Episode Transcript
Transcripts are displayed as originally observed. Some content, including advertisements may have changed.
Use Ctrl + F to search
0:00
Welcome to Pragmatic.
0:02
Pragmatic is a weekly discussion show contemplating the practical application of technology.
0:18
Exploring the real-world trade-offs, we look at how great ideas are transformed into products and services that can change our lives.
0:23
Nothing is as simple as it seems.
0:25
Pragmatic is sponsored by LifeX.
0:28
Visit lifex.co/pragmatic for more information and to take advantage of a special discount
0:35
off their amazing LED smart bulbs exclusively for Pragmatic listeners.
0:40
I'm your host, John Chidjie, and I'm joined today by my guest host, Jason Snell.
0:44
How are you, Jason? I'm doing great.
0:46
Thanks for having me. Well, thank you for coming on.
0:49
I've been following your work for quite some time, so it's sort of a bit surreal to be
0:53
talking to you but I wanted to get you on specifically to talk about one thing
0:58
and it's it's interesting I find in engineering one of the things that I
1:03
never thought when I was younger was just how much writing that would be
1:06
involved so much so much documentation and so much writing and one of the
1:11
things I've struggled with is bridging that gap from starting out with I can
1:18
put words on a page to you know what are the right words to put on the page it
1:21
It sounds simplistic, but it's really a lot harder than people think.
1:25
So in terms of your background, if I remember correctly, and please correct me if I'm wrong,
1:31
you went to University of California, San Diego and worked at the UCSD Guardian.
1:36
And that was starting about 1988. Is that correct?
1:38
Yeah. It sounds like you've been reading my Wikipedia page.
1:41
It's quite possible, yes. And you have a Wikipedia page too.
1:44
Congratulations, I think. Yes.
1:46
Yeah. Somebody needs to update it.
1:48
It's getting kind of old. - And I'm not allowed to update it myself.
1:52
You can't edit your own Wikipedia page.
1:54
I learned that lesson the hard way. - Yeah, I'm hearing John Syracuse
1:57
are in the back of my head right now complaining about that, yes.
2:00
- Oh yeah, I got to witness all sorts of Wikipedia wars
2:04
once somebody made a page for me. Yes, I went to UC San Diego
2:07
and was the editor of the school paper there.
2:09
And then left there, went to,
2:12
when I graduated, I went to graduate school in Berkeley
2:15
at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism,
2:18
met an editor for Mac User magazine back in the day.
2:21
And I was always interested in media and writing
2:25
and things like that, as well as technology.
2:27
And so that was a perfect fit. And I was actually a Mac User reader.
2:30
And so I got an internship. And then they liked me, so they hired me.
2:35
And I have been doing this ever since.
2:37
So it's been-- in January, it was my, basically,
2:40
20th anniversary of being paid full time
2:43
to be a technology journalism guy.
2:46
Wow. OK, cool. Well, definitely a fair amount of experience there.
2:51
And I don't mean that in a way to make you feel old or anything, I'm sorry.
2:54
But no, and well, I've been doing engineering, not coming close to 20 years now,
3:00
but it's the sort of thing that in engineering, you're paid to be an engineer.
3:05
You're not paid necessarily, you're not really paid to be a writer.
3:07
But what you inevitably learn is you end up doing a heck of a lot of writing.
3:10
And it's a, it's a, there's enough different subtle drivers in that technical writing
3:17
compared to the sorts of writing that you do.
3:19
But I think it's gonna be an interesting exercise
3:22
to look at, compare and contrast and see ways that people can improve.
3:25
So I guess everyone in their life
3:29
that has gone through some form of formal schooling
3:33
knows how to read and write. And I guess that's sort of a broad statement
3:36
and maybe that's a first world kind of statement, but I'm expecting the majority of people listening to this
3:41
have been through school and can read and write.
3:44
If not all, then the vast majority of.
3:47
And I guess my issue is that a lot of people seem to have this concept that,
3:51
"Hey, I can put words on a page, therefore I'm a writer, you know,
3:55
and I can start a blog, start a website, write a book, be a journalist." And
4:00
that if you just keep doing that, that success will just happen to them.
4:03
And I think that that's, well, perhaps somewhat simplistic.
4:08
I think that it's a matter of understanding the different styles of writing.
4:13
And I guess my background is that I don't think about this enough,
4:18
and maybe that's part of my problem when it comes to writing stuff for my site.
4:21
Tech distortion is getting my head in the right space,
4:24
clicking out of engineer mode, as it were. But I think it might be interesting just to talk about the different styles of
4:30
writing just quickly. And, um, so first of all, uh,
4:34
there's expository writing and descriptive writing,
4:38
persuasive writing and narrative. And when you're writing for a factual information about a subject, you almost, I think, almost exclusively sort of tend to live in expository writing.
4:51
And because you're just describing the detail about a subject, if you're reviewing a product or if you're, if you have a commentary on an event that's happened.
5:00
Whereas if you go into the descriptive, you end up using lots and lots of adjectives and putting lots of detail around events, places, characters, those sorts of things.
5:10
But there's sorts of... it tends to be sometimes there could be a little bit of a blend of descriptive in with the expository, I suppose.
5:16
Persuasive is the opinion piece. It's the... I'm the editor of the magazine and I'm gonna write.
5:23
I guess from your point of view, that's something that you would probably do more so than I would.
5:28
But narrative is pretty much out, I think, because, you know, as the author putting themselves in a position of a character or narrating a story that has no real place in what either of us do.
5:38
I don't know, I could argue that I use all of those techniques.
5:45
Not to upset the four slots of different kinds of writing, but you could argue, I mean narrative
5:50
a little bit less so, but a lot of the stuff, so let's say I'm writing a review of a new
5:57
iPhone. Part of that is going to be me describing what the new iPhone looks like and what the
6:04
ports are and how does it feel and you know how heavy does it feel and how does
6:09
it feel when you hold it and all those things. There's going to be some
6:12
persuasion because I'm gonna have an opinion about what's good and bad about
6:15
it. There is going to be some some drier sort of like recitation of information
6:22
about it and potentially there is going to be the story, the storytelling aspect
6:28
of it, which is how do you make this piece that you're writing more
6:30
interesting. And you know, most, not a lot of reviews or not a lot of stories are like that, but that
6:35
does happen from time to time where the act of using the product becomes part of the story
6:40
as well. And you're sort of telling your story as a way to explain some aspect of the device.
6:49
Like maybe not an iPhone for an example, but maybe something like a GPS app where you tell
6:54
the story about getting lost in your car as a part of explaining why you would use it
6:59
or explaining why the app isn't very good, 'cause if you got lost while you were using it.
7:04
So I'd say those are all tools. When you're being taught how to write,
7:10
you're very much sort of told,
7:12
you write a persuasive essay, or write a descriptive piece.
7:17
- Absolutely. - Those are all good muscles to tone and train on,
7:26
But in the end, I do think that you end up a lot of times
7:30
using all of those techniques in different places.
7:33
And I found that even writing about tech, that you do do that.
7:37
I mean, it's not-- there was a time, I think, when writing about this stuff was
7:42
considered more straightforward.
7:45
Even-- I felt it even a little bit when I started in the '90s
7:48
that this idea that a review is going
7:51
to be this perfect, pristine thing that has no personal bias, and it's just you're just
7:55
of detailing the facts and then you walk away and these days that you know that's just not that's
7:59
just not how it's done. Yeah and I'm glad you brought that up because I did actually want to
8:04
have a point to talk about that because if my recollection and um you know I guess I'm getting
8:10
on so in years but hey when I was younger and I was reading this sort of stuff back in the you know
8:15
the well the early 90s late 80s and I started to get more of an interest in that and started buying
8:19
uh you know magazines and so on about that technology and oh wow look at these portable
8:24
computers that weigh you know 10-15 kilograms or something crazy. You know
8:30
when I was reading that stuff it was all very factual very much written a lot like you
8:34
would read a newspaper. As opposed to not reading a newspaper I mean not
8:38
not an opinion article but a factual yeah as you say there's no... Yeah it's
8:45
right this is these are the hard facts and you know we're gonna get these facts
8:48
into you and that's it. Whereas now whereas in the last probably 10 to 15
8:53
years, perhaps more so the last 10. And maybe I'm wondering if this is an influence of blogging
8:59
platforms and whether or not people feel that there's more of a connection with your reader
9:07
if you are less factual and add a little bit more descriptive, a bit more persuasive into
9:11
the pieces you write. What do you think?
9:15
So an old boss of mine, Rick LaPage, used to point out, and I think he had worked at
9:23
Mac Week and then he worked at Mac World and was my boss for several years.
9:30
And he would always talk about how reviews are the point of view of the person who writes
9:36
them and they're all personal and they are all subjective and that you can use objective
9:40
evidence, but that in the end, a review is one person's opinion.
9:44
And that was counter, I mean I think when he started making those arguments before I
9:48
worked with him, it was probably quite iconoclastic to do that.
9:54
That you were very much saying, going up against this feeling that everything is very scientific
9:59
and there's no personal opinion and when we tell you what the best hard drive is, that's
10:02
because it's the best hard drive.
10:04
And you know, the fact is, a lot of this stuff, it really is like writing a movie review more
10:08
than a lab report. And I always, you know, what Rick said really, really struck me that not only does that make
10:16
it entertaining to read, and one of the reasons you write the way you need to write is to
10:21
make people want to read it, but also, you know, getting across your perspective is useful
10:26
because people understand where you're coming from, and if they trust you and they understand
10:31
that you know about this stuff, they're going to give your opinions weight.
10:35
Whereas if you're just sort of coming across as a robot, they don't really know where you're
10:38
coming from, just sort of like from on high, but there's no authority there except like
10:43
the brand name. The PC magazine said this and therefore you should believe it, which
10:48
is definitely what all of the computer magazines were like in the 80s and early 90s. But I
10:54
like that too because that takes a little bit of the pressure off of you. You can be
10:58
who you are and explain why you think this. It also, honestly, this is one of my reviewer
11:04
pet peeves is it also makes you as a reviewer start to think about what your own biases
11:10
are and note them, which I think makes the review better. Because I think this is, and
11:17
I'm not thinking of anybody in particular, there are a lot of people who do this, but
11:20
one of the things that bothers me about a lot of reviews in general, not just tech reviews,
11:25
but book reviews or record reviews or whatever, is that people are very focused on their opinion.
11:34
And I know this sounds crazy, but it's like, they come from a background and they are concerned
11:38
about the way they would use this product, let's say, in their life.
11:42
And if it doesn't fit with them, then it's bad.
11:45
And that's terrible because you do need to put yourself, if you're a good writer, a good
11:49
product reviewer, you need to put yourself in, understand your place and that there are
11:56
other people who have different lives and different needs.
12:00
And think about using your knowledge as a reviewer, think about those people and who
12:04
might like this. Why was this product created?
12:07
Is it something that other people could use? And if you can't do that, at the very least say, "Look, this isn't for me," which is different
12:14
than saying, "This is bad." And so that was a lesson that I learned.
12:18
I'm not sure if I'm answering your question or not, but this is a lesson that I learned
12:23
that I really have taken to heart. And honestly, I think the way that the writing on the web these days about technology and
12:29
I think writing in general these days, everybody seems to have come around to that to some degree.
