On 15/06/07, Christopher Woods <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm sure a quick Google would explain it in words everybody can understand. All the media industries suffer from an overabundance of buzzwords - I'm working in the music industry myself at the moment (student on placement) and it's amazing how quickly you pick up on all of them (and usually have to end up using them to sound even vaguely professional).
Well "a quick google" won't tell you how to do it. Unless you think that being able to Google for "HTML" teaches you how to write code ;)
Commission features that were interesting, exciting, and got > people to read them? Write entertaining copy? Edit other > people's copy to a high standard? sp - other peoples' copy, not other people's copy. Let's be thankful you're a layout specialist, not a copy editor!
LOL hey - you pay me, I'll hit the magic "spell check" button ;) Interesting you say that - I've noticed that there are a number of stories
about new publications that are struggling to establish and retain their foothold in the extremely competitive publishing market in the UK. A couple of years ago, when I worked in a local supermarket's petrol station I used to do the night shifts and every so often along with the paper deliveries would come the trade magazine... And some of the stories in that, very disheartening. I get the impression that the publishing industry is constantly having to cut back and downsize on their more 'experimental' new product launches as it's becoming increasingly hard to find a niche or absorb some of another mag's existing readerbase.
Well the thing is that more magazines being sold doesn't equate to more revenue for publishers, because in the majority of cases a magazine's cover price is below the cost of production. For example, one magazine I worked on was cover priced at £2.95, but actually cost £6 to make. Advertising, of course, makes up the rest - and the advertising market for print is falling as more ad revenue moves online. Smart publishers are getting that ad revenue too, of course, but it makes launching a new print publication hard to justify - a lot of good ideas get focus-grouped to death, because the cost of launch makes it a big risk. That's not to say there's not great launches and relaunches out there, but they've mostly been in particular sectors - women's magazines, for example. I've seen very professional sites that've sourced their imagery exclusively
from flickr - they're few and far between, but they do look very good (and they're not professional photographers, just pro-am).
But that's something that the print world has done for years - think of all of those photography mags which publish reader's images (or, for that matter, the marvellous JPG magazine). Pro-am's can do great work (and can graduate to doing it as professionals), but that's not the same as saying the man in the street can walk in and be a top photographer, which is what was stated earlier. It takes a long time to get that good, unless you're extremely gifted. I fully agree on the point being made - the pro media outfits are producing
the best quality stuff. Not to say that there's some real gems out there; but the established outfits have the industry clout to get the advertisement out, get the word out. The various BBC Radio 1 podcasts are thoroughly pimped to the listeners in countless trails, bumpers and DJ announcements all day every day on their respective broadcast shows. Heck, some of the podcasts even get replayed on Radio 1 in their own dedicated broadcast slots! The magazine podcasts are advertised in their respective print publications, the newspaper podcasts same again. How can you even expect an indie podcast to achieve that kind of mass coverage without some big backers behind it to invest the initial and ongoing advertising costs?
Yes, the big media types get ad money - but ad money only buys you one shot at it. If your podcast is rubbish, you won't get a second chance from the consumer. People are lazy; they set up a podcast to download and it'll download, and
even if they don't actually listen to it (or they listen but donp't like that particular episode) the download will still be registered as a download. They'll keep on subscribing and just hope the next episode is better. So, peoples' laziness will give the podcast more votes than it deserves and artificially distort the Top 10. I never go by top 10s personally because I don't think they're representative of actual quality.
It would be interesting to see some figures on that - I have no data... And of course, Top 10's aren't representative of quality if you think "quality" is some absolute value. But they are representative of what people like, which is a very good test of quality overall.
