Some Notes on the Print Front

Let's start with an interesting piece by London-based Fortune editor-at-large Richard Siklos, who looks at a range of opinions about, and strategies for, the print news business:

• Rupert Murdoch thinks that print will be around for at least 20 years, or until after his death.


• Sam Zell had decreed that the Chicago Tribune (I originally typed that as Tribute, which perhaps is apt) and LA Times will have 50-50 splits between editorial and advertising, and is reducing the news hole to reach that. To be fair, magazines have done this for many years as well. It's just that Zell seems determined to destroy his newspapers' abilities to deliver news to achieve this goal. And he wants to measure the productivity of journalists. Good luck - I'd like to see the "manager" who was able to get as much done in a day as a newspaper reporter must routinely.


• US News & World Report is going to bi-weekly issues and might as well become the US News & World Report About Health and Money.
  
• The Christian Science Monitor may shift from a daily to weekly format.

But it may be that all the business issues ignore a significant factor of people's underlying reading habits actually changing. Andrew Sullivan, writing in the London Times, finds that he now approaches text significantly differently than before the Internet:

In researching a topic, or just browsing through the blogosphere, the mind leaps and jumps and vaults from one source to another. The mental multitasking – a factoid here, a YouTube there, a link over there, an e-mail, an instant message, a new PDF – is both mind-boggling when you look at it from a distance and yet perfectly natural when you’re in mid-blog.

When it comes to sitting down and actually reading a multiple-page print-out, or even, God help us, a book, however, my mind seizes for a moment. After a paragraph, I’m ready for a new link. But the prose in front of my nose stretches on.

His piece is interesting, worth reading, and disturbing. If someone like Sullivan has a difficult time facing a page of uninterrupted text, what does that say for most people? And how could this change the way writers approach their craft?

A third article may have some answers: Michael Agger in Slate on how people read online. He starts off with a bit of parody on usability expert Jakob Nielsen. There's an interesting fact that he attributes to Nielsen: on-screen reading is 25 percent slower than reading on paper, at least when it comes to conveying information.

Consider for a moment that your reading speed was suddenly slowed by a fourth. Would you keep reading as much or as often as you do? Or would you get frustrated and either try skimming or completely move to a different activity? The reader cannot change the experience, other than by walking away, so Nielsen argues that the writing must change:

• highlight keywords
• use meaningful subheadings
• rely on bulleted lists
• include only one idea per paragraph
• use the old newspaper standby, the inverted paragraph, with the conclusion at the top
• cut the word count by at least half

Definitely click on the link and read to the end, including an example where Nielsen's lab tested multiple variations of a single promotional message.

Opting for the Long Open-Ended Interview

During the fall, I was interviewed a number of times regarding my cookbook. Each time, the reporter seemed to have a strict list of questions. It's not that they were close-ended, which is the death of interviewing, but more close-scoped. The writer had a structure already in mind and was looking to fill in the appropriate blanks. Another way of looking at this is that the writer had already written the article, and just needed the requisite finishing details.

That, to me, is an almost unthinkable way of conducting an interview. I don't mean unthinkable in the judgmental and disapproving sense, but unthinkable, as in such an approach rarely occurs to me. Perhaps it's my rambling nature, but I prefer longer interviews - 45 minutes to an hour being a usual amount for me. While that increases the research time of an article, I find that the payoff is immense, which keeps me going back to the same method.

A bit part of what I can offer to editors - and what they specifically have said they like - are the details and unexpected views and insights that they often find in my work. Although having a large dose of ego, I don't mean that as backhanded bragging. I often enter intricacies in subjects that don't often get coverage. I only get those because I don't decide ahead of time what I "need" and let the interview dictate that. It may be that the nature of the stories I do lend themselves to this, but I've also done at least 30 minute interviews, and often longer, even for stories that will only run several hundred words.

Not only do editors like the result, but so do I. the available material is deeper and richer, giving me many more options in structuring and writing the piece, which makes the writing process more enjoyable. I get other story ideas, a lot more information in case I'm doing another take or slant on the story, and I seldom get questions from editors that I can't answer directly from my notes.

