Old Media, New Media: The Case Of The Collins Podcast
15 04 2008Caution: not-exactly-revolutionary insights ahead…
You know what I love about working in new media more than anything? It’s not the aesthetic. Gadgetry and computers, even those hailed for their clean design, aren’t beautiful. Or not to me. I can respect the way a nice bit of kit has been designed, but it could never make my heart sing, in the true sixth-form poetry sense of the phrase. Even at a more mundane level, give me a dustily comfortable study heaving with leather-bound books and battered oak-paneling over a tooled-up media suite humming with the glare of progress any day of the week. And I’m certainly not in love with the burning eyeballs, cramping fingers and Steptoe spine that are a heavy day’s work’s legacy, though that’s hardly new media-specific.
No, what I love most about online journalism is the sheer speed and accessibility, the chance to just get on with it, have an idea and make it happen. Yesterday afternoon I was proofing for publication on 4Talent Central an interview that journalist Karen Krizanovich had done with the annoyingly multi-talented Andrew Collins, presenter of Radio 4’s Banter, writer of Where Did It All Go Right?, ex-editor of Q magazine and, recently, co-host of a series of podcasts with the excellent Richard Herring, wackily entitled The Collings & Herrin Podcasts.
These are nice podcasts. People should hear them. Andrew describes them as “our own sideways look at the news. Our fervent wish is to recreate our now legendary news reviews from my now-defunct BBC 6 Music show, except without the indie records interrupting us, and without the need to temper the content for fear of offending a Sunday afternoon BBC radio audience. We don’t get paid, and they are free to listen to, it’s all done for the love of laughter.” It would seem to make sense to link to these podcasts from the article, no? Better still, why don’t we host one direct as a sample for the readers?
Granted, I have about as little experience of working in the Old Media as eternal trainee Jimmy Olsen - and he’s fictional - having spent but two years on an old-school film magazine without a website (the much-missed - er, by me, anyway - Hotdog magazine). But even in my ignorance, I do know that it wasn’t really the monthly magazine cultural ethos to go from this initial thought at about five in the afternoon, to heading over to Andrew’s blog, contacting the man direct, asking if we could host his podcast, to him checking whether that’s ok with other folks, to me uploading the podcast and sticking it on our frontpage next morning.
This is a slightly different type of example of course, but I remember that trying to organize a competition to win DVDs, t-shirts and assorted branded tat in Hotdog used to seem to take a minimum of a fortnight, from initial email to press officer, to permission forms, promo images, faxing legal agreements, passing assets to a designer, tweaking copy, proofing PDFs, obtaining approval… god, it brings me out in a giant yawn just thinking about it.
Of course, in this example you’re dealing with huge companies who “need” to make sure they’re “on brand” and other such tedium, in the grand cause of increasing the audience numbers for films of variable quality, while the other is simply downloadable audio files featuring established media pundit types in a not-for-profit scenario.
So perhaps it’s about the money flying around, or lack of it, not the medium. And that’s fine. If big corporations want to hinder themselves by slowing everything down, that’s their absolutely their right. But if people like Andrew and Richard want to make their own lives easier by letting grubby web monkeys like myself promote their for-the-love-of-it work for free, that’s, to me, actually rather wonderful.
As stated in this episode, if anyone would like to buy out Andrew and Richard’s podcast series, they’ll happily look at all offers, starting at c. £5 mil or near offer.
That’s forever been a recurring theme throughout all creative industries, though, hasn’t it - as soon as people are happy to stop trying to make money everything gets a thousand times easier, and more enjoyable. Generally, though, they either have to have made a fair whack of money already or be so young and keen it doesn’t occur to them they could get paid for what they do. So at either end of a career, then.
Yes… I broadly agree with you, but think what we’re seeing an increasing amount of is a symbiotic relationship between free and paid-for work over the entire course of an individual’s career, whereby people do a lot of in-itself-valuable work for free, but which is also self-promoting. In the example above, I suppose, Richard and Andrew (who I think would consider themselves mid rather than end/beginning career types) can afford to work for free on a podcast series, and they do it “for the love of laughter” - but evidently if you can then turn around and say “yeah, we had a number one iTunes podcast download hit”, you’ve achieved something concrete beyond the laughter too.
The skill, I suppose, lies in separating the useless free work you’re asked to do from the potentially valuable, and in identifying what type of outcome is valuable to you - money, kudos, sympathy with the project’s aims, public demonstration of skill… personally, I’d want at least two or three out of those four every time.
[...] be bothered with all this “text” nonsense) will seem like it’s contradicting a previous entry about old media vs new media? It isn’t though; that was about the contrast in working [...]