A Few More Favorites in 2012

It's always hard for me to determine which article is my favorite in an issue of CJR, and this time it took longer than usual. Drum roll, please... it was this one. Most of the Nov/Dec issue focused on celebrity coverage and publicity - a faction of the trade that's not often esteemed by the newsier types. But CJR, not surprisingly, managed to address the bias, admit it, explain it, and go beyond it.

Which is why I love CJR.

And yet I'm not ready to call it my favorite magazine. It has some pretty tough competition for my reading attention as it sits next to National Geographic on my nightstand, on the car seat, and bleachers throughout the year. We're also known to pick up an issue of Scientific American or something (just a little) lighter so there's some darned fine writing at my fingertips wherever I am.

What about you? If you had to, could you pick ONE favorite thing, or o ne favorite writer, to read?  I doubt it. Look, it's practically 2013 - so how 'bout for the new year, you pick 3 (if you want to show off) or 13, and share them here. Tell me why you love them, and why the writing lands on your favorites list and your reading table.

*cheers*    

~Diane Stresing

What Are Words For?

Missing Persons asked the question, What Are Words For? in the early 80s, and it seems we're still asking. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The answer is, words are for human communication.

I hope you'll forgive me when the question "is content still king??" makes me roll my eyes and spew sarcastic sound bites. Such as, well, you only need content...if you want to communicate.

Full disclosure: I'm a writer who just laid off from a company (Viacom) that recently hired a half-dozen (more) SEO/Social Media Marketing gurus.

Sour grapes? No!

We need SEO that works. We don't live to search, we live to find. And what we're looking for - in a gazillion different forms - is content. Ergo, good SEO is pointless without good content.

Content, of course, can be a picture, a game, a form, a joke, King Lear or step-by-step instructions on hotwiring a car.

I think we've heard the "reading is dead" argument enough over the centuries (Plato?) to realize it's not. I think content is still king as long as SEO marketing firm Best Rank (and others) say it is. True, content has taken a hit in accounting. But even as stately old newspapers are disappearing others are starting to ask the right questions, like: what about distribution? and how can the print product add value to the web product? Aha! Now we're getting somewhere!

(But where? It's hard to say. Just keep reading.)

What the Hell is Attribution? Who Wants to Know?

Who wants to know? It's the engineer. The one I married.

The conversation started, "what the hell is attribution?" and a minute later, we agreed to disagree. (One of the benefits to being married to an engineer: short arguments. One of the benefits to being a writer: I can always get the last word.)

My husband forwarded an e-mail to me this morning, with a lovely article (and picture) of one of his "bumps." The "bump" is a new communications radome used by Southwest Airlines to allow its passengers to enjoy wi-fi (sky-fi!) communications while in the air.

The article was lovely, however, there was no attribution. It took me less than a minute to find the source, Run Way Girl's blog, posted yesterday. Then I replied to the e-mail with a "attaboy" and a promise/threat to lecture his sales manager, who forwarded the article sans credit, about attribution.

"What the hell is attribution?" was his reply. Well, the writer deserves credit, first, I explained (and almost lost him right there) but more importantly, the reader needs attribution; it provides context.

If the article had been written by Southwest, or my hubby's sales manager, we'd know to read with a slightly jaded eye. (It's PR.) If the article had been written a month ago, it's old news - not necessarily less important, but time = context, too.

Then he had the gall to say, "Who cares? It's just an internal e-mail!" Which he forwarded to me, and a friend, and fellow pilot, and former co-worker... do I have to explain how this works?

Attribution matters, if you want to know you know. To riff on the old adage, in God we trust. All others need to cite their sources.

Bye Bye Blogs, So Long to Standards?

Today I read that blogs are passe, dead, a waste of time. When the question is, how can I get readers? apparently, the answer is Twitter. Hm.

I can digg (in fact, I really Digg it!) but I'm not ready to tweet.

Assuming there's some momentum and truth (or real worth) to back up the tweeting on Twitter, and Digg lasts longer than most of my web-crushes, then (you know what's coming) what does it mean for writers? and for writing?

I'm not sure, beyond the fact that it's acceptable to start a sentence like the one above with a lowercase "a."
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I believe writers are really, really important in any civilized society. Seriously. And not just the legal specialists who write the plethora of contracts, disclaimers, and warranties.

But it's been a long day.
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I spent part of it on a conference call with about a dozen eager writers who were, I was led to believe, all ready to jump at the chance to write for the website of a "major brand" in the medical space for ... ready? $70 per article. The articles should take about two hours to complete, we were told. (I suspect more like five.) Writers on the project are instructed to conduct one interview and use it to create 5+ articles on a given topic. And/or to source quotes from the host website - with attribution to the folks previously quoted on the host website.

Is anyone besides me nauseous at this point?

If we, the professional writers, are to repurpose and essentially regurgitate the same material, the same quotes, over and over and (I really HATE this part) reuse OTHER writers' material (even from "approved" websites - in this case, a partner site, but one with separate ownership and a separate staff of writers) how long will it be before what we read has no meaning?

Not very long, my friends; webspeed is roughly equivalent to the speed of light.

And the ugly twist in the wild-web-world is that while we can crank out "new" material with a few keystrokes and cut-and-paste commands, it's damn near impossible to to determine the relative age, or accuracy, of anything we read.

What if I repurpose a quote from a doc who was an expert in his field last year but who recently was indicted for having sex with his patients, prescribing drugs based on kickbacks, fiddling with research results to further his career at the big-name clinic?

I won't know and readers won't know, if I didn't do the interviews firsthand.

So for $70 you can get a pithy article on pinkeye, and say "goodbye" to journalistic standards.

That's a very costly mistake.

I'll admit that news of the death of the blog may be grossly exaggerated, and not at all related to the demise of journalism, however, there's a lesson to be learned in both.

I think it's this: While you don't always get what you pay for, even more often, when the price tag is low so is the quality.

In the case of the $70 medical article, you, dear reader, don't know if you're getting the story straight from the horse's mouth, even if the horse is quoted and the website looks like a thoroughbred.

Caveat emptor, dear readers. Writers, good luck. And fact-checkers, raise your rates. I hope you'll soon be in great demand.

Following Up on Great First Lines

"You've got to have a great first line."

Well, duh. But it's tricky stuff, this writing first lines. They have to go somewhere. No matter how great the first line is, by definition, it's the start of something. The writer must build on it... apparently, that's easier said than done.

Here's a great first-line:

None of this that I'm about to tell you would have happened if my mother hadn't found that squirrel in the toilet.

--The Middle of Somewhere by J.B. Cheaney
Random House Children's Books, 2007
Pretty good, eh?

It hooked me, but not for long.

I made it through the squirrel chase and ensuing battle/injury. (To say more would ruin the surprise.) But after that, the book fell flat. And as it turned out, the squirrel wasn't anything more than a hook. I felt sort of cheated.

We readers - even YA readers - can be demanding and picky. I better remember that...I'm gearing up for another submittal (vegetables) and revision (historical novel). Wish me luck!

Boo! Book Pages Shrinking

My local paper, the venerable Cleveland Plain Dealer, sliced a significant chunk of its book review space this summer. And we'll probably never see it again. Groan.

Yeah, I know the newspaper biz is reportedly (ha! there's irony!) dying. But the book pages appeal to readers and papers really, really need readers, right?

The cut is likely to result in one, or maybe two or three fewer reviews each week. All of the reviews are likely to be shorter.

If you care, let the editors know that you miss the space.