How Air Canada screwed two children over
Posted on | February 27, 2012 | 13 Comments
I’m writing this from a railroad train in Kamloops. It’s 6:30am, the kids are up, and we’re slipping quietly by a frozen river. The early morning sky has a pink blush, the scenery is transforming into dramatic, snowy mountains, and it’s going to be a good day. But Saturday wasn’t such a good day, and that’s the reason we’re here.
This is my first train trip with my son John, who is eight, and my six year-old daughter Lucy. I’m a divorced dad, and every three weeks I travel from my home in Vancouver to see them in Saskatoon.
Three times each year, I bring them back with me to Vancouver for a holiday before taking them back to Saskatoon and returning home on my own. Saturday was to be the end of one of those holiday trips, which is why I found myself checking in at an Air Canada kiosk with John and Lucy that morning.
We had a two-leg flight, stopping over in Calgary for an hour. After checking in at a kiosk at Vancouver airport, I noticed that we were not in the same row on the second Calgary to Saskatoon flight, although all the seats had been booked together.
I asked the gate attendant in Vancouver if we could sit in the same row together on the Calgary to Saskatoon flight. He glanced balefully at me, and then at his screen.
“You’ll have to talk to the gate attendant in Calgary,” he said. “I can’t deal with that.”
Our flight to Calgary was uneventful. When we got there, we grabbed a sandwich and then sat dutifully at the gate. Then the gate attendant announced that the flight was oversold, and asked for volunteers to take a later flight. I thought nothing of it. After all, we’d paid for our tickets months in advance, and there were three of us. And two of them were kids.
When she called for pre-boarding, we went up. She checked our tickets and then pointed at John’s. “He doesn’t have a seat assigned,” she said. “He may not be able to fly.”
“That’s not acceptable,” I said. “We paid for our tickets months ago.”
“Let’s just get everyone else on the flight and then see,” she said.
We sat down and waited. I calmly told John and Lucy that there may only be seats for two of us, rather than three, and that if they liked, I could have a flight attendant to escort them both alone so that they could get home to mum straight away. The alternative was to travel with me, but that meant not being sure when they would get home.
John, a sensitive little guy who has toughed out his parents’ divorce, broke down in tears. “I’m freaking out,” he said, tears streaming down his face. He could barely articulate how scared he was of travelling alone. I told him that it was only a suggestion, and that no matter what, I would always be with him when we travelled. He would never have to travel alone unless he agreed to it, I told him. He could always trust me.
But could I trust Air Canada to get us home?
Everyone else got on. The two attendants were busy talking to two other oversale victims at the desk, and hadn’t called me up. So I went up to see what was happening.
The flight attendant told me that we couldn’t get on the flight, and that all other flights to Saskatoon were booked up that day.
“How can they be allowed to do this to us?” I asked. I was angry, but calm, with a steady voice.
Perhaps I should be the kind of person that causes a scene. I could have shouted that we were a family, and they were letting on single people travelling alone. But I’ve always taught my children (who were sitting behind me and one of whom was in tears) that yelling and stamping your feet isn’t the answer. Making agreements and sticking to them is. Reason and integrity should be enough to solve a problem.
“Please. You’re not just affecting me – you’re affecting two young children,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I will never use your airline again.”
“I don’t blame you.”
We had to get the kids back home as soon as possible. School started on Monday, and Lucy had a follow-up meeting with a surgeon at the hospital early in the week, to check in on some surgery that she’d had the previous month.
She said that Air Canada might be able to get another section (which means a larger plane with more seats) on a later flight. But she didn’t know yet. She told me to wait and see. We waited.
Eventually, a manager arrived, and sat down next to us. Another section had not been approved, he said.
I began exploring options. Could Air Canada rent a one-way drop off rental car for that day or the next, so that I could drive them home?
It couldn’t do that, he said. Neither would it guarantee that I would be reimbursed for the rental fare if I booked my own car. Such things were considered on a case-by-case basis and I would have to apply directly to their customer relations division after the event. Apparently paying for car rentals raises liability issues for Air Canada.
In any case, driving to Saskatoon was out, not only because of a prairie storm en route, but also because one-way rentals are difficult if not impossible to arrange between Calgary and Saskatoon.
Westjet was booked up. And although Air Canada agreed to put us up in a hotel that night, there were no seats available on flights the next day either. So what was the point?
