Tam Harbert

As a writer, I believe strongly in the concept of copyright, retaining the rights to the work by which creative professionals earn their living. But I have a confession to make. Ever since I launched my website, I’ve been operating in a gray area when it comes to the copyright on images.

I strongly suspect, however, that I’m not alone. How many of you out there – yes, you writers and bloggers – verify the copyright and obtain permission if required for every image you use from the Web?

I thought so. Me, too.

Initially, I was concerned about using the magazine covers on my website. Still am. But the images are so small I’m betting these publishers won’t give me grief about it. At any rate, it’s probably fair use.

But I faced another copyright challenge once I figured out how to add images to my blog posts. I’ve tried to be careful, but it’s not easy – in fact it often seems impossible – to figure out whether images are copyrighted. A Google search for mountains, for example, yields more than 37 million images. If I start clicking through these, a few are obviously copyrighted – they carry the familiar copyright symbol, ©. But most do not. Of course, the law no longer requires a work to display the © symbol for copyright protection. In fact, when I click on any image, Google warns me that “This image may be subject to copyright.” When I click further to go to the original source – which may be a commercial website, someone’s blog, or even a variety of websites that claim to offer “free” images, it’s never clear whether the image is copyrighted. There is no copyright notice on the photo, although there is a copyright notice at the bottom of the website. Presumably this copyrights the website, but not the photo.

When I attended the Future of Freelancing conference last summer, one presenter mentioned that a good way to find images available for legal use was to search Creative Commons (CC). I’ve tried, but remain baffled. Right off the bat, the home page tells me:

“Do not assume that the results displayed in this search portal are under a CC license. You should always verify that the work is actually under a CC license by following the link. Since there is no registration to use a CC license, CC has no way to determine what has and hasn’t been placed under the terms of a CC license. If you are in doubt you should contact the copyright holder directly, or try to contact the site where you found the content.”

In addition, Creative Commons offers a confusing array of different types of licenses that specify different conditions under which I may use the work. So even if I figure out it’s licensed under Creative Commons, I still have to decipher exactly how I’m allowed to use it.

All this means that locating and verifying an image often takes as long as writing the blog post. Sometimes longer. Occasionally, I actually discover the copyright owner and ask for permission. The outpouring of gratitude tells me how widescale this problem is.

Here’s what Richard Krzemien, the author of the cartoon I used in last week’s post, told me about copyright infringement: “I used to keep close track of copyright problems, but honestly it can become a full time job. That’s why I took most of my comics down from the site. And all that’s available are the low resolution versions online. I figure it’s the cost of doing business. So I greatly appreciate you contacting me for permission.”

I’m sure what I’ve run into is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of copyright infringement on the Web. Come to think of it, that would make a good illustration for this post. There are 1.5 million images of iceberg tips on Google. I wonder which ones are legal?

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a week. Really. Then I told myself, “hey, it’s August. Everybody’s on vacation. It’s not like the six people who read my blog are going to actually miss it.”

I put off starting a blog for a long time. I knew once I started I’d have to post regularly. At least that’s what all the experts say. And I knew my habits well enough to understand what that would mean. Without an editor setting a deadline, I expend tremendous amounts of emotional energy just to psych myself into sitting down and writing.

Even with an editor imposing a deadline, my procrastination tendencies often back me into a corner when it comes time to file a story. I love to report, conduct research and interview people. I also love to write. But there is this strange no-man’s land in between those two activities, where my brain acts like a seven-year-old with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Unless I’ve got a brilliant idea for a post, or the results of my reporting have yielded a fantastic story that I just can’t wait to tell, anything and everything becomes a diversion. Suddenly, I must:

- Run out for Starbucks. I don’t even like Starbucks.
- Walk the dog, even though I have to wake him up to do it.
- Bathe the dog. Ditto.
- Check my social networks. Facebook alone is good for killing at least an hour.
- Check how the stock market is doing. As if it makes any difference to my pathetic nest egg.
- Search freelance sites for job opportunities. I can always justify the time spent as “marketing.”
- Call former editors and colleagues. Ditto.
- Research some obscure question on the Internet. Did you know that Mozart’s full baptismal name was Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart?
- Perform routine computer maintenance, including deleting thousands of e-mail messages, running security scans and updating software.
- Make personal appointments. Hair cuts. Dental appointments. Don’t I deserve a massage this week?

