Things I grew up thinking about the media

Sometimes overwhelmingly it strikes me that other people did not grow up with journalists. As usual, there are people angry on Tumblr about a 'media conspiracy,' utterly outraged that something didn't spin the way it would in their ideal world. I usually abjectly fail to comprehend.

My mom, dad, and step-mom all have journalism degrees. All have worked extensively in print journalism, though none do anymore. They've collectively worked variously in PR (both before and after social media), political campaigns, television, online news coverage, editing (ranging from copy-editing daily newspapers to helping writers organize the content of their history books), and magazines. They imparted three important things:

1. Journalists lie.
2. Factcheck everything.
3. Don't watch Fox News.

Journalists lie.

Every journalist is a person, and people are subject to cognitive biases as well as personal bias. Journalists have a professional code of ethics, but it doesn't cover every circumstance, and journalists are still fallible. Some of them can't find sources who have accurate information, or can't do so by a pressing deadline. Some of them can't or don't find the sources for balanced coverage. Some of them have to work within editorial bounds that include political leaning. Some of them are Joel Stein.

Factcheck everything.
People get things wrong. People misapprehend. People read summaries and then try to summarize them and end up somewhere else completely. No matter how much you adore someone, unless your chief reason for adoring them is rigid and obsessive factchecking, be prepared to check their story before repeating it. Some things, a sanity check is most of what's needed: if a three-headed cow was really born in Nebraska, wouldn't it be more likely to be in an article in Agri-Chemical News than in The National Enquirer? Check as many sources as possible! I ran into an issue last week where I'd only read one news source for a thing, and it wasn't recent enough or comprehensive enough to actually give me the answer I was looking for, but I ended up repeating it anyway, and then retracting my statement and apologizing and feeling very silly.

Usually, I try to check two independent sources before I repeat or reblog (I'm on tumblr a lot these days) any kind of newsy thing. Like the persistent urban legend that Mister Rogers served in the military: no, he didn't. Try to get independent confirmation of things, try to get multiple sources, try to get firsthand accounts, try to get physical proof. The truth is important, and the story you tell with the truth is important.

Don't watch Fox News.
You know that first point about journalists? An important thing to keep in mind is that most of the people who talk on Fox are commentators and analysts and not actually journalists.

Fox lies. Fox fear-mongers. Fox wasn't allowed to broadcast in Canada until 2004, and even now broadcasters are required to monitor it and "abridge or curtail" any hate speech, because it is an active concern. Canada has standards about lying on air, and so Fox isn't allowed out without a leash on.

Fox is sometimes put on the same playing field as news agencies because they present themselves as the more right-leaning news option that is still totes reliable, yo. That's incorrect. There are tons and tons of articles out there enumerating the ways Fox has straight-up lied on air: find them. Check up on me. Factcheck. Just don't do it with The O'Reilly Factor on in the background.


These are the reasons I am dumbfounded when people point out that the story in the Saturday paper is different than the one in the Sunday paper and cry conspiracy or coverup: if it's a normal morning paper and the incident happened late late late Friday night, the journalist who wrote the story probably had an hour or less to find out what happened, get a statement from a witness, write the article, submit it to their copyeditor, and have it sent to Layout to make the deadline. Then they had all of Saturday! That means they got to talk to more people, maybe get a photographer by, and do their own factchecking.

This is mostly a ramble, but if there's anything I'd really like anyone to walk away with, it's that 'The Media' isn't a massive unified faceless machine: it's a few (disturbingly few, but that's a separate issues) corporations and a lot of Editors in Chief and even more journalists, all with slightly different agendas and all with varyingly applicable codes of ethics. The best, and ultimately only, thing you can do to further pursue truth is to think critically about everything.

Wix and an SEO rant

I sometimes help people with websites: I've been doing so for the past few years. Mostly simple stuff, setting up pages for authors and editors and friends.

I usually use Wordpress, because it's simple, straightforward, and, while you can get more mileage from it if you know how to override the CSS and edit the HTML manually, you can get a perfectly functional, useful website without any of that knowledge. You can even get a decent website out of Wordpress if you don't feel comfortable poking around with all the settings. Having that low barrier of entry for use is really great, especially for people who want a website but not to live on the internet as they swear at code at 3 in the morning.

I've also worked in Joomla!, which was fine, but required more poking around before I could reliably make it do what I wanted it to. I don't usually recommend it for people, since it did require that experimentation.

