Goodbye Maxim. Hello Maxim.co.uk

It’s finally happened. I’ve given up my weekly copy of Grazia. The decision came after  my sister and I agreed to take The Mother out for lunch. It turns out that between us we didnt have enough cash to pay. I’m ashamed to say that Mumsey had to step in. At that low point in mother-daughter relations, I realised that in the “current climate”, spending £1.90 a week is a bit frivolous. After all I can still read  a version of Grazia – and any other mags that take my fancy - online for free until the money situation starts improving.  

Maxim: off the shelves in the UK. Image: Wikipedia

I’m not alone in giving up my mag fix. This week, the print version of Maxim folded. From next month it will be online only in Britain. James Brown, the former Loaded editor, puts the demise of one of the original lads’ mags down to the rise of the men’s weeklies, the freesheets, the newspaper supplements and the huge range of TV channels the average chap has to chose from.

In short, men don’t want to fork out to read something that’s already out of date when they can get new content everyday online and on the box. Brown reckons that the women’s magazines have fared better because the publishers have “built a web of titles”, so they cater for all ages and demographics. If he’s right, say, these days a girl might progress from Bauer’s teen publication, Twist, to More magazine, onto Grazia. As a life-long mag reader, I’m not sure that’s true – I just read any magazine that appealed at the time, regardless of who published it. 

Either way, the magazine market is changing. I think the online-only move is one that others will be forced to take this year, and not just the men’s monthlies. I’m just wondering who will be next.

It’s headline pun time

So, as an antitdote to my previous two posts here’s a little selection of funny headline puns. Sorry about the dodgy camerawork, I’m new to this multimedia lark.

More SEO: it’s just not pun anymore

So, yesterday’s post has come back to haunt me. Anthony Thorton, editorial director at IPCIgnite, came to give us feedback today on our mag website. One of his criticisms was that some of our headlines were “too magaziney”. Yep, SEO strikes again. He said that web headlines should be clear enough so that someone who has English as a second or third language is able to understand what the story is about out of context. 

He added that puns very rarely get through. So no more web headlines like “bin appetit“.  (That gem was from a news story about a teacher who made a pupil eat food from a bin.) So while I still love a good pun, they just don’t work online.

We have been told (again).

SEO for journalists: it’s not about the pun

There are certain assumptions my non journalist friends make about the profession. One common misconception is that I wile away hours coming up with amusing puns for headlines. I don’t. That’s a job for the subs, and anyway, these days it’s less about the pun and more about the SEO friendly heads. 

 

Before the course, I’d never really thought about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). I’d not considered that those tabloid headlines just don’t translate to online. Instead journalists have to make sure that the headline (which often is used as the title tag – the information used to find a page) tells the search engine about the story. It’s not about being clever with words, it’s more like a science. 

Take one of my favourites, “Toe Job to No Job.” This classic Sun headline was brought to my attention by my subbing teacher John Booth. It’s actually about the politician David Mellor’s resignation from the cabinet in 1992 over kiss-and-tell allegations involving toe sucking. Imagine if this was the title tag for the story. 

Anyone searching for the article on the web who didn’t know the headline would search for, “David Mellor” and “resignation”, not “toe job”. The headlines rely on context, background information and other content to make sense. I encountered this recently while working on a feature for our university magazine project. 

The article was about Butlins Redcoats. The subs wrote the headline for the piece as, “Grin and Bear it.”

This was accompanied by pictures of the Redcoats manically grinning with the Butlins mascot - a giant bear named Billy in case you were wondering. Without the pics, the headline would make no sense at all so wouldn’t work online.  Instead the head would have to include the important key words.

All this sounds a little dull but is very necessary if journalists actually want anyone to find their articles, drive traffic on the website, and generate ad revenue.

TOE JOB TO NO JOB: No place on the web

It doesn’t end there. There’s the issue of putting the key words high up in the copy to make the article easier to find. Or using searched for terms to drive traffic, that are not entirely relevant to the copy. Some have been rightly critical of this. Charlie Brooker wrote in the Guardian last year that SEO is:

“the journalistic equivalent of a classified ad that starts with the word “SEX!” in large lettering, and “Now that we’ve got your attention . . .” printed below it in smaller type.” 

 Brooker’s SEO-heavy headline was:                   

“Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it”

 

Brooker does have a valid point.  Sometimes, the quality of writing can be diminished by the need for strong SEO. I’m determined not to let that happen to my work. 

