Author: Lauren Orsini

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What happens when your feelings get in the way of your reporting

I want to start by saying there’s no reason for me to get nervous about being on the radio.

I started making semi-regular radio appearances when I worked at tech blog ReadWrite. If they thought an article I’d written recently was timely, I’d show up on WBEZ 91.5 Chicago and talk about stuff like the Apollo 11 spaceflight. After I moved on to Forbes, I got to talk about topics closer to my heart, like Isao Takahata’s legacy as a Studio Ghibli cofounder for BBC radio, or this extended interview on cosplay for CBC radio’s q show.

I’ve also been on TV—a local Fox News channel interviewed about my book and then again about cosplay in general. I still haven’t watched either video, so there’s probably something emotional to unpack there but that’s not the point of this blog post. 

The point is that last Thursday morning, I found myself processing my feelings about the horrific Kyoto Animation fire in front of a live international audience in my worst radio interview ever. 

Here’s the episode, though I’m not sure how you listen outside of Canada. Host Tom Power covered the basic facts and then asked me for details about why the studio had made such a big impact on the anime industry. As usual, I’d been prepared in advance with the questions and even did a rehearsal. But about halfway through, I think it was after Tom asked me something like, “What’s the fan reaction to the news of the fire?” I froze. Mentally, after years of public speaking, I knew logically that I only stopped talking for about two seconds. But two seconds feels like forever on the air, for both you and your listeners. I had been simply repeating my prepared notes when suddenly the impact of the question hit me. I’m one of those fans, too. 

I found out about the fire around 3 AM. I’m pregnant and uncomfortable enough that I wake up at 3 AM pretty consistently most nights, check Twitter, and go back to bed. Our world is such a hellscape nothing I saw on Twitter interrupted my sleep, until Thursday night. As more details unfolded, I couldn’t look away. I ended up giving up on sleep at around 4:30 and started work for the day. Around 8, I heard from my contact at CBC, who asked if I could provide some background on Kyoto Animation’s legacy and appeal. I didn’t think twice about accepting, because I’ve been on the radio so much in the past. 

What I didn’t think about was how, in my sleep-deprived state, I had mostly been considering the situation as a journalist—just gathering the facts. I was upset, to be sure, but more in a numb way. It wasn’t until halfway through that interview that the full reality of the situation hit me. After I got off the radio, I finally cried for the lives lost, for the senselessness of this attack. Talented creatives whose only crime was bringing entertainment to millions—gone. 

Since 2011, I’ve spelled out my personal credo in what I call the Otaku Journalist Manifesto. The news landscape at large has changed immensely since then, but I still love this part where I champion authentic, not objective, reporting: “I’m not saying to take sides. But don’t be a cold observer. Bring yourself, your experiences and intuition, to the article.” It’s a great sentiment, but not one I’d ever examined this deeply. How do you report on a story so close to your heart that you’re barely holding it together during the process? 

I have immense respect for the reporters like Crystalyn Hodgkins who kept covering the tragedy all day. I couldn’t do it. I took time off until evening, when I wrote a piece for Forbes including all the things I wanted to say on the radio but couldn’t. This is not one of my blog posts that wraps up with a neat solution: nothing can undo the KyoAni attack, and it’s not something I or anyone will stop grieving overnight. But I wanted to share what it felt like when something I care about personally came crashing into the work I do. Please take time for yourself to grieve. Send a message of support to KyoAni through Crunchyroll (I’m told they’ll be translating as many of these notes as possible). And be kind to your fellow fans—including the professionals still working despite this—who are just as frustrated and wrecked by this news as you are.

Photo credit: Matt Botsford on Unsplash.

How making money online has changed in 2019

As I get ready to take two months completely off work, and as I get increasingly fatigued while doing basic tasks like walking to the store, I’m thinking a lot about passive income and how to make more of it.  

Passive income, as I’ve written about it in the past, is an income stream that continues to generate money even when you’re not working. For me, nothing can compare to the feeling of waking up and realizing I’ve made $50 while I was sleeping.

What passive income does not mean, however, is “income stream that you set and forget.” Especially this year, I’ve realized that several of the ways I make money need an update.

Can you still make money niche blogging?

