Interview Wins Content of the Year Award

The Yahoo! Contributor Network has announced today that one of my interviews was selected as the winner of one of five Content of the Year awarded for 2012. The article in question, my interview with Jake Reilly, was published by Yahoo! News and was selected as a feature to appear on the front landing page at Yahoo.com.

One day Jake was visiting friends and looked up from his cell phone long enough to notice that all the friends were spending the entire visit texting people who weren't there. The sudden realization that he and his friends seemed more connected to their electronics and social media apps than they were to each other caused him to swear off using his cell phone, email, and social media for 90 days in favor of in-person conversations and good old-fashioned letter writing.

The experience, he says, changed his life and the way he views his friends. Without the crutch of IM and social media messaging, some 'friends' just faded out of his life, others became closer than ever. He even managed to recapture the heart of a former girlfriend.

When I initially heard of the story and decided to interview Jake about his experience, I expected it to be a quirky, almost glib article that was mildly interesting. Instead, as I talked to Jake and dug into his experience, the depth of the emotions he experienced during what he termed his 'Amish' experiment began to come through. I was moved, and I hope that I was able to convey some of that emotion to readers.

Ironically, when it was first published the article went viral with tens of thousands of social media shares and readers measured in the millions. Even before the $1000 bonus for the Content of the Year award from Y!CN, this article was my single highest paid article for any publishing platform. To date, this article has earned a little over $3,300 and it continues to earn royalties every month. That's for about six or seven hours of work.

Most articles don't earn nearly that much, but Y!CN articles which are chosen for features on Yahoo.com can earn thousands of dollars since payment is based on readership statistics. Articles must be entertaining and unique to get such prominent placement. Think about the kind of articles that you can't resist clicking to read more. That's what web publishers want, and most of them are willing to pay well for them. Sometimes, you guess wrong and end up with a dud. At other times, you might write something for the upfront fee with little expectation for future royalties and wind up amazed at its popularity.

What advice do I have for anyone who wants to be a successful web content writer? Write what you'd like to read, but can't find anywhere else. Write often. Be yourself. When you're finished with each article, ask yourself if you would have been disappointed if you had clicked an eye-catching headline to read that article. If the answer is yes, then no matter how many popular search terms or celebrity names you've included, it probably shouldn't be published. Don't use cheap tricks to attract readers who will only end up disappointed. Strive for quality. Learn from your successes and your mistakes. Listen to your editor(s).

More than any paycheck, I am rewarded by overhearing strangers or my son's friends talking about something they read online and realizing that I wrote it. That's happened to me several times, and it's as satisfying as having the referee raise your hand in the middle of the ring after a fight. Getting paid to do what I love to is great, but it's those little moments of vindication, the praise of a stranger, an editor's choice to feature something you've written, or an award like Y!CN's Content of the Year that are my most prized compensation.







 

Publishing for Just One Reader

Of all the interviews that I have published, I think I am most proud of this one: "Mother Seeks Kidney, Lifesaving Hero Through Facebook." It tells the story of one brave woman who is facing some some serious health issues. Even with dialysis treatments, the prognosis is bleak, and she expects she might have five years left, during which time she will become sicker and sicker.

The thing is, though, her condition can be not just more effectively treated, but virtually cured with a tested, approved, and proven medical technique. Despite this, 4500 people each year die while waiting their chance to undergo that "cure." Granted, the cure is ot permanent, but it does grant a reprieve of 10-30 years or so. That treatment is a kidney transplant.

Unfortunately, too few donors step forward to meet the needs of patients who have experienced kidney failure. The interview with Maria gives an emotional account of what it's like to sit on a transplant waiting list for years, knowing that it only takes one person, one hero, to step forward and offer to help. In Maria's case, she has turned to Facebook to try to locate a suitable donor.

This article hopes to reach that one single individual willing to give the gift of life for Maria. In order to reach that one reader, however, it's important to put the article in front of as many people as possible and get them to share it as broadly as they can to aid the search. Of course, all of them will also learn about the effects of kidney failure and dialysis, as well as the importance of organ donation.

Those who donate kidneys are thoroughly screened to make sure they are healthy and have no significant risk factors that would reduce the function of their remaining kidney should they donate one. So effective is this screening that kidney donors have identical life expectancies as those with two functioning kidneys.