We had one shot: the customer service staff at Calgary tried to get us on another flight from Vancouver that was going to be late arriving in Calgary en route to Saskatoon. If they decided not to hold that flight for some other connections, then we might get seats, they said.
If that happened, other passengers would have been bumped. As the attendant confided, with Air Canada, someone always ends up with the short end of the stick, in a long chain of suffering. In any case, they held the plane for the other passengers anyway.
So, we were screwed. We were not getting back to Saskatoon in time for school, or for my daughter’s hospital appointment. Instead, they put us on a flight back to Vancouver.
The problem was that the next available flight to Saskatoon from Vancouver was on March 2 (and that was an overnight in Edmonton). After that, there was nothing until March 6. Westjet had a similar story. Apparently seats to Saskatoon were impossible to get because of a curling tournament there.
Which is why I now find myself on a Via Rail train, taking a 34 hour trip with two children from Vancouver to Saskatoon. Then, I’ll be flying home – via Westjet.
We got our tickets refunded, and $300 in compensation. But I didn’t want any of that. I just wanted my airline to honour its commitment. Air Canada screwed us. Why?
“It’s the cancellations,” whispered one of the customer service staff when I asked. Apparently, Air Canada’s yield management service makes a rough guess as to how many cancellations and no-shows there will be on a flight, and oversells the seats to accommodate for them. Sometimes they get it wrong, which is when children suffer. “They oversell all the time,” said the customer service rep. “And then it lands on us.”
None of this explains why a family of three got bumped while other single passengers got on the flight. Or why the disinterested gate attendant at Vancouver failed to warn me of the problem before I got on the plane, which would have saved a day of our time.
Ostensibly, Air Canada is the best airline for divorced parents who live in another province. It is the only airline travelling between Vancouver and Saskatoon I know of that offers a passenger deal for parents taking a round trip to drop off children, and the only one currently offering a lone-travel policy for children over eight.
But I will never travel with Air Canada again. Ever. The customer service attendant suggested that instead of getting a refund, I simply used the money to book a future trip with Air Canada. I politely declined. I can’t trust the company now. And when you’re a single parent flying with two young children, you have to be able to rely on your airline not to fuck you.
I work as a freelance writer, and I would like to explore this in more depth. I am interested in hearing more from any current or former Air Canada staff who would like to tell me more about how Air Canada’s internal processes work. I would love to hear their stories about challenges they have encountered being caught between the company’s back-end processes and angry customers.
I would also love to hear from other Air Canada customers who have been poorly treated – especially parents with young children.
I will be very happy to have conversations in confidence, and to deal with people anonymously. Please mail aircanadadoesntcare@itjournalist.com.
Finding your cat muse
Posted on | December 13, 2011 | No Comments
Having inherited two of them, I’m slowly becoming a cat person. This is just as well, because thanks to Skud, Emily and other contributors, there are kitty cats all over my desktop right now. They produced Written Kitten, a web site that rewards your writing efforts by overloading your cute glands.
Written Kitten is simple. It gives you a space in which to write words, and for every 100 words that you write, it gives you a picture of a cat. It’s simple, but effective.
There are other programs out there that use punishment to beat your muse into submission, forcing you to write a set number of words per hour by displaying reminder messages, playing annoying sounds, and even unwriting your work. But Written Kitten spares the punishment, and ladles on the love. Like my cat Ludwig, I tend to respond more readily to reward than to punishment. 
I’m still looking for a word processor that will multiply your word count by a set per-word amount, giving you a running total, because frankly there are times when the only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that finishing a ghostwritten piece is going to score me some of my mortgage payment. But until that day comes, I’ll settle for cat pictures.
After a day of pilot testing, I’m finding that Written Kitten works rather well. You can set your own kitty wordcount threshold, but I’m finding that one cat every 100 words is a good fit. It injects the necessary reward at just the right stage in the proceedings. Dull article about customer relationship management KITTEN! More unfortunate writing about corporate IT chargeback policies KITTEN! Writing about something so mind-crushingly dull that I want to take my own eye out with a fork KITTEN! Trying to find yet another way to describe source code management techniques KITTEN! Halfway through ghostwritten opinion editorial about the importance of rubber valves in the plumbing industry KITTEN!
Give it a try.
