Tam Harbert

A few weeks ago, I read “Connecting America: The National Broadband Plan,” a 376-page report by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, for a story I wrote for Electronic News. OK, I didn’t read every single page, but I skimmed through most of it, and actually read entire chapters.

One chapter in particular hit me where I, and in fact anyone who works from home, live. In Chapter 3, which describes the state of broadband in the United States, the FCC points out that consumers are not exactly getting the broadband speeds that are advertised. In fact, the actual broadband speed in American households is on average only 40 to 50 percent of the speed advertised by the provider, according to the FCC.

I’ve often wished there were a way to verify the speed claimed by my broadband provider, Comcast. Over the years Comcast has purportedly upgraded my speed several times. I’ve never noticed a difference. Last year, when I called to complain about its prices, the customer service rep lowered my monthly subscription fee by 50 percent. (This had more to do with Verizon’s high-speed fiber service, FIOS, moving into my neighborhood than my complaining, I’m sure.) He also threw in a free PowerBoost, a speed upgrade which is supposed to deliver download speeds of up to 15 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds of up to 3 Mbps. Notice that very useful marketing phrase: “up to.” As the FCC report puts it: “An end-user with a connection for which download speeds are ‘up to 8 Mbps’ can expect to reach 8-Mbps download speeds, but not necessarily reach and sustain that speed all or even most of the time.” Again, I never noticed a difference.

Meanwhile, the FCC recently launched a nifty Consumer Broadband Test on its website. The test, still in beta, actually offers two different testing tools: one from Ookla and one from M-Lab. Simply enter your address and click a button, which starts a transfer of small amounts of generic data between your computer and the nearest test server. In about a minute, it gives you download and upload speeds, as well as a few other statistics.

I ran both tests several times, expecting to find how much slower my speeds were than what Comcast claimed. The results were different each time, sometimes wildly so, both between the two tests and for the same test in different instances. But in general they all fell within a certain range. And those general results surprised me. If I’m correct in my math (the tests deliver speeds in kilobits per second, which I had to convert to megabits), the tests showed download speeds of around 24 Mbps and upload speeds of about 4 Mbps – much faster than the advertised speeds. If this holds true for most Comcast customers, the company is missing a golden marketing opportunity. It’s rare that this broadband provider has delivered more than it promised, at least to me.

Then again, the FCC cautions that the current beta version of the tests may not be very accurate. Presumably, the FCC will improve future versions so I can trust it at least more than I trust Comcast. The FCC report notes that broadband companies have misled consumers about more than just speeds; they’ve also been accused of not actually delivering services in certain parts of their advertised service areas. The Consumer Broadband Test will give consumers and the government (which plans to gather and aggregate the data from the test) a way to keep them honest.

Some days it seems like a neutron bomb has exploded across the country and I, sitting in the basement bunker that is my office, am the only person left. I reach out to the world, but get no response. My e-mails vanish into the ether. I don’t know whether they are being received or ignored. My voice mails start to sound a bit lonely and desperate, like a high school nerd trying to find a date. I call Comcast just to make sure the broadband connection is still up. Never reaching a real person (which is not unusual when you call Comcast) increases my paranoia.

There is no deep, dark conspiracy behind these days when no one is out there. They just happen, out of the blue, like when solar flares knock out satellite communications. I’m fairly sure that everyone has days like this, but since I work alone my overactive imagination can get the better of me. Maybe some horrid rumor is circulating and everyone – editors, sources, colleagues and friends – has decided to blackball me. Or I remember 9/11, when I was oblivious to what was happening in the world until my best friend e-mailed me one short, curt message: “Are you OK?”

I tune in to NPR just to make sure.

I roust my dog from his afternoon slumber, just to get a rise out of someone. Then I do the one thing that always guarantees an end to the silence: I take the rest of the day off. I used to be annoyed when I’d return to dozens of e-mail replies and returned phone calls, as if everyone had waited until they knew I was out of the office. But I’ve learned to chuckle at the cosmic joke. And be thankful that people still want to talk with me after all. And start again tomorrow.

In technology, there is a well-known marketing technique called FUD, which stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt. By playing on customers’ insecurities about doing things differently (i.e. buying from a different vendor), you keep them buying your products and services.

