Beggars, choosers, and the new media

I just finished reading a piece in The Globe and Mail by an unemployed graphic designer who is now on welfare and struggling to regain her dignity. "Curious, powerful, capable; pushed down, scolded, reduced," is how she summarizes her current state.

The pathetic irony of this article is that The Globe and Mail, a highly profitable newspaper jointly owned by Canada's wealthiest family (the Thomsons) and the BCE conglomerate, states in its essay guide, linked at the top of this woman's article: "There is no payment if your essay is published."

And there you have it. A media professional whose job was outsourced to India, a single mother on welfare, writes about her plight in Canada's newspaper of record, which does not pay her a cent for her work. Thus continues the cycle of this "curious, powerful, capable" professional being "pushed down, scolded, reduced."

This practice is not unique to The Globe and Mail, though. The paper is only adhering to current market rates for talent, which is zero. It never used to be this way. Blame the internet, I suppose.

I was first exposed to this practice while working as a magazine editor in Singapore. I thought it was abhorrent, but at the time I thought it was just the ethics of media in that region of the world, and I'd have to suck it up until I returned to Canada. The first time I was asked to solicit contributions for our magazine while offering no compensation, I was mortified. I countered to our publisher that no half-decent writer would contribute a travel article or a personal story without being given at least a token payment. And even if they did, I simply had a problem with the ethics of being an editor for a lucrative magazine and not even offering a token honorarium, especially when we're the ones asking for the work.

But what did I know? The publisher informed me that this was the way it had been done since long before I arrived, and she wasn't about to submit to my idealism. As it turned out, my call for submissions yielded a small flood of decently written pieces. What was in it for the writers? The chance to see their names in print and show it off to friends. That was enough.

When I took sole editorship of the company's travel guide that year, a huge chunk of it was made possible not only by generous writers, but by semi-professional photographers who were happy to donate their work. When I needed, say, a photo of an impecunious little girl selling postcards in a Cambodian market (to go along with a story that one of our scribes had related), Flickr came to the rescue when our own stock photo sources failed to deliver. In every such case, I would contact the owner of the photos for permission, and to my surprise, they were always (with one exception) enthusiastic and thrilled. I would offer a free copy of the magazine as compensation.

The irony is that the "old media" (printed magazines) that we were publishing would not have been possible without the advent of "new media". Digital cameras made it possible for our writers to take their own quality photos while on assignments. The internet made it easy to solicit writers who were happy to get exposure for no pay. Blogs also made it simple for good writers to make themselves known to us, who didn't want to get caught up with sticky matters like invoices and cheques. Google and Wikipedia made it easy to check facts and perform research in a matter of seconds or minutes, whereas such tasks would have once required a trip to the library. And while we paid our graphic designers, technology like Adobe InDesign made it easy to crank out multiple titles a month using a couple of overworked design grads, especially when editors such as myself were giving them a head start by doing some basic layouts of our articles in advance.

The reliance on donated labour and DIY technology was even more dramatic in my next position, where I was editor-in-chief of a free custom publication that was distributed to members of a Singapore social club. Where in my previous job we relied chiefly on staff writers, at this new job I was the sole full-time staff member. The only other employee, our graphic designer, was half-time (though often worked full-time hours). The modus operandi here was to never pay for anything, ever. (I exaggerate: we did throw a few bucks a month to a stock-photo agency, which we used sparingly.) When the publisher wanted me to stock up on "stand-by" articles that might never be published, I drew a line and said that it was necessary to offer the writers something if we couldn't stroke their egos by publishing their work in a timely manner. After all, they were only doing this to build a portfolio and see their names in print. If we were going to sit on their contributions for six months or forever, then the least we should do is offer a gift certificate donated by an advertiser. No-go, the publisher said. Didn't want to set a precedent.

The trick to getting people to submit free articles and photos was to be overwhelmingly nice and gracious. Promise a prominent layout, a byline in large typeset, and a free copy of the magazine. And when their work was good enough to ask for more, then I'd pay a huge compliment: "Wonderful article, very poetic and descriptive. Thanks for doing this. I'd be happy to print your next article if you can keep them coming." For the most part, this relationship-building worked well. Until the publisher wanted me to be more demanding and less nice; then I knew my position was untenable.

Here's the thing. There were many significant experiences I had in Singapore where I'd shake my head and say, "That would never happen in Canada." Yet I came home only to find that nothing was really that different here, either.

