In some cases editorial integrity is up for sale.

Advertorial deals come in different flavours. Many publications are entirely advertorial – if an advertiser pays for space they have a say over the publication’s editorial content.

More credible titles wall off areas of content for advertorial. These might be clearly marked with terms like “advertising supplement” or “special advertising feature”. This isn’t always transparent to readers.

Some publishers run editorial-style material provided by advertisers and charge for it. Others allow advertisers to send copy for inclusion next to advertisements.

Publishers may or may not allow advertisers control over advertorial content. Some publishers have journalists write advertiser-friendly copy for these sections, others keep a strict demarcation between editorial and advertising.

Business model

Free publications are more likely to run advertorial and compromise editorial integrity for commercial consideration than paid-for titles.

Paid titles are less likely to take this approach. Some paid titles have little in the way of advertising and charge a hefty premium for quality editorial content. This works best if they can manage a high circulation.

Have I missed anything here? Do you have any questions about how this works?

Want to publish directly from Google Docs to your WordPress site? Setting-up Google Docs is a chore, but once you've done the hard work once, it's easy. Here's how I did it.

Google Docs may not be the world's best word processor, but you won't find a better way of collaborating on documents. Sharing and collaboration works far better than with Microsoft Word.

Recently I used Google Docs to edit some shared documents which would eventually become WordPress posts.

After writing the first post, I cut and pasted the text into WordPress. It wasn't pretty. Eventually I used WordPress' paste as plain text function, but that loses formatting.

I decided to investigate posting directly from Google Docs to WordPress.

There are a number of guides explaining how to do this, but an online applications like Google Docs is a moving target – some of the steps explained in the guides have changed in recent updates.

Here's what I did:

1. Get WordPress ready to receive Google Docs. Go to the Dashboard, select Settings, then Writing.

2. Select the box where it says:
XML-RPC Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.

3. In Google Docs, open the document you'd like to post in WordPress.

4. Pull down the Share menu in the top right hand corner of the screen and select Publish as web page.

5. You should see two items, the second says This document has not been published to your blog.

6. If this is the first time you've tried posting to your WordPress site from Google Docs, there will be a message saying: You need to set your blog site settings before you can post documents to your blog.

7. Click on the link.

8. If you use a hosted WordPress.com blog, then click the first button (which is selected by default) and choose WordPress.com from the pull-down menu next to the word Provider. If you run a self-hosted WordPress site, you'll need to select the My own server / custom option then choose Metaweblog API and your site address. It's important to end the xmlrpc.php – which is normally in the home directory.

9. Add your user name and password.

The process isn't foolproof – I still ended up needing to edit some HTML code which came through from Google Docs – but if you've build your workflow around Google's tools, this is relatively straightforward.

In network with x nodes, adding a (x+1)^th node means there 2x additional potential connections between nodes.

For example, on a telephone network, a new subscriber can call all existing subscribers and they can call back.

So the number of possible connections increases with the size of the network.

If the network is commercial one with nodes representing customers and each connection has a fixed value then the value of adding one more customer increases as the size of the network increases.

For a network with x nodes, there are x(x-1) connections.

When networks get large – so large that (x-1) is more or less equal to x, the value of the network is x² .

This is why network products and the companies selling them have what mathematicians call exponential growth.

Think of it as the difference between stuffing bank notes under your mattress and or investing it in a compound-interest account.

In the golden age of print publishing, copy sales were an important source of revenue.

With publishers like Rupert Murdoch building online pay walls for news sites, selling publications to readers, not giving them away, could enjoy a renaissance.

Here's how copy sales fit in the old school print publishing business model I grew up with.

Print publishers rarely keep all the money from copy sales.

Newsagents, book stores and other outlets sell newspapers, magazines and books. They earn a margin of around 30% of a magazine or book's cover price.

Margins are lower for newspapers, but newsagents make it up with volume plus they can sell customers extra items with better margins.

In some cases distributors take a second slice of the sales revenue. Either a percentage or a fixed fee per copy.

Sell-through rates

Retailers rarely sell every copy of their newspapers and magazines.

Publishers talk of sell-through rates – that’s the percentage sold. Retailers usually send unsold magazines – usually just the masthead – back to distributors to get a refund on unsold copies. Newspapers are similar. We call the copies sent back ' returns'.

Poorly managed titles have a low sell-through rate. Others can have a higher rate.

Some publications sell out – but this is rare. Publishers regard selling-out as a failure because it means they don't get maximise sales. Newsagents like this because they don’t have to worry about returns.

