Last week, I unofficially finished up a major project. This week, a wave of introspection has taken over, leaving me wondering what to do next and beginning to organize the stack of proofs and endless rounds of edits on my desk.

I’m reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, and managed to find a quote that evokes content strategy just as much as world domination. Author Jack Weatherford writes:

“Genghis Khan’s ability to manipulate people and technology represented the experienced knowledge of more than four decades of nearly constant warfare. At no single, crucial moment in his life did he suddenly acquire his genius at warfare, his ability to inspire the loyalty of his followers, or his unprecedented skill for organizing on a global scale. These derived not from epiphanic enlightenment or formal schooling but from a persistent cycle of pragmatic learning, experimental adaptation, and constant revision driven by his uniquely disciplined mind and focused will … In each struggle, he combined the new ideas into a constantly changing set of military tactics and weapons. He never fought the same war twice.”

As we know from faded bumper stickers and forwarded emails from our mothers: it is not the destination, but the journey that matters. Use this modified adage for project review purposes: If you don’t take time now to reflect on the work you’ve done, how are you going to improve the next time around?

Warriors and writers unite: whether you have conquered the free world, sent a magazine to the printer or launched a new site, how do you wrap up a project? What questions do you ask your team, and how do you ensure that you are taking something away from the process and applying during the next iteration?

—Wendy Joan

photo from wikipedia

If you want great content, nothing beats a compelling story.

It’s the first rest day of the 2009 Tour de France cycling race and in the absence of having to follow live updates from the roads of Gaul today, let’s look at nine elements of great storytelling as illustrated by this year’s Tour.

1. A rich backstory. This year’s iteration of the Tour has something that has been sorely lacking for the past few years: a compelling backstory. The backstory is one that’s as old as human civilization: the conflict between the power and vitality of youth versus the wisdom and experience of age.
2. A young brash upstart. 2007 Tour de France champion Alberto Contador, known as “El Pistolero,” (The best cyclists get cool nicknames, unless they already have a Saturday matinee idol name, like Lance Armstrong.) was the heavy favorite coming in to the race. Not only was he riding for the strongest team, Astana, but he has proven himself to be one of the best climbers in cycling, winning the trifecta of cycling’s grand tours—Spain, Italy and France—already in his young career.
3. The old lion, back for one more shot at the title. Seven-time Tour champion Lance Armstrong stunned the cycling world last fall when he announced he was returning to competitive racing and planned to compete in the Tour de France, cycling’s biggest race. Armstrong, who spent more time in the tabloids than on his bike in the past few years, said he was mainly coming back to draw attention to his Lance Armstrong Foundation , one of the premier cancer education and support resources, but most pundits speculated that if Armstrong was going to race, he was going to race to win.
4. A grueling test. The Grande Boucle, as it’s known in France, is cycling’s most demanding test. Three weeks. Thousands of kilometers in the saddle. Tens of thousands of feet of climbing. Nowhere to hide. This year’s course is somewhat peculiar for several reasons.  The team time trial was back, but the individual time trials are short and technical. The race’s two forays into alpine territory feature only three summit finishes and one of the Tour’s legendary obstacles, the Col du Tourmalet, was placed in the middle of stage, reducing its race impact to nil.
5. A shot across the bow. In the race’s only summit finish in the Pyrenees, into the ski station at Arcalis in Andorra, a select group of contenders rode together toward the summit until Contador, apparently not acting on team orders, attacked the field and rode away alone toward the finish. This show of strength added fuel to the fires of discord between Armstrong and Contador and indicated a possible split in the team.
6. The French. Can you minimize the fact that this race is taking place in France? No way. The French love a good story and they love to be right in the middle of it. After a love/hate relationship with Armstrong while he was winning the Tour, the French have jumped on the Lance bandwagon this July. As Velo News editor-at-large John Wilcockson (@johnwilcockson) noted last week, “The French love an underdog—and old dogs.”
7. An unwritten code of conduct. When Contador took off on the road to Arcalis, Armstrong was bound by the part of the cycling code that does not allow you to attack a teammate once he goes up the road alone.  Armstrong instead stayed back to mark the other contenders, none of whom tried to follow Contador. Contador is bound by the same code (of course, they are more like guidelines than actual rules) and has stated that he won’t follow an attacking Armstrong when the race hits the Alps later this week.
8. A near insurmountable obstacle. What happens in the Alps may not even matter because of what stands in the way of riders on the penultimate day of the Tour. Two words that strike fear in the heart of every cyclist: Mont Ventoux. A summit finish on the “Giant of Provence” will likely decide who will ride into Paris the next day wearing the race leader’s yellow jersey.
9. Wild cards. Armstrong and Contador are not the only world-class cyclists competing in the Tour this summer. In addition to two other potential podium finishers on the Astana team (Levi Leipheimer and Andreas Kloden), 2008 TdF winner Carlos Sastre, two-time runner up Cadel Evans and others lurk, waiting for an opening.

