A long overdue site upgrade

Jul 27

Posted by Peter in Uncategorized

If there’s a bright side to neglecting my professional website, it’s that I was too busy writing stories during the first half of the year to notice.

The work keeps rolling in, including two features for Executive Travel and another for an in-flight magazine in the coming months. I’ve also been contributing travels stories for culturemap.com and features for more of Dog Fancy’s specialty publications.

More on those later. For now, check out the overhauled reporterbarnes.com. With an updated credit list and a new layout, it looks a lot better than basic design I put together almost three years ago.

Stay tuned for more travel tips, random links and updates on my work. Stephanie and I moved to Charlottesville, Va., over the 4th of July. Now that we’re settled in, I hope to post here on a regular basis once again.

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Back from Peru!

Dec 11

Posted by Peter in Uncategorized


 

* Photos (c) Peter Barnes

We departed for South America two weeks ago. Four cities, 13,000 feet of elevation gain, 4 ceviches, countless pisco sours and two guinea pigs later, I’m happy to say we’re back and had a great time. I’m still playing catch up following our red-eye flight Thursday, so I’ll post details later. Meantime, I hope you enjoy the pics.

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Houston magazine arts issue now on stands

Dec 6

Posted by Peter in Uncategorized

Check it out here. This issue was a lot of fun, and I wrote stories ranging from the FOB philanthropy timeline, to the feature on private art collections on public view, to the blurbs in the main story on international art, Galveston’s gallery scene and other topics.

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What’s wasting my time these days

Nov 30

Posted by Peter in Uncategorized

A friend introduced me to Top Gear recently, and I’ve been painfully distracted ever since. First off it’s British, so the hosts’ general sensibilities tend to be hilarious, regardless of what they’re saying. Second, they don’t just test drive Ferraris and Zondas.
topgear
They attempt to cross the English channel in sealed-up jalopies fitted with outboards, they cross Vietnam on tiny scooters, they get pulled over multiple times driving muscle cars across the United States. If you need to escape for some some non-holiday-related entertainment, this is a good source.

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Culturemap now online!

Nov 24

Posted by Peter in Uncategorized

About a month ago, the former style editor at the Chronicle approached me about a new arts and entertainment site for Houston. Culturemap.com is now live and offers a bevy of activities, happenings and news from some of the best freelance writers in town. They even hired away Shelby Hodge, legendary society and entertaining-Houston-rich-people columnist from the Chronicle.
The best part? I now have a weekly column on outdoor sports. Check it out.

columnshot

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Why buy something ridiculous when you can rent instead?

Nov 17

Posted by Peter in Uncategorized

My contribution to this month’s Houston magazine (pg. 68) explores some of the more obscure luxury items available for rent.

nov09hml

For example, a thrifty $19,900 gets you in to a Houston car club that loans out Lamborghinis, Bentleys and the like for a few days at a time. You can rent a elephant – conveniently located in Dallas – from a film production company for $10,000 for your next schindig, or you and several hundred of your closest friends can rent the entire Houston Zoo for $25,000.

Considered, but left off the list: a private island off Belize, rental couture handbags and fine art rental marketed to corporate offices.

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World’s most expensive car driven into lagoon

Nov 15

Posted by Peter in Uncategorized

For all of you who live outside Houston and didn’t see this on the front page of the local daily, a local rich guy drove a $1.5 million Bugatti Veyron off the road the other day. Initially blaming the crash on a low-flying pelican and, later, his cell phone, the driver plowed into a lagoon alongside the I-45 where salt water quickly worked its way through the 16-cylinder, 1,001-horsepower engine that helps make the Veyron the fastest car in the world.

Even more remarkable, the owner of the purchased toy repairs wrecked exotic cars for a living.

This has my vote for the “Hey, Mable!” story (as we endangered newspaper types call them) of the year.

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Catching up

Nov 14

Posted by Peter in Uncategorized

Don’t you just love it when someone keeps a blog, neglects it, then starts the first post in a month with a boring mea culpa about why the posts haven’t been more frequent? My bad …

Fortunately, I’ve been busy since my last dispatch. Houston magazine assigned me three fairly involved stories for their December issue, and I picked up a corporate client who found me through my Web site. Meantime, the following stories ran and/or were made available to me:

- A feature on the Reliable Source, the National Press Club bar, in Bartender Magazine
- An FOB on leasing the luxury lifestyle in Houston magazine
- Another short feature for American City and County on converting school playgrounds to public parks
- An A1 story in the venerable Washington Times on immigration enforcement in a Houston jail

I’ve also been working on a column for Culturemap.com, a killer new site edited by the Chron’s former style editor that has some of Houston’s best freelancers keeping the world posted on the city’s arts, entertainment, food and news.