 To counter my SEO fatigue I’ve been having a look at some good old-fashioned print  headlines. This site, punlimited, documents the bests ones. I’ve also asked some people to tell me their favourite, and definitely non web-friendly headlines. Video to follow.

Also, anyone following my efforts to embrace twitter, I’ve even tweeted about this.

I’m learning.

 

In praise of twitter?

I think I might have to reevaluate twitter. 

A few weeks ago I was a bit dismissive about the power of the “tweet.” Since then, a few things have happened to change my mind. 

Yesterday I read that there are draft plans to add  the knowledge of using twitter - and Wikipedia, no less - to the primary school curriculum. According to the Guardian, the draft proposals include teaching about twitter, blogging  and other web 2.0 tools as a means of communication. In the same proposals, they’ve done away with some traditional areas covered by schools, like the teaching of the Second World War.

Of course these are just draft proposals, and the inclusion of twitter was just one of many changes. Either way, Sir Jim Rose, the former Ofsted head who drew up the proposals, obviously regards twitter as having the longevity to be included. Schools are taking it seriously as a means of communication, so should I.

On Monday at City we had a round-table panel discussing “Practices in online journalism.” Twitter was top of the list. One of the panelists, Jemima Kiss, the Media Guardian writer, is currently top of Media UK’s “Newspaper people on twitter” list. As I type this she has 9,948. I have 20 followers, no wonder I’m not getting much use out of it.

Jemima Kiss: top twitterer. Photograph: Documentally/Flikr

The panel agreed that twitter’s success is partly due to it’s simplicity. There was an consensus that twitter itself may be a short lived market leader, but that imitations of the same system are likely to prevail. They all reiterated the point that it should be used by journalists.

Of course, I know that twitter is useful for talking to communities, getting feedback on stories, finding potential stories or sources. Or for following major world events as they unfold, like the Mumbai bombings. I just haven’t yet made use of any of these things myself. 

Before, I was thinking about this short-form communications in terms of the Facebook status. Now I intend to change my ways. I like these suggestions on how journos can use Twitter on Post-Standard journalist, Gina Chen’s blog.

Another reason for my change of attitude is that a friend  asked me for ideas on how to get more publicity for his upcoming world record rowing attempt. I found myself telling him to get on twitter, get people to follow him, and tweet updates from the row. I told him with authority that if he followed the right people, it would be a good way to perhaps get media coverage. Then I realised I was being a bit hypocritical.

I’ve started hearing stories of other student journalists sourcing stories on twitter. A classmate was trying to find someone to interview about the female bishops dispute.  She followed a bishop on twitter, who responded to her tweet. She ended up getting an interview and fresh quotes that no one else had.

I will of course be careful not to get carried away. Jemima conceeded that twitter’s not the best platform for all stories. Definitely not for the tweeting of a three-year-old’s funeral, as the recently folded Rocky Mountain News did last year.

This aside, I’m going give the tweeting another go. Follow me on twitter.

Lessons in journalism 1: drowning kittens

My friend passed on some words of wisdom today. “Be prepared to drown your kittens”. No, he wasn’t suggesting a bit of felicide. What he meant was, don’t become too attached to your words. Obviously, I’ve experienced editors chopping my carefully crafted pieces before. But now I’m trying to look at my work with a more critical eye before hitting “send”. I’m learning to cut, cut, cut. 

 

Kittens: a picture of my words wouldn't be as cute. Image: www.letfreedomblog.com

It’s a painful weaning process. There are those sentences that you get attatched to and can’t imagine the article without. Or there are bits you feel, if changed, would alter the impact of the words. Everyone saw what happened when subs edited Giles Coren’s restaurant review. Sadly I’m no Giles. However good I think something is, I need to accept that some words should get the chop.

 

Yesterday I was working on an article and the editor told me to cut a whole  paragraph and make it into a boxout. To me, without the second par, the piece didn’t flow at all. I begrudgingly did as he suggested. Guess what?  The boxout looked much better on the page and was a more engaging way for the reader to get the same info. I’d let myself get too close to the article, so couldn’t see the obvious flaws.

 

I need to learn the art of, “killing my babies”. 

 

The art of procrastination

This week I have mostly been procrastinating. It’s not my fault, honestly. It’s just that as journalists we’re supposed to know what’s going on, who’s saying what, or what’s the next big thing. Sadly keeping in the know is detrimental to getting anything constructive done. 

