The word economy

Every time a newspaper or magazine is redesigned, the call for additional white space and images shrink the spaces available for articles. New media publications demand that writing be as concise and interactive as possible. Writers’ roles have shifted. We have to think more like television and radio producers and learn to better use pictures, audio, links and video to deepen our stories.

I have found that writing short, thorough pieces can be every bit as time consuming as writing those with a more luxurious word count. You become an editor and writer simultaneously to keep your word count close to the bone without losing the soul of your story.

If you are lucky enough to write for one of the few places that still publish long, voluptuous pieces, trying your hand a short one now and then can be a benefit as well. If you learn to convey something meaningful within a 200-word space, it can help you write a leaner, more compelling 2,000-word piece.

Here are some articles with tips on writing short:

Write Tight by Chip Scanlan at Poynter.

Literary fat reduction by Scott Lindsay at Ezine @rticles.

20 tips for tighter writing by Bill Leuning of the Kansas City Star.

Generating random ideas

For as long as I can remember life on the web, there has been the Surrealist Compliment Generator - a simple bit of programming that allows you to reload the page over and over, telling you that your eyes are like “milky pools of pantyhose” that you have “the intrepid appeal of a carnivorous apple on its way to a pile of cadaverous stones” and that “sound barricades itself into rolls of peanut butter when you speak.”

The same morsel of technology is used in abundance throughout the web,  especially when it comes to helping creative writers and bloggers find quick ideas and prompts to kick-start their writing when blocked. Sometimes the exercises that seem the silliest yield the best results.

Here are a few of the random generators out there:

• Seventh Sanctum’s writing challenge generator. (There are several other generators on the site, as well as technical resources to help you create your own random generator.)

• Prompts contain a technical parameter, a character parameter and a word or phrase for inspiration at the almost totally random writing exercise generator.

•  For personal journals or blogs, there are blog and essay prompts here or here.

• If you’ve been dying to write a B-movie screenplay, try the random logline generator.

• A random writing prompt generator for kids.

Your input wanted: Favorite writing sites

As I continue to go through my bookmarks to pull the blogroll of this site together, I would love to find out which sites about writing that you find most useful, fun or illuminating. I will also be doing some site reviews on this blog. Please post links to sites you feel are worth a look in the comments.

Note to readers in my region: I plan to include Ohio writing resources here as well, so please, submit away!

“Link journalism”: Sharp or shiftless?

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has been working to circulate a new term that he coined: “link journalism.” It’s the process of aggregating stories from on-line publications and blogs that has made outlets like Drudge and the Huffington Post lucrative with minimal overhead, and could be better applied by existing news publications, or used effectively in all kinds of independent niche markets.

For a journalist like me, who often loves the act of research as much of the writing, it’s an appealing concept. It’s also appealing to me as a reader because of the vast amount of news and information that exists out here in the digital wilds. I could use a few more trusted  sources drawing up signposts to help me find my way around.

While many news sites link to discussions out in the blogosphere through bot-discovered links and keywords, it’s often clear that no human hands were involved in the process. For example - a post I wrote about Barack Obama’s speech about race on my personal blog a couple of days ago appeared on CNN.com as though it were related story about Brook White, a contestant on American Idol, I’m guessing because I talked a lot about being white. No matter how many filters are applied before that link is generated, it ultimately takes a sentient being with the ability to read, interpret and analyze to truly keep those kinds of mistakes from occurring.

What do you think? Is the ability to lasso and present a group of stories that are interesting to a particular readership enough of a skill to be called journalism?

The beginning…

Over the years, I’ve received multiple emails from wanna-be freelancers asking for help or advice as they tried to launch their writing careers — many more emails than I’ve been able to answer. I’ve always kept a link page available for these visitors, directing them to a few online resources that I thought might be instructive, but no more than a handful.

Meanwhile, I’ve remained a constant web surfer, gathering innumerable links that I have found helpful about the craft of writing, news and trends in journalism and communications, as well as producing and designing web content. I intend to only include things that I find genuinely useful to writers (be they journalists, creative writers, bloggers, communications professionals or any combination therein) to make this an authentic and well-tended resource.

I hope that this blog will help me , as well as its readers, to feel better armed with information in the face of the wildly evolving world of word-smithery