Finally, when you provide clients with what they like but seldom get from others, you increase the value you offer and, accordingly, what you can command in compensation. Here are some tips from my time in long interviews:

• Avoid pointed and specific questions. At least early in the interview, skip the particular questions that will net you the information you think you will need for the story. There is always time for those later into the interview. Start by asking about the topic in question. Encourage people to just start talking and see what is important to them. You don't need to make a direct assault on the topic. Use this time to get a lay of the land - a topicgraphic map, if you'll pardon the pun.


• Use what you just learned. Once you've spent some time letting people talk about the topic, you'll realize that you've provided the psychological tool and opportunity for them to show you what they consider most important. Take note, because it can explain what they know best or see as the heart of the issue. Some people will use this as a chance o dictate their own spin, which is fine. Use it as an opportunity to let them get that out. Until they do, you probably won't get anything else.


• Begin exploring. Now that you've figured out the person's relationship to the topic and their interests, you can start to investigate the topic. Continuing with an open-ended interview technique, enter into some of these areas and keep digging. Let them define and describe, even if you think you know what they are saying. There might be an alternative vocabulary that will be important to understand, or you might find that you know squat. That's fine, as you need to know the limits of your knowledge.


• Keep pushing. Remember the basics of who, what, when, where, why, which, and how (WWWWWWH) in reporting? here's where you can use them in a natural and investigative way. Let each be part of the foundation of your being able to describe something that the interview subject says. Don't just repeat, but be sure you know the importance of what they say, its relationship to other parts of your topic, the mechanics of its operation. The questions help you structure a whole picture that you'll then integrate into the other pictures from the other interviews. In doing this, you move from the information-based world of traditional news reporting to the understand-based world of modern journalism.


• Use a topic list, not a question list. Of course there are things you'll need to learn to write the story, and you want to ask those questions. But treat them as topics you need to discuss. Rather than create a topically close-ended question - When did you first start cooking? - you now have a topic of the person's introduction to cooking. You'd start by asking them to talk about their early times cooking, and then move into additional WWWWWWH questions (Who introduced you to cooking? Do you remember the first dish you cooked? Did other people you knew show any interest?) about those early times.


• Ask for help. You've just shown evidence that you're interested in what the person has to say, and not just look for a series of stock answers to plug into your "process." So ask who else might be helpful. You can get some great sources that way.


• Honor the subject. In most articles, you cannot use everything the person said. But you can use things in context, mine the conversation for the points that the interviewee thought were important, and present, as much as possible, the essentials of the person's views. When you do that, you reduce the subject's feelings of having wasted time on just "a quote or two" and increase the sense of having participated in something substantial.

Try these techniques in non-critical situations at first, and see how you can make use of them. Then, as you gain experience, you can bring more depth to your reporting and differentiate yourself from all those "other" writers.

Technique: Eleven Types of Endings for Non-Fiction Articles

I know many writers, including myself, who spend conspicuous time working on the opening for a given piece of writing. But almost as important, if not as obvious, is the ending. For the readers who make it through the piece, the ending ties things up, helps create a sense of having read something substantial, and helps satisfy the need to hear the entire story. They are also as difficult, if not more so, to write well than ledes. Here are 11 types types - along with some strengths and weaknesses - to inspire some experimentation:

• Kicker - An ironic transition out of the last point or two in the piece. Can be humorous and even make an interesting point, but is more clever than profound.


• Summation - Provide a summary of the article's main point. This offers reinforcement of the most important thing you're trying to convey, but it can seem repetitive and pedantic.


• Take-away - One last point (not the main one) that you want the reader should consider. It provides additional emphasis, but only for those who read to the end. If the point is that important, make it earlier in the piece.


• Circular - You return to the theme of the opening for a sense of thematic closure. It ties things up nicely and delivers a solid feeling of completion, and yet if used badly can leave the reader feeling that nothing has changed.


• Quotation - Uses a quote from an interviewee as a final commentary. Generally carries an emotional weight of a problem that is ongoing. It's a sneaky way of doing a "time will tell" ending without saying that time will tell. Unfortunately, it's over used and may (but not always) leave an editor feeling that you've indulged in cliche.


