Tam Harbert

I’m a single-tasker. Listening to the radio while eating breakfast at the kitchen table is the extent of my multitasking. When I do something, or even think about something, I focus on that one thing. That probably makes me a good writer, but it also makes me ill-equipped for the modern world.

When I talk on the phone, I have to sit down and think about what I’m hearing and what I’m saying. That takes about 95% of my attention. As much as I’d like to, I have trouble doing other things while talking. This is a problem for a journalist. It took me years before I was somewhat comfortable taking notes during an interview. I had a hard time listening and writing at the same time.

Long before people worried about how mobile phones led to distracted driving, I refused to talk and drive. I knew how dangerous that would be for someone like me. I recently discovered that I can’t sing and drive either, when I ran a red light while practicing a choral performance for my church.

For years after Microsoft introduced Windows, I stubbornly clung to MS-DOS and a word processing program called XyWrite. The whole idea behind Windows – having multiple screens available so you could run several applications at the same time – spelled doom for a single-tasker like me. As it turned out, Windows was just the beginning of the multitasking culture that dominates society today. It’s a culture that’s always excluded me by default. Now everyone else seems to juggle two, three or even four things at once, while I’m still focusing on one.

Lately, though, I’m not feeling so inferior. The latest research on multitasking reports some alarming results, including evidence that multitasking makes most people less productive, not more. Some scientists even think that multitasking can rewire people’s brains, and not in a good way. Constantly juggling multiple streams of information can undermine the ability to focus and shut out irrelevant information. One study reported that computer users at work change “Windows” or check e-mail or other programs almost 37 times an hour. That’s once every minute and a half. No wonder people have trouble concentrating.

Multitasking may be creating a generation of interruption-addicted, attention-deficit junkies. Although my serial brain may be vindicated, my mind is not eased. My ability to focus may be becoming a quaint relic. What good is it, after all, if I’m concentrating while all around me are spinning in a flurry of multimedia streams? I may be able to write The Great American Novel, but no one will be left with an attention span capable of reading it.

At this time of year, my workload tends to fall off. It’s one of the few times that, instead of panicking when I see the number of projects go down, I actually welcome the lack of business. It gives me time to enjoy the holidays, instead of running around in a frenzy of activity. It gives me time to do those things for my business – like update my website or upgrade my PC – that have been pushed to the bottom of the to-do list for months.

It also gives me time to evaluate the state of my freelance career. In spite of the economy, I had a fairly good year. I’m especially thankful for:

• My clients, most of whom have maintained my pay rate, even in this bad economy
• Editors who make good copy great
• Editors who think my stories are good enough to enter in the ASBPE awards, one of which I won in November (Thanks, Computerworld editors!)
• Clients and colleagues who refer business to me

But there are several things I want for next year. Here’s my freelance wish list. If there is a Santa, I hope he’s reading this.

• Quality, affordable healthcare. I’ve posted about this before, both here and here. The single most difficult part of being a freelancer is obtaining and paying for health insurance. After a long struggle, I finally got mine through a Maryland state high-risk pool. To keep costs down, I’ve gone with high-deductible ($2,600) plan. The premiums have gone up more than 100 percent in four years. I now pay $300 a month, or $3,600 annually. Meanwhile, my doctor is changing to a “membership practice,” which will require another $1,800 a year on top of that. That’s $8,000 before my health insurance provider even thinks of covering my healthcare costs.

• Reliable electricity. My regional power company, PEPCO, has one of the poorest reliability ratings in the country, and I seem to be on the weakest part of its grid. My power can go out for no apparent reason, even on a sunny, windless day. When bad weather hits, my street is usually the first to lose power and the last to regain it. During last winter’s Snowmaggedon, when the D.C. area got hit by two blizzards in a row for a total accumulation of almost four feet, my power was out for more than three days.

• If I can’t have #2, then a windfall of $10,000 to buy a generator for the house would be nice.

• Continued economic recovery. I’ve seen business pick up this year, and then fall off again, and then pick up again. It’s generally headed in the right direction, but I’m paranoid that another financial catastrophe could pull us all down again.

• Just one more steady gig to even out my sometimes erratic cash flow.

In the spirit of slowing down to enjoy the holidays, I’ll be taking a break from blogging for the next couple of weeks. Happy Holidays. May we all get our wishes in 2011.