Returns are controversial with newsagents and retailer because they often have to carry the cost of holding stock on behalf of publishers.

Long established, popular, frequently-published titles typically have better sell through rates than new or irregular publications. That's largely because publishers have more information to help them plan print runs and know where to send copies.

Revenue lags sales

Copy sales revenue for monthly titles usually takes a month or two to trickle from the reader, through the retailer and distributor back to the publisher.

Printers want payment – or a guarantee of payment before the presses role. So a publisher needs to carry the costs of at least three editions of a monthly title before seeing a penny in copy sales revenue.

This would cost more for weeklies, less for bi-monthlies and quarterly magazines.

Revenue lag explains why so many publishers are keen to sell their titles direct to readers through subscription sales.

Subscriptions are lucrative for publishers.

First, the money arrives upfront – usually a year in advance. Some publications offer two-year and even three-year subscriptions.

Second, a publisher gets to keep all the revenue – there’s no retailer cut – but mailing out subscriptions has a cost attached and there's a small management fee paid if an external company handles subscriptions.

Have I missed anything here? Do you have any questions about how this works? Please add your comments and questions below or get in touch through my contact page.

Microsoft Security Essentials is arguably the best free computer security tool. I looked at the free antivirus application in October and found it ticked all the important boxes.

It works well, it imposes hardly any overhead and the price is right. Yet as Simon Sharwood says at SearchSecurity, the lack of interest in Security Essential has Microsoft scratching its head.

Moreover, Sharwood asked security specialist Symantec what effect the Microsoft package had on its sales. “None at all” was the reply.

It seems Microsoft has a great security package, but the company can't give it away.

Microsoft can’t give away better security :: SearchSecurity.com.au

Steve Yelvington is on the money when he says Apple’s iPad is not the new print.

Like me he thinks Apple has the tablet computer just about right “from a usability perspective”. And for many people, tablets will replace PCs.

Yelvington says old media companies like the iPad because it seems to return things to the business model they know and understand.

In my view, the iPad could herald a new era for the publishing industry, but it requires new business models. I don’t think selling iPad apps or expensive electronic editions of print magazines is the answer.

I doubt selling banner advertising, advertorial or ad words is the answer either. But both approaches may have a place in whatever publishing business model emerges.

A whack on the head from Maslow's hammer | yelvington.com

News Corp is at it again. Earlier this week Rupert Murdoch’s company bought the Skiff e-reader software – but not the company’s hardware.

As Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism Blog says; it’s a sensible move for a company trying to pull value from the news delivery chain.

Murdoch has a mixed record when it comes to buying tech companies and products. MySpace was a disaster.

Skiff gives News Corp control of an important part of the delivery chain. And, just as important, bypasses attempts by Apple and others to clip the ticket as news moves between publishers and their customers.

News Corp absorbed the lessons from pay TV where integration is essential; where hardware and software form part of the deal.

Murdoch’s plans to make readers pay for online news content still seem fragmented and confused at the moment. But a vertically integrated distribution chain could yet pull those fragments together.

Peter Drucker said no executive should make more than 20 times as much as a company worker.

He was speaking in 1982. He was spot on then and his point stands today.

I'd phrase things differently:

No executive is worth 20 times the pay of ordinary workers.

So why are companies willing to pay some executives many hundreds times the pay of ordinary workers?

It isn't because they deliver 'shareholder value', there's almost no link between company performance and executive pay.

John Mackey at the Harvard Business Review blog says:

If CEO compensation is primarily driven by competitive markets, then how come the ratio was only 24 to 1 back in 1965 and is about 300 to 1 today? Surely the market demand for good CEOs is no greater today than it was 45 years ago or 25 years ago. Are CEOs today really worth that much more than their comparable peers were worth just a few decades ago?

Erin Brenner at the Writing Resource asks: “Does spelling still matter?”

It does. It matters a lot.

Some people think worrying about spelling and grammar is anal and backward. They are wrong.

There are two non-anal reasons why spelling and grammar are important and will remain important for as long as people still read printed words:

First: Well-written, properly spelt (I’m British, this is allowable), grammatically correct English is unambiguous.

Poorly written English is more open to misinterpretation.

If being understood is important, then worry about spelling and grammar.

Second: Well-written text flows, it’s a pleasure to read. It sends readers a message about your professionalism and wisdom. It is credible.

Poorly-written English jerks around, causes readers to stumble, they may not realise why this sets off alarm bells in their heads, but it does.

