Category: Writing

EVERYTHING IS A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY

From The Slow Death—and Occasional Resurrection—of Original Reporting:

How We Fix It (a non-complete list)

  1. Fund the digging. Subscriptions aren’t charity; they’re R&D for democracy.
  2. Celebrate articles that wreck your priors. Surprise is the price of learning.
  3. Demand receipts. If a story leans entirely on “sources familiar”, ask for the paper trail, The Verge does this well.
  4. Back legal defence funds. Lawsuits stop more stories than lack of curiosity.
  5. Publish your changelog. Post the list: people spoken to, documents read, and known unknowns.

Excellent post.

I WRITE TO REMEMBER

From my People & Blogs interview with Manuel Moreale:

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Honestly, no. WordPress and the hosting and such works fine for me. I don’t care much about the name, or the theme, or whatever. The blog is 100% for me.

“I write to remember,” as the lyrics go in ‘One Armed Scissor’ by At the Drive In.

Read the rest here.

BUILD DENSE THINGS

From ‘3 Ways to Amplify Your Creator Gravity,” by Alice Lemee:

LinkedIn posts and Substack notes and Skeets (that’s Bluesky for the uninitiated) are not dense. They extend your reach, sure, but they’re more like your planet’s atmosphere—thin, easily dispersed, and quickly forgotten.

Instead, you need density. When I say dense, I mean something that doesn’t have a 24-hour life cycle and can’t be plucked from the top of your head.

WRITING ISN’T ALWAYS ABOUT US

Writing newsletters can be tough because we think it always has to be us us us…. me me me… look at all the things I got going on! But it’s so fun when we show this world we’ve built, talk about the people in our creative orbit. Tell the stories of how we got where we’re at, and the people who made it possibiel.

HOW TO WRITE ONLINE

Solid advice for writing online, from Sean Goedecke:

  • Try and find opinions you have that lots of people disagree with. Those are the interesting opinions others might want to read about
  • Ideas should come naturally from doing actual work, not from sitting and reflecting on what a good blog post would be
  • It’s OK to write multiple posts about the same thing
  • I deliberately don’t include every caveat – good readers will know I’m only writing about my old experience; bad ones won’t care anyway
  • I try to be upfront about my experience so readers can judge how seriously to take what I’m saying
  • Set up a RSS feed and some kind of analytics

Read more at ‘Writing a tech blog people want to read‘ (via Hacker News).

LOSE THE MAP

As Seth Godin says in his book Linchpin:

“The reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map.”

If you want a guarantee, buy a hammer.

Stop looking for tricks. There is no shortcut. There’s no “one size fits all.”

Make a painting, a photograph, a sad song, teach a course, call an old friend, dance like no one’s watching, cuz no one cares more than you do, so you might as well get to it.

START OVER

Photo by Seth Werkheiser

If an unpaid intern could write it, start over.

There are things can could be written by someone else on your behalf – announcing a new product, an upcoming tour, a fancy new something or other.

Lay out the facts. The dates. The logistics. “I’m really excited about this,” you say – gee, really?! Tell me more 😕

There’s enough safe, boring, dry text out there. Throwing chatGPT into the mix makes it even less spicy.

Your creativity is your magic. But please, don’t stop using it when it’s time to talk about the things you’re doing.

I wrote about this in ‘Find social media success by occasionally riding a horse,’ where I say:

“If all you can muster is “I updated my site,” lower your expectations. The algorithms are cruel, but it’s nothing personal. Is this fair or kind? No. But playing this game is a choice, and hardly anybody wins.”

NO GOING BACK

Here’s the terrifying thing about the state of music in 2024 (from The Verge):

“The tech industry’s introduction of MP3 slowly felled major retailers. Behemoth music stores went belly-up in the 2000s: Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, and Sam Goody. FYE bought up the rest. Ads from those retailers vanished, too.”

Like, that happened 20+ years ago and we’re still recovering. All the music knowledge, the time we spent going to those stores, the jobs that were cut and lost… the digitization of music is an atomic bomb that I don’t think we’ve recovered from.

Back when we paid $16 for a CD, yes, music review sites were crucial. And of course, yes, music critics are of course needed, but they’re not valued (as we can see).

There was a time you could write for an online outlet and make a few bucks. There was also a time when you could write for a newspaper and pay the rent.

Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That’s more than $21 per word in today’s dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn’t exist. 

That’s from Defector (above).

When I ran Noisecreep in 2008 we were paying writers $50 a post.

A few years later, I was writing posts for $5 a post.

Now Yahoo for Creators isn’t even paying per post, but they “offer a competitive 50/50 ad revenue share from ad placements in your articles as well as e-commerce benefits like affiliate revenue share.”

CPM display ad placements. On blog posts. It’s 2005 all over again.

“I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.”

Cory Doctorow