Thomas Kemeny:
I used to have trouble doing long copy because I’d get stuck in the structure of it, trying to land the ad perfectly from the very beginning. Logic and order come more in the editing than the writing. Treat long copy like a piece of documentary footage; you gather a bunch of content before you chop it together.
Junior
Write first. Edit second. Don’t let perfectionism get in the way.
When Dutch bicycle manufacturer Vanmoff put a drawing of a TV on the boxes used to ship their bikes to the US shipping damages dropped by 70-80%. True story.
This is a good example of how communication can change behaviour.
Maybe it is time for platforms to rethink the idea of engagement, purely from the point of view of conversations and communication. In a weird sort of way, the Snapchat streaks are a perfect encapsulation of an engagement dynamic, which cannot be monetized but is just a non-verbal, non-textual conversation between a small subset of friends and meaningful only to them.
Journalist and professor Jeff Jarvis on storytelling, explanations and a need to revisit definitions of journalism. Less focus on simplifying, more on interdisciplinary approaches, and building bridges:
“Journalism requires a different starting point: not getting and writing stories to fill a Gutenberg-era product called a publication, not convincing ourselves and our public that we can summarize and explain their world in the neat confines of text, not merely saying what happened today or will tomorrow. Instead, I want to imagine a journalism that begins with the problems we see and reaches across disciplines to seek solutions. (You might expect me to turn to technology but, no, I am looking to academic fields of study that have much to teach us about the society we serve.) Thus a reimagined journalism would not act as gatekeeper but as bridge.”
Read the article, a short simplifying quote doesn’t convey the full meaning.