Here’s a four-part series I wrote in 2016 about setting up a profitable niche blog. While I still agree with most of this advice, I’m aware that on this blog, at least, my earnings have plateaued. Why? Because I don’t update as much and that penalizes me in searches (Google prefers sites that update at least once every 30 days). So this blog isn’t truly generating “passive” income.

In 2019, this blog has made $61.41. Well, not counting my books, which made an additional $25.92. The point is, that’s $17.44 a month in income, which is barely a dinner order. (Or maybe it is near you, DC prices are ridiculous.)

I could do things to make Otaku Journalist earn more. I could place more affiliate links, use ads on every page, nevermind that my ads are performing 50% worse than they did in 2018 thanks to the mass adoption of ad blockers—which I don’t fault, I use those too!

More importantly, I could blog more often, centering my posts on valuable SEO keywords. For a more passive version of this, I could go back in my archives, view the current 20 most popular Otaku Journalist posts, and load them with new keywords and affiliate links.

But here’s the real best use of my time: focusing on more niche blogs.

The “late-stage buy cycle”

Otaku Journalist is a grab-bag of posts about my freelance life, geek careers, and anime and fandom topics. It doesn’t usually target readers who are looking to make a purchase. If you still want to make money blogging in 2019, you need to focus on people in the late-stage buy cycle.

No, this has nothing to do with late-stage capitalism. (Well, maybe adjacently?) Basically, you want to write to a very specific audience of people: not those who are thinking, “Should I buy an anime character body pillow?” but those who are wondering, “Where can I see a comparison of different anime character body pillows before I choose one to buy?” We are talking about people who have already decided to buy, so there’s no sales pitch involved anymore. All you need to do is research the products for them and ease that purchase process along. So if you’re focused solely on passive income, instead of writing posts about how fandom has improved your life, you can write posts listing the ten best anime of 1999 and where to get them. This is why Anime Origin Stories is my least profitable blog (well that, and its low recency score.)

This is a lot more transactional and a lot less fun than the kind of blogging most people like to do. It’s informative in a very specific window for a specific group, and not the kind of thing that is particularly shareable. So yes, you can still make money blogging, and perhaps even a fairly good living, but not while blogging about the things that matter most to you.

Of course, this is assuming corporations don’t screw you first.

The danger of relying on corporations

My niche blogs rely on Amazon’s affiliate program. In the past, Amazon has made several changes to make this program less profitable for affiliates—for example, the commission structure, which used to increase the percentage you earned depending on how many products you recommended to buyers, is now set flat depending on the department. This is good or bad depending on your department: it hurts my Gunpla blog (Toys, 3% commission) but boosts my candle blog (Home, 8%).

Amazon has all the power, and it has no responsibility to me or anyone else to keep its commission structure profitable. Even if the company doesn’t decide to eventually shut down the program altogether, there are other reasons I could lose this income stream. For example, Google may kill the affiliate link economy by superimposing its new shopper recommendation algorithm, promoting its own affiliate program above Amazon’s.

This is the deal with the devil that many online earners face. If you’re a YouTube vlogger, you have to contend with YouTube’s pro-harassment policies and the mercurial algorithm which no longer treats corporate and indie content creators equally. If you’re a Patreon user, you have to roll with the whims of the company’s ever-greedier shareholders. Even if you use PayPal for transactions, you have to be aware of the company’s Puritan morals, which have it freezing the accounts of not only adult content creators but weirdly, ASMR video makers, too.

Of course, there’s still one passive income stream that bypasses most of these issues.

Products and services still come out on top

The people who are really making bank online aren’t making content to promote corporations. They’re making products and services people can use.

I know this. I’ve written a couple of books, and I even wrote a guide to creating your own profitable side income by building a product or service. The problem is that this is the passive income stream with the most work up front and the most risk—so I find it the most intimidating. How do you know if your product or service is something people want? How do you tell people you have it for sale when you’re just starting out? This is why it’s so vital to create a minimum viable product until you know you’ve landed on something people are demanding, so you don’t waste your time putting a lot of effort into something that won’t be profitable. But each time I’ve let this kind of thing slow me down from releasing a product or service, my biggest regret has been not doing it sooner. A lot of the anxiety was all in my head.

