For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

A few weeks ago, I decided to prepare and can my own pickles for the first time. Without an expert canner to guide me, I obsessively read up on the dos and don’ts of pickling and canning.

I found the process to be quite easy and enjoyable, as long as I adhered to the steps. Back in the office, I triumphantly told Jonathan of my success, and he said, “there must be some sort of connection between pickling and content strategy.”

There is. And here they are—what preparing pickles can teach content writers:

1. Do your prep work. My grandmother was an excellent pickle-maker, and her secret weapon to ensure delicious and crunchy pickles is an ice bath. Before you even get started on the pickling, you need to soak the sliced cucumbers in ice for at least three hours. You can’t rush this part of the process, even if it does eat up most of your Saturday afternoon.

Before you start writing, you need to put in the time and do the essential research that will inform your writing. Thoroughly read your background sources, and spend the time referencing additional sources that will strengthen your piece. You want to put in this time BEFORE you get going—if you don’t, you might end up with a less-than-appetizing finished product. No one likes soggy pickles, and no one likes less-than-compelling content.

2. Don’t forget to wear your gloves. Having decided that my pickles should be both hot and sweet, I spent the better part of an hour carefully slicing countless jalapeño and poblano peppers. I was more careless than careful, and the oils from the peppers seeped into the pores on my hands, and painfully burned for the rest of the afternoon.

When writing potentially hazardous content, be sure to wear gloves. If you don’t, you might continue to feel the pain even after the piece is complete.

3. Sterilize. If you don’t wash, dry and sterilize your mason jars and lids, you could end up with poisonous pickles.

Same goes for content writing: you want to make sure that your piece is germ-free, clean and entirely your own content. Even the slightest bit of unwanted substance puts the entire jar at risk.

4. Listen for the ‘pop.’ When your mason jars are packed full of pickles-to-be, you place the sealed jars in a hot water bath and boil for 10 minutes to process.

After carefully removing the jars from the hot water with a pair of tongs, they’ll begin to cool. Over the next hour or so, you’ll hear a loud ‘pop’—which means that the jars are air-tight, and the seals have taken properly.

Before your draft becomes a completed piece, you need to make sure that it ‘pops’ as well. Read the piece aloud. Does it have that Je ne sais quoi that makes the article shine, or do you need to take a step back and re-process?

5. Store in a cool, dark place. Being a pickler requires patience. After you have canned the pickles, you need to let the jars sit for at least two weeks to let the spices infuse the cucumbers. You could eat them earlier, but they probably wouldn’t taste much like—or nearly as good as—properly aged pickles.

Writers rarely have the luxury of sitting on a piece for an extended period of time. Unless you’re on a tight deadline, do allow any time you can spare apart from your writing. Be patient. Walk away. Sleep on it and revisit in the morning with a clear head. You’ll see something that you didn’t before.

Your pickles (and your content) will thank you.

—Wendy Joan

(Jalepeno photo by Beau B, mason jar photo by Brown Eyed Bombshell, Pickle photo by Wendy Joan)

This past weekend, I undertook the laborious task of sorting through stacks of The New York Times from 2009 and late 2008. From those countless newspapers, I cut out 21 stories, and whittled down the list to bring you what I consider the best of the best stories I read over my morning coffee this past year.

In Booming Gulf, Some Arab Women Find Freedom in the Skies

By Katherine Zoepf, December 21, 2008

Rania Abou Youssef, 26, a flight attendant for the Dubai-based airline, Emirates, said that when she went home to Alexandria, Egypt, her female cousins treated her like a heroine. ‘I’ve been doing this for four years,’ she said, ‘and still they’re always asking, ‘Where did you go and what was it like and where are the photographs?’

In a journalistic sea of black burqa news reporting, a refreshing look into the profession of choice for young, working women in the Persian Gulf—flight attendants.