Now as I sit at my computer, I’m tantalised by the ever-growing choice of laptop-based distraction. My homepage is the Guardian online where I usually spend a good quarter of an hour reading the day’s news. Then I’ll probably check out The Times and The Telegraph and perhaps the Indy. From there it’s a guilt-ridden descent into the Daily Mail celebrity section. Then I’ll look at what the Sun’s saying and if I’m feeling particularly decadent, The News of The World. All this dipping-in to the national media falls into the my self-styled bracket of “necessary reading.”

 I blame it on British Media Online, an innocuous looking site recommended to us in good faith by a City tutor. It’s a page of links to every British newspaper and the major mags. He claimed it’s “very useful.” Indeed it is, so useful it’s the bane of my life. 

Mail celebs: a journo's private hell

 I’m very good at persuading myself that I’m not really procrastinating. I kid myself that it’s okay to spend five minutes reading my friend’s blogs, peruse the bbc.co.uk or grab a cup of tea . Then I think it must be time to check my emails and Facebook. Mustn’t it?

 The rise of social networking has done everything to exacerbate my procrastination problem. Now statuses must be updated. Tweets must be tweeted. Photos need to be uploaded. Blog posts must be blogged, except if it’s obligatory blogging, then it can wait.

 Don’t get me started on the Facebook “black hole” Any user will know what I’m talking about. It’s that thing where one minute you’re reading a wall post from your best friend. Half-an-hour later you come-to starring at the holiday snaps of someone you don’t even know.

Is it that my brain is now only capable of about five minutes work? Must I languish in deadline hell with the concentration span of a particularly slow goldfish?  I sincerely hope not but I fear the worst. I spend a lot of time online. Websites are designed for little nuggets of information to be read in brief stints of concentration. That’s how I seem to work too.

 My articles are produced in painful short bursts interspersed with mental wanderings that drive me to a point of desperation. I know exactly what I’m doing, I just can’t seem to do anything about it.

 I admit even in the process or writing this short article I went into to one of my black holes. I regained consciousness and realised I was reading FHM.com. Now, FHM.com is a website aimed at men so I’m not sure what I was doing there. Gender aside – it’s pretty funny – I was somehow lured in. Anyway, while reading some amusing but pointless “True Confessions,” I couldn’t help but notice that the website’s strapline. “Work can wait.”

 What hope do I have against that?

The friends and family debate

Is it ever okay to write about your friends at family? The Julie Myerson debacle of the last week has reignited this debate with ferocity. The nationals pounced on the story, with most criticising Myerson for writing about her teenage son’s drug usage in her latest novel. While a minority did come to her defense, the consensus was a resounding “no” to a dilemma that faces journalists every day. 

I’m not going to attempt to go wading to the Myerson saga, but it did make me think about my own moral boundaries as a journalist. 

In my days writing for my university student newspaper it was fine to call up my friends for quotes for a news story. After all, they were legitimate sources. They were students with an opinion on student matters. Now it’s got slightly more serious and more ethically dubious. When I’m stuck for case studies, I’ll wrack my brains for friends to call on, or friends of friends. On work experience sitting in editorial meeting desperate to make a good impression, I’ll end up saying, “I know someone who..” Then when it comes to picking up the phone I’ll wish I’d never opened my mouth.

 I knew I’d gone too far recently when I sent one of my best friends a Facebook message asking to interview her boyfriend -who’d recently had a serious operation- about his health problems. As it turns out, he agreed to it and it would have been a great story. My conscience got the better of me and I found another case study.

 Myerson’s husband claims that she wrote her book to raise awareness about the dangers of skunk. Essentially, because she cares and wants to warn others. I too can claim that I want to write about a friend’s situation because I really care and want my writing to make a difference.

My problem is, a lot of the time I do really care, but perhaps only up until the deadline. Then it’s byline achieved and on to the next story. By this time, despite all good intentions, I care a little less. At the moment it’s about getting the assignment in. Soon it will be about getting my copy in to make money or achieve acclaim- as it  partly was for Myerson.

 A fellow journalism student told me about a particularly sensitive interview she recently did. It was for a short feature for our student publication. Yet to that one woman who bared her soul and was telling her story for the first time, it was everything. To my friend who had already started on her next piece, that woman, who badgered her with emails and calls, became a mild annoyance

 This dichotomy bothers me because I know it’s something I’ll have to accept. If I reject it, I’m not sure where that will leave my career…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Avoiding cliché like the plague

We’re always being told to come up with words that are “fresh,” and to avoid cliché and journalese. The problem is, it’s like drawing blood from a stone  really bloody hard. 

I read recently that Ian McEwan gets his literary friends to proof-read his work. Apparently McEwan and Craig Raine, the poet and editor of Areté Magazine,  write “FLF” in the margin of each other’s work when they come across a cliché. FLF stands for “flickering log fire,” a perfect example of an over-used description. 