Last week, I started my review of the writers groups to which I belong. All two of them. I belong to only two because I can’t afford more, in either time or money. Last week, I talked about the National Press Club (NPC), which at $562 a year is quite pricy. This week, I’ll cover the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), which at $195 is well worth the price.

Unlike the NPC, which virtually everyone knows, the ASJA has a lower profile. I, at least, had never heard of it until a colleague of mine mentioned it. It’s been around for more than 50 years, however, and bills itself as “the nation’s professional organization of independent non-fiction writers.” My friend had found its annual conference, held in New York City, to be worthwhile, with lots of great networking and professional development opportunities. I decided to join in order to go to the conference.

It’s going on three years now, and I still haven’t made it to the annual conference. The first year, I had to choose between the conference and a free trip to Hawaii. (No brainer!) Last year, the choice was between the conference and opening night of my son’s high school musical, in which he had the lead role. (Parental guilt pangs won out.)

And yet, I’ve still gotten a lot out of my ASJA membership.

Because it targets freelance writers, ASJA seems a better fit for me. Most of the services are practical, offering help with the day-to-day challenges of freelancing. Although its website, like the NPC’s, is poorly designed, it contains some very interesting resources if you poke around a bit. (Note: these are mostly in the walled-off “members only” area.) There’s a section where members list what they’ve been paid for certain jobs – a great resource when I’m at a loss for how to price a particular project. The trouble is, the search function on this doesn’t work very well, so I end up manually looking through all the submissions. There’s another section where writers spread the word about publications that have stiffed them on payment. Again, very useful information.

They also have a contracts committee that reports on the latest trends and things to watch out for in legal agreements. I have written to the committee chairman, an attorney, several times with questions about contracts and copyright law. He has always responded with very detailed answers and advice (although with the caveat that this is not official, legal advice). Again, this is stuff that hits me where I live, every day.

I’ve also found work through ASJA. If you request it, the organization automatically sends e-mails on freelance opportunities. I don’t have to worry about hunting around on its website for find a jobs board.

ASJA also publishes a monthly newsletter that usually has at least some articles of interest. How to get into particular niches, like ghostwriting or medical writing, for example, including how much they pay. Each issue has an interview of an editor at a magazine that uses freelancers. The piece usually covers what type of pitches the editor looks for, the best way to reach him or her and what the magazine pays for freelance work.

Even though I have yet to attend its annual conference, I did go to one ASJA-sponsored conference, and it turned out to be the single most valuable event I’ve attended in my freelance career. Sponsored by ASJA and the John S. Knight Fellowships, “The Future of Freelancing” was not just informative and inspiring, but gave practical advice on how we freelancers can survive and thrive in the new era of digital journalism. The information, and the camaraderie, was great. (I blogged enthusiastically about it last summer.)

As for the annual conference, three’s got to be the charm. I don’t expect another free trip, and my only child is off to college. Meanwhile, there is a local ASJA chapter in my area, and we meet periodically. It’s a great networking event. We all talk about our latest jobs, the state of the profession, good and bad experiences with various clients. It’s invigorating to talk with others who are enthusiastic about what they do. I always come away with a list of about a dozen things to follow-up on.

While ASJA isn’t perfect, it’s well worth the money. I’m still looking in vain, for example, for a writers organization that offers reasonably priced training in digital journalism skills — things like podcasting, video reporting, even basic programming skills. If you’ve found such a source, please share!

As a freelance journalist working from my home office, isolation is my natural state. With no single employer sponsoring me, I have no built-in professional network. And I have no easy avenue for professional development. I have to make a concerted effort to get out and find these things myself. Writers groups are a great way to do this.

But which ones to join? Which ones are worth their cost, in both time and money? I now belong to two groups. I’ve been a member of the National Press Club (NPC) for 12 years. About three years ago, I also joined the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA). I’ve had very different experiences with each. In this blog post, I describe my experience with the NPC. Next week, I’ll talk about ASJA.

I joined the NPC in 1998 when I moved to Washington, D.C., to become national editor for a high-tech magazine, Electronic Business. At the time, technology companies were just beginning to become involved in public policy. (The Justice Department’s anti-trust suit against Microsoft had rudely awakened the industry to the fact that those folks in Washington could be troublesome.) Because my job was to cover Congress and the major federal agencies, an NPC membership seemed worthwhile. Because my employer covered the $562 annual membership fee, it was a no-brainer.