The first site I set up for my mom was with Yola, which has convenient drag-and-drop boxes for doing stuff. The second, when she wanted to blog more, was Wordpress, because of the simpler comments features.

This, obviously, is Blogger, and I like it for the stripped down simplicity. I don't need it to do anything fancy or have particular page features, because it's a blog and it blogs and that is all I require of it. I like the clean back end with clear labeling and the option to compose both pages and posts either in rich text or HTML. If someone doesn't want to do fancy things with the appearance of their site and prioritizes the blogging over the static pages, Blogger is a great option.

Today I got to mess around in Wix, which I hadn't before. I don't like that it automatically adds big banners advertising themselves to the bottom of every site. I don't like that on so much of the back end, clicking a link opens a new tab or window. I don't like that the font modification options aren't universal: you have to change them page by page. I don't like that everything is popups. The ability to create an online store is pretty neat. The fact that all elements need to be moved around by hand instead of, oh, going into a neat sidebar, is fucking maddening. It also treats subpages as forms, making links to particular subpages look sloppy. Also, when you view page source (to see wtf is up with the fonts), it treats every subpage as part of the same page, so you are looking at every single element. I'm used to looking at the source for Wordpress, which is full of stuff that governs margins or whatever: endless lines of repetitive whatever, but that doesn't look anywhere near as sloppy. Wix also gives the options to add SEO keywords to pages, which, I guess, could make sense with image-heavy galleries, but is also reflective of a five-years-out-of-date approach to SEO.

Here's the secret to SEO: write about the shit you want to write about. People who are interested in that shit will find your website. If you are an artist who takes commissions, having a blog post that talks about different art styles will bring in people who search for those art styles. They will find you and give you money.  Would keyword stuffing with sex and kittens and whatever be of benefit to you?

It might get you more hits, but is that of benefit to you? You want people to buy art from you. Unless you specialize in like cat pinups or something, you are not attracting people who are interested in what you're doing, you're just getting people who will click things.

Blogger's statistics section shows search keywords that have lead to my blog. Let's look at some of the top ones of all time:

authorsrefuge.blogspot.com
kishotenketsu
laura bradford interview
eileen young
laura bradford author
adam schreckenberger
amazing spreadsheets
is the kobo vox backlit

So, the first one is people forgetting that this is a .ca blog, and the third, fifth, and sixth are because of interviews I did with people more popular than me. Those all make sense as people who would appreciate the content here.

I've only talked about kishotenketsu once, but people continue to be interested in it, which is great. It's something I was really interested in, so people also interested in it might be interested in other things I talk about here.

Fourth is my name. Excellent. SEO is doing its job.

Amazing spreadsheets is probably because of my 'spreadsheets are amazing' tag.

And the question 'is the kobo vox backlit' probably leads directly to my review of the Kobo Vox, which includes the information that it's backlit and other details about it.

Search engines are designed to take people to what they're looking for. So use common terminology (if you're talking about books, don't call them bound stories or something like that) and correct spelling and provide regular new content, and that is your SEO.

If you're not getting as many hits as you'd like, make sure your website is attached to your profile on every site you're on and post more.

Back to Wix: you can't even configure a Facebook like box to go to a page you've already created. It does some auto-suggestion bullshit.

In conclusion: Wix sucks and I hate it. Only real benefit is the webstore, but that's what eBay and Etsy are for. 2/10, would set fire to again.

Changes

At one point, I had ten weeks of posts queued here.

I am down to two, because I keep forgetting and losing track of days.

Part of that is that I'm just involved in different conversations about writing, on different platforms. I spend a lot of time on tumblr these days: mostly involved in fan things, but discussing writing and story structure nonetheless, and reading a lot more about social justice and science.

I'm also not freelancing, or particularly on the hunt for freelance work. I'm writing as much as I'd like, and don't need this to push myself to write or talk about writing: if anything, I need more of a push to get off the internet and talk to people.

So we're coming off a weekly schedule. New posts will happen whenever, so some manner of subscription will probably be the best way to keep up if you're interested.

Happy writing!

Meta: Victoria

I really enjoy writing about places: the idea of setting as character is an aspect of CanLit that's really stuck with me. I like to think that generally I can keep a narrative going, but this piece was really designed as self-indulgent location-porn. It's not particularly plot-heavy. A lot of the way it's framed is because I can't quite conceive of actually doing travel writing and making it interesting to anyone, but I love architecture and the things that make each place unique.