After spending the last year helping my son through the college application process, I’m convinced that the higher education industry engages in its own version of FUD. Starting in the ninth grade, and often even earlier, colleges, universities, school counselors and others start sowing fear in the minds of students: Fear that they won’t be good enough to get into a good college, or any college for that matter. They bombard students, and parents, with e-mails, meetings and automated phone messages about the importance of good grades, doing research to find the best college for you, spending time visiting college fairs and college campuses, working on those college applications, applying for scholarships and – ironically – not stressing out about the whole process.

I used to denigrate parents that got all caught up in this. But that was before my son hit junior year, when the campaign really ramps up, on its way to a fit of frenzy in the fall of senior year. On top of all the propaganda from the high school, which has a vested interest in perpetuating this in order to achieve statistics that will bolster its own status (“65 percent of our students go on to Ivy League schools!”), we also got a deluge of snail mail and e-mail from the colleges, the College Board (which administers the SAT test), test prep companies and consultants who advise parents on how to get their kids into the right college and how to pay for it. (One consultant who offered me a “free” consultation was really just selling life insurance.)

I’ve known we were being manipulated all along, but I’ve been swept away with the rest of them. We’ve spent thousands of dollars and several weeks on college visits, SAT prep courses and training/preparation to compete for scholarships. My son spent every Sunday from September through January on college applications and related work. It’s taken its toll: he is weary and his grades have suffered. I felt like I was working a second job, staying up late to file the incredible amount of forms to apply for various scholarships and financial aid.

In the end, he got into all five schools to which he applied. He got very attractive scholarship offers from his two top choices. Now he’s trying to decide.

In retrospect, the most useful part of this process was the college visits. That was worth the investment and the time. As for all the rest, I doubt that it helped much. In the end, I think he would’ve gotten the same results without all the frenzy. But I can’t be sure. That’s the FUD, and so it goes on. There are a lot of people who benefit from this horrible system. Unfortunately, students and their parents are not among them.

A couple of years ago I was approached by a woman who was looking for freelancers for a new magazine. We talked at length about the magazine’s target reader and the tone it was going to take. I even ventured a couple of story ideas, which she liked. Then we finally got around to talking about money. She told me what she was paying and asked me if that was in my ballpark.

I was so surprised that I blurted out: “Not only is that not in my ballpark, it’s not even in my state!”

Needless to say, she never called again.

I’ve learned to broach the subject of fees a lot earlier in discussions with potential clients, to avoid wasting my time and theirs. This has become even more important with the proliferation of websites that pay would-be writers nil or pennies per hit just to blather on about a given topic. This has given some inexperienced publishers the impression that writers are, quite literally, a dime a dozen. Would-be, novice writers are. Professional journalists are not.

Freelance pay rates have always been a tricky equation for both editor and writer. I know because I’ve spent more than half of my career as an editor. I know how hard it is to find and hire good, reliable writers but stay within a limited (and these days continually shrinking) budget. I also know how valuable a good freelancer can be.

Most editors need freelancers who can do more than just write well, although that’s the first prerequisite. Writers must be able to follow specific directions. They also need to be able to do the opposite: work with vague, general assignments from editors who either don’t know what they want or are not very good at communicating it. Freelancers need the background and experience to know how to report a story and to be able to shift gears (in consultation with the editor, of course) if the information doesn’t fit with the original notion (if there was one). Finally, freelance writers must be able to meet deadlines, take criticism (constructive or not) and be willing to revise a story if it doesn’t hit the mark.

Editors that try to get by with paying the lowest fees won’t get all, or any, of the above. They will typically spend so much time trying to manage the writer and then editing, revising and even rewriting the article that it costs them twice what it would have if they paid a good writer a fair wage. Most editors, including myself, know this. And that’s why good writers, including myself, will want to know upfront if the assignment is going to pay enough to be worth their time.

As I work on a story about new ways that managers are monitoring employees, I’m reminded of and increasingly grateful for one of the biggest advantages of the freelance life: my time is my own.

When I worked for a company, I generally had to be in the office by 9 in the morning. During the course of the day, I was expected to sit at my desk, work on a computer, talk on the phone, and attend meetings. If I left before 5 p.m., I had to have a good reason. (They never seemed to mind, however, if I stayed late.)