In other news, preparations for Peru are going well, and I’m planning a road trip north for Christmas that should take me through Acuna, Mexico en route to Phoenix, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Stay tuned.

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November Cruising World now on stands

Oct 26

Posted by Peter in Freelance

CWgalvestonsmall
I picked up the latest copy of my favorite sailing magazine, and I’m stoked to announce that my piece on Hurricane Ike recovery is inside. It’s a department, so nothing terribly long. But, it might just open up the door to a feature I’ve wanted to pitch them for years.

I’d written this following a positive response to a query, but still on spec.
At one point the source for my art fell through, and I wasn’t sure this was going to come together. I had to run back to Galveston to take some photos, and seeing one of them published above my story made my day.

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Writer mills: Exploitative? You bet. A threat to me? Not really.

Oct 24

Posted by Peter in Freelance

This month’s Wired has a great story on the the $1 billion company behind Demand Studios.

It’s fascinating. They’ve developed an algorithm that analyzes data from Google and other sources, spits out topics for “articles” and calculates how much money that content can bring in from ads over its life on the net. Afterward, an assembly line forms, starting with people who refine the algorithm’s titles for 8 cents apiece (“how to cake roses,” for example, becomes “how to make icing roses for a cake”) and feed them into the Demand Studios site. There, “writers” pick topics and fill a template with relevant details for up to $15 per article. An editor reads each piece for $2.50 a pop, and the results power sites like ehow.com, livestrong.com (Lance Armstrong is an investor) and a raft of other content sites. The individual pages generate very small returns, but the sheer volume of words the system creates makes it a profitable and fast-growing endeavor.

Naturally, many people who make their living writing for reputable print and Web publication view this as an affront to the value of their work. Good writing, solid research, integrity and the other traits of a successful freelancer are worth more than 2 cents per word (20 to 50 times more, in fact). That people are willing to devalue their own work to the degree required to work for Demand, Helium.com, Suite101.com, Examiner.com and the like cheapens the craft, many say, and drives down the value of the work done by the professionals.

Yet, I’ve begun to think that the proliferation of writer mills will have a negligible effect on professional freelancing in the long run. Here’s the short of it: Journalism and Web content production aren’t the same thing, and as such they draw from two distinct labor markets. Successful Web content sites require high search engine rankings and volume, as opposed to good writing and original research. Creating that content requires a combination of Web surfing, data entry and the language skills of a native speaker with a high-school degree. In short, it’s unskilled labor. Anyone who speaks English can do it.

Journalism — the hard work of interviewing, researching and writing about what we discover in a way that is fresh and compelling — is different. It’s a profession in the sense that it requires a set of hard-earned skills to do well. A limited number of people have what it takes to write for a magazine, and pay rates will reflect that limited supply.

I imagine many of my colleagues are concerned that hordes of content drones eventually will vie for more high-profile work, ask for only 10 cents per word (a 500 percent raise!) and price the rest of us out of a middle-class living. There are a couple reasons why that’s unlikely. First, it’s pretty damn easy to compete with someone whose best writing sample consists of 600 words entitled “The Best Ways to Reduce Your Dog’s Flatulence” that was researched on Wikipedia and dashed off in 40 minutes. Second, anyone who churns out the volume of stories needed to earn worthwhile money writing for content sites is unlikely to have much time to work on projects that would actually bolster his or her portfolio. Demand recently announced that it will offer access to a health insurance plan to some of its writers. That’s great, but it’s also a cunning way to keep Demand’s top producers writing indefinitely for pennies.

Meanwhile, the number of writers walking the tough road toward a career in real freelance journalism will actually shrink. A smaller number will start out in the church newsletter or a friend’s blog, finagling their byline into tiny publications, then leveraging modest clips with great story ideas to craft portfolios that grow with the writers’ skill, connections and business savvy. Instead, many aspiring freelancers will take the $15, hone their speed-writing skills and trade a hard climb toward professionalism for the instant gratification of a job on the assembly line.

As someone who writes stories that are worth a lot more than $15 to the people who assign them, a market full of unskilled workers spinning their wheels at Demand Studios only makes me look more professional by contrast.

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