Content Wise

Does Farmed Content Threaten "Wild-Caught" Journalism?

by Susan 

My Smithsonian pal Beth Py-Lieberman hipped me to a piece from Time magazine about Demand Media, which is a "content farm" that uses the Web's most popular search terms to decide which topics to cover (hence "demand"). The company's thousands of freelance writers--many of them newly unemployed, top-notch journalists--are paid just pennies per word to crank out articles such as "How to remove dents in a hair dryer" and "How do I donate a car in Dallas?" Editing and fact-checking are minimal. The pieces end up on Demand Media's popular sites eHow.com and Livestrong.com, as well as in print outlets such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Demand is valued at $1.3 billion.

The Time piece got me thinking about the debate over farmed vs wild-caught fish, and how journalism/content production seems to be in a similar fix: Sure, the farmed stuff meets the market demand, but it's less tasty, less nutritious, more likely to be tainted, and may threaten wild stock. What happens to "wild-caught" journalism--investigative stories and unexpected, richly reported narratives that take months of research and dedicated work by writer, editors, and fact-checkers--when farmed content floods the market?

Take NYU's nominees for The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade. These stories, many of which you'll recognize as news-breaking and ground-shaking, are the result of curiosity, dedication, and independent thinking. The topics they cover may end up among popular search terms, but they didn't start out that way. And many of the news organizations that published these stories are struggling to survive.

What do you think? Does farmed content threaten wild-caught journalism? Or is there room for both?

Stanford Writers Workshop for Book Authors and Magazine Journalists

Magazine writers and book authors: Wouldn't you like to spend two days this summer honing your craft, learning some business tips, and getting smart about digital tools that can help you become more visible online? How about hanging out on a gorgeous university campus here in Northern California?

If that sounds tempting, please join me at the very first Writers Workshop presented by the Stanford Publishing Courses. I'll be teaching some of the magazine writing and new media sessions, and the book sections will be led by two real stars in the field. Alan Rinzler, executive editor at Jossey-Bass, the West coast imprint of John Wiley & Sons, will be covering books for adults, both non-fiction and fiction. Deborah Brodie, who spent 22 years at Viking and cofounded Roaring Brook Press, will spearhead the program on books for children and young adults.

Alan, Deborah, and I will be joined by an impressive roster of additional speakers and panelists--accomplished authors, editors, publishers, and agents. We will cover everything from pitching to writing to video to blogging and, yes, Twittering.

• Friday & Saturday, July 31 & August 1, 2009, at Stanford University
• See the full schedule of sessions.
• Read about the workshop leaders and speakers.
• Visit the workshop's social network.
• Register here.

See you on campus?

Wired Magazine's Story Behind the Story

Wired.com has posted the final entry of its Storyboard blog, which followed the magazine's design and edit staff through the entire process of producing an article about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. For magazine wonks—you're reading this blog, aren't you?—it's an irresistible look over the shoulders of a smart creative team.

Playing off the self-referential, Möbius strip-style world of Kaufman's films (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), senior editor Jason Tanz proposed tracking the story's development online. The blog would be a "profile of a profile."

Reading Storyboard grunt-by-grunt for a month might have proven a little tedious. We didn't. But looking over the whole collection of posts now that it's complete is fascinating.

Among the artifacts:

• Video of an early meeting exploring the idea with Tanz, creative director Scott Dadich (who is very into chronicling the creative process at his own design-oriented blog, The Process), senior editor Nancy Miller, design director Wyatt Mitchell, executive editor Bob Cohn, and editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.
• The pitch memo that Tanz used to get approval of the magazine article. It's a nice parody of the Kaufmanesque paranoid internal monologue that Nicholas Cage delivered in Adaptation, a vehicle that Tanz rejected as too predictable for writing the actual article.
• Excerpts of e-mail messages about headlines and other display copy
• Written comments on the developing manuscript from editors and fact-checkers
• Design layouts in various stages of evolution.

As interesting as it is to magazine makers and journalists, we can't help wondering what Wired.com's main audience made of the Storyboard blog. And did Wired learn anything from this exercise that will shape its publishing plans online, in print, and in the Kaufman-like realm in between?

