Creating media with an uncooperative mind

This is the first of two parts on media creation. I’ll update this post with a link when the second one is out.

“The students already come with an understanding of the grammar of visual storytelling, but not of writing or audio.”

This was one of the lecturers on audio and radio production at the university where I was teaching.

Back then, in the early 2000s, I was a postgrad student with teaching duties in the Art, Media, and Design faculty’s Media Practice program and, as always, “kids these days” was a perennial topic among the lecturers.

Not in the way you think. These were, mostly, a bunch of idealists. They believed in the job of teaching and were constantly trying to figure out what they needed to adapt. Times change – they always change – and people who care about teaching try to work with an awareness of the new, a care for younger generations, and subsequently get rewarded with constant burnout and mental health crises.

One observation was that newer students needed more support at the start of the course than they used to, with a higher share than usual really needing to take a foundation course before starting their actual degree studies.

That is, they felt in the early 2000s that the students who did a foundation course before going on to do their Media Practice degree were roughly as capable as the average student – without a foundation course – was a few years earlier.

The other observation was more positive. Although this audio production lecturer’s subject wasn’t the direct beneficiary – back then as today, people didn’t listen to what they were listening to – he noted that many of the students had what looked like a head start when it came to studying the practice of visual storytelling. Video, specifically. They might not know the terminology, but they recognised the practice and structure of it when they saw it.

They could “hit the ground running” in ways they couldn’t with writing, designing, or working with audio.

This was a quarter of a century ago.

When I say that our current era of video dominance has been a long time coming, I mean it.

A mass medium no more #

Fourteen years ago I wrote about comics – how they had gone from being one of the biggest mass media industry in the world, with a presence on every corner of every town in the Western world, to being a niche industry with a limited presence beyond a corner in some book stores and the occasional dingy speciality store, and how the prose book seemed to be following the same path.

Publishing is on a crossroads. It’s not just a question of how the form will develop but also who we want as an audience. As books lose their real-world presence, do we really want to just cater to a minority of voracious expert readers? A casual reader is never going to buy a bespoke reading device, but will buy an iPhone or iPad, where ebooks are competing with games, apps, websites, and comics. Pretending you aren’t competing with other media on price, accessibility, and value, is a surefire way to kill off long-form reading.

Today, I think we’ve reached the same point comics had in the 2000s, except the speciality stores are cleaner, better decorated, and better lit. The book industry is now largely in a steady-state equilibrium catering to dedicated hobbyists, the kind who would list books and related topics specifically as their interest.

That makes writing for readers a lucrative niche market – the margins are solid when you aren’t getting mugged by “AI” companies and don’t fall into the trap of competing with overproduction – but a niche nonetheless.

The problem that producers of niche media – such as comics or prose books – face when trying to market their work is that they are guests in a bigger world. We are working in an environment built on dynamics and structures very different from our chosen media. We constantly encounter a mismatch between the venues and skills that are effective for promotion and the skills and capabilities we have developed for our work and craft.

Today to promote prose you need to do something that is not prose.

Fifty years ago you could promote a book largely with more writing.

• Written reviews
• Extracts published in magazines and newspapers
• Reactions and analysis
• Interviews

All delivered in print, the medium of the work itself.

Radio and TV were additions.

Print used to be a complete mass media ecosystem unto itself.

I don’t think that’s true today.

To promote writing or comics, you’re going to need to do video and audio. At least in some form.

So, I’ve been continuing my experiments with media. I need to have a handle on audio and video and I need to figure out a way that I can practice regularly and improve.

Some of the experiments have been short and fragmentary enough for me to just post on social media. Many have just been tests I’ve done myself and put away, having learned what I needed to learn. As is the nature of experimentation, much of it is too insubstantial to publish and goes straight into the drawer.

My tendency to go overboard when starting on new things means I sometimes work very slowly to begin with.

The uncooperative mind #

I also have to contend with my own neurology. I’ve always known that I am almost certainly autistic, but there are no realistic pathways to an autism diagnosis for a middle-aged adult in Iceland and our healthcare system offers little in terms of resources or assistance even if I did get diagnosed.

That means “almost certainly” will have to do as I try to adapt my life around a characteristic that Icelandic healthcare finds inconvenient to acknowledge.

I’ve also been discovering that I’m not as high-functioning as I thought previously. I’ve been relying on very energy-intensive coping mechanisms and an over-extended working memory.

Put simply: I’m exhausted and need to change what I’m doing and rely less on high effort coping mechanisms.

