Ignore that tax accountant behind the curtain
Numbers intimidate me. Tax forms, with their confusing formulas and convoluted IRS regulations, downright scare me. But when I went freelance full time, I decided to take the plunge and do my own.
I had several reasons. First, energized by a spirit of self-reliance, I figured if I could make a living as an independent writer, I could do my own taxes. After all, what is a freelancer if not the ultimate “do-it-yourselfer”? Second, at that point I had more time than money, so it made sense for me to spend the time doing my own rather than spending the money to hire someone. Third, I wanted to learn more about the tax rules that apply to sole proprietors, figuring that if I understood them I could make better business decisions. And finally, my old tax accountant was literally old – he was retiring – and had made a major mistake on my last return, one that even I could catch. (He had forgotten that I had worked as an employee for part of that year, and did not include my W-2s.)
So I’ve done my own taxes for the last five years. I’ve gained several advantages. I have assuaged my number/tax phobia and have learned much about the tax implications of certain financial decisions. I’m more tax savvy. It’s also forced me to better organize my accounting and recordkeeping. The downsides: hours and hours spent gathering records and entering data into TurboTax, and the annoying, nagging worry that some critical error or omission will come back to haunt me.
Last year was a good year, and so far this year looks good, too. So now that my time is at a premium, I decided to hire an accountant. That would save me those seemingly endless hours of work, plus I would be rid of that nagging feeling that something might be wrong. Tax accountants know all the answers, right?
Wrong.
I had forgotten that accountants do not go through your files and gather all the numbers for those tax forms. Hiring someone saves me from having to sit at the computer and enter information, but that’s probably only about 30 percent of the work. The rest is actually hunting down the information, such as reviewing credit card bills to figure out business expenses or calling clients whose 1099s don’t agree with my records.
Still, I figured that this guy would answer important questions that I’d had for years. There were deductions that I didn’t take because I wasn’t sure about them, so I brought a list of questions when I delivered my records to him. Could I deduct my doctor’s concierge from my Healthcare Savings Account? He wasn’t sure. When we got into a discussion, it became clear that he didn’t know the different between an HSA and an FSA (flexible spending account), a savings program some employers offer their full-time workers. What about including among charitable contributions that online payment to a fund to help a colleague’s uncovered medical expenses after she was hit by a car? Gee, he wasn’t sure. I also asked him for advice on what I might do differently this year to save on taxes. He suggested becoming a Subchapter S corporation. But I was hoping for more tactical tips, such as keeping better records on the use of my car for business. He didn’t have much to offer.
He did, however, try to sell me a long-term care policy.
The last straw was when I received my completed forms for review. All I did was compare his work to last year’s forms – the ones that I had done myself. My worst fear was that I would find something that I had overlooked or done wrong on the forms that I did. I did indeed find a major mistake. But it was his. He had forgotten to apply education credits to which I’m entitled because I have a son in college, credits that reduce my final tax bill substantially.
The guy even had the nerve to try to charge me $100 more than he initially quoted to do my taxes. When I asked why I should pay extra after his mistake almost cost me more than $1,000 in additional taxes, he backed down.
So ends my quest to find tax expertise. I’ve pulled the curtain back on the “great and powerful Wizard of Accounting,” and found a weak little man pulling the same switches and levers that we could all pull ourselves. He tries to impress and intimidate us with fancy offices and complicated language. In the end, we all have the power to do this ourselves, and probably more thoroughly and accurately than he does.
Guess who’ll be doing my taxes next year?
The iPhone: A Swiss Army knife for reporters?
Neal Augenstein is a one-man multimedia news crew. But the reporter, who works for Washington, D.C., talk radio station WTOP, does not schlep heavy, expensive video and audio equipment as he drives around the metro area covering breaking news. Instead, he uses his iPhone. With his phone, a charger, a few apps, a $2 piece of foam and some practice, Augenstein says he’s able to produce fairly good quality audio and video reports for the station’s radio station and website.