The way media talent has been devalued is one such example. I started to hear stories about print media in North America relying far more heavily on unpaid internships, with some even charging their workers a fee for the privilege. I accepted the new reality and I pitched my own essays to Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail. To no avail, but I kept trying. Being on the other side of the equation now, I too would have been happy to see my name in print and build a portfolio with some major-media clippings.

I eventually caught a small break when an editor for a local newspaper found my blog. He liked one of my posts and wanted to put it up on the paper's website. No compensation, of course. I agreed, hoping it would lead to paid assignments. It didn't. Some months after the article went public, I had a change of heart, as I was anticipating the necessity of looking for work in Asia again, and some of the opinions I expressed could be a barrier to employment in certain parts of the world. I contacted the publisher and asked if the article could be taken off the site. (I realize that the accepted wisdom is that once something is on the internet, it's there for good. But the article hadn’t been reproduced elsewhere, as far as Google told me, and I expect the cached version to disappear over time.)

The editorial team said, "Our policy is to not remove content," but after a couple of polite exchanges, they said they would delete the article. However, I got a little lecture in the final e-mail. This "represents a waste of our time, money, and energy to devote to something which then gets deleted."

How soon we forget about the days before the internet, when time, money and energy would be devoted to putting something in print and then get thrown in a recycling box and completely disappear from public view after a day or a week. Not only that, every single word in those pages was paid for. Now we're in an age when someone gives us an article for free to distribute on a world-wide network forever, and publishers get their shorts in a knot when the author asks for the delete key to be struck after several months of availability.

The final note concluded: "We will make an exception in this case. However, this would preclude you from writing for us again." That kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Not because I want to write for them again, but because they asked me for the piece.

I think back to the gratitude I showed our volunteer contributors in Singapore, because, really, they kept me employed. The more of their work I stuffed into my magazines, the better I looked. "Here's the quality work I can produce on zero budget." If one of my volunteer writers had asked for an article to come off our website, I would have happily complied. After all, their part in enhancing my profile was done, and if my company had been so concerned about time and resources being wasted, then I'd think we could have prevented that by paying a token amount for the work and agreeing to ownership ahead of publication. In the end, we had gotten far more than we paid for.

I do realize how fortunate I was. I'm aware that if I had been dealing with a major organization like The Globe and Mail, my request likely would have been ignored. But this is the thing that gets me: This particular weekly is a left-wing paper that continually challenges the behaviour of major conglomerates, including their competition. This paper helped shape my values when I started reading it as a young adult, and all of the ethics that I carried into my media work were developed by years of reading principled journalists – including the ones in this newspaper, which remains one of my favourites. So to be given a little bit of lip and banished as a future writer, over work that I volunteered to them at their request, just made me shake my head in sadness to realize that this is what all media has been diminished to. Even this paper, which has been a steadfast supporter of labour movements, can afford to alienate contributors over minor matters because they probably have no difficulty finding other unpaid correspondents.

The lesson I've learned from this is that it's not worth it for any writer to give away free content that ends up on the internet. There was a time when a journalist, photographer or fiction writer could break into the industry by donating work to publications. Nowadays, you're not really breaking into anything but a competition with bloggers and Flickr members who will be happy to undercut you to see their name pop up in search engines. Besides, if you're never paid for your writing and you're not one of the lucky ones who gets offered a movie deal for your blog, you'll have to make a living somehow, and whatever you're writing about will only be open to judgment by HR personnel and managers who Google your name.

I've had another thought about that welfare recipient who donated the story of her plight to The Globe and Mail. Maybe she was being clever. Perhaps this was her grand, last-ditch effort to get noticed, and possibly someone will take pity and give her a job. We think that beggars can't be choosers, but the reality of the new media is proving that cliché wrong. So if an unemployed graphic designer is going to take advantage of that to do some begging herself, then good on her for playing the game.

But I have to say, if this is the new paradigm in the freelance racket, where begging and choosing is turning into a defeating feedback loop, I'm not that keen to fight my way into it.

Update, Oct 16, 2013: I am aware that my story is just one tiny drop in a very large, quickly filling bucket. The pattern of writers being insulted and shunned for putting some value on their work is endemic throughout all hemispheres and various levels of media. Here's just one example (Academic calls Philip Hensher priggish and ungracious for refusing to write an introduction to his guide on Berlin). If widely respected authors are enduring this, there's no hope for freelancers or those trying to make a name for themselves.

