Write Better Blog Posts by Writing Like a Journalist
Some of the most valuable skills that have helped me the most with blogging are those I developed through my background in journalism. Of course, writing is the most important skill for creating quality blog content. Writing and editing a few hundred articles definitely honed my wordsmithing abilities. But other journalism skills translate well to blogging: interviewing, capturing the personality of a subject with the right quotes, structuring an article, and photojournalism.
Interviewing
Whether an interview lasts 10 minutes or two hours, the structure remains the same. First are easy questions to establish the basic facts of the story:
Who: What’s your name, your role, and a little of your background?
What: What did you do/are you doing/will you do?
When: When did it happen/will it happen?
Where: Where is the action of the story taking place?
An interview can get cut short anytime, so the essential information must come first. Afterward, your questions can branch out for more details:
How would you describe what you make/do?
What is your process like from start to finish?
What would you say is your favorite part?
What challenges do you have to deal with to make this happen?
How does the finished project compare to the original idea?
What comes next for this project/you?
Often the answers to these merit follow-up questions. For example, once you know what challenge a person faced, you want to know how they handled it and how it resolved. Your readers want to know, too, so you have to ask.
How it Relates to Blogging
When you write about yourself, your craft, and your business for your blog, you have to write with your reader in mind. What do they want to know? What will they find interesting? These can feel challenging to answer if doubt and imposter syndrome try to convince you that your story doesn’t matter.
Any time you want to write a blog post about a specific project—whether it’s in progress or complete—you can use these questions to outline your content. Turn your answers into paragraphs, rearrange them into an order that feels like a narrative, add a few transitions and you’re done.
Honing in on Passion
If you pay attention while interviewing a person, you can usually tell when they’re holding back on a topic they have a lot to say about. Many people feel self-conscious once they have an opportunity to go into detail about one of their passions. If you show genuine interest and a willingness to actively listen, they’ll often give you a wealth of information without needing to be prompted by follow-up questions.
This part of the interview produces some of the best quotes. When someone gets to tell you all about one of their passions without fear of judgment, they’ll also tell you about their experiences and opinions. These quotes tell the story while capturing the personality of the interviewee.
How it Relates to Blogging
Many people struggle with developing a clear, unique voice in their blog posts. You end up with a generic voice based on imitating too many examples of how you think your voice should sound. Your content also ends up being shallow because you’re still self-conscious about talking too much about your passions.
If there’s a topic related to your craft you could say a lot about, allow yourself to write all your thoughts freely. Spare no detail. Once it’s all on the page, you can fine-tune how you share it. An edited version of your deep dive into a topic could make an excellent blog post. You could expand it into a series if you have enough material.
Journalistic article structure
When you write for print journalism, the length of your article is restricted by the physical space available on the page. If your publication sells an extra ad on your page, suddenly you’ve got to cut 100 words to make it fit. Not only does this train you to be merciless in excising unnecessary words, but it also makes your writing more decisive.
You also don’t have space to waffle about in your introduction. The first three sentences have to tell your readers all the important things they need to know because they might not read any further than the first paragraph. You cut straight to the point, then let the rest of the article give a more detailed story.
How it Relates to Blogging
Since one of the goals of a blog post is to keep people on the page, using a journalistic narrative structure might be counterintuitive. If you answer a reader’s questions right at the beginning, why would they read the rest? The same reason people read a news article to the end: for the details.
It’s important to remember your blog posts are meant to be read by other humans who are:
Busy
Easily bored
Impatient
They’ll cut and run if it takes too long to get the information they want, or if they aren’t enjoying themselves. Even if they leave before reaching the end of a post, you shouldn’t let them leave empty-handed. Your readers should be rewarded for whatever time they give you.
Photojournalism
You don’t just write about an event or story; you take photos of the action that enhance it. If the focus of your story is a person, you don’t use a posed headshot unless you have to. You get them in action: speaking, walking, working, talking to someone else. The point isn’t just to give some visual information to the reader. You want them to feel like a witness to that person’s story.
Good photos for an article still follow the principles of design: line, balance, contrast, scale, movement, and so on. Even if your photos are in black and white, color can still be an important element. Without sufficient contrast between colors, the details of your subject can be harder to distinguish once the image is desaturated.
How it Relates to Blogging
Access to quality stock photos makes pairing eye-catching visuals with your written content easier. However, stock images only offer a generic visual break from blocks of text. They won’t enhance your story.
Imagining what type of photo might go with your blog post if it was written like a news article can help give you ideas. You might have to stage a few of yourself in action or document your work as you go along, but the results will be worth it.