WTOP reporter Neal Augenstein demonstrates a gerry-rigged mic clip for the iPhone, using a traditional mic clamp and a scrap of foam to wrap around the phone.
Augenstein explained how he does it at a professional development session on “iPhone Reporting” last week at the National Press Club. As technology brings radio, TV, print and web together in one big mess of media, journalists are increasingly called on to do a little bit of everything, like it or not. And don’t expect any training, even if you are a full-time employee. Augenstein took the initiative at WTOP, educating himself on the capabilities of the iPhone (and later the iPad), and then producing reports that convinced WTOP of the viability of the iPhone as a sort of reportorial Swiss Army knife.
Augenstein makes it sound easy, but of course for most of us it’s not. For a print reporter like me, audio and video are intimidating. I couldn’t even figure out how to get my iPhone to record audio during his presentation, and was too embarrassed to ask. And who has time for the “practice” part, when our priority is meeting the next deadline so we get paid?
I did manage to snap a photo of Augenstein (right), the quality and composition of which will convince editors that I should stick with words. I even used one of his tips on how to edit the photo on the spot and e-mail it to your editor. After taking the photo on the iPhone, size it and crop it on screen using your hand (pinching or spreading your fingers). Then take a screen shot by simultaneously pressing the on/off button and the home button. The newly cropped photo appears in your camera roll, and from there you can e-mail it to your editor (or in my case, to myself so I could put it on my website.)
A few other things I learned:
• YouTube isn’t the only online broadcasting platform out there. Check out Ustream. While YouTube is more commonly used to store and show recorded videos, it appears that Ustream is more like live TV, showing events as they happen in real time. (When I tuned in, the Arena Football Club of Des Moines was broadcasting a game between the Iowa Barnstormers and the Chicago Rush.) With an app called Ustream Broadcaster, you can tweet your broadcasts.
• Augenstein uses SoundCloud (which he called “YouTube for audio”) to store his audio clips. It has a free app that allows you to tweet your audio clips.
• The iPhone is sensitive to wind, even light breezes. You can solve the problem by slipping a standard microphone wind sock over the mic end of the phone. Augenstein says it worked so well that he was able to cover a hurricane using his iPhone.
I’ve heard plenty of complaints about the sound quality of the iPhone’s built-in mic. Augenstein admits the quality isn’t as good as using a professional mic and high-end digital recorder, but says it’s good enough. If you put professional equipment audio quality at 100 percent, he estimates iPhone quality rates about 92 percent in comparison. And he expects that new equipment add-ons for the iPhone, specifically an external mic due out in April, will improve that to 95 percent.
I’m not exactly a roving reporter, and probably won’t be using my iPhone to record audio and video. Honestly, I barely remember to tweet when I’m at an event. But it was fascinating to learn what Augenstein can do with the technology in the palm of his hand. More of his tips can be found on his blog on iPhone reporting.
Cloud jobs in the U.S. could drift overseas
Have you heard enough about job creation yet? In this election year, it seems that politicians can’t stop talking about it. In fact, the Senate is now debating proposed legislation called the JOBS Act (although it has more to do with cutting regulations on going public than it does with creating jobs.)
So it doesn’t surprise me that a tech industry trade association is touting how many jobs technology creates. What does surprise me is that it has chosen to highlight cloud computing as the great jobs engine. 
Last week, the TechAmerica Foundation held an event in Washington, D.C., to release and discuss a report on just that subject. The trade group, which represents a broad swath of the tech industry, didn’t give a reason for the report or its timing, but such events are routine in D.C. as a way to “educate” federal policy makers and members of Congress. TechAmerica wants to keep up the tech industry’s reputation as a job creator.
The report, written by consulting company Sand Hill Group and sponsored by software company SAP, says that cloud computing companies in the United States are expanding their employment at five times the rate of the tech sector overall. Other numbers from the study:
• Cloud companies could generate as many as 472,000 jobs in the next five years.
