Tuesday was paper recycling day in my street. We’ve just moved house so we left a huge amount of paper on the kerb. Among the pile were nine supermarket carrier bags* of paper from my home office. I held another couple of bags back because the material was potentially sensitive and needed shredding.

Nine carrier bags is a lot of paper. It certainly weighed a lot. At a guess I’d say it amounts to entire file cabinet drawer. And yet, recycling that pile has barely made any practical difference to the space in my home office. It is as if, where paper is concerned, this room uses the same technology as Dr Who’s Tardis.

Clearly the whole paperless journalist project needs to move up a gear.

*Around these parts we are asked to put recycled paper in plastic bags.

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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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It’s no longer brave, rash or insightful to suggest printed newspapers will play less of a role in the future. But it counts for something when the scion the world’s largest newspaper company voices the same opinion.

James Murdoch talks about being in “the business of ideas” and says journalism plays a role (phew!) but it won’t be on the scale of News Corp’s broadcasting and entertainment operations.

James Murdoch sees smaller role for newspapers.

“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.

In June I asked Can Twitter be journalism? At the time I concluded Twitter could be journalism, but that’s not how most journalists use it.

Over the past week, Liam Tung at ZDnet Australia has shown just how powerful a tool the 140 character messaging service can be in the hands of a skilled reporter.

Tung is providing daily coverage of the trial between Perth-based ISP iiNet and the Australian Federation against Copyright Theft (AFACT).

He is also providing frequently updated tweets from the court room.

You can follow Tung’s tweets through Twitter from his home page (LiamT) or by tracking the #iitrial hashtag.

ZDNet also publishes the feed on a web page. This makes sense because it’s hard to make money from a Twitter feed, but a popular web page traffic sells plenty of advertising.

The signals coming from Fairfax may be slightly jumbled, but the message is clear. Australia and New Zealand’s largest publisher plans to follow Murdoch and charge for online news.

I describe the signals as confused because on Friday, Stephen Hutcheon at the Sydney Morning Herald wrote a story about readers’ reluctance to pay for online news. On one level Hutcheon’s Not happy, Rupert: readers say they won’t pay for online news was a simple dig at the rival News Corporation – complete with an unflattering photograph of Rupert Murdoch. He says News’ announcement was followed by 140 reader comments – mainly from angry readers threatening to go elsewhere the moment charges are applied.

Clearly Fairfax’s left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing because Sunday saw Tom Hyland write Fairfax, News to charge for online at The Age website. He also wrote the longer Stop the presses. Hyland had the unenviable job of quoting Fairfax chief executive Brian McCarthy who told him; “charging for online access was essential if publishers were to maintain their newsroom staff.”

You always know things are going to get tricky when a newspaper executive uses a word like ‘monetising’ and Hyland quotes McCarthy getting his teeth around that in the very next paragraph. He went on to talk about a two-level model at the The Age and the The Sydney Morning Herald websites.

Of course Fairfax is no stranger to charging for online content. The company’s The Australian Financial Review has long been one of the regions few major titles to eschew the free online model and charge readers. By all accounts the AFR’s paywall hasn’t been very successful, but it will have taught the company some useful lessons about how to turn reader clicks into real money.

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