The fifth in our new series of Hyperlocal Voices explores the work done by the team behind the Londonist. Despite having a large geographic footprint – Londonist covers the whole of Greater London – the site is full of ultra-local content, as well as featuring stories and themes which span the whole of the capital.
Run by two members of staff and a raft of volunteers, Editor Matt Brown gave Damian Radcliffe an insight into the breadth and depth of the site. Continue reading
UPDATE: Readers of this blog can now get a 20% discount off the book by using the code ME1211 when ordering on the Routledge site.
Magazine Editing is one of those books that I’ve used for years in my teaching. Unlike most books in the field, it has a healthy focus on the less glamorous aspects of running magazines, such as managing teams and budgets, editorial strategy, and the significant proportion of the industry – B2B, contract publishing, controlled-circulation, subscription-based – that you don’t see on supermarket shelves.
For the third edition, publishers Routledge approached me to update the book for a multiplatform age. That work is now done – and the new edition is now out.
Although it now has my name on it, the book remains primarily the work of John Morrish, who wrote the first two editions of the book. Editing his work gave me a fresh appreciation of just what a timeless job he has done in identifying the skills needed by magazine editors – as I write in the introduction:
“It is striking how much of the advice in the book is more important than ever. In a period of enormous change it is key to focus on the core skills of magazine editing: clear leadership, effective management, people skills and creative thinking around what exactly it is that your readers are buying into – whether that’s printed on paper, pixels on a screen, or something intangible like a sense of community and belonging.”
So if you can find one of the older editions cheap, you’ll still find it useful.
So what did I add to the new edition of Magazine Editing? It goes without saying that digital magazines (web-only, apps) are now covered. The diversification of revenue models – the increased importance of events, merchandising, data, mobile and apps – is now explored, as well as how online advertising works, and how it differs from traditional advertising. How to use online resources, including web analytics, to better understand your audience and inform your editorial strategy; and how magazine campaigns are changed by the dynamics of the web.
The chapter on leading and managing now includes sections on managing information overload, social bookmarking and social media policies, and there’s a new section on legal guidance on placements and internships. The budgeting sections now include online considerations, and there’s an exploration of the pros and cons of using free or minimal cost third party services against building tools in-house. A passage from the section on ‘Making money online’ is illustrative of the shifts facing the industry:
“Like so much else on the web, it is becoming difficult to see where content ends and commerce begins. The concept of a ‘magazine’ blurs when, online, it can also be a shop, a game, or a tool. It helps to think of how the business model of magazines has traditionally worked: gathering a community of people in the same place (on your pages) where companies can then advertise their products and services. The same principle applies now, but the barriers to selling products and services yourself have been significantly lowered, just as the barriers to publishing content have been significantly lowered for those companies whose advertising used to fund print publishing. Integrity is no less important in this context: users will desert your website if your content is only concerned with selling them your products, just as they will desert if your events are badly organised, your merchandise poor quality, or your service shoddy. Publishers increasingly talk of a ‘brand experience’ of which the content is just one part. In many ways this makes the reader – as they also become a consumer – more powerful, and the advertiser less so. Your insights into what they are talking and reading about may be of increasing interest to those who are searching for new revenue streams.”
The chapter on writing covers considerations in evaluating online sources of information and the debates in online journalism around objectivity versus transparency, and the values of a ‘web-first’ strategy. I also cover online tools for organising diaries and monitoring social media. There’s an exploration of best practice guidelines in writing for the web, and when multimedia is appropriate or preferable.
The chapter on pictures and design now includes advice on dealing with web designers and developers, multiplatform design and branding, sourcing video for the web, copyright and Creative Commons, infographics, and image considerations for online publication. And ‘Managing Production’ covers search engine optimisation, scheduling online production, and online distribution. The penultimate chapter on legal considerations adds data protection, the role of archives in contempt of court, and website terms and conditions.
I end the book with a list of tools that allows the reader to get publishing right now. And aside from the legal developments, the new considerations, roles and stages in the production cycle, this is perhaps the most important change from previous editions: a student reading this book is no longer waiting for their first job in publishing: they should be creating it.
If you have read the book and want to receive updates on developments in the magazine industry, please Like the book’s Facebook page. I’d also welcome any comments on areas you think are well covered – or need to be covered further.
Looking down? Photo by Bhaskar Pyakurel/Photoctor http://www.flickr.com/people/dev07/
Here we go again. Fleet Street Blues reports on a user comment which “seems to makes quite a lot of sense”. It reads as follows:
“Five years or so ago, there was a certain kind of old-school journalist who, converted to the cause, as it were, banged on at length about the importance of hacks having a web presence of the highest order to demonstrate the new skills. It turns out, however, that the new skills are a piece of piss (particularly with current web technology), and promoting a yarn via Google, Facebook, Twitter etc is, in reality, an administrative task rather than a journalistic one. If you want to employ a proper journalist rather than a cheap web monkey, the SEO stuff really is secondary. (Of course, there is the fact that many employers actively want web monkeys rather journalists because they are so much cheaper, but that’s a whole other debate.)”
What is wrong with this picture?
Well even before we get to the conclusion, the premise is flawed.
The headline is indicative: “The difference between promoting a yarn… and writing it”
This is the usual ‘drawing a line’ waste of time (“Is ice cream strawberry?”) that seeks to establish some kind of higher ground that journalists can occupy, rather than actually asking what we want to do in our journalism.
If you want to have a web presence to demonstrate new skills for your career, fine. If you want to use those skills to produce good journalism while you’re at it, however, then you’ll probably do a great deal better.
The point of community management/SEO/social media optimisation etc. from a journalist’s point of view is that it should seek to involve readers as early as possible, and so improve the editorial product while it is produced. Not only that but also so that, once published, any errors/additions etc. are likely to be added by users.
It’s the difference between seeing users as passive audiences, or as active collaborators.
If you see them as audiences then, yes: SEO/SMO/community management is an administrative job akin to being a papergirl or delivery man. Let’s all look down on those poor web monkeys who fail to live up to our own high standards.
If you see them as collaborators and users, however, then no: SEO/SMO/community management is not something you can comfortably leave entirely to someone else.
Online Journalism Blog 