It’s that time of year again
Posted on | October 24, 2011 | No Comments
“I met a man at a party. He said “I’m writing a novel” I said “Oh really? Neither am I.”
― Peter Cook
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Participants agree to produce a 50,000-word novel in a month (that’s 1,666 words each day, for the mathematically challenged). 
Hemingway only wrote 500 words each day. Isn’t it a bit of a tall order to produce three Hemingways of text each day? Why, yes, yes it is. But Hemingway focused on quality and quantity. NaNoWriMo encourages you to simply write, even if you’re writing a whole bunch of wordy crap.
The idea is to get your creative muscles working by flexing them repeatedly, and frequently. The hope is that this will stop you being the kind of writer that knows there’s a novel in there somewhere, but who needs surgery to get it out. At least write something, goes the theory. It’s better than nothing. And who knows, maybe you’ll be able to edit it down to some good bits later.
Several published writers have come out of NaNoWriMo, so it has some merit. But the real merit is in the community aspect. There are community write-ins across North America and beyond. They write in coffee shops, and libraries, and they laugh, and talk, and, most importantly, type. Join up, and find your region, and you’ll see community writing events, and web sites, and social media pages designed to hook you up.
I haven’t participated before, but my fiction output has been almost non-existent lately, and I’ve been enmeshed in corporate blogging and feature writing. I need to dust away some literary cobwebs, and it’s time to get writing. Will you join me?
Can freelancers afford investigative journalism?
Posted on | April 19, 2011 | 1 Comment
Broadly speaking, there are two types of non-fiction writing: investigative, and non-investigative. The non-investigative writing targets ‘on-diary’ and PR-driven stories, where organisations are eager to work with journalists to get their message out. Greg Palast’s expose on the 2000 and 2004 elections, and a piece on ten great photo accessories for your iPod are both useful for an audience in different ways, but one is investigative, and one isn’t.
Investigative reporting is emotionally and psychologically rewarding, but it’s also time consuming, which is a problem for freelancers, even more than staffers. It also carries the risk of attracting lawsuits and repelling advertisers, which are practices that few publications these days can afford. Some investigative stories may take up weeks of time and come to nothing.
This, along with the consolidation of mainstream media ownership, is why investigative reporting is atrophying. Seymour Hersh talks about it here (with particular relevance around 58 minutes in):
Freelancers don’t get holidays, or sick pay. What they do get is a crushing need to earn a certain amount of cash each month, writing whatever sells. In many cases, that’s everything from consumer puff stories through to corporate white papers.
Staffers, too, are increasingly tasked with generating large quantities of fungible stories. The reprehensible AOL Way – AOL’s set of editorial and publishing guidelines – mandates it, it, requiring 5-10 stories daily on average from staffers. The AOL Way is a record of the triumph of profit over quality if ever there was one. Not much room for investigative stuff there then, beyond “five ways the iPad 2 sucks”.
The minute most writers start working on an investigative piece, you see your profitability per hour go down, but in many cases you also see your job satisfaction – and hopefully your readers’ interest – go up. How can you balance the two?
Editors I know who used to be freelancers used the bread and butter features to pay for the investigative stuff. Everyone, after all, has to earn a living and we can’t all sell articles to the New Yorker. But there’s another option: in the growing movement for community-funded projects. I’ve covered the increasingly awesome spot.us before, which is a project designed to help fund civic reporting in the Bay Area using pledges from interested readers. Someone posts an idea for an article that they’d like to write (or see written), along with a fee. If enough people are interested enough in reading the story to pledge some money, then the target is reached, and the story can be written.
I love this idea not only because it provides an independent outlet for the articles, but also because it gets us away from the horrid, SEO- and revenue-focused bullcrap that pollutes an increasingly cash-constrained industry. It also opens up the possibility of participatory articles, in which interested members of the community contribute ideas and feedback to the story as it goes along.
Incidentally, the broad crowdfunded model appears to be spreading. Various documentary and book projects have already been well-funded via Kickstarter. Rockethub seems to harbour fewer successful projects, but has promise.
Then there are sites that let the community vote up (or out) ideas, until an idea reaches the point where heavy hitters take notice. Webook does this for fiction, for example, while recently-launched Ahhha promises to do it for broader business ideas.
How will investigative reporting evolve in a crowdfunded world? I hope it thrives, because democracy has a nasty habit of atrophying without it.
