How I switched career at 55
Think LiveStreaming is for the kids? Think again.
I spend most weekday evenings with an iPad propped on my lap, consuming YouTube videos to avoid watching the seemingly endless stream of murder-mystery TV shows that my wife loves so much.
I regularly find myself disappearing down a rabbit hole of 1980s music videos, how-to guides to fishing, and archive footage of London in the 1960s and 70s. But there’s a small handful of content creators to whom I return with unplanned regularity: Sean Cannell at Think Media; Peter McKinnon who has single-handedly pushed Canada to the top of my list of “places to visit before I die”’ and Steve Dotto at Dottotech.
With the exception of Dotto who — like me — has more than a bit of snow on the roof, most are young, almost irritatingly upbeat and endlessly enthusiastic. They talk about YouTube and Instagram as if they’re real places and not just some global, semi-imagined construct. They talk of algorithms, find their own lives and opinions deeply fascinating, and they use apparently inspirational phrases like “punch fear in the face”.
In real life, their ceaseless enthusiasm would make them precisely the type of people I would cross the road to avoid. Little did I realise that — for several years — they have been invading my sub-conscious; covertly arming me with the tools needed to pay my bills when a global pandemic robbed me of my usual income stream. Neither did I realise that they had taught me so much that making the transition from print journalism to “LiveStreamer” would be seamless, painless and sufficiently lucrative to cause me to re-examine and redraw my career path at the ripe old age of 55.
Going Live
On 14 March 2020, I returned from a business trip to the US and immediately placed myself and my family in self-imposed quarantine. Within just a few days, the team that sells the advertising on my magazine had been placed on furlough. The printers that put my words onto paper to produce that magazine had shut up shop. And the combined demolition and construction industry about which I normally write had packed away their hard hats and safety boots, and they too went into a prolonged lockdown.
Almost overnight, after more than 30 years of beating a keyboard, all of it had gone away. My income comes from the advertising in one of two magazines that I own. Suddenly, the team charged with selling that advertising were stuck at home. So too were the people that actually buy and pay for that advertising. And besides, even if we had managed to produce a magazine, there was no-one there to actually read it.
With mounting bills and with the light at the end of the tunnel far too dim and distant to offer any consolation or reassurance, I could quite easily have fallen into a funk of self-pity.
Instead, I reached into a toolkit that I didn’t even know I had. I punched fear in the face and — with zero planning and even less experience or expertise — I became a live streamer. Really. Just like that.
I decided to pursue this new career path on a Friday evening. I spent the weekend watching how-to guides on YouTube. At 3pm on the following Monday, I pressed the “Go Live” button and the rest — as they say — is history.
I produced almost 60 daily shows — most with guests but with a few solo missions stirred into the mix. As lockdown restrictions were slowly lifted and my audience began to drift back to work, I shifted gears and switched from a daily broadcast schedule to something a little more sensible; a little more manageable.
Mind you, manageable is the last word I would use to describe the biggest and most-ambitious show I have undertaken to date. When a major construction industry exhibition was postponed amidst Coronavirus fears, I joined forces with a pair of industry influencers to put on a near two-hour show featuring more than 40 contributors. That show was broadcast across multiple Facebook, YouTube and Instagram TV channels to a potential audience of more than half a million people.
All of this — and much more besides — was achieved using free software and a webcam that is already built into my PC. Admittedly, I did employ an external microphone that I had lying about the place. But I could have done all of this with zero financial outlay and investment.
Back to Normal?
I am writing this at the end of the week in which my magazine advertising team returned to work. The printer has reopened, and the readers of my magazines are back at work. We can and we will produce those magazines again. In fact, the first of these is currently in design.
But I have no intentions of giving up what — out of necessity and serendipity — became my day job. The live shows have become far too popular with viewers and guests alike to just walk away. The audience is way larger than I can reach with a magazine; and that audience is far more engaged. It is not unusual for shows to achieve thousands of engagements and comments. Contrast that with a paper magazine that receives letters to the editor with all the frequency of a fly-by from Halley’s Comet. Furthermore, I can react instantly to developments and news. In the past, I would have written a few hundred or a few thousand words, sweating over each word, and analysing every phrase and sentence from every angle before pressing the upload button. Now, I switch on my webcam, check my teeth for spinach, and I report.
So there you have it. A 55-year old, dyed-in-the-wool print journalist with a face for radio and a voice that would have most right-minded people reaching for the mute button transitioned — in the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic — from beating a keyboard to waffling to a webcam.
If I can, anyone can. As Sean Cannell would say with trademark enthusiasm: “Punch fear in the face and press record”.
Mark Anthony is editor of DemolitionNews.
