If you’ve worked as an independent writer for long, you know the nature of the language we use to describe what we do has changed along with the rest of our profession. Gone are the days we talked about mailing editors clips with self-addressed stamped envelopes. Today we email a .pdf of our work and share a link to our resume and clips on LinkedIn.
Even the terms we use to describe ourselves has changed. Independent writer, journalist entrepreneur, web journalist and multimedia content producer have taken the place of freelance writer, freelancer or wordsmith (although truth be told, I never cared for that one, or “scribe”).
Here are a dozen words from the new freelance lexicon:
Click through – What writers want people who visit their blogs or the websites that run their stories to do on ads on those pages. Like the BlogHer ad you see on this page. Yes, like that one over there on the right. Go ahead and click on it. But come back.
Content assets – The nom du jour for a writer’s output, synonymous with “story,” “article” or “piece.” More publishers buy all rights to work created by contract writers so they own the “content assets” and can repurpose them as they see fit. More on that below.
Content mill – Websites providing how-tos, service pieces and other evergreen information, in some cases along with national and local news, created by a massive number of contract writers word slaves, including professionals and hobbyists. Includes sites such as Examiner.com, Associated Content, Suite101 and Helium and well as companies such as Demand Media, which produces content for multiple sites. Depending on what you think of them, also referred to as content sites, farms, aggregators or “demonic.”
Deliverables – See content assets.
Hyperlocal – Popular term quickly veering on overuse for coverage of current events happening in a community that is produced and published entirely online. Definitions of coverage, events and community varies, but could include written, audio, video, map-based, real-time or reported coverage of a city or town, individual neighborhoods within a city or town, or specific industry, topic or subculture within a given city or community.
PIE – Short for “payment in exposure,” what some start-up websites try offer as compensation to writers they’d like to work for them for nothing. Yeah, right. Here’s what author Harlan Ellison says about that.
Repurpose – Verb meaning to use a story in multiple media, publications or venues. As in, “I’m going to assign a 4,000 backgrounder on credit cards divided into 12 sections so we can post it on the website first and then repurpose individual sections to run in our weekly e-newsletter.”
SEO – Short for search engine optimization. Catch-all phrase given to techniques used to push web pages high within Google and other search engine results, making it more likely someone will click on the contents, thereby increasing page views, and hopefully, advertising click throughs. Value and effectiveness of SEO in non-web content writing is widely debated.
Site producer – The Big Kahuna running an online content or news site, or portion thereof. Online equivalent of “editor.”
Uniques – Short for unique visitors, a measure of traffic to a website. Used to determine ad rates. Usage: “I need to get uniques to my blog up to 250,000 a month so I can charge $5 CPM.”
Web content writer – Individual who specializes in writing SEO-based copy for websites, including content farms. Works for low pay and/or share of ad revenue, creating writing practice based on quantity v. quality. Not to be confused with writers whose works appears on the web, though some freelancers do both.
Web style guides – Writing style rulebooks created by Yahoo and others to explain formats and other usage, incorporating tenets of both SEO and AP style.
I find content farms (especially those run by Demand Media) to be extremely detrimental to both writers and search engines. They clog up Google and Yahoo with bogus articles written in five minutes by people who obviously won’t be getting any real writing gigs any time soon.
For those who actually know what they’re doing and write substantive pieces that take actual thought and/or research, they unfortunately make only pennies on the dollar for their hard work.
Content farms take advantage of freelancers who have hit a wall due to the recession by promising money for work, but pay a pittance. I’d know – I used to write for a few (Suite101 and eHow specifically).
Harry, I share your sentiments on this topic.
Michelle
Content mills take advantage of people who are anxious to get something, anything, published for people to see. Not realizing that being seen on content mills makes it less likely, not more, that anyone else will purchase their work. The other set of people is the ones in third world countries, for whom the pittance paid is real money. Both groups are exploited.
I agree with Harry that they just clog up the search engines. Churn enough stuff in there and something rises to the top, drek or not.
Thanks for the definitions of the new words, Michelle. I always enjoy your posts.