bill bennett

journalism + new media

1. Start straight away. Don't waste time warming up.
2. Reduce barriers between your ideas and your audience.
3. Write clearly. Use readily understandable language. Be unambiguous.
4. Learn grammar. Forget what teachers said about long words making you look smart. It's not true.
5. Instead use simple words, grammar and sentences. It's harder to go wrong.
6. Go easy on adjectives and adverbs.
7. Spellcheck.
8. Try to imagine your reader – an ordinary bloke or woman. Write for that person.
9. Use 'be' verbs sparingly to make your writing more interesting. Use them even less in headlines.
10. "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." Most people think it was Mark Twain; it was Blaise Pascal, a French Mathematician.
11. Keep sentences short; up to 20 words. A 15 word sentence limit is better.
12. Keep paragraphs short; usually one to four sentences. Only use more if you need to.
13. Use plenty of full stops and line breaks. Use lists and bullet points. Be generous with crossheads (secondary headings).
14. Highlight keywords with bold or italics.
15. Writing is story telling.
16. Summarise your story in the headline.
17. If you write an introduction use it to tell readers what your story is about. Expand on your ideas in the following paragraphs.
18. Write so the story can be cut at any point yet readers have the maximum information.
19. Aim for short and crisp. Online readers will tire after 200 words and start dropping out at around 300 Keep most stories below this length although you can write some longer pieces.
20. You can find longer explanations of all these points elsewhere on this site.

My presentation from WordCampNZ in 300 words.

Good riddance to Google Wave.

I never understood what the fuss was about.

Wave may have been clever programming, but it didn't do anything other applications already did better. In fact Google has better tools for most Wave tasks.

It did instant messaging although Google already had one and a half tools that do the same job very well.

Wave did communications. Why bother when Gmail is so much better?

Wave was a collaboration tool. Who needs that when collaborating on Google Docs is so easy?

There was a social media twist to Wave, but Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are all simpler to use and way more polished.

Wave had a bad user interface and was difficult to use.

More importantly, it was difficult to understand what was going on and what one was supposed to do.

Bad advertisements make me wish I used an ad-blocker.

Take noisy online advertisements. They wake up my sleepy family, disturb co-workers and interfere with telephone calls.

Thanks to them, my computer speakers are switched off a lot of the time. I miss useful audio cues.

An ad-blocker might be handy dealing with video commercials and those annoying animated things that dance across the screen.

But I'm not going to block ads.

Advertising pays for the best stuff online. Without online advertising, we would have to pay for everything we read, hear or see on the Internet.

There's nothing illegal or immoral about blocking ads. Ad-blocking isn't killing the internet.

But it is damaging. It means publishers invest less in writers and other media. It means there are fewer jobs.

I'm a journalist. I earn a living because people pay me to produce words.

There are three ways I can get paid:

1. Commissioning: People pay me directly to write.
2. Copy sales: Readers buy a print publication or subscribe to an online title or go through a pay wall.
3. Advertising: Advertisers pay me when somebody reads my words and, at the same time, looks at an advertisement.
   

If you want to read online and you block ads, then subscribe to online pay wall sites or start commissioning copy because these are the only two options over the long term.

If my posts, comments, tweets and Facebook messages about newspaper pay walls seem contradictory, it is because I'm conflicted over the issue.

I'm a journalist. I've worked as an editor and a publisher. For the last 30 years I earned almost my entire income from journalism. Most of it came from newspaper publishers, so I've personal vested interest in the industry's profitability.

As a journalist I want projects like Rupert Murdoch's pay wall at The Times to work. It means I'll get paid.

If he can get online readers to subscribe, journalism will have a healthy future and I don't need to find a new career.

That would be a good thing.

People will pay for good material. I work as a freelance for Communications Day, a daily PDF subscription newsletter.

Its business model works because the newsletter covers a narrow niche in-depth. Telecommunications people are willing to pay someone else to sift through the day's news; then summarise and interpret it.

My conflict comes because as someone who has grown up with computers and the internet I'm not convinced Murdoch-style pay walls can work for everyday newspapers.

I don't subscribe to the 'information wants to be free' idea. That's nonsense. Information doesn't want anything. But there is a resistance to non-free information.

Many people aren't willing to pay for online information, news or entertainment. If they are the overwhelming majority, then pay walled online newspapers will struggle to make money.

This is a problem because there isn't enough advertising money to pay journalists to gather and write news.

Publishers can make more money from more obtrusive advertising, but that turns readers off.

So publishers are caught in a vice. At the moment, pay walls and subscriptions seem  the best route out of this mess.

The only other answer is for quality online publishers to find a way to charge advertisers a premium when their marketing material appears alongside good editorial. The problem here is to get premium rates without selling the editorial integrity.

This isn't going to happen. So at the moment I'm hoping the pay wall will work while looking for another way to turn online traffic into money.

Any better ideas?

What to do when an interview subject talks like a robot

Interviews are the best way to quickly collect information for any kind of writing.

As a freelance journalist I interview two or three people every day.

I like writing interviews because other people's words are livelier and more interesting than long passages of descriptive prose.

