Are You A News Writer Or An Article Marketer?

Fresh out of journalism school over 20 years ago, one of my first jobs was with The New York Times (D.C. Office), where I had the opportunity to work for some of the most talented and celebrated journalists of today (Maureen Dowd, Gwen Ifill, Visit online https://insquable.com/ for more details ,Thomas Friedman). I learned a great deal about writing and editing news articles (I went to a lot of congressional meetings:), and understood on a more meaningful level the art of news reporting.

Fast forward ten years later. I was married and had a child with another one on the way and I was trying to transition my career as a psychotherapist into one that I could do online because I wanted to stay home with my children. At first I didn’t know how I was going to make that successfully happen, so I thought the easiest thing I could do while I figured things out was to write.

As I wrote more articles for the web, I began to realize that how I was trained to write was not going to get me the results I was looking for – for people to actually read the articles!

The two styles of writing are completely different and you need to be really clear about what kind of writer you are when looking for results on the web.

1. News reporting means that there is an issue or an event that a reporter (writer) is going to investigate, research, and report about. There are no opinions in news reporting – just facts.

In article marketing, there can be a variety of article types. There can be fact reporting, opinion, how-to and many more approaches to the writing. There are no rules on the type of articles you will read on the web. In fact, more often than not you will read an article that has a unique perspective on a topic of interest.

2. News reporting is timely. It is not evergreen. You typically cannot read a news article that was written last year and it still be relevant the following year.

Good article marketing articles are evergreen. This means that the articles apply to today and will remain relevant the next year and even longer. While this is not always the case, for the most part, this is a good standard to write by for the web.

3. Good news reporting requires a great deal of research. In fact I would say that 70% of the work of a news article is the research that goes into it. The other 30% is the energy and talent that it takes to pull all that information together into a cohesive and interesting article that people will read. Needless to say this takes a lot of time. Research has to be searched for, found, and then validated.

On the other hand, article marketing requires less “research” on your part. While there may be some initial research for content you may want to add to your articles, the real purpose of article marketing is to educate or entertain the reader about a topic that you specialize in. You shouldn’t have to do a lot of research and fact checking. In fact, people are more interested in your perspective and your opinion on the topic — not just “the facts”.

4. News articles typically begin with a lead (the point of the article), the facts (supporting information), and then the background information.