See You at a Summer Publishing Conference

$1,500 Discount to Stanford Course
We'll be teaching again this July at the the Stanford Professional Publishing Course, an intensive and inspiring program for mid-career pros--and we'd love for you to join us. If you'll send us an e-mail to let us know that you're interested, we'll enter you in our random drawing for a $1,500 discount on the tuition.

Online Strategies for Magazines: Toronto Conference
On June 3 we'll present a workshop at the Mags University Conference in Toronto entitled, "Transcend Print! What Magazines Should Do Online." We'll also be speaking on "editorial marketing" for print publications and on how to write and edit for the Web. For descriptions of the talks, please see the seminar schedule.

Web Site Tune-up: Educational Publishers Summit in DC
If you can't catch us in Stanford or Toronto, we hope to see you at our "Web Site Tune-up" at the Association of Educational Publishers Summit on June 4 in Washington, D.C. We'll cover best practices in Web publishing and we'll conduct mini critiques of selected participants' sites.

Building a Better Paragraph

Following up on our post several weeks ago about well-built sentences, we offer these tips on putting together effective paragraphs.

• A paragraph should have only one point.
• Structure a paragraph to leave the reader with the take-away message.
• Build each sentence on the previous one.

You can see some illustrations of how to apply these rules in our paragraph structure handout.

The Well-Structured Sentence

Great articles are built of great sentences. Here's some assembly advice from a recent editing workshop we presented for a client:

• A sentence should have only one point.
• Structure a sentence to orient and cue the reader.
• Structure sentences to emphasize what you mean to emphasize.

You can see these rules in action by checking out the sentence structure handout on our company site.

Confused About a Word? Check "Confusing Words"

Editor's pop quiz: When do you use "lie" rather than "lay"? What about "capital" as opposed to "capitol"? Here's a particularly worrisome pair: affluent and effluent.

Confusing Words is a handy online tool for sorting out these and 3,200 more words that are "troublesome to readers and writers." With simple definitions and illuminating examples of correct usage, it's like a digital Strunk & White. (Or maybe you think that should that be, "...its like a digital Strunk & White." Check the site to be sure.)

Promote Content With Clear Headlines & Social Links

It's not enough to simply publish content on the Web and hope that the audience will come. You have to work the system.

Writing at Poynter Online, Managing Editor Mark Russell of the Orlando Sentinel shares some strategies that work for his newspaper's site:

1. Write Web-friendly headlines that are readily picked up by search engines and clicked on by searchers. This means using quick, informative, concrete language. Some recent examples from the Sentinel's site:

• Kidnapped teen's dad: 'Watch your children'
• 10 held, 3 at large in cocaine roundup
• Polk residents can recycle tires, phones, ink cartridges

It also means avoiding the clever turns of phrases that may amuse your colleagues but leave the Web audience scratching its collective head. For instance, "Commission to dive in on pool." Oops--that was a rare instance of The Sentinel ignoring its own advice.

2. Submit article links to social recommendation & networking sites. Russell describes two recent cases in which the paper attracted considerable attention for local stories by putting links to them on Facebook.

Washington Post Explores New "Digital Avenues"

"If circulation is dropping," says Washington Post sports reporter Barry Svrluga, "and we're trying to figure out how people are going to get their news, who am I to say no to trying out new avenues?"

That sentiment is increasingly expressed by writers, editors, and publishers scrambling to move beyond their traditional print platforms--or at least it should be.

Svrluga's multi-platform activities (breaking news Web blurbs pounded out at the nearest Starbucks, online chats with readers, blogging, podcasts, and, oh yes, articles for the newspaper) are described in a terrific analysis by Fortune magazine writer Marc Gunther of the Post's aggressive exploration of digital avenues.

Anyone feeling the push to get beyond print--and who isn't?--will find the Post's "platform-agnostic" survival strategies useful.

The Rewrite Letter, a Model for Editors

We (editors) have all been there. The first draft of the article you assigned comes in off-target. It's time for that critical tool of feedback, the rewrite letter.

As a guide for editors in this spot, we just posted a model rewrite letter (on our company site).

This is the last piece of our three-part strategy for eliciting a strong manuscript before you actually roll up your sleeves and begin your edit. See also our advice for getting the best from freelancers, and our model assignment letter, which to this day remains our most frequently read and downloaded resource.

Please help yourself.