Ex-Detainee of U.S. Describes a 6-Year Ordeal

By Jane Perlez, Raymond Bonner and Salman Masood, January 5, 2009

Mr. Iqbal said he had been beaten, tightly shackled, covered with a hood and given drugs, subjected to electric shocks and, because he denied knowing Mr. bin Laden, deprived of sleep for six months.

As the country anxiously prepared to welcome a new president (who vowed to close Guantanamo Bay within a year), The New York Times published this terrifying look into the six-year imprisonment of a Pakastani man never charged with a crime.

Iraqis Snap Up Hummers, Seeing Them as Icons of Power

By Rod Nordland, March 29, 2009

In a country with at least 20,000 Humvees and a war-weary population, who would think there would be a market for a civilian version?

An interesting look into the Baghdadi elite, and the not-so-culturally-different idea that driving an oversized SUV exudes wealth, power and confidence.

No Job and Soon No Benefits, Race to Help Son Stay Cancer Free

By Kevin Sack, April 20, 2009

‘You just feel that you’re at a loss, that you’re at your wits’ end.’ I ask myself, ‘Do I really have to lose my home to save my son’s life?’

When Danna Walker found out that she had lost her job with DHL, she was more worried about finding health insurance for her 21-year-old son who has been cancer-free for just one year, than putting food on the table.

This story made me want to send it to every member of the House and Senate, because if the Walker’s story can’t swing votes, nothing will.

You’re Name’s Not on Our List? Change It, Beijing Officials Say

By Sharon LaFraniere, April 20, 2009

The character is so rare that once people see it, Miss Ma said, they tend to remember both her and her name. That is one reason she likes it so much. That is also why the government wants her to change it.

A new law in China requires each of it’s 1.3 billion citizens to replace their handwritten identity cards with computer-readable ones, Chinese citizens with uncommon names might not have any choice but to change their names.

Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut

By Charles McGrath, May 15, 2009

He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes.

Did Jack Kerouac invent fantasy sports? Doubtful, but the writer kept a secret pastime that none of his Beat counterparts had ever heard about: he “obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention.”

Made in India, But Published In New Haven

By Peter Applebome, May 31, 2009

Alert readers of The New Haven Advocate and its sister publications in Hartford and Fairfield County may have noticed a consistency among the bylines in its newest issue: Annie Rani, Dev Das, Nidhi Sharma, Asmi Rana, Neha Bhayana, Shreya Sanghani, Vijeta Bhatia and others.

Peter Applebome’s “Our Town” column on outsourcing local journalism was the catalyst for a previous Eat Media Blog post. An interesting—albeit depressing—look at how the global job pool might very well be eliminating the need for local, on the ground reporters.

E. Coli Path Shows Flaw in Beef Inspection

By Michael Moss, October 3, 2009

Ground beef is not a completely safe product. . .

This article has my pick for the most-informed scare tactic report of the year. As a self-disclosed vegetarian, countless meat-eaters brought up this article to me, vowing to never eat ground beef (or, at least, non-organic ground beef) again.

—Wendy Joan

(Writer’s note: All headlines mentioned in this article are from The New York Times’ print edition. Photo by fraley_tera)

It has never been easier to gather audio. Free editing programs (like Audacity) and recording device applications for many cell phones make it possible for anyone to gather audio without additional financial obligations. For many print writers, the transition to audio storytelling is intuitive: at the very core, it’s your story, narrated by your voice, with added sound to set the scene.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

Know your device because if you don’t, you’re not going to have any audio to edit. Before you start formal recording, it’s important to spend some quality time with your device, getting to know its wants and needs. Will your phone interfere with your recording? How often does your recorder need its batteries changed? Will a light wind ruin an on-the-street interview?

Be familiar with the sounds that your recorder picks up—some are more forgiving than others when it comes to throat clearing, distant traffic and air conditioners. When it comes to unnecessary noise, it’s more effective to prevent it the field rather than editing it out later.

Travel Light and Arrive Early. Resist the urge to overpack and keep your gear to a minimum; it makes you much more accessible to the people you’re interviewing. I can get by with my recorder, a pair of headphones for checking levels and a spare set of batteries.