To hear Maria's story in her own words and learn more about kidney donation, click the interview link.

Finding the Story

As for the interview itself, I first learned of Maria and her situation when a former colleague of mine contacted me and mentioned that it might make a good story and, of course, help to publicize Maria's search for a donor. Personal contacts can be an important source of potential news stories and newsworthy interview subjects.

Editorial Requests

I thought the emotion of the story made it very compelling, but my editor suggested that the Facebook search made it more unique and asked me to revise it to focus a bit more on that angle. Unusual and emotional stories are more likely to be prominently featured and reach a larger audience. Since that is the goal of the piece, I was happy to oblige.

Print Publisher Discusses E-books, Social Media

Will print books go the way of the dinosaur?
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2011. All rights reserved.

Working in the consumer electronics industry for a company concerned with music, I watched as digitally downloaded music became the standard, displacing Cds as the focus of music publishing. Now that I'm more involved with the written word, I see some interesting similarities and differences between the music industry's approach to advancing technology and the way that at least some print publishers are adapting to the growing popularity of digital content.

I recently spoke with Rob Tempio, Executive Editor, and Leslie Nangle, Associate Marketing Director, bot from Princeton University Press about the challenges and opportunities presented to their industry by digital content. I found the discussion quite interesting and if you are interested in online content creation, digital downloads, books, technology, or Princeton University, you might enjoy it as well.

Here is my interview with Tempio and Nangle of Princeton Universtiy Press as published at Yahoo! News.

Anti-social media message goes viral

On Saturday, I conducted an interview with Jake Reilly, a young copywriting student from the Chicago Portfolio School. He had just finished a self-imposed exile from all social media, email, cell phone, texting and television which he referred to as "going Amish." He felt that these things were too much of a distraction from actual real-life personal interactions and that the superficial types of communication that can occur through texting, tweeting or Facebook messaging were crutches that interfered with real relationships.

I finished the article Sunday evening and it was posted first to the news page at Yahoo! (news.yahoo.com) as many of my interviews are. Later it was added to the text list of news articles on the front page at Yahoo.com. It was moderately popular there, and so it was elevated by Yahoo! to the featured article scroll at the top of the page, added to Editor's Picks and Today on Yahoo! The latter two appear at the bottom of every news page on Yahoo!

The short story is that the article was very visible on a very popular web property for a little more than 36 hours. For a while, it was the number one most popular article at Yahoo.com. What is interesting though, is that this article was also the most shared on Yahoo.com. In other words, this story about a young man who felt he was overdependent on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, was shared more than 8000 times on Facebook, well over 1000 times on Twitter, and generated at least 32,000 page views coming directly in from links sent out on Twitter.

The article talking about one man's struggle with social media addiction went viral. In total it racked up more than one million readers in the first 24 hours that it was up. I don't yet have totals beyond that as my reporting is delayed. During the 36 hours that it was being heavily featured on Yahoo! it reached a peak of 750 visits per hour from Twitter alone (a small percentage of the overall traffic total). However, the day after it was removed from the Yahoo! front page, it was still drawing Twitter traffic and reached a new peak of more than 1000 visits per hour from Twitter links. The article has social media inertia.

As I conducted the interview, I found myself quite interested in what Jake had to say. Clearly, many people his age use social media, cell phones and texting in a much different way than people my age do, and people a generation older than I am use it differently still. The comments on the article also show that the readers view texting and social media differently as well. Older folks say things like "I never use that stuff, but I can barely get my grandchildren to look up from their cellphones. Congratulations to Jake for breaking free from it all."

Those Jake's age who are heavy users of Twitter and smart phones make comments like "I could never do that" or "I want to try that." Those his age who did not develop the texting habit, and many my age who use social media applications, but not heavily say things like "That's stupid. Anybody could go without. I do it all the time."

The range of the comments themselves help to underscore the point that I tried to make int he article. Technology isn't evil or something to be avoided, using 140 character texts as proxies for real human interaction is the problem. Real communication involves depth of feeling and emotion that simply can't be conveyed in a text message that takes 12 seconds to write. When the majority of our communication is filtered through this insufficient medium, we lose the very connection that defines real human interaction. For some, it's not a problem, but for a whole generation, it is becoming increasingly common.

