Everyday coders, designers and content creators craft napkin sketches into wireframes—wireframes into stories—stories into messages. These are the first choices that shape the content:

Content is either editorial or marketing focused. Custom, sourced or user-generated. Informative, trust-building or asking for the sale. Printed on paper, or displayed electronically on a computer/device—with exception for the lost art of skywriting which is best bemoaned at the beach with a cold beverage in hand.

—Ian

Yes, I am piggybacking off of Jonathan’s last post. He wrote about interns, and I am putting in my two cents in.
It hasn’t been all that long (but definitely long enough) since I graduated from college, so my intern wounds are far from healed. I spent two semesters as an intern with a major publishing house, and the last semester of my senior year as an intern for a trade magazine. Here are my top five tips for being an intern, whether you are an aspiring intern, or an intern supervisor desperate to understand the angsty, over-worked college student sulking in the corner cubicle.

1. Meet with your supervisor on a regular basis
Just because you see your supervisor every day doesn’t mean you both are on the same page. Remember, you are not an employee of the company, you are an intern with the company. Your responsibility is to work and to learn and not get your employer in any legal trouble, and your supervisor’s responsibility is to make sure you are learning all you can.  Good communication can only make your internship better.

2. Address a new responsibility as soon as you receive the assignment
This tip goes hand in hand with good communication. When you receive new assignments and take on responsibilities, immediately open up communication with your supervisor. Maybe you are ecstatic about having the first read of a newly submitted manuscript. Maybe you are not cool with rummaging through stacks of papers on the senior editor’s desk to find a disk that she misplaced. Let your supervisor know how you’re responding to your new duties.

3. Make friends with your superiors
Chances are your internship is in a field that you want to work in. Engage your superiors; they will teach you something. At the trade magazine, I would make cappuccinos for a guy in advertising, and he would return the favor. He went to school in Western New York, where I grew up, and we never ran out of things to talk about, whether it was bars in downtown Buffalo or the progress of my undergraduate thesis.

4. Ask for more
As an intern, you are usually responsible for keeping yourself busy. Ask for more work (as long as you don’t have a school assignment hanging over your head). Look alive, and remember, that graduate school recommendation isn’t going to write itself.

5. Take as much as you can (but don’t steal anything)
Long before I owned a coffee table, I had plenty of art and design books to put on it. Though they may not be paying you, more often than not the company you intern with is more than happy to bequeath upon you the products of your labor. Make sure you have a copy of a book you worked on, even if you only copied and distributed the manuscript.

Of course, you should be taking away more lessons than things. By the end of your internship, you should know whether or not this industry is right for you, built a substantial relationship with your supervisor and have at least one professional reference.

—Wendy Joan

Intern.

If ever there was a word associated with suffering, intern is it.

Interns get no respect. Not that they’ve earned all that much, but all too often, they are treated like chattel. Interns have even had been auctioned off on eBay.

But this is not to say that an internship can’t be a benefit for both the intern and the mentor.

It has been a few years since my intern days as a young field biologist, but let’s just say that my months collecting data for other people’s research projects taught me a great deal about life and two important corollaries to Murphy’s Law:

• Nothing is so bad that it cannot get worse, and

• There is no limit to how bad things can get.

I won’t go into the details, but I learned to problem-solve my way out of situations that included the following obstacles: pelican vomit, bicycle handlebars that occasionally detached at speed, rotting sea turtle eggs, the four worst employees in the entire Costa Rican national park system, clueless and sunburned tourists and bird-eating spiders. Yes. Bird. Eating. Spiders.

Fellow Eat Media Content Editor Wendy Biddlecombe also had some memorable experiences as an intern:

• Trade Magazine, New York City: Ridiculed by conservative, old New York executives for wearing fedoras and a Hillary Clinton campaign button. Said New York executives tried to turn me into a cigar smoker. This is the only internship that gave me a stipend. That stipend was well spent when the company fired their senior editor during her maternity leave, promoted the junior editor and assumed that I could pick up the slack. Plus side: I know more about tea, coffee and cigars than anyone else I know.

• Book publisher, New York City: After a semester spent as an editorial assistant with a killer midtown view from my personal office, I interned with the company again after a semester in India, only to find that the office has been filled and the only desk available to me was in the window-less mailroom. I spent the semester looking for little pleasures, like snooping through high profile writer contracts and returning new releases to Barnes and Noble for store credit. In my defense, it was only to afford books for school.

All that said, internships are highly sought positions, even by those who are already earning the big bucks.

