It seems every publisher has an ironclad policy when it comes to letting sources review stories pre-publication: either they forbid it, or they require it. These policies were set in stone some time around the Mesozoic era and any troublemaker who tries to alter them clearly does not understand A) journalistic integrity or B) the business objectives of the publication in question. In fact, these policies are taken so seriously, anyone who violates them faces grounds for immediate termination.

A post on UMagazinology, a blog about university magazines published by the editors of Johns Hopkins Magazine, tackled the subject of pre-publication review in a recent post (the bolding is mine):

“Why not? What’s the harm?

The harm, I think, is to our standing as professionals, and that is not a minor thing. University magazines produce the highest-quality work, and thus best exemplify and promote the excellence of their parent institutions, when they are allowed to approach the work as professional journalists. And it is part of journalistic professional practice to not show stories to sources before publication. No matter how strongly you stipulate that you are showing a piece to a source only for verification of accuracy, you are implicitly inviting everyone who reads the story to approve it, advise on how it should be written, and grant permission to publish it, and all those things undermine our standing as professionals. That in turn undermines our ability to argue for the freedom to publish substantive, credible stories that will be read because they matter and because our readers trust how they were produced. We don’t advise chemists, physicists, surgeons, literary scholars, historians, biologists, or mathematicians on how best to do their work. If we genuinely believe that what we do merits professional respect and an essential measure of autonomy, why do we so willingly accede to non-journalists telling us how to do our jobs?”

Yeah! Like they said!

Print-to-Web integration and the Advent of New Devices has Shaken Up Production. This coupled with the adoption of more user-friendly CMS systems and device driven publishing taxes most organizations on the production, project management and change management fronts.

“Publishers have got to do things that are richer, more dynamic and interactive, not just transfer a static page from print to digital.”

Steve Grande, VP of Sales for Fry Communications

This is exceedingly difficult when many publications originating as traditional print based pubs are now transitioning (see struggling) to move to digital. Excessive stakeholder reviews and print based project management/review processes are dinosaurs in today’s digital world —a world where news is immediate, influence is measured by trust and originality expands with devices and technology.  Brands that want to be successful need to embrace speed and adopt the concept of being nimble, whether they inhabit 500sq ft or 50 floors. It’s not just about undermining an editor’s expertise or dragging out a project. It’s about the final outcome. It’s about your brand.

—Britta

We recently launched a redesign for a university magazine (finally!) and thought we’d pass along some of our favorite tips for making your own custom publication better.

1) Rethink your magazine architecture

BEFORE A front of book section that didn’t evolve with the magazine’s needs. Too many new sections had been added over the years, and the naming convention was starting to not make sense.

AFTER Help readers hold their place by redesigning the flow of the entire reading experience. For example, we converted several choppy sections into one umbrella FOB section that encapsulates the university’s mission. We gave the client a menu of various columns/formats that can be rotated in and out of this section from issue to issue.

This new format also creates a stronger branded magazine that a) is not re-invented each issue and b) begins to build recognition with readers.

2) Kill the “Wall of Words”

BEFORE Each page had one story and an average of 550 words. There were excessively long narratives about a single source. An earlier attempt to break up this text with subheads was ineffective because subheads were the same size/style as the body text.

AFTER Chunky, colorful, big and juicy. Get away from a traditional narrative style—there are a million ways to tell a story. Put two or three stories on a spread and let stories cross the gutter (which also means you’ll greatly increase the number of voices in each issue). Make numbers and subheds stand out from body text. Update your fonts.

Even better, ask yourself if your story could be more quickly communicated in a chart or graphic. For inspiration, start collecting “charticles” from New York, Esquire and Good. Think those publications don’t apply to your trade pub? Check out what Inc. has been up to lately. Bring some much-needed inspiration to your weekly status meetings by sharing examples from Information Is Beautiful.

3) Don’t tell a life story in every story. Or any story for that matter.

BEFORE A 150-word piece about an award recipient, once in the hands of marketing and product stakeholders, morphed into a 600-word monstrosity.

