As promised, here is the first installment of my re-interpretation of “How to Produce a Small Newspaper” by the Harvard Post. I’m starting out with some tips from chapter three on editing.

Editing is what gives writing character. Let’s be realistic, your potential regular readers could go to any one of the 137,426,958 blogs. News is the news and the events in your life have been experienced on some level by many others. Unless you are one of the fortunate ones who gets to break news or one of the unfortunate who gets to be news, you need use your “voice” so readers have a reason to return to your site.

Make sure that when you write you have an opinion. If you don’t have (and share) an opinion on a topic, you really have no reason to write about it. If you aren’t adding to a story in some way, your potential readers will read the story elsewhere. Think about where you get your news from and why.

And don’t be afraid of your opinion chasing off potential readers. No matter what your opinion is, there is an audience. As Tyler Durden would say, you are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. There are other people out there who think like you and will enjoy re-affirming their opinion by reading yours. If your opinion isn’t popular, your competition is smaller.

Another important task of editing is mechanical editing. Blogging isn’t held to the standards of a newspaper. To be honest, newspapers don’t seem to be held to the same standards as they were years ago. All the same, your writing must be clear. Leaving readers scratching their head is fine if they are doing so because what you said made them think. If they are doing so because they need a Babel Fish translator that converts nonsense to coherent text, you have a problem.

My personal writing sin is the use of unemployed words. Unemployed words are those that are not needed. I like to pretend wordiness is my style and that frugal speech is not important on a blog. I will make an effort and hopefully as time passes I will improve.

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