I’ve always struggled with traditional 9-to-5 hours. I have never been a morning person. I may be awake and at my desk by 9 a.m., but I’m not fully conscious until about 10 a.m. Being able to set my own hours has been a huge blessing. I can structure my day according to my own circadian rhythms. I try to start at 9 a.m., but I do undemanding work, like going through e-mails or reading my daily news sites, until 10 a.m. when my brain is up. I’ll work steadily until about 12:30, then break to go to the gym, run errands or do some housework. My energy peaks in late afternoon, so 2 till about 7 is my most productive time. I try to reserve my heaviest mental lifting for then. I’ll break for dinner and evening activities, but often go back to my computer to wrap up loose ends between 10 and midnight.

That’s my typical schedule, but it’s not set in stone. If I have a lot of work, I’m at my desk at 7 a.m. (with a huge mug of coffee) and work till midnight. If the workload is light, I take the day off. If it stays light, I spend my days marketing myself to new publications and editors. Or teaching myself new skills like how to do more with Wordpress or how to search for sources on Twitter. If the workload is medium and it’s Opening Day, I go to the ballpark.

The point is, I’m free to use my time in the most productive ways. In traditional jobs, employers are in charge of time and they decide what’s productive. They watch not only when employees are in the office, but increasingly what employees do on the computer. They use technology that blocks websites, and not just the pornographic ones or the shopping sites, but also social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Network administrators keep logs of what websites employees frequent. Some employers even install software that records every key stroke and captures screenshots.

If I waste two hours socializing on Facebook, nobody cares, but I may pay the price in lost productivity and lost revenue. On the other hand, I may spend an hour figuring out how to do specific searches on Twitter, which may lead me to the perfect source for a particular story. That’s productive.

As a freelancer, I have the constant pressure of meeting deadlines and earning enough income to live. But I’ll take that any day over a rigid schedule set by others and ruled by their judgments about how I should spend the most precious thing I own: my time.

Sometimes, when I’m on a deadline, my head hurts. And I think I know why. There’s a war going on in there, a war between my left brain and my right brain.

When I’m reporting a story, it’s all very logical. My left brain is in full control of the situation. I conduct research. I talk to people. I ask questions. I gather answers. If something doesn’t make sense, I ask for an explanation. Most of the time, my emotions don’t play much of a part in this process. I’m cool and efficient.

I’m nothing if not thorough in reporting. I usually gather too much information for any given story. That means when I finally sit down to write, I’m overwhelmed. Where to start? How to make sense of all this?

My left brain is nearly always the one to dig in first. The left brain is logical, analytical, objective. It looks at each snippet of information and tries to build a linear sequence. That becomes my rough outline. Often this works. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the parts just don’t fit together logically.

That’s when my right brain steps in. And that’s when the trouble begins.

The right brain is intuitive, random, subjective. It likes to synthesize parts into a big picture. My left brain bats it back, saying, “Hey, I’m in control. If I just try harder with this outline, I’ll get everything to hang together and it’ll be a great story.” My left brain insists on handling each tidbit of information like a piece of colored glass. It reviews my notes and my outline, sorts the pieces into piles, by shape, by color, over and over.

My right brain usually stands back and lets my left brain bang itself against the wall for awhile. Then, after ol’ Lefty is battered, bruised and hopelessly confused, Ms. Right will step in and sigh. “Take it easy,” she says. “Go for a walk. Take a nap.”

Researchers who study the brain are finding that daydreaming is actually an important thought process. New brain-scanning studies suggest that our brain may be most actively engaged when we just let go and let our mind wander. “Solving a problem with insight is fundamentally different from solving a problem analytically,” one researcher told The Wall Street Journal. “There really are different brain mechanisms involved.”

When I come back from my walk or wake up refreshed from my nap, I often find that my right brain has taken those bits of colored glass and created a beautiful mosaic. I sit down and start writing, and everything flows together into a nicely packaged story, sometimes with an insight or conclusion that I never knew was there.

Chalk one up for the right brain. At least until the next story, when the battle begins anew.

Very little of what I write actually gets printed on paper anymore. Most people read my stories online. But most publishers – magazine publishers especially – haven’t adjusted well to digital. The visual presentation is boring, often awkward and sometimes downright ugly. The text is hard to read. A beautiful two-page spread from a major magazine feature gets stripped of its best design elements online. It just stands there, naked.

It’s not all the publishers’ fault. So far, no technology has been able to do justice to the beauty and class of glossy magazine articles. Three weeks ago, I was skeptical about the future of digital magazines . But in the course of reporting a story on e-readers, I’ve learned about recent developments in both publishing and technology that could bring magazines fully into the digital age.

