 Thank you so much for having me here this morning. Today we're going to be talking about website content and tips that we can steal from journalists to improve what we publish online, whatever it is. To say journalists have a bad reputation might be an understatement. They're maybe not everyone's favorite person. In fact, I looked into it a little bit and there was a recent study in Canada where I'm from that rated journalists at an 18% trust rating. So 18% of people that journalists were trustworthy. So why would we get any advice or take any advice from journalists, right? These are the people that tell us things like if it bleeds, it leaves. And other tips like that for how to publish good content. But I think that marketers and I think that bloggers can get a lot from journalists. Why? Well, bloggers have a 6% trust rating and telemarketers had a 4%. So, I mean, you can see the stats. Journalists for better or for worse have been trying to attract readers since before the internet. So over centuries, they've learned a lot about conveying information to short attention spans and about building trust, which is important. They may not have always translated this that well into the digital age, but I think there's deeper lessons that we can learn from them and that we can apply to the work that we do today. My name is Andrea Zollner and I'm a copywriter and content producer. I spend most of my time working for WordPress.com doing writing content and doing video tutorials. So if you don't recognize my face, you may recognize my voice from WordPress.com video tutorials. I'm the person that says, hi and welcome to WordPress.com. This is how you're gonna do this, this and that. I studied journalism for four years before deciding that I didn't wanna be a reporter. I thought that the work was too fast-paced and the hours were a little bit too crazy, but now I'm a freelancer in the tech industry where I work crazy hours and things move really quickly. So can anyone tell me where I went wrong? I'd love to know. But let's get to the core of the subject or as journalists call it, the nut graph. These are the tips that I wanna start with. The first one is to know your audience. That's the first thing that I learned in journalism because the words that you use are important and the people that hear them can be different. The language on a reputable news site, for example, like The Guardian, will be different from the headlines that you would see on a gossip blog. So let's take a look at these two headlines and how different they are. So who you're writing for really is important. And when speaking to your audience, intention is important too. So are you trying to educate or create desire? A white paper, for example, will be different from a restaurant menu. So it's really important to note that your objective of communicating is only complete if the receiver perceives your message the way that you intended it. This is why knowing your audience is really important. And this is important for any brand because you wanna know who you're speaking to to be able to really craft your brand voice. The second tip, don't bury the lead. And don't ask me why journalists spell it this way. I haven't quite figured it out. But the lead is the first sentence or the first part of your text or article. So don't bury the lead means don't push the good information way down to the bottom because you're really gonna be asking too much of your readers if that really good information is in the second or third paragraph. So really you should have the most important information up top. And whether that's in your headline or the first sentence, you really wanna make sure it's prioritized. If not, your readers are probably just gonna bounce right off your page and they won't keep reading. The concept of below the fold is also borrowed from journalism. So we know that a newspaper is folded. I don't know if any of you have purchased a newspaper in a really long time, but it's folded. So anything that appears below the fold is considered less important information because people might not read it. And in web design, people might not view it, click on it, engage with it. So in web design, anything below the fold is anything that doesn't appear on the first view of the website as it loads. So research across chart B network shows that if you can hold a visitor's attention for just three minutes, there are twice as likely to return to your site if you hold them for only one minute. So it's really key timing there and people are really, everything's happening in the first few seconds. In fact, 55% spent less than 15 seconds on a page. So why you put really up top is important. Does that mean that you should put everything on that 60, 600 pixel space? Well, probably not, because like you can't fit everything in a headline, you can't fit everything on that first page. But it's just really important to prioritize what you put up there and then you hook your reader. This is just an example of how little that space is compared to the rest is on your page and so how important it is to get people to keep scrolling. Then people are gonna ask me, well, what about mobile? Because depending on the device, the iPad, the Android or your iPhone, that fold might be different for different people, right? Well, here's another tip that you might think is familiar is to know your audience. Google Analytics allows you to see what the