When I left the magazine in 2005, however, the fee was on me. I took a close look and realized that I wasn’t getting much for my money. For one thing, I didn’t attend many events because they weren’t inconvenient. The NPC is in the National Press Building in the heart of D.C. I’m out in a suburb, and go into D.C. only occasionally.

The other, more important, reason was that the NPC didn’t offer me many networking and professional development opportunities. Anyone who’s ever visited the Club senses its history. Its storied conference rooms and bar (“The Reliable Source”) are filled with photos of presidents chatting with the national press and with historical newspaper front pages: “Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor.” The downside is that the Club has had a hard time moving into the 21st Century. Its membership is the old guard of journalism – the men and women who started in the era of “get me rewrite” and neared the twilight of their careers just as the Internet was about to change everything. Until recently, the club’s website was atrocious. Once I found the list of committees and activities, I looked in vain to find anything relevant to either the coverage of technology (my beat) or training in digital tools for journalists.

What’s more, the club was geared to journalists who were employed full-time by national news organizations. For a freelancer, and one who was focused on a niche rather than general news, there was nothing.

Nearly six hundred dollars seemed too much to pay for the prestige of occasionally taking a source to lunch or drinks at the club. I was ready to drop it.

Then an energetic young member created a freelance committee within the club. She rounded up a few of us freelancers, and we started organizing meetings and professional development events designed for people like us. How to write the perfect pitch. Using social networks. Podcasting. There was a core group of us who were interested in these things.

The attendees of these events, however, were somewhat depressing. There were a few younger, savvy journalists. But many who attended were the walking wounded – the victims of the dramatic changes that the Internet has caused in the media business. Today, Washington is full of middle-aged and old journalists who have been laid off or bought out as major national news organizations have cut back on staff and even closed their Washington bureaus. Many of these people seem bewildered and lost. They worked for the same news organization for most of their careers and are, for the first time in their lives, without a job. They are freelancing out of desperation, not out of career ambition. They are unprepared for the new world. During a session on how to break into freelancing, I remember one of them asking, “Do I have to send a query? Can’t I just write the article and send it in?”

After an initial flurry of activity, the freelance group faded. I’m told it still exists, but I haven’t heard about any events in nearly a year. Once again, I’m pondering letting my membership lapse. Surely, there are other groups where I can find more of what I need. Fellow journalists: what groups do you find useful? Check back next week to see how ASJA measures up.

I’m probably one of the only people in my neighborhood that hasn’t upgraded to a flat-panel TV. There, taking up a good portion of my living room, is the big-old-honking Sony.

Why haven’t I gotten rid of the beast? For one thing, it still works fine. And besides, I don’t watch that much TV.

OK, the real reason is fear. Setting up a new TV has become more complicated and intimidating than setting up a computer. I remember the days of having to reinstall software, update drivers, and doing dozens of other things by trial and error to get PCs to work. It didn’t take hours; it took days. But the computer industry has improved the process immensely. It’s still not idiot-proof, but at least I don’t need a degree in computer science to do it.

Meanwhile, TVs have moved in the other direction. Rather than just plugging them in and turning them on, you have to be an electronics engineer to get everything connected and playing well together.

My sister’s experience is a perfect example. Last spring, she and her husband bought a 46-inch flat-screen HDTV. With a beautiful picture like that, of course they wanted to complement it with the best audio and video components. But integrating all the components – Blu-Ray player, stereo receiver, CD player, cable and Internet – turned into what she calls her “high-end nightmare.”

The Best Buy salesman assured them that the Geek Squad could do it all. The Geeks came, they installed and connected everything, quickly demonstrated how everything worked, and then they were gone. But the head geek reassuringly left them his card, so they could call him personally if they had any problems.

An hour later, they had problems, and thus began “six months of hellish trial and error.” There was finger pointing between the Geek Squad and Comcast, then the head geek simply ignored my sister’s voicemails. Comcast came and switched out the cable box several times before one of the technicians finally admitted that the Comcast remote didn’t communicate with several of the new components. My sister and brother-in-law were on their own.