My personal favorite: Making lists of what I’m going to do on each of the next few days. This makes me feel tremendously productive.

While these things keep me busy, they don’t divert my brain much. I think a lot about what I’m going to write. I compose the article in my head. I like to say that the entire piece is all completed, all that’s left is the mechanics of getting it down on paper. Hell, Mozart did it. “Everything has been composed, just not written down,” he once told his nagging father.

Problem is, I’m not Mozart. And even if I were, that “writing down” part takes a long time, even with a computer. I’d better get started.

Too bad it’s time for my pedicure . . .

My freelance writing usually falls into one of two categories: straight journalism and custom publishing. Over the last year, as journalism and independent publishing suffers the extinction of the dead-tree business model and desperately searches for digital models that can replace it, custom publishing has become a much larger part of my business.

Custom publishing – producing articles, newsletters and magazines for a corporation or organization – is a form of marketing. As such, the goal of the writing is usually to get someone to buy something. Even the high-brow, glossy custom magazines that publish in-depth articles aimed at top-level executives are selling something. The goal of these magazines is often “thought leadership,” a vague marketing term that means the company is promoting how smart it is. They are trying to get the reader to buy into the image of the leaders of this corporation as particularly intelligent, insightful and strategic thinkers.

Such phrases have started creeping into my vocabulary as I do more custom work. I’ve always been a stickler with myself, and with others whom I edit, about keeping language simple, clear and concise. While many marketers value good writing, some do not. They – and the executives above them – apparently think imprecise, vague language effectively promotes their product or advances their agenda. Granted, the goal is to sell something, to in some way influence the reader’s behavior, but to do that you need to hook readers – by entertaining them, piquing their curiosity or delivering valuable information. Marketing people often think in terms of what they, and their company, want to say, rather than what the reader – their customer – needs. I try to point out to them that few people will actually read their custom magazine or corporate white paper unless it’s interesting, well-written or useful – and preferably all three. And those that do read it aren’t likely to take action if they get the sense that the article is just promoting the company.

But the marketing folks sign the checks. My job is to write what they want in the way they want it. So I cringe, subvert my hard-earned skills and write how I’m told. I write about challenges, rather than problems. There are no products or services – they are all solutions. Some are even, God forbid, unique solutions. And these solutions are often optimized, a word that runs all too rampant in marketing copy. (To optimize is to “make as effective, perfect or useful as possible.” If you have to optimize a product, that implies it wasn’t very effective or useful to start with.) All the while I imagine my notoriously loud and dictatorial journalism professor, John Bremner, rolling over in his grave and screaming “barbarisms!” (Yes, that word applies to writing. According to Dictionary.com, definition #3: “the use in a language of forms or constructions felt by some to be undesirably alien to the established standards of the language.”)

I know I shouldn’t complain. After all, in a strict business sense, my goal is to please my customer. Still, it gives me a stomach ache to write this way. And that’s not all. Like a fungus in a dark room, these marketing phrases and meaningless executive pronouncements proliferate and sneak into my journalism. It doesn’t help that I often interview marketing people, as well as executives, for my stories, and thus am exposed to these phrases on several fronts.

How to combat this? One of the best antidotes I’ve found is editing work. In college, Bremner seared so many editing commandments into my brain that I somehow channel him when I edit other’s work. My ability to sniff out the inexact phrase or dangling participle becomes keener when I read someone else’s copy. When I don’t have others to edit, I try to bifurcate my personality. I’ll write a draft of something, let it sit for a day, and then come back to it with my merciless Bremner persona, red pen ready to slash.

The other method is to really listen and think when I interview people. Even journalists – who are professional listeners as well as writers – sometimes get lazy as they take in the answers to their questions. I try to remember to ask, at least once during any given interview, some version of the question: “What the hell does that mean?” More diplomatically than that, of course. For example, the other day a CIO was explaining to me a strategic move that his company made. “They were charged to come back with a change in communication initiatives to drive better alignment for not only the IT organization, but also drive better alignment for the enterprise.” I was able to partially translate as: “I asked them to tell me how .. .” but I had no idea what he meant by better alignment. So I asked. His answer got into important details that enabled me to write a much more interesting and useful story for the reader.