Products and services can never truly be passive. My book sales waned after a couple of years, so I either need to update them to get with the times and re-release, or write new books that resonate better with 2019. Meanwhile. any service I provide, like generating niche SEO keywords for a select group of clients, will always involve active work from me (so really, the “passive” part comes from not having to look for clients, who usually just seek me out). And I still rely on big companies—Amazon Kindle for books, and Quickbooks Self Employed (owned by TurboTax the Terrible) for invoicing—so it’s not perfect.

Products and services are currently my most recommended suggestion for your next online income component, but I’m certain there are revenue streams out there I haven’t heard about yet. Just like early adopters of the Amazon Affiliate program made bank I couldn’t conceive of today, there’s always going to be a better way to earn online that risk-takers will find and capitalize on first. As my good friend Kyle said, “If I knew the next big way to make money online, I wouldn’t be talking to you about it, I’d be doing it.” It’s up to you to find it.

Lead photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

How I’m preparing to take maternity leave as a freelancer

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I’m over halfway done with being pregnant, and it’s starting to feel extremely real. At Anime Boston, I didn’t have to tell people I was pregnant for them to guess (though of course, nobody said anything until I said it out loud, because you should never assume). If you ask me to put your hand on my belly, you might feel her kick. She kicks a lot! I feel like a Gundam occupied by a small, angsty pilot. I hope this means she’ll be a protagonist.

Even before I started showing, I started planning out What Happens Next. I have a lot of experience with newborns for somebody who still decided to have a kid anyway. I’m not going into this blind; I know that I’m going to be out of commission for weeks. Survival mode, barely rested, “I put on a clean T-shirt and that’s my work for the day” kind of thing.

In most nations, this is a given and often built into a country-wide healthcare plan. Here, not so much. I covered this last summer when I ghost-wrote How to Survive Unpaid Maternity Leave in America for GoFundMe (you will just have to trust me as my name isn’t on this), and I actually cried frustrated tears while writing it. I interviewed several moms who have been screwed by their workplaces’ leave policies or lack thereof. I was acutely aware that my own plans to start a family would be intrinsically tied to this struggle. Additionally, the central message of this GoFundMe-funded piece still wasn’t a solution I wanted to pursue unless I had to: “Why not use our platform to beg your friends and family for money?”

I’m due in early September, so I’m planning to take that month and October off from work. As I get bigger (and more tired—nobody talks about this!), here are some of the ways I’m getting ready to take all that time off:

Figure out my finances

First off, I have to say that being on John’s insurance and living in a two-income household is a huge help. I hope I’ve never been misleading about how much more I’d have to pay in Virginia if I were responsible for my own freelancer health insurance instead. I’ll say that one of the more affordable options here is eHealth, which is around $300 a month.

John’s healthcare covers my doctor’s appointments (of which there are many), but it does not offer life insurance, which is recommended for pregnant people. I looked into a few policies, but since pregnancy is a “preexisting condition,” it is pricey! So I decided to just go without. John and I joke that he can just order a bargain-rate funeral if something happens to me.

Maternity is not only a preexisting condition but in some cases, also a short-term disability. In Maryland as well as in Washington, DC beginning next year, pregnant people can apply for a short-term disability program, and if they are approved, receive a stipend during their leave. Virginia doesn’t have anything like this, and with another income in my household, it’s difficult to tell if I would qualify for it even if I applied. But I made sure to check anyway. (The answer is no.)

One way I am keeping costs down is by buying a lot of items for the baby secondhand. I joined a Facebook group for parents to reuse and recycle items and have gotten a few items for free or around $10. Since babies are only babies for so long, they quickly outgrow their nursery furniture—and after just a year or two of wear.

Find a replacement

NOTE: I AM STILL LOOKING FOR ONE! If you look at my work and think, “Hey, I could do that,” and are available during Eastern Standard Time, please reach out. Update, July 30: I found one!

When I found out I was pregnant, I told John first, my family second… and my clients third. The good news about being self-employed is that I don’t have to ask for permission; I just let them know I have already decided I will be taking two months off. (The bad news is I have zero job security, and there’s no guarantee anyone will take me back after that time is up.) I usually work a revolving door of gigs in which some clients don’t contact me for a month and then need me a ton the following month, so this won’t be all that different from usual.

