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Jumping From Journalism
By Michael Abrams

Author Bio

Both technical writing and journalism appeal to people who love to write and are capable of doing it professionally. But technical writing is a growing field aligned with the future. Print journalism has been in retreat ever since television took over, with the Internet just accelerating the trend. This imbalance is creating a growing pull on journalists.

Money plays a role, but opportunity is the main force. Freelance journalists (as well as cub reporters) are truly among the earth’s wretched. The rule of thumb is $1 a word for freelance copy. National magazines sometimes pay three or more times that, but the work is hard to come by. The New York Times pays $15 an hour to stringers, which is a typical rate. A career journalist I know, who strings for national trade publications and news outlets, tells me the most he ever earned freelancing was $38,000 annually, and that included no benefits. Some make more, but they are the exceptions, as many do worse.

Journalists who make it onto the staffs of trade publications and magazines and some newspaper reporters do better. Journeymen reporters at The San Diego Union-Tribune make between $50,000 and $60,000—not that much when you consider the pressure but still a living wage. But the odds of landing such positions are increasingly unfavorable now that the UT has shifted to a two-tier pay structure. Hard-working cub reporters, dubbed "community news writers," now make about $25,000 a year, far less than entry reporters would have earned even five years ago.

Vanishing Act

Mirroring national trends, the local print scene has seen substantial shrinkage at the major news organs at the same time that the number of employers of technical writers has mushroomed. Over the last decade The Los Angeles Times pulled the plug on its San Diego edition; the Copley Press merged The Union and The Tribune; Oceanside’s Blade-Citizen and Escondido’s Times Advocate were combined as The North County Times; and The San Diego Reader purged most salaried long-time writers. JournalismJobs.Com posted 57 journalism jobs in all of California in July. Of these, only two were in San Diego, one seeking a video editor at Channel 4 and the other an advertising position for a scuba diving magazine.

Publications Specialist Marsha Fickas used to string for the Times Advocate and AP in Temecula. At the end of July, she checked the number of job leads the San Diego Press Association had posted. She reported there were only two, and they were both for high-level managers. In comparison, the dwindling stream of tech writing jobs seems, from a journalist’s perspective, like a flood of opportunity.

It’s hard to say with precision the number of journalists who have already beaten the path. STC’s Ed Rutkowski, an editorial assistant at STC headquarters, e-mails me to say that the organization’s database isn’t equipped to respond to a query about previous careers of members. But evidence handed over by Signature Associate Editor Sharon Bradshaw attests to a healthy migration.

In a recent thread on STC’s Lone Writer SIG Listserv (www.stcsig.org/lw/listserv.htm), members shared biographical information. Of the 62 respondents, 12 confessed to having committed journalism in the past, mostly in college or small trade publications. That compares to 15 people with other sorts of writing credentials and 15 who were "techies" up front. Others entered the field from a variety of other backgrounds, including art historian, song writer, and waitress. (The numbers don’t add up because of overlap and, also, because some people didn’t give enough information to be counted.)

What’s the Difference?

Though kindred disciplines, journalism and tech writing have differences, and it’s revealing to try to tease them out.

• Generalists vs. Specialists. A piece of print journalism or a broadcast segment aims at either informing or entertaining an audience at leisure. In contrast, the mission of a technical writer is to document and often tell readers how to do something, usually about a technological or business process or object. That often means delving into the very details journalists are free to ignore.
  

Of course, there are exceptions. White papers and other technical materials, including too-cryptic help documentation, sometimes leave out the details. Meanwhile, some of the longer features in niche-directed newsletters can be very detailed without providing full documentation. Still, I believe I’m on firm ground asserting that journalists are master generalists, while tech writers master the details. Many things flow from this.

• Only the Facts: Given its broader mission, good journalists spend lots of time setting the context. But a technical writer often addresses people under stress. When the software won’t load or a printer won’t plot or a piece of equipment has to be serviced in the field, readers don’t have to be told why they’ve grabbed the manual.
  

• Nattering Nabobs: Journalists, hoping to generate reader interest, are prone to sensationalism and negativity. A tech writer, in contrast, often handles material that some journalists might think boring, and rarely is a tech writer a naysayer.
  

• Form Following Function: Suzanne Hosie, owner of Write on the Edge, Inc., has observed stylistic differences. A journalist may engage in sentence contortion to avoid repeating a word in a paragraph, lest the flow of the article be interrupted. But tech writers often repeat words in their texts when it makes things easier to understand.
  

  I’ve also noticed that some tech writers don’t mind using personal relative pronouns (that is, who, whom, and whose) for the inanimate (that is, for a piece of software or hardware or a process). The practice horrifies journalists. While it also horrifies some technical writers and editors, others shrug it off, countering that anything that eases understanding is beneficial, including even occasionally violating a grammar rule. Journalists have their religious wars too but this isn’t one of them.
  

  Knowledge Manager Patrick Morrissey, who escaped from television journalism more than 15 years ago, says the key difference between the two disciplines is varying "windows" of time and access. Journalists are regularly terrorized by three forces: too little time to report a story, too little time or space to tell it, and limited access to sources. Tech writers also face similar pressures, but they don’t regularly have to turn out copy in the space of a few hours, nor do they find their work threaded between the advertisements.
  

  Because newspaper and magazine column inches are expensive, only the most important articles are supplemented by photos or graphics, leaving room for the ads. But tech documents often have numerous graphics to illustrate instructions or steps in a process. Often the flow of a document will come from the graphics.
  

• Culture: There are cultural differences as well. Journalists operate as outsiders. Even if they are contractors, tech writers are in the company employ, normally gaining access a journalist would envy, even if it’s never enough. In tech writing a premium is placed on collaborative skills and teamwork, while many journalists like to think of themselves as lone wolves.
  
  Tech writers esteem technological know-how. They regularly boast of being masters of the latest tools. Many tech writers fall into the profession after developing expertise in a technological area. Morrissey, for example, was a network administrator when he started documenting processes and programs for his employers. Of the lone writers mentioned earlier, 25 moved into technical writing when nobody else was available to do the job or when a position opened.
  
  It can’t hurt for a journalist who wants to be a tech writer to learn something technical. Being able to extract information engineering source materials, for example, is the type of skill that could come in handy, but coming up with a full list of such skills is fodder for another article.