To do good writing, read good writing; here’s the good writing I’ve been reading this week:
Don’t let the clever headline fool you. I Can’t Stop Reading This Analysis of Gawker’s Editorial Strategy is a serious must-read. It dissects the online tabloid’s recent experiment to assign one writer a day to finding and writing posts they think will bring in the most traffic and new readers. The staff at Nieman Journalism Lab, which is run by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, thought it would be interesting to analyze the outcome independently.
What Nieman writer Andrew Phelps found: posts that Gawker writers produced when they were on “page view duty mode” (Gawker calls it something more colorful that I can’t repeat because of the terms of my BlogHer Publishing Network agreement) averaged 54,958 page views each; other posts, the ones that they worked longer and harder to report and write, averaged 59,920 page views, or about 9 percent more.
“The allure of that cheap content,” Phelps writes, “is in its higher apparent return on the investment. Why bother working all day on a piece if something you throw together in 20 minutes will get the same attention from the world?”
Page-view duty posts also attracted more new visitors to the site, Phelps found. The ideal, he concludes, is probably running a mix of the two because if all you give readers is weird, titillating or dumb stuff they’ll eventually get bored. And more substantive stories are more likely to pull in big-name advertisers (or sponsors).
That’s a good rule of thumb for freelancers too. If you’ve got a blog, consider mixing up quick hit pieces with more well-thought research pieces. Toss in some photos, haiku, Wordles and quotable quotes with the more serious topics you blog about. When you’re pitching editors, remember that not everything you do needs to be serious, or frivolous. The same holds for paid blogging work you do for news sites or other clients: it pays to be Sir Mixalot.
Phelps’ piece is also a great example of the interesting work that a journalist can do by crunching a few numbers. Math can be a reporter’s best friend.
Don’t Write for Free
John R. MacArthur: Internet con men ravage publishing (Providence Journal) – The long-time Harper’s publisher and Journal columnist uses the occasion of delivering a Delacorte Lectures at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to explain how he really feels about newspapers and magazines offering their content online for free. He calls the practice “business suicide for magazines and newspapers and career suicide for writers.” The trend has been especially painful for freelancers, MacArthur says:
What about ordinary journalists and writers, most of whom have no control over the production of media, apart from their unpaid, vanity blogs? A lot them went along for the ride because they thought that they had no choice. A few have been able to make money as promoters themselves, or even as highly paid bloggers, such as Andrew Sullivan.
But by and large, the condition of the freelance writer and midlist author is very bad. Ask any author or freelance journalist – even fairly successful ones – what’s happened to their income in the past few years.
MacArthur admits to not having solutions for how publishers or writers can make it in the brave new world of digital media, only suggestions. “Such as don’t write for free. This is becoming nearly impossible, but you should really think about it. Put up paywalls on blogs, if you must blog, for pennies if that’s all the market will bear. But at least hold fast to the principle that writing is work, that writing has value, and that writers should be paid.”
Tech Tools for Writers
Yahoo Style Guide (Yahoo) – Is it OK to start a sentence with “And?” Should the word “app” be capitalized? Is “Click” here” the best way to get someone to click on a link? You’ll find answers to these and other burning questions about style, usage and grammar, and especially about writing specifically for the web, in the Yahoo Style Guide, which is available for free online.
The guide includes sections on writing for the web, editing, resources and a list of spellings and usage for common words and phrases. Use the Ask the Editor section to submit a question. Follow the Yahoo Style Guide on Twitter or buy the book. (According to the guide, the answers to those questions are usually not, no and no.)