When it comes to the business of writing in the digital age, clickbait, shuttered platforms and broken URLs are the least of our worries

By JULIE SCHWIETERT COLLAZO 

For those of us who have at least one foot in the digital world–and most of us do–it’s worth talking about the downside and drawbacks of digital projects. Moreso, it’s worth talking about how to protect yourself and your work in the digital world.

I was already thinking about this before I met, earlier this week, with a colleague who is a digital content director for a major media brand. “My outlook is bleak,” she said, as we talked about clickbait articles that are sensationalized and not fact-checked and lamented how often digital “strategy” is determined by variables like number of social media followers rather than a writer’s or subject’s actual skills or interests. We talked about the never-ending to-do list of the media property she oversees, a site that could have way more views and engagement–the end-game of any website–but which is crippled by limited staff, micromanagement by people who pretend to know a lot about the digital space but have little actual fluency in digital media, and, she admits, her own flagging motivation.

The real reason I’ve been thinking about this subject though is because so much of my own digital work has been lost or is beyond my own control. Click on any of the links on my published works page and you’ll find that far too many of them generate 404 errors. As editors learn more about how user engagement works, they rewrite URLs or rename stories, and, poof!, my article is floating around in space. But maybe I can find it and fix the link (a time-consuming task even if it is discoverable) because the search function on the same website has disappeared completely (the elimination of search functions is one of the worst ideas ever, by the way).

Then there’s the phasing out and shutting down of platforms. If you’re one of those folks who crows about digital’s advantage over the supposedly dying medium of print, check yourself: Have you been keeping tabs on how many online properties–even legit, big-name properties with big-time funding and old-school media brands behind them– have turned off the lights and pulled the plug? The New York Times regularly eliminates blogs it has invested time, money, and staffing in nurturing. So does The Washington Post, as my friend and colleague Tracie Powell reported recently for All Digitocracy. And my own former employer, Matador Network, recently decided to eliminate its community blogs, which were the platform many of its writers used to get started in the field. If writers didn’t back up their own work, it was scrubbed from the site and their servers. Fortunately, I’d anticipated that possibility and made print copies of all my past work a few years ago, but the investment of time was hours, as there was no native back-up system that writers could use.

Other downers? Digital editions of print magazines pull their archived issues after a certain period, decide to put them behind a paywall, or another publisher acquires them and they disappear from the Internet in a flurry of renaming and rebranding. Your work gets copied and pasted by someone who knows more about SEO than journalism, perhaps attributing your work to himself or herself or some invented “author,” and it gets more page views, praise, and pennies than your own piece did.

And those are just for starters.

Most recently, I’ve been confronted with a dilemma related to mobile apps. Back in 2010, I signed on to an app development project, the promise of which was that with a core group of talented writers, many of whom had bona fides from the print world, we’d be able to corner the travel app market, which was still young. For me at least, that promise wasn’t realized, and my app never made much more than $20 a month, a sum that never compensated for the time invested in the making and marketing I did for it.

Now the company that owned the platform upon which the app was built and maintained is defunct. When it folded, the ability for authors to access the back-end of their apps–the place where updating is done–disappeared while the business partners tried to figure out the answer to “What next?”. They still haven’t resolved the question, at least not for authors, who have been left hanging, along with their reputations. Our names are associated with guides that are outdated, yet we have no control over those guides. Several writers have pulled their apps from iTunes since they, like I, don’t want their names on out of date material they can’t correct. Others have said that the decision to scrub the considerable amount of work they did just makes them sick to their stomachs and they can’t bear to hit the delete button because… where does all that effort go? {Please, don’t answer that question.}

I don’t sit around lamenting or worrying excessively about any of these scenarios or situations; after all, the bumps and jostles are part and parcel of figuring out a media landscape that is changing constantly. I haven’t even taken care of certain tasks that may be within my control, such as ferreting out those broken links and finding the new ones that replace them, because frankly, that’s not the best use of my time. I need to be generating new, paying work.

That being said, I do think there are certain precautions and protections that we can take when exploring and experimenting with new digital opportunities. Here are a few that come to mind based on my own experiences:

1. Get a contract. Read it.
For new and emerging media especially, it’s important that you temper your enthusiasm about the platform by ensuring that you’re holding it to the same standards of professional treatment that you expect of traditional media. If you’re offered the opportunity, for example, to develop an app, make sure that you receive, review, and sign off on a contract first. One important clause of that contract should address what happens if the developer goes bottom up. Where does your content go? Can you control it? What kind of money are you entitled to?

2. Ask about the monetization plan.
So many Internet ventures are launched on a wing and a prayer rather than a solid foundation and, crucially, a monetization plan (much less a viable one). For most players online and in the digital space, it’s getting harder to make money online, not easier. If you’re a writer or journalist who wants to make a living from your work, don’t accept “exposure” in exchange for some pay-off, whether that’s actual cash or equity, down the road. It’s rare for that pay-off to come. There’s nothing wrong with asking about a project’s monetization plan. You may not need proprietary specifics, but you do need to feel comfortable that the people steering the ship have a clue about what they’re doing and that you’ll be compensated appropriately for your work.

3. Back up everything.
Don’t rely on editors or publishers to keep digital proof of publication for you. If your work is destined for an online or digital outlet, find a way to preserve it. Maybe that’s a PDF, maybe it’s a hard copy of your article, or maybe it’s a screenshot or a file uploaded to the cloud. Whatever system works best for you, use it.

4. Keep in close communication with editors and publishers.
Keep an eye on your outlets, especially regular ones. When you notice that a site or platform is stagnating, ask about it. If you’re seeing gaps or problems, so is the average user/reader and these may foreshadow the twilight of the project. You’ll want to make sure that you migrate your own content (especially if you haven’t followed through on the preceding tip) before the site goes dark and your work disappears.

5. Confront content scrapers, then move on.
Content scraping–the act of someone else cutting and pasting your work and trying to pass it off as his or her own– is becoming more and more common. When you notice that your work has been stolen, confront the person who did it. Mobilize your network of readers and friends to call out the offending party on social media. And then move on. Otherwise you’ll spend far too much of your time on a battle for which the odds are not in your favor.

What advice do you have to add? Please share your tips in the comments.

Julie Schwietert Collazo is a bilingual (English-Spanish) writer, editor, and translator whose work covers a wide range of topics and interests, from art to science and from food to Pope Francis. She lives in New York City with her children and her husband, photographer Francisco Collazo. She blogs at cuadernoinedito where this post originally appeared and is re-published here with permission from the author.