• Venture capital investments could create another 213,000 jobs through the creation of cloud-related startups.
• The adoption of cloud could save U.S. corporations hundreds of billions of dollars, which they could reinvest to create new jobs.
After reading the report, I have lots of questions about how Sand Hill comes up with its numbers. For example, the report does not even define what constitutes a “cloud company,” nor does it explain how or why it focuses on 11 companies ranging from Google to Concur (a $400-million company that does online travel and expense management). But the biggest flaw in the study is its contention that most of these jobs will be in the United States. They may be today, but as the world becomes more and more connected, cloud computing is more likely to spur new business and job growth around the world than in America. After all, the basic advantage of cloud computing – the fact that you don’t have to provide your own computing but can buy it from others on an as-needed basis – means that you don’t really care where that computing comes from. It doesn’t have to come from the United States.
And those VC-backed startups? There’s no guarantee that they will be in the United States rather than China, India or other regions of the world. In fact, there is evidence that startups grow faster and become more profitable when they are based outside of the United States, writes Glenn Solomon, a partner at GGV Capital, in a recent blog post. “Lately, as several foreign economies have been on a rapid growth curve, a crop of non-U.S. startups has been particularly good at producing both [growth and profitability]. Perhaps U.S. entrepreneurs seeking high growth and high profits would do well to look outside the U.S. — expanding their businesses into high-growth markets.”
The report also fails to factor in how the cloud eliminates jobs. That significant cost reduction that cloud computing brings to corporate IT? Part of it comes from the fact that the company will have less IT in-house and thus will be cutting IT staff, perhaps significantly. Another part comes from a dramatic reduction in the number of servers, PCs, storage systems and other equipment that companies have to buy. That could decimate the revenue of traditional hardware companies and lead to huge layoffs, even bankruptcies. And don’t think that the big cloud providers will make up for those sales by buying gazillions of servers for their data farms. Many of the cloud companies, including Google, are designing and building their own hardware. Traditional software companies could also suffer. In fact, the study acknowledges that the cloud’s “pay-as-you-go” subscription model has already started cannibalizing licensed software revenue.
Finally, cloud computing continues the world-flattening started by the Internet, enabling work to be done anywhere in the world. It will likely increase the outsourcing of all kinds of jobs, from low-skilled data entry to high-end electronics design.
This all seems so obvious, it left me scratching my head at the end of the roundtable. Perhaps the trade group believes that Congress won’t understand the full implications of cloud – which is probably true. It’s nothing new, but I find it sad and disappointing when trade associations that purport to be educating government are in fact obscuring the true picture. Even so, if the tech industry’s goal is to promote how it creates jobs, surely it can find a better angle than this.
Do chip industry statistics add up to anything?
If a tree falls in the woods . . .
You know the old saying. If no one is there, does the tree make a sound? That was my first thought when I saw two news items last week: First, Intel has pulled out of the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) report. Since AMD had already pulled out late last year, Intel’s numbers now make up most of the microprocessor data collected and published by the WSTS. Presumably, Intel pulled out because it felt that was too much data to share with the rest of the industry. (The company didn’t give an official reason.) Shortly after the WSTS announcement, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) said it would no longer publish its Semiconductor International Capacity Statistics (SICAS), a quarterly report on chip fab capacity utilization.
Will anyone notice that these numbers are gone?
As a journalist who has covered electronics for two decades, I’ve always wondered whether these statistics were valuable or relevant. I haven’t used them in stories. My sources don’t cite them. I haven’t gotten the sense that readers care about them. The only times I heard about them were when I received a press release from the SIA. Am I missing something?
I may be. Junko Yoshida of EE Times thinks this is a big deal, writing in a recent editorial that it will impact chip companies’ planning, market researchers’ forecasts and ability to interpret market trends and the media. (See her commentary here.)