AFTER Focus on a tiny sliver of the story. Do this by establishing very clear column descriptions and criteria (complete with word counts!) in your redesign. For example, one of the goals of this particular magazine is to get alumni to re-enroll. So we created a column called “How it Paid Off” which essentially demonstrates the “ROI” of spending thousands of dollars on an advanced degree. This could easily eat up 1,500 words. Instead, we created a list format:

HOW IT PAID OFF

Name/Degree
Job title before degree
Job title after degree
How my degree helps me make a bigger impact
Biggest benefit of earning my degree at x university.

We captured this in 102 words. In and out.

4) Use better art (without necessarily spending more)

BEFORE Stale headshots, outdated stock illustration styles, far too many “grip and grin” photos

AFTER Instead of sending distant sources to their local mall photo studio (shudder!), we worked with the same art budget and hired photographers across the U.S. who could capture environmental portraits (hint: get your sources outside). We also pushed sources for submitted images and gave them ideas on what we wanted to see. When we got good images, we ran them big. We saved the standard headshots for thumbnails (or not at all).

5) Remember: What’s important to your administration is probably not what’s important to your readers

BEFORE Too much real estate given to university news, and placed where the university thought it belonged—right up front. Long articles covering university events that already happened.

AFTER With a 2x/year frequency, news is not a primary purpose of this magazine. So we moved news section to back of book and capped the word count for each “brief.” (Again, build this criteria into your redesign. The more “rules” you can establish up front, the better chance you have against word creep.) Each news piece ran with a call to action to get the full story online (interested to see the metrics on those redirects).

For event coverage, which used to eat up spreads at a time, we offered up one 1/3 column where we ran big, chunky sound bites. Outcome? We were able to “cover” four events in 139 words.

What would have made this project even better?

A print-to-web integration, which is something all clients should include as a mandatory line-item on their publication budget.

Check out some great examples from min online.

Ready to launch your own redesign or improve your print-to-web integration?  Give us a shout.

—Britta

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

Seriously.

Because as one of the sources in the Today Show segment said, “I just wanted to learn a little bit about a world that seems to be still asking for content.”

–Britta

As a former literary agent, friends and family are constantly asking me advice on how to get their book published. And since I end up giving out the same information over and over again, I thought I’d share a recent email I sent to a friend.

Chris emailed me because his friends have a b-to-b title they’d like to shop around. Being that the authors are M.I.T. graduates and have a successful medical consulting company, they have a pretty solid chance of getting noticed by a professional/medical book publisher. Here’s what I recommended.

//

Hi Chris,
Ian sent me your email. My experience is in consumer publishing, so I don’t have any editor contacts in the b-to-b sphere. However, some of the same search tactics still apply.

I did a search on Amazon for professional>medical books and got this result.

From this search, you’ll be able to identify book publishers who publish in your category. This is a good way to figure out who you should submit your proposal or manuscript to.

(NOTE: Chris doesn’t necessarily need an agent because his project is a professional/technical title. See below for more info on whether or not you need an agent.)

Once you narrow down your list, go to each publisher’s website to get specific instructions on how they want material submitted. And by all means, follow their guidelines so your manuscript doesn’t get trashed by some intern who was told to go through the pile and light fire to any submission that doesn’t fit their submission criteria–seriously!

McGraw-Hill is a good publisher, and you’d want their Professional-Medical division. From their description, your book would be right on target:
“McGraw-Hill MEDICAL provides students and professionals with the global standard of best healthcare practices by delivering current and comprehensive resources from leading authors and institutions.”

Here’s their page for authors who want to submit proposals.

They have a series of pages about submissions, and you’d want to be sure to go through their checklists before submitting.

In this case, it looks like they would want to see the full manuscript (vs. a book proposal).

However, if you find that other publishers want a proposal and if you need help writing one, I highly recommend the book How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen.

//

More about finding a Literary Agent
Authors hoping to get published by a mainstream consumer publisher (Random House, Penguin Putnam) will need an agent. Most mainstream publishers no longer accept submissions directly from authors. And no author should even think about signing a publishing contract with having an agent or experienced publishing lawyer (i.e. not your brother-in-law, the criminal lawyer) reviewing it first.