Whatever one's perspective on the issue, the article struck a chord with a wide variety of readers. When all the updates are in, I expect something like two million readers will have read the article and roughly 1 in 40 of them will have shared it with their circle of virtual friends through social media, making this my most widely read news article to date.

It was not about a celebrity, or someone expounding on some popular news item, but simply a story about one young man who decided to step outside his comfort zone to reassert his humanity.

TV Star Interviews

Today, I conducted a brief interview with Steve Arnold, star of the Science Channel television show "Meteorite Me." The season premier of the third season of the show is tonight (November 28) at 10:00 p.m. and both Steve and his cohost Geoff are looking to remind old fans and alert potential new fans of that fact.

I had spoken with Steve last year, as well, and published several fairly popular articles about the show. Today's interview ended up being published on three Yahoo! web properties: Associated Content, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! TV. It'll be interesting to compare the popularity of the three separate web locations of the same article.

Celebrity interviews are examples of going straight to the source for information. From a journalism perspective it's the same as interviewing the victim of a crime or other person with first-hand knowledge of an event or topic. Celebrities with something to promote may be easier to get as interview subjects because they also benefit by granting the interview as long as they get their plug into the interview. When the topic of the interview and the event being plugged coincide, such as an article about the season premier of a television show, everybody wins.

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Meanwhile, as per my last post, I'm still working on discussing the situation on the streets in Egypt with people who live there. I was surprised, although I shouldn't have been, that the first two people I contacted essentially refused to speak about it, saying they didn't know anything about it. I suspect that they simply didn't feel safe discussing their feelings about the current political situaion in Egypt.

Live, From the Revolution

There are people who are qualified experts on the political happenings of various places around the world, because the study of that place is central to their work. They can offer valid and valuable insight into the events, the causes, and key players in major events within their sphere of expertise. My discussion with David Patel of Cornell University who specializes in Middle East politics and political culture was invaluable in helping to sort out the key players in the protests that resulted in the ouster of Hosni Mubarek from Egypt, for example.

At the time, he told me, "A lot of people have incentive to make sure the military comes out, as a whole, in a strong position, economically, perhaps even more importantly than politically." That statement has proven to be quite accurate as the military is now running the country, most recently it appears with as firm an iron fist as Mubarek ever did.

Sometimes, however, the only expertise needed for an accurate assessment is having eyes and ears in the right place at the right time. How do average people living in Egypt see the new regime? How have things changed? Do they feel as if they've had the revolution stolen out from under them? These are questions that can only be answered by the people of Egypt.

Toward that end, I am working on contacting a number of ordinary people who are not only in Egypt right now as a new set of protests threatens the country's stability once again, but who were also present during the first set of protests in January and February of this year.

2001 Anthrax Attacks Remembered

This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. It was just a week after that that letters containing deadly highly purified anthrax spores were sent out to several media outlets in New York City. Those letters were followed up with similar letters to Senators Leahy and Daschle in Washington, DC.

The anthrax spores were so easily spread that postal workers employed in the post offices which handles the letters began contracting anthrax. One woman in Connecticut died after a letter she received from an unrelated source simply came into contact with one of the anthrax letters. In all 5 died, more than 30 were infected, and thousands were medicated as a precaution.

I recently spoke to one of the people responsible for sequencing the genome of the anthrax spores used in the attack to determine its origin for the FBI. I asked her to talk about the investigation and whether we are safer today because of new precautions put in place after those anthrax attacks in 2001. Read the interviews at the following links:

• Are We Safer frm Bioterror attacks after the 2001 Anthrax Letter Attack?
• Investigator Discusses 2001 Anthrax Attacks

View from the top

The subject of my latest series of interviews have climbed to the summit of Mount Everest,but that isn't his primary claim to fame. Scott Parazynski is best known as a veteran NASA astronaut who has travelled 23 million miles aboard five space shuttle missions. He has been on numerous spacewalks totalling 47 hours outside the spacecraft. He was also instrumental in the development of a heat tile repair system to prevent future accidents like the one that claimed Columbia and it's crew.

It was a fun interview, and I was able to cover a lot of groun: from Mount Everest to Mars, so to speak. The first one covers what it's liek to look down from the top of Everest and to look down on the Earth from space. It really changes one's global perspective, Parazynski says. Read more about his feelings about the fragility of Earth at this link.