12:34
It is about a personal thing. Some people get really focused on them
12:38
and they miss that larger perspective,
12:41
which I try to always hold in. I might, you know, when I say I don't like something,
12:44
I'll say, look, I have an 11-inch MacBook Air.
12:48
This doesn't make sense for me, but maybe this is why they did it.
12:51
And maybe if you have a bigger screen, then it would be fine.
12:56
So I can criticize something, but also kind of recognize that it's coming
12:59
from a specific place, which is me and the way that I use this product.
13:04
It's a little like if you read an album review of a new album that just got released, and
13:10
it's from somebody who's hated all of the previous output of that artist, and you're
13:16
a fan of that artist, that review tells you nothing, because what you want is a review
13:22
from the perspective of somebody who is where you are.
13:26
And that's always, you know, and so when you lose perspective like that, I think you're
13:30
not doing anybody any favors. So I think that's...
13:34
You're writing a review for yourself and not for anyone else.
13:38
Okay, and what's the... I mean, that's fun, I guess, but what's the point if you're trying to...
13:41
If the purpose of writing is to communicate with other people and be persuasive, laying
13:45
your cards on the table, which people used to be afraid of, of what are your biases,
13:49
where do you come from, why are you writing this? But it actually is a strength because then people understand and then they can choose
13:56
to agree or disagree, but at least they know where you're coming from. It's funny, it didn't
14:03
used to be that way. There very much was this strain of, "It needs to come from on high,
14:07
you've got all the lab data." Macworld and I think others, but I saw it at Macworld when
14:13
I started, actually had a spreadsheet that you were supposed to fill out. So you'd do
14:16
your opinions and then you'd put them in a spreadsheet with numbers. You'd numberify
14:20
them along with lab data and it would spit out a rating. And that was the rating.
14:25
you couldn't say this feels like a three and a half
14:28
out of five. It would say, no, this is four, or this is--
14:32
at one point, it was like, this is 3.6.
14:34
And it was all fake and stupid, because it
14:39
was trying to make this thing completely robotic and quote
14:46
unquote "objective." And all it was doing was using the biases of the spreadsheet
14:50
and whoever had made the spreadsheet, and not the person who actually used the product, which
14:54
seemed like a-- - Yeah, I didn't. As soon as I had the ability
14:57
to throw that spreadsheet away, I did.
14:59
- Well done. Excellent, cool. Well, that's something I didn't know, that's for sure.
15:04
I mean, fascinating.
15:06
Some of the things you said, I just wanna quickly follow up on. And I guess one of the problems that I sort of see with,
15:11
well, not problems, but part of the evolution of what we've seen
15:15
with this change of tone and perspective of the author
15:19
when we do a review,
15:21
has to do with the original sort of the journalistic style or the new style of
15:26
reporting whereby everything is sort of explicit precise you sort of you kind of
15:32
you show a balanced perspective and or you rather you try to show up with your
15:37
mind if you're good at it you show a balanced perspective and you know you
15:41
take that opinion out of it and as you sort of move away towards that it's it's
15:45
what just a paraphrase it's okay to add a little bit of your personal opinion so
15:50
as you temper that with some balance and say, "Well, here's my use case. This is why it matters
15:57
to me. But in terms of my criticisms, how I'm going to criticize this product, service, whatever
16:02
it might be, well, I'm going to back that up with, here are my reasons why. Oh, and by the way,
16:07
here's also my personal bias." And then that way, I guess, as you say, all the cards are on the table.
16:12
And so, the reader can then make a more informed decision. And I think that that balance is
16:16
critical and I completely agree and I think that that's something that is sorely lacking
16:22
in a vast majority of, I don't want to say bloggers because it sounds almost dismissive
16:27
because it's not, it's just that there are people at different stages when they're developing
16:31
their own online writing and I guess one of the things that I always enjoy about reading
16:37
your reviews is that all of that is already there.
16:42
So you've reached that point after all this, all these years of refinement.
16:45
And then you can read someone who's been writing
16:47
on the web for a year or two and you read it and it's like, "Ugh, okay, I can't quite put my finger
16:51
"on what it is." But part of why I wanted to get you on and talk about this
16:54
is, well, for my own benefit as well, I guess,
16:57
to try and get my head around it. 'Cause I can't put my finger on it,
17:01
but I'm starting to be able to put my finger on it now, exactly what's wrong with some reviews.
17:05
So I'm glad you brought that up.
17:08
So, I guess one of the next thing I want to talk about is jargon and detail.
17:16
And it's one of the... Yeah, I know.
17:18
It's one of those things that I've struggled with and I know a lot of people struggle with.
17:23
And from an engineering point of view, I struggle with that as well,
17:27
because different documents are for different audiences,
17:30
and knowing your audience is extremely difficult.
17:33
- Oh, yeah. So, writing for a magazine like Macworld,
17:39
is it fair to still call it a magazine? I mean, I know it's a magazine physically,
17:41
but there's so much online presence. - Yeah, I don't even think of it that way anymore.
17:45
We really all write for the website and then some of it gets in a magazine
17:48
that some people see, but yeah.
17:51
- So, for a publication,
17:53
perhaps is the best way of putting it then. - Okay.
17:55
- Yeah, how do you refer to it internally?
17:59
The web thing, I'm sure it's something.
18:03
We would just say the site or Macworld and not but you know, I think we're all basically focused on the site. Yeah
18:09
Yeah, you're right about levels levels of levels
18:12
Who are who are you trying to reach is always the big question when you're writing anything right is who is this for?
18:16
Yes, absolutely
18:18
so when you're writing for such a diverse audience because you you're going to have people that have got a
18:24
very small amount of experience that have heard of Macworld or have picked up something off the shelves or have
18:29
have wandered across the website after doing a Google search and they see Jason Snell's
18:33
review of the iPhone 5 or 5S or whatever it is, or Yosemite more recently, and they're
18:41
going to have a very different level of technical knowledge versus someone who's been following
18:47
Apple for the last 5 years or 10 years. How do you balance and take control of the depth
18:56
of that detail when you're writing?
19:01
You know, you have to know who you're writing for.
19:05
I mean, you do. And you can't just say, "Well, this could be anybody on the internet."
19:11
I mean, because it could be. It could always be anybody.
19:13
You have to say, "What's my target audience? Who am I trying to reach here?"
19:17
And ideally, you internalize that eventually.
19:20
And you realize, again, you're not going to hit everybody, and people are going to have...
19:23
I've had feedback, I think I even wrote in one of my 7,000 word long iPhone reviews at
19:30
one point, I made the point that there's going to be a group of people who read this article
19:36
who wishes it was 15,000 words and another group who thinks it's 4,000 words too long.
19:41
And you just have to make a decision. And when I write an OS 10 review, it's a third of the length of John Syracuse's OS 10 review.
19:50
And that's not because I couldn't write 20,000 words about OS X, because I most certainly
19:55
could. I'm not saying it would be better than John's, but I certainly could match him on volume
20:00
if I really tried.
20:03
But it's not what my site is for.
20:05
And if I was writing for CNN or Yahoo or the San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times,
20:12
I would probably write 600 words or 800 words about it and have to stop because it's a different
20:18
audience. And so that always, you internalize it.
20:21
So for Macworld, I've got my own sort of map
20:23
about who these people are, which is that they are excited about Apple stuff
20:27
and they wanna know, and they're technical enough
20:30
that they have come to this website to find more detail
20:32
than they're gonna get in a newspaper or something like that
20:35
but they're also not,
20:37
I'm not searching at the level of Ars Technica
20:39
where I'm speaking to developers and people who understand detail, incredible,
20:43
and want to get down into that level of detail
20:46
of what's happening behind the scenes
20:48
at a super nerdy level.
20:51
I'm trying to be a level up from that.
20:53
And that's just the level that I've set.
20:55
And you're not gonna be able to please everybody, but you try to imagine that.
20:57
And that is always the case, is you're trying to figure out who that audience is.
21:01
'Cause it's almost impossible to write anything
21:05
if you don't have some idea of who you're speaking to.
21:08
And that can be, you know, it's a bell curve, right?
21:10
So you're sort of imagining the peak of the bell curve
21:12
and the range around it.
21:16
And I don't wanna say this like it's totally, like I sit down and I go,
21:22
okay, what demographics am I targeting today?
21:24
Because that's not what I'm doing. But I am thinking, who am I writing this for?
21:29
And so like when I'm writing about OS X Yosemite,
21:33
that is a story for Macworld. It is for people who are probably using Mavericks
21:39
and certainly are aware of the march of OS X over the years.
21:44
I'm not writing that story for somebody who is using Windows and thinking about switching to the Mac.
21:49
Because that's just not what my story is about. Those people are out there and they might even find that story on the internet.
21:53
And if I think that there is a market for that kind of story, I will say to the editors
21:57
at Macworld, maybe we should do a story about, you know, for switchers thinking about going
22:03
to Yosemite. But that is a different story and that's not the story I'm writing.
22:07
So you've got to have that in mind, even if it's just a default.
22:11
And that can make all the difference. Andy Anotko talks about this a lot.
22:14
He and I are in sync about a lot of this review stuff.
22:17
The incredible importance of knowing who your audience is and laying all your cards on the
22:22
table about your own biases and where you're coming from and trying to reach a broader
22:28
audience and trying to understand why other people might want or not want a particular
22:33
product and trying to broaden it out from there.
22:35
Because my audience is also not me, right?
22:37
We talked about that earlier. It has to be this broader audience.
22:41
And I read John Syracuse's review of OS10.
22:44
I'm happy to go down that deep, but that's not my audience.
22:48
So that's part of the trick, too, is picturing that person who isn't you and trying to reach
22:53
them while also channeling your own experiences and biases and things like that.
23:00
When I think about it like that, it's a little bit like breathing or riding a bike, where
23:04
it's something you do all the time and you don't think about it.
23:07
Or like tying your shoes, if you try to break down how you tie your shoes into little bits,
23:11
it starts to fall apart because you realize you've just sort of internalized it as a block,
23:15
and I tie my shoes, and then you start to pick it apart and it gets a little weird.
23:20
This is sort of like that, where it's not like I sit down every day and think about
23:23
these points, but they're definitely going back there.
23:26
And it goes back to your point about somebody who hasn't been writing as long, isn't as
23:30
experienced with it, might not have all of that stuff internalized.
23:34
still, you know, over time, they're still going to learn those lessons and figure out
23:39
how to set the right level.
23:42
Absolutely. And I think that part of the experience comes back to feedback that you've received along
23:48
the way from various readers, as well as your own personal choices as to where you would
23:54
like to take the writing that you're doing.
23:56
And obviously, when you've got a site like Macworld, it's obviously much larger, it's
24:00
got a lot more momentum behind it, a lot more history, and there's a different set of
24:04
expectations but I think that a lot of people need to ask that question and
24:09
it's something that I will admit I will confess to having struggled with a
24:12
little bit with tech distortion is how deep do I go you know my audience that I
24:18
have on my side is not huge in fact it's probably miniscule compared to
24:23
Macworld's but the point is that you have to have some kind of conscious
24:27
decision and say I'm going to consistently write at this sort of depth
24:32
because if you don't, what I fear happens is that you will lose the people that are
24:36
not technical enough or you can't retain the people that are technical enough.