• Inconclusive - Although popular in modern fiction, this approach leaves things hanging and you guessing as to what happens next. It's similar to the quotation in that it can create the feeling of a situation that is ongoing, with resolution in the distance at best.


• Surprise - More a fictional tool, you might still be able to use it in non-fiction. At the end, something completely unexpected happens. But this is a tough balancing act, because it has to be logical and conclusive at the same time.


• Chronological - If you're writing narrative, you can have the end of the article be the chronological finish of the event or subject. Be aware that you can choose slightly different ending points to create different emotional responses in the reader: irony, disappointment, elation, satisfaction, and so on.


• Abrupt - You would use this in a newspaper, not a magazine, and generally it would be in an inverted pyramid structure, where you make points from opening to closing in their order of perceived importance to the reader. This is fine for the recitation of facts that a hard news article can be, but is not a good fit for anything even slightly more literary.


• Poetic - If you've used rich imagery and a literary tone, you can sometimes go out on an image that becomes a metaphor or visual association you leave with the reader. It's easy to become the "artiste" and call too much attention to your writing style with this one.


• Tagline - Just like it sounds, the tagline is a fixed phrase that you always use. Although it has worked well for some in audio (like Paul Harvey's "Good ... day!"), it has no place in the average article and would often seem strange even in a column.

Blog Links and Responsible Writing

While looking at stats for this blog last night, I had a minor revelation. The article I wrote about SPJ's support for National Geographic in its law suit was fairly popular popular, but with two links in it, not even 10 percent of the readers went beyond what I wrote. That got me thinking about statistics for all my blogs, and I realized that many people never click on links that lead off the blog page.

It was a depressing thought, in a way. It could be a result of a skewing of my audiences, and this is a small sample, but I'm now wondering to what degree people actually use links. In other words, if you provide links for additional information and to back up what you claim, very few people have a practical care. They just read what you wrote and go on to something else.

That puts a great burden on the writer. You can't reliably use links as a way to help explain a story. You can't use statements that are cryptic unless understood in the context of a reference you provided. In short, we may all need to assume that for many people, what we write could be it.

Let that sink in. Posts really need to be thorough, recap all the necessary information, and be able to stand on their own if necessary. Most need to have the discipline of miniature reported articles. That's just on the craft and writing side. How about marketing? Getting a link to your piece in someone else's story is probably going to draw a lot less traffic than you might otherwise want.

We all have a lot of learning facging us when it comes to these new media. No one can give you certain answers because they don't know them. The experience does suggest that paying scrupulous attention to the usage numbers of your blog are important for writing quality and responsibility in addition to better controlling your marketing.

Here's to finding out that this "easy" form of writing is a lot more difficult than one might think.

Too Much Information

Journalists often learn that detail is the heart fo writing. Read some of the early classic pieces of non-fiction narrative and you'll see one piece of information after another intended to put the reader into the scene. Instead, the details often put the reader to sleep.

I can remember looking at a piece regarded highly by some big names in the non-fiction narrative genre. The reporter was walking through a field that had the smell of apples from a distant orchard. So the writer did some research, found the varietal being grown, and mentioned it by name. But what did that add to the story? If the average person were walking through that field, would he or she know whether the smell came from a gravenstein, winesap, royal gala, or some combination? Not at all. This is the use of detail that falls into the smart ass category: journalists add information simply because they can and like to show that they know it. But the apples in this case weren't central to the story - it was just the scent of apples that provided a detail of what it would be like to walk through the same fields.

This is when detail becomes distraction. Ever hear the phrase about killing your darlings? It means that no adored sentence or passage can take precedence over the piece as a whole, and that you have to be ready to eradicate that which will get in the way of the story. That's what needless detail does. Just as you bring the reader further in, it's that annoying noise that breaks the mood. Yet detail has become a matter of one-upsmanship, particularly in newspapers, from what I can tell.

