Five Strategies for the Credit Crisis

Roiling financial markets have sent many leaving the equity markets and seeking solace with their remaining piles of folding money. But for writers the crisis can provide a financial boost, even with advertising down, if you know anything about finance or can help someone who does.

• Consider a book. Book chains and publishers are looking to make money from consumer fears with financial titles. So now might be a good time to go to a publisher with a title that helps people either make sense of what is happening or find ways to lessen the impact.


• Talk to your editors now. They will also be reacting to everything happening and will likely be open to stories about cutting costs, reacting smartly with personal investments, and even getting into stronger position for the eventual recovery.


• Companies are likely to expand custom publishing even as they trim back advertising. They can't completely stop marketing, so they'll want what seems to provide a greater assurance of success.


• Those specializing in financial advice will probably need to repair customer relations and otherwise find a way to dig themselves out of a hole. So offer them some help in doing so.


• Take the load off clients. When everyone wants to cut costs, help them by providing additional services. For example, you might take on large aspects of a project, managing it for the company at an additional cost that is still lower than it would be to bring someone in-house or even hire a temp. That frees them up to shore up the business and increases your income. A warning on this strategy: do not give the services away, or you devalue them and now create the expectation that you should be doing it for free going forward.

Publishing Needs to Focus on Smarter Editors, not Smarter Readers

Photographer director Rob Haggart had a great post on what goes on the cover of magazines. You can feel his pain in, between, and on top of the lines:

Who should we put on the cover? How about someone who actually wants to be there and that the audience cares about. How about someone we can spend some time with a write a meaningful story and take interesting pictures of. I look forward to the day when magazines can return to serving their audience and not the newsstand. Until then you're stuck with 109, free, biggest, hot, ultimate, travel, toys, secrets, great, perfect, best, sex, abs, weight-loss, getaway, new, insider, easy, delicious, shortcuts, paired with a celebrity you keep seeing over and over on the covers of magazines.

He knows of what he writes, because he's been there: a former director of photography for Mens' Journal and Outside.

I agree that the dumbing down comes from the editorial side, only in a different way than many of this think - that is, many editors are bringing less intelligence to the job and assuming that they are talking to people who know even less than they, when that may not be so. How many times have you seen editors set off on a topic or story angle that assumed the worst of their readers, or that wanted to prove a theory of theirs, no matter how much evidence suggested that they were wrong?

Maybe if we want better copy that will really attract readers, the industry needs to stop low-balling salaries of everyone other than the EIC so they don't have to focus so much on the next jump of their career, because they aren't having to live out in NJ on $28,000 with 4 roommates. Perhaps magazines could attract some people who not only love the work, but are smart and willing to consider things from the readers' vantage. And maybe have more of those editors actually talk with a lot more readers. What a concept, talking to your customers.

Tool: Google Trends

If you ever need to add keywords into your writing - which could easily happen either in Web corporate work or when writing editorial headlines that you want to grab attention - it helps to know how well a search term does. That's why you should check out Google Trends. It doesn't work for all terms, as it filters out anything that gets less activity than some secret threshold measure of popularity. But you can take a term and see both the search volume index (a relative measure of demand) and an index for how often the term is used in searching news items.

Check this example of trends for the search term chocolate. Not only are there graphs of the ebb and flow of user interest, but it marks some points by given news stories, so you might have a sense of why there was a sudden spike at one point. (It's imprecise, however, so there may be no story link to a given rush of interest.) Then you can see relative strengths in different countries, cities, and even languages.

Plus, you can actually compare the relative strengths of different search terms, so you can see which ones you might use, or not. Here's an example of searching on chocolate, cocoa, and carob. Also notice that you can restrict the examination to searches originating from a given country or that happened during a specific year.

Writing Memorable Phrases

Marketing expert Al Ries had an interesting piece in AdAge about some of the techniques that make for good marketing slogans. It seemed to me that the principles would not only apply to headlines and deks, but as ways of putting in the nuggets of memorable writing that can help make an article stick. (To say nothing of getting those doing corporate work to write better slogans.) Here are the techniques he mentioned (though read the article, because the examples are good):

• Rhyme and alliteration Used well, they can make language stick to the mind of the audience.


• Double entendre This is in the literal sense of a double meaning, and not necessarily a sexual double entendre. The tension between the two meanings helps cement the writing.


• Repetition This is a more sophisticated use than literally repeating the same thing. Instead, you use the concept two or three times in a row, underscoring it.


• Reversals This can be in the sense of chiasmus - the rhetorical structure where you use parallel construction but invert or reverse the latter ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country") - or a literal melding of opposite mental concepts, like sweet and sour.


• Pass-along phrasing Not only do you want the wording to be memorable - that is, lending itself to unconscious incorporation into memory - but you want it to contain words or concepts that one customer might use to pass on the message to another.