Can Lance Armstrong beat back Contador’s challenge and the sands of time to win an eighth Tour?  Coming back to “win one more” rarely succeeds, but Armstrong can look at one other great champion who made it happen: Pete Sampras. Sampras won his fourteenth and final major championship, the U.S. Open, two years after most pundits had written him off.

The 2009 Tour de France has all the makings of race for the ages and certainly has more intrigue than the last few iterations. When will we know the true quality of this year’s story? Not for a while yet.

A story only becomes truly great when it passes into legend and someday when that legend becomes myth.

— Jonathan

(@bentpiton)

Photo of Mt Ventoux Summit by Pereubu

Photo of Tom Simpson Memorial on Mt. Ventoux by Welland

We may have reached the point in the internet revolution where pervasive broadband access has made everyone a publisher, but this explosion of content providers—most of them roaring pell-mell down the information superhighway—has made the need for savvy editors ever more acute.

This thought struck me yesterday as I was plowing through Flickr, looking for some photos to accompany an upcoming story. The simple search for “student teacher”—and mind you, this was not on the full Flickr library, but just the Creative Commons subset—led to nearly 900 results.

Too many to wade through, but after having exhausted the 7.4 million photos on Shutterstock and not even finding one appropriate and non-cheesy photo, it was off to the wild, wild West of photography, Flickr.

Screen after screen shuttled by, but eventually, I was able to dig up a few gems that could be sent to the stakeholders along with the story.

As I chugged through the 895 items tagged with the words student and teacher, I did find myself longing for a little self-editing from the photographers on the other end. Many of the photos were of dismal quality, the kind of snapshots that in the Fotomat era, would never escape the little envelope and find their way into an album. What, I wondered, was the person thinking who uploaded all 200 shots from a new teacher retreat in China, most of them underexposed and completely bereft of anything resembling composition? And what was with all the shots of the guy scooping out the innards of a watermelon? Why did the photographer feel compelled to take those photos in the first place, and then, later, decide that more than one needed to be shared with the world?

Why wasn’t the photographer editing as he went? When I trained as a photojournalist, I was repeatedly admonished to “Crop with the camera, not in the darkroom.”

Memory cards with massive capacities have made it too easy to take too many photographs. Giant hard drives make it too easy to keep every photo; just download and resume shooting. I am guilty of this at home. There are seven years worth of photos of my dogs and five years worth of photos of my son at home on my iMac.

But yes, only select images have been edited in Photoshop and either printed or emailed to family and friends. I can remember a set of photos, uploaded to a sharing site by a-family-member-who-shall-remain-unnamed, that contained more than 100 images of his young child, all from the same trip to a pumpkin patch or petting zoo. I scanned the thumbnails, but I couldn’t make myself leaf through all of the photos.

Which brings us back to why editors are going to be ever more valuable as the amount of content on the internet continues to burgeon. We may all be publishers, but we are not all editors.

1.    Editing is a skill. Whether it’s text, photos, video or audio, deft editing takes experience and knowledge.
2.    Editing is an art. Having the ear that detects a tin word, the eye that can pull the one image from hundreds or thousands or the touch to slice up an hour of raw video into 10 compelling minutes, there is an aspect to editing that cannot be acquired; it must be possessed.
3.    Editing takes time. If it’s not being done as the writer writes or the photographer shoots, it’s going to have to happen at the editor’s desk. The less care taken on the front end means the more care that will need to be taken on the back end.
4.    Editing takes care. Corralling and curating your content so that it stay fresh and compelling is the only thing that is going to keep your readers coming back.
5.    Editing is necessary. Is it reasonable to ask users to edit their own content? Maybe. Is it going to happen consistently and carefully? Probably not. There are plenty of websites that are just content dumps. Don’t let yours be one of them.

—Jonathan

(@bentpiton)

Photo by Jennie Faber