Honesty in journalism
Posted on | April 19, 2011 | 2 Comments
Forget the story that this link leads to – I just love the wording of the URL. Check it out before they take it down.
UPDATE
Aww, the Twitterverse says that it’s just a quirk in the Indie’s URL system. You can type anything before the article number and it’ll still resolve. Look:
That’s a shame, as this could have turned into a rather nice blog entry about how the print-based screw-ups of yesteryear happen digitally today. The mistakes are legendary. There are the obvious:
The even more obvious:
and the downright bizarre:
I really don’t want to know.
But I was really thinking of the types of headline where the inner workings (and thoughts) of the production team made their way into print, through erroneous submission – and lack of omission.
Like this one:
From the Wollongong Northern Leader. Or, my personal favourite, from back in 1992. A production team on Amiga magazine screwed the pooch by putting “Type some shit in here please” in a headline – and forgetting to replace it with something else:
At least when you make a mistake in cyberspace, they’re easy to fix…
Six steps to a good PR pitch
Posted on | April 4, 2011 | 3 Comments
I got a polite but frustrated sounding email from a PR guy who pitched for an article that I’m putting together for a pretty high profile publication. He’s pitched a few things in the past, and I’ve accepted a few, but there are a lot of things that I haven’t taken from him. He said:
I am failing to see what we are doing wrong here in regards to the pitches and the clients we are presenting. I know you may receive a tonne of email perhaps requesting the same thing – but you don’g get it if you don’t even attempt to ask. Therefore, I am enquiring whether you can point us in the right direction. Is there anything that we could be doing that we are not aware of?
As it happens, this guy’s pitches are normally perfectly fine. I understand how frustrated he must get, having a client who was just perfect for the article and not getting a look-in. And here’s the thing: There’s nothing else he could have done.
That’s possibly the hardest thing to hear. Because if a journalist says “your pitch was too long,” or “you didn’t explain it well enough”, then at least you can work on tailoring the pitch to suit them in the future.
This article that I’m putting together: it’s 600 words in length. 800 max. In that space, I have to get the reader from zero to sixty, explaining the subject matter to them, giving them an understanding of the history, the present, and the future – and doing it all in a way that differentiates it from the hundred other articles on the subject that you’ll see this year.
Frankly, I could write this without interviewing a single person. I know the subject well enough already, thankyouverymuch. Actually, I’ve written it twice already, for other people, with different angles and different interviewees, but broadly the same subject.
Anyway, competing for that 600 words, I got around twenty pitches. Twenty. And mostly, they were all great. I can’t choose all twenty pitches, because ten hours of interviews (assuming half an hour each) for a piece of this length just isn’t feasible, commercially speaking. I’d never get anything written.
Pitching a curveball can sometimes help - Image courtesy Will Folsom (Flickr)
In any case, I couldn’t fit all of the interviewees in. Assuming, say, eight words to introduce someone (“Ivor Biggun, chief bulshitter for Rat’s Ass Enterprises”), that’s 30% of a 600-word article gone. Just for introductions. Before we even get to quotes.
But because I’m a boy who can’t say no often enough, I do end up overinterviewing, and then I have to take calls like the one from a PR guy the other day who told me that I ruined his night because his client, who I interviewed, didn’t make it into the piece. Either way, I can’t win. Either I’ve ruined someone’s night or the PR person “fails to see where they’re going wrong”.
They’re mostly not going wrong, it’s just that there was a pitch that stood out more. And I can’t automatically tell you, up front, for each and every feature, what makes a pitch hit home. At the end of the day, this has to come down to your instinct, and mine. I do what I can to make my requirements as clear as possible, but often, it comes down to simply knowing it when I see it.
As a guide, though, here are a couple of quick pointers to pitching an interviewee to a journalist:
Be succinct
Journos have to read through lots of pitches, so keep it short. Don’t paste in five pages of boilerplate just to fill it out. Include the basic facts: who’s the interviewee? Why are they relevant?
Be timely
Pitching after the journalist’s deadline because you didn’t see the ResponseSource post is mostly just a waste of time, and will irritate the writer.
Explain what the interviewee has to say
This is where you can really win over other pitches. Know your client well enough to understand their basic views on a subject, and let the journalist know. Most pitches I get focus on the fact that the client is an expert. The person pitching rarely outlines the client’s point of view.