This interacts with work I need to do in that I have pretty severe monotropism. Task switching is quite hard and, if I need to juggle different tasks, they need to be integrated into a set routine with predictable boundaries, otherwise none of it will happen. It also means that some tasks work best in batches that let me do one kind of work for a period that I can then parcel out over time.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve never charged by the hour as a freelancer. With a few exceptions that depend on the kind of work and my relationship with the client (you know who you are) you’re buying a day of my time or nothing at all.

All of which affects the media side of my business. When I experiment with media formats – newsletter styles and schedules, blog post structures, podcasts, video, and the like – they don’t just need to fulfil a business goal, they need to be workable for me personally and cooperate with an uncooperative mind.

For example, I’ve made the mistake in the past of just publishing blog posts as they were written, leading to a flurry of activity for a couple of weeks and dead air for another few.

This means that a media format – medium, structure, style, production, platform – needs to fulfil a number of criteria for it to work for me:

• It needs to further my business goals. I already have photography as a hobby, so other kinds of creative media needs to pay its way or be cost-effective. It doesn’t have to have a full-on revenue stream, but a clear and defined role in an overall business strategy would be ideal.
• I need to be able to do it in batches, with as little of what my brain considers task switching.
• It needs to be something I can add to or turn into a routine. Otherwise, I’ll only get it done once in a blue moon.
• Preparation work should either be minimal or low-energy. I’m fine with certain kinds of rote work. They require little in terms of mental energy so can be an enjoyable way to recharge while doing something productive. (This could explain why I find the suggestion that I should replace relaxing and largely deterministic rote work with error-prone and non-deterministic LLM “automation” that requires considerable mental energy to monitor and check to be nonsense. To me, it’s like saying that writing a book underwater is useful and fun. Just weird irrational nonsense that borders on surrealism.)
• It should involve very little in terms of unstructured or random social interaction. Interviews are fine, but anything that involves going out and talking to strangers is just not going to happen.
• It needs to have a repeatable process that can be improved over time.
• Low budget or a concretely positive Return on Investment. I don’t want to spend a ton of money getting started.
• A topic that’s likely to feed into my freelance or media business. I’ll cover the topic problem separately in my next blog post.

(And, yeah, I do realise that this kind of granular, bottom-up, analytical thinking you see in this post is yet another indicator of autism.)

But the vaguest and probably the most important criteria is that it needs to feel right. In what’s probably yet another symptom of my neurology, things have to feel right for them to happen and if they don’t “feel right” my mental energy drains at a rapid clip and burnout happens.

What’s “right” depends on my taste, my values, and how well I understand the thing and its purpose. It doesn’t have to be fun, but it does have to be at least vaguely interesting.

Sorting out all these issues requires trial and error. You don’t know what a task involves until you’ve tried it. Then you need to think about it, assess, and try again.

Video is the first and obvious candidate for these kinds of experiments.

The Video Experiments #

Video has become the core organising principle of our society. It’s how most people get their (mis)information, how we run our meetings, how people learn, and how they express themselves.

Figuring video out seems important.

Last year I experimented with a few different approaches to video.

I tested four different formats or structures before having to move on to other things.

If any of them had worked outright for me – fulfilled all the criteria – they would have become a routine and I would have continued to make them.

1. Walk-and-talk #

The walk-and-talk format that I tried for a couple of videos were interesting productions but didn’t lend themselves to batch work – not without sucking the joy out of the hikes themselves. The topics were also just personal rambling that didn’t fulfil any meaningful objective. Natural lighting was a bit tricky to work with, but the payoff is that the Icelandic environment is more interesting to look at than your average indoor room. Ideally I would need to buy an adapter to put my variable ND filter on the phone camera, but this style is workable even without that investment.

This could work as a method for making shorts – vertical videos for Shorts, TikTok, and other social media. Instead of making one ten-minute video at a time during a hike I could instead make a batch of five two minute shorts. With a more strategic choice of topics this might be an effective approach.

2. Home office video essays #

The obvious video format to experiment with has always been the talking head video essay.

My reasoning is straightforward: this format is extremely popular. It’s the modern equivalent of the blog post except, y’know, with the potential of reaching an actual mass audience.

Match it with a transcript and a podcast version, where each has been edited both for clarity and to adapt it to its medium as well as possible, and you’ve maximised your potential audience.

Process and edit the audio properly, and you’ve got a solid column-style podcast.

Edit the transcript a little bit more aggressively than usual, and you’ve got a solid newsletter.

