Writing in the old and new world
64Writing, old-school
I was in high school in 1972 when I began to realize I could write.
A dozen years later, in 1984, I started doing it professionally. This became my full-time job, with a few interruptions here and there, until I left the newspaper industry in 1997.
It was about that same time that the newspaper industry died, only it was a well-kept secret for a decade.
Now, in 2010 I am again writing for food. Except I realized I needed to be retrained.
While you lose some off your writing chops if you don't use them for a while, that wasn't so much the issue with me. In fact, when I started blogging and Hubbing in 2007, my old managing editor said my work was as good as it ever was. The issue was that the writing industry saw some massive sea changes in the decade I was gone.
Journalism as us oldsters remember it is gone. But while online writing may open up vistas that were unknown to us old-school ink-stained wretches, many of the rules have also changed. Some, I fear, are not for the better.
Writing for real readers
I used to write for human eyes. Journalism demands you write crisp, clear prose, with relatively short sentences and short paragraphs. The lede graf shouldn't be any longer than you can read aloud in one breath, and it is, well, a lead. It's a summary, with the most salient details. The inverted-pyramid style allows a reader to break off from his reading at any point and get all the facts he needs to know.
Feature writing is a different animal, as is magazine writing. There you can take your time getting into a story. But a well-crafted lede graf is still important; it captures the reader's attention and induces him to read more.
The headline is there to "sell" the story, to again capture the reader's attention. Headline writing was an art; you had to consider some very tight parameters set by the typography, so you had to have a certain number of letters in the head. And this while grabbing the reader's attention. Like some of the classics: "WAR." "DEFEATS TRUMAN." "SNIPER KILLS PRESIDENT." It's an art, and even though I'd written my share of eye-catching heads in my day, I still have to take my hat off to the old headline writers.
Like when the late Verne Peyser covered the San Ysidro, California McDonalds shooting in 1984, where the guy went nuts and killed 22 people. Verne was working with the Palm Springs newspaper at the time, and the McDonalds shooting came in via the AP wire. But his headline used the word "McMassacre," which a) got panned for really bad taste and b) won an award.
Or when the Fontana Herald-News ran a wire story of actor Redd Foxx's death. My editor, Greg Bucci, ran a classic headline: "FRED JOINS ELIZABETH," a direct play on one of his signature lines from Sanford and Son.
Writing for machines, or 'Thanks, Google'
Online, I also write for an audience. Only the audience isn't my subscribers; my audience has a bunch of guys named Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Now, these guys are not terribly literate. They don't know well-written prose from hack work. They don't care if it's readable, coherent, or whether the writer was sober at the time. But they know keywords when they see them.
And people who call themselves writers (and those with no illusions whatsoever) have made a science out of this keyword thing. The more keywords you can stuff into your lead graf, the more Google notices. Headlines are built around keywords, and Web writers are urged to repeat the head somewhere in the lede graf--which was always a no-no in print journalism.
Several large online media companies assign work by furnishing the head while the writer files a story to fit it, somewhat like the National Enquirer and Weekly World News used to do. But in the online world, the heads are generated by machine, based on what people are searching for on Google. And there are tools out there that can help a writer formulate his headline depending on what keywords are hot now.
One of the results is that there is this gigantic push-pull between the need for quality writing and the writing that sells. OK, that's not a new story; people are more likely to read People Magazine than Atlantic Monthly. But the buyers at least had flesh and blood, and sometimes even a brain. But now much of the stuff on the Internet is pure crap with no discernible value, even though it's well-keyworded pure crap with no discernible value.
I understand Google changed its formula some, in an effort to weed out the copy that has no value but is designed to game the keyword system. Some cosmetic changes may result, but the emphasis on Web writing is still to capture the attention of a machine.
More writing
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In the New World
Relearning the craft
When I wrote the Hub "Writing like a tortured soul," I developed a wild hair to try an experiment. I mentioned Lady Gaga as a peripheral character in the Hub. "But the lyrics to 'Alejandro,' a song by pop tart du jour Lady Gaga was likened to Shakspeare. Uhh, I really can't see that," I wrote.
OK. A couple of days later I ran across a news story where Her Gaganess was mentioned only peripherally, and the writer was thinking of some SEO points there. I picked it up in my blog, with the headline "Of newspapers, pot tarts, and Lady Gaga." It ran June 17.
On June 25, I ran a Google search of "lady gaga pop tart," and on the first page I had two references -- one for the blog itself, and one for my link via YouSayToo. In fact, I had the first two references. On a second search using the terms "lady gaga tart" (ask any Brit what a tart is, kiddies), I had one on the front page. But it was front page, a nice Google position to be in.
Since then, though, I dropped out of the front page -- in fact out of the top five pages. Web fame is, at best, fleeting.
The state of freelance
As a freelance writer, I pay attention to trends in the industry. And part of this includes watching the job ads for Web freelance work.
It's depressing.
Much of the freelance writing for the Web is designed to game the system. Use your keywords, with a bonus paid for how many times you can stuff them into your prose. After that, quality doesn't really matter. Your work can be run through a translator to get it into a semblance of your target audience language, run through content-spinning software to re-angle the same regurgitated piece of garbage another time, and slapped onto the virtual page.
I tell you, it's enough to make a fella want to swallow his revolver.
But again, no illusions about the writing industry. As a journalist, my job was to produce copy for a newspaper to get you to open it so you can take a gander at the advertising inside. It's bait. But at least the bait was better crafted than it is now.
So if I have designs on making a killing on the Internet, I need to change my writing attack considerably.
Do I plan to?
No.
Because I'm stubborn.
Also because I still prefer to write for real people.
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CommentsLoading...
Thank you, onegoodwoman. Most of the stuff I write here (and elsewhere) is simply something I feel must be said at the time.
I've been known to stir things up with the pen or computer, but trust me: It's my mouth that really gets me in trouble.
This hub took me back to my student days, when as a young gun who was going to take on the advertising industry I was given an A+ for headlines in a media assignment. It was the best feeling.
Like you I have seen the changes in the writing industry, not just in journalism, and I too am a little saddened by it.
What annoys the crap out of me though is that most of the writing on the net is exactly that, crap! You are so right in pointing out that SEO has changed the way articles are written. Give me good writing like this hub any day.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane Eric, I enjoyed it. Voted up.
Thank you, MPG. I keep thinking that someone, somewhere might actually want quality writing on the Web and is willing to pay for it. And if so, I hope I'm ready.
Eric, a word of warning, read my hub about my some work I did that wasn't paid for before you commit to online work ...
http://hubpages.com/hub/Hubpages-Stealing-Someone-
Good luck with your writing.
Thank you, MPG. Very useful stuff. Looks like upfront money is one of those nonnegotiable things. Bookmarked your Hub, will read it again & comment.
onegoodwoman Level 4 Commenter 19 months ago
I truly like this Hub, it is not about the glitter. No, this is about the soul.
My written words do a much better job of speaking for me than my mouth does. The written word can be manipulated to convey my message ( thanks to erasers and the delete key), but once spoken, I can not recall the words. It has been this way for me since Grandad put the pencil in my hand. Money is not why I am here. There will come a day, when my work reflects that.