Dear Taiwanese friends; here's why we can't pronounce your names

It's easy for us in the West to take for granted that Asians feel compelled to assume English names when immigrating to our countries. In fact, our culture demands it. While we're accommodating to all the Diegos and Stanislavs and Gethsemanes who come from other distant corners of the world, for some reason we refuse to cut any slack to Dong Hyun, Zhen Yi, or Yusuke. "Can I just call you John?" is what most of us would ask.

I've generally been sensitive about the names I use for my foreign friends. When I become close to someone, I'll ask what their native name is. Half the time, my acquaintance prefers his English name. "Don't ever call me Ming Han. Only my mom calls me that, and usually when she's mad." The other half the time, I get a response like, "I love my Chinese name. I only picked an English name because I felt I had to, so I'm really happy if you call me Wei Cheng."

"Patrick" and "Alan"

There was a telling moment when I was staying in Taiwan. My friend from Malaysia, Shen Siung, came to visit me and my friend Tzuching. These were the names I had always known them by. Yet when they met, they called each other Patrick and Alan. Here I was trying to respect their culture by using their proper Mandarin Chinese names, but even with each other, these two Chinese men reverted to English names. I was astounded. I looked at them both and asked what was going on.

Shen Siung said, "You Westerners don't know how to pronounce our names properly." But you guys aren't Westerners, I replied. After some more probing, I got what he meant: Western culture imposed on them spellings that even they couldn't understand. The confusion was borne out of the antiquated and byzantine system of romanization that Taiwan and Malaysia had adopted. During the discussion, I came to realize that I had been mispronouncing their names since the days when I first met them, and they were too polite to correct me.

Learning Chinese in Taipei

The method of romanizing Mandarin Chinese used by the Taiwanese was invented in the mid-1800s by academics named Wade and Giles, and thus it was unsubtly christened the Wade-Giles system. However, the system recognized by the International Organization for Standardization is a creation from the mid-1950s called pinyin. Because it was developed by China's Communist government, the Taiwanese shunned pinyin to distinguish a separate identity from the mainland. Fully adopting pinyin would have been seen by many as a form of linguistic treason. (Pinyin has been used to some degree in Taiwan for the past decade, but more about that later.)

Consider the grief that this stubbornness causes. Coming back to my friends Shen Siung and Tzuching, here are their names in pinyin: Shan Xiong and Zi Jing. Actual pronunciation: Shan Shee-ong and Dz-Jing. Neither Wade-Giles nor pinyin represent an exact phonetic transliteration (the linguistic term for "translating" a character-based language into a phonetic alphabet), but which one do you find more accurate?

Learning pinyin, a writing
assignment from week-one
of Chinese class.

To be frank, there is actually no single perfect system of transliterating Mandarin Chinese into our Roman alphabet. That's because there are subtle sounds in Mandarin that don't have an English equivalent. (In linguistics, these sounds are called phonemes.) For instance, our ch phoneme comes from placing the tongue on the roof of the mouth, coming out like chuh. In Chinese, there are two ch phonemes – one similar to ours, and another made with the tongue extended closer to the teeth, sounding like chee. It's the same with sh – one from the front of the mouth, another from the back.

The challenge in romanizing Chinese is to imagine new letter combinations that represent these different phonemes. Between Wade-Giles and pinyin, the most accurate in many people's opinion is the latter.

Many aspects of Wade-Giles resemble a bit of a linguistic joke. Take, for instance, Peking. That was the old spelling of China's capital city before the nation formally adopted pinyin in the 1970s. (Peking was actually a French-missionary spelling, not Wade-Giles, which would have been Peiching, but still an interesting example.) I had always been curious as to why China changed the name to Beijing. But, in fact, bay-jing has always been the pronunciation. 

In Taiwan, however, they continue to insist on phonetic spellings that often bear no relation to actual pronunciation. The city of Kaohsiung is one good example. Kow-see-ung is how I always spoke it. In fact, it's closer to gao-shee-ong. And did you know that Taipei is actually tai-bei? In fact, there is a method to the Wade-Giles madness, a formula to explain how "k" becomes "g" and "p" becomes "b", but it's not worth explaining here, as it remains understood only by academics. The Taiwanese layman generally has no clue as to the workings of the nation's transliteration system.

