vera has a website

web 2.0 storytelling - emergence of a new genre

don’t let the number of words scare you. if you’re a journalist, this is a must-read.

a story about a story about a story

wired magazine is awesome, I’m sure I’m not breaking any news here. But of all the cool features and blogs that the mag includes, one of them has been catching my attention - storyboard.

Storyboard is the story of a story or, as they call it, a profile of a profile.

It all started here and the experiment has been updated with fresh content on an almost daily basis.

Wired is putting itself out there and revealing the whole process of one of their features, using a profile of Charlie Kaufman as the subject.

(see? It’s all so deliciously meta - even the subject of the subject is interesting! And have you noticed how this is a blog post about a series of blog posts? Fantastic!)

So, anyway, just wanted to give the suggestion to those who were distracted enough to have missed it.

Back to my own stories now.

insert title here, please

a few days ago i published a post with 5 reasons why i love my job. there’s a bunch of stuff i don’t love about my job (and i write “don’t love” to stop myself from writing “hate”). the first one i can think of is writing titles. i hate it i hate it i hate it. i never know what to write and sometimes the shortest title takes me longer to write than the longest article.

it might look like a minor issue but it’s not, really. titles are a very important part of a story and writing stories is one of the most important parts of a journalist’s job. when the busy reader is going through the pages of a magazine or newspaper or jumping from news website to news website reading headlines, the title is the decisive factor between reading or not reading the story.

when i was studying to become a journalist (or sort of), a journalist that i highly respect taught me that a good title should be informative, kind of like a sum up of what the article is about, something simple and direct. supposing that the reader didn’t have time to read the whole story, the title should be enough to let him know what’s been talked about. looking at it this way, it’s kind of like the title is the tool for the lazy reader.

so i’m confused: to we want readers to read our stories or not? should the title reveal the essential like that journalist told me or should it just attract the readers’ attention and make them want to know more about what’s being talked about? if that’s the case, maybe “informative” isn’t the best adjective to define a good title. creative or appealing, perhaps. and maybe it doesn’t have to tell much about what happened, forcing the reader to at least pay attention to the first couple of paragraphs of the story.

well, all this rant is to justify the fact that i suck at choosing titles. that’s it.