We're all faking it | #167
"If you want to call yourself a journalist, you can call yourself a journalist."
▶️Last week: How I made my AI Twin
▶️Today's topic: Imposter syndrome
"We wondered if you'd be interested in this project and how you'd approach it, given that you market yourself as a content strategist."
👀Imposter syndrome oh yesss. Last year, I was asked to do a content audit for a client’s website redesign. 12 websites to mine for data to help with comms planning for 2024. I've done mini-content audits before, but nothing on this scale.
After reading the brief, my inner critic, Nancy, kicked off. "You can't do this. Turn it down. You don't know what you're doing."
But it was five weeks' work, pre-Xmas, proper freelance (no PAYE), and GREAT money, so I said yes.
On the first call, I tried to sound confident and ask the right questions so they'd know I was up to the job. I was a bit vague about process and said I'd need to read the docs and have a think. Asking about templates fell flat. The PM looked at me. "There are no templates; we've got to build it from scratch.” Nancy again 🤦🏻♀️ “I can’t believe you just asked her about templates.”
They took a punt on me anyway and offered me the job. Maybe desperate, I hope not.
How I did it
Panicked for two days. Read some articles. Read the classic books on content strategy by Kristina Halvorson and Meghan Casey.
Bought a handbook on content audits (God bless you, Paula Ladenburg Land, for writing this wonderful book!).
Found a template I could tweak (thanks, Lauren Pope). Emailed her for a quick chat to understand her process - turns out she made the template!
Asked ChatGPT loads of questions. I'm not an advanced Excel user and wasn't sure how to validate data.
Transparency. Wrote down what I’d do and what tools I needed so the team could review and feedback. They seemed happy with that. It helped that they had no clue either.
Taught myself how to use SEO tools: Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and Google Analytics.
Broke it down into small jobs. Doing a little bit each day made it feel manageable.
As hairy as it was, I'm glad I went for it. I had a supportive team and a fantastic PM who let me get on with it. If she'd micromanaged me, I'd have been a nervous wreck. I need to be on a looooong leash.
It made me realise that the quantitative data is useful to a point. "Data refines the work we do but shouldn't define it." (love this,
). The human side: HCP interviews and focus groups were more helpful. Understanding people's challenges and designing a digital experience to support them.I could see how much knowledge and context the PM had - that's her superpower (as well as being a data whizz). She'd been working with this client for a while, and knew their goals and the bottlenecks - info I didn't have as an outsider. That took the pressure off as I could only do the job I'd been hired for.
What I do find weird is the feeling when you finish a big project. One day, you're working closely with the team; the next, they're gone. You probably won't see them again. I missed the office banter, the silly hats and little chats.
NUJ Coffee Morning
This week, we did a workshop on Imposter Syndrome w/
founder Lily Canter, which made me reflect on all this. There were over 40 people on the call. It’s a BIG deal.
There was less on the psychology behind IS (I'm not sure that's so helpful anyway) and more practical tips to overcome it.
Journalism is not actually a profession; it's not like being a doctor, vet, or lawyer, where you have to pass certain exams or have certificates. It's actually, by definition, a trade that anyone can do.
If you want to call yourself a journalist, you can call yourself a journalist.
Funny how it can feel like an exclusive members' club. That can be intimidating, especially when you're starting out.
It comes down to self-confidence, knowledge, and building your network.
I agree that freelancing with multiple clients can create a sense of disconnect. I feel that. You're working on short-term projects. You can't get too involved, so you hold yourself back. I keep my Harry Potter Invisibility Cloak on!
You have no single sense of identity as a freelancer. You don't belong to one institution. You're not an expert on a topic unless you have a 'beat'. You're dipping in and out as a generalist and you’re always doing new things.*
People can be critical about that, and it used to bother me. Feeling like a jack of all trades.
You’re also dealing with rejection and ghosting when pitching for work. All these feelings compound over time, and it can be overwhelming. You can get a bit lost.
*I now see this as my superpower.
Solutions!
Don't let imposter syndrome hold you back. Use the feelings of inadequacy and discomfort to take action rather than procrastinate.
Take stock of everything you've done. Gather cuttings, testimonials and feedback (print emails and keep a 'Praise' file). You have a body of work which you can use to sell yourself.
Take action. Build your digital brand - website, socials and email signature ("often overlooked, but it might be the only thing an editor looks at, so make it good."). Have a portfolio. I like Muck Rack as it automatically updates and pulls from the web (all your Substack posts!). You just need to claim your profile.
I also found it comforting to hear how she & Emma felt like imposters doing their award-winning podcast, as neither of them is a trained broadcast journalist. Despite 150+ interviews - and being experienced print journos.
Also, don't be afraid to rebrand. Lily went from money, health and lifestyle to running + fitness journalism. "I quite honestly feel like a weight has been lifted."
I spent my 20s/30s writing about sex, health + wellness, and in my 40s, I switched my focus to business, tech, writing & entrepreneurship. I'd lost my mojo for sex toy reviews and realised female entrepreneurship was the bit I was most excited about.