Don’t be stingy about giving away some of your royalties, even if you already have an offer in the bag. There are hundreds of stories about an author who didn’t fight for film rights—or foreign rights or that extra ½ percent—who got royally screwed. Agents typically have “boilerplate” contracts on file with major publishers. These boilerplate contracts represent years of haggling with the publisher’s legal department.

How to find a literary agent? Start by reading the acknowledgments page of your favorite titles in your category. Authors usually thank their agents, and agents tend to be interested fresh takes on the same topics. Don’t fret if a junior agent expresses interest in your project—do you really want to share an agent with Stephen King?

Additional tools for finding a literary agent:

• 2009 Guide to Literary Agents by Chuck Sambuchino
• Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents 2009
• Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction–and Get it Published by Susan Rabiner
• MediaBistro.com’s “Pitching an Agent” column

But don’t just find the agent: find the agent who is going to add the most value.

In his recent post, “Where Have All the Agents Gone,” Seth Godin wrote, “Literary agents are crucial when publishers believe that their choice of content is essential but have too many choices and too little time. But publishers don’t trust every literary agent. They trust agents they believe in. Key point: anonymous agents are interchangeable and virtually worthless.”

Good luck!

–Britta

Confession: Up until this week, I’ve been building production schedules in Excel. It’s something I started in my early 20’s at Ammirati Puris Lintas, where I wore miniskirts and three-inch heels and tracked 100 unique print ads a month for the Dell account.

(That was before my eventual transition down to the creative floor, where, as a copywriter, I wore red corduroys and green Nikes and got to hang out in the creative lounge dreaming up campaigns for Montblanc and Marriott. Life was much better on the 35th floor.)

After hammering out dates for a July launch only to realize that a September launch would make much more sense, I loathed the thought of reworking the entire schedule. Which is when my brilliant partner Ian informed me that everyone else in the office uses ConceptDraw to build their production schedules.

Is this a print vs. web thing?

Lured in by the pretty colored lines that show intersecting milestones, I downloaded ConceptDraw and got to work. I endured multiple crashes and some annoying usability issues, but I got through it. And the launch date still wasn’t quite right.

Which is when I realized just how much extra work I had been creating for myself as an Excel devotee (er, dinosaur). Because a Gantt chart calculates the total number of days for each project phase, all I had to do was plug in the new launch date and—presto magic!—the schedule updated itself. It even knew the difference between work days and weekends.

Sometimes it’s shocking to realize ways in which you are (i.e. I am) behind the times. I use Mint.com on my iPhone. I Twitter occasionally. We play Pandora in the office on our George. I’m a slave to Basecamp and Backpack for project management, and can even work my way around Dreamweaver. So why was I still using Excel for my production schedules?

Because that’s the way I’d always done it.

Which goes to show that just like our clothes closets (i.e. miniskirts and chunky heels), our Applications folders could use a seasonal assessment.

Meanwhile, I wonder if could still rock the red cords?

–Britta

If you’ve ever watched an episode of Hell’s Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares, you have seen (and heard) the F-bomb machine that is Gordon Ramsay. It takes a lot of moxie to walk into someone else’s business and tell them they don’t know their a*$ from their elbow, but episode after episode Ramsay does it. While both shows are entertaining, Kitchen Nightmares showcases some quality project management and problem solving skills bloody relevant to content strategy solutions.

Here is the flow of the show:

1. Assess the problem as an outside observer—Ramsay inspects the restaurant, staff and food.

*Content strategists need to find the root of the problem. Is the design struggling due to limitations with the CMS? Is the CMS choking because of an IT issue? Is the content irrelevant because of usability issues?

2. Inspect the systems being used to manage the team/projects—Ramsay watches the way employees interact and inspects the physical and interpersonal ways they distribute information from management, to the front of the house staff, on to the back of the house staff and back to management.

*Content strategists often play the role of cartographers. They take migration maps, design specs, software limitations, internal politics, wishes-on-horses, the beggars-that-ride and put the puzzle pieces together. When they are one of many vendors on a project they must stitch together vendor and client systems from: Word, Excel, online collaborative tools, Visio docs, XML, forwarded emails, IM’s and phone calls. It ain’t always fun and it ain’t always easy.