Whether the reader is a magazine subscriber or a customer, that should always be the goal.

I used to think I didn’t need a mobile phone because – frankly – I’m not very mobile. But as phones become smarter they are becoming the prime line of communications for most people. I’m finding it’s increasingly difficult to function without an up-to-date phone.

My primary reason to have a mobile phone was always so I could be reached in an emergency. I never liked the quality of cell calls, and much preferred to do my talking on a landline. A couple of years ago I got tired of being locked into contracts that made me pay for minutes that I never used, so I’m now on a pre-paid option of Verizon’s. I bought my own phone – one of the cheapest available at the time – and I buy minutes in increments of $15, which covers about a month’s worth of my calling and texting.

I do virtually all of my work in my home office, which is equipped with two landlines and a broadband cable connection. With all these lines of communication in my home and office, why would I need to use my mobile phone as well?

Several recent events have shown me why. For one thing, more and more people consider mobile phones as the primary means of reaching someone. In fact, young people text and Facebook on their mobile devices far more than they talk. So much so that my teenage son rarely checks his voice mail, or even his e-mail for that matter. And he assumes that everyone else is like his crowd. Last week, for example, he didn’t come home at the time he was expected. After an hour of worry, I finally called his mobile phone to make sure he was OK. He was surprised to hear that I didn’t know he was running late. He had texted me earlier to let me know. Since I was at home, I wasn’t checking my mobile phone for messages.

Recently, our region had widespread and lengthy power outages caused by a thunderstorm. With no power and in most cases no broadband, I saw how critical having sophisticated mobile broadband can be. I called my dog groomer about an hour before our appointment to make sure she had power. She had e-mailed me earlier that day to cancel. When I pointed out to her that I couldn’t get e-mail because the power was out, she expressed surprise that I didn’t get e-mail on my mobile phone. That same power outage threatened to cancel a swim-team banquet because the power was out at the building where it was going to be held. But the pool itself had power, so the coach e-mailed everyone an hour before the event, telling them we were changing venues. The presumption was that everyone had a phone or a Blackberry that could pick up e-mail.

As these phones get smarter, I’m missing an important communication channel. It’s time for an upgrade. And yet, I still don’t like the voice quality on mobile phones, and I find it hard to justify the expense when I probably won’t use it often. If anyone can recommend a good compromise between expensive, cutting-edge technology and your basic mobile phone, I’m all ears

I remember how excited I was when I first read about Verizon’s FIOS technology. The company intended to blanket the country with fiber-optic lines, bringing lightning-fast Internet, wonderful high-definition TV and low-cost, reliable phone service to millions of homes. I was especially thrilled that I’d finally have another Internet service option besides Comcast and the phone company’s DSL service. I could hardly wait.

That was nearly five years ago, and I’m still waiting for FIOS (the F surely stands for fiber, but no one’s very forthcoming about what the rest of it stands for). It was introduced in Keller, Tex., in September 2005. Reading about it, I felt like the people in Keller were taunting me. “It’s been the most incredible service I’ve ever had,” one Keller citizen was quoted as saying. “You’re either part of the technology revolution or you’re not, and I wanted to be part of the cutting edge.” Uh – me, too.

By June 2007, Verizon’s FIOS was available in 12 states and had more than 500,000 subscribers. Although my state, Maryland, was one of them, my neighborhood was not.

I started checking Verizon’s FIOS locator page regularly. Every time I entered my address and phone number, it responded with the message: “We’re sorry. FIOS is not currently available in your area.” As if I didn’t know that. It also gave me the option to add my name to a list so that I’d be notified when the service was available. But they never wrote, they never called. If they had, I would’ve been deluged with voice and e-mails – that’s how often I added my name to that list.

Meanwhile, FIOS was growing up all around me. In Northern Virginia. In the District of Columbia. In several parts of Maryland. But not in my neighborhood.

Then, last summer, glimmers of hope. FIOS trucks were spotted in our neighborhood. Then, our homeowners’ association newsletter announced that, indeed, FIOS would be coming in the summer of 2009. But it turned out that Verizon was leading me on yet again. FIOS was installed in the next neighborhood over – about six blocks away. It did not come to my street.