The second part of the interview dealt with the end of the Space Shuttle program. Parazynski disagrees with the decision to retire the space shuttles before a new crew launch vehicle is available. Read more about this and why he resolved to fly one more time to honor the crew lost in the Columbia accident here.

The third part of the interview is more or less a catch all for everything else that we discussed. What's next for the future of NASA? How does the human body change in the absence of gravity? What are the medical risks of space travel? What do Space Station resident do when a potentially harmful burst of solar flare radiation is heading their way? How does Russian Cosmonaut training differ from NASA astronaut training? If these questions intrigue you, or you're curious about what else I asked, read the third part of  my interview with astronaut Scott Parazynski here.

Debt ceiling crisis interview

My latest published interview was with an economist who told me that the debt ceiling crisis was the result of "an accident of history." He also said he thoguht the Tea party had fallen under the spell of groupthink and was unable to see the consequences of their actions. Whatever happens, if the Tea party gets what it wants or if they block the debt ceiling increase, it looks like they will cause a double-dip recession, putting more people out of work in America.

Here's the link to the complete debt ceiling article.
Part 2 of the interview: "How a U.S. government debt default will affect the average American."

ROR: Maximizing your return on research

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have a number of "beats" or automatically recurring assignments at the Yahoo! Contributor Network. All the news beat articles that I submit end up published at Yahoo! News. One of the beats is an open topic Question and Answer format beat meant for original interviews. It is the one that pays the most upfront. It's a beat I proposed, and for which I negotiated the upfront rate.

Lately, I have been getting additional interview assignments outside of my regular beat for Y! News. These interview assignments tend to be more highly targeted. Sometimes they'll ask for an interview with someone who possesses a particular expertise and, at least once, they even asked for a specific individual by name.  Obviously, these rely on my ability to get in touch with the specific individual requested in order for me to complete the assignments.

These assignments tell me in the details that I am the only one receiving the assignment so if I don't want to claim it or can't get the sprecific individual to agree to an interview, to email them back and let them know so they can plan accordingly. The first one of these I received, I refused as the offered upfront was less than my standing offer for my Q&A beat. When I pointed this out, they increased the offer and I accepted.

Once I have my interview material, there are often several different angles the article can take or it might be one longer article covering several topics that were discussed. Generally, I shoot an email back to the Y!CN contact who requested the interview and propose several different angles. For example, recently I was asked to interview someone who had direct involvment with the space shuttle. I managed to get George Whitesides who was the Chief of Staff for Administrator Bolden at NASA until around the middle of 2010.

After a great discussion, I had what seemed like four possible main thrusts for an article. Since the original assignment said that Y!CN had reason to believe that they might get featured placement on the front page of Yahoo.com for the assigned interview, I wanted to run the angles by my contact to see if one was preferred given their front page plans. My four proposed angles were:

1)    Q-and-A: Former NASA Chief of Staff Talks about Government’s Role in the Future of Space Travel

2)      Q-andA: Virgin Galactic Chief discusses the end of the space shuttle era

3)      Q-and-A: Virgin Galactic Chief gives update on passenger flights

4)      Virgin Galactic Chief suggests top 3 big goals for NASA to inspire America again

I though they might want option #2 and/or #4. My contact said he'd ask the Yahoo! front page people what they wanted, but he, personally thought they were all excellent.

So, without dragging out this story any longer, my Y!CN contact said that he didn't get a preference from Yahoo! so I should write up all four angles (without duplicating any of the actual interview material). That meant four separate upfront payments totalling $120 for this interview (plus the usual ongoing page view royalties).

This kind of multiple payout for these interviews has happened several times recently and it changes the financial equation and makes them much more worthwhile. While page view bonuses can exceed the upfront payment, sometimes by a wide margin, there is no guarantee of that, and sometimes they don't do well at all. I prefer to get a decent upfront so that if page views don't come in as expected, my time is still covered.

The Bottom Line

Whatever kinds of research you do, look for ways to use that research in multiple ways. Don't just respin it, nobody wants to read the same thing restated, but apply different aspects of what you learned to different angles. Getting multiple quality articles out of your research makes it economically feasible to spend more time doing higher quality research which, in turn, increases the quality of your articles and their usefulness to your readers.