First, e-readers are catching on fast. There are about 50 e-readers on the market today. Semiconductor companies, excited by the potential, are jumping into the market with chips that offer faster speeds and more functions at lower costs. These chips will enable new e-reader makers to enter the market. The drop in electronics cost combined with the increased competition could cut the price of an e-reader – the least expensive of which is about $250 today – to less than $100 by year end. To differentiate themselves, e-reader vendors are experimenting with designs, including a hinged reader that would open up like a magazine, according to Gregg Burke, manager of the e-book business line of chips recently introduced by Texas Instruments. He thinks such a product could be on the market by December 2010.

The displays are still limited to black and white, but some promising color technologies are on the horizon. Jennifer Colegrove, director of display technologies at consultant DisplaySearch, says that within five years, rich, full-color e-magazines could be common.

Second, publishers seem to be finally loosening their death grip on the old print model and rethinking how to sell their product in digital form, taking a cue from Amazon’s Kindle and its digital newsstand, which offers dozens of magazines, including Time, Forbes and Fortune. Hearst Corp. recently launched Skiff, a digital magazine and newspaper service for e-readers. And in December, a consortium of publishers, including Time Inc., Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst and News Corp., announced a joint venture to create a digital storefront for their magazines.

Independent companies also are trying to make a business out of distributing digital magazines. Zinio claims to be the largest digital newsstand in the world, offering 1,900 consumer magazine titles.

The big question is whether publishers can and will design their content for multi-dimensional digital media rather than plain old analog paper. After all, why would I pay $3 a week for a digital subscription to Forbes when I can already read it on my PC for free? Several reasons:

• It’s hard work to read a long magazine article on a PC. All that scrolling and jumping through pages. Plus the text is hard to read, at least for middle-aged eyes. Take one look at the crisp display of an e-reader and you’ll immediately appreciate the difference.

• I want to read that magazine at the dinner table, in bed or on the subway – NOT at my desk when I’ve got more important stuff to do.

• I get articles with beautiful color and layouts, articles that are presented even more attractively online than on glossy paper.

• I get interactive features that are fun, useful and informative. Clicking on a photo of baseball star Manny Ramirez, for example, might reveal a list of his stats.

Technology is already delivering on the first two points, but that won’t be enough. As for the last two, the next year will be critical. I hope the technology to present rich color develops quickly. I hope magazine publishers invest the time, money and effort to get it right. (To get a sense of how magazines could develop, see this video from Swiss media company Bonnier AB.)

Magazines just might survive. I plan to buy an e-reader so I’ll have a front-row seat to watch.

I did an unusual thing the other day. I called my friend. It’s not that we have been out of touch, but I haven’t heard her voice in months. Instead, we have communicated through Facebook, e-mail and texting.

At least this friend answers her phone. I have another friend who rarely does. She does not even respond to e-mails. She’s strictly text. Most of the time I don’t even have my mobile phone on, since I work at home. I’ve told her that and suggested that she call me on my landline. Still, she texts.

It’s ironic that the more ways we have to communicate, the less we talk to each other — actually use our voices interactively in real time in person to exchange information. It’s called conversation. I first noticed this in my work. It’s rare that I can cold-call a source and actually have someone pick up the phone. Most people let voice mail pick up and then return the calls they want to. Virtually all of my interviews are arranged through e-mail. I did reach an IBM executive on her mobile phone once – she told me to text her my phone number and question and she’d get back to me.

Sure, interviews are conversation. But they are a conversation that’s been prepared for. They are at least partially scripted.

This real-time avoidance seems to be increasingly common in my personal life. Rarely do I have an impromptu, casual, meandering conversation in which there is no agenda. We seem to be using our digital technologies to build a wall around ourselves in which we can view the information that comes in and then choose whether, when and how to respond to it. That’s useful in that it helps us to be more efficient and protects us from confrontation with people we may want to avoid.

But it also has a price. It isolates us and increases the potential for misunderstanding.
Conversation is intimate. It forges a strong personal connection. It can foster an understanding of or at least appreciation for another’s point of view. For all our social networking, each of us is a lone voice adding to the digital cacophony. Electronic communication is fine for exchanging information. But knowledge and understanding requires listening to someone, in the context of a situation, and seeing the light in their eyes and the animation in their gestures. I’m really starting to miss that.