As of the end of the second quarter of 2010, Verizon FIOS was available to 12.9 million “premises,” according to its financial reports. And I was pretty sure that mine would never be one of them.

Finally, this summer, along came a crew of subcontractors – digging holes and trenches every 10 to 20 feet, laying fiber, putting stinking port-a-potties at the end of our street. And Verizon started teasing me again with flyers left on my front door and brochures in the mail. “FIOS is coming soon to your neighborhood!” they said.

It’s been about six weeks now. The construction crews (and the port-a-potties, thank God) are gone. All is quiet. Including Verizon. I haven’t received a flyer in awhile. Tonight, I checked the FIOS availability page again. It still tells me that the service is not available in my area.

As far as I’m concerned, FIOS stands for “forever imminent online service.” Before I’ve even had a chance to try it – and regardless of how wonderful the technology may be – I’ve soured on FIOS. If Verizon does ever offer to sell it to me, it’s hard to imagine that it could be so incredible as to make up for these repeated disappointments. Besides, I bet that the next new, and even better, technology is right around the corner. I’m so good at waiting, I just might wait for that one to arrive.

As every freelancer knows, working from home has its pros and its cons. Among the pros: spending all that extra time with family. Among the cons: having family assume that since you’re there, you’re always available to them. We’ve all had to manage this delicate balance.

I’ve adjusted to different types of interruptions as my son has grown. When he was a baby, his schedule ruled. Until he went to daycare, I crammed my work into the short slots of time between naps, feedings and play dates. As he grew, the types of interruptions changed. As a boy, he sometimes seemed to demand my uninterrupted attention just when I was in the thick of a conference call. But he gradually learned to refrain from interrupting me when I was on the phone, “unless there’s blood or fire involved.” (We later added water to that directive, after he shyly and sheepishly called down the steps to me one day that water was coming through the ceiling. The upstairs toilet had overflowed and he was trying to stem the tide by himself.)

Even now, at age 18, he sometimes bounds into the house – if he’s with with his cadre of friends, it sounds like a herd of elephants – and starts asking for money or the car before he even reaches my office, only to find me with the phone to my ear, glaring at him.

As kid interruptions subsided, pet interruptions escalated. There was always the dog, whimpering at the front door for a walk. As he reached middle age, my Yorkie developed seizures. Many times I conducted an interview while stroking and comforting his quivering five-pound body splayed out on the floor. He also had stomach problems. I became expert at discerning the distinctive retch in time to scoop him up off the carpet and onto the hardwood floor (for easier post-interview clean-up).

That dog now is also 18. He’s blind, deaf and arthritic, and sleeps most of the time. Still, when he wakes up and figures out I’m not in the same room, he goes hunting for me. He’ll sit at the top of the stairs whining until I come to carry him down to my first-floor office. And I’ve learned that I can’t ignore that whine for long – he’s tumbled down those stairs more than once.

Like an old man with Alzheimer’s, he sometimes wanders aimlessly around my office. He usually ends up ensnared in the nest of wires and cables behind my desk. I know he’s back there when my speakers start inching away from me.

Soon, both son and dog will leave – one for college and the other for the great beyond. It will be quiet around here. My work days will run more smoothly. Gone will be all those interruptions. And I’ll cry, missing them terribly.

I didn’t learn much about art in journalism school. The professors who taught reporting, writing and editing focused on gathering information, checking facts and writing a story that answered the five Ws: who, what, when, where and why. The art – if there was any at all – was someone else’s job.

When I was reporting for newspapers, editors started asking me to gather art as well as information. Ask your sources for mug shots, they’d say. It was the 1980s, and USA Today had defied the critics who called it a cartoon newspaper, making the then-unfamiliar concept of infographics popular. Suddenly editors were demanding that I get statistics the art department could use to make fancy, colorful charts. I, and my reporter colleagues, considered it a burden.

I didn’t learn the value of art until I became a magazine editor. And it didn’t come easily. I butted heads with more than one art director who demanded we sacrifice text in order to make room for a photo spread, illustration or graphic. In the art director’s mind, a picture literally was worth a thousand words. The worst was when he wanted neither words nor pictures – he wanted aesthetically pleasing white space. To me, white space was nothing more than a hole that needed to be filled, preferably with words.

