Tips from a journalism seminar in London - from print to web

From Mag to Web
Women in Journalism held a seminar last night in London. The panel were Bernadette Fallon, editor allaboutyou.com; Sarah Lindon, senior moderator at guardian.co.uk and Kathryn Corrick, digital media consultant and former manager at newstatesman.co.uk

I went along hoping for some tips on how I can embrace this lovely new technology that seems to putting all us journalists out of work - and possibly even learn how to increase my income by working more on the web.

Yes I can twitter, yes I can facebook and web 2.0 - but most of my income still comes from my pieces in print media. So if anybody can tell me how to make money from the web I'll be very happy indeed. Don't want to be a print dinosaur.

Sadly, didn't learn anything about boosting my income - the three speakers were interesting but seemed to echo what all journalist and publishers know already - that nobody seems to know much about monetising the web - or what a good business model might be.

Bernadette was a good speaker - and explained how the site grew out of a single site bought by NatMags and then used as the She website. Because the readers of Country Living, Coast and other stablemates had the same 35plus female readers, they consolidated the web presence and called it allaboutyou.com - it now serves all these mags.

Bernadette said employment wise there was now a big opportunity for journalists with the right skills to work on web instead. Those skills, she said, were picture awareness (knowing how to use photoshop as well); being able to make a basic video package (at this point I felt sorry for all those TV journalists losing their jobs because we can all make crap web video stuff now) and knowing how to write copy with Search Engine Optimisation terms in it.

About 40% of her content is different from the print mags adn she does have a budget to commission, but you guessed it, it's tiny.

The other interesting thing I learned from this talk was that web people working in the publishing have an inferiority complex next to their print colleagues - they feel unloved and unheard. (Not surprising they are putting us all out of a job and using free writers and punters to contribute free comment). Yes dear Guardian - comment is free - you don't have to pay journalists to produce it!

Sarah the moderator at the Guardian - told us about her job - basically policing reader comments. Learned that it's best if journalists interact with the comments when they have written stuff and post comments back in comment on comments. Just filed to The Guardian so I 'll give it a go when the piece comes out in print - that's assuming I, er, get any comments. It's a good and a very, very terrifying thing that readers can interact with your copy.

Interesting, she spoke about the change from readers being 'consumers' with the journalist as the authority to being 'prosumers' where they interact, debate and take part in a Web 2.0 sort of way.

She said journalists writing for the web tend to have a more conversationalist style, rather than the slightly preachy tones of print journalists. Think I must definitely be from the latter school of journalism.

Journlists, said Sarah; 'Should move away from being experts to being more of a collaborator or a curator.' Found this deeply interesting - can see myself curating lots of opinions, but then a piece doesn't work if you don't take a strong line with it as well.

Kathryn was the last speaker - and raved about a writer called Jeff Jarvis and his thoughts on the web. I'm not sure of the spelling of his name, as I haven't yet checked it out.

She also talked about what we all know - that people expect web content to be free. Apparently, there is a seminar in London on 30 March 2009 called 'Freeconomics' about this - run by Chinwag Digital, but again I'm not sure of spellings on this - so if you're interested you'll have to google. Oh look I'm being all interactive here rather than authoratative.

Kathryn had worked at the New Statesman and nothing had brought in money to the web version, not advertising, not a paid-for PDF version, not micropayments...nothing.

But she did say that one way of making money was EVENTS AND AWARDS --- so I guess you stil have to get people together for a reader event or industry award to get advertisers to sponsor and punters to part with their cash. They just won't buy content off the internet.

She said email is still crucial. You need as many readers email addresses as you can - research shows people like updates from publications they like over email She said Amazon use email updates better than anybody else - just enough to alert you without annoying you.

So that was it - I learned a little more about the web. But I didn't learn how to make money from it. Oh look - I just wrote this blog for free and I'll earn nothing from it - unless you want to send me a free donation of course!

Feedback on this would also be lovely.

Liz