I’m not talking about extensive written responses from the client here; I’m talking about bullet points that can capture the journalist’s interest and inspire them to ask for an interview.
Come up with a new angle
When I was writing academic papers, professors would always be impressed if I married the topic at hand with something entirely off the wall. It gave them something different to read from the tens of other essays saying exactly the same thing. Try doing more than simply saying how well-versed your client is in the subject matter. It’s boring. Everyone says that. Find an angle that the journalist hasn’t considered in their brief.
The caveat to that, of course, is that it still has to be legitimate, and worthwhile. There’s a big difference between a new and inspiring angle on a topic, and a non sequitur.
Stay within the confines of the brief
Not to be a grouch, but if a brief says “I’m only looking for customers and analysts, not vendors”, don’t email saying “I know you said that you’re only looking for customers and analysts, but would you consider a vendor?” Because then, no, I probably won’t even send you a reply.
Offer hard information
Opinions can be interesting, but they’re also commodities. The best articles offer hard data, too. Does your client have any? If so, foreground it in the pitch. Offering a concrete deliverable will generally attract a journalist’s attention. Again, a caveat: don’t highlight the data and then refuse to supply it. Someone recently pitched me a client who had completed an in-depth report on a subject. When I took the bait and asked to see the report, he said that it was proprietary and he couldn’t release it. Bait-and-switch just rankles.
These are some pointers. They won’t guarantee that a journalist will accept your pitch, but they’ll increase the probability that they’ll read it. They may well open a dialogue, at least, and that’s a healthy start.
It’s also worth noting that journalists face the same problem. I’ve pitched lots of articles recently where editors didn’t even reply, let alone grace me with a rejection mail. The important thing is not to be disheartened. Find the joy in the pitch itself – if you enjoy writing the pitch, then it’s likely a good one. A negative or non-existent response then becomes more about the editor, not about you, or the pitch you sent.
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This is a repost of a blog post that I made five years ago, updated to make it more timely. Many thanks to Alicia, who sent it to me, saying that it had helped her over the years.
Why writers shouldn’t be rankled by bad reviews
Posted on | March 29, 2011 | 1 Comment
Poor Jacqueline Howett may be regretting her outbursts on a popular indie book review blog. The independent writer had submitted a book, The Greek Seaman, to BigAl’s Books and Pals for review. Big Al blogs regularly on independent authors, with a particular focus on the Kindle platform.
The independent publishing scene has a relatively broad scope. Al deems it inclusive of any title not published by one of the big six publishing houses and their imprints. That leads small independent publishers, backlisted books with rights that have reverted to the authors, and self-published titles.
If your work and your business acumen is good enough, you can make a big splash–and a heap of money–in self publishing. One writer, Stephen Leather, sells 2000 electronic novels per day at £.70 a shot. Admittedly, he also enjoys a more traditional publishing career with Hodder and Stoughton, but it shows what is possible.
It remains to be seen what Ms Howett’s torrent of ungrammatical abuse and expletives will ultimately bring her, but in the short term, it has sparked a witch hunt. When Big Al published a review of her book, he gave a well-balanced, but warts-and-all account. He called the story “compelling and interesting”, but also criticised it for “spelling and grammar errors, which come so quickly that, especially in the first several chapters, it’s difficult to get into the book without being jarred back to reality as you attempt unravelling what the author meant”.
Ms Howett was far from impressed with her two star review, and published a haughty riposte before cutting and pasting several positive reviews of the book from Amazon USA. That drew criticism from Al’s other readers, who called her unprofessional, and also condemned the work. Read it all here.
Ms Howett succumbed to temptation, and posted an increasingly defensive series of messages, finally ending by dropping the F bomb–twice–on the collective readership. The comment thread continues, mostly with posters advising her that her career is over, and pointing out that decision-makers from several publishing houses lurk on the blog looking for potential candidates.
She definitely handled the whole affair badly. But how should a writer deal with criticism, whether constructive, as in this case, destructive?
The best advice I ever read on this subject came from Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art. A guide for creatives, it talks about how to win creative battles and cope with the blocks that get in the way.
Pressfield talks about resistance, and even personifies it. Resistance wants you to fail as a creative. It’s the thing that stops you writing when Facebook beckons. It prevents you finishing the last ten pages of your story because you’re secretly worried that it won’t sell. And resistance is what unsettles you when someone points out something negative about your work. The true pro, he says, separates himself from the amateur by his ability to overcome resistance.