Is this fire flickering?

My writing could do with the FLF treatment.

One of my tutors, Marcelle D’Argy Smith, a former Cosmo editor, devotes a whole day each week to teaching City students to revise anything formulaic in our work. 

Of course there are the clichés that are easy to spot and to then avoid. Take this passage from the BBC training and development website on how not to write the news:

“A question mark hangs over the fate of the ship, which took advantage of the calm before the storm to limp into port under cover of darkness. Despite a full-scale search, during which no stone was left unturned, it has vanished into thin air and its whereabouts are shrouded in mystery.”

I think even I would have the sense to know that these phrases result in tedious, meaningless copy. 

It’s only now that I’m trying not to write in clichés that I realise how commonplace they are in journalism.  The sports writers are the most maligned of all, but every genre has its own set. 

A few years ago, Telegraph reviewer, Tom Payne, identified a list of cliches that frequently turn up in book reviews. He’s right. I’ve read lots of reviews describing books as “wickedly funny” or “an emotional roller coaster.”  I’d just never really thought about the power (or lack of it) of the words before. 

Magazine journalists are some of the worst offenders. I noticed that Grazia went through a phase of always describing leather as, “soft-as-butter.” 

The upside to this is that the reader may instantly know exactly what the writer means.  The author Julia Cresswell makes this point  in her defence of the cliché. She calls them, “efficient in terms of communication.”

I think she’s partly right. I can clearly imagine what that leather jacket feels like. I just hate the idea that when I read the phase, “soft as,” I already know what’s coming next. 

I’m not criticising the journalists who do this, because I’m one of them. It is hard to avoid those FLFs. Consider this challenge, courtesy of Marcelle. 

She asked us to complete these phrases with some fresh/ non-clichéd words:

1. as sincere as..
2. as warm as..
3. as tough as.. 
4. as high as..
5. as secretive as..

Easy as pie? Maybe not.

 

Women’s weeklies vs Porn: Let the battle commence

I question my attempt to forge a career in magazine journalism on a daily basis. It doesn’t help that we hear a constant stream of industry experts telling us that things aren’t like they used to be. 

We’re forever being reminded of the heyday of print, when magazines sold millions and editors influenced the way people thought. 

Former Cosmo editor Linda Kelsey is the latest to add to the tale of mag woe. She wrote in the Daily Mail that buying a stack of women’s magazines in 2009 is more embarrassing than buying porn. 

Yep, apparently purchasing a copy of Love It!, is less socially acceptable than paying for a strictly top-shelf publication.

Some of the offending titles

Kelsey’s wrath is directed at the women’s weeklies that rely on “demeaning” real life stories. She views the editors as having a a gratuitous reliance on weird sex and violence to shift mags. Closer gets a particular bashing for a recent spate of incest stories on the cover.

 She laments the death of the days when the pages of weeklies were filled with innocuous knitting articles and cooking tips. She claims that the  downturn in the weeklies market proves that women just don’t want to read about the woman who had sex with her car.

I beg to differ.

I think Kelsey underestimates the Jeremy Kyle effect. The women’s weeklies continue to thrive – albeit slightly less so in the recession – because people love to read  about others more unfortunate than them. It makes them feel good about their own lives.

The outrageous coverlines sell because they are escapist, and the mags aren’t taking themselves too seriously.

Take A Break sells nearly a million copies a week, compared to Cosmo’s 450, 836 each month, but TAB is not doing the same job as a glossy monthly. Kelsey is wrong to compare a coverline in Cosmo on carrying condoms during the AIDS scare in the 1980s to a story on lesbian incest in Closer. 

Kelsey’s rose-tinted view of the role of mags was never meant to apply to all women’s titles: 

I am deeply troubled at the loss of women’s magazines as what I used to think of as a safe haven for women. The idea of a magazine as a girl’s best friend, an entertaining pick-me-up, an aspirational forum for advice on how to look and feel your best, get the job you want – and, yes OK, with a few sex tips thrown in for good measure – seems to have disappeared.

What the former editor seems to have forgotten is that the likes of Love It! and Take A Break never had such grandiose ambitions, or the same readerships as the glossies.

Sometimes the real-life mags are a bit lurid, but while slamming that end of the market, her comparissons are misguided. She needs to give the readers some more credit. 

 A story on a woman breastfeeding a puppy is going purely for shock-factor. An informative piece on sexual health, or an article on achieving job satisfaction is an entirely different matter.