24:40
- Yeah, if you try to broaden your focus, you end up not having a focus and then broadening
24:46
your focus generally does not mean you have a bigger audience.
24:49
It means you have a smaller audience because now nobody is happy.
24:54
And that's, yeah, this is the lesson I learned.
24:57
And actually, since you're not a listener, this is actually fitting.
25:00
This is a lesson I learned with The Incomparable, which is I wanted it to be ... That's my podcast.
25:05
I wanted it to be what I wanted it to be.
25:08
And it is unabashedly the stuff I'm interested in, in this particular area and nothing else,
25:14
and that's just what it is. And that has resonated with a lot of people, incredibly more people than I ever expected,
25:22
and it resonates more with them than I ever expected.
25:25
It really has proven to me the power of podcasting as a medium.
25:28
With that said, it is not for everybody, and I think those go together.
25:33
The reason that it is sticking with the things that delight me gives it an energy that it
25:39
wouldn't have if I felt like I needed to make some decisions to try and have more popularity
25:45
or have it be broader. And likewise, I think it would maybe not resonate nearly as strongly with the people it does
25:51
work for because of that.
25:53
And so that's a choice. I could make it super narrow, or I could make it try to have the super broad appeal, and
25:59
instead I've kind of hit exactly what I want it to be.
26:03
And when it works, it works really well.
26:05
And it doesn't work for everyone. And I'm okay with that too, right?
26:09
Accepting the fact that this thing that I made, I made it the way I wanted to.
26:13
I didn't make it for everybody to use it.
26:16
And that's fine, because I don't think it would work if I made it for everybody.
26:20
I think nobody would like it if I made it for everybody out there, because I'd be rethinking
26:25
second-guessing myself and pandering and doing all sorts of things that would
26:29
just make a bad product. Absolutely and in some respects I also think that
26:33
that's part of what's wrong with mainstream journalism at least
26:36
traditionally is that they tend to go for the things that will get the
26:41
will sell the product get the well the modern equivalent page views and so on
26:45
and they it's it's more about reaching that biggest demographic or having a
26:50
sections of the newspaper or the news report or you know whatever that
26:55
targets slightly different demographics to cover as many as possible. Whereas
26:59
it seems to be a trend with blogs and with podcasters is they're far more
27:05
personal about what an individual would like to do and they're not concerned
27:09
with getting a massive audience they're concerned with doing something that
27:12
they're passionate about like you say with The Incomparable that's something
27:14
that you're passionate about in the same way that I'm passionate about Pragmatic.
27:17
It's one of those things that adds a different spin on things.
27:21
But market, well, I almost said market share.
27:24
I guess it is kind of a bit like market share. It's like that's not what it's about at all.
27:27
It's about focusing on that audience specifically,
27:31
but you're only focusing on it because that's where you're interested in.
27:35
And I think that that energy gives it that special something.
27:38
It's something that didn't exist 15 years, 20 years ago, I think.
27:42
I think a lot of these tools that have come into the hands of people
27:45
like ourselves and everybody really, is that someone can choose to do that. It's so much
27:50
easier now. The bar is so much lower and it's so much easier to get into this than it used
27:54
to be. In the 200th episode of The Incomparable, I had a conversation with John Siracusa and
28:00
Dan Moran and Serenity Caldwell. We were talking about being nerdy teenagers and feeling isolated
28:05
and how the internet has really changed that. This is what we're talking about here, is
28:11
that the internet has aggregated together large parts of the world to the point where
28:18
you can have the most esoteric interest and find lots of other people who share it. And
28:24
that means that there is a market, if you want to call it that, for things that were
28:27
previously never considered things that would have enough of a critical mass to be worth
28:32
serving, because the internet puts all those people together. And it might be one person
28:36
in a town, but there are lots of towns and you end up with thousands of people who are
28:40
interested in these esoteric subjects. It's funny, I feel like the internet ... I'm actually
28:45
recording a podcast later today with Glenn Fleischman about a version of the same topic.
28:49
I feel like the internet has really polarized, at least media, in terms of audiences, where
28:54
you either need to be serving, trying to serve the widest possible audience, which is what
28:59
you were just saying, or you are serving the most engaged, the people who are the most
29:04
enthusiastic about a particular subject. And that seems to be where we are right now in
29:08
in terms of media on the internet. You're either trying to go for everybody
29:11
and that's viral videos and maybe even websites
29:15
like the New York Times or Yahoo or places like that,
29:19
or you are super narrow like a lot of tech websites
29:22
where it's like we're here for people who really care enough about tech
29:24
that they're gonna read 20 articles about tech from our website every day.
29:27
And what's missing, which I think is interesting,
29:30
is people who are mildly interested in things.
29:32
Now it's sort of like you're either not interested
29:35
in anything and feel no passion except for videos of cats
29:38
or you are super into it and there's a website for you.
29:41
But this, I think this leads to another challenge,
29:45
which is what if you're into it but not super into it?
29:47
I was listening to, oh, what was that?
29:50
It was, oh, it was "Random Trek,"
29:52
which is this podcast that Scott McNulty started
29:54
out of "The Incomparable," and one of his guests
29:57
was admitted to having not watched
29:59
a couple of the "Star Trek" series. And he was like, oh, the "Star Trek" fans
30:03
are gonna kill me. I'm like, I like the original series
30:05
and "The Next Generation," and then I kinda stopped watching.
30:07
And I thought, you see, there is an interesting
30:10
internet effect, which is,
30:12
you're somebody who is actually interested in the subject,
30:15
but you're not as far deep down into it
30:17
as the true fans are. And so you start to sort of feel like
30:20
you either have to go all in or you have to back away.
30:22
And I think that's a weird place we're in right now, culturally.
30:25
And I'm not quite sure what the solution is,
30:28
but I think it's interesting that there's sort of like,
30:30
you either have to like completely commit.
30:32
And I get this feedback from my podcast too, right?
30:34
It's like, why don't you just talk about comics every week?
30:37
or why don't you just talk about TV every week?
30:39
And the answer is I'm not interested in any of those enough
30:41
to make it the same every week. That's why it's not about the same thing every week.
30:45
I just can't get that deep down in.
30:48
And yeah, so I think it's just a funny place we are
30:52
in society where the people who are super enthusiastic
30:54
about something, they can find their people
30:56
and that's great. And then there's sort of the broad,
30:59
again, click here to see pictures of cats.
31:02
And then there's this vast in between that is,
31:06
we haven't really figured out how to make that work yet.
31:09
That kind of got served by magazines and newspapers
31:11
and things like that, where you just sort of got a general interest publication
31:15
and that's kind of faded away. - Absolutely right.
31:19
And I just want to pause for a moment
31:22
and quickly talk about our sponsor before we continue.
31:25
And our sponsor this week is LIFX, spelled L-I-F-X.
31:30
And it's a smart light bulb
31:32
that gives you previously unheard of control
31:34
of your lighting. Each bulb is Wi-Fi enabled, it can give you light in whatever colour of the rainbow you
31:38
like. It's an energy efficient LED light bulb that you can control with your smartphone.
31:44
With over 1000 lumens at your disposal, it's incredibly bright but consumes only 18 watts
31:48
of power at maximum, although most rooms use only half of that.
31:52
Controlling the brightness, colour and there's a range of cool effects, it's really easy
31:55
on your smartphone using the LIFX smart bulb using the smartphone app.
32:00
The LIFX smart bulb is also made to last.
32:02
It's rated for 27 years of operation, that's at 4 hours a day, that's the equivalent of
32:07
about 40,000 hours. You'll probably move house before you need to change the lightbulb again.
32:11
The LIFX bulbs support both standard Edison screw and bayonet connectors and will work
32:15
at all standard voltages around the world between 100 and 240 volts AC.
32:19
It has developer friendly SDKs currently available for iOS, Android and Ruby, which means that
32:24
if you can think of a great way to control them, you can go out and build it on whatever
32:27
platform you like right now. I've been testing some demo bulbs and my kids went absolutely crazy.
32:32
I set up on the disco effects where the music was playing and it was changing
32:36
the color of the lights in tune with the music. And they had a dance party in the main lounge.
32:39
It was just fantastic. It's so much fun. LIFX bulbs are shipping today for only $99 US with free shipping worldwide.
32:46
Simply head on over to LIFX. That's again, that's spelled L I F X dot co slash pragmatic to learn more and enter
32:53
the coupon code pragmatic for 15% off the total price of your order.
32:58
Thank you to LIFX for sponsoring Pragmatic.
33:00
So one of the other things then to just to continue on about with knowing your
33:06
audience is something else that the internet has done,
33:09
which some people get frustrated by.
33:12
And I've seen a few interactions with yourself and other people on Twitter in
33:17
particular, about the internationalization of,
33:22
of what we do, where I write an article, you know,
33:26
And I guess the simplest and most obvious example
33:30
is that something's happening in the fall,
33:34
which, you know, of course in Australia, we don't call it the fall, we call it autumn,
33:37
but that's not really the point. The point is that we're out by six months
33:41
'cause everything shifted because of the tilt of the earth. So where it's summer where you are,
33:44
but it's actually not, it's now it's winter
33:47
where I am right now in Australia.
33:49
So that becomes a rather interesting dilemma.
33:53
And some people, and not just that, also the whole issue of publishing times and time zones and what I find
33:59
interesting is that a site such as Macworld that has such a large audience
34:04
internationally, fair enough I suspect and maybe you can confirm, but the
34:08
majority of your readers would be based in North America so perhaps in
34:13
that respect some of that is taken care of but I would expect that there's still
34:16
a reasonable slice of the international audience and I'd like you to see what
34:20
you think about how you approach internationalization for the one
34:24
a better word, of the articles?
34:26
So that's a great question. There's a lot there.
34:29
I think one of the challenges, and this will probably go away in the next five or 10 years,
34:34
one of the challenges is, as a media company, we have our business unit is in the US.
34:39
And IDG is worldwide. And there's an IDG in Australia.
34:42
There's an IDG in UK and Germany and many other countries.
34:46
There's Macworld in Australia. There's a Macworld in the UK.
34:49
There's a Macworld in Germany.
34:53
And yet we are not directly tied to them.
34:56
We are our own business unit for the US that runs Macworld and PCworld and a couple other
35:02
websites in the US.
35:04
And so the US is ... Well, and the other part of this is ad serving, which is our sales
35:10
force sells ads in the US to companies that largely want to buy US traffic.
35:17
A lot of the sales that they do are specifying US traffic.
35:22
They are buying, their budgets are US budgets to reach US audiences.
35:27
And so if half of our traffic is from outside the US, which is I think roughly the case,
35:32
then half the traffic we generate can't fulfill the ads that are sold by our sales force.
