A wily old editor who had been under the long term employ of Lord Beaverbook told me a number of months back the best approach to journalism was ‘make it fast, make it first, make it up’. The final piece of that advice is better applied to tabloid sensationalism rather than tech journalism, but I think you get the point. Fast and first is a good rule of thumb by which to write and live.
In setting the title for this post I was thinking about how to balance blogging with other time demands including 8 hours a day in the bear pit of IT Consulting, travel, downtime, sojourns in Social Media and general ‘lazing about’. And so I wondered if it would be feasible to become a 30-minute blogger, allocating 30 minutes in any day to write a worthwhile article (in the region of 1,000 words).
The execution of this article from start to finish is a timed example (and at the end of paragraph 2, I’m ahead of schedule) – no time to celebrate!!!
Simple Advice
So what advice am I following myself as I consider the recommendation ‘make it fast’.1. Behave like a journalist (well maybe not as outrageously or wear so much tweed). I mean get the job done, crunch out the words, cover the story, but don’t (unless you have the talents of Robert Fisk) get overly hung up in the first draft about style and award winning literary prose
2. Go through the first cut of the story from start to finish without stopping. Grammar and typos, structure, order can all be tuned once the ‘bones’ of the article are laid out
3. Spend any ‘downtime’ – e.g. dead time when travelling ruminating about ideas for content. If you think of something useful, keep a notebook handy. Sometimes it is practically impossible to use laptops etc. on trains, but even having a handy pocket diary and pen ‘about your person’ can save time as you jot down bullet points, key phrases or even just blog post titles
4. Have a style guide, but don’t get overly stylistic. Use numbered lists or bullet points to help get ideas down quickly
5. Graphics – yes, but spend under 2 minutes looking and choosing. Get yourself a decent clipart / image resource (I have a 15GB set on two DVDs). They are searchable by keyword and I can pick an accompanying (and licensed) graphic to supplement any post in a few seconds
6. Don’t get hung up in re-reading / proof reading too early. I advocate a 3 pass strategy.
Pass 1) get everything on paper,
Pass 2) get the flow / structure / conclusions added and make sure they are clear,
Pass 3) add links, graphics, formatting
7. To speed up some of the pass-throughs in point 6, use an offline blogging client in preference to a word processor. I don’t like word processors particularly as they contain ‘bloat’ which translates into unwieldy html code when pasted into some editors. You can quickly strip this by pasting into notepad and from notepad into the blog editor (although this requires re-application of formatting styles, and remember doing that is keeping you from a pleasurable task – e.g. doing the dishes!). I find Windows LiveWriter perfectly adequate for my needs, although there are tonnes of other blogging clients. Make sure whatever you are using has a spell checker
8. Make sure your blog automatically sends pings to services such as Technorati when new entries are created. You don’t want to waste time visiting and sending manual pings. If you use a blog pinging service such as Pingoat, bookmark the URL for pinging the selection of services you wish. This shaves another 30 seconds off
9. Hook up Twitterfeed to your blog’s RSS. This means that Tweets will automatically be created when new blog entries are written. This is a fast / automatic way of promoting a new post without taking any further action / time
10. Make sure your blog feed is in your life-stream either on a service like Friendfeed or Lifestream.fm. This again provides exposure of the new content and is automated, so once configured ‘always active’
11. Subject matter can greatly determine speed of writing. If you write on a topic with which you have familiarly and authority it will speed up creation time as there is much less research to do. I advocate ‘always be researching’ as reading other material helps seed new ideas and quickly cite existing resources. Ideally choose a topic which you work on in your ‘day job’. Not all topics will be applicable (e.g. where you are working in highly sensitive roles where you need to protect Intellectual Property). If you are always researching in terms of your everyday ‘on the job’ learning then this will really help shortcut the creation time of your extra-curricular content. If this is infeasible, pick a topic which you enjoy fanatically in your spare time
12. When it’s done it’s done. Adding another 1 or 2% to a blog post doesn’t really add much. Remember if this is a form of journalism, today’s post will be transient and wrapping tomorrow’s digital ‘fish and chips’. if you decide something is still missing you have the following options
a. Review the article at a future point and expand
b. Add more detail in the comments section (works best for minor after-thoughts)
c. Take the missing points and weave these into a new entry perhaps as a counterpoint or specific juxtaposition on these points
Did I succeed?
Here’s how I did:1. Idea formed on train on way to work
2. First pass article written in 20 minutes
3. Pass two tidy up in 5 minutes
4. Links added in under 2 minutes
5. Article written and posted in 30 minutes ‘flat’
Do you have any tried and tested tips for speedy-blogging? If so, please share.
Time is precious, pro-blogging is about getting the job done, cranking out quality content consistently and making sure this remains a pleasure and does not negatively impact on time demands for other things.
Automate what you can, and remember to keep notes and jot down any ideas for other articles that ‘come to you’ as you write the current article.
Today’s mantra: Write it fast, write it first, utilise the best practices of journalism.The Rock ‘n Roll crowd say ‘live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse’. Well, for IT consultants and technology journalists alike there was never much chance of leaving a good looking corpse (as the living entity tends to look like a heavy abused and badly nourished version of Dorian Gray’s picture).
