Danah Boyd

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June 15, 2010 | 10:56 AM | By

What constitutes a “bloggy sensibility”?

Flickr photo courtesy of user minifig.

In talking with the Argo editors, I’ve often said that we’re looking for reporter-bloggers who demonstrate a “bloggy sensibility.” Just as there are folks who intuitively grasp the lede-to-kicker rhythm of a great newspaper story, and people who have the ear for tone and timing that a great radio story demands, I think there are writers out there who just grok blogging.

But what does that bloggy sensibility look like? How do we identify it? And which aspects of it can be taught?

Fundamentally, of course, the sensibility is an intangible – we know it when we see it. But if you forced me to write a formula to determine someone’s blogginess, I’d probably emphasize five factors:

They’ve got voice.

This is the number one thing. In journalism, the institutional voice often cloaks a writer’s natural charm and wit. Institutional voice works very poorly in the blogosphere. Personality wins.

An infinite variety of tones work well on the Web – gee-whiz, insidery, breathless, literary, confessional, erudite, pithy, wonkish, and of course, snarky. I think the only essential is that the writing betray the tendencies, preoccupations, and idiosyncrasies of a real person.

They cut to the chase.

Whatever the genre, the Web consistently rewards snappy, economical writing. The newspaper lede is a narrative invention devised for a general-interest audience – an arresting literary moment or clever turn-of-phrase the writer uses to hook you into the main story at hand. On the Web, writers are allowed and encouraged to get straight to the point.

Distillation, synthesis and hierarchy are all prized qualities in online writing. Where a newspaper story might demand a narrative transition, readers on the Web are perfectly all right with bullet points. Great long-form writers package mountains of information into an elegantly shaped, smooth and flowing story. Great bloggers, on the other hand, unpack complex information into discrete points and lay those out in concise and orderly fashion. If he weren’t busy being President, I imagine Barack Obama would have made a terrific blogger. Danah Boyd is an extraordinarily nuanced thinker, yet her writings and speeches are marvelously easy to parse. In a newsier vein, Ezra Klein has a great talent for weaving order out of chaos.

They’re constant communicators.

The pace at which successful bloggers tend to post often intimidates storytellers used to media with longer turnaround times. But one reason that bloggers can be so prolific is that they overshare. Newspaper reporters and broadcast producers leave a metric ton of material – quotes, press releases, public records, published reports, internal documents – on the cutting-room floor as they develop The Story that will appear in the paper or on-air. For a blogger, everything is fodder for a post.

Isn’t this a great quote? Post. Check it out, interesting video! Post. Ooh, quick news flash! Post. Just caught up on my morning reading. Post. News conference coming up, here’s what I’ll be looking for. Post.

They command your attention.

In the not-so-recent past, reporters considered publication as the final step in the life cycle of an article. You drafted a piece, polished it to a shine, and it was done. When newspaper reporters work on a piece, they don’t tend to focus directly on how many people will read it; instead, they focus on where in the paper it will be placed. You might consider this a subtle distinction – after all, placement helps drive popularity. But the consequence was that it mattered less how a story played in the real world; the reporter’s goal was to produce stories that sold well internally, stories that fit nicely into the content mix of a section.

Great bloggers work with a perpetual sense of the post-publication life of a post. After something gets published, people check it out, they comment on it, they pass it around. Or they don’t, which we finally have the tools to determine.

So bloggers design their posts to move. They craft strong headlines, they spread the word through their social networks, they dip in to comment threads, they pay attention to metrics. They work to develop a genuine sense of their community and its predilections, and they adjust accordingly.

But here’s the rub: truly great bloggers lead just as much as they follow. They use their mastery of their crowd to guide its attention, to find ways to hook you into engaging with things you might not otherwise try. This is how Ezra Klein gets his community to indulge him in a discussion of actuarial values.

They’re the life of the party.

The discussion on any topic happens in a number of places online, and the best bloggers always seem to be in all of them. They’re hobnobbing with subject experts on Twitter, they’re in regular dialogue with other bloggers and online communities on the topic, and they show up on air and in the press.

There’s a chicken-and-egg issue here, of course. Obviously a popular blogger is going to be feted all over social and commercial media. But the best bloggers really seem to enjoy their position atop a conversational ecosystem.

Classic reporters still obsess over the pursuit of the scoop. Bloggers who’ve achieved the type of ubiquity I’m talking about understand that today, owning the community is more important than getting the news out first. Even if someone else breaks news on their beat, they’re still a key participant in the conversation about the news, and might possibly even deliver the authoritative take.

FILED UNDER: Theory, Danah Boyd, Ezra Klein, hiring, style
June 10, 2010 | 2:29 PM | By

How writing a blog is like writing a book

Chris Anderson blogged his book The Long Tail into a blockbuster. Flickr image courtesy of user Pop!Tech.

