REAL PEOPLE, REAL ADVICE

Leonard Witt of PJNet has been a busy man, filing blog posts while attending an APME Credibility Roundtables training session. Two of the posts in particular caught my attention and are worth passing along.

The first:

Ken Sands, online managing editor at the Spokane Spokesman-Review, is talking about how to "Keep in Touch with the Public."

He does a little exercise in which he goes through a newspaper and highlights all official sources in blue, then all real people in yellow.

In his example, the St. Petersburg Times was fairly blue with just a few yellow highlights, until he got to the obituary pages. Finally the people got in the news.

Even in policy stories about issues that would directly affect everyday folks they were not included in the story. Just the officials and elite. No one like you showed up on the pages.

Yellow and blue markers. What a great, quick way to judge how well a paper is doing in connecting with real people.

The second item is a Rosalie Stemer's Skeptical Editing List, a bunch of useful questions to ask when you're editing copy, whether it's your own or someone else's. I'm not going to reprint the list: waltz on over to PJNet and take a look. Better still, print the list out and tape it to the wall next to your computer. Make it one of your writing tools.

11:58:42 PM