most popular browsers are, what the most popular devices are of the people that are visiting your website. So if you can prioritize those, you can design for those. The third tip is to observe the style guide. What is a style guide? So in journalism, a style guide is establishing the rules of what your content is gonna sound like and look like and just basic things like punctuation can be part of your style guide. So that can really expand into grammar and tone, the layout of your web content as well. It could mean that every piece of content uses the Oxford comma, for example, or that photo captions are always gonna be with 10-point merry weather. A style guide is valuable for several reasons. So it shows that you're consistent from page to page. Everything looks like it belongs together. It shows that it's professional because people will see that you've put time and care into what you've created and that goes down into every punctuation as well. It shows intention, that you've really thought about what you're creating and how it's gonna be perceived. And it can also, once you've assembled this style guide, become an onboarding resource for people that join your team. So you're not always explaining to them all these rules that you've come up with. It can be condensed into a really nifty style guide. It helps brands as well. Once you have that style guide, that can be the foundation of building up your brand voice, your brand look, the way that you communicate with your customers and that's just a really solid thing to have. When you study journalism, for example, we're told go out and buy the Associated Press Stylebook or the Canadian Press Stylebook and that is gonna be your Bible for your whole career until the next edition is published and you have to go buy that Bible for the rest of the time as well until the next one comes out. The reason why WordPress is so popular in newsrooms is that it's really easy to manage multiple authors and contributors to one site. For example, you can style your paragraphs and your headings and your walk notes to look a certain way. So no matter who's contributing, they can just go in, pick what it's gonna look like and it's gonna look the same from page to page. So the fourth tip is to ask the copy editor. It's always important to get a second pair of eyes on whatever you do, whether it's getting a code reviewed or even just like a sentence reread. Traditionally, after a journalist filed a story, you would have your manager who would reread it for the story, make sure everything was accurate and then you would have your copy editor that would improve the grammar and maybe trim some of the fat and then you'd have the line editor that would look at every single word to make sure there were no typos before it was sent to press. So not all of us have a three-person review team for everything that we do. So what are some ways that we can just simply apply these rules to our everyday work? Well, get a friend to reread, get a colleague, get your partner, send it to someone that you trust. You can even invest in a really good grammar checker like white smoke or Grammarly and so it's important to get someone else because it's not just about maybe the typos, it could be about the feeling or how messages could be perceived or misunderstandings or UX. So these are things that you wanna get someone else's gut check on because you will regret the error if you don't. So regret the error is kind of an old-school term that traditional papers would use and it was that little block that would just go through all the typos, all the mistakes, all the misnomers that were published the day before with at the end we regret the error because we should. It's really embarrassing to publish broken links, false information, inaccuracies and it can actually get us in some pretty hot water if it's anything legal as well. So you wanna make sure that what you're publishing is accurate. Depending on the type of information, I mean that could be anything, right? These mistakes that just slip into our work and we've all seen what can happen to someone that publishes one misguided tweet. So luckily there's like a little buttons like delete or edit but if someone screenshots it, you're kind of done and you have to start preparing for damage control really. So luckily in WordPress you can edit things and we publish but that's not always the case and I wanna share one little story, one little anecdote of something that happened to me could have gone really, really awry but luckily I saved it I think. So who here knows what nomophobia is? So nomophobia is a bit of a hyperbolic expression for being too close and attached to your phone. And so I thought it would be kind of fun to put that in my Twitter bio except that my autocorrect didn't know what nomophobia was. And so for two whole minutes my Twitter bio was tech, fashion and homophobia before I realized it, died a little and then edited it but so just get people to reread your stuff, you never know, it's just really important. So I don't wanna leave you with that horror story because I mean I want you to go out and publish and feel confident and express yourself and share your content with the world but just remember your friends in the newsroom trenches and remember to know your audience, to not bury the lead, to observe the style guide, to ask a copy editor and to regret the error or avoid the error. Thank you very much.