What’s more telling, however, is the relative silence from the semiconductor companies themselves. I didn’t see any quotes from chip company executives in the news stories. The Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA), formerly the Fabless Semiconductor Association, expressed concern, although it didn’t explain its reasons very clearly.
“The GSA is concerned that – without an industry body collecting information from semiconductor companies – there may be a loss of transparency that will alter the ability of these companies to navigate their industry,” it told EE Times. What exactly does that mean? Why are these numbers important?
Virtually all of the chip companies are public, and thus have to report revenue and give guidance on what they expect in the near future. WSTS reports billings and revenue broken down into more than 100 categories of chips (microprocessor, analog, memory, etc.) But won’t market researchers still be able to use public information to compile such data?
In fact, the weakening of WSTS and SIA data could be a boon for market analysts, at least those that have the resources to dig up the information. It gives semiconductor analysts more opportunity to differentiate their services and add value. It will stimulate competition. Semico said as much in a post on its blog. “Analysts will have to do their homework,” it said. “All data is not created equal.”
At least some of the commenters on EE Times’ coverage said they wouldn’t miss the WSTS and SIA data.
“My team moved away nearly 10 years ago from SIA and conducts our own bottoms up research on semiconductor companies,” wrote one. “It’s time for a new organization to emerge that is more in tune with the dynamics of our business.”
Said another: “These [fab utilization] reports are overrated — they are always a day late and dollar short and also state the obvious — there are more pertinent, clear signals & trigger points that occur that are more useful. Even anecdotal information on fab loadings is as accurate as these trumped up reports.”
Which brings me back to where I started. I’m trying to figure out whether and why it’s important for WSTS and SIA to provide these statistics. How do you use WSTS and SIA numbers? What do these changes mean to you? Comment here or send me an e-mail at tam@tamharbert.com.
Who needs trade publishers?
Last week brought news that another trade publisher was dropping print. Penton Technology Media Group announced that all of its magazines would go digital-only as of May 2012. . A quick Google search lists at least two other trade publishers – Ziff Davis Enterprise and Linux Journal – that have stopped printing magazines in the last six months.
By dropping their old distribution method, these magazines will cut their operating costs significantly. But I’m not sure that the raison d’être for trade magazines – to deliver hard-to-find, specialized information to a qualified readership – still exists. 
I find myself relying less and less on traditional publishers to collect and package articles that meet my needs and preferences. This function – the buzzword for it is curation – is helpful, even essential. It’s just that I don’t need trade publishers to do it anymore.
If I’m looking for details of a specific news event or a feature article on a specific topic, I can usually find it quickly by using Google search. For more in-depth information, curated by an expert on a topic, I might search Apple’s app store. For example, in researching information for a trip to Costa Rica for later this year, I’ve become overwhelmed by information from Google searches. I needed a better filter, so I downloaded an iPad app based on a tour guide written by a respectable, though not necessarily widely known, travel writer. The reviews sounded good and, for four bucks, what did I have to lose? The app was very helpful.
For information that I’m not searching for but that would interest me, I rely on my social circles. Online, that means my social media – primarily Twitter and Facebook. After all, by their very nature of being my followers, followees and friends, these people share at least some of my interests. These folks, not some impersonal publisher, are my curators. And the more I plug into to them via social media, the better information I find. This realization crystalized for me last week when John Bethune, a journalist and new-media editorial consultant I follow on Twitter, tweeted about his “New-Media Survival Guide: For Journalists and Other Print-Era Refugees.” The self-published book is available from several sources, including Amazon.com, both as a paperback and an e-book.
I’m a print-era refugee (although I prefer the term bilingual – I speak both analog and digital), and I’m always scanning for information that’ll help me keep up with the latest in social media and digital publishing trends. But it takes a lot of time to wade through the information stream to find the most valuable golden nuggets. Bethune’s guide has done a lot of the panning for me already. It may not deliver all the gold, but it gives me a map that shows where some of the richest veins are.