35:39
So if they want to buy 6 million page views, we have to generate 12 million page views
35:44
because we can't really, it's very hard to write US specific articles that generate US
35:48
traffic. articles in English, and people speak English, not only in all the predominantly English-speaking
35:55
countries, but really the world over. And so, this is a problem, because I think, I
36:01
said five or 10 years, this will be solved. I suspect that with the rise of ad networks,
36:06
we're all going to get a lot better at monetizing, sorry to use that word, but we're talking
36:10
about internet ad sales, so if you're ever going to use that word, now's the time, monetizing
36:15
international traffic. A lot of media companies don't make a lot of money off of this kind
36:22
of traffic. It would make sense that IDG, for example, with its UK business unit, would
36:29
let those business, those salespeople in the UK also have access to all of IDG's worldwide
36:37
traffic from the UK, from UK visitors, so that, for example, they could sell the ads
36:43
on our site for UK visitors and that they would get a cut and we would get a cut. And
36:47
that doesn't happen yet. I think eventually ad networks will make that all different.
36:51
So part of it is that, which is, although we know we are reaching half of our audience
36:57
outside the US, almost all of our revenue comes from the US audience. And so on that
37:04
level, I've told people this, you've seen it on Twitter, which is we're a US site, and
37:12
a US site, we're focused on the US, and we're aware that the rest of the world exists, but
37:16
we are a US site. Especially when it's angry people in the UK, we're like, "There is Mack World UK, you know.
37:22
They are focused on you." And the other thing is localization is hard.
37:25
It would make our jobs a lot harder if we had to mention that it's US dollars, or here
37:32
are what the prices are elsewhere, or that this rationalization about why this product
37:37
is best doesn't work in certain countries because this product is different and there
37:41
or other products that compete there but not here.
37:43
And we read about Amazon and people say,
37:45
"Ah, but Amazon doesn't work except in the US and the UK
37:50
"for all of these different media types." It's like, well, that's true, but we can't,
37:55
I mean, we could do that, and if we really felt that our duty was to cover the entire world in detail,
38:00
I suppose we would do it, but in reality,
38:02
we are, in the US, speaking to a predominantly US audience,
38:07
and that's our focus. So we will mention the rest of the world,
38:10
but it's hard. You know, the upside is that being an English publication
38:17
opens you up to this enormous worldwide market
38:20
wherever you are in the world. And the example I always like to give is Federico Vatici,
38:23
who is in Italy, but he chose to do Mac Stories in English.
38:28
And so as a result, he can reach the entire English speaking world,
38:32
including people who speak it as a second language,
38:34
with that site. And if he had chosen to do an Italian Mac site,
38:37
we would probably not know who he was.
38:40
and that would be a shame because he's great.
38:42
I talked to Andrzej Tomic, I'm gonna slaughter his name.
38:46
- Andrzej Tomic. - Andrzej Tomic.
38:48
- Yeah. - From, yeah, Atomic, I like to call him.
38:53
- Atomic XX, yeah. - Yeah, he is in a very tiny country
38:59
with like two million people.
39:01
And as a result, if he does all this stuff
39:06
in his native language and, you know,
39:09
I mean, that's a tiny audience.
39:13
And then he does Storming Mortal in English, and that's got a huge audience, potentially,
39:18
because it's addressing everybody who speaks English.
39:20
So it's a beautiful thing, but it's also a problematic thing.
39:25
And personally, as a writer on Macworld, I'm very focused on the US.
39:30
And for The Incomparable, I am a little less focused on the US, but at the same time, I
39:36
live in the US. That is my perspective.
39:38
I can be open to other perspectives,
39:40
but that's my place.
39:43
But it is funny, if you're a for-profit corporation
39:48
like IDG is, and almost all your revenue comes from the US,
39:53
you're really actually not motivated to serve people outside of the US.
39:57
And it's not like we're gonna put American flags everywhere and say USA, USA, and try to scare people away
40:01
who are from outside the country. But it's actually kind of, it works against us
40:07
being more focused on the rest of the world
40:09
because we don't actually make any money
40:14
from outside the US essentially at this point.
40:18
And I think it would be, the awareness would change
40:21
if the business needs change. But right now it's very hard to have people come to us
40:25
and just say, it's US traffic.
40:28
And I always tell them, we can't control that. We just write stories and people come.
40:32
We can't like write US stories.
40:35
That's not how it works. Yeah, understood. Absolutely. And it's an interesting point about the financial drivers behind it, the advertising.
40:43
And I think that part of the problem with the advertising, well, there's two problems.
40:47
I suppose there's the tax element, because if you have a company that's spread around the world,
40:52
the individual tax laws in individual countries can be an issue with getting revenue shifted around between countries.
40:59
So if you get ad revenue that comes from Australia, shifting that across to the US or vice versa and so on,
41:04
and gets difficult and Apple makes profits
41:07
in other countries, for example, and they can't bring that money back to the US.
41:11
So I understand that issue.
41:13
There's also the other issue, which is a lot of these companies,
41:15
like you've mentioned Amazon, perfect example,
41:18
they're only really active in a very small handful of countries.
41:20
And most of this stuff is really only available in the US.
41:23
And when I get upset about that in an article,
41:26
I'm not upset with you or with Macworld or anything,
41:29
I'm upset that Amazon, come on guys, ship here, please.
41:33
I want Amazon Prime, I want all that stuff too.
41:36
But, you know, alas, that's the nature of--
41:38
- Yeah, and sometimes it rains down on us for being the bearer of that information
41:42
or the reminder of those frustrations. I wrote a story-- - You're the messenger.
41:45
You got shot. - Exactly. I wrote a story for a crazy Apple rumor site
41:49
a few years ago when it was active.
41:52
I guess it was probably more like 10 years ago now, John Maltz's site that was,
41:56
the headline was iTunes Store Never Ever Coming to Canada.
41:59
And that was my getting my frustration about it, every time we would write about iTunes
42:04
in the early days of the iTunes store, we would get angry comments from Canadians
42:08
who were just furious because it's not in Canada.
42:11
And they would direct at us and say,
42:13
"You didn't mention it's not in Canada!" It's like, well, how many times do we need to mention it?
42:17
So then I wrote a story that was like, literally, Eddie Cue and Phil Schiller announced
42:22
that Canada, just forget it, Canada. You're never gonna get it, just 'cause it was,
42:26
you know, I totally get it. I think we're all aware of the international audience
42:33
and that a lot of stuff that's a little less traditional
42:39
is much better at being able to serve that.
42:43
But it is true, a lot of businesses too,
42:45
their budget is for one country.
42:48
And so you see some, the web is international,
42:52
but large other parts of where money is in the world
42:57
are not, and that includes things like, why is Amazon not in more countries?
43:01
Part of it is rights issues. You know, part of it is that other businesses
43:06
are not, like movies and TV and things like that,
43:08
require separate, and music even,
43:10
require separate deals for every country,
43:12
even though the internet doesn't work like that. And all of us who have been on here for a while,
43:16
we're citizens of the internet. It shouldn't matter.
43:18
You know, it shouldn't matter where that company is that's selling me software,
43:22
because I can just download it
43:24
and give them a credit card number, and they get money and I get software and we're done.
43:28
It shouldn't matter and yet, in a lot of other places,
43:33
and we know it won't matter eventually, but right now it does.
43:36
And so I think that all factors into it too.
43:39
I love the fact that our stuff reaches a broader audience
43:42
and I know with the Incomparable, but that podcast reaches an amazing number of countries
43:48
and I love that. It's fantastic, but it is a real challenge,
43:55
but we're not doing it despite anybody, not even Canada.
43:57
- No, no, no. (laughs) And this is the thing is that I didn't expect it,
44:02
you know, obviously that, I didn't expect that you would be,
44:04
it's just that it's one of those things that I try,
44:07
and I guess my background is obviously very different
44:09
because I'm not, I'm writing a tiny little blog
44:14
in a corner of the internet, if there is such a thing as a corner in the internet,
44:18
technically, but anyway, the point is that it's a little,
44:20
very small dot blip on a radar,
44:22
on the corner of a radar somewhere. And yeah, I want to make my articles when I write them to be, when I say internationalized,
44:30
it's simply you strip out the stuff that is not location specific.
44:33
So, yeah, instead of saying it's going to be in the fall, you'd say that would be in
44:39
likely September, October or something like that.
44:43
And then of course, when I was thinking about this before the show, I thought to myself,
44:46
well, what if you're not working on a Gregorian calendar, I suppose?
44:49
And I guess you got to draw a line at some point, don't you? But I mean- This article that I have open right now in
44:54
BB Edit actually uses the phrase "Do this fall" for OS X Yosemite. And it's difficult
44:58
because the alternative there is for me to say "Do between September and November" or
45:04
"Do between mid-September and mid-December of this year," which is, again, too far to
45:11
go, but you know- It doesn't flow.
45:13
Right. And I could say "Do this fall, spring in the Southern Hemisphere," but again, that's-
45:18
Well, that doesn't flow either. It's kind of, yeah.
45:20
So it's hard. But if you're in Australia and you're trying to reach that broader audience, I mean, the
45:25
larger selection of your potential audience is in North America and Europe, right?
45:33
So you ... Sure.
45:35
And that's what Vitici probably goes through every day, which is he's modeling, I think,
45:40
kind of a US-centric audience to a certain degree, but it also is just this knowledge
45:45
that the broader they are, the more people they're appealing to.
45:49
But it's great, but these are all problems that we have.
45:53
Every time we list a price, every time we do a what Mac should you buy, the way Apple
45:58
does its prices, especially in Australia, where they're often completely out of whack
46:04
with exchange rates and therefore horribly overpriced, it was always the knock on Apple
46:09
in Australia was that they didn't adjust their prices for the exchange rate very often.
46:14
and so you'd end up with these just ridiculously out of control prices, that would completely
46:21
change the matters. And I guess what I would say to that is I'm glad there's an Australian Macworld to talk
46:26
about that. And they get our stories, and they can fix them and make them actually relevant for Australia.
46:32
Yeah, well, that's true.
46:34
And when I do read Macworld, I'll tend to actually-- it may sound strange, but I actually
46:40
read a bit of both. And yeah, I can... you can tell the stories that they've taken from the main US site and
46:49
then, you know, sort of filtered them for the Australian site.
46:52
Right. And as opposed to the ones that are locally written.
46:55
But you're right, they do tend to localize it a little bit.
47:00
So, it's good to have, but not every site has that, of course.
47:03
So, in any case, that's...
47:05
I think we've talked about that enough. I just want to move on if we can.
47:09
Sure. The next thing I want to talk about is managing the length of your article.
47:15
We sort of touched this briefly before, but it's a little bit about the technical depth.
47:19
But one of the problems that I've seen is that there seems to be a...
47:25
It's hard to draw the line between what is technically a long-form article anymore
47:30
and what's considered to be the right sort of length.
47:33
If you look at a site like The Verge, for example, where most of their articles
47:38
really only several paragraphs long. If their reviews are there in depth, then
47:44
you know they can be much longer probably the the 5,000-6,000 word kind
47:48
of length but it's it's interesting and difficult at the same time to for me
47:53
anyway to gauge how long an article should be and I guess I'm curious about
47:57
your thoughts as to how you manage the length of the article based on well I
48:01
suppose based on the topic more than anything I would expect. Yeah that's
48:07
That's a constant question.
48:09
Part of it goes back to who are you trying to reach
48:16
and do they want more, do they want less?
48:20
We have this back and forth all the time.
48:23
Do we want to write a 1,000 word article about a pair of headphones?
48:30
Probably not. That's probably too much detail.