Peruse the New York Times Bestseller List for nonfiction at any moment, and you’ll find several familiar archetypes – celebrity or politician autobiographies, self-help tomes, partisan political mind-candy packaged as cultural commentary, and a smattering of works from popular historians and magazine authors. In recent years, though, you might have noticed a new vanguard taking up more and more space on the list – the blogger-turned-author. (Looking at the list right now, I’d count 4 of the top 35 titles as being blog-driven projects – Dan Pink, Nouriel Roubini, Jen Lancaster, and Simon Johnson / James Kwak.)

The blog-to-book-deal pathway is now so well-trod that there are entire blogs devoted to dreaming up snarky blog-to-book ideas. But there are several reasons these two great tastes taste so great together:

A table of contents is like a taxonomy.

A key part of any nonfiction book proposal is the description of how the book will be organized. Often, even plot-driven books become mostly thematic in their organization. For example, Jonathan Alter’s book The Promise – about President Obama’s first year in office – hews very loosely to a chronological thread from inauguration to the 2010 State of the Union. But if you look at the book’s chapters, they’re all about topics – Cabinet selection, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, the financial crisis, health care reform, Afghanistan and Iraq, etc.

Planning for a nonfiction blog requires similar thinking about what themes and topics you’ll hit on regularly. Like a draft table of contents, the taxonomy helps you determine the scope and emphasis of your site.

Compelling books and blogs often employ a core narrative engine – a unifying objective, big idea, mystery, or argument.

This is what I call the quest. At its most basic, the narrative engine is a gimmick – the author plans to cook all the recipes in Julia Child’s most famous cookbook, or read every entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Done deftly, it transforms messy, pattern-defying reality into a vivid and graspable narrative.

Michael Lewis’ The Big Short lays out the fundamentals behind the financial crisis by focusing on the story of the small club of individuals who made their fortunes betting against the housing market. That framework, while narrow, is flexible enough to allow Lewis to touch on diverse contributors to the crisis – regulatory failures, market failures, foreign investment, individual irresponsibility and fraud – without overwhelming his readers.

Of all the highly-regarded economists qualified to comment about the causes behind the crisis, Simon Johnson might be among the most prominent. He’s appeared all over public media – Fresh Air, This American Life, Bill Moyers’ Journal – and has been ubiquitous in news stories about the disaster. I’m convinced Johnson’s hit blog, The Baseline Scenario, is a key reason he’s become such a key source. And I’m further convinced that what makes the blog really sing is its unifying argument – about the peril of allowing banks to become and remain “too big to fail.” In post after post, and in book chapter after book chapter, Johnson and Kwak explain all the little ways in which megabanks pose the potential to distort our financial and political systems to the point where disastrous crashes become inevitable.

Successful authors tend to write every day.

This is the most consistent detail I recognize in authors’ stories about their processes. They force themselves to write almost every day. Writing creates its own inertia. When you start putting words on a page, and plunge ahead with it no matter what comes, you tend to end up with better material than if you hem and haw over every word. When Chip Scanlan taught reporting and writing at the Poynter Institute, his most constant piece of advice to writers was, “Lower your standards.” Get your words out there before they have the chance to logjam your mind. Then refine.

Blogging demands similar discipline. It requires a rigorous, regular pace, but that pace itself quickly makes you better. The journey from classic long-form reporter to true blogger-at-heart is reflected in posts like this, from James Fallows:

I thought this was — yet again — a “surprisingly” effective Big Speech by Obama, though with a very few revealing lapses. Will take my time on doing the Full Annotated Version tomorrow, ideally by early afternoon.

“Lowering your standards,” when applied to journalistic blogging, doesn’t mean shirking responsibility for what we post and tossing off unverified rumors on a whim. It means exposing our process at moments when we haven’t yet produced a refined result. It means writing posts that begin with, “I’m working on … ” and continue with, “but I’m struggling to …”

Ernest Hemingway often described a technique that strikes me as very bloggy. He actually concluded his writing for the day right as he was hitting his stride. That way, he could plant the seeds for some of his best ideas in the afternoon and reap the bounty the next morning, before he was truly warmed up.

Making a book and a site successful both require a flair for person-to-person marketing and promotion.

You’ve poured your heart into researching and writing a book. Years of missing deadlines, drafting and redrafting, getting coached, paring down extraneous beautiful passages like so many pieces of your soul – it all culminates in the publication of a book. And at last, you get to rest, right?

Heh.

The book release is the moment when some of the most grueling work comes in – traveling to city after city, conducting readings in whatever bookstore will have you, signing covers, doing interviews. When selling 20,000 copies can launch you onto national bestseller lists, it makes sense to target 100 potential buyers at a book-signing.

This is one of the key reasons successful blogs so often result in successful books. When publishers see hundreds of thousands (or even tens of thousands) of regular visitors on a site, they know that a solid percentage of that audience might convert to buyers upon release, propelling the book onto the charts before the author even practices her signature. The blog becomes a key part of the book’s promotion.

But getting people to the site in the first place is an exercise that can require as much devotion (if not as much travel) as the book tour. It means engaging key conversation-leaders on Twitter and on their own sites, like a hundred little bookstores, getting in front of 100 new potential users every chance you get.

FILED UNDER: Theory, content planning, Danah Boyd, Ezra Klein, James Fallows, marketing, passion