So You’ve Written for the Media? Now Change Your Ways For Medium
8 shifts to make before writing on this platform
It’s a sad fact of life that, wherever you are in the world, your local newspapers will be skeletons of the impressive beasts they once were. And that has left thousands upon thousands of journalists out of work and trying to make money through writing online.
I am one such person. I wasn’t forced out of my job like so many of my colleagues — I asked for redundancy and thankfully received the payout. I wanted to get out of the business I’d once loved so much.
There is also an army of writers who contributed to newspapers in their spare time, maybe on their specialist subject, perhaps on behalf of their community with local news. These people, too, have had an arm of creative writing, and perhaps income, suddenly cut off.
To give you a little background, if you’re not familiar with the global tale of woe, once upon a time there were newspapers, with large staffs, great teams of journalists getting to the heart of the stories that matter most to people, holding people in authority to account, informing the public of what was going on, and when.
Carrying out with great professionalism those three mantras which still drive me today — Inform, Educate, Entertain. Getting both sides of the story. Telling the truth with no bias attached.
Then the internet arrived…
For me, I have to be honest, the internet was such an exciting development. I have already admitted that I wanted to reach a wider audience and I find the obsession with all things ‘local’ to be damaging to our mindsets.
Nevertheless, good journalism simply had to be protected. And it wasn’t. And now we live in a world of fake news, and the real news being branded by everyone from conspiracy theorists to presidents as being fake, too. A sad state of affairs.
It’s all down to an off-the-cliff drop in newspaper sales and advertising revenue. Media companies were slow to embrace the internet but then decided to put most of their content online, free of charge. So of course, people got used to getting their news without paying for it.
Advertisers were keen to reach people on digital platforms but the media never got to grips with a workable model to charge them by. Also, businesses soon discovered they could set up their own websites and Facebook pages and reach their customers that way, saving their marketing budget in the process.
That money was equivalent to journalists’ salaries. Many publications have disappeared over the years, many more are hanging on by the most desperate thread, squeezing out all life and income until their inevitable demise.
My local newspaper, the one I left four years ago, fired all its photographers except one. Now they’ve made him redundant, too. A newspaper without a photographer. Can you even imagine how that works? The poor journalists remaining have to rely on taking photos with their own phones, or asking people to email photos in (to use without payment). Or they’ll raid old photos from the archives or steal them from social media. Quality is a word no longer valued.
Mastering the skill of writing online
Nations have been awash with former journalists, many of whom have decided to go into the world of public relations — because they can connect with the media, they know what the media requires.
Many others have been struggling to make ends meet as writers. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a skillset where I could do lots of different things, but many ex-journos were made for one thing only, to write stories — which has led them to search for freelance work, and found that freelance budgets have been slashed as well.
So that brings former journalists, often kicking and screaming reluctantly, to platforms like Medium. They might also try to set up a personal blog, or launch their own ‘freelance services’ website.
The trouble often is, the industry we grew up in was rigid in its traditional and archaic ways. That meant the use of language was severely restricted. All newspapers had style books, or style guides, and these styles had to be adhered to strictly, or you would feel the wrath of the chief sub-editor — the guardian of the language.
My argument was always that journalists should NOT be guardians in this way. Language evolves constantly, new words enter our vocabulary every year, and the only way newspapers could have given themselves any chance of survival was by speaking the same language as the reader — especially the younger ones.
Not a chance. The industry was infected with dinosaurs and this has led to many thousands of journalists struggling to communicate in the modern world of blogging.
Sometimes the obsession with communicating in flowery language leads editors to make some crazy decisions. One of my former editors banned the word ‘kids’. He instructed us to use the word ‘children’ instead.
Now that wasn’t great for headlines, when you often needed to find a short word, but apart from that, the whole English-speaking world used the word ‘kids’, and obviously still does.
So with all this in mind, I feel I have some useful advice to pass on to former journalists if they want to make money on Medium, or in the world of blogging and other online writing.
1. Write With Freedom
Throw off the shackles of the style book. Enjoy your writing. Express your feelings and your emotions. Use words you wouldn’t have got away with using before. Let it flow freely, write as you would speak. Don’t worry about starting a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘Because’. Let your hair down, run through the wind and breathe new life into your writing.
2. Communicate With The Reader
Essential and obvious, but this is what so many newspapers fail to do. Know your reader, know your audience, and speak in their language. If you’re writing in a niche, such as motoring, IT, engineering or cookery, use whatever terms are necessary. In general writing, be honest and sincere. You have to build trust with the reader. They have to know you understand their problem, curiosity or point of view. Write casually, be friendly.
3. Be Concise And Get To The Point
Journalists are usually good at summing up a story to write a detail-packed yet short introduction to a story, to set the scene for the reader and entice them to read on. At least that’s the job they should be doing. When it comes to blogging, all sentences throughout should be short. Paragraphs should be short. Attention spans online are short as well, so get to the point of your message and then go into more detail if necessary.
4. Express An Opinion
You can never do this as a reporter, unless you’re one of the chosen few who gets to write an opinion column. When people read blogs, however, they trust the information more if they feel that the author has lived the situation, or really knows what they are talking about. So don’t shy away from writing things from a personal perspective, and offering your own opinion on matters. This will now be valued, not removed!
5. Write Evergreen Content
Newspapers need their information to be up to date. So much so that it quickly becomes old news and suitable only for archives. Blogs can be updated and re-shared once the information changes. And by writing content in the first place that will stand the test of time, your story could be read for many months, even years to come. And if it’s on Medium, that means a story you write today could still earn you money long into the future.
6. Include SEO Keywords
This is one skill you may not have acquired before, but if you want people to find and read your articles, among the millions circulating on the internet, make it easy for them to find them. That involves using keywords — words or phrases that people actually search for, especially in your headline, sub-heads and meta description (the summary people will read on search engines), Do some research on this, but for a quick pointer, start typing into the Google search box and see what comes up — these are genuine trending searches. For example, type in ‘how to’ and look at the list of suggestions that follows. These are things that people actually want to know.
7. Be Aware That Blogging Is Merging With Journalism
You might like this one better. To get found on Google, the algorithm now favours long-form, original, quality content. That means you can — and should — write longer blogs, 1,500 words-plus. Just keep the sentences and paragraphs tight, still. The content should not be clickbait, it should be genuinely informative and interesting to the reader, and deliver what the headline suggests it does. It should not duplicate anything else out there — put your own spin on things. All these skills should come naturally to a trained journalist.
8. Be On-Trend With Your Branding
I have seen so many former journalists set themselves up as freelancers or copywriters with a logo of a typewriter — or even a quill! Your desire to associate yourself with an age when language offered little compromise is not going to impress most clients you want to write for. Likewise, if you’re setting up a publication on Medium, take time to think about how you might be portrayed through your imagery. People often need to know that writers are digitally-savvy, so even if you’re not, pretend that you are! And then learn more skills to ensure you are. It’s a competitive world out there…
