by Leo Wiles
16 September 2015
Hi Rach and Leo, I recently read about the Washington Post’s new platform for writers, The Talent Network. Sounds great for freelancers, sure – but am I the only one thinking it sounds like a bum deal for editors? I’d love your point of view. Amy
The Talent Network sounds so cool, doesn’t it. Nicknamed UberLancer by its Washington Post founder Anne Kornblut, her vision for the platform is to streamline ‘hiring and deploying’ practices for the newspaper’s 600 strong team by categorising freelancers’ talents and location, in a universal way to make it easier for Post editors to find them.
To my mind it sounds like the love child of Contently, Pressfolios, MuckRack and Clippings Me (with Newsmodo’s hook-up arrangement and Google Earth thrown in for good measure). All of course designed to enable freelancers to be easily found by potential employers who are just tripping over themselves to hire you. Where’s the harm in that? Well, I’ll get to that.
While it has yet to expand outside the States or even the confines of the Post’s team, you can already sign up to be notified when this Washington Post initiative makes its way offshore. And why not? As a freelancer there probably is very little downside in hanging your virtual shingle for all to see. However as an ex editor what really gets my goat (warning, rant ahead) is the constant devaluing of editors. Because if matching freelance skills to stories is the ermine robe of an editor then it’s THEIR contact book that is the jewel in their crown.
Normally it’s a huge book with a broken spine built up over years (if not decades) of trusted relationships with experts, PRs and talent. Something that belongs solely to that Editor and makes them so valuable to the team. A well-manicured nail could find the name of the right person to talk to in seconds, including the names of those stringers best suited to the task at hand.
In my pre-Google editing days, I had a 6-volume contacts book of everyone I could ever need in my 60-80-hour working week. No matter where in Australia the story had broken, my editor in chief (an old Australasian Post editor) and I had the country covered and knew the best photographers and writers to do the feature justice.
My fear is that with the emergence of an online contacts book, admittedly of vetted candidates kept in house, editors will becomes as vulnerable and potentially redundant as the checkout cashiers who compete with the self-service aisles alongside them. Especially if the plans to take it public in the future bear fruit.
What do you think is it time to kick relationships to the kerb in favour of automation?
I can see how such a directory could undermine an editor’s network of relationships. But I do think editors will always prefer to use people who they have personally worked with and found to be reliable – no matter how they were first introduced to them.
True Louise commissioning decisions will always be based on a mutual trust that each party can rely on the other to share a vision and deliver.
It’s just this open season on editors and the incremental devaluing of them, their knowledge and skillset that worries me.
We’ve lost enough good people this past decade. It’s time to look after those that are still in harness.
I think you’re right to be worried Leo – although Louise has a good point – but really is it not just part of the debasing of journalism as a profession that has been going on for at least a decade. Newspapers used to be owned by people who took their obligation to inform the public and speak truth to power seriously, now they’re just part of a multi-media conglomerate with shareholders and KPIs etc. We used to be journalists or writers and now we’re content producers. Sub-editors who had been in the industry for decades and who remembered so much stuff it wasn’t funny (I’ve got a great story about a clueless barely 20-something ‘sub-editor’ calling a Falcon GT HO Phase 3 a Holden and a Walkinshaw Commodore a Walkenshaw Commodore) started being seen as an expense that could be dispensed with rather than a priceless asset.
The corporates won’t be satisfied until editors are reduced to being just another souless manager rather a journalist who would prefer to be writing the stories he or she is briefing out half the time.
Good points Darren.
I think subbing has been one the most noticeable casualties in our profession. Not that we don’t have a wonderful collection of talented people who have certainly saved my typos from getting through!
As you say it’s been a long time coming, do you remember the front page gaffe re PM ‘Julie’ Gillard in a national newspaper thanks to the offshore subbing…
It was my first real taste of how undermining the choices re our industry were.
I guess I chose to speak on behalf of Editors as they seem now to be the ones under attack form people who don’t understand how crucial their roles are in producing something worth reading.