An amateur lets the negative opinion of others unman him. He takes external criticism to heart, allowing it to trump his own belief in himself and his work. Resistance loves this.
When someone responds petulantly to a bad review, they’re letting themselves be rankled by negative comments. He reminds us as professionals not to take failure personally:
A professional schools herself to stand apart from her performance, even as she gives herself to it heart and soul.
Ideally, the writing itself is the reward. Immersing yourself in a world of your own creation is what sustains the soul. The professional writer self-validates, Pressfield says. That doesn’t mean that she won’t accept criticism. Instead, she’ll evaluate it objectively and take it on board where helpful. She won’t lose her head.
So when a reader comments negatively on an article you’ve written, or an editor comes back with queries, tweaks, and notes, do you get irate and take umbrage, or do you take it in your stride, make any amendments necessary, and carry on? Are you an amateur, or a pro?
Automatic writing
Posted on | March 26, 2011 | 1 Comment
When I was first starting out as a journalist, an enterprising but astoundingly unethical freelance colleague of mine told me that for a few years, he’d been ripping off other people’s copy. He’d take trade articles written in another language, such as German, and run them through a machine translation system. Then, he’d edit them, change a few phrases around, and flog them to an unwitting editor as original copy. He made thousands this way. That was before the days of Google translation, of course.
Image courtesy Jeff.W.Brooktree
These days, automating stories might be easier, and perhaps more ethical by simply taking the writer out of the picture altogether. Narrative Science, a startup in Evanston, Illinois, wants to do just that, with data-intensive stories. Its technology uses natural language algorithms to craft rudimentary news articles about data-intensive subjects, such as sports and financial results. This short piece is entirely auto-generated:
Michigan held off Iowa for a 7-5 win on Saturday. The Hawkeyes (16-21) were unable to overcome a four-run sixth inning deficit. The Hawkeyes clawed back in the eighth inning, putting up one run.
I had a similar idea in 1993, when I was working for a newsletter with an editor who had a real hate-on for me. The editor routinely gave me financial results to write up. I had to produce dozens of one-paragraph stories summarising quarterly and year-end results for obscure technology firms.
At one point I considered creating a Word macro that would take the financial numbers and plug them into an algorithm to automatically produce the text. The numbers would be strung together using a database of a few hundred phrases, like “soared to”, “plummeted by”, “improved its revenues by” and so forth. Simple math could be used to determine which subset of phrases to choose from, and I’m sure the algorithm could have been coded to calculate and throw in percentage figures occasionally.
I didn’t end up executing on the idea, but that was more a result of laziness than ethics. After all, the algorithm would have done what I was being made to anyway – there would have been little difference.
These days, people like Narrative Science, which raised $6m in funding back in January, have the capital to do far more sophisticated things than a simple Word macro would allow.
We know that companies are already commissioning basic stories like this from low-cost overseas workers. Now that work could be ‘nonsourced’ as we digitise it in software. The question is, how far will this trend go?
Writing stats-heavy stories using computer software is one thing, but what would be really interesting is whether software like this could be used to write press releases, or the churnalism that feeds off them. I don’t believe that churnalism will disappear in a cash-constrained industry that often prioritises content over quality. But if it could at least be compartmentalised, and if any money saved could be used to fund real research, perhaps it would create more of a space for real journalism. What an interesting concept.
What was the best interview you ever did?
Posted on | March 1, 2011 | No Comments
“I’m not going to write your f*cking article for you!” yelled the analyst, when I asked him the third question in the interview. The tirade, delivered over the phone, was a bit of a shock. The interview had been set up by a PR and the analyst had the time scheduled in his diary. I know my subject well enough to know that I wasn’t asking dumb questions. He was just having a bad day, I guess.
But that wasn’t the only interview to go sour. Once, when filming, I travelled to DC to interview a very spiky ex-military chap about the bombing of Hiroshima. I politely asked him to sign a release form. “I’m not your performing monkey!” he shouted, and stormed out of the room, leaving the Air Force PR guy and me staring blankly and awkwardly at each other.