3. Remove/replace unproductive team members. Simplify complicated systems. Create authenticity, transparency and accountability—Most of the F-Bombs and “you Donkey” comments are saved for this portion of the show, this is when Ramsay gets hands-on with the staff, operations and makes projectiles out of overcooked salmon and soggy veggies.

*Content Strategists are most effective if brought in at the outset of a project but often they parachute in during the middle of a project. When that happens, identifying your strong and weak links is essential. Create new transparent systems and get all vendors, team members and management focused on the same goal.

4. Give the new system a test run. Assess. Repeat—Chef Ramsay’s new menu is usually a struggle the first dinner service. There is usually push back from management and staff but in the end he reviews, adjusts and makes it work.

*The process of creating a content strategy is…a process. It is a living, fluid monster that learns and moves and occasionally leaves a little present in the middle of the room for you after a long day at work. The ongoing execution of a content strategy takes work, in our experience at least two cycles, before finding a balance between stakeholder/content creator/editor and end-user. Be patient. Execute one, cohesive strategy. Have lots of paper towels on hand.

A successful content strategy consists of many sciences, oftentimes multiple vendors and the ability to be both uber-macro and atomically micro. Though Information Architecture doesn’t embrace all categories it is incredible useful for the heavy lifting, “whose bucket does this go in”, decision-making.  Here is a great outline and introduction to Information Architecture sans F-Bombs and cockroaches.

“In today’s fast-paced world, everyone’s looking for a shortcut. It can be very difficult to convince people, particularly senior mangers with little hands-on web experience, of the importance of taking the time to do research and develop a solid strategy…The immediate perception of progress feels good but often comes at the expense of overall efficiency and effectiveness. Since information architecture forms the foundation of the entire web site, mistakes made here will have a tremendous ripple effect.”

Morville & Rosenfeld
Information Architecture-for the World Wide Web
1998

—Ian

Now that all the inauguration hoopla is over, it’s time to make like Obama and get to work. But before we let our Basecamp to-do lists get the best of us, let’s take a breather and remember what we’re in this for.

On my corkboard, buried under production schedules, magazine layouts and meeting notes, is a little gem I pulled out of Timothy Ferris’ The 4-Hour Workweek.

It helps me remember the big picture, even when I’m feeling too overwhelmed to answer its questions.

—–

Define: What do I want to be doing?

Eliminate: Am I being productive or am I being busy? Eliminate the noise and disruption.

Automate: Delegate or automate the remaining tasks.

Liberate: Enjoy your mobility and use the time you create.

—–

Your turn: What messages are tacked up beside your desk?

BONUS: I just stumbled on Basecamp’s new time-tracking feature, check it out.

—Britta

If you’re a freelance writer, don’t make these mistakes.

As ad budgets come and go and staff writing jobs continue to evaporate, freelance content marketing is a viable way to earn a living (and buy you some time to work on that screenplay or novel). Avoid these mistakes; make your editor happy; get more work; keep the good life going.

1)    Don’t understand the primary tool of your trade—the computer. As a staffer, you worked on a six-year old version of Microsoft Office, your IT team set up your email account and no one used IM because they loved sitting in unproductive meetings all day. So when you launch your freelance business, you buy a no-name computer from a friend loaded with software you don’t know how to use. You use webmail as your primary email source because you can’t figure out how to use a real email program. And you broadcast your outdated ways to the world by using an AOL or Hotmail email address.

Bottom line: Learn the technology of your industry. It’s your job. And get a Gmail account, already. Or better yet, buy your own domain.

2)    Take full advantage of the fact that you work from home and you’re your own boss. Go out of pocket for blocks of time during the day so that when your editor has a question about a piece that’s hours away from going to press, there’s no way to reach you. Consistently take several hours—or even up to a day or more—to reply to simple email queries, thus holding your editor hostage and unable to shuttle your piece along.