48:32
We are not a headphone website. You'd be better off writing a thousand word article about all the headphones we looked
48:38
at and which one was best. Leave that to Marco.
48:40
Marco will do it. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly.
48:44
This is the thing is that you can go too far that way and you can go too far the other
48:48
way and not have enough information and people get angry about that.
48:53
Every story is different and you're trying to imagine that audience that is going to
49:00
be receiving it. Length, you know, I suffer from this.
49:03
I write long. write way too long.
49:05
And sometimes I think that's, and like I said,
49:07
some people think that's great and some people think that it's way too long.
49:11
- I'm in the great camp. - I'm well, my target audience does not feel bad
49:16
about an 8,000 word long iPhone review.
49:19
That's the, you know, and maybe they would feel bad about a 15,000 word long one,
49:23
but I write them as long as I think it takes.
49:26
I tend not to shoot for a word count for those things,
49:29
but there are other times when you're just trying
49:32
to get the information out there. So, you know, I got a call the other day
49:35
about Apple killing Aperture,
49:37
and I wrote a thing that was probably 700 words
49:40
that said, you know, Apple killed Aperture,
49:42
here's what they said, here's what this means, here's one paragraph of background
49:46
about like when it was introduced and when Lightroom came out,
49:49
and, you know, I was done, and there was no more that needed to be said.
49:52
And for news, I think that's the case. A lot of the Verge stories that are two paragraphs long,
49:56
they're news, they're cheap, they move on to the next thing.
49:59
There's some search engine optimization happening there
50:01
where they're just trying, you know, It's the economics of it.
50:04
They're paying somebody, I don't know what they're paying them,
50:06
but let's just say 50 bucks for a news post
50:08
and they work for half the day
50:10
and they post as many stories as they can and it gets people to the site,
50:14
but they're not the prestige stories that they're doing.
50:17
So I don't know. It's a great question.
50:19
I don't have a great answer other than to say that I try very hard to just sort of write
50:24
what I think is relevant and see what the length is.
50:28
That all said, sometimes the length is insane.
50:30
And yeah, then it's a challenge for my editors
50:34
to decide if they want to cut it or not.
50:36
- Yeah, that's just a little brief aside then
50:40
about editing, 'cause your job title at the moment,
50:44
are you still editorial director? 'Cause I lost track of your job title.
50:47
- I am editorial director for IDG's consumer business unit.
50:52
- So if you're the editorial director, who edits the editorial director's stuff?
50:55
- Yeah, who watches the watchman? Well, everybody needs an editor.
50:58
Everybody needs an editor. So I don't edit as many stories as I used to,
51:04
but they're lead editors for all my websites.
51:07
And yes, and this has always been the case that when I write something, somebody else edits it.
51:11
We have a peer review system. We actually don't have copy editors
51:14
working on our website anymore. It's all peer review.
51:16
You have somebody else who looks at it. You might put it in,
51:19
I might put it in our content management system myself
51:21
and get it ready to go.
51:23
But before it goes live, I'm gonna send that link to somebody and say,
51:26
could you look at this? Or I'll just mail them the markdown file that I wrote
51:29
and they will edit that and put it in themselves.
51:32
So it can vary. With my "Macworld" stuff these days,
51:36
it's mostly Dan Miller or Dan Morin doing that,
51:39
but it has varied over time.
51:42
When he worked for us, John Sef used to look
51:44
at a lot of my stuff too, and Phil Michaels looks at my stuff sometimes.
51:49
And you find somebody who is sort of responsible
51:51
for that story and they edit it.
51:54
And if we have disagreements,
51:59
I try not to demand, invoke my privilege
52:03
and say no, I want it to run that way. I very, very, very rarely do that.
52:08
My argument is that I wrote it this way
52:12
and their argument is they wanna change it.
52:15
And usually that's where it goes. Occasionally I'll say, well actually,
52:19
I was doing that for this reason, here's why.
52:22
And if they say, oh, okay, that's fine, then it's good.
52:25
And if they say, well, the reason I changed it is this,
52:27
and I'll let it go, and it's a conversation.
52:30
And I try very hard to have that be not something
52:32
where my position factors in,
52:34
'cause everybody does need an editor. And whenever I talk about handing something into my editor,
52:39
people get very baffled because they're like, "But I thought you were the lead editor."
52:42
It's like, well, I am, but there's still somebody
52:46
who is expecting that story, who is going to read it
52:48
and see if it makes any sense and get it ready to go.
52:52
And that's also the case if you're not at my level.
52:56
If you're a news person who's then writing a feature story,
52:59
you're writing it for someone else. You're not gonna edit your own story.
53:03
That's not possible.
53:05
- It's an interesting challenge for people that are writing their own blog
53:09
where technically they have no editor.
53:12
And I find, I'm not really sure what the right answer is.
53:16
I mean, is it, if you were,
53:19
and this is something that I've sort of struggled with
53:21
because I've worked with a few editors on and off
53:25
over the years, but more off than on actually. But anyway, and it's been a very eye-opening
53:32
experience having a different person's perspective, especially someone who's been doing it for
53:37
a long time as an editor. But if you're doing your own blog, I almost think that there is
53:44
some value in, as it were, getting some peer review from people that you know either on
53:52
Facebook or on Twitter if you really want to polish what you're doing rather
53:57
than just putting it out there without having any kind of peer review. But funnily
54:01
enough I don't think a lot of people do that and I'm wondering if there's
54:05
like a fear or a stigma of some kind because it's meant to be "oh I can
54:10
just blog about whatever I want" as opposed to the point of a peer review is
54:14
to improve the quality of what you're putting out and in some respects to give
54:18
you that different perspective and that helps you to focus. I wonder if that's
54:21
something that people should consider and maybe that's something I should be considering
54:24
as well. Yeah, it's hard.
54:26
It's hard. I mean, part of it is that the blogging systems generally don't let you do that, right?
54:31
You can post it or not and then you're like, "Well, what do I do?
54:34
Do I send them the text that I'm going to paste in and then they're not going to see
54:37
if there are any images or whatever?" It gets complicated.
54:40
It would be nice if they all had sort of a preview URL that you could send to people
54:46
and they could see it but nobody else would know that it's there because that's what we
54:51
do internally is we'll send around the preview stuff
54:55
that's on the staging server and not the live server
54:57
and people can look at that even just to give a thumbs up.
55:00
When I'm doing stuff on my own, you know, that you read it over more times and you,
55:07
you know, for big things I would say yes,
55:10
it's very hard for things throughout the day to keep pestering your friends and saying,
55:13
could you look at this, could you look at this? I think, you know, if you've got somebody--
55:17
- Pushing friendship. - Yeah, unless you've got somebody who also
55:20
their own site and you sort of like go back and forth and say, "Hey, could you check this
55:23
out?" And then they say, "Could you check this out?"
55:25
And you're kind of like helping each other out. I could see how that would work.
55:28
Also, the audience, I mean, the beautiful thing about the web is unlike print where
55:31
it gets printed and that's it, the web is changeable.
55:35
So I hate to say it, but one of the great things about the web is if you post something
55:40
and your audience is, they're going to be paying attention and they're going to tell
55:44
you. They're going to say, "No, that's not true.
55:46
I did this the other day with one of my Yosemite pieces.
55:48
I wrote a thing about private browsing and didn't mention the fact that there is a private
55:52
browsing mode in older versions of Safari because I never use it and I know it's there,
55:57
but I just never use it. And so I had two people say, "Well, actually private browsing is in Safari now."
56:01
And within five minutes of that story going live, that paragraph had been rewritten to
56:06
make it more clear that there was now a per window private browsing mode and that the
56:12
old private browsing mode wasn't ... I didn't find it very useful because it was under the
56:18
Safari menu and it was like everything went private and then you had to go back to public.
56:23
And so in that case, the audience helped. Those people who saw my link on Twitter and
56:27
gave me comments back in those first five or 10 minutes within, presumably like 90%
56:32
of the people who read that story never saw those issues because the audience had fixed
56:37
them for me. And I would try very hard to have everything be perfect before it goes
56:42
out there, but the fact is, if it's just you, other people are ... And in this case, my
56:48
editor didn't see that either. So, relying on the audience, I think is a good thing.
56:53
And I think that's okay. I think relying on them to notice things and be able to fix those
57:01
things is perfectly fine. Although it's always better to have a second set of eyes on something,
57:06
always. Yeah. It's an interesting way of thinking
57:09
about things is that I then start to see that your audience essentially become your assistant
57:15
editors. And the larger your audience, the more that assistance, what wanted or unwanted assistance
57:21
and feedback. But anyway, all right, cool.
57:26
So I think we need to keep moving on.
57:28
And the next thing I wanted to talk about, and because there is actually, I was surprised,
57:32
I thought, yeah, I wonder if I'm going to have enough to talk to Jason about.
57:34
There actually is quite a lot to talk about.
57:36
And one of the things I really wanted to touch on is what are the elements that you think
57:41
go into making a good article? And I'm going to start just with my list and we'll go from there, I guess.
57:47
I think that in order to make the best possible article is that you need to stick with the
57:53
message. Well, first of all, be clear about the message that you're trying to convey and stick to
57:56
it. So I think that rambling is the enemy, definitely.
58:01
And I'm guilty of that time and again.
58:03
And I like to say I'm working on it. So hand up, yep, I'm working on that.
58:07
I tend to start when I'm building an article
58:09
with a beginning and an ending, more so than an outline.
58:14
Although then I sort of tend to fill in the outline in the middle.
58:17
And I guess that, sort of mixing the two up there,
58:22
but I guess for me, it's about the message.
58:24
It's, and we've already talked about understanding your audience.
58:26
So that's sort of implied, we've already talked about that, but I just, I find there's so many articles out there
58:31
that just aren't focused enough. And I guess, yes, what are your thoughts?
58:36
- That's a pretty short list that you've got.
58:42
- I have a longer list, but I just realized that we've covered it off previously.
58:46
- All right, well, rambling is the enemy.
58:49
There's a lot, when I'm editing stories
58:51
by people who have not done a lot of writing before,
58:53
there's a lot of throat clearing, we call it, which is the, as a, you know,
58:58
I think professional writers,
59:02
or I don't even want to say professional, experienced writers,
59:04
'cause not all experienced writers are professionals.
59:07
Experienced writers, they are as guilty of throat clearing as anybody else,
59:12
but they learn to do it and then get rid of it
59:15
because it's not what the article is.
59:18
And this is the, you know, you take a long run up to get started
59:21
with what you're saying. You say, "Oh, you know,
59:24
"operating system releases are annual now from Apple
59:28
"and Yosemite is the latest one.
59:31
And in the past, I've had issues with the included apps
59:34
that were there. There was that time when the leather texture
59:38
was on the calendar app, and they
59:41
lost one of the panes in the contacts app
59:44
because of skeuomorphism. Well, Yosemite is here, and it's been a year
59:48
since the first movements in this front when they did the--
59:53
right? And now, but now I'm going to tell you
59:55
about the apps in Yosemite.
59:57
And that just is-- everybody does that.
59:59
And you're sort of thinking, you're taking a run up to like, what is this really about?
1:00:03
Here's the background, I'm trying to figure it out.