Through his blog and social media activity, Bethune is building his own qualified circulation. A trade-publishing colleague of mine recently gave me an example of how social media can enable this. “With LinkedIn Groups, you have a self-qualifying, self-assembling and self-maintaining list of people with a common interest,” he said. “It’s the equivalent of a magazine’s mailing list, and you don’t pay a thing for it.”
Indeed. When individual writers can establish their own brands, build their own readership and publish their own apps and articles, what’s left for traditional publishers? Tell me, if you know.
Postscript: Interesting comments by Warren Bimblick, senior vp of strategy and business development at Penton Media, at a recent roundtable on “The New Influencers of Content Creation,” hosted by Folio Magazine:
“In fact the b-to-b controlled circulation model is all about a social community. What it really is about is finding 47,262 people who all qualify and about whom you know tons of information and you give them content in the way they want it, which means asking them. And for some reason yet again the industry is going out to Facebook and LinkedIn, when in fact we own these communities.
My soapbox right now is to keep the communities to ourselves, because we are the qualified people to run them. That said, if I were 30 years younger and an editor, I would be checking every day to see who is following me. It is fascinating what you can use social media for. Not just for pushing content out but for product research, and so on.”
SOPA protest, political winds and Google’s whims
The Internet enables my career, and to an increasing extent, my life. I spend hours online every day communicating with sources, editors, colleagues and friends not only by e-mail but also via social networks like Facebook and Twitter. I spend even more time using Google to conduct research for various stories. (Remember when we reporters actually had to use the telephone and go to the library?) I do a substantial amount of my shopping online. I do virtually all of my banking online.
But what if someone suddenly pulled the plug on the Internet? My work and much of my life would come to a halt. I’ve been thinking about that ever since Wikipedia and other sites went dark a couple of weeks ago to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). An effort to fight online violations of copyright and intellectual property, SOPA would have expanded the power of U.S. law enforcement over Internet service providers (ISPs). It would’ve allowed the government to bar ISPs and search engines from linking to or conducting business with websites suspected of aiding and abetting violators, and could require them to block access to such sites. (A good explanation of SOPA can be found here.)
I agree with the opponents of SOPA, who said that the bill threatened free speech and innovation. I’m glad the bill was defeated. But it wasn’t defeated because opponents won the argument. It wasn’t even defeated by lobbying muscle. (Google last year spent $9.7 million on lobbying, an increase of 88 percent over 2010.) Rather, it was defeated by extortion.
Google purportedly considered shutting down its search engine for a day, but the company wisely refrained. It settled for covering its logo in black to protest the proposed legislation. Even without the participation of Google, the Internet strike peeled back the curtain to show how dependent we’ve all become on the Internet in our daily lives. As Larry Magid put it in The San Jose Mercury News, “Tech companies flexed their muscles Jan. 18 and we found out that they’re a lot more buff than many had thought.” Virtually all of the key players on the Internet – including Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter – opposed SOPA. What if they had all shut down? For that matter, what if the major wireless providers also joined in? Just try going through a day without using wireless technology and the Internet. How would you find your way to that off-site meeting? Still got a paper map in your car? But what about traffic jams? Turn on that AM radio. Need to call because you’re running late? Dust off your phone books, if you still have them. And good luck finding a pay phone.
I know what it’s like to be at the mercy of a service provider. My neighborhood is on a bad part of the electricity grid. We have old lines and large trees, so when the wind blows we sometimes lose power. It’s infuriating that my service literally depends on which way the wind blows. But I’ve found that I can get by without air conditioning, refrigeration or heat (we have a fireplace). The real worry for me was my lost connection to e-mail and Internet. So now I use 3G. When the power goes out I can still get e-mail on my iPhone and access the web on my iPad
Now my informational lifeline feels threatened. My access to electricity may depend on the vagaries of weather, but my utility has never threatened to cut my power because they don’t like proposed legislation. My access to the Internet depends on a few powerful technology companies. And they have made that threat. Whether they carry it out apparently depends on the vagaries of the political winds.