By Steve-Nimmons
A wily old editor who had been under the long term employ of Lord Beaverbook told me a number of months back the best approach to journalism was ‘make it fast, make it first, make it up’. The final piece of that advice is better applied to tabloid sensationalism rather than tech journalism, but I think you get the point. Fast and first is a good rule of thumb by which to write and live.
In setting the title for this post I was thinking about how to balance blogging with other time demands including 8 hours a day in the bear pit of IT Consulting, travel, downtime, sojourns in Social Media and general ‘lazing about’. And so I wondered if it would be feasible to become a 30-minute blogger, allocating 30 minutes in any day to write a worthwhile article (in the region of 1,000 words).
The execution of this article from start to finish is a timed example (and at the end of paragraph 2, I’m ahead of schedule) – no time to celebrate!!!
Simple Advice
So what advice am I following myself as I consider the recommendation ‘make it fast’.1. Behave like a journalist (well maybe not as outrageously or wear so much tweed). I mean get the job done, crunch out the words, cover the story, but don’t (unless you have the talents of Robert Fisk) get overly hung up in the first draft about style and award winning literary prose
2. Go through the first cut of the story from start to finish without stopping. Grammar and typos, structure, order can all be tuned once the ‘bones’ of the article are laid out
3. Spend any ‘downtime’ – e.g. dead time when travelling ruminating about ideas for content. If you think of something useful, keep a notebook handy. Sometimes it is practically impossible to use laptops etc. on trains, but even having a handy pocket diary and pen ‘about your person’ can save time as you jot down bullet points, key phrases or even just blog post titles
4. Have a style guide, but don’t get overly stylistic. Use numbered lists or bullet points to help get ideas down quickly
5. Graphics – yes, but spend under 2 minutes looking and choosing. Get yourself a decent clipart / image resource (I have a 15GB set on two DVDs). They are searchable by keyword and I can pick an accompanying (and licensed) graphic to supplement any post in a few seconds
6. Don’t get hung up in re-reading / proof reading too early. I advocate a 3 pass strategy.
Pass 1) get everything on paper,
Pass 2) get the flow / structure / conclusions added and make sure they are clear,
Pass 3) add links, graphics, formatting
7. To speed up some of the pass-throughs in point 6, use an offline blogging client in preference to a word processor. I don’t like word processors particularly as they contain ‘bloat’ which translates into unwieldy html code when pasted into some editors. You can quickly strip this by pasting into notepad and from notepad into the blog editor (although this requires re-application of formatting styles, and remember doing that is keeping you from a pleasurable task – e.g. doing the dishes!). I find Windows LiveWriter perfectly adequate for my needs, although there are tonnes of other blogging clients. Make sure whatever you are using has a spell checker
8. Make sure your blog automatically sends pings to services such as Technorati when new entries are created. You don’t want to waste time visiting and sending manual pings. If you use a blog pinging service such as Pingoat, bookmark the URL for pinging the selection of services you wish. This shaves another 30 seconds off
9. Hook up Twitterfeed to your blog’s RSS. This means that Tweets will automatically be created when new blog entries are written. This is a fast / automatic way of promoting a new post without taking any further action / time
10. Make sure your blog feed is in your life-stream either on a service like Friendfeed or Lifestream.fm. This again provides exposure of the new content and is automated, so once configured ‘always active’
11. Subject matter can greatly determine speed of writing. If you write on a topic with which you have familiarly and authority it will speed up creation time as there is much less research to do. I advocate ‘always be researching’ as reading other material helps seed new ideas and quickly cite existing resources. Ideally choose a topic which you work on in your ‘day job’. Not all topics will be applicable (e.g. where you are working in highly sensitive roles where you need to protect Intellectual Property). If you are always researching in terms of your everyday ‘on the job’ learning then this will really help shortcut the creation time of your extra-curricular content. If this is infeasible, pick a topic which you enjoy fanatically in your spare time
12. When it’s done it’s done. Adding another 1 or 2% to a blog post doesn’t really add much. Remember if this is a form of journalism, today’s post will be transient and wrapping tomorrow’s digital ‘fish and chips’. if you decide something is still missing you have the following options
a. Review the article at a future point and expand
b. Add more detail in the comments section (works best for minor after-thoughts)
c. Take the missing points and weave these into a new entry perhaps as a counterpoint or specific juxtaposition on these points
Did I succeed?
Here’s how I did:1. Idea formed on train on way to work
2. First pass article written in 20 minutes
3. Pass two tidy up in 5 minutes
4. Links added in under 2 minutes
5. Article written and posted in 30 minutes ‘flat’
Do you have any tried and tested tips for speedy-blogging? If so, please share.
Time is precious, pro-blogging is about getting the job done, cranking out quality content consistently and making sure this remains a pleasure and does not negatively impact on time demands for other things.
Automate what you can, and remember to keep notes and jot down any ideas for other articles that ‘come to you’ as you write the current article.
Today’s mantra: Write it fast, write it first, utilise the best practices of journalism.
By Steve-Nimmons
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