Essentials, the women’s monthly magazine from IPC, shows this month why its circulation is rising faster than any other women’s magazine: its closeness to its readers. Essentials’ October edition is edited by 7 women readers. We are used to celebrity editors but this puts the readers into the celebrity slot. They are featured on the Read More
Category: Exclusive original quality content
“Hold the blog page…!”
Those campaigning folk at StinkyJournalism have just published a neat little study into the editing habits of US newspapers. Specifically, they wanted to know how many of the top ten newspaper websites actually edited their own blog posts. What do you think they found? The answer may surprise you! Have a look and see how many newspaper blogs Read More
Demand Media no threat to exclusive, original & quality journalism
Demand Media, a content farm as it is called, is about to go public and make its founders a pile of money. They have built a content farm which pulls together content from other sites and serves it up as How To lists and even full articles. USA Today is already using it to generate Read More
The best advice on writing?
Reading the post on The best advice I ever received on 10,000 Words got me thinking about the tips I’ve received over the years. The ones that stick in my mind tend to be the practical tips, designed to improve writing. Things like this one about quoting in features: Only quote what you can’t say Read More
How to write better feature intros
My advice? Keep them short. Too many intros go on for far too long. And that’s not a good thing in these days of busy readers with ever shorter attention spans. I’m all for being creative and using scenesetters and anecdotes to pull the reader into your piece. But that is not an excuse to Read More
It starts with content, but how does it end?
Remember that business school cliche ? “Pony Express went bust because they thought they were in the horse and carriage business, not the transport industry.” In media this has been pertinent for years – the magazine publishers of old are now information distributors or multimedia user group hubs, for example. Reading this excellent article about Rupert’s latest Read More
The content debate, or the news debate?
Wow isn’t life exciting! Whatever the eventual outcome of the current transformations taking place in media – and especially news media – we can all say we were there when it happened. This Paid Content article is a good example, where an experienced (respected? see the comments…) press man is utterly disbelieving of Rupert’s paywall model. I Read More
Working for the reader: telling what the news means
Let’s start with a classic definition of news: a fact or event not made public before. Facts or events. And the public is the reader, listener or viewer. The attempt to implement this classic definition is under pressure from: • Smaller teams of journalists who do not have the time to get to the new Read More
Exclusive, original and quality content to the rescue
By Richard Sharpe I’m optimistic about the future of journalism. Why, you ask, when there’s so much to be pessimistic about: • Publishers are in a perfect storm of recession and a challenge of digital media; • Contract/customer publishing is challenging the independence of journalism as magazines especially become an arm of branding; • User Read More