Every morning starts with you spooning your laptop like a lovesick, needy fool.
If this is you (and you aren’t a video game junkie or a technophile with a bizarre fetish), you’re a Web journalist.
It’s also entirely possible that your laptop isn’t the only piece of technology curled up next to you. Your smart phone is probably nesting comfortably near your head, while your tablet is lost somewhere in your covers.
Welcome to the world of infinite knowledge and information. Now wipe the sleep from your news-swollen eyeballs, eat a hearty breakfast, and add something meaningful to it.
In case you’re still midway through your first bowl of Wheaties—feel free to have two, it’s always a busy news day—here are three things you should do once your caffeinated brain hits the Internet:
1. Become a Coverage Detective
There’s something more valuable than finding out what the news is—analyzing how it’s being covered.
Historians define this as historiography. Instead of just running down the facts of an historical event, a historiographer examines how different historians and social commentators have analyzed that event over time. How have attitudes toward the event changed? Have the principal actors gained more or less sympathy? Is the event rendered moot by later events, even if it was considered monumental during its era? That’s why there are so many damn Civil War histories out there. New generations develop different perspectives that thirst to redefine the eras that came before.
The Web journalist needs to act like a historiographer. However, while a historian may have months or years to research a theory, us poor Web people have minutes or hours. The process remains the same. How much coverage is the major news outlets devoting to the topic you’re thinking about covering? What are those outlets lead writers saying about the topic? Which opinion makers on social media are following it, and what thoughts are they broadcasting to their followers? What’s your competition writing about it? What are lower level news sources reporting?
Asking yourself these questions as your scanning Google News or Bing headlines can make all the difference in developing a nuanced, newsworthy, and readable post people will actually get value from.
You can’t add to the noise without making sense of it.
2. Develop an Opinion
Now that you’ve figured out what everyone else is saying, make up your own damn mind.
There is nothing worse than an Internet writer without an opinion. Odds are your readers have gotten the facts well before you sat down to write your opus on yesterday’s epic hot dog eating contest. If you have loyal readers, they are going to want your thoughts on the winner being DQ’ed after barfing up the winning wiener.
Give them what they want.
Also, give me a reason to care about your opinion. Who are you? Your readers need to know what you’re all about as a human being before they will go anywhere near your work. Your first post should introduce you to your audience, and every post after that should contain some fraction of your DNA readers can analyze and relate to.
But for the love of urban food trucks, stay in your lane. If you’re a serious person, don’t try to pepper your prose with one-liners. If you’re funny, don’t write like you work for The New York Times. Give readers your authentic opinion and self, and they’ll give you what you really want from them: more hits and social media love.
3. Engage in Silliness
There is no end to the fascinating—and horrifying—amount of utter crap on the Internet. And you should find it all. Take 20 minutes out of your morning to look up everything you shouldn’t be looking up.
The Internet is a fun place, so—while levelheaded and heady journalism is important—infusing your writing with some lightheartedness shows you understand the world you’re engaged in. It doesn’t hurt to show your readers that you don’t take yourself seriously that you can’t enjoy a good fart joke or yawning kitten. There’s a good chance you might find a few more the more if you write like an actual human being.
You can do this while remaining true to your persona. Engaging in a lighter topic doesn’t mean you switch lanes, it just shows you can get close to the divided line sometimes and still make a valuable point.
[image: Chapendra]