1:00:06
And you know, the fact is that you need to, your lead, your first paragraph or a couple
1:00:11
paragraphs or however you want to structure it needs to be, what is this thing about?
1:00:15
And and so you write that long thing and then you look and say, Oh, what I really need to
1:00:19
say is, hey, OS 10 updates mean apps get updated and a bunch of apps got updated.
1:00:24
Here they are. And that's it.
1:00:26
And that's all you, you know, that's all you need to say there. So that happens all the time.
1:00:29
There's throat clearing, there are personal anecdotes that are off topic.
1:00:32
I think personal anecdotes can be really funny as a sides.
1:00:37
And if they do illuminate what you're writing, but there are a lot that are sort of like,
1:00:40
why is this here? I don't want to hear about this trip that you took.
1:00:44
I don't know. I don't read every one of your articles.
1:00:47
And so I don't know the story you've been interweaving in every single article about
1:00:51
your own personal life. I don't want to hear it.
1:00:53
It doesn't answer the question of what are you here to do?
1:00:56
So I think that's always the question that I ask myself when I'm looking at leads is
1:00:59
what is the story here to do? What is its purpose?
1:01:02
What's it trying to get across? Because stories are, anything written, it's a machine to have an impact on somebody else's
1:01:07
brain. You are trying to change the way they think or inform them or do something and one of
1:01:13
the things you have to do is say up front, "Hey, this is what the story's going to be
1:01:17
about." Otherwise, they're just going to close the browser tab.
1:01:20
They're not going to read on unless you say, "Here's what I am here to do."
1:01:25
And then you talk about having a beginning and ending more than an outline.
1:01:30
I will have outlines that are generally not outlines, but they're lists of things.
1:01:34
It's like, these are the things I want to cover. And then as I go, I'll see them in my little, just like down below in my text editor as
1:01:40
I'm writing. I'll know these are points I need to hit.
1:01:42
And occasionally something will come to me and I'll put it in as a point I need to hit.
1:01:45
And then when I get there, I'll hit it and I'll delete that item.
1:01:48
But it's more like a list of things to be crossed off that I should mention these things.
1:01:53
I do think good beginnings are good, like I just said,
1:01:57
and you wanna know what you're there for. And tying it up in a bow at the end is great,
1:02:00
as long as it isn't kind of too ridiculous.
1:02:03
It's always nice to be able to say,
1:02:05
to let the reader know they've reached the end
1:02:08
in some way, tonally, not to say the end,
1:02:10
but to say something that wraps it up
1:02:13
to make people feel like, oh, okay, I completed this experience.
1:02:16
If they get to the end, which a lot of readers don't,
1:02:19
you should give them a reward and say, yes, you got to the end, good job.
1:02:22
- It's interesting you should say that.
1:02:25
Sorry, can I just interrupt for a second? A lot of readers don't make it to the end.
1:02:28
- Yeah. - Wow, okay. - Oh yeah. A lot of readers don't make it to the end.
1:02:31
If you look at something like Chartbeat, which is a real-time analytics tool that we use,
1:02:36
it actually measures where people are on the page,
1:02:39
and boy, that's depressing. So many people don't get more than halfway down
1:02:43
any given article. People just, you know, they load the page
1:02:46
and then they go away. You know, some people do.
1:02:49
This is why journalists are trained about the inverted pyramid,
1:02:52
which is you put the most important things on top and then you continue writing your article
1:02:56
in decreasing order of importance until you get to the bottom.
1:02:59
And that was partially because newspapers
1:03:01
would sometimes just cut the story off at an arbitrary point.
1:03:04
And others also because readers would abandon the story
1:03:08
at an arbitrary point. And there's some truth to that even now,
1:03:12
although I don't write most of my stories in that fashion
1:03:15
because I'm not writing hard news stories so much anymore.
1:03:19
But the other thing I wanna mention is working with my daughter who is 12
1:03:24
and she is frustrated often by writing.
1:03:27
There are a couple things that I tell her as a writer. I say, first off, writing is hard for everyone,
1:03:30
including writers. So don't get frustrated just because it's hard for you
1:03:34
and think I can't write because it's hard
1:03:37
because even professional successful writers
1:03:39
also find it hard. It's just hard.
1:03:41
But she gets stuck on beginnings. She gets stuck on introductions.
1:03:45
And so when you mentioned it's important to have a beginning and an ending,
1:03:49
One of the things I tell her is, you don't have to have the right beginning now.
1:03:53
You don't, you know, we don't write necessarily linearly.
1:03:55
You don't need to write the beginning that you're gonna keep forever.
1:03:58
Write a beginning, right? Have it be terrible, have it be generic,
1:04:01
have it be a placeholder that says, this is the beginning of the story.
1:04:05
I'm gonna tell a story about this and then get into it.
1:04:08
And then when you're done, you're gonna see the story you told
1:04:10
and that beginning is gonna be way easier to write
1:04:13
because you're gonna know where you're going 'cause you've got the rest of it.
1:04:15
So that's something that is also important
1:04:18
is not just having an idea of the story that you're telling,
1:04:22
but that the introduction, that's where you get throat clearing
1:04:24
is somebody doesn't know what they're writing about yet. So just put a placeholder, put something generic,
1:04:28
put something terrible that you'll never use,
1:04:30
and then write your story, and then come back to the top and say,
1:04:33
"Oh, well now I know what my story is."
1:04:35
That's a good technique that I think more people could probably do.
1:04:39
And I think a lot of people don't think about,
1:04:41
a lot of people don't think about writing as a craft.
1:04:44
They don't think about that there are techniques and tricks
1:04:46
and that when you're a novelist,
1:04:50
when you're writing a novel, and I learned this as I was writing
1:04:53
one of my unpublished novels that I've written in the last few years,
1:04:56
is it's not like you put in
1:04:58
all the foreshadowing and symbolism and everything that's leading up to the plot twists
1:05:02
when you write it through the first time.
1:05:05
It's not like writers have everything down
1:05:07
and then they write it from start to finish and then they press print
1:05:09
and it goes to the publisher and it's done. They go back and ladle that stuff in after the fact
1:05:14
when they've taken the journey and they know where their story is going.
1:05:17
And even on short form stuff, like what we write on the internet about technology,
1:05:21
the same holds true. You don't write it from start to finish.
1:05:24
You can write it from the middle with something generic at the top
1:05:27
and then go back and fix it when you're at the end.
1:05:30
So, you know, people, writing gets treated mystically
1:05:37
and is mystified in a way that it needs to not,
1:05:40
it doesn't need to be. That it's, you know, they're tricks.
1:05:43
Sure, you don't have to write from top to bottom.
1:05:45
Yeah, absolutely. And that's a very good point.
1:05:49
It leads into the next thing I want to talk about, which is revision.
1:05:51
But before we do, I think the problem people face is that they see it from the outside looking in.
1:05:57
If they're trying to get into writing more professionally, is they just see the finished result.
1:06:01
They don't see the steps in the process that the writer's gone through to reach that final result.
1:06:06
And, you know, and I think that there is a certain degree of, oh, well, they're such a good writer for, you know.
1:06:12
I just can't put my finger on why, but whereas if they learn more about the difference, it
1:06:18
is okay to start in the middle if you want.
1:06:21
But I mean, just the way I personally do it, and this is definitely not my way of doing
1:06:26
it, it's the only way of doing it, sure as heck isn't, but simply there's different ways
1:06:30
of attacking the problem and it's okay to approach writing anything, and that includes
1:06:37
documentation in engineering as well as for a blog as well as for a site like Macworld,
1:06:43
it's okay to revise it because you can start an article and think, you know,
1:06:47
I've just got to get the words down and then I will polish that later. There seems to be a bit of a
1:06:52
perception, I think, Matt, is there a perception? I think that people like the idea that good writers
1:07:00
are just able to sit down, churn out a piece, not do much revision, and it's all good. And that that
1:07:05
is somehow a measure of whether you're a good good blogger or writer for the
1:07:09
internet because it's like I can I can sit down in 30 minutes, churn out a
1:07:12
piece, hit publish and it's all good. Whereas I tend to prefer and I
1:07:18
think and I'm this is my own personal bias here I acknowledge but I prefer to
1:07:23
look at articles that have had more consideration that are a little bit
1:07:26
longer that I know have have been through revision and have been refined
1:07:31
to a point where, you know, they are more fully fleshed out and I tend to shy away
1:07:36
from the ones that are, you know, typed in, quick review, hit publish because they
1:07:41
tend to not have the depth and I guess revision is one of the next topic I
1:07:46
want to talk about it was revision and one of the problems that I face is that
1:07:50
I go through varying levels of revision based on what kind of, you know, article
1:07:54
I'm writing. At the moment I'm in the middle of just finished a review for
1:07:57
something and I am I'm finding myself revised going back and rereading it and
1:08:04
I think I've reread yesterday I think I reread it six times and I'm still
1:08:08
tweaking it and how at what point is the right point to draw a line and say right
1:08:15
that's it and hit and hit basically stop and hit publish and how do you know and
1:08:19
I guess that's a question I've always wanted to ask you oh yeah well so the
1:08:23
line that I always use and I can't even remember who said it originally but it's
1:08:27
It's a no artist finished, only abandoned.
1:08:30
(laughing) - That's good. - And that is, you could go on forever.
1:08:34
I use that a lot for podcast editing these days
1:08:37
'cause you could literally edit a podcast forever.
1:08:39
And you just don't do it.
1:08:42
- No, I don't. - And I don't either.
1:08:45
But the same goes true for writing. It's hard to find the end.
1:08:49
It can vary based on what the story is. I've had stories that have plagued me
1:08:55
where I have spent a lot of time going back and forth
1:08:58
on how things are worded.
1:09:00
It depends on how you write too. I do a lot of editing as I go for my articles for Macworld
1:09:07
where I'll write it and change it
1:09:12
and move along in a different way. I think as a writer in general,
1:09:16
I think in the spectrum of writers,
1:09:20
I am probably a cleaner first draft person than many.
1:09:24
A lot of my stuff is not dramatically changed
1:09:28
from my first draft when it gets to the end.
1:09:30
But I do more structural things.
1:09:33
I'll move things around. Oftentimes I'll leave things in the middle
1:09:38
that are marked to come back later
1:09:40
because I don't know the answer
1:09:42
or I am not able to check at any given time
1:09:45
and I'll just write around it. I'll just say, put lab test results here
1:09:50
and just keep going in order to keep the flow going.
1:09:52
And then in the end you come back and you've gotta sand off all those little blemishes
1:09:55
and get it into a better condition.
1:09:58
Sometimes you write a dummy lead
1:10:00
because you're not ready to go and you come back to it and do it later.
1:10:04
The novels that I've written have all been
1:10:07
during National Novel Writing Month, which is this thing at nanorimo.org.
1:10:12
- Nanorimo. - You can go to it. I'm on the board of directors of Nanorimo now
1:10:16
'cause I believe in it so much. And those, the whole point with nano is not to stop
1:10:22
and edit yourself, turn off your self-editor,
1:10:24
and just keep moving forward and write 50,000 words in 30 days.
1:10:27
'Cause a lot of times what writers get bogged down is
1:10:29
they're so obsessed over the sentence that they've written
1:10:32
that they won't go on to the next one. And I would say that for all kinds of writing,
1:10:36
that is a good tip.
