5 skills content marketers should pinch from journalism

Like so many others, I found my way to branded content via journalism.

Forgive me for banging on about the olden days, but while I was studying journalism and working for my first couple of years as a local newspaper reporter, no one in my circle had ever heard the term ‘content marketing’. I know I’m not alone in having assumed my ideal career path would be to transition into old-school print magazines.

It all changed pretty quickly.

In the early 2010s, I felt an itch that led me to dig around the internet, somehow coming across the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the now-influential consulting, training and research organisation. Then in its infancy, CMI would grow to be instrumental to the global boom in content marketing over the coming decade.

Back then, a big focus discussed by CMI was for brands to hire journalists in-house so they could ‘act like a publisher’, bypass pesky public relations departments and produce their own content with as strong a focus on their audience’s needs as the eyeball-hungry media.

These days, content marketing is everywhere, and people come to it from all sorts of backgrounds. I’ve worked with great people from book publishing, advertising and the law, to name a few, as well as those straight out of uni – and everyone brings their own set of useful transferable skills.

There are plenty of aspects of working in the media that I don’t miss one tiny bit, but some of the rigorous principles and technical skills I was trained in have sure served me well working for brands. Here are just a few of them.

1. Always focus on the audience first

Journalists exist to serve their readers’ interests – the media business model depends on it. Whether they’re selling eyeballs to advertisers (or, in the olden days, circulation figures), or charging subscription fees, the buck stops with the reader.

Although marketers have a slightly different reason behind why they want to engage their audiences, it’s so important to avoid being that business that just wants to toot its own tiresome horn.

2. Structure information in a reverse pyramid

This is journalism 101. The most important information goes at the top, and everything else in order of importance from there. Don’t ‘bury the lead’ (or ‘lede’), as the saying goes.

Why? Make no mistake, your reader (or viewer, or listener) is time-poor. You must write with the expectation that they will stop reading at any second. Sorry, not sorry.

Another traditional reason for this rule that’s less relevant to digital content was because when formatting a newspaper, the subeditor would chop bits off your story from the bottom until it fit the space available on the page.

3. Speak or write in easy English

Avoid jargon, keep sentences short, never assume knowledge.

Many major newspapers have a limit to how sophisticated their content can get, writing so an 11-year-old or 15-year-old can understand everything they publish. This is partly to ensure the news reaches the largest number of readers, which isn’t necessarily the way all brands should approach their content. But there’s lots to learn from the focus on easy English.

Too many businesses fall into the trap of thinking they need to use big words and confusing sentences to sound ‘professional’. There’s no shame in being easy to understand.

4. Use active not passive language

‘Dog bitten by man’ is a little less punchy than ‘Man bites dog’.

As a former newspaper reporter, I’ve had active language drilled into me so strongly that I feel almost allergic to sentences in their passive form.

Passive language can be obtuse and confusing, and at its worst, omits crucial details. There’s no better example than that old cliché from avoidant politicians and PR departments everywhere: ‘mistakes were made’.

5. Interview and quote real people

The news is all about reporting on the world around us, so it’s natural that journalists go out and ask questions to people. But conducting real interviews to use in content was a foreign concept to many marketing departments not long ago.

Advertising is an internal-focused creative pursuit, where the team works out the best way to say the thing they want to say, then huddles away until they have something polished to push into the world.

The best branded content is curious and insightful, just like great journalism. It quotes sources like experts in a field and people with real stories to tell. I love a good interview, and I truly think it’s the (not so) secret sauce of the best branded content out there.