The audience knows what to expect. You know what to do. You can start simple and improve the quality over time.

Looking back at my earlier experiments, I have a lot of problems with what I was doing:

• I chose the topics poorly. (Poor topic choice is the running theme in these experiments.)
• The structure of each video didn’t work. The whole thing was a muddle.
• My process for making them was too involved.
• Something feels off to me about the visuals: both how I looked and the lighting.

The topics and structure hang together. If you’re making media to further some sort of business, you need to be answering questions or solving problems that matter to people. Those then need to complement the rest of your business in some way.

One approach is the one, I think, coined by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman which has the memorable acronym PDF:

• Pain. You begin by describing the unanswered pain that the reader or viewer might want addressed. They will know immediately upon reading whether this is a pain they need solving or not.
• Dream. Describe the ideal – what it would like to have that pain solved.
• Fix. The solution. The explanation or detail that helps people solve the pain.

This should be followed by a Call to Action. “Subscribe to my newsletter! Like, Share, and Subscribe! Join my Patreon!”

Others have outlined very similar processes. Chris Goor, for example, calls it HIDE, or Hook, Intrigue, Delivery and Exit, which correspond to Amy’s Pain, Dream, Fix, and Call to Action, but Chris is framing it specifically in terms of making captivating videos.

I followed none of that in these early videos. This is something I need to do better.

I did manage to improve how my talking head videos looked in later shorts, but there’s still some ways to go. I’ve continued to experiment in private, delivering an image of my home office without actually changing said home office or buying expensive kit.

3. Home office shorts #

These looked a little bit better. I did them to promote a graphic novel to the Icelandic market and not really to build an audience (that kind of work should have started months prior to publishing).

It hinted at a more repeatable process. Shorts lend themselves to batch creation, obviously.

Reviewing these in hindsight, I still think that videos shot in the Icelandic environment would be more interesting, visually, than these but this approach could be a solid fallback for when the weather is being uncooperative, which is most of the time here in the subarctic.

I need to use props more in these videos. Having something in your hands to show is a simple and effective way to make the video just a little bit more visually interesting.

4. Shorts with narration #

I did these to promote that same graphic novel.

The basic approach is to narrate over a visually interesting sequence of images or videos.

This format works extremely well when you have something very visual to show but, personally, I don’t think it works well with generic images or shots.

Sure, everybody does it on YouTube, but I think it’s a big contributor to the ongoing homogenisation of online video. Everything looks the same and is lit the same. (So many soft-boxes.)

I’m not fond of how stock footage or the ever-present marginally related B-roll that infects most videos online makes everything look the same, but if the topic is visual, and you have visuals to show, then you show the visuals.

It’s more work, usually, but when the topic lends itself to it, you take that win and run with it.

Audio experiments #

The other experiments I’ve been doing involve just audio: no video or graphics.

What surprise me, considering how much I enjoy photography, is that I’ve been enjoying audio-only productions more than I did video. That isn’t a deciding factor by any means – like I wrote above, interesting is more important than fun – but it wasn’t something I expected.

Through I probably should have expected my enjoyment at least a bit. I come from a family of radio people all the way back to my great-granddad. Throw a dart at my family tree and odds are you’d hit somebody who has, at least for some part of their life, worked in radio, myself included. I have opinions on microphones even though I haven’t used one in any serious work-related capacity for over twenty-five years. My “shitty” headphones are the Sony noise-cancelling ones I mostly use with my weighted blanket. (Again, a bit of an autism cliché, that.) I should have seen this coming.

But I’m also very much not an audiophile. The audiophile space is largely populated by con artists and the self-deluded, but the biggest reason is that my hearing is damaged. Even during childhood my hearing range topped out at around 15 000 hertz, so I’ve never heard the sound of a CRT hum (which is above 15 000 hertz) for example. I also have auditory processing issues which may or may not be related to the damage. Today my hearing isn’t great. It’s probably closer to the average for men my age than when I was younger, but that’s largely due to the dudes of my generation treating their ears with little respect, so their hearing has been getting worse faster than mine.

So, while my enjoyment of audio may well be obvious in hindsight I did have plenty of reason to discount it.

