Recently we began recruiting a new writer for the editorial jugganaut that is Lovefood.com. When one candidate asked about the team structure I replied ‘how many people do you think there are?’ ‘six?’ came the reply. Wrong, there’s one (me), soon to be two.
Much of my time then is spent managing a team of freelancers. So I’ve written this post because I got tired of explaining to people individually how to best structure their work so I commission them again. But more than that it serves as a broad guide to how to write for the web. So even if you’re specialism is football, philately or fashion, it’s a case of same meat, different gravy.
I’m not really that interested in your words
Most writers – most of whom have a background in print journalism – recoil in horror when I tell them this, for them the craft of verbage is why they do the job. It’s why I wrote my book too, and pieces for Delicious and Waitrose Kitchen. To me words are like Lego, to be clipped together to make giant elegant structures.
However this isn’t always the case for writing for the web. A better analogy would be that words are like cement, because they glue and hold other things together. Here then, is Webb’s golden rule…
Writing for Lovefood is about having a good idea, then gathering assets from around the internet to prove that idea, and sticking them together with words.
Writers do all this research on the net, then try and obfuscate that so it looks as if they know it all ready. When in actual fact, much like a maths exam (which I failed) you get points for showing your working out. People don’t just want the answer, they want to see how you got the answer.
The ‘story’ in effect comes from these sources. So don’t just mention Mrs Beeton, don’t even just link to wikipedia's page on Mrs Beeton, go on Google books and clip out the very page that mentions the think you’re talking about for Mrs Beeton. Sauce for calf's head anyone?
All of the following can enrich articles. Tweets, Flickr images, YouTube videos, Google books, Audio Boos
Compare this piece from the early days of Lovefood, to this from a few weeks ago. One looks like a page from the Bible, the other is content for web. In the following list you can see that the actual writing forms just one task in getting an article on a website live.
1. Write feature
2. Make sure that there are at least three link outs to internal/external articles
3. Make sure that the URL is SEO friendly
4. Check title is SEO-able
5. Add images and video
6. Add alt text to images
7. Tweet it
8. Facebook it
9. Reply to any comments/tweets
Badly formatted, un-illustrated, linkless copy with a non-seo friendly title and first paragraph waffling on about something else before getting to the point means I’ll never commission you again. By the time I've fixed all that and put it into the CMS I could have written the actual few 100 words myself.
Naturally being a rule there are exceptions to this. If the piece is very personal, where story comes directly from your experience, you can draw the user in. But for a guide to cheese, we don’t care – just the facts ma’am.
How to pitch
Firstly know your subject. The lovely Katy Salter when at Waitrose Food Illustrated gave this interview to the Press Gazette in 2007, and it’s as true now as it is then.
Don’t pitch a subject you don’t know anything about.
Food writing seems to attract a certain type of ‘gal’ and ‘chap’ – slightly posh, a touch horsey, with bright eyes, good teeth and shiny hair. They are perhaps not the best of people to write an in-depth piece on the history of halal. Good food writers who can write for the web are rare indeed. Like Katy above many is the time that I’ve been pitched ‘Tuscany on a plate’ stories.
Cliches
A lot of food writing is lazy ‘what I had for dinner’ and it winds me up. Ingredints are toothsome and unctuous, with the ‘flavours of X cutting through the attribute Y of ingredient Z’ I’m not interested in food writing, but journalism about food. There is a difference.