If you’re covering an event, arrive early to collect ambient noise of guests arriving—in a pinch, ambient sound makes for a great way to set the scene or transition from one idea to the next.

Talk to Everyone in the Room. If you’re at an event, like a rally, town hall meeting, etc.—it’s just as important to gather interviews from the event-goers as it is to record the speeches from the event. Talk to attendees before and after the event, and catch up with the speakers for their impressions. When you’re in the field, you’re not entirely sure what your story is yet, so it’s best to gather as much information as you might need for your story to take form back at your desk.

Organize Your Audio Files ASAP. As soon you’re back in the office, download your audio and label your files. Believe me, you’ll forget. Give everything a listen through to discover all the details you missed while navigating through the field, get a feel for your content and start putting a story together!

Happy recording,
—Wendy Joan

For the last four weeks of so, I’ve been practicing a good writing habit. As soon as I get into the office, before I check my emails or agenda for the day, I write for ten whole minutes.

Week one was automatic writing. Lately, I’ve been assigning myself little writing assignments for my ten minutes.

This morning, nearly fresh out of ideas, I turned to Google for a writing prompt. I had NO IDEA how unhelpful the results would be. Here is a sprinkling of the most appalling and least helpful:

1.    Poking fun at you, a relative gives you a dubious award at a family picnic. In a twist, you accept the award and give a short speech. Write the scene.

2.    You are running for president of the writing community. What promises do you make to swing voters in your direction?

3.    When was the last time you saw a coaster? What meaning of the word ‘coaster’ inspires the best memory for you?

While these prompts might meet with some success at a senior center writing seminar, content writers need more meat, more action. If we’re going to spend time writing for ourselves, before we start a day of more writing, certainly we can find a more provocative muse than a coaster, or the prospect of being president of the writing community.

Here’s a prompt from the notebook of yours truly, inspired by my recent fascination with historical fiction.

•    Choose a story from a news source of your choice. (Sparse, AP wire or police blotter stories work the best for me.) Write a scene based on the characters involved in the news story, either leading up to the main event of the story or explaining what happens after the news story comes out.

Do you set aside time to write for yourself? What do you do to get your wheels turning?

—Wendy Joan

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

Despite being a self-professed non-tweeter with a twitter account, and an avid follower of tweetingtoohard.com, I have been fascinated by Twitter’s role in the disputed Iranian election.

Today, between 2:00–2:01 p.m. eastern standard time—10:30–10:31 local time in Tehran—104 new tweets were added to the #iranelection thread, the primary national news source for Iran since Iranian press coverage was suspended last Friday. Between 2:00–2:10 p.m., 671 tweets were added to #iranelection.

A tweet heard round the world, repurposed by countless major news sources, reads

“We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Mousavi’s message. One Person=One Broadcaster.”

I am excited by the power of a raw human voice without photos, videos or sound clips.

I am excited by the initiative of people to spread the news that is nearly impossible to spread.

I am excited that the rest of the world is listening and taking action.

This is bigger than Iran and the Iranian election.

What does the Iran election mean for the future of social networking?

—Wendy Joan

As unassuming column, hidden in the corner of this morning’s New York Times (A15), has incited a message board race riot.

The article, “Made in India But Published in New Haven,” by Peter Applebome, chronicles a recent experiment by the New Haven Advocate. For a single edition, the alternative weekly recruited Indian journalists and content writers to report on news, art, film, dining, music and sex. The idea wasn’t to cut costs (à la Orange County Register), but to find out what happens when local stories assigned to writers halfway around the world.

The articles aren’t bad. They’re appropriately and knowledgeably written for an alternative press audience. Cultural taboos aside, a sex advice column, is generic in its inherent question and answer format, and doesn’t require any firsthand reporting. Neighborhood restaurant reviews and local news, on the other hand, raise an eyebrow, because you know in advance that the writer has never set foot in said restaurant and, arguably has never set foot in New Haven, Connecticut.