Fortune magazine’s March 1 cover story, “The Future of Reading,”  is an interesting and well-written piece reviewing the quandary that magazine publishers have been in since the birth of the Internet. Author Josh Quittner argues that the new tablet computer from Apple could be the launch, uh, pad that magazines can use to save themselves from extinction.

He tells how his 12-year-old fashionista daughter scours issues of Vogue, then saves and categorizes photos and information she finds there. She’s frustrated, however, by all the work and manual cross-referencing it takes when she wants to, for example, match the right shoes with the right dress.

The tablet and its web browser, he implies, lets publishers solve that problem and offers promise for a new breed of digital magazine.

“Raised to expect instant, sortable, searchable, savable, portable access to all the information in the world, these digital natives — tomorrow’s magazine subscribers, God and Steve Jobs willing — could well become the generation that saves the publishing industry,” Quittner writes.

Maybe. Although it opens on a hopeful note, the article delivers few concrete reasons to believe its premise. What Quittner seems to have in mind sounds more like a mini-Google, focused on a narrow interest like fashion for pre-teens, than the magazine form that I still love and hope somehow survives. I relish the long, creatively written feature article that comes nicely packaged with beautiful photos, artful illustrations and enlightening sidebars. While print newspapers have lost their appeal for me, I still subscribe to several magazines. I skim through them quickly when they arrive and note the articles that I look forward to reading later, in my leisure time. These are the type of deep-dive information packages for which print magazines used to have more space and readers longer attention spans.

Quittner pines for that, too, saying that many people still “crave deep reading experiences.” They do, indeed. But I haven’t seen a computer nor a web publisher that can create those deep reading experiences. I want a hinged e-reader that would open like a book or magazine to two 8-by-11-inch screens. It would be light enough to carry on the subway or take to bed and rest on my lap. I could use it to browse the websites of my favorite magazines (to which I would gladly subscribe) and download the articles I want to read. These stories would be displayed in beautiful layouts with photos and illustrations. There would be the traditional sidebars, but also interactive, multimedia boxes that provide video or audio clips.

Quittner’s point – that the size and shape of the device is a  key to enabling profitable publishing of digital magazines – is right on. The iPad may be a start in the right direction, but it’s not there yet. A slate that retains the attributes readers love about their “dead tree” magazines while using the web to make them even better. That’s what might save the magazine business.

For the first couple of years I was freelancing, I just signed on the dotted line when it came to contracts. I didn’t want to read the fine print because, frankly, I needed the money. It was depressing enough that virtually every contract granted copyrights to my work in any and all forms in existence now or ever to be invented in the future, throughout the universe.

But curiosity and concern finally won out, so now I’m reading the contracts more carefully. I’m alarmed at what I find in some of them:

The writer pays for the lawyers: This clause specifies that I agree to indemnify the publisher from damages, costs and expenses that the publisher incurs because of copyright infringement or even the claim of copyright infringement. Some contracts specifically state that I am to protect and defend the publisher against such lawsuits at my own expense. I have never been accused of infringement in 25 years as a journalist and will gladly promise that my work does not infringe. But editors change wording, sometimes in major ways. It’s not fair to hold me responsible for a mistake an editor introduced into the article. And what if some kook out there falsely accuses me and the publisher of infringement?

The writer sells her soul: A contract I recently declined not only asked me to indemnify the company – a multi-billion-dollar corporation that is a household name – against any claim of infringement, it also wanted rights to use my name, voice, likeness and biography to promote its website in whatever way it wanted. This was for an initial story paying $400.

The writer stops freelancing: Last year I was presented with a contract to work with a custom publishing firm to produce a corporate magazine, again for a Fortune 500 client. It was no surprise that the contract had a section covering confidential information. Routinely, the contractor promises not to divulge or use any confidential information from the client for any other purpose other than that expressed in the agreement. But this contract stipulated that I could not, ever, disclose or use any information not only about this particular client but any client of the custom publisher. It wasn’t limited to trade secrets or even to information obtained during the course of producing the magazine. It was any information, forever, about any client. And I didn’t even know who the other clients were.

Most publishers are reasonable when I call their attention to these inequitable clauses. They are willing to work with me to make changes that satisfy both our needs, even though they sometimes say I’m the only writer who’s ever raised such questions. Although I have lost some business from a couple of inflexible publishers, so far I’ve been able to afford to do that. I hope that luxury lasts.