Audio has several practical advantages:

• Much easier to self-host and distribute in various ways because of the smaller file sizes.
• Podcasts are still a mass medium.
• You can distribute to video platforms with just a tiny bit of decorative imagery. It might not play well with their algorithms but can still extend your reach and save bandwidth.
• Audio editing is similar to editing text in that they can be seamless. It isn’t a jump cut if you can’t see the jump.
• Working with audio is much easier and less labour-intensive than video.
• You don’t have to worry about lighting or, y’know, your complexion, but you do need to think about acoustics, background noise, and reflections.
• A good microphone is proportionally cheaper than a good camera.
• Microphones are awesome, in general. Just look at them. Amazing devices. So cool.

Atmosphere #

One aspect of getting back into audio recording that I have enjoyed has been practicing a simplistic form of field recording during my photography hikes. Sometimes I just stop, take in the atmosphere of a location and record a bit of sound.

It brings me joy.

For example, just listen to the sound of this bee going from flower to flower and doing a might fine job despite very windy conditions.

Or this recording from my balcony where you can hear my neighbour’s cock crow.

Isn’t that nice?

It isn’t practical in any way but is a nice complement to the photography as a hobby.

Audio journals #

The experiment I highlighted in my last newsletter was more or less just to answer the question could you do a podcast using a similar format and process as a blog post?

And the answer seems to be “yes, yes you can, absolutely” – people don’t seem to be inherently against podcast formats that don’t involve a bunch of people nattering on for hours – but it does come with many of the same downsides as a blog or newsletter.

You can run your blog as a journal and use it as a way to structure your thoughts, generate ideas, and process what is happening in your field or around you.

You can also run your blog to build an audience for your business with writing helps people with their problems or answers their questions.

One blog or newsletter can do both. Documenting your thought process is useful to others. But you need to strike a balance and often that comes at the expense of the journalling side of the blog.

I’ve been finding out that audio journals work in very similar ways. Procedurally and structurally they work quite well. Much as with video, location recording can sound more interesting, but recording at home can work well as a fallback. But unlike video there’s a lot less work involved both in preparation and production.

But they also have many of the downsides built into blogging.

Journaling in general is a good mechanism for generating ideas. It’s not uncommon for me to have to scrap half a blog post because writing it gave me a much better idea that needs more work. The same has been happening with my audio journaling experiments. I’ve had to file away at least one recording because it gave me a much better idea for the future.

Another one went in the bin because I, sensibly as it turns out, had ambiguous feelings about what I had said and decided to digest it a bit.

I was recording a journal where I was processing my own rigid thinking. Cognitive inflexibility is something I know has on some level more to do with my neurodivergence than my actual opinions because it gets worse when I’m tired.

Another way to put it is that people’s actions don’t get more or less ethical just because my own energy levels change, but I do get more or less judgemental.

Part of that journal went into untangling my feelings about a couple of YouTube personalities: Hank Green and Adam Conover.

Namely, my first instinct to them fucking up is “in the bin with them, they fucked up! I’m never watching their garbage again.”

At least in Adam Conover’s case. I’ve never watched a Hank Green video to the end.

Adam Conover, however, I largely enjoyed. Not a huge fan, but if he was covering a topic I found interesting, I’d click and watch. And as far as I could tell when recording my journal, my harsh judgement of him was objectively unfair of me. He’d messed up by taking on a cryptocoin sponsor, but he had apologised and hadn’t seemed to have made another mess since.

I still couldn’t and can’t bring myself to watch any of his videos. The vibes are off, which I chalked up to my tendency towards rigid thinking.

“I should give him a change. But he broke the rules!”

I still couldn’t talk myself out of the notion that I don’t owe these influencer personalities anything, they aren’t my friends, and any of them that starts messing about with “AI” advocacy, Effective Altruism, or cryptocoins can just fuck right off. It may be cognitive inflexibility on my part, but fuck 'em.

This caused me a little bit of anxiety as I worry about which parts of my behaviour are my neurology and which are my genuine personality.

Then he crops up as a contributor to a… flirting conference? One that seems to be run by a bunch of rationalist, evopsych, “AI” Doomer types?

His name has since been removed from the conference page, but my hesitancy looks justified and sometimes a rigid moral framework – “don’t take money from or hang out with those kinds of assholes” – turns out to be rigid and inflexible for reasons that are practical and useful.

(This reminds me: I need to post less on social media in general.)

Taken together this means audio journals, much like blogs, are a bit of a balancing act that need to be in the mix with other forms of writing or storytelling.

Workshopping a podcast idea #

As you might guess, I’ve been planning to launch a podcast, beyond just the audio journal that I’m planning to cross-post to the existing newsletter.

I’ve been workshopping ideas and getting people’s feedback on approaches and topics.