Once they got the BluRay player hooked up and tried to play a BluRay disc from Netflix, an error message popped up on the TV screen saying the BluRay player required a software upgrade. They hadn’t planned to connect the TV to the Internet yet, but now they had to in order to get the upgrade they needed. But the TV wouldn’t connect with their WiFi network. They had to call in a home multimedia specialist, at $140 an hour, and even he had trouble making it work.

Now, six months later, they’ve mostly figured it out. But they need four different remotes, depending on what component they’re trying to control. They keep notes near the TV so they can remember how to turn various components on and off. And they can’t play a simple audio CD without the TV monitor booting up and running rhythmic patterns of color to illustrate the music.

The total cost of the TV, components and fees for various technicians: more than $2,500. The time spent tinkering in frustration and chasing after the Geek Squad, Comcast and other technicians: 50-plus hours. “The sheer mental anguish – priceless,” my sister deadpans.

Who needs that? That’s why I’m buying a new computer this year. In fact, I may even throw out the old Sony and put the new PC in the living room. After all, with the PC, it’s easy to watch movies and TV shows, listen to my music and tune into the radio. Oh, and did I mention it can access the Internet, too?

I was surprised to find a huge package sitting on my front porch last week. I hadn’t ordered anything, so I figured it must be a gift, even though it was too late for my birthday and too early for Christmas.

Inside was an assortment of coffee, a travel mug, a stainless steel carafe and a fancy 12-cup coffee maker, all from a company called Gevalia. Whoever sent this, I thought, doesn’t know me very well. I like coffee, but I’m not the kind of gourmet who would appreciate this sort of high-end beverage. (I’m more the Dunkin’ Donuts type.) Then I looked at the packing slip, which said that I had ordered it and paid with my Visa card.

Uh-oh. I sat for a couple of minutes, trying to figure out if there was any way that I could’ve inadvertently placed such an order. Then I called the company and explained what happened. Mysteriously, someone had used my name, address and Visa number (she verified it by reading me the last four digits) to place the order. But they had a different phone and different e-mail address, which she gave to me. She also noted the exact time of the order, which was while I was driving to see my son at college. She said she’d put a fraud alert on the order and told me to keep the goods for my trouble.

I then called the phone number that was associated with the order. It was a non-profit organization a couple of miles away from me. When I told the receptionist that someone was using their phone number in a case of credit-card fraud, she mentioned that she’d had several calls like this. She didn’t know what was going on.

I was tempted to send an e-mail to the address I had, but I thought that then the thief would have my e-mail address.

My next call was to Visa to find out what else might have been charged to the card. Luckily, there were no other charges. We immediately cancelled the card, Visa placed a fraud alert on the number, and I was issued a new one.

The whole incident baffled me. Although I was concerned that someone somehow got hold of my credit card information, I was not that surprised. I take reasonable precautions, both online and off (I shred all my mail), but I’ve done enough reporting on Internet security to know how easy it is for thieves to get your number. And even if you never use a credit card online, your financial institution keeps all that information on a computer somewhere, a computer that can often be just as easily hacked.

What baffled me the most: who was this person who would use my credit card to order coffee and send it to my house? I imagined some teenage hacker-in-training, just trying out his skills to see if he could get away with it. Or maybe it was someone in my neighborhood who pulled my information off my WiFi network, ordered coffee and hoped to pick it up from my doorstep before I noticed?

Then I did a little research online and found that this has been an ongoing problem with Gevalia, dating back to 2008. There is a formal complaint lodged with the Justice Department in the state of Delaware, where Gevalia is located.

Now I’m doubly baffled. Why would a merchant do this? Are they hoping that some of us actually think we ordered the coffee but forgot? And how did Gevalia, with whom I’ve never done business, get my credit card information? I’ll never know. But I consider myself exceedingly lucky that my only experience with credit card fraud (so far) cost me nothing but a couple of phone calls and gained me some cool coffee paraphernalia.

My days of working in a bathrobe are numbered.

One of the joys of freelancing is that I don’t have to get dressed up to go to work. In fact, I don’t even have to get dressed. I do, of course, eventually. But when I have loads of work or a pressing deadline, I stay in my pajamas. All in the name of efficiency, of course. Why spend time on clothes, hair and makeup when nobody’s going to see me anyway, except maybe the FedEx man?