And nothing is permanent.
There is no reason why I can't rebrand again in a few years when I want to focus on something else. Because that is the beauty of freelancing.
YOU are the brand, and your niche will evolve as you do. I find that very freeing.
Great session - thank you, Lily. I've shared some resources, as it came up on a few pods.
Imposter Syndrome | FFJ w/Donna Ferguson & Nick McGrath
How one tiny mindset shift can help you overcome imposter syndrome | Josh Spector (45m mark)
When your business hands you lemons w/Jenny Blake |
(the best thing I've listened to this week! Appreciate you, ).
How do you deal with imposter syndrome?
Cheers,
Nika 🥂
Journalism at its historical roots, surely, is about keeping a journal or diary about events: anyone able to read and write could do it. Once somebody invented an expensive printing press, however, it started to become something else. https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth/ (Peter Vanderwicken in the Harvard Business Review Magazine, May-June 1995):
"The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works ...
"The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity. What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying. ... The architect of the transformation was not a political leader or a constitutional convention but Joseph Pulitzer, who in 1883 bought the sleepy New York World and in 20 years made it the country’s largest newspaper. Pulitzer accomplished that by bringing drama to news—by turning news articles into stories ... His journalism took events out of their dry, institutional contexts and made them emotional rather than rational, immediate rather than considered, and sensational rather than informative. The press became a stage on which the actions of government were a series of dramas."
I like this "conspiracy theory" of journalism, because I'm interested in understanding physics, and keep finding conspiracies between journalists and scientists. In elementary physics textbooks on 1st quantization (and about 100% of TV propaganda shows) an electron has a single "wavefunction" amplitude, that's indeterminate until measured, is not correct because of quantum field theory, also known as 2nd quantization (in the form of Feynman's 1947 path integral), shows that particles don't have a single wavefunction. Instead, there's a wavefunction for every possible path or interaction, which have to be added together. But this switch-over from 1st to 2nd quantization debunks the single-wavefunction models, except as "flat earth approximations", yet people are still "using" single-wavefunction "physics" (flat earthers) for "wavefunction entanglement", etc. No journalist will debunk it. Maybe it's harder to explain than nonsense?
The same for climate change. Temperature is rising, and CO2 are rising. But the rise in CO2 is ~26 times too low to directly give the temperature rise, so all IPCC models incorporate a positive-feedback amplification loop whereby water vapour evaporates (triggered by the small CO2 rise) and causes a massive temperature rise (water vapour in the air strongly absorbs infrared radiation in sunlight).
But there's a snag: 71% of the earth's area is water, so if water evaporation causes positive feedback, amplifying climate changes ~26 times, then why isn't the earth in a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus? After all, temperature has varied in ice age cycles in the past, so why didn't the heating cycles of the natural climate change then trigger off the runaway water vapour positive feedback until the planet was boiling, exterminating all life?
Clearly, when that extra water vapour evaporates and then heats up by absorbing infrared, it rises, expands, and condenses into extra cloud cover, which reflects heat away (or absorbs it high above the ground). So you then have to ask: is this in the climate change models? Over a decade ago, none of the 21 IPCC climate change models took account of negative feedback from water vapour. Not surprising, because there's really not much data on the time dependence of atmosphere water vapour (however, see Fig 3 in my paper https://vixra.org/pdf/1302.0044v2.pdf for some data, showing a FALL in water vapour between 1950 and 2000, taken from Fig 9 in https://friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/E&E_21_4_2010_08-miskolczi.pdf which is still ignored for political reasons!).
So, all the "experts" and their entourage of "journalists" in the climate lobby are really free to say whatever they want about water vapour increasing in response to CO2 increase. They simply ignore the admittedly limited data, which slows a decline in water vapour - which you'd think would debunk the key of their models, the amplification of CO2 warming by water! But they just ignore it.
More recent data shows no significant correlation between water vapour and the hockey stick CO2 or temperature curve, see p21 of https://gml.noaa.gov/publications/annual_meetings/2014/slides/22-140327-C.pdf which is currently the only set of graphs referenced by wikipedia which states at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_vapor#:~:text=IPCC%20AR6%20expresses%20medium%20confidence,per%20%C2%B0C%20of%20warming. :
"IPCC AR6 expresses medium confidence in increase of total water vapour at about 1-2% per decade;[46]"
The problem is what proportion of it becomes extra cloud cover, reflecting back heat into space? "Medium confidence" for such a vital question is pathetic pseudo-science. Science depends on facts.
The same kind of thing is also true of cosmological "dark energy" and quantum gravity in physics. You can find solutions, but you can't get anyone interested unless it is fashionable, which it sure as hell isn't! I think the BBC said about 15 years ago (around the time they put out the Horizon show by Sir Paul Nurse dismissing Delingpole) that it had made a decision that the "science was settled" on climate change. You have to wonder whether this attitude is just politically expedient hubris, and whether the flat earthers also claimed that the science had settled on the accuracy of their 2-d maps?