Then there was the founder of a social activitism web site who was as sweet as pie until the end of a cheery, hour-long interview, when I asked him the first vaguely difficult question of the session. Suddenly he turned sour and accused me of malicious journalism, reminding me that, for all the bonhomie and joviality, when the going gets tough, interviewees are not your friends, and you can’t buy into their world. You’re an observer, and shouldn’t be emotionally involved.
Some of the interviews that you’d think would be awe-inspiring have been mundane. I interviewed Steve Ballmer twice, and was unimpressed to find him mostly bellowing and banging the table, in his enthusiasm about something or other.
I interviewed Bill Gates, but the PR team set it up as a round table affair, with a bunch of journalists from around the world. We were only allowed to ask questions, one after the other, round-robin style. This, of course, gave Gates an out, because he wouldn’t have to answer follow-up questions. I was all for teaming up and having us co-ordinate our questions together, in the hope that we could take him down, like wolves.
But sadly, it was not to be. The Peruvian journalist thought and acted locally, asking ponderous questions about software licenses in Peru. The Italian journalist just before me actually asked: “So, Dot Net: What’s it all about, then?” and it was all I could do to avoid slapping him. All in all, it was a rather dull affair. although Gates did get to have his photo taken with me so that he could impress his mum. Doesn’t he look excited?
I don't fancy yours much.
These are not good interviews. They are regular interviews with important people, which is not the same thing at all. The problem with CEOs is that, unless they’re some mercurial warlock like Larry Ellison, they’re generally going to stay on message to satisfy the compliance team, and send their interviewees to sleep.
So what makes a good interview, anyway?
Obviously, being interested in the subject helps. You can try to be as enthusiastic as you like about storage resource management software, but there still comes a point at which you have to stab yourself repeatedly in the leg with a fork to stay awake. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best interviews I ever had were with people who were interested in the same stuff I was.
There have been a lot of good ones. A lot. Far more than there have been bad ones. Jay Rosen, from NYU University, gave me an hour of his time to talk about the future of journalism, back when blogging was just gaining traction. Stuart Brand knocked my socks off by talking about the idea of slow living and its relationship to millennial thinking, while Peter Bacon Hales, who wrote a treatise on how the nuclear arms race affected American geography, knocked my proverbial socks off. He’ll never know it (unless he reads this) but a story he told me about a friend and teacher of his started me on an existential train of thought that I kept coming back to. It was one of the things that eventually led me to embark on a life-changing event, a few years later.
One of my bests interview ever was conducted on a crappy data link via Skype over a tethered iPhone, in a car, with my girlfriend, driving through Banff, Alberta. We were on a road trip, and I had an interview scheduled with Richard Bartle, who invented the original Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). It was an article about our tendency to live increasingly virtual lives.
I’d sent Bartle a bunch of questions in preparation, via my assistant. They were smug, assuming questions, coming from a set of preconceived ideas. I thought I was quite clever when I sent them along. He came back with a collection of well-thought-out responses, politely but firmly trashing each of my assumptions with some astute observations of his own. It was like being in a freshman philosophy class, and having the professor take your world apart and put it back together again.
The actual interview was a technological disaster. The connection was broken, patchy, and I had to redial him about five times. But amid all of that, a patient Bartle sketched out a whole new world for me. A simple interview about whether online games were making us stupid turned into a heartfelt discussion that ranged from game theory through to a discussion of narrative, Joseph Campbell, and the Hero’s Quest.
The best interviews are the ones that inspire you, and leave you questioning your own prejudices. The interviewee is able to politely and gently turn your world around, and open up new vistas for you. They don’t take difficult questions personally (just as you, dear interviewer, shouldn’t take nasty answers personally). Neither do they necessarily join the conceptual dots for you – they show you new dots that you didn’t know existed before. That’s a sign of true excellence, and it’s what makes the job worthwhile.
What was your best interview?
Should you accept that job?
Posted on | February 25, 2011 | 3 Comments
Should you always accept every job that comes your way? The temptation for freelancers is to take everything, because they’re worried that the work may dry up. But it’s worth being judicious about the work you take on, and I’ve created a methodology to help you.
One of the dark secrets of freelancing is that success can be your downfall. If your work is good, and word gets around, then you can end up being showered with gigs. This is good. This is success. Or is it?
I was talking to a public relations exec who runs her own small communications company a while ago, on Facebook. She was posting from a cruise ship, where she was on holiday. She was working. In a cruise ship. On holiday. On a really bad satellite connection.