1:10:38
That if you are afraid,
1:10:40
if you believe that writers
1:10:43
just make these amazing things appear full-blown
1:10:46
right off of their fingertips as they're typing into their keyboard,
1:10:49
and that you'll never measure up, you should be paralyzed about that sentence.
1:10:54
But the fact is, that's not how it works. And writers write, great writers write terrible things
1:10:59
and then they fix them later. So I guess what I'd say is,
1:11:01
if you're having trouble writing, the first thing you should do is stop editing yourself,
1:11:07
get the words down, and make that commitment to go back
1:11:12
and walk through it again when you're done to make it better
1:11:15
because what you'll find is that you'll get in a rhythm
1:11:18
and a lot of the stuff you write in that scenario
1:11:20
will be good, and you can fix the stuff that's bad,
1:11:24
but you will have written it, and having it be written is, believe it or not, number one.
1:11:30
Having it be good is number two. Number one is having it be written,
1:11:34
and a lot of people get so hung up on number two
1:11:36
that number one never happens, and you can't do that.
1:11:39
So I would say my novels,
1:11:42
the reason my novels haven't been published or self-published, because I would self-publish them,
1:11:46
I wouldn't have a problem just to get them out there.
1:11:49
The reason they haven't been is because I know I need to rewrite them.
1:11:53
I need to revise them.
1:11:56
And they're huge. And so that's become kind of daunting for me.
1:12:00
But on my smaller scale stuff, my tech writing, you know, the same thing applies.
1:12:05
I try to write it. And if I come to a point where I am up against a wall, I will usually put something in brackets
1:12:11
that says, you know, something about this here, and then I just keep going.
1:12:15
and I'll come back to this something later, either when I'm done or when I'm at a better point
1:12:19
and I can grasp that thing. Moving ahead and continuing the writing.
1:12:23
So I'd say revision is a great tool to help you.
1:12:26
The existence of revision is a tool
1:12:28
to help you get the words down. That's its most important thing.
1:12:32
And everybody does need either a second set of eyes.
1:12:35
I would say I'd much rather have an editor than revising myself.
1:12:38
I will do some revision myself if I have a chance.
1:12:42
I will give it a second read of my own and make changes.
1:12:44
but the number one thing would be to get somebody else to look at it if I can afford that time
1:12:48
and if I've got somebody who's willing.
1:12:51
But that, for me, the most important thing
1:12:53
about the existence of revising your writing
1:12:56
is that it gives you a blessing to keep writing,
1:12:58
even though you're not sure that what you're writing is good enough.
1:13:01
Because in a lot of cases, it actually will be good enough
1:13:03
when you read it back, but it's so easy
1:13:06
to keep your inner editor on and never be able to get off that sentence.
1:13:10
- Awesome. Now, that's good advice
1:13:13
and certainly something I need to start, I need to stop revising my current review and just move on.
1:13:20
- When you have to write 1800 words or whatever 1666 words per day for NaNoWriMo,
1:13:24
you get really good at just getting the words down.
1:13:27
And there's something to that. I mean, this is what professional writers say
1:13:30
is they're writing a couple thousand words a day.
1:13:32
And this is what they do is they will get it down.
1:13:35
And then there's a revision period later, but you just gotta get the words down and don't let it,
1:13:39
my daughter does this too, like I said, and you just can't let yourself get paralyzed.
1:13:43
That is the number one problem with writing
1:13:46
is you get paralyzed about, is this sentence good enough?
1:13:50
And I don't know what to do here. And just get the words out.
1:13:53
Once the words start flowing, you can fix them later.
1:13:56
- Cool, excellent, all right.
1:13:58
So just one more thing before we wrap up.
1:14:03
And I just, I wanna talk about working with an editor
1:14:07
and we've talked about other people reviewing your work
1:14:10
and so on. And I know I've talked about this previously on previous episodes of the show
1:14:17
about different kinds of review, design reviews in particular. But handling criticism and
1:14:22
taking, well, I say handling criticism, taking on board feedback, there's a whole bunch of
1:14:27
different expressions that cover the same sentiment, which is you're putting your work
1:14:32
out there publicly, of course, when you do hit publish, but in order to work with a site
1:14:39
like Macworld or to get work in say the magazine or there's a whole bunch of different, the
1:14:48
list is endless out there.
1:14:50
You do have to work with an editor and because in the end the editor sets the tone for that
1:14:56
publication/site.
1:15:01
What I found interesting is that the people that haven't worked with, well okay maybe
1:15:05
I should rephrase this from my perspective is that I had not worked a great deal with
1:15:10
editors per se until the last few years and I started to work with editors on and off
1:15:17
about four years ago and it was quite a shock to the system for me and I think there's a
1:15:23
lot of people that are listening to this that haven't actually worked with an editor before
1:15:29
And when I first started working with an editor, it was difficult because my perspective of
1:15:36
what they were trying to convey to me was it was highly critical.
1:15:40
It was very much like, well, this needs more detail.
1:15:46
That's not really the right way of putting that.
1:15:50
And who is your audience? And some of this we've already sort of talked about.
1:15:53
But I guess one of the things is that what I wanted to explore, because you've been an
1:15:57
an editor for quite some time is when you are actually working with an editor, I guess
1:16:03
it's about not taking it personally and learning from it. And in the end, you have to care
1:16:08
about what you're writing being on what the editor is in many respects is a gatekeeper.
1:16:16
And you have to provide things in the format for the publication that you're writing for,
1:16:21
as opposed to taking that as a criticism of this is the way that you write and I don't
1:16:25
like it. It's like, well, no, no, no. You know what I mean? It's like, you've got to
1:16:28
get your head in the right space. It's like the editor is there to help you. And I just,
1:16:32
I'm curious from your perspective on the other side of the fence, do you perceive a lot of
1:16:39
frustration from people that are trying to get their work published when it comes past
1:16:43
your desk as an editor? Yeah. I mean, and all of us, you know, editors
1:16:47
generally have also been writers and are writers and they've been on the other side of it too.
1:16:51
I would say a few things.
1:16:53
First off, it is a collaborative process and the best way to think of it,
1:16:56
especially if you're doing something on an assignment
1:16:58
from somebody else, is you are collaborating with your editor.
1:17:02
Your editor gave you the assignment. They're actually hiring you to write what they want
1:17:06
for their website or publication.
1:17:09
And so it is not your canvas.
1:17:16
It is not your space.
1:17:18
It is their space. And they know the audience
1:17:20
and they asked you for this story,
1:17:22
and so they would like it. And this is especially true if it's sort of news or a review.
1:17:26
It's a little different if it's an opinion piece.
1:17:29
But even then, there may be a format issue
1:17:31
where the editor knows what the pieces are like,
1:17:33
and maybe you don't. So the best thing to do in those situations
1:17:37
is always to just think of it as a collaboration. The editor is not there to embarrass you.
1:17:42
The editor's job, the editor's there ideally to do two things.
1:17:45
And the first thing is, they wanna work with you to get the story
1:17:48
in publishable form for their publication.
1:17:51
So, you know, they're trying to make it better.
1:17:54
They're not trying to make you feel bad. And if you listen to what they have to say
1:17:57
and learn from it, and this is the key, and it's harder for some writers to get this than others.
1:18:02
If you learn from it, you are learning what they want
1:18:05
so that you can give it to them. Because again, you're not, it's their publication.
1:18:08
You're not gonna educate them on how you write
1:18:12
so that they will accept your particular style.
1:18:16
You are learning what they like
1:18:18
so you can give them what they like. And you know what?
1:18:20
Professional writers, you know, real pros,
1:18:23
they know that if they're writing for X, they're gonna do it this way,
1:18:26
and if they're writing for Y, they're doing it this way.
1:18:28
Even potentially for the same website
1:18:32
or magazine or whatever, you might say, oh, well, this person likes this kind of article
1:18:35
and this person likes this kind of article. And that's just part of being a writer,
1:18:40
is knowing who your audience is.
1:18:43
And audience number one is the person
1:18:45
who assigned you that story. So you need to do that.
1:18:48
So ideally, number one, you need to think
1:18:51
it's a collaborative process. They're there to help.
1:18:54
They wanna get what they want,
1:18:56
but you can learn something from that. And ideally, number two is that they're thinking,
1:19:01
I am helping you be a better writer. I'm helping you by using my experience as an editor
1:19:07
about what we like and what we don't like
1:19:09
to let you know now, because a lot of writers don't know.
1:19:12
They just don't know. I mean, how are you to know before you try
1:19:15
about we like to do it this way,
1:19:17
or there's a kind of thing you could do, or oh, you should call the company for a comment here.
1:19:21
Oh, well, I didn't think about that. I could do that, right?
1:19:24
So ideally, editors also view themselves as developing not just stories, but developing writers.
1:19:29
I will tell you, there is nothing more precious
1:19:31
to an editor than a reliable, good writer.
1:19:35
They are going to want to find those people. They want to cultivate those people.
1:19:39
Because eventually, then it's just like,
1:19:41
hey, can you do the story? Sure, and they give you the story,
1:19:43
and you're like, all right, publish the story with very little work. And that's really great. And slogging through
1:19:50
changes, maybe in the days of huge staffs and big budgets, this was different, where
1:19:55
it was sort of like everything had to be a Vanity Fair article. But these days, let me
1:19:59
tell you, with small staffs, and very little copy editing and things like that, editors
1:20:03
really do want to work with you to to make what you give them better, because that makes
1:20:09
their jobs easier and it makes you have a good connection and a market for your work
1:20:15
that you understand and you know how to provide what they're asking for.
1:20:18
So I would say it's easy to take it personally.
1:20:23
There may be disagreements. It may not be, what they want might not be something you are willing to give or are prepared
1:20:28
to give and that's fine.
1:20:31
You don't have to view it as you failed necessarily, although I mean that happens.
1:20:35
Sometimes people are not good writers and I don't want to pretend that that's not the
1:20:38
the case. But there are also lots of times where the issue is not that. The issue is
1:20:43
what you do is not what they want. And that's not about, you know, there's a judgment there,
1:20:49
but the judgment isn't you suck. The judgment is, you know, we need this. And if you can't
1:20:54
give it to us, then we shouldn't work together. And that's okay too. But I do think that it
1:20:59
is a yeah, and it is collaboration. And the best editors are trying to collaborate and
1:21:03
communicate and that doesn't always come across. Sometimes you have to glean it yourself as
1:21:06
a writer, you have to look at what they did to your article and say, "Why did they do
1:21:10
that?" And maybe even ask, "So why the changes?
1:21:12
I want to learn here." That will help.
1:21:14
Editors are happy in most cases to explain why they made the changes they made if you
1:21:18
ask, because again, it's showing a sign that a writer wants to learn and improve.
1:21:24
And yeah, this isn't, especially if you're doing things like tech writing, it's not art.
1:21:30
There's an art to it, but it is also something that on your own site, you can do whatever
1:21:35
you want, but on their site, they know what they want, and they're going to give you money
1:21:41
for the product that they're asking for.
1:21:43
And if I ordered a table, and the table I got from the table maker was like it had too
1:21:48
many legs, and the wood was different, and the chairs didn't look anything like we agreed
1:21:52
on, I would not pay them for that table.
