Month: June 2015

Medium vs. WordPress

I had almost decided to park my blogging efforts at my Medium address. Medium has become a better blogging site than it once was. The final product looks great once you publish. I get the impression it’s pretty easy to get eyeballs on your stuff if you have a Medium site. Then I read this post by my friend Scott Bateman, which states, “Due to Medium not valuing creative people who bring them literally millions of page views, you can now find my chart-like charts at chartlikecharts.tumblr.com.”

Scott was one of the creators (writers and artists) doing paid work for Medium until about a month ago, when the site peremptorily ended the popular publications featuring those folks’ works.

I’m a shitty team player. I never have been good at that sort of thing. I’m certain it’s a personality flaw, plus an impulse to take charge that is often counterproductive, at least in some situations. But I do have a sense of solidarity with many groups of people, including creatives like Scott.

His post made me think, “fuck it, I have my WordPress space, I know WordPress, I can make it look how I want.” That made my decision for me. I’m not going to use the site much, if at all ever again, if that’s how they dealt with a talented guy like Scott.

It isn’t trying to be weirdly holier-than-thou for me, it’s just understanding how it feels to have people suddenly discount your work.

My first professional writing was for Crime Library, a site that has been defunct (after many incarnations over the years, some very high profile) since last August, officially.

To be clear, it was an amazing opportunity. For web-only writing, it paid well (in hindsight). I had more leeway than I realized at the time to cover what I wanted. I’m grateful I got to do it and grateful to the person who gave me the opportunity.

However, nearly a year into the gig–it was “perma-lance,” not staff writing–I submitted an article about a truly horrible aspect of a crime I was actively covering for Crime Library and on my own crime blog. A serial molester and killer of children, Joseph Edward Duncan, had apparently recorded some of his crimes on video. Just the fact he did was nightmarish enough, and I reported it as straight as I could, but it was clear, I think, that I was really horrified. I’m queasy thinking about what I learned even now.

I don’t remember the title I suggested for what I wrote, but I know it went against news practice by being more suggestive of the horror of the crime than explicit.

When the article went live on the site I was fucking sick to see the title had been changed to “JOSEPH EDWARD DUNCAN’S PORN TAPES.” (That may not be the 100% accurate actual title but it’s very close.)

Writing about crime in an appropriate way is hard enough. I have not always succeeded, at all. That time I’d done the best I could and I came to find out that the editor had changed the article title to that leering tabloid bullshit after consulting with an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert.

I don’t recall how long I kept working with Crime Library after that, but my disgust weighted everything I did, so it wasn’t long. It wasn’t the same as what happened to Scott Bateman with Medium at all, but I suspect the sudden realization your work had no value to the publisher the way it might matter to you was probably similar.

So that’s the root of a simple, dumb decision to stick with one blog platform or another, this time. WordPress mostly knows it’s a tool others use to try and present their thoughts in whatever way is most pleasing to them. Medium, after Scott’s experience, and in reviewing the homogeneity of all its publications, feels a little more like a product of some kind of vaguely dystopian thinking. Like hey, be a special part of the hive mind, we’ll even pay you, until we won’t. No to that. Nope.

On being boring

Every day I write a little in a moleskine. I date each entry. Most entries are just a paragraph, and often just things I tend to observe–the weather, something that happened with one of my kids, sometimes my exercise. Anyone finding that journal hoping to see some sort of Secrets of Steve situation would be disappointed; it’s seriously fucking boring.

I don’t do it in lieu of blogging, I just do it for me. It feels like, at this point, an oddly necessary practice. And for someone who has always prized trying to make his writing interesting, it feels almost like a zen thing: let yourself be boring.

A brake on my blogging–there are many–is that fear of being boring. I only recently realized this, and realized it was keeping me from writing at length in a way that I used to do every day. That daily or near-daily blogging, even before I had paying jobs doing it, mattered to me. I feel confident I can tweet something mildly amusing once a day–tweeting is pretty easy. But a whole blog entry? Apparently I’ve developed the attitude it must be Received Wisdom of the Ages or nothing at all. That’s arrogant bullshit, because honestly, I kept blogging after I began the practice (and blogging is a sort of practice) 15 years ago because I enjoyed it, not because I thought I was great at it. Having blogging and writing jobs later was a total surprise to me, and sometimes still is.

I think I still might do this thing on a regular basis if I just chill out and don’t worry so much. I’ve said before (I think) that I keep this space open for a reason, even though I don’t touch it for months. I think that’s true.

I recently read somewhere a good way to fuck up a goal is to tell people about it. So I’m not going to get into any goals I have re: blogging from here on out. I’m just gonna give it a go and see what happens. Practice is practice.