Gradually and grudgingly, I began to appreciate the role art can play in journalism. I became the dreaded editor who demanded that reporters gather good art material along with the facts and quotes for their stories. Some great art directors taught me how important the presentation of a story can be. They showed me how art can heighten the impact of a hard-hitting piece of investigative reporting. How a good custom photo of a CEO can reveal character and pique interest, thus pulling the reader into the article. How a well-designed graphic can convey more information than paragraphs full of tedious statistics. How unusual typography can convey the mood of a story. I even started to like white space.

By the time I left that magazine, I was a complete convert. I had grown to love art and respect the creativity of art directors. One of the favorite parts of my job was the art meeting for each issue, where we brainstormed what kind of art to develop for each feature and what we should do on the cover.

That type of collaboration – the union of great writing with great artwork – seems rare today. For one thing, there aren’t many magazines left that can afford to invest in expensive photos or illustrations. Second, as print has waned and the Web waxed, tasteful art designed to support the story seems to have fallen into the background. Indeed, on the Web the layout of stories is still awkward, much less artistic. I rarely see anything comparable to a two-page magazine spread that pops out at readers and demands their attention. (Although Gannett’s experimental online magazine, The Bold Italic, is an interesting attempt.) And magazine covers? Sort of an anachronism, although publishers still reproduce on the Web what they’ve done in print.

But as more online magazines experiment with multimedia, that’s starting to change. Designers are using new types of art, including video and audio, to illustrate stories. (Hmmm, I can think of lots of different sounds and music that could accompany a story on, say, the BP oil spill, but what about an article on the latest wireless technology?)

Editors are asking for podcasts and even videocasts of interviews. With all this new technology, journalism is going to become much more than just reporting and writing. We journalists are going to have to loosen our exclusive reliance on the written word and learn how to use other media creatively. For those who do, journalism will become more art than craft. And for some of us, it just might become more fun than work.

At the Future of Freelancing conference in June at Stanford University, Richard Koci Hernandez, a Ford Foundation Multimedia Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, gave an excellent presentation on multimedia reporting.

It essentially boiled down to “teach yourself.” That’s nothing new for freelancers. But doing all the research to find out what we need to get started and where to find it – that can be a real time-suck, assuming you can even find this information. And that’s what was so valuable about Hernandez’ presentation. In one hour, he ticked off his recommendations of audio and video equipment as well as software programs we’d need to get started. All of it is geared for beginners and carries a price freelancers can afford – most of the equipment is under $200 and much of the software is free. He recommended websites where we could learn the basics. He pointed us to sources of audio, video and still images to illustrate our stories.

Many of us were amazed at how magnanimously he shared his knowledge. With Hernandez’ permission, I’ll continue in that spirit and “pay it forward” by passing on some of the golden nuggets.

Pocket video cam: Kodak Zi8

Low-cost tripod for video cam: Gorillapod

Digital audio recorder: Edirol R-09HR

Microphone: Sennheiser MD-42

Produce a slideshow with sound: Soundslides

Edit your sound files: Audacity

Edit your video: YouTube’s recently-launched online video editor

Illustrate your stories with maps: Umapper

Create timelines for your stories: Dipity or VuVox

Find public domain clips of audio, music, video or still images: Internet Archive, Audiojungle, Creative Commons

Create graphs, charts, word clouds and other types of visualizations: Many Eyes

Best site for online tutorials: Lynda.com

Get tips on online storytelling from Ira Glass on YouTube

Useful websites on digital journalism: 10,000 Words, Interactive Narratives and The Poynter Institute’s News University

Journalism is all about telling a great story. That hasn’t changed, and never will.

That was the happy message at the “Future of Freelancing” conference held last week at Stanford University. Several sessions served to inspire the 120-plus mid-career freelancers in attendance, telling us to stay brave and persistent in pursuing our craft. I was heartened by a panel of assigning editors from Popular Science, The Washington Post, Wired and The New Yorker, as they talked about the wonders of long-form journalism, a “crying need for narrative” and their hunger for new ideas from freelancers.

Everything else, however, is changing fast: the platform on which we publish our stories, the tools we use to tell our stories, and who controls how we tell those stories and to whom. While the changes are daunting at best, for freelancers they can be an opportunity to become the vanguard of a new age of journalism.

