Publishing in the modern age has gotten a lot easier. Anyone with a computer can hit the publish button. Even with a phone. Entire books have been written via text. While quality content is as much in demand and as hard to find as at any time in the past, it’s not that content isn’t searchable, that reviews don’t matter, it’s that finding the nuggets of gold in a field of noise requires effort.
When I used to work at the LA Times (in marketing by the way) there was a sense of pride that every employee had for the stature and quality of the content that we collectively worked to render to the public day in and day out. Dozens of Pulitzers and an executive editor who sat on the Pulitzer board — I’m not missing the irony of that connection by the way — served to instill a sense that we stood for something meaningful. Even the gothic font of the logo added to the mystique. It was the waning days of a time when we need venture no further than a big-city newspaper to find what we deemed to be quality content.
But today?
Today we have noise. Lots of it. And we have this thing called truth bias, which is that we readily believe content that fits our world view regardless of how truthful it may be. Even more so, if we seek out content that fits our world view we’ll have no difficulty finding it in large supply, because there is a large supply of content supporting literally every world view. Whatever we believe, a few searches and we’ve got enough content to validate our belief system.
But it doesn’t make it true, and it doesn’t mean it’s quality content.
I’ve attended more than a few webinars over the years on how to write content people will want to read, and they all tend to follow the same track — focus nearly as much attention on the title of your articles as you do on writing them. Because (as the thinking goes) if people don’t click on your titles or open your emails no one will read them. It’s a kind of rationalization that says because I have this content that I think is valuable and worthy of people’s time I need to write a headline that grabs them. But I’ve never been good at hype. It doesn’t feel authentic and seems a little manipulative.
One of the top writers on the Internet says that writing catchy titles is fine so long as you deliver on your headline. Meaning that the writing lives up to the promise of the headline. But it’s a fine line. Certain adjectives in titles often border on hyperbole, and while an article may deliver on a title in terms of subject matter, whether it delivers on the adjective is up for debate.
Therefore, as I scroll my inbox daily reading dozens of titles and asking myself if I want to go further, I ask myself what it is about a title that makes me want to read it. The common answer is that I’m feeling drawn in by an adjective, which most often means some measure of hype or exaggeration. Thus my practice has become that if it’s an adjective that evokes a sense of curiosity I keep scrolling.
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