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Tweet Update: Church & State’s Alleged Demise Just One Of Many Editorial Worries

Top management attendees attending a Folio conference applauded closer sales/editorial collaboration. But will ethics principles be a casualty? Other challenges posed during past few months include conference presentation snafus, maintaining sufficient content diversity, and how best to provide continuous enterprise reporting flow. Other tweets described new training opportunities offered by Editorial Solutions, Inc. Showtime highlight:…
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August 9, 2019 0

Feature Analysis Helps Detect Productivity Blips

Instructive evaluation of editorial productivity requires access to a variety of quantitative data. Consider, for instance, the data you need to determine whether staff and other writers are producing an acceptable number of features. What’s required is to go through the previous six print and/or online issues and count accurately—in pages, inches, or words—each author’s…
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July 25, 2019 0

Time to Abandon Source-First/News-Later Story Openings

Whenever possible, I pester B2B writers who persist in adhering to a source-first/news-later editing policy. The chance to revisit the topic arose during a recent conversation with Bianchi Public Relations president Jim Bianchi. Here’s how we addressed this exchange: Howard Rauch: There is a basic editing issue that shows up quite a bit in my…
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July 15, 2019 0

Acquaint Your PR Contacts with the Meet the Media Blog

Do your PR contacts blog regularly offering editorial management how-to advice? Sounds like a good idea to me. I’m talking about the Meet the Media blog program created by Bianchi Public Relations. According to company president Jim Bianchi, the firm “tries to do two profiles per month on a journalist who covers our clientele—automotive or…
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July 12, 2019 0

Competitive Editorial Analysis 101: Consider Dual Goal When Gathering Data

High-value competitive editorial analysis reports should go beyond conventional page counts. In fact, they should aim for a dual goal. Of course there is the obvious objective of matching quantitative strengths and weaknesses. But equally important—and frequently overlooked—is input gained regarding qualitative superiority. Perhaps you’ve overestimated your edge in that respect. What follows here are…
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June 13, 2019 0

Competitive Editorial Analysis 101: The Enemy Is Us

Earlier in this series, I described an eight-factor e-news editing test that should be applied during competitive analysis projects. Warning: that collection of caveats is merely the tip of the snafu iceberg. And in many cases, you are your own worst enemy. Take timeliness, for example. Needless to say (I hope), the news you post…
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June 11, 2019 0

Competitive Editorial Analysis 101: B2B News Needs More End-User Quotes

Writers and editors of B2B news need to pay more careful attention to the use of direct quotes from end users (that is, their target readers). While many trade publications excel at gathering comments from readers, just as many do poorly. Still others gather ample reader quotes, but mostly from advertisers and vendors, not end…
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June 6, 2019 0

Competitive Analysis 101: 25 Qualitative Factors for Comparisons, Part 2

In part 1 of this article, I covered the first 13 of 25 qualitative factors in my competitive scoring system. Here are the remaining 12. Contents page. Do headings go beyond conventional labels such as “Features” and “Departments”? Are photos accompanied by newsy captions, not just the page number? Do department listings consist of the…
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May 27, 2019 0

Tweet Update: The ‘More With Less’ Editorial Dilemma

Will corporate demands to “do more with less” overwhelm editors who already have their hands full with print and online responsibilities? Several tweets posted over the past two months indicated that answers are not immediately forthcoming. Other tweets in this time frame summarized several high-value guidelines covered in the first four installments of the new…
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May 23, 2019 0

Competitive Analysis 101: 25 Qualitative Factors for Comparisons, Part 1

The system described here emerged shortly after I launched Editorial Solutions Inc. in 1989. A B2B publisher with multiple titles asked me to prepare a two-day, in-house editorial workshop. One of the longer sessions (90 minutes) was to focus on competitive analysis. Part of the challenge was to create an objective scoring system that would…
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May 16, 2019 0

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