How will the world ever survive without me for two months? Just as well as always, I am sure. But one of the clients I work for most often is looking for somebody who can take over my tasks—blog post and press release writing, copyediting, WordPress website upkeep, and PowerPoint presentation generation—while I’m gone. The job is remote, but you’ll need to be available to work during EST business hours, around 9 to 5 EST. If my client is happy with the work, they might keep you around far longer than two months!  

Keep my expectations low

One of my favorite posts on maternity leave is Jen Dziura’s A Not-Very-Relatable Post About Taking Zero Maternity Leave and Doing All the Things and Everything Working Out Just Fine. Obviously, as somebody preparing to take leave, I don’t find it relatable but I do find it impressive! Kudos to Jen for being able to balance her business with literally giving birth. This post, more than any other, reminds me that having a baby is a totally different experience for everyone, and there’s no prescribed process.

I have no idea what my life will be like as a parent. I haven’t figured out childcare or even decided on a name yet. I am bringing a baby into a terrifying world where unvaccinated morons could make her sick, where kindergarteners carry bulletproof backpacks, where students are demonized as political radicals and saddled with tons of debt. So to keep my sanity I’m just trying to take things a few days at a time. This plan is fairly minimalist for that reason.

One of my most helpful resources has been hearing from freelancer friends about their experiences taking extended leave—and not always family leave, either. I’ve known small business owners who blocked off their client calendars in order to devote a month to writing a book or for international travel. The plus side of freelancing is this freedom to choose how you will budget your income and spend your non-work hours. Everybody does it differently, which is a big reason why I wanted to share my plan: because friends’ stories have shown it is possible to leave for months and come back! I plan to be transparent about what those two months away from work are like, but I’m keeping my expectations so low that I am not even going to promise a blog post during that time. My “work” on leave will be keeping a baby and myself alive.

This is the longest Otaku Journalist post I’ve written this year, but I still have so many thoughts about this topic, and far more questions than answers. If you’ve ever taken an extended leave as a freelancer for any reason, I’d love to hear about it.

Lead photo via Markus Spiske from Pexels

You’re allowed to grow out of your terrible opinions

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Magic: The Gathering Fifth Edition

Recently I got an email from somebody trying to read one of my locked older posts.

The post in question is “Why Don’t More Women Play Magic?” which I wrote in 2010, nine entire years ago. I was 23 at the time, and well, this post is not exactly progressive or even feminist. My conclusion was that I personally am not very competitive, other women probably feel the same way, and maybe that’s why they don’t play on a tournament level in the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering as often as men do.

There are many reasons I no longer believe this. Aside from the not-so-revolutionary discovery that I don’t share identical life experiences with everyone who happens to share my demographic, it’s undeniable that there are incredible women and nonbinary people proving me wrong every day. Magic is attracting an increasingly diverse audience, in part because of the game’s parent company, Wizards of the Coast, making deliberate, consistent efforts to make harassment a bannable offense. They’ve also worked repeatedly with artists to expand the perceived gender and ethnicity spectrum of the denizens of the Magic world in card illustrations. I wrote about this in a 2016 article for Forbes which I’m far more proud of than the 2010 blog post, since actual research and nuance went into it.

It shouldn’t be a dark, shocking secret that I once held uneducated opinions. I think that’s a part of growing up, and in our always-online world, a part that increasingly occurs in public. But the problem with the internet is that it skews the passage of time. You could use the Wayback Machine or check out one of the forums that discussed the post to still read it in 2019. I feel like I’ve moved beyond this opinion, but once something is online, it’s here forever.

That’s why I’ve tried to take a semblance of control by privatizing that post, and all of my posts written before 2014. In Your embarrassing former self, I explained my reasoning this way:

“At their best, my old blog posts needs a good editor. At their worst, they’re just plain offensive… I don’t owe anyone to store my posts in an unchanging, museum-like archive. This is my blog and I can run it however I want.”

The internet is forever, but we don’t have to be. I am forever evolving, becoming a better writer, a more intersectional feminist, and a more empathic member of our fandom community. My husband John and I make it a habit to remind each other, “You don’t have to be the same person you were yesterday.” Even if yesterday I overslept and said something dumb on Twitter, it doesn’t mean I’m the kind of person who can never get up in the morning or ever apologize for a stupid comment. Unless I double down, my mistakes do not have to define my permanent identity.