Stories are the only victim. So are queries. Another writer asked me to look at a pitch that ran 700 words. I made some suggests that kept the essence of the pitch and cut the length in half - meaning that it's more likely the writer will get the attention of an editor. The details I pruned weren't irrelevant - but including them only did damage to the query because of what it had to accomplish and the constraints on space.

When applying the detail, think of Chinese brush painting, or a really good cartoon. There are only enough lines and details to render the whole image. Every piece of writing can go on only so long. I'm not suggesting to forget details. When writing an article, for example, I typically have a 10 to 1 or higher ratio of research notes to final article length. Properly handling detail means gathering all you can and then being judicious in the inclusion. Those details aren't wasted - they serve two purposes. One is being available in case the story needs them. The other is saving time by being available if the editor wants them.

The En Passant Quote

In chess, en passant (in passing) is a specific circumstance under which one pawn can capture another while moving by it. But a few years ago I found a way of using a quote in passing.

I was writing an article for Newsweek, which meant a lot of information in a small amount of space. In this case, I had about800 words and 10 sources. Normally that would be overkill and you wouldn't use all of the material, but in this case I really wanted to, so I had to find a way to fit it in without being too obvious in the reading.

So I experimented with using a quote as both a way of delivering additional information and acting as a transition between paragraphs at the same time. Here's an example:

..."Many of the people running dot coms have never run a business before. All they're doing is spending a lot of money and getting very little return." Experience is key, because there are no hard and fast rules about exactly how to value intangible services like consulting. As Marty Winston, an old time technology PR expert, puts it, "PR pricing always has been a bit of voodoo."

More often, though, the real source of trouble is "Internet time," the frenzy that arises when the impossible is expected and service providers have to lavish staff and other resources on projects simply to keep up. ...

In this case, the Winston quote adds an insight into a business issue - PR pricing - while creating a natural transition to the next paragraph. It's not a technique that always works, and overuse can look clumsy, because you might well be using quotes from two different sources in one paragraph after another. But when you need to squeeze a bit more into limited space, this reduces the need for separate transitions, and the words they require.

Blogs: the Writer's Weight Room

Many people spend hours a week on treadmills, in front of weight machines, and traveling to and from the gym. They don't get paid; on the contrary, they pay with both their money and time because the experience itself provides a benefit.

I've seen many writers take up blogging and then drop it, or only do so sporadically. My own experience over the last six months would suggest that even when you are busy, it can make sense to set aside time to blog.

To write well, you have to set words to paper. Lots of them. The more you write, the better and faster you will get. But there are only so many assignments you can land. So unless you're writing constantly and getting paid for it, try blogging. Not just a quick line pointing to something that has appeared somewhere else, but actually writing.

I'm currently maintaining four blogs with new posts once a day, Monday through Friday. At even a few hundred words a post, that adds up to well over a quarter million words a year. No, I'm not getting paid for it (although I've had at least one assignment come from an editor I knew looking at a topic I had pointed out).

But it's like intellectual weight lifting. My writing feels stronger and faster just in the last few months. There is always room to improve, if you're putting in the requisite work. Concert musicians will practice hours a day to keep limber and to stretch their abilities in new ways. The same applies to writing. If you're a pro, you should still be writing every day, doing the equivalent of scales, putting one letter after another. You can write non-fiction, write up material that you couldn't otherwise use, work on a novel section at a time - anything you want. The important thing is to sit and write, whether you feel like it or not. You'll get the direct satisfaction of improvement and the indirection one of being able to more easily impress editors. It's a long term investment, but one that seems to me worthwhile.

Developing Your Own Theory of Writing

There are a lot of writing books and many theories of how you should do one thing or another. But there comes a time, after you've been practicing your craft for some years, that you need to develop your own theory of writing and its processes.

There used to be a tradition in craft guilds of someone progressing through the ranks as an apprentice, then journeyman, and finally as a master. The master took on apprentices to teach them the craft and to get inexpensive help. They hired journeymen to get more practiced aid but were still expected to pass things on.

When you teach, you solidify your own grasp of what you do, because suddenly you're forced to think it all through. The more conscious you are about what you do, the better you can do it, because you will notice what you might change to improve, what the best practices are, and so on.

