Think about your reader – again

Think about what your reader will be looking for. It’s advice worth repeating (which is why I keep repeating it).

That means forgetting all the things you know that you reader might not and putting yourself in their place.

Take this email from the Royal Opera House:

It talks about BP’s Big Summer Screens but it doesn’t say where they are.

Result? Confusion.

I didn’t even see the link that says “Find a screening near you” the first time I looked at it because it was below the fold.

So two simple things could have made this a much more effective email:

• Adding the words “all over the UK” in the first paragraph of text
• Moving the link to just below that paragraph.

Tablets show how to make digital customers pay

The UK magazine industry leads the world in putting its content on tablets, says Mark Wood, CEO of Future Publishing.

Future is selling “10s of 1,000s” of magazines on tablets worldwide, he says.

Found the model?

He thinks magazine publishers have found the way to get people to pay for content online by delivering to tablets.

He speaks as tablet sales have slumped, it was revealed by IDC this week.   World sales are down 38.4% in unit sales in the first quarter of 2012, according to preliminary figures.

Amazon thumped

Android sales took the hit.  Apple had a strong quarter taking 68% of the market.  Yet Wood thinks Apple will not continue to dominate the market.

Amazon is getting hammered: its unit share in Q1 of 2012 was 4%, down from 16.5 in the last Q of 2011.

Are your Tweets worth reading?

Turns out Twitter followers are just as picky any other readers. A recent study found that only 36% of tweets are worth reading.

That leaves a lot of tweets that aren’t. Why? Because they break the key rule of good writing: think about your reader

The people who were surveyed complained about boring tweets that didn’t tell them anything new.

They want tweets that add information. And they particularly like question tweets. We can see why: they are involving and following the answers gives them the hope of learning something they didn’t know before.

There are some other familiar complaints too. Tweeters want tweets to be easy to read.  Too many # and @ signs make reading difficult.

So when you’re tweeting, don’t forget the rules of effective writing.  Think about what your readers are likely to want, then give it to them in an easy-to-digest format,. And it’s Twitter, so keep it concise!

Get more advice on writing online and effective writing from our e-learning courses.

Dress like the Queen with The Tatler

Dress like the Queen with Tatler’s June edition app.  How cool is that!

The June edition will have an app, built by Zapper, with which you can even wear the Crown Jewels.

I wonder what Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729), the original editor of the Tatler, would make of that.  He was quite a natty dresser himself but I know of no instance of him dressing in women’s clothing.  Here he is: quite a natty dresser.

The app is a great marketing coup by Tatler.  It is fun, state-of-the-art and the corgi on the cover “comes to life”.

Get into video

Fascinating figures from Ofcom show:

• Men consume more media and communications than women;
• Those in work consume more than those out of work;
• ABC1s consume more than C2DEs; and
• 25 to 44-year olds consume more than the other three age groups 16 and over.

Ofcom polled people to see how long they were awake: 945 minutes a day for 16 and over. And they spent 425 of those minutes with media and communications.

The clear winner is video.  The rankings of media and communications are:

• 40% of all media time watching video;
• 17% listening to audio;
• 15% in text communication;
• 7% Internet other than games;
• 7% other media;
• 6% print media;
• 5% voice media; and
• 3% games.

If you want to get your message across: get into video now.

Mail Online – a masterclass in writing for the web

It looks like Mail Online is about to prove that chasing traffic is one way to make digital pay. It now predicts that the Daily Mail website will be in profit by July 2012, even earlier than expected.

It is already, by most counts, the most read newspaper website in the world.

It’s not luck. They’ve got a tight operation that uses all the tools available to drive traffic on the web to do just that – drive traffic.

They chased traffic from the start, according to a fascinating profile in The New Yorker magazine.

The New Yorker profile on the Daily Mail

“We just decided to go hell-for-leather for ratings,” someone who was involved in the launch told the author, Lauren Collins. “Anything relating to climate change, American politics, Muslims—we just chased the numbers very ruthlessly.”

We’ve looked at how they optimise their content for search engines before.

They test titles. They watch what is driving traffic and provide more of the same.

And they get their users to do a lot of the work by creating content that prompts a steady flow of comments. That story by Samantha Brick on the problems with being pretty is a good example of their technique.  It got Mail Online  1.5 million users to one story in a little over 24 hours.

You may not like the content, but if you’re looking for tips on how to write for the web, it’s worth a visit.