Making rain with cloud computing
Every few years, some big trend comes along in the technology industry that drives marketing spending through the roof. It creates a flood of advertising in the trade publications and a tsunami of marketing materials, such as white papers and case studies, as companies scramble to position themselves on the cutting edge of this new trend, whatever it is. In the 1990s, it was the Internet itself. Many of us journalists remember the “Everything Internet” wave, when our publications were booming and people who could write about the Internet and World Wide Web were golden. In fact, more than a few journalists, including my boss at the time, were lured by high salaries and stock options from their lowly profession to join Internet startups. 
Today, it is Cloud Computing. “The Cloud” may indeed change computing forever, but no one really understands quite how yet. That doesn’t stop people from writing about it, however. Companies are again clamoring for people who can write about the nebulous technology. Publications want to be regarded as the most authoritative source of cloud news. (One editor told me: “We want to be known as the expert on all-things-cloud.”) And yet few really know what they are talking about. In most cases, it’s more like a Rorschach test, with companies projecting what they hope cloud will do for their business. They spend big on advertising to crow about how their products and services relate to the cloud. And they churn out a never-ending stream of white papers and “thought-leadership” articles to show that they understand what cloud computing is and how it will affect the industry.
It’s whistling past the graveyard. The basic idea of cloud computing – that someone else owns and runs the computer and you just buy the service (like Google Apps) – is scaring most hardware and software companies to their core. After all, what happens to their business model if most individuals and corporations no longer buy computers or applications? Better to talk loudly about how cloud actually creates a need for whatever they are selling.
For freelancers like me, who specialize in technology and business, cloud computing has been a boon. Last year, as companies started recovering from the economic body blow of 2008, they restored marketing departments’ budgets. After a very lean year in 2010, I suddenly had a wealth of assignments all about the cloud. Take any topic that I might otherwise have written a story about a couple of years ago – computer security, for example. Now it is a story about computer security in the cloud. Mainframe computers? How mainframes can be used to create clouds. Storage technology? How to store data in the cloud. At least 50 percent of my work last year was related to cloud. And so it seems to be going this year as well.
We journalists like to complain about the hype in the high tech industry. We sometimes accuse marketers of trying to create FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in order to sell their products. But, at least in this case, the FUD fallout from cloud is selling my product and paying my bills. Let it rain!
Brand new confusion: How much of your brand does your employer own?
A writer’s personal brand is becoming increasingly valuable. As a freelancer, I establish my brand through networking – both in person and via social networking. I spend a lot of time showing people what I know, what I do and how well I do it. I have a website. I blog. I post links to my stories and I comment on relevant news topics on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. My hope is that as people get to know me, they will come to appreciate my talent, knowledge and judgment, and thus when they need my services, will hire me.
Full-time staff writers and editors also are out there promoting their brands. They post under their own name on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ to promote their articles. They also post professional items that are of interest to other journalists. And they post about their daily personal lives as well, just as I do.
We’re all trying to build up high numbers of high-quality connections, or “followers.” However, full-time employees are also promoting their employers. Employed journalists are expected to post stuff to promote certain articles in their publications and events sponsored by their publishers. So, whose followers are they? The writer’s or the employer’s?
That’s the question at the heart of a lawsuit brought against Noah Kravitz by his former employer. In 2010, Kravitz quit his job at Phonedog.com, a publisher of news on mobile devices and platforms, and took his 17,000 Twitter followers with him. The company is suing, saying the list of Twitter followers is a customer list, according to the New York Times.
There are some wrinkles here. Kravitz started the Twitter account and built up his followers while he was a full-time employee, under the Twitter handle Phonedog_Noah, according to the Times. When he left he changed his handle to NoahKravitz, but says that his employer agreed that he could take the followers if he twittered about the company from time to time. Apparently, though, there is nothing in writing.
