If Content is King, Why is the Emperor Naked?

You hear the phrase everywhere: “Content is King.” It’s the holy grail of media, especially the internet. If your site, blog, tweet, Facebook page, you-name-it is going to succeed, you need content.

But look around the media landscape. Towering over the good stuff is a toxic waste dump of ungrammatical, inaccurate, vague, boring, sometimes all-of-the-above writing not worthy of the name.

How can this be? If everyone is intoning the “Content Is King” mantra, why is so much of the final result so terrible? And even if it’s not terrible, why is it, at best, blah?

I have a two-part theory.

First, poor writing is the natural result of the corporate mania for doing more with less. (There’s a great scene in the last season of The Wire, where one angry editor, at a newspaper undergoing staff cuts, declares: “You don’t do MORE with less…you do LESS with less!”) Staffs everywhere, in every line of work, have been cut and cut again. That means everybody has an increasing workload. And that in turn means that something has to give. In many cases, that something is the amount of time devoted to writing, including the time available for proofreading and polishing (and, oh yeah, thinking about what to write in the first place).

And this hasn’t just hurt major projects, like annual reports, or position papers. While doing more with less, we’re also drowning in an ever-rising tsunami of emails. Thinking about the content? Checking it over? No time. Hit “send” and hope for the best.

Add in the fetish for multi-tasking (which new research indicates is a terrible idea, i.e. you can’t really do two things at once, at least not very well), and it’s no wonder that much of what springs from the keyboard isn’t very good.

The second part of the theory comes under the heading of Carnegie Hall. You remember: practice, practice, practice. You have to work hard to become good enough to perform on that hallowed stage. Yet who works hard at perfecting their writing? For most people, their last English comp or writing class was in college, maybe even high school. Sure, everybody writes all the time. But do they think about it? Practice it? Actually try to make it better? Among other things, who has the time?

There is one lucky subset of writers who DO get to practice and try to perfect their craft: journalists. Not all of them bother; there’s plenty of lousy news writing today. But working in news is a golden opportunity for those willing to seize it. Journalists write all day long (and frequently well into the night). And at least until recently, they were surrounded by people who were willing, indeed whose JOB it was, to criticize and correct their work. (The fact that this criticism sometimes took the form of “who taught you to write, you idiot!” shouted across a newsroom doesn’t negate its value.)

We consider ourselves extremely fortunate to have spent years in the news business, learning how to write. Whether in radio, television, or print, writing was the crucial ingredient; all the other work (researching, interviewing, etc.) stood or fell on the strength of the writing.

Which brings us to re:Write. Let us put our writing skills to work for you. We’ll go over everything from a newsletter to a blog post to your entire website. We’ll polish it up, making sure it tells the story you want (and need) it to tell.

But wait, there’s more! We can show you (and your staff) how to become better writers. Whether one-on-one, or in large seminars, we’re eager to share the techniques and knowledge we’ve gained through years of practice. We can’t promise you’ll become Hemingway; for one thing, you’re probably too busy perfecting that better mousetrap you created. But with our help, you’ll be able to tell everybody just how great that mousetrap is.

And we won’t be yelling “who taught you to write!”