It’s getting to a place where the next logical step is to record a couple of test episodes with my collaborator and see how it works.

One aspect to it that I want to try is to position it specifically as an audio-only podcast.

That is, the participants won’t be on camera or zoom during recording and even though I may post them on YouTube, you won’t be watching any of us talk. The video aspect would be superfluous and entirely decorative.

“Audio-only podcast” used to be a tautology, but increasingly podcasts are expected to be YouTube series. Basically, many podcasts have become low-rent TV talk shows.

I want to specifically not do that even though I personally have no aversion to video (see the section above on video).

A major reason for this is that quite a few people are hesitant to be on camera in this day and age for reasons that are entirely rational.

Requiring a camera presence in that way rules out both interesting collaborators and a number of interview subjects – especially ones that feel more vulnerable.

People, in my experience, also talk very differently when they know they’re on video than when just their voice is being recorded. I’m curious to see if that translates into a podcast style.

Positioning it as “audio-only” also serves as a signal to the audience about the priorities of the podcast, how we might approach both topics and interview subjects, as well as its structure.

The newsletter #

The background to all of this is my newsletter, which has been unusually quiet for the past few months.

Although, if you look through the archives, it isn’t that unusual. Over the quarter decade or so that I’ve been blogging I’ve regularly paused blogs, discontinued them, and launched new ones.

By a conservative count this is at least my ninth blog. Most of the rest are long since offline and honestly didn’t work.

Even this blog has gaps where my priorities shifted and audience-building became less necessary to my career.

Writing on baldurbjarnason.com has been a fixture in my career and I don’t see myself quitting it any time soon. It’s genuinely the foundation for everything I’ve done. Nor do I see myself abandoning prose writing.

I’ve been writing, until a few months ago, two to four essays or posts every month for the past five or so years.

I did this because it worked. People found it helpful and I sold books and services. Sometimes the pace wasn’t working, so I dialled it down to two a month. Sometimes the topic wasn’t working – it was getting read but not translating into leads, sales, or easier launches – so I paused and shifted topics.

Then it largely stopped working. Largely.

• The tech writing freelance leads disappeared, but that was fine at the time because my book on the business risks of generative models was doing okay.
• Then the freelance web developer leads began to dissipate. I work mostly in web dev and my declared aversion to LLM tools probably doesn’t endear me to potential clients.
• Then the dev training market basically disappeared. Most of my peers who were doing training and education – especially in web dev – have seen their business collapse. There are a few survivors, but it seems that even many of the devs who aren’t using LLMs for coding are still using them to “learn”. Corporate training budgets seem to be largely gone.
• Search engine traffic was never much of a factor for my site, but I’ve heard from others that this is basically gone as well.
• The books have still been selling at a semiregular pace, which is great.

I still have an audience, which I’m thankful for, but the economy both I and the audience live in has changed fundamentally. Circumstances, priorities, and values have changed.

All of which is to say that there isn’t anything wrong with the blog or newsletter format and there’s still a lot of value in using it as a venue to detail my thoughts and understanding (like I’m doing here).

I’ve made this argument before, but if I’m going to keep my media and publishing business going, even as a sideline, I’m going to need to think about new topics. Not to replace this newsletter specifically but as a substitute for the decline in freelance and training work. It makes sense to approach those new topics with a broader approach to media and formats in mind.

If I had started down the path of audio and video before the “AI” bubble, much of this would have been simpler. I would have had clear options had wanted to shift away from web development as a topic.

For example, even though I don’t have much familiarity with the Zig programming language, I could have started documenting my learning process on the blog and over time built up to something like a “Zig for web developers” ebook or course. It would have been a lot of work, but work that was by its nature fairly straightforward. The audience would know what they would be getting. Employers still had training budgets. Freelancers were still doing well enough to be able to chalk a book or course down as an expense. I know – or can figure out – how to learn a new programming language, how to write about it, and then how to explain it in the context of something else I know.

Even though the audience for that kind of learning is never going to be zero, it’s now much smaller than it used to be which would make something like it a bigger risk and more work for smaller reward.

Not impossible, but harder overall.

The “AI” bubble has also made me and many others much more sceptical about wanting to be a part of the tech and software industry in the long term, which could make the notion of retraining in another part of the field hard to swallow.

So, even as I’m getting a clearer and clearer picture of how to approach audio, video, and even the newsletter, the topic – the most important part of a media business – remains less clear.

But it still needs to be tackled, I still need to decide, and I have a few ideas, all of which I plan to go over in the second part.

Until next time.