But now that integrated webcams have become a standard feature in most laptops, rudimentary video conferencing through services like Skype and Google video chat are becoming more common. I started to realize this when my son went off to college this fall. He was amazed that he couldn’t video chat with me. (I was amazed that he wanted to. It was probably just a momentary lapse caused by the novelty of the webcam on his college-issued laptop combined with a golden opportunity to make me feel clueless.)

Initially I thought maybe we could keep this Skype thing just between me and family. Then in October Cisco introduced Umi Telepresence , a video conferencing system for the home. The system, which retails for $600, includes a camera that connects to a high-definition TV to become a video-conferencing system that shows everything. With this technology, you’re no longer just a talking head at the computer, but a full person, head to toe, with a picture “so clear, natural and lifelike that users will see . . . the twinkle in your eye.” Or, in my case, the stain on my bathrobe and the fuzzy slippers on my feet. Wonderful.

I’m hoping this won’t catch on. But the monthly subscription cost – just $25/month for unlimited video calls and storage of up to 100 minutes of video messages – is going to be attractive for businesses that till now have been priced out of the high-end videoconferencing market. And there’s going to be lots of competition that will drive those costs down further. Skype, for example, just hired away a senior vice president of Cisco’s, Tony Bates, to become its CEO. It doesn’t take a high-definition picture to see what’s going on there.

My five-year-old computer is about ready for retirement. But I keep putting off shopping for a new one, because I probably won’t be able to avoid buying one with integrated webcam and microphone. Which means this time around it’s more than the hardware and software that requires an upgrade. Bye, bye, bathrobe.

Every now and then, I hear a tech executive say something so astonishingly oblivious to what’s going on in the rest of the world – the world of us average, common people – that at first I think he’s kidding. Then my jaw drops as I realize that he is completely serious. He’s certainly not stupid. In fact, most of these people are very smart. But the tech cognoscenti can get so wrapped up in their insular world of cool inventions that they don’t see obvious problems and dangerous pitfalls.

Case in point: At Forrester Research’s Content and Collaboration Forum, held last week in Washington, D.C., a Microsoft executive described how the company’s employees use their in-house podcasting platform, called Academy Mobile. The platform is like a “private YouTube network,” where employees can post video clips to share their knowledge, said Christian Finn, director of SharePoint at Microsoft. To demonstrate, he showed a webcast created by a Microsoft salesman to share tips on demonstrating and selling a particular product. There is the intrepid salesman, greeting us from behind the wheel as he drives at a speed of probably 65 mph down a busy interstate highway somewhere in North Carolina. Speaking to a webcam mounted on his car’s dashboard, he introduces the other sales reps in his car – taking his right hand off the wheel to move the webcam and show his passengers – and tells us how the three of them are going to share some of their most effective techniques.

The clip isn’t long, probably about 30 seconds. But it’s long enough to show that the driver is paying much more attention to the camera than to his driving. Already alarmed at what I saw, I was horrified when I heard Finn joke about the fact that they were webcasting while driving. He warned the audience to watch out for these guys. “If you’re driving down in North Carolina,” he chuckled, “be careful!”

Apparently neither Finn, Microsoft’s marketing team nor the traveling salesmen saw anything wrong with a) a driver conducting a webcast from a moving vehicle or b) Finn using this as an example in a public presentation of the technology. Multi-tasking while driving is so common, acceptable and probably even expected in the technology world that they either forgot about or decided to ignore the mounting evidence that distracted driving is killing people. In 2009, 5,500 people died and 450,000 were injured in America because of distracted driving, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. That represents 16 percent of the total deaths on U.S. roadways. And that’s considered a conservative estimate because many police reports don’t document whether driver distraction played a role in the crash.

They should know better. Microsoft’s own home state of Washington is one of eight states that prohibit drivers from using handheld mobile phones, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. (North Carolina is not among the eight.) Even if these laws don’t ban webcasting while driving (yet), how can these guys be so tone deaf? Just last month, the Department of Transportation held the second annual National Distracted Driving Summit in D.C. Ironically, DOT Secretary Ray LaHood talked about the joint efforts of the government and the Network of Employers for Traffic Safety to get U.S. corporations to adopt policies to discourage distracted driving among their employees. Apparently, Microsoft didn’t get the memo.