It’s news to nobody that publishing platforms are changing. While paper isn’t going away, other platforms have proliferated. The Web is already as popular as paper, for reading short items at least. The e-reader and iPad are becoming increasingly popular as ways to deliver news and magazine stories. Writers need to be on all these platforms, or they’ll miss part of their potential audience.

As these platforms change, they open up new ways to tell our stories. Ways that we should all learn. Although the editors at most sessions wouldn’t go so far as to say they’d pick a freelancer with video and audio skills over one with just writing skills – all other things being equal – it was clear to me that writers without audio and video in their toolbox will limit their opportunities. The most practical and useful session of the conference was given by Richard Koci Hernandez, a Ford Foundation Multimedia Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, who inspired us with his belief that today “is the golden age of storytelling,” excited us with the prospect of “reaching a global audience with one click” and gave us practical advice on how to acquire audio and video skills.

Finally, the old gatekeepers of publishing are losing their grip on the creative product. Remember the term “disintermediation,” which was popular in the 1990s when the Web had just burst onto the scene? It’s gaining speed in publishing. Authors are publishing books themselves rather than going through traditional channels. Why can’t journalists publish their stories directly on the Kindle? Journalist Damon Brown recently published a guide to the iPad on the Kindle, for example. It’s priced at $1.99.

For those journalists with an entrepreneurial bent, in particular, the future could be interesting indeed. This conference was a one-time deal, the project of Christine Larson, a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. She deserves an award for having the idea and pulling it off. We freelancers – indeed all journalists – need more conferences like this. I hope the immense amount of positive feedback I heard at the conference turns into action by all attendees to make sure we get them.

I’m looking forward to attending “The Future of Freelancing,” a conference this week at Stanford University. Co-sponsored by the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the conference’s goal is to “help freelancers explore their evolving careers and stay inspired.” Well, I know many freelancers that are not only uninspired these days, they are downright desperate. In fact, the conference title might be more fitting if it had a question mark at the end. Because many of my colleagues doubt journalism, much less freelance journalism, has a future.

I’m convinced it does. But it’s going to be so different from what we’re used to that we aren’t even capable of conceiving it yet. A source for one of my stories on digital publishing points out that when the automobile first came out, people called it the horseless carriage. The only way they could define these early cars was by relating them to a familiar mode of transportation. That’s the kind of disconnect we have in the publishing business. The whole world has changed, and we don’t understand the new world well enough yet to see where and how we’ll fit in. And many of us are terrified that we are selling buggy whips.

The terror has been building steadily this year. A couple of months ago, I participated in a lively LinkedIn discussion. The thread was started by a post by freelance colleague Polly Traylor, who lamented the state of the freelance business on her blog. It didn’t take long for many of us to chime in – and the opinions ranged from: it’s a brand new world and “those who learn to adapt and embrace the change may actually find a lot of opportunity in it” to “freelance journalism is dead” and all that’s left to do is “put fresh flowers on its grave.” (You can read the discussion here.)

It’s clear that no one – including the biggest media companies – has a clue. Consider these two news reports from just this week. First, News Corp. announced strategic moves toward its promised strategy of charging readers for online content. It bought Skiff LLC , which makes an e-reader and a digital publishing platform. News Corp. also invested in Journalism Online, a startup by Steven Brill and other media executives that aims to offer a way for publishers to charge readers for online news.

In contrast, Forbes.com is going in the other direction, apparently planning to use thousands of unpaid contributors instead of professional journalists, according to a report by Paul Carr on TechCrunch. At a recent staff meeting Lewis Dvorkin, who oversees Forbes editorial, said that “Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent,” according to Carr. As my colleague Howard Baldwin has pointed out, that comment makes us freelancers feel like we belong in a museum. (Getting old is a theme for Howard. See his blog, “Middle-Age Cranky.”)

Meanwhile, social media consultant Paul Gillin recently passed along this trailer to an upcoming documentary, “Fit to Print,” on the dying news business. While melodramatic, what this clip does not exaggerate is the level of fear among professional journalists.

It’s the end of the journalism world as we know it. The big question is: what’s next? I hope this conference gives me at least some possible answers. Tune in next week to find out.