Sun strides on

The Sun on Sunday is into its stride.  A fine front page this Sunday included both entertainment and getting the story, as UK journalism at its best does.

The entertainment was in the story about the hooker who claims she has slept with both Rooney from Manchester United and Balotelli from Man City.  Balotelli beats Rooney, she says, more on pages 4 and 5.

Sun on Sunday above the fold: entertainment

Getting the story is below the fold.  It is a story that in the UK a 5-year old Asian girl was wed.  She thought it was a birthday party but it was her wedding.  That’s a super piece of journalism.  More on pages 8 and 9.

Sun on Sunday: getting the story

The order in which these stories are presented – first the hooker’s and then the child bride’s – shows the values of The Sun: entertainment first.  But the information is there.

Budget mess up

Also in the issue is another attack on the Conservative-led coalition’s budget.  George Osborne cut his own tax bill with the budget, page 6 claims.  And it names 6 other cabinet ministers who will benefit.

Getting the story and entertainment is the key to the best in UK journalism.

My research shows that journalism on other countries aims at other targets:

• France: be a member of the elite and comment on policy; and
• Italy: direct to a political stance or distract with trivia.

I prefer entertainmant and getting the story.

Quality: fit for purpose

I now get the Sun on Sunday because I ordered the first issue and did not cancel it.  With this quality of journalism I will keep reading it first, before my other orders of The Sunday Times and The Observer.  Quality means fit for purpose, and now the Sun on Sunday is in its stride from such a poor first issue it certainly is that: quality journalism.

Eight days wasted in London on Twitter libel

The victory of a New Zealand cricketer in a libel case against an Indian cricket official in London’s High Court will enrage the critics of libel tourism.  As well as the advocates of free speech on twitter.  And it should.

Chris Cairns, ex-captain of NZ, sued Lalit Modi for libel because Modi tweeted that Cairns was a match fixer.

24 words for £90,000 and costs

That 24-word, 131-character tweet cost Modi £90,000 in damages and costs will be on top.  He says he plans to appeal.

Cairns says in an interview that he was consumed by the case: he spent 8 hours in the witness stand.  Modi declined to go into the stand.  This further seemed to enrage Cairns who said he reacted angrily when he heard Modi would not take the stand.

Admittedly Cairns has an international reputation.  And admittedly Modi’s tweet could be read in England and Wales.  But the tweet was seen by a maximum of 95 people by Modi’s tweet followers here.

Eight days wasted

All this took 8 days in the London High Court.  I’ve seen nothing that indicates that Cairns will sue in NZ, where his reputation is centred.   Nor in Australia where he is now resident.  I’ve seen nothing that indicates that the tweet was sent from England and Wales by Modi.

I know it is not where the material is sent from, nor where it is stored, in social media.  It is where it can be read.

But this is a waste of time and a poor precedent.

Publishers can adapt – more proof

Print publishers can combine new media with their traditional strengths.

Future Publishing put it all together for the launch of craft mag  Mollie Makes.

So is Paul Bradshaw right when he asks Should a community editor be a magazine’s first hire?

Writing for the web – take 2

ITV’s news website is causing a bit of a buzz. It’s worth a visit because the people who designed it, Made by Many, set out to take a fresh look at the way people want to get information and create a design that would work for them.

The resulting ITV website looks different to other news websites, because says William Owen the designer,  people want to be able to follow a story.

We hate the visual and conceptual complexity of many news websites and we know users do too because we’ve found it so in testing. Our quest for simplicity was sharpened by focusing on two basic and related use cases: “As a user, I want to know what the world’s talking about today”, and: “As a user, I want to follow the big stories through the day across devices wherever I am”. This was why filtering was so important: “just show me updates on Phonehacking…Syria…Soapstar murder…Cup Final – whichever stories I’m interested in.

The new look ITV news website

It comes back to the devices people are using. More people are getting their news on mobiles and tablets.  In the US, a study on the state of journalism by the Pew Research Center found that 27% of people now get their news on mobile devices.

One of the reasons that writing for the web is different to writing for print is because people are reading from a computer screen. Mobile devices are changing the game again. On mobile phones particularly, a blog-like list is easier to use than a more traditonal site. And you can see the influence of Twitter and Facebook on the ITV approach.

The ITV team started from the right place: thinking about the reader. It will be interesting to see if what they’ve come up with is what users want.