A Marketer’s Guide To Catching And Keeping A Journalist
This story originally ran under the same title in the Content Marketing Institute’s Chief Content Officer magazine in April 2020. Read that version here.
If great writers seek truth and freedom, today’s marketing departments are terribly incompatible with fostering great writing. But they could be. And if they want results, they should be.
More journalists have lost jobs than coal miners in the past fifteen years. Authorship and freelance writing pay less thanks to an abundance of opportunities to self-publish. Publisher’s checks—once tuna-sized—have shrunk into anchovies. A generation of the brightest writers still aspire to be picked up by The New Yorker but they are more willing than ever to contract with brands who can actually pay the bills.
Writers from these fields can work wonders on your conversions. Words are your first impression and have the power to make stocks soar or spark civil war. Consider how Salesforce rose to a $145 billion juggernaut partly by painting Oracle, its chief opponent, into a semantic corner with the phrase “on-premise,” or how Zuora reached unicorn status by coining the term, "the subscription economy."
Great writers are worlds apart in thought and draft from most marketers who, through no fault of their own, don’t have the same luxury of agonizing over word choice or story format. And thanks to frequent and heavy-handed executive input and eleventh-hour interjections, what’s produced is often a stream of unbroken cliche.
But how’s a marketer to attract great writers with advanced degrees in literature and journalism? As Editor in Chief at Find A Way Media, I’ve interviewed nearly 100 writers over the past several years and have seven ideas.
Rule number one is don’t call your business boring. Not ever. I hear it often from B2B firms who say, “Security isn’t exactly sexy,” but it manifests in consumer brands too, in phrases like “We’re not curing cancer here.” If you don’t think it’s interesting, who will?
Every business no matter how seemingly plain has a deeper story to tell, often around the change they create for customers. For instance, Patagonia is saving the environment. SoulCycle inspires people to be their fittest self, inside and out. Glossier gives people a voice through beauty. The marketing data startup Pinpoint isn’t just selling data—it’s helping marketers shed persona stereotypes. Sometimes the story is about how the product is made, as with Cesta Collective, which employs women in Rwanda to make handbags. Each of these angles roots the business in a sociological or historical context that gives writers something more exciting to write about than simple feature comparisons.
“Great writers want to pursue great stories,” says Jordan Teicher, Editor in Chief at Contently, a marketing software that connects brands with writers. “As a whole, freelance writers are a marginalized group, so they tend to care a lot about business ethics, morals, community service, and legitimate corporate missions.”
Writers are chronically overeducated and underpaid. Many journalists have multiple advanced degrees and according to BLS data, earn an average of one-third less than high school teachers.
In November of 2019, an online spreadsheet went viral among media writers because it allowed them to anonymously share their salary, and see what others were being paid. In response to one writer’s claim that they made just $23,000 per year, an editor at that organization publicly blustered that someone with their experience (10 years) should be making at least twice that.
Writers as a whole in the U.S. do somewhat better, at $62,000 per year. There are 123,200 of them. Many support families. If you can afford to pay more, advertise it.
Good writers will want to know who’ll be editing them, and just as important, who won’t be. The nature of writing is such that non-writers are often flush with opinions that aren’t always helpful. As Rusty Weston put it in How to Survive Content by Committee, “Collaborative editing rarely produces compelling content.” Many cooks produce gruel.
Common pitfalls you can advertise your structure as saving writers from:
Late interjections: An executive waits until the 11th hour to say, “Hey, I just read this unrelated article can you incorporate it?"
Unnecessary input: A junior team member judiciously edits the writer’s work based on arcane grammar rules they learned in school, from which they only recently graduated.
Heavy editing by non-editors: A developer line-edits the whole thing because, “It’s not how they would have said it,” even though, if they were asked to write it alone, it wouldn’t be very clear.
Compromising restrictions: An SEO wizard (warlock?) replaces their immensely interesting headlines and subtitles with literal and boring Google-friendly phrases.
Those with little writing experience tend to think writing is like sculpting with clay, where you can continue to add new ideas until it’s complete. These folks often create a word doc and invite everyone. But writing is more like knitting a sweater where late additions mean you have to painfully unravel everything to make a change. It’s usually best to allow the writer to lock the document to allow comments only.