In their editorial, the New Haven Advocate staff explained the outsourcing project to their readers. Ultimately, the experiment boils down to a “what if” on a global scale. In a cheeky voice the alternative media knows all too well, the Advocate staff present their experiment as a word of warning to the news industry—it’s not that hard to outsource local news.

I thought outsourcing local journalism was subject enough but, delving deeper into the Advocate’s message board, a new story became overwhelmingly apparent.

Comments from the community reflect a vastly different story than the one Advocate editors are telling. The first commenter on a thread of many denounces the project as journalistic “betrayal,” “ludicrous” and coins the term “Slumdog Journalism” that is used over and over again throughout the thread. One or two commenters praise the project as an interesting exercise, while another criticizes the editors’ lack of knowledge on the business of outsourcing. The majority of the commenters bypass the Advocate editors’ intentions, and turn the conversation into a pro- or anti-outsourcing argument. Fair trade is brought in, as well as China and fluctuating global currencies.

And no one even mentions the fact that “journalists” have been doing online, rather than in-person, research for years.

Maybe these commenters are angry because American jobs are being replaced overseas. Maybe workers who telecommute feel like they aren’t taken seriously enough. “Outsourcing” has an extremely negative connotation. “Outsourcing” is linked to the idea of more work for less money and less quality.

The Takeaway
How knowledgeable are your journalists and content writers? Are they the most knowledgeable and qualified writer for the job, do they have the capacity and flexibility to become the best writer for the job, or should you expand your contact list?

—Wendy Joan

Photo from the New Haven Advocate

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

Around 1 p.m. on Monday, I clicked on mediastorm.org for the first time.  I don’t remember how I came across the link or why I clicked on it, but within seconds a pile of drool pooled on the desk below me. Media Storm is a space for journalists to publish stories using still photography, audio, video and voice. The site’s design is minimal, and the content of the pieces speak for themselves, literally, because they are told through the voice of the journalist’s subject.

I watched the first half of “The Marlboro Marine,” by Luis Sinco before lunch. By the end of Monday proper, I had watched videos chronicling life after the Rwandan Genocide, a Fifth Avenue apartment rife with young addicts, black market wildlife trade, people living with AIDS in Africa, American soldiers never coming home from Iraq and life in Cuba in 1976. Each story was compelling and moving, and taught me something I hadn’t known before I watched it.

Almost immediately, I started about thinking about what makes a good story, and what in particular made these stories great. Leafing through On Writing Well, it didn’t take long for William K. Zinsser to say exactly what I was feeling during my Media Storm haze:

“The nonfiction writer’s rare privilege is to have the whole wonderful world of people to write about. When you get people talking, handle what they say as you would handle a valuable gift.”

—Wendy Joan

Ps. Tomorrow the Eat Media Team is meeting to discuss, among other things, stories that succeed despite weak or no assistance from visuals (so “The Marlboro Marine” is out).

My pick

Jonathan’s pick

If you were coming to our meeting tomorrow, what story would you bring?

Last weekend I attended my first major league baseball game. Sitting behind left field, I had to rely on the Jumbotron to see every play in the infield.

Now I know why good seats are so expensive. People are willing to pay big money to watch the game live on the field, not on the giant screen that shows fans in the upper levels screaming and pouring beer over their heads between pitches.

Though not completely uninterested in the game, I spent the better part of my Sunday afternoon at Tropicana Field thinking about the Jumbotron, and that split second that happens before and after you recognize your face up on the big screen.

Which got me to thinking about content. My content. Your content. How will it change when people start paying a bit more attention to it? Or a lot of attention to it?

Will you stay true to yourself, and keep providing the content that attracted more visitors to you in the first place? Or will you cover your face in bright red paint, pump your “We’re number 1” finger in the air and scream until you can scream no more?

Remember, people like you for who you are, not for who you are on the Jumbotron.

—Wendy Joan