Most interviews go well. The best interviewees know their stuff and express their ideas clearly. And they sound human. That is, they talk like real people and use everyday language.

Some interview subjects are anything but human. They sound like bloodless automatons.

Some people hide behind jargon and officialese because they feel safe that way or because they, wrongly, think it makes them sound smarter. They may be nervous or not confident using their own words.

Another explanation is media training. Some interviewees learn or prepare 'canned' statements designed to stay "on message". In some cases there is a communications professional standing in the wings.

They sound like they are reading from a prepared document. Sometimes they are.

I've three techniques for helping interviewees to sound human:

1. Let them get the canned statements off their chest first. Take notes – this could be all you get. Then ask them questions which get them to say the same things again. They'll be far more likely to speak like humans second-time around. If this doesn't work, I've found even Daleks run out of resistance when you go back for a third try.
2. Play dumb, get them to explain jargon. Some interviewers fear this because they worry it makes them look stupid. Don't worry; you can look smart when your copy appears explaining difficult ideas in understandable English to the rest of humanity. If it really bothers you, say something like: "I understand what it means, but my readers aren't familiar with the term".
3. Put them at ease. This may sound like a black hat strategy, it isn't. Often interview subjects are tense before the interview. Once they think they have delivered the key message in their corporate language they often relax. When this happens chat about their words, go over points casually– but keep your eyes and ears open. If you use a microphone leave it running.
   Once the show is over, interview subjects drop back into human form. I've had interviews where the best words came travelling down in the lift or even while unlocking my car to drive home.
   

Good writing doesn't always come easily.

It boils down to making an effort to think clearly — then turning your lucid thoughts into words in a logical fashion.

Most people can usually produce simple, straightforward copy even if they've little experience.

Start by sticking to basic words and simple sentence structures. Don't worry if it feels like plodding. You can experiment when you feel more confident.

Inexperienced technology writers often have one of three faults:

• A pompous and overbearing style. Avoid this by being friendly, although not too chatty. And by using active language.
• Too technical. By this I mean it does not explain technical aspects clearly enough to non-experts. Fix this by keeping the jargon to a minimum and explaining tricky ideas in simple terms. Don't worry if  this makes your writing longer.
• Trying to be cute. There's nothing wrong with making jokes or using everyday speech, but beginner writers often take this too far, to the point where it's hard to understand what is being said.

Pitching your copy at the right level is the hardest part of technology writing. It's accepted wisdom with technology writers that no one ever succeeds in this business by overestimating the reader's intelligence, but then we also know no one succeeds by underestimating them either.

Remember people who are expert in one area of technology, may not automatically understand other areas. And a technically literate readership does not give one a licence for sloppy explainations of complex technical matters.

If you find this difficult to grasp, imagine you are writing for an intelligent colleague working in another area of your organisation.

• Picture that person reading your words.
• What questions would they ask if you were in the room with them? Make sure the text answers these questions.
• Have you written something they would find patronising? Hit the delete button and make that point again.

Finally, always get someone to proofread your copy. Ask them to point out what doesn't make sense and to see if you've made any obvious errors. Don't take offence if they find lots of things that need changing, your pride will be more wounded if the rest of the world saw your mistakes.

Update: I'm indebted to Thomas Beagle for reminding me about bullet points. Like the man says, use them where possible to break up block of text and make your writing easier to navigate.

There are two reasons why I'm looking forward to next month's WordCamp New Zealand 2010.

First, I expect to expand my WordPress know-how. I use the software to manage this web site and one for my other half's new business. You can run a WordPress site with zero technical knowledge, but I want to dig deeper.

However, although raw knowledge is useful, that's not the only reason I'm going to WordCamp. It's not even the main reason.

At WordCamp I'll meet dozens of like-minded people grappling with similar issues. We'll swap ideas and experiences. In some cases I'll be doing the learning. In others I'll be doing the teaching. Either way, our collective pool of knowledge will increase.

I've found this way of learning motivates me. I'll come away with extra knowledge and fresh ideas, but I'll also be charged-up.

There's another great aspect to this kind of learning. Although it is busy, it gives you the time and mental space to reflect on what you already know. You can view things from a different perspective and to pull the various threads together.

Good writing is direct, clear and precise. It sends your thoughts and ideas directly to readers.

Concrete nouns keep your writing on track. They are unambiguous, specific and to the point. Use concrete nouns to pin things down and inform readers.

A noun is concrete when it refers to something you can touch, smell, see, taste or hear. They are things you sense directly.

Banana, chair, piston engine, trumpet, pterodactyl are all concrete nouns.

I like to think of concrete nouns as crunchy, but they could be squishy, smelly, loud or colourful.

On the other hand, abstract nouns are things you can't form a picture of. They are ideas, conditions and qualities, such as courage and happiness.

Many abstract nouns started life as verbs or adverbs, but become abstract nouns with suffixes. So fascinate, becomes fascination, credible becomes credibility and so on.

If you are reporting on events, it's best to steer clear of abstract nouns.

Abstract nouns are useful when you want to generalise or when writing about ideas. However they make it hard to figure out exactly what the writer means and writing is often open to misinterpretation.