Why? Because they not only offer a glimpse at what it’s really like to ply a trade but you might even pick up some of the tricks of the trade along the way, depending on the quality of your mentor. Also, depending on how much independence you are given, you may get to learn a lot about self-reliance and problem-solving in a non-academic setting. No more theory. Time for some practical skills.

Sure, you probably won’t be paid much, if at all, and you will likely be asked complete some hideous, mind-numbing task of the sort that goes along with the phrase, “We’ll get the intern to do it.” But even these tasks can have hidden Easter Eggs within them; you just have to be willing to strive for the Zen state of Samadhi—total oneness with the moment—and don’t mess up the Starbucks order.

— Jonathan

Photo by dsb_nola

The list of oldest registered domains starts on March 15th 1985 with Symbolics.com. The top 25 oldest domains contain a who’s who of heavy computing including IBM, SUN and INTEL to name a few. Today’s top 25 most popular websites either provide content, store content or search for it. Where things are is important and SEO/SEM have a place (even if it is not in my heart.) Content may not be a magic elixir but it is the web. Take it away and you have a big fat buy button.

*This post was inspired by one of my favorite comments on the web:

—Ian

Freelance writers, ya gotta love ‘em. Sure, they can be a prickly and fickle bunch, but spend enough time prospecting and you will uncover the geniuses among them. Treat these gems right and they will take you far.

If you’ve ever worked as an editor, you’ve had to learn a lot about the care and feeding of this unique subset of humanity. Here are the top 10 tips for managing a stable of off-site freelance writers:

1. Write the most comprehensive creative brief you possibly can. Initially, some freelance writers are like Harry Potter’s house elf, Kreacher—they require extremely precise instructions if you want the desired result. Leave even the tiniest gap in the creative brief and the story you had in mind may not be the story you are returned.
2. In addition to the creative brief, provide as much background as possible about the publication the piece will appear in and who makes up the target audience. A story on fusion technology that’s written for engineers will look a lot different than one written for a general audience. The background is also a good place to tell the writer what NOT to do. Again, this will save a lot of time for both of you.
3. Specify the length, the tone, the takeaway and the format for the story. If you want 1,500-word case study written for MBAs that concludes with a list of five process implementation tips, ask for it.
4. Be clear, up front, about the expectations on revisions. If you have a kill-fee policy, be up front with it: writers need to know going in that if they fail to revise a piece to a reasonable point after two revisions, they will get the kill fee only (and probably won’t ever see another assignment from you). Though if you reach the kill fee phase, some of the blame lies with you, editor, for failure to vet the writer properly or for failing to adequately communicate what you desired in the story.
5. Tell the writer what they will be paid, how they will be paid and when they will be paid. Honor your financial commitment to the writer in a timely fashion.
6. If a piece needs major alterations, let the writer do them. Give as much direction as is necessary and let the writer do the work. The piece belongs to them. (At least until it’s published, depending on your contractual agreement.)
7. Remember that your writers will be working on other projects at the same time as yours, so you may not be able to get instant turn-around on revisions.
8. Be specific about the supporting materials you expect to be turned in with the piece. If you want source contact information, brief source biographies and source headshots, along with five links to related material and a 50-word call to action, ask for them. And if you want something in a specific format, ask. But be reasonable and respectful: If you think you need to ask for a full interview transcript, why did you hire the writer?
9. Be available for questions. No matter how good your assignment is, questions may come up—some may improve the story in a way you’d never considered. Writers must be able to reach you by phone, email or IM during normal business hours. The work you save may be your own.
10. Be clear about the deadline, but also be flexible with your writers, especially the ones you have an established relationship with. There should be enough room in your editorial calendar to wait a few more days for information from a key source. If there isn’t, build it in for the next round.

A final, bonus tip: Writers are people too. Treat them like adults (as long as they continue to act like them). Keep the lines of communication open, honest and timely.

— Jonathan

My presentation from IA Conference 09 in Memphis

Full Screen version of presentation here: Off to The Market

—Ian

Content wants to be free.

We all want free content.

But somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody is you. And me.

What are we willing to pay to get our content for free? What costs are we willing to pay beyond the monetary?

How much of our privacy are we willing to have invaded to get the information and convenience we desire free of charge?

How good does the content need to be in order for us to part with our hard-earned bucks? I was certainly willing to pay for New York Times opinion articles when the Times Select program was in place, but apparently, there were not enough people like me as the program was discontinued.

Now, the Wall Street Journal is one of the few major content providers to charge for content, but it’s not content I’m willing to pay for. However, when an iPhone app recently appeared that allowed free access to WSJ content, I was all over it. Rupert Murdoch is, apparently, quite upset at the existence of the app, but the technology does not exist to charge iPhone users, yet.