1:21:54
I would refuse that table. I'm paying for the table that I ... I may have consulted with them, we may have had
1:21:59
a good conversation, we all agreed on what we wanted, but in the end, I'm paying for
1:22:02
the product that I desire.
1:22:06
And so, yeah. And, you know, if it's fiction, things like that, then that relationship is very different
1:22:10
because, you know, but even then I would encourage writers to think of editors as collaborators
1:22:18
and that the writing process is, you know, is improved by collaboration.
1:22:24
You may not always agree and that's fine, but they are trying, the goal is generally
1:22:29
to make what you're writing better.
1:22:32
And so that should be teamwork. The writer's not out there by themselves.
1:22:35
Ideally, you're part of a team
1:22:39
and the editor is in your corner.
1:22:41
Or they want you to be in their corner
1:22:44
if you're writing for them and they want a certain thing
1:22:48
because that's how their website does it. Then they want you to get what it is like to write for them
1:22:54
so that the next time you do it, you don't have to have that conversation.
1:22:57
It's just, oh yeah, you got it. You know what writing a review for Macworld is like
1:23:01
and then that's it. And then that's the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
1:23:05
(laughing) - Well, certainly I'm sorry. So, okay, excellent.
1:23:08
Well, the last question I wanna wrap up on
1:23:12
is about advice.
1:23:15
And this is the sort of, I'll tell you what I think,
1:23:21
but I'm far more interested and I'm sure listen to be far more interested
1:23:23
in what do you think? And that is, I was asked recently in real life
1:23:29
about what advice I would give them regarding getting into "blogging"
1:23:42
and I'm like, "Well, it's really easy actually. You just turn up and write."
1:23:47
But I think if I had to give any one piece of advice about anyone that wanted to actually get their writing published professionally,
1:23:53
I'm the wrong guy to ask because my work hasn't really been published professionally.
1:23:58
And, you know, I'm sort of working towards that at some point, but, you know, I have a, you know, a career as an engineer and I don't have to do that if I don't want to.
1:24:06
But the point is that there's a lot of people out there that do want to have their work published.
1:24:10
And I guess my advice, based on my perspective at this point, is, first of all, to care about what you're writing and to acknowledge the fact that you need to improve.
1:24:20
And there's always room for improvement. But that's probably of less interest to what you would suggest.
1:24:27
If there's a single piece of advice that you could give anyone that was interested in taking
1:24:31
the step from blogging, whatever they felt like, to actually writing professionally and
1:24:38
actually writing for a site like Macworld, what advice would you give them?
1:24:45
Your scenario has actually touched on some of my advice, which is one of the great things
1:24:50
about the web today is that you can write without anybody's permission.
1:24:56
That's a good start, because if you show interest
1:24:59
in what you're writing and you've got examples
1:25:01
of the things that you've written, and you can put those up on your own,
1:25:04
start your own, if you wanna write about tech,
1:25:06
start your own tech blog and write some stories and show that you care about it
1:25:11
and that you wanna do a good job doing that.
1:25:13
Because as an editor, I'll look at that. If somebody says, oh yeah, I would like to write for you,
1:25:17
and I say, what have you written about tech? And they say nothing, that's a lot harder conversation
1:25:21
than if they say, well, I've got a blog where I posted a bunch of stuff of different kinds,
1:25:25
here it is, check it out, and that's good,
1:25:28
'cause then I have writing samples from you, and I have seen that you actually care about this,
1:25:32
and you cared enough to set up a little blog
1:25:34
about your pet subject, whatever it is,
1:25:36
and that all goes into it, 'cause like I said,
1:25:40
editors really like to find good writers.
1:25:42
It's, there aren't, especially in something like technology
1:25:46
where you have to understand the technology and be a good writer, boy, it's hard to find
1:25:50
good tech writers, and it's great
1:25:53
when you find somebody like that. So that's, I think step one is having your stuff be out there.
1:25:57
I used to say things like, contact Adam Angst and say you want to write something for Tidbits,
1:26:02
which was yes. I was just turning people over to Adam and saying, "Good luck.
1:26:06
Talk to Adam." But Tidbits was an example of a non-paying market where they were really good at working
1:26:12
with unpublished writers and you wouldn't make a living at it or even necessarily get
1:26:16
paid, but you would get your name in print or at least on their website and in their
1:26:23
newsletter if you worked with them, and that was a good sign.
1:26:26
And then Macworld would say, "Hey, you've been published in Tidbits.
1:26:30
That's great." That was a good sign from something else.
1:26:33
So some of it is finding somewhere else.
1:26:37
If you want to go work at X, maybe you start with writing something for Y or Z, and eventually
1:26:42
you make your way up to X, that can happen.
1:26:45
But I think number one is demonstrating your interest in having what we used to call in
1:26:50
and print days, clips, having writing samples online.
1:26:54
And if you can't do that for somebody else's blog
1:26:57
where you're a contributor because you don't know anybody,
1:27:00
then I would say start with your own.
1:27:02
And even if nobody ever goes to your blog,
1:27:06
you will have, and maybe you just wanna start
1:27:08
your own blog and not work for anybody else.
1:27:10
That's fine, just do that. And even if it's just a means to an end
1:27:14
of you being noticed by other people,
1:27:16
having something to point to and say, I did that, I'd love to do this sort of thing for you, that goes a long way.
1:27:21
So I think that's number one.
1:27:23
When I've hired people for jobs, I'm just throwing this in here, when I've hired people
1:27:27
for jobs, again, demonstrating your enthusiasm is always going to go far.
1:27:33
If it's a Macworld job and you are demonstrably into Apple stuff, that helps.
1:27:39
Because if it's a Macworld job and you are not into Apple stuff and don't really care,
1:27:44
boy, that's a bad fit.
1:27:47
But then I would say just as important is demonstrably into media, into writing, into
1:27:53
publishing things on the internet, into living on the internet.
1:27:57
I would have job interview applicants for entry level jobs at Macworld and I would say,
1:28:02
"What have you written?"
1:28:05
And they'd say, "Well, I was an English major." And I'd say, "Did you write for your school newspaper?"
1:28:09
"No." "Did you do a school magazine?"
1:28:11
"No." "Did you have a website?"
1:28:13
"No." "So what are your writing samples?"
1:28:15
some papers that I wrote and I took a journalism class.
1:28:17
Like you did no extracurricular anything, no.
1:28:19
It's like, you know what? I'm probably not gonna hire that person
1:28:22
because they are not showing a passion for being a writer.
1:28:26
And that's a bad, that's just a really bad sign.
1:28:29
That's somebody who is theoretically like casting about
1:28:31
trying to find a job that they want and they were an English major,
1:28:33
so maybe writing is for them. But if they really wanted to do it,
1:28:38
they would not be able to keep it in. They would have found an outlet for it.
1:28:41
And I'm not interested in somebody who is just sort of like
1:28:44
mildly interested in possibly being a writer
1:28:47
as a career path. I want somebody who is demonstrably into it.
1:28:51
And so, again, having that website you can point to
1:28:55
and say, "I did that," or, "When I was in school,
1:28:57
"I did this whole thing." Those help a lot if you're an editor
1:29:00
who's looking for prospective writers. 'Cause you get a lot of people who'll be like,
1:29:03
"Yeah, I could write some stuff."
1:29:05
And you have no way to gauge their level of interest
1:29:09
and commitment. Are they gonna flake out on you?
1:29:11
And do they really care about this stuff?
1:29:13
If you can say, "I'm super into Apple stuff
1:29:16
"and I wrote reviews of 30 different apps on my blog
1:29:19
"about apps that I have over here "and I wanna write app reviews for you."
1:29:23
I'm gonna say, "Wow, okay, we should give this guy a shot."
1:29:27
And then maybe the reviews are terrible
1:29:30
and we don't use you or maybe they're good and we have some notes and you get better
1:29:34
and maybe they're great and we, again, beginning of a beautiful friendship.
1:29:37
But demonstrating that you care
1:29:39
and having examples of what you wanna do
1:29:42
is the best start.
1:29:44
- Okay, cool. I'm really glad you brought up passion
1:29:46
because I did an episode of the show,
1:29:50
episode 10 called "Passion Over Academic Proof"
1:29:52
that was in engineering, it's the same kind of thing.
1:29:55
I wanna hire people to work for me that,
1:30:00
maybe they don't go home and program a PLC
1:30:03
or their SCADA system at home to control their house or something.
1:30:06
Maybe they don't do that. Although I actually had one guy work for me
1:30:09
that did do that, which is kind of crazy to me,
1:30:11
it still. I want the people that are keen, that love what they're doing, and I'll weight
1:30:20
that more heavily than the marks they got when they went through university. So, I'm
1:30:26
really glad you brought that up, passion is a big thing.
1:30:29
You can detect when somebody doesn't have passion. You can tell. Passion, you don't
1:30:33
have to have it, but boy, it makes a huge difference if somebody's got a passion for,
1:30:38
know, again, in this business, a passion for technology, a passion for writing and or making
1:30:43
videos or whatever it is, that is what separates the good from the great, I would say certainly
1:30:51
and a lot of times the mediocre from the good.
1:30:54
- Yeah, no, fair comment.
1:30:57
So I think we should probably wrap it up there.
1:30:59
We've gone a bit longer than I normally like to, but that's okay.
1:31:03
It's been, we've been on a roll, so that's okay.
1:31:06
So if you would like to talk more about this, you can reach me on Twitter @johnchijji and
1:31:11
check out my writing at techdistortion.com since we've been talking about writing.
1:31:14
If you'd like to send any feedback, please use the feedback form on the website and that's
1:31:17
where you'll also find the show notes for this episode under podcasts pragmatic.
1:31:21
You can follow Pragmatic Show on Twitter to see show announcements and other related materials.
1:31:26
I'd also really like to thank my guest host today, Jason Snell.
1:31:29
And Jason, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you?
1:31:32
This way is probably Twitter, Jsnell on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L.
1:31:37
And you can also find me at mackerel.com and all of my mini-podcasts at theincomparable.com.
1:31:45
Fantastic.
1:31:47
I'd also like to personally thank LIFX for sponsoring the show.
1:31:50
If you're looking for a great LED bulb that's energy efficient, remotely controllable, colorful,
1:31:53
and just plain fun to use, remember specifically visit this URL, LIFX, that's spelled L-I-F-X
1:31:59
and use the coupon code pragmatic for 15% off the total price of your order.
1:32:06
Thank you everybody for listening and thank you Jason.
1:32:09
Thanks everybody. Thanks. [MUSIC PLAYING]
1:32:14
(upbeat music)
1:32:16
(upbeat music)
1:32:19
[MUSIC PLAYING]
1:32:22
(upbeat music)
1:32:25
(upbeat music)
1:32:28
(upbeat music)
1:32:30
(upbeat music)
1:32:33
(upbeat music)
1:32:35
(upbeat music)
1:32:38
(upbeat music)
1:32:41
[MUSIC PLAYING]
1:32:44
[MUSIC PLAYING]
1:32:47
[Music]
1:33:16
(dramatic music)
1:33:19
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Podchaser is the ultimate destination for podcast data, search, and discovery. Learn More