Lawyers in several news reports say the Twitter handle is key to who’ll win the lawsuit. They imply that if he’d tweeted under his own name all along, then he would own the followers. But, would he? It’s one thing if the writer came to the job, bringing his followers with him, or if he had developed a following for tweeting about something besides his full-time employment. But what if he developed his expertise and his followers while at the employer? The employer may have a good argument for retaining the followers.
Freelancers may be a bit more aware of how our ability to attract an audience increases our value. My editors have told me they want me to write another story for them because of how many hits my stories get. I don’t have a particularly stellar social network, but most of my editors do want me to tweet and post about that story of mine that they are running this week. At writers’ conferences, I’ve heard book publishers say that they consider the number of Twitter followers and other social media numbers of the author when they are evaluating whether to publish a book. Who doesn’t want a ready-made readership? In fact, I won’t be surprised if that eventually becomes a standard question in job interviews.
So I’d like to poll my own social network on this topic. Does anyone know of other cases where a journalist left his job and tussled with his employer over his social network? For my full-time employed colleagues: do you think you’re more valuable to an employer because of your numerous followers? Does it help ensure your job security? Does it make you more attractive to your next employer? Freelancers: how helpful is your social network in impressing editors?
Online plagiarists: Catch them if you can
With the explosion of online publishing, many people are now posting words on the web and calling themselves journalists. But a good proportion of them are more like plagiarists.
I recently got a first-hand lesson in this. While preparing to pitch a story idea to an editor, I googled “mainframes and private cloud computing.” Not the most interesting topic in the world, and not one that’s been widely covered. So I wasn’t surprised when a story that I’d done earlier in the year popped up several times on the first page of the search results. (My publisher owns lots of magazines and buys the rights to run my stories in all of them.)
But I was looking for fresh information, so I went to the second and third page of the search results. I clicked on a link at a website purporting to cover all-things-cloud. As I read the article I found there, I had a strong feeling of déjà vu. Here was an executive at IBM being quoted saying the exact same things about mainframe computers that he had told me. I know these guys are often coached on their “messaging,” but these were specific comments to specific questions that I’d asked during our interview. It was clear that the writer had lifted them from my article. There was no mention of my article nor the publication in which it appeared. It sounded as if the author had interviewed the IBM executive himself.
I notified my editor of the plagiarism and she kicked it to her higher ups to see what to do. The answer: not much.
“At any given time hundreds (possibly thousands) of Web sites are republishing entire stories [from our publications] without our permission,” says the response that my editor e-mailed to me. “About 50% of the time, we wind up doing nothing.” The publisher will take action under several circumstances, including when it’s a professional publisher’s site, when the site is running ads alongside the content, or when the site is plagiarizing entire stories repeatedly. But most of the people who do this “are lay publishers who’ve never heard of the Fair Use law and have no understanding of search engine optimization. They often think they’re doing us a favor, in fact.”
In other words, many of these so-called publishers think plagiarism is OK. How depressing.
Nevertheless, my publisher suggests that editors contact the offending site and nicely ask them to remove the story or at least acknowledge and link to the original source.
In my case, there was no contact information on the website for the writer, nor the editor. In fact, there was no information on who was publishing or funding the website. Clicking the “about” tab told me only that the site was launched in 2009, is done with “a team of content creators from around the globe” and “is one of the fastest growing cloud computing media sites on the Web.” I clicked on “contact,” and got only a form to fill out. There was no address, phone number or e-mail. This is not uncommon. Even when a publisher wants to take legal action against plagiarism, the lawyers sometimes can’t find anyone to which they can address a cease and desist order.