This is not to say that pinyin is flawless. With the example of Kaohsiung, the pinyin spelling is Gaoxiong. The "x" would throw off native English speakers. It's not easy to intuit that it represents a sh phoneme. However, here's what pinyin does to make the learning and intuition of the system easier: it makes use of redundant Roman letters to represent phonemes that aren't replicated in English. While the letter combination "sh" in pinyin represents its English equivalent, "x" represents the softer sh with the tongue extended. Similarly, "ch" is self-explanatory, but "q" is the letter that represents ch with the tongue moved toward the teeth.

Wade-Giles is misleading by taking common letters and changing their vocalizations. Let's look at Kaohsiung again. The sound of the letter "k" in English is made with a burst of air but no vocalization. The letter "g" is like "k" but with a vocalization. Why should the "g" phoneme end up being represented by the letter "k"? Again, we can look at Peking (Peiching) and Taipei – the "b" phoneme (made with vocal chords) ended up being represented by the letter "p". You will find this replacement of vocalized and non-vocalized letters and phonemes all throughout the Wade-Giles system.

When pinyin needs to use a letter to represent a phoneme not found in English, it uses letters with similar English phonemes, making the pronunciation of a word easier to intuit. With that in mind, look at the difference between Tsingtao and Qingdao, the same Chinese city before and after pinyin was adopted. Neither has a completely intuitive spelling for native-English speakers. But the former version uses "ts" for a soft ch phoneme, and "t" (non-vocalized) for d phoneme (vocalized). In pinyin, the temptation might be to pronounce Qingdao as king-dow, but once you learn that the "q" is a soft ch, it's not as hard to wrap your head around that as it is to think of "t" forming a d phoneme. The old spelling of Tsingtao has the potential for a reader to misunderstand two phonemes, whereas the pinyin Qingdao only offers one misleading phoneme. It's not perfect, as no language system is, but it does the job more efficiently.

So that explains the problem Westerners have pronouncing names that use the Wade-Giles system. We meet Mao Tse-Tung and we pronounce his name phonetically. In fact, it's not t-see-tung but dzeh-dong. (Wade-Giles even changes the phonemes of the vowels by using tung for dong.) The pinyin spelling, Mao Zedong, is more likely to elicit a correct pronunciation, making Mr. Mao less likely to say, "Just call me Dave."

Try it with this Wade-Giles name: Hsien Chiu. Did you say huh-see-en chee-oo? Now in pinyin: Xian Jiu. I bet you're closer to the actual pronunciation: shee-an jee-oh.

I am not a linguist and I have not done any studies or serious readings on this subject. I am in no way an expert. However, I think my layman's observations are probably more relevant than an expert's opinion, because you shouldn't have to be an academic to pronounce the name of the street you see on a map, or a city you want to visit, or to greet a new friend or employee.

I should also state that I have simplified Taiwan's linguistic predicament in this post for the sake of clarity. It's actually more of a mess than I let on. Taiwan did adopt something called Tongyong Pinyin between 2002 and 2008, which was a sort of compromise that would have allowed Taiwan to ditch Wade-Giles while not conforming to mainland China's system. Standard pinyin (called Hanyu Pinyin) has since been adopted officially, but the government continues to abide with a jumble of systems – in Taipei (Wade-Giles) you can find Jhongjheng Road (Tongyong Pinyin) and visit the Xindian district (Hanyu Pinyin) or take the train to Tamsui (Wade-Giles). Birth certificates and passports in Taiwan, as far as I can tell, are still being issued mostly with Wade-Giles transliterations.

All of this just creates unnecessary stumbling blocks for those of us who are learning Chinese and must use some form of romanization to grasp pronunciation. Westerners living in Taiwan can regale you with stories about the inanity of signs being replaced and re-replaced, and systems being adopted, modified and reverted, depending on which party (the pro-China KMT or the pro-independence DPP) is in power, which county or city you're in, or which constituency is most vocal about its preference at any given time.

In the meantime, here's my advice for any Chinese person dealing with Westerners. If you absolutely want to ditch your Chinese name, by all means, take an English one. If you like your Chinese name and you have a Wade-Giles spelling, adopt a pinyin rendering (or even something more phonetic if necessary). And if we still can't pronounce it, teach us. After all, if you took the time to learn our entire language, we can take the time to learn your name.