To do good writing, read good writing. Here’s the good writing I’ve been reading this week:
Harry Potter fans have 21 more days to wait until the opening of the last movie of the last book in the series about the boy wizard.
But the wait’s over for learning more about the mysterious Pottermore website. This week, J.K. Rowling shared details about the site, which will go live in October as the first and only place for Harry Potter fans to buy ebooks of the popular series. As Rowling discusses in a video announcement, it will also be an online reading site built around the Harry Potter books “for fans of any age.” Here’s the clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5DOKOt7ZF4
Here are my other picks for what writers should be reading this week:
AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out (Faster Times) – At first, Oliver Miller thought $35,000 a year writing about TV for AOL was a sweet deal. That was until he was actually doing it. Miller, one of a legion of contract writers unceremoniously fired after the online giant bought Huffington Post, figures he wrote 350,000 words in less than a year – that’s about 10 cents a word. That’s not the worst of it. Miller says he regularly reviewed shows based on one or two-minute video clips, got assignments based mainly on what would grab the most page views and ads, and had editors routinely add grammar and other mistakes to his copy.
R.R. Donnelley buys Helium (Bloomberg) – Speaking of content farms, this week R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., which made its name in book, magazine, catalog and direct mail printing bought its way into the digital media business. The $10 billion company acquired Helium, which dubs itself the world’s largest writing community but what some categorize as a content farm. The deal, along with Demand Media’s public stock offering, Yahoo’s purchase of Associated Content and Examiner.com’s control by a billionaire railroad baron, means all the big content farms now have the deep pockets they need to continue their quest for (media) world domination. But will it result in better wages for content slaves like Oliver Miller?
My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant (The New York Times) – Journalist Jorge Antonio Vargas, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Washington Post for his reporting on the Virginia Tech massacre, is also an undocumented immigrant. In a revealing first-person essay, he talks about arriving in the United States from the Philippines at the age of 12, not knowing he was in the country illegally until trying to get his drivers license and the double life he’s led ever since. He writes:
Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream. But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.
Mommy Bloggers Have Their Own Talent Agency (AdAge) – Former Edelman publicity Danielle Wiley has started Sway Group, an agency representing 25 mommy bloggers, the first step in what she hopes will be a network of bloggers on topics ranging from food to design.
7 places to look for database journalism stories (10,000 Words) – Good resources for government and other statistics that reporters are often called on to flesh out trend pieces.
The lifespan of online content is nasty, brutish and short (ScribeMedia.org)
New app helps find places to work on the road (SecondAct)