My editor and I tracked down the writer through LinkedIn – he happens to be an MBA student at a major U.S. university – and sent him an e-mail about the offense. Within an hour, we received a response from his publisher:
“After reviewing the article and discussing with [the writer], we have no problems citing your article regarding the quote. [The writer] had mentioned that he did not realize that this was an exclusive. Eitherway [sic], we’ll make the change to the article citing [your publication] as a source of the quote. We’ve also indicated to [the writer] to clearly define the source of any future quotes.”
It was not signed by an actual person, but rather with the name of the website itself, so we still do not know who runs the operation. Likewise, the return e-mail was the generic email@thewebsite.com.
Lay publisher, indeed. The fact that this publisher thinks that it’s OK to use any content that is not marked as “exclusive” shows his lack of publishing experience, not to say his disrespect of copyright law.
This whole thing piqued my curiosity, so I used an online plagiarism detector, called Duplichecker, to search for other sites that might be lifting the same article. I put in the quote from the IBM guy, and found that the entire story had been lifted, verbatim, unattributed to me or the original publication, in a Middle East computer news site as well. Just as I was working up a slow burn, however, I realized that it was affiliated with a sister publication of the original publication. Of course, my original publisher has the right to republish my story all over the world in its own related publications.
As I start 2012, I’m making a New Year’s resolution to launch my own little battle against online plagiarism. I plan to regularly use Duplichecker or something similar (googling “online plagiarism detector” brings up several free ones) to see where pieces of my stories are popping up. I may not be able to stop it, but I can at least try to educate the offenders, one plagiarist at a time.
A jobless recovery? That depends on how you define “jobs.”
The more I hear about stubbornly high unemployment and the jobless recovery, the more convinced I am that we’re looking at things all wrong.
We’re in the midst of a national political obsession about creating jobs, but what exactly constitutes employment today? Fewer and fewer U.S. citizens hold a 9-to-5, 40-hour-a-week job with salary, healthcare, 401k plan and paid vacation. Even fewer will in the future, because what people do for a living, and how they do it, is changing.
As a freelancer, I work at home, set my own hours, try to get paid what I’m worth, buy my own health insurance, contribute to an IRA (no matching funds here) and make a reasonably good living. But some people still don’t consider that a real job. Including many freelancers. A colleague of mine, who was laid off from a magazine six months ago and is freelancing while looking for another position, still refers to herself as unemployed. My neighbor, who lost her job as an administrative assistant two years ago, is among the “long-term, chronically unemployed.” Despite her best efforts, she hasn’t been able to find another full-time administrative job. But she seems to stay fairly busy temping.
It’s not just full-time communications and administrative positions that are vanishing. As we buy more and more stuff online, we need fewer salespeople. And at my local grocery store, where I used to chat amiably with a cashier who got good pay and benefits, I now scan and bag my own groceries.
The truth is that much of what we call employment are jobs that were created by and structured for the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, they are no longer necessary. In the span of human history, most people worked for themselves (unless they were wealthy or enslaved), scratching out a living however they could. My grandparents, for example, were all farmers. In 1900, 41 percent of U.S. jobs were agricultural, according to government statistics.
Whatever you want to call it – – the contractor economy or free-agent nation – this new model of work requires individuals to have different skills and requires government to provide different services to support such a workforce. (National healthcare, anyone?) “People who are spending all their time trying to find that full-time job with benefits – some small portion will get them, but for the vast majority, these [freelance projects] are the jobs,” Sara Hororwitz, executive editor of the Freelancers Union, told Crain’s New York Business in an article earlier this year. (Note: Crain’s requires you to register for a free trial subscription.)
Yet our national leaders are looking backward, talking about creating last-century jobs, as if U.S. companies were going to start hiring full-time workers again. Even if the economy improves, corporations have learned that they don’t need employees. They only need contractors. In many cases, it’s going to be up to individuals to create their own jobs. That bodes well for those of us who have the skills and aptitude to become a company of one. For the rest of society, it’s time for the politicians and our government to face the realities of employment in the Digital Age and figure out how to nurture it.