Just because drivers can use these products in their cars doesn’t mean they should. Rather than encouraging us to take our hands off the wheel, tech executives had better put their own ears to the ground. They just might hear the rumblings of an oncoming public relations crash.

The first time I quit my job to freelance full time – 1989 – I learned how valuable referrals are.

My former employer started using me as regular contributor. I hadn’t planned on that, but I had left on good terms, and apparently they missed me. It was a good deal for the publication as well as for me. The editor already knew how talented, reliable and thorough I was. And I already knew the publication’s style and readership. I could report and write great stories in half the time it would take if I were working for an unfamiliar magazine, so my projects for them worked out to a nice hourly rate.

Then, as editors and writers from that publication moved up or out to other jobs, they continued to hire me for freelance work. It was a wonderful sort of cross-pollination. Like butterflies, people for whom I’d worked flitted off to a new flower, and then offered new opportunities to me. Many times I not only added a new client, but continued working for the old one as well. Thus, my client base grew.

Today, however, the publishing industry is consolidating. As more and more magazines and newspapers close, more of my colleagues are being laid off. Given the state of the economy and of journalism, they aren’t necessarily landing on a new flower right away. Many have become freelancers by necessity.

And yet, the cross-pollination has continued. Most of my new clients still come from referrals from former editors or freelance colleagues. A few recent examples:

A former colleague who’d been freelancing for the last several years just took a full-time job editing blogs for a major trade publisher. Not only is she handing off at least one of her freelance clients to me, she also has hired me to do some work for her new employer. On top of that, she’s in a position to circulate my name to other editors at other publications the company owns.

A former editor took a job at a custom publishing company. He has hired me for regular contributions to an online newsletter for one of his clients.

A freelance colleague and former editor has found himself suddenly buried in work. Rather than say no to a valuable client, he referred them to me.

I’m amazed, and grateful, that this process continues. In this time of upheaval in the publishing business, maybe even because of it, there is still work out there. It’s just more difficult to find. That makes referrals especially sweet.

Twy as I might, I can’t figure out what to do with Twitter.

I’m not exactly on the cutting edge of social media, but I do use Facebook, have my own website and blog, and pride myself on being an early and fairly sophisticated user of LinkedIn. I find all of these platforms useful – either professionally, personally or both. They each have their learning curves, but they aren’t so steep that they keep moderately intelligent people away.

Twitter, on the other hand, baffles me. Its content is neither relevant to my life nor useful in my work. The top Twitter trends last week – the NCAA and Justin Bieber – don’t interest me. Every time I see an article on how to use Twitter, I scan through it eagerly, hoping that I’ll find the key to make sense of this confusing world. So far, nada.

Typical tips for how newbies can get started on Twitter:

1. Share URLs. We’re already overwhelmed by stuff to read, see and hear on the Internet. Unless it’s really important, why would I want to add to that burden? And if it is really important, why would I rely on Twitter – where it will get lost in the great galaxy of tweets (except of course for those people who’ve mastered the Twitter universe and can filter out the critical news from the mundane I-just-spilled-coffee-on-my-keyboard drivel)? Having said that, I have tried to use Twitter to market myself. Each week, I dutifully tweet the URL of my blog post. Google Analytics tells me it draws very few readers. (It’ll be interesting to see the stats this post generates.)

2. Retweet information. If I don’t understand the usefulness of tweets, why would I want to retweet and just add to the cacophony?

3. Directly message friends and colleagues. I already can’t reach them by phone, e-mail, texting or IM. Now I have to add tweeting to that list of futile attempts? Sometimes I suspect it’s all a cosmic joke by the gods of the Internet, who laugh as we all run circles around each other online.

4. Search for friends and colleagues. See non-reason #3. Besides, when I try to search for people, I either come up with complete strangers (with similar names), I can’t tell which of the people listed are my friend/colleague (most don’t have photos), or I locate the right person but find they haven’t tweeted since 2009. (There’s a lot of us newbies who tweeted once or twice, then gave up.)

I’ve also tried some of the desktop clients, such as TweetDeck, which are supposed to make all those tweets manageable. I couldn’t figure out how to use them. It probably had to do with the fact that I didn’t even know what it was I was trying to manage . . .

So, why twouble myself? Give me a good reason – in 140 characters or less – why I should tweet.