If you want to go even further, appoint a “CEO” for each piece of writing (usually the writer), who’s ultimately responsible for decisions on word choice. At Find A Way Media, we use something called the double-diamond process. Participants tell me they find structure freeing.
Brands sometimes trip over themselves trying to insert vacuous terms such as “data-driven decisions” from analyst firms like Gartner, but jargon only hurts them. Readers don’t care that you hit all the keywords. They want to grok the topic and be on their way. Good writers know this, and they need the grammatical autonomy to deliver on that mandate.
Editorial freedom in content marketing means the freedom to select stories, language, and sources without interference from the owners of a publication (read: the company’s execs), even when the story isn’t wholly on-message. You don’t cultivate consumer trust by hiding things or talking ad nauseum about your products alone. You do it by boldly telling the truth about readers’ experiences, even when it’s inconvenient.
“From what I’ve seen, brands lose out on great writers by limiting the scope of their coverage,” says Jordan. “They end up with blogs full of generic listicles and stories directly about their own products. That’s a huge turnoff. Publish stories that push boundaries—think of investigative work, in-depth features, humor pieces—and you’ll have an easier time convincing people to give you a shot.”
The most interesting story ideas rarely come from within marketing. They tend to come from primary sources—the people building the product, salespeople on the frontlines, or from customers and prospects. Yet many marketers keep writers on a tight leash out of a fear that they’ll bother others, grill executives, or somehow gum up the company machinery. Nothing could be more detrimental.
Writers are only as good as their source material and good writers need to see and hear for themselves. It’s what peppers their work with the real-life anecdotes that make stories vivid and accessible. Without access, the well of ideas quickly runs dry.
Great writers want to see their work represented well, and nobody wants to be published on a blog that’s an eyesore. There’s a fair amount of pride that goes into the art of writing and good writers are keen to see that the design investment is commensurate. “It helps to have a site design that looks clean and modern,” says Jordan. “Veteran contributors will do their due diligence before agreeing to anything, and your site is the first thing they’ll see.”
To quickly spruce up an ailing company blog:
Adjust the body text width to no more than half the screen
Select a more modern font
Ask others to verify that the font size is legible
Add author headshots and bios
Turn off any ads that use motion
Brand writing may not come naturally to great writers. Depending on their background, they’ve probably been inculcated with loads of beliefs and habits that can take time to unwind or adjust. For instance:
Journalists are taught strict ethical codes that implore them to seek the truth and tell it even when it’s inconvenient. Many, at first, see marketing as dirty propaganda.
Fiction writers or book authors are often accustomed to holding onto stories until they’re ready—for years, if need be. They may see weekly deadlines as an anathema.
Writers for consumer audiences often struggle with understanding the intricacies of B2B sales cycles. (In B2B, you have to understand how your company makes money, but also how your customers make money.)
For all these reasons and more, provide a soft ramp that offers gradual exposure to the business and topic. That ramp could be rewriting old work or scouring transcripts so they can first learn what’s been done before and why the business is the way it is.
Good ramp tasks include:
Writing a roundup newsletter
Interviewing experts
Interviewing customers
Summarizing larger documents
Editing the rest of the team’s work
Use your writer job description to promise all of the above:
We have a bona fide mission
We pay well
We have a strong content creation process
We give you editorial freedom
We give you unlimited access
Our design team will make your writing look as good as it reads
We offer a soft ramp to help you acclimate to writing for our industry
And in addition to that, come right out and say what types of writer backgrounds you’re looking for, like journalists.
“Brands that want to attract talent from the journalism world need to make it clear that they’re interested in reporters as candidates for marketing positions,” says Kendall Walters, a Content Marketing Manager at the video marketing startup Vidyard who possesses a Masters in Journalism. “This can be as simple as including ‘journalism’ alongside the usual ‘English’ or ‘business’ degrees in the education section of a job posting or loosening requirements for direct experience in the industry. It can also be as proactive as going outbound to search for and reach out to writers with journalism experience on platforms like LinkedIn.”
Great writers have never been so available and willing to write for brands. It’s up to you to help them understand why yours is the company they should select, and there’s a lot you can do to make that choice clear, including keeping an open mind. Great writers rarely present the same industry bona fides as marketers. But if you take a chance and land a writer who improves the entire company's word choice, they can work marketing wonders.