Today was the last day at my job as a news writer for the tech and gaming sector. I thought I'd take the opportunity to highlight what I'll miss about it, what I learned, and what I won't miss. This may be helpful for those that plan on starting a career in this sector, or ar just starting up and wondering if things will get better. Hang in there, it won't, but if you're here, you've either got passion or slid into it sideways and got stuck here.
What I learned
- Proofreading is a good thing
- The place you work at has a style guide somewhere. It may not be written down, but it exists and you should conform to it
- Over the course of a year slowly ditch the style guide and build your own way of writing, if it's gradual enough, they won't notice
- Realistically, you won't be able to specialize and will have to spread yourself thin to cover everything needed
- SEO is actually more important than the content, according to the SEO people
- They're not totally wrong
- Always delegate responsibility for the facts, because you can't trust anything that anyone says in any industry. EX: "Product x to be released in march"- bad, "Company Y or Person Z says that product X will be released in march"-good
- Always cite your sources.
- No one's actually going to read the sources
- Some people will call fake news even when given 100% accurate and sourced facts. There's no changing their minds, don't bother.
- There's no way you can actually improve the field you work in.
- People care the most about things that just happened, not things that will happen, because they'll forget about them
- Any news that you find interesting will be less important to the people reading it than something about a flashy, expensive and pointless gadget by a big brand company
- The sooner you gain a basic understanding of the technical aspects of what you're reporting on, the sooner you'll become immune to scams and fake news.
- Enthusiasm is important
- Having a good soundtrack on the background will help you get through the day after the first few years
- Having a Netflix account running on a second monitor will help you get through the day in later years
- Always know who your sponsors are, stepping on their tows will lead to unexpected surprises
- A lot of your audience won't read past the title
- A part of them won't even read the entire title
- Both categories specified above will comment nonetheless and never be right about anything, but have a lot of passion when they usually say something about you needing to be fired
- If you share your news on Facebook with a short description of the article, a lot of people will think that short description is the entire article.
- Once people learn the word clickbait they'll use it to describe anything where you didn't manage to fit every detail of an article in the title.
- A spelling error means to some that the entire article you wrote is fake news
- Some people just can't be informed or educated, don't lose sleep over it
What I'll miss
- Being one of the first to know about just about everything in tech and gaming
- Making punny titles
- Jokes in the comments section
- Having actually good discussions with people in the comments (rare, but they exist)
- Writing about memory technology that no one else will ever be as excited about it as I was. When Xpoint dropped, I was over the Moon! No one else cared.
- Giving an indie dev a nod and having his mom see it and be happy about it
- Making new contacts through the news
- Being proud of spending an entire day, writing 15 articles to completely cover a tech show... a day of a week long tech show
- Informing people about things I feel should really be common knowledge
- Writing about stuff I know no one else will write about and very few will care about, but knowing someone should write about, because it matters, dammit!
- Telling people 'I like big bots and I can not lie' when writing about Battletech ( I had a song and everything at one point)
- That one week when I had Stardew Valley running in the background
What I won't miss
- The daily grind of doing the same thing
- The "can you do me a solid"
- Proofreading
- Spending half an hour digging through court case files to make sure a story that no one cares about, no one will read, no one will give a second thought to, is accurate
- Covering Apple events
- Covering events in general
- 40% of the audience
- Having to ask if I can write a story, and being told no, because it's about a sponsor
- People not understanding a joke
- Not knowing that a company is a sponsor and writing a piece about a security flaw, highlighting how inept the company was
- Seeing that story be edited in record time with words like "Good guy Lenovo fixes bug in record time", when in fact it's not fixed and it's been an known issue for months
- Earning very little money
- Being told I can't be paid because of the way the economy works now
- Having to remind people to pay me on a daily basis
- People expecting me to spend hours on a single story that I have no interest in, and would be less financially sound than washing cars at a traffic stop for the same amount of time
- Getting things wrong because I was cramming 2 articles in 15 minutes
- Being asked to cram articles in less time that actually properly writing them requires
- Being asked to do a fluff piece
- Doing a fluff piece
- Being asked to report on a fluff piece as if it were news
- Being asked to copy-paste and translate things and pass them off as original articles
Hope this helps some of you make your career in this field a bit better. Or makes you reconsider going in this direction. Heck the Associated Press is using AIs to write news these days, you'll be replaced by a bot in a few years anyway.