“Stop working! You’re on holiday!” I said.
“I can’t,” she said, with a frowny emoticon. “I have to work!”.
I’ve been there, and done that. As a freelancer or small business owner you feel prompted to take on everything you’re offered, lest people stop approaching you with jobs. That’s what I used to think. That’s why I used to work on holidays, too – which was partly responsible for my general misery and high stress level.
These days, I do it differently. I’ve recrafted my definition of ‘success’ to include happiness, and self-respect. It takes a lot of rewiring. You need to have a higher sense of self-worth, and be faithful that people will still keep coming back if you turn down the occasional piece of work. You have to leave time to enjoy the work that you do, and also to read, and think. That’s important if you want to continue to be a ‘knowledge worker’ and not a word processor who pumps out meaningless guff. The bottom line is that working too hard on every single thing that comes along without being discerning makes you boring and less talented.
But which jobs should you turn down, and which ones should you accept? I created a flowchart to help guide you through some of those decisions. It’s designed to fit onto a desktop, as wallpaper. It is where I keep mine, so that I can refer to it every time I get an offer of a piece of work:
I structured this flowchart with the help of a few people. My first version had the ‘can you enjoy it’ box further down in the decision tree, but the way it was structured meant that I would effectively only ever take on work that I could enjoy. I’ve heard it said that if you aren’t 100% inspired by what you do, and following your bliss every single minute, something’s wrong. I believe that, but also believe in paying the mortgage and feeding my kids, so, that’s an exercise in balancing risk and reward. Sometimes you do need to take on less enjoyable jobs to make ends meet (especially if you’re early on in your career).
This flowchart allows you to do that, while still emphasising moderation, and a striving to find work that inspires and stimulates you. How do you find that work? Well, you pitch for it, of course!
Making this work requires some preparation, though. For a start, you have to understand what your financial goals are, if you’re to stop taking on work blindly without any endgame in sight. For that, you need a budget – ideally a personal one *and* a business one. These budgets should include savings, for contingencies, and investments. Once you’ve reached those financial goals, that mundane job that you’re not going to enjoy isn’t really necessary.
I worked without a budget for years – I just spent what I earned and saved a little on the side – but it meant that I’d work myself into the ground because I didn’t have a set of success criteria. Now, my success criteria includes making time for new business projects that inspire me (even if they don’t generate immediate income). It also includes making time for family, and for personal writing that I really enjoy.
Also, consider the time management box: “Do you have the time to commit?”. One of my biggest problems in the past has been overcommitting, partly because I had no clear idea of how much time would be taken up by the things I’d already committed to. I just figured I’d get it done, somehow. It led to a lot of missed deadlines and late nights, and feelings of guilt and stress. Feeling as though you’re behind the eight-ball every day is not good.
How can you stop that feeling? Schedule every single task that you have, with a rough estimate of how long it will take. I use Toodledo, which allows me to add estimates of job lengths. For freelance writers, allocate time for interviews and writing. You’re never going to get it exactly right, but we all know, deep down, roughly how long a job tends to take. When you max out the number of jobs you can take on, then either stop, or negotiate a different deadline up front with the editor, before taking on the commission. I try to structure my week based on this to-do list, using the big rocks approach to time management.
The other box to pay special attention to is outsourcing. Depending on your industry, there may be some work that you can outsource. If you’re given a magazine to produce, then maybe you can outsource some of the feature writing to other freelancers, for example. If you have a particularly long, labourious feature to write, with lots of technical detail to fill in, then it may be possible to outsource some of the less demanding research (hey there, freelance researcher! I need a list of all IPOs valued at over $500m in the past year – with sources! Start at the SEC’s site and work from there!). Letting others do the mundane legwork lets you concentrate on your value add – marshalling ideas and facts together, and then crafting an article with style and verve.
So, this is my decision system. I hope it works for you. If you have any tweaks you’d like to suggest, I’m all ears.
keep looking »About
Word Herder is a site for writers and readers of both fiction and non-fiction. Surf here to read more about useful tools to help you organise your writing and optimise your research. I'm Danny Bradbury and I'm a freelance technology writer writing for the Guardian , the Financial Times, the National Post, Backbone magazine, MSN Canada, and the trade press. Here's a feed showing some of my work.
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