Many sites exact a non-monetary toll, requiring you to create an account that collects personal data that, theoretically, can be used to market products to you. These sites do assume that you are faithful in reproducing your biographical information. I am not. I have signed up for many a site as Phil McCracken, Hugh Jass or Jacques Strappe. Age 104. Etc. (While this makes me feel better, I doubt this small-time deviancy really affects the value of the database.)

But there’s other information about yourself online that you can’t hide from the marketers.

If you have a Gmail account, as I do, you already agree to let Google read your email. Why do you think the ads you see are uncannily related to the content of the message you are reading?

Troubling? Yes. Worth giving up the convenience of my FREE Gmail account? Not yet.

(As an aside, it’s really wonderful when contextual advertising fails spectacularly. See this great juxtoposition between a swine flu story, an advertisement for White Castle’s new pulled pork sandwiches, and the cover of The Jerusalem Post. Kosher? No. Funny. Yes.)
Contextual advertising is just one of the tools the advertisers have to get their meat hooks into us when we’re partaking of the free content.

On a logical level, and this is coming from a former newspaperman, I know that there is a cost to producing content. I know that top-notch, unique content costs even more. For years, I readily paid a nominal fee every day to have that content delivered to my doorstep, but the internet changed the content landscape in a fundamental way.

(Interestingly, I pay more each day for internet service than I ever paid for a newspaper subscription; ironically, none of the money I pay my ISP goes to the content creators. It’s like if my newspaper subscription money just stayed with the paper carrier and never went to the New York Times.)

So I am conflicted. I know that advertising pays for content, but I am used to getting my content for free on the internet and there is a part of me that will do what it takes to make sure I don’t have to pay, monetarily or otherwise. However, there is exceptional content out there that I have paid for in the past and would pay for again rather than go without (Sunday just isn’t Sunday without The Times, printed or not.).

And I have resigned myself to the fact that Google reading my Gmail is probably just the beginning of the future of advertising that’s directed solely at me based on where I have been browsing and what I have been writing. Behavioral targeting is the next step, but that’s another post.

— Jonathan

Photo by Fagerjord

If you are just graduating J-school or have recently left another industry and for some odd reason, have a hankering to parlay your writing skills into the field of journalism, you may have heard that this is not the greatest time to be entering the business.

In one sense, you would be right. The field has lost thousands of jobs in the past couple of years as several factors have come together to put a serious financial crimp on the industry.

So, the likelihood of you landing a job at a major daily newspaper or national magazine is low. Very low.

But if you swing over to JournalismJobs.com, you will see that there are hundred of jobs available in the field. They are just probably not the sort of job you’d have previously considered. And they are not in the sorts of places you think of as journalism hot spots.

Idaho Falls, Idaho. Sierra Vista, Arizona. Waynesville, North Carolina. Sharon, Pennsylvania. And many other spots that line the blue highways of America.

But these jobs, most of them at small community newspapers, offer an immense number of benefits.

1.    You get to hone your craft every day in close proximity to your subjects. This is both a blessing and a curse. I won’t elaborate further.
2.    You get to practice every facet of journalism. You will write news and features, editorials and columns, sports and business, you name it. You will take photos. You will shoot video. You will learn a whole host of computer programs. You will blog.
3.    You will learn humility. You will screw up and it will be in everyone’s hands the next day. Your office will likely be on Main St. People won’t be shy about pointing out your shortcomings.
4.    You will get to know a community better than you have ever known any place in your life.
5.    You will get to experience the upside and the downside of the sort of Mayberry-like living that’s still present in broad swaths of rural America.
6.    The public will get to know you better than you’d ever dreamed of. People you’ve never met will approach you in public places with “something that has to go in the paper.” Depending on your personality, you may or may not get used to being a local celebrity.
7.    You will get creative. The paper must go out every week and some weeks, especially around the holidays (and during the off-season if you are living in a tourist town), there will be NOTHING going on.
8.    You will become a better writer because you will be writing a lot. You will learn to edit your own work, quickly and ruthlessly.
9.    You will also learn to edit the work of the barely literate and the hardly coherent, AKA, letters to the editor.
10.    Finally, you will hone you web skills. Even the tiniest newspapers have a website these days and you will be maintaining it.

Full disclosure: I spent 10 years working at community newspapers in Colorado, Nevada and Georgia. And if you decide to take the plunge, read Jock Lauterer’s Community Journalism, Relentlessly Local.

— Jonathan
Photo by Marcin Wichary