It has been brought to my attention that I haven't posted anything lately. Some of you may have noticed the change, but don't feel bad if you didn't. In fact, I can't really say even I was aware of this fact except in an abstract way or, even more surprisingly, that I had such a loyal readership who would notice such things.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! It has been 4 months since my last confession. As you all know, I'm back in Madrid until August and have been enjoying my time so far. I was going to start this re-inaugural post by introducing y'all to my new digs, having sadly relocated from that impossibly tiny closet/room I was inhabiting in the fall, but then I realized that this was as close as I would ever get to visitors and that maybe I should make the bed before I take pictures to post all over the internet. You never know - there may be people out there who are dying to hire me for some incredibly cool and well-paying job and who miraculously also happen to read this blog and who would be completely turned off by the mussed blanket and lack of wall decoration. Therefore, regretfully, I am postponing that post until a later date when I can be bothered with things like making myself look presentable.
So what exactly have I been doing here if I don't spend my time making my bed or fashioning hip wall decorations from found objects? Pretty much the same things I do when not living abroad - namely wasting time on the internet, spending time with friends and struggling to communicate in the simplest of situations (okay, maybe with the exception of that last one). My Spanish skills (or should I say "skillz") have improved to the point where I can confidently know how much the cashier at the grocery store is asking me to pay her without looking at the register's display, but not to the point where I can adequately ward off the advances of the creepy janitor guy in the same grocery store.
The most "productive" way I spend my time is editing (and very occasionally writing) stories for MAP, an online magazine about Madrid. Although I must admit that this takes up far less of my life than I would like, I do enjoy what time I get to spend on it and (future employers kindly skip down to the next paragraph now) it sounds really excellent on my resume, considering the actual amount of work required. It's actually a very informative and well-written "zine" but probably not at all interesting if you don't live in or ever plan on visiting Madrid.
I should maybe add that this job was ridiculously easy to get, especially considering how the other English magazine in this town completely ignored my pleas for employment. I think it may be the only time in my life that I will meet someone who seems genuinely impressed that I actually have a degree in journalism and thinks that it might be useful or, say, actually qualify me to do something useful. Perhaps based on the (mistaken) idea that I know what I'm doing, the "real" editors (as in, the guys who have their money invested in the site) have spent a lot of time consulting with me recently about business plans and how an operation like theirs works.
This, while nice, is obviously misguided. The fact that I have a degree in journalism should key them (or anyone) into realizing something about me: namely, journalists are bad at business. Journalists are the kind of people who want to bring down the machine, or at least they usually start that way (with the possible exception of those strange ones who only want to cover entertainment "news", but I don’t really count them as journalists, so it's a moot point). And since they ALWAYS consider themselves so much above "business" (best said with a grimacing facial distortion) they end up sucking at business. "The news," they will tell you, "shouldn't need to make money." And this is why our society is now trapped in a vacuum of crappy corporate news. If only journalists could figure out how to make the news make money, we might be able to break away from News Corp. and Time Warner and all of them, but they cant, so we don't. It's all very tragic.
This all brings me back to MAP. When they started the magazine they thought they had a great idea - a site updated daily with new, fun, cool, trendy things to do in Madrid. They thought if they made a site and slapped up some ads that soon they would be rolling in the dough. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a very naive business "plan". In its two years of existence, the site has cost these guys much more than it's ever generated. This is all very useful information for someone like me to have.
Now we come to the interesting/sad part. Since this is a commercial world and we live in the google era, it turns out that in order to make any money (or indeed, to break even!) you have to hawk hotel rooms and plane tickets, cater to a more elite audience and strip all originality from your writing in order to seek the good favor of the holiest of all deities: Google (and their search engine kin, the lesser gods of the internet). Search engine optimization is so much more valuable than interesting writing. So now many of our witty headlines and zippy opening lines are being systematically replaced with boring google-friendly ones. The good news is that I can now say I have experience with SEO!
One last little tidbit about the adventure with the magazine. In their quest to reinvent the magazine as something financially self-sustaining, a lot of travel guide-style content is being added, as quickly as possible, in order to build up a base. Although the site was always meant to be a guide to an extent, it was supposed to be a "locals" guide. Now they're adding a lot more information (why would someone who lives here need to know about expensive hotels?), including a lot of historical articles about various landmarks. I volunteered to write several of these but before I got a chance - get this - the job was outsourced to India! I always thought that my job as a native English-speaking volunteer writer would be safe from outsourcing, but it turns out that the Indians seem to have excellent English and can churn out really superior articles at an extremely high 20 landmarks a day for less than a cup of coffee (or something). Oh well.
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