Too much poor English and they’ll question the message. This may not happen on a conscious level. It may not happen with all readers. It will happen enough for it to matter.

Just when the New York Times (NYT) most needs to show it can play in the digital world, it proves its cluelessness over online publishing by demanding Apple remove Pulse an iPad RSS reader.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian tech journalist Adam Turner says the NYT has made “a fool of itself in front of the online audience it so desperately wants to woo”.

Turner is bang on the money.

The NYT says Pulse infringes its rights. But the RSS feed it delivers to iPad readers is publically available and free. Moreover the NYT publishes the feed. When readers see an interesting headline, they click-through to the paper’s own website.

If the NYT doesn’t like this, it could kill its RSS feed.

As Turner points out, in the eyes of the NYT Pulse’s biggest crime isn’t serving up its stories, but doing the job in style.

I’m not to blame for this headline. It comes from the quoted Human Resources Leader story.

Knowledge workers doing the work of three people

The good news is it’s easy to fix. We can get rid of the wasteful words.

Articles like ‘the’ are best avoided in headlines. “Work of three people” is  passive, “three people’s work” is better.

I recast this as:

Knowledge workers do three people’s work

Another headline that could do with a small trim is:

Educated workers doing better in this recession

Headlines work best without pronouns, so we’ll do away with ‘this’.

The phrase ‘doing better’ is weak, but accurate. Replacing it with a word like ‘thrive’ would be incorrect. The educated workers are doing better than others, but they’re not advancing.

I could express the idea with a negative phrase such as “suffer less” – but that’s not good for headlines.  So I’ve chosen a different word and changed the meaning:

Educated workers safer in recession

For an old school journalist like me, reading Trevor Young's  8 Things I'd Do If I Was a Starting Out in PR Today¹ is like the Poms getting hold of the German's Enigma machine at the start of World War 2.

It means I know what the enemy² is thinking and can stay one step ahead – at least some of the time.

Young has written a road-map for junior public relations professionals. It should be cut out and pinned beside every agency or in-house desk. It shouldn't. That's old school thinking. It should be downloaded and stored on every PR person's iPad or smartphone.

Along the way he writes:

SIX – I would read every newspaper I could get my hands on, hang out at the newsagent and flick through as many magazines as humanly possible (without getting sprung!); read newsletters, swap radio stations, check out the array of cable TV channels on offer.

Traditional media is not going away any time soon; if you can 'join the dots' between traditional and social media, you will become a lot more valuable to your employer!

The advice applies to everyone, but journalists and PR people not reading everything in this way are in the wrong job.

¹. Trevor, the ninth thing I'd do is learn how to write headlines in Australian newspaper style, grammatically correct and without sticking capital letters on everything. Or am I out of touch and this is just old school journo thinking?

². If all PR people were as smart as Young, who cleverly brands himself online as the PR Warrior, we could drop the idea of journalists and PR people being at each others' throats all the time.

A great YouTube clip adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates knowledge workers.
I found this at Miramar Mike's site posted as Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.

Many of us work in the part of the economy where there are no jobs, just clients and projects. We market our services, try to find interesting opportunities and finance our larger interests with the revenue. We’ve been out of the hierarchy for so long that it’s become unappealing.

John Sumser writing on the joys of being unemployable explains life as a modern knowledge worker.

Sumser say knowledge work rarely aligns with jobs and companies haven't yet got their heads around the idea of employing people for projects.

We're moving to a world where people work on a series of short, independent gigs.

I count Auckland-based Chris Bell as one of the more interesting journalists I’ve worked with in recent years.

He’s also dangerous because he has ideas and is creative.

I’d like say that sentence is a joke. As an editor and a publisher I always preferred hiring creative, idea-laden journalists. But independent thought scares the carpet strollers who run today’s publishing companies.

Bell knows how to write. He knows how to edit. He can do journalism. Unlike a lot of journalists he writes cracking fiction and poetry.

He can also play bass guitar and talk for hours about obscure bands from times past.

Like I said, he’s an interesting bloke.

You can find examples of his writing at chrisbell.co.nz. There are books to buy as well – so take your credit card.

Bell’s latest story is Iniquity. The title is the kind of word I tell writers not to use. In the wrong hands it can backfire badly. But Bell can pull it off. He knows his stuff.

And anyway, most of my writing advice doesn’t apply to fiction writers.

Iniquity is the written equivalent of film noir. There’s a whiff of Raymond Chandler and Phillip K Dick. It’s set in Auckland – not too far in to the future – in a time when every man wears a hat.