I fondly remember my first role out of college: working at a digital marketing firm as an SEO specialist, generating content for satellite sites, owned sites, and more, optimized for keywords. The time was in the late 2000s, one of the first downturns of the journalism industry. As much as I pursued my dream of journalism, it seemed more practical to learn online writing.
This reluctance toward forgoing journalistic integrity and learning how to write for SERP, and later for online content in general, became the biggest blessing in disguise. I forayed that skill into content development for numerous websites, learning the ins and outs of meta-tags, photo optimization, linking strategy, and more.
But while the advent of online content consumption (and eventually mobile consumption) brought many opportunities, it also brought me a controversial perspective: the inverted pyramid and traditional structures in journalism needed to be replaced. The attention economy needs a new way of writing.
The Inverted Pyramid Turned Upside-Down
Painstakingly learning the rules of journalism from acclaimed reporters and news producers with numerous awards to their names was an experience I’m grateful for. From my news production professors, I learned the importance of visual communications, context, soundbites, and proper interviewing skills, which later served me well in visual content development and content sessions with executives. From my journalism professor, I admired her reverie for the craft, the push to interview multiple sources with different points of view to have a balanced piece, and, of course, her push on the inverted pyramid.
Working in communications, however, the journalism purist in me had to step aside for data-driven insights and the results of A/B testing. The inverted pyramid didn’t work. Personal anecdotes, provocative statements, hypothetical scenarios, and open-ended questions hooked readers in more. In online communication, the goal is to bury the lead - to get a reader to click on the article to learn more, and to encourage as much time on the site as possible. Why share all of your information in the first paragraph, and lose your reader after the first few seconds? Little did I know that mobile consumption would soon challenge this debate even further.
Making Mobile Content Memorable
With the rise of information consumption on smartphones, optimizing for mobile became the next frontier. Long-form videos were replaced with fifteen-second visually compelling content. You were lucky to get ten seconds of someone’s attention, let alone ten minutes to read an article. And while creating content in an abyss of information can seem intimidating, the solution lies in the problem. Numerous AI tools, visual communication best practices, and more are available for communications professionals should they choose to use them.
For example, the Hemingway App is a free online tool that automatically detects overly complex sentence structures, grammar errors, and reading levels, providing recommendations to simplify content for your readers. Grammarly is a great resource for automatically checking for typos, grammar, simplicity, and more. Online translation tools are great for checking the cultural relevance of vocabulary. Even design can be partially automated with AI, looking at tools like Canva to help enhance visual communications to be more compelling and universally understood.
The Next Era of Online Reputation Management
In an age with fake profiles, review sites, and bots, learning how to optimize - and more importantly - manage and lead your online reputation is more critical than ever before. What happens when there is a boycott of your products, and there is a series of negative responses on your social media pages? How do you handle a bot-driven DDOS attack? What claims can you make to remove inaccurate content posted online?
As Dave Chappelle would say, “modern problems require modern solutions.” Communications professionals need to be versed in advanced social listening and brand health tools, understand their resilience scores, regularly conduct vulnerability audits, and develop contact and protocols for online reputational risks. Better yet, how can you identify a reputational risk before it becomes one?
While the inverted pyramid will always have a place in traditional journalism, communications professionals need to evolve with the rising channels and mediums that our audiences are using - or risk being left behind. What new methods, best practices, or tools do you use to develop your content to meet your audience where they are?