In addition to his strong list, I noticed three other points that I think bear consideration:

• Keep customers close Frame a concept with the customer in mind. Most of the winning slogans he mentioned communicate a vision of something the customer wants: a tractor that keeps running, non-messy chocolate, a newly cleaned drain, the promise of a job, getting your rear out of a sling by knowing the document you send will arrive by the deadline.


• Express big by talking small There is a specificity to the benefit or image that is important. For example, "You deserve a break today" speaks to a small benefit that people would like, and the delivery is an antidote for the larger disappointments of life.


• Specificity The more concrete the imagery, the more powerful the statement. I think that's why the "absolutely, positively" in the FedEx slogan works so well - because it conveys the real need of a member of the audience.

It would have been interesting to see some of the "bad" examples turned around. For instance, the EDS slogan "Expertise. Answers. Results." (which puts all the focus through the first two words on EDS, not their customers) could well have been changed to "Problems. Answers. Profits." or "Problems. Solutions. Pleasure." They aren't brilliant, but at least bring some sense of the customer in.

The "Best Writer" Myth

If you've ever attended a writers' conference or read the first writing business self-help book, you've come across this dictum: "Show that you're the best writer for this job." It's been repeated so often that it has become a factoid, but like many factoids, it's not really true. It just sounds like it should be.

I know that is going to sound outrageous to many, but hang in for a moment. Editors say this repeatedly for two major reasons. One is that they hear other editors say this repeatedly, and who wants to look like a dope by saying something that colleagues might find wrong. The other reason is that they are actually, albeit inaccurately, trying to convey something they need, but that relatively few writers provide.

To get to the value, let's deconstruct this statement. Is there a "best writer" in any category? Obviously not. If there were, and if the editors were serious, you'd only see one version of any story. Imagine the quandary of of the women's titles or any specialty interest magazine. They'd never be able to run a second article on a subject. And if the editors were serious abut there being a best writer for a story, there would be such competition that editorial rates would actually - gasp - go up!

That's obviously a silly thought. Editors aren't so naive as to think that writers are this uniquely and singularly qualified. No, they're actually saying something slightly different. They want the best writer they can find for that topic at that moment without actually having to put in significant effort in looking. Best writer actually means some combination of seven things:

• The writer has an advantage in covering the story. That advantage may be expert knowledge, experience covering the topic, inside connections, proximity for something that needs live coverage, or any other factor that helps get a better story.


• The writer's style or voice lends itself to the topic or will provide a unique take that adds value to the reporting.


• The writer is well-known enough that having the person connected to the topic will increase sales of the magazine or newspaper issue.


• The writer's working style will mesh well with the publication's editorial process and needs.


• The publication can keep within its budget for the writer, which could mean that the writer is inexpensive enough, or that the necessary premium isn't too dear.


• The writer is available to do the assignment.


• The editor will look good in the eyes of his or her boss after the assignment is done.

As you can see, this is a subjective judgment of comparative superlative worth. The "best" writer for one publication might not be the "best" for another, and your standing at the apex of all possible writers drops quickly if the magazine decides that it can't afford you.

Now that we have the theory, let's get to the practical application. What editors really ask for when saying that they want the "best" writer is that writers pitching a story address these needs. In other words, we're back to thinking like the client and trying to meet the client's needs, both spoken and unspoken, material and emotional. To increase your fitness for that latest fitness story, weave answers for each of these points into your pitch. That doesn't mean the editor will see you as the best fit. It may be that someone else with a similar idea has a better degree of connection, or more expertise, or what have you. It might be that while two writers both have five out of the seven points, one has more of the ones that are a higher priority for that editor. But the greater a degree to which you can show that you will satisfy these needs, the better and better you look to an editor.

When Pressured by Ad Department, Editor Leaves

According to a C/Net story, PC World editor Harry McCracken said that he had to get crackin' and left the magazine where he had worked for a dozen years. According to the story, he moved on because a senior vice president kept pressuring him to pass on stories that were critical of advertisers. For those writers who think that there is always an impenetrable wall between editorial and advertising, all I can say is ... wanna buy a bridge? Small bills only, please.

I can remember in the late 90s writing a piece for a major technology magazine. When I finished the draft and talked about it with an editor, I heard a lot of concern that my article wasn't complimentary enough to what turned out to be a class of advertiser the magazine wanted to approach. They ended up radically changing the article to make the advertisers happy.

In such a situation, there are only a few things you can do. Have your byline removed from the article if possible, and be sure never work for the publication again. And I think this is one of the few situations where you should become confrontational with the editors. Those who have talked to me about negotiation strategies know that I almost never suggest this, but there are principles involved and nothing to lose. Sure, they might go elsewhere and cause problems at another publication if you show up. But while lots of people note how small the publishing world is, remember that it's also pretty big. Maintaining your business is important, but there do come times that you have to stand up for yourself and for what is right, if for no other reason than backing down can sit with you for an awfully long time - like the rest of your life. And what business client or contact is worth that?