Sometimes when there’s a debate raging in fandom, I feel discouraged by what I perceive as misinformed comments on an issue. How can I ever see eye to eye with somebody who believes that pirating anime is a good idea, for example? But what this viewpoint ignores is that people change. Somebody with that opinion today won’t always feel that way. I’m still not going to engage with them—in fact, I think if somebody had made a tweet thread shaming my crappy, arguably sexist blog post, I would have felt defensive rather than prepared to immediately rethink my view. But it makes me feel hopeful to know that anyone can choose to change.

I was able to change in part through educating myself more about feminism, meeting more people in the Magic: The Gathering community, and improving my ability to express myself through writing. Are there any views you used to hold that embarrass you today? I’d like to know, what made you grow out of them.

(Image credit: me. Fittingly, I took this photo of my first Magic deck in 2010.)

What is the purpose of a call-out post?

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No community is without its bad actors, and anime fandom is certainly no exception. I’d argue that 2019 has been all about our fandom family discovering this anew and looking to flush out bad behavior. It’s what is behind the incredibly brave reporting from Lynzee Loveridge and others regarding the previously untouchable Vic Mignogna, which has had incredible repercussions that years of whispers about Vic’s harassment had been unable to match.

But not every call-out is on that level. Recently, I’ve been following a much quieter Twitter discussion in which anime fans were becoming aware of a member of our community who habitually makes deeply offensive remarks. This person was brought to my attention a while back and while I did some investigating, I did not end up writing an article about them.

In a time that calling out bad behavior has actually led to consequences for bad actors and retribution for their victims, why would I choose not to write the article? It all comes down to what a call-out post is really designed to do.

When this person was brought to my attention last year, they were in a position of power. They had a history of regularly tweeting racist, sexist, and homophobic attacks toward marginalized people. They were also in a gatekeeping position at an anime convention, where they had a significant role in choosing who could and couldn’t present a panel at that con.

After reaching out to that convention during my reporting process, I discovered that they had recently been made aware of this person’s actions, and were in the process of cutting ties. Within a week, this person faced the consequences and today has no platform beyond Twitter.

I began my reporting on a racist with a platform. But within weeks, they were just a racist with no platform and no way to significantly affect the community at large. I thought that writing an article about their behavior would be punching down, the same way that sending my 8,000+ Twitter followers after any random person on the platform would be.

But recently, I have been questioning this decision after following the recent conversation. People are sharing this person’s offensive comments on Twitter, which the person continues to make routinely. As a result, people are becoming aware of this person’s behavior, often for the first time. The fact that so many people didn’t know about this person’s bad behavior makes me wonder if I was right not to publicize my reporting last year.

It all comes down to what the purpose of a call-out is in the first place.

My view on the purpose of a call-out comes from my journalism school education, where we were taught to weigh a private citizen’s right to privacy vs. the public’s right to be unharmed. When this person was in a position of power, a call-out would have been fair game. It would be similar to the time last year that I wrote a post about John Leigh of Anime Matsuri. It’s hardly punching down to critique the bad behavior of somebody who runs an anime convention with thousands of attendees.

But this recent call-out weighed privacy vs. potential for harm differently. Though this person is no longer in a role where they can influence fandom or gatekeep who can and can’t participate in a convention, they still are a part of our community, joining in on social media conversations. After this latest call-out, a lot of people blocked this person, which begs the question: when we call out bad behavior, what is the intended outcome? Is it to create consequences for bad behavior where there weren’t any before? Or is it to shut them out forever?

In full disclosure, I have this person blocked as well. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do. I don’t know if people are allowed to have a second chance to play nice in the community, especially if they are a repeat offender. It pains me that this is the second time I’ve had to wrestle with this dilemma this year, and the previous time it happened, I had initially considered the person in question a friend. I know that what I (and my blue checkmark) do on Twitter can send a message that’s bigger than me, but I also know that blocking people so I don’t have to engage with bad-faith arguments is better for my mental health.

I’m still undecided, so I’m opening this up to you, reader. When we call out somebody’s bad behavior, what should the result be? To make them face consequences for their actions when there weren’t any previously, or to shut them out of our community? How significant should those consequences be, and should they last forever? What kind of apology, if any, would be acceptable before we welcome a prior bad actor back into the fold? In 2019, this is the kind of debate we need to be having because these call-outs aren’t going to die down soon.