So even if you aren't teaching anyone about writing, act as though you were. Work out the explanations so you can gain that greater degree of consciousness into your own work. You can always mentor people, answer questions on writing boards (though too seldom are they about craft), help newcomers, and otherwise give yourself a chance to communicate what you've come to intentionally understand.

The added benefit? When someone actually does ask you about writing problems, you'll be ready to answer.

Wrestling with Stories, Ideas, and Mental Burnout

I recently saw a discussion on the FreelanceSuccess.com forum of what to do when your idea well is running dry. The major schools of thought were to stop thinking about the problem - taking a break, basically - or to find sources of inspiration in a given topic.

That made sense to me in the light of my own experience - we all get that drained sense at one time or another - but I kept wondering why. What is it about getting away that helps? Why does seeing more on the same subject spark new ideas? The greater a grasp writers have of this issue, the more efficiently they might find a way out of the problem when it happens.

Then I saw some connections, literally. For a moment, consider the difference between an idea and a story. The former is a notion or concept that grabs your attention and interest. A story is when you take the initial idea and develop it - consider the questions it raises, understand its implications, find one facet (a story angle) on which you will focus, decide on what types of information and resources you'll need to explore the angle, and develop an expression of what is now a story that you can pitch to an editor. Development depends as much on the specific writer as it does on the idea. That's why two writers can take an identical angle on the same story and still come up with two entirely different treatments.

When writers feel that they are coming up dry, it's generally not in the story development. There you can run into barriers or difficulties - where to get this statistic or who might offer a cogent view and expertise on a specific area of knowledge. You're not going to fall into that desperate emptiness of feeling that you're out of ideas and nothing new comes to mind.

That is a problem whether you're doing editorial or corporate work, because in both cases you need to tell the story, and to do that you need the initial idea. Either you face economic problems by not being able to generate enough work, or your craft suffers as everything you write starts sounding the same.

Generally I've found that one of two things spark an idea - either a piece of information new to you raises questions or captures your interest, or you see a new potential relationship among things you knew before. But there's something common here. An "idea" for a writer seems to be an incomplete new path of association. The new information starts a chain of associations or a new developing chain suddenly links at least two things for the writer that weren't connected in that way before. You start with certain groups of information, and suddenly you wonder what the nature of something is, or what ramifications it has on the way people normally perceive or understand the world. A previously unconsidered new set of associations between information you may have had before suddenly presents a brand new picture.

That gives a way of looking at going dry. Nothing seems new because you are not experiencing a new set of associations - learning, if you will. You're effectively in a literal intellectual and emotional rut. Your wheels are stuck in those tracks and you keep running along the same thoughts and feelings. No wonder you can't get a new idea; every time you want to take a turn, it's as though you're on one of those kid's amusement rights where a fake antique car goes around a track guided by a rail. Steer as much as you want, you won't go in a new direction.

The reason it's necessary to understand this is practical. No technique for creating new associations will work every time, and if you don't understand what you're trying to do, one day you'll find that method doesn't give you the jolt you needed. To jump the tracks, you need new ideas, and if I'm right about the nature of ideas for writers, this could happen either on the side of what you know or on the side of how you associate things. From that, you can guess at some things that might help:

• take a course (an area that might help you write or something completely different from what you've done before)


• read a book (learn about a topic you know little about, gain exposure to good writing, read deeply about something where you have surface knowledge)


• get away from your desk and go someplace different (a "mini-vacation" or maybe the Starbucks phenomenon of working elsewhere)


• go to a source about a topic you cover where you're likely to learn new information or associations (attend a trade show, do a background interview of an expert)


• look differently at what you do know (draw as many connections as you can between things you have never looked at as related, ask new questions about topics you've covered, assume that something you think you know is wrong and see what logical conclusions that would create)


• take a topic and consider what it would be like in another place or time or with a different set of people or circumstances

These are only examples, but I'm sure you can see where it's going: when you know the two main factors that make up ideas, you can start consciously planning how to change them to break your old associations and free yourself up for a new idea. It becomes a way to methodically think and feel differently to create new associations - about how to new associations as a path to new ideas.