Bottom line: Just because you work for yourself doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep normal office hours. If you’re committed to shopping at the mall on Wednesday afternoons, then get a Blackberry or iPhone. Make yourself available like a professional person.

3)    Refuse to learn your editor’s style guide. Submit a 3,000-word story full of dashes or space-dash-dash-spaces instead of proper em-dashes—and if your editor is kind enough to explain to you how to create a proper em- or en-dash using the Mac shortcuts and you’re on a PC, don’t bother to do a simple Google search to figure out the PC equivalent. Editors LOVE combing through 15-page documents to convert your lazy dash-dashes to proper em-dashes.

Bottom line: Pay attention to the line edits you get back from your clients. Ask for a copy of their style guide. Keep a Post-it by your computer listing which clients use the serial comma and which don’t. Even though these are simple fixes we’re talking about, wouldn’t you rather have your editors focus on the content of your work rather than the mechanics?

4)    Fill your word count criteria with lazy metaphors, throwaway quotes and “narrative resume” material. Hey, no one wants to read an actual story, right? Just take a look at a source’s resume and write it out in a series of paragraphs. That should do the trick.

Bottom line: If you’re bored by your writing, you can bet your readers will be, too. It’s your job to dig deeper in your research, get better material out of your interviewees and work an idea until you get an interesting angle or twist.

5)    Your editor has spellcheck and proofreaders, so don’t bother printing out your work and reading it over before shooting it off. Spell your sources names two or even three different ways throughout your story. Forget a period here and there. Ignore the squiggly red line Word offers to help you identify typos throughout your work. And definitely don’t take time to proof for the things spellcheck wouldn’t catch, such as typing “if” instead of “it” or “an” instead of “and.”

Bottom line: You’re not just a writer; you’re an editor and proofreader, too. Read your own work.

6)    Don’t bother to read the assignment letter detailing minor points like word count, where to send your draft, and when (and how) to submit your invoice. While your at it, go a few hundred words over the word count—that way the editor has plenty to work with, right? Send everything directly to your editor instead of their story inbox or accounting department—he or she will handle it for you, right? Shoot off an informal invoice in the body of your email instead of creating a proper Word doc or PDF—they’ll figure it out, right? Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Bottom line: Pay attention to the job details. Not following the guidelines your editor took the time to explain is no different from going to a restaurant and the waiter bringing you a “top shelf” margarita with Jose Cuervo tequila instead of Patron.

7)    And the always popular—let deadlines come and go without alerting your editor in advance. Let the editor wake up in the middle of the night to realize your story didn’t come in. That’s a great way to build a relationship and get more work.

Bottom line: If you’re a week out from a deadline and still haven’t heard back from a key source, let your editor know right away. He may have an alternate source for you, or he may give you an extension. A week out from a deadline means there are still possibilities. A missed deadline means your editor is left scrambling to fill the hole left by your lack of a story.

-Britta

This weekend (Friday night at 8pm) I was contacted by a “content marketing” firm from California. After a litany of fast-talking hubbub (I thought fast-talking hubbub was passé) and admittance by the CEO of being a “pain in the ass,” I was asked if our writers could drop links on his client’s blogs for a fee. Really? I’d collect cans before I would have our writers post insincere, irrelevant links on blogs. In my mind it goes against everything wonderful and democratic about the web.

I’m going to do this company the incredible favor of not mentioning their name. But the part that saddens me is their client list seemed impressive and their sales numbers looked good.

I believe that branding and content marketing are about providing relevant content first and tuning SEO and technology second. But moments like Friday night give the impression that messages like 100% FREE and spamming are the way to go. Someone bring me back to the light.

This newsletter from Steve Baldwin, editor-in-chief at Didit, just popped in my inbox and gives hope:

“The onus is on us at SEM agencies to prove our case, realistically, free of jargon, hype, and especially over-promising. We need to start acting less like salespeople, and more like serious business consultants. If we can’t be honest and forthcoming about what we can — and can’t — do for our clients, and can’t find a way to make all the complicated moving parts of search comprehensible to plain people who don’t know or care who Danny Sullivan is, we shouldn’t be surprised when these people slam the door in our faces.”