Each week, Evan Peterson rounds up stories from across the Web that scribes of all stripes should check out.
Are we called to write, or do we do it because it's the thing we're best at? Plus, the advertising/editorial wall is crumbling, and why we already know how to measure the quality of a speech.
A calling or a job?: The New York Times has a pretty good weekly installment called Bookends, in which two writers take opposing views on a question about writing. This week: Is writing a calling or a job? In defense of "calling," Benjamin Moser writes that you identify as a writer by knowing, and caring about, the struggle:
It is good that no beginner suspects how torturous writing is, or how little it improves with practice, or how the real rejections come not from editors but from our own awareness of the gap yawning between measly talent and lofty vocation. Fear of that gap destroys writers: through the failure of purpose called writer's block; through the crutches we use to carry us past it.
Fear of the gap also sends writers into non-writing careers. But on the "job" side of things, Dana Stevens argues that writing is like anything else, if you will it, it will eventually happen, because for some people, it has to:
Putting words in rows on a page is at once the only task I can reliably perform well enough to get paid for it, and the only one in which — on the best days — I can still find those elements of exploration and freedom that make work and play seem to flow into one.
Branded editors: Condé Nast is making its editors available to marketers. In the biggest move towards native advertising any major publisher has made so far, Condé Nast is opening a studio where it will produce branded content for marketers that will appear on sites for publications including Vogue, GQ and Vanity Fair.
The problem journalists have with this sort of arrangement is that it destroys the wall between advertising and editorial. World-class editors can be purchased for your next promotional campaign. The more realistic view is that this is exactly where we've been headed for a long time. Brands want to be (need to be?) publishers, banner ads don't work and editorial staffs want to stay in tact. Something had to give.
Speech measurement: In the digital realm, we've come to value every piece of writing based on a set of numbers: page views, click-through rates, sign-ups, time on page. A piece of writing lives or dies based on these and other metrics.
What about a more typically analog form like speechwriting? Should we assess its quality and success on the same scale? In a blog post titled, "Once and For All: We will never be able to quantify the impact of a speech," Professional Speechwriters Association President David Murray articulates why he recently grew frustrated at the suggestion of one of his members that the PSA should publish research on the effect a speech has on an audience. In Murray's assessment, we don't need it because we have access to the only metric that counts:
I've always appreciated speechwriters for knowing, more than members of other communication disciplines I've covered, that the main measure of a successful speech is simple: The boss liked it.
One post per day: Because Twitter and Facebook and search make your internet consumption an indiscriminate jumble of quality and waste, there is a new site called This.cm. It lets users post one thing per day. That's it. As in, "This. (Great story)." You've got to be invited to use the site, which makes it more enticing.
Evan Peterson is a writer based in Chicago, and the editor of OpenMarkets magazine at CME Group. He's on Twitter at @evanmpeterson.
Written by NEWSTRAWL ONLINE UPDATE
Sodiq Oyeleke is a Media, Human Resources, Project Management and Public Relations Practitioner
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