Put your head down to stare at a document at the start of your writing career, then look up and it’s 20 years later. That’s how it feels some days. And then others you can feel the slow grind of change in your industry, blog posts in the early 2000s, then Facebook in 2004, then myriad other platforms, then the rise of video. This nostalgia trip has a focus, though—I wanted to look at the way writing assignments have changed over the years. Here are a few ways and thoughts on why:
Word counts shrinking
Where once my average writing assignment was 2000 words, now it’s 1200 words. Where once I wrote a blog post at 600 words, now it’s 400. Except for that blip five years ago when it was 1200. Generally, the word counts have been getting shorter and images larger. No secret here as to why, it’s the attention span—people love to skim and scroll these days, to get the gist of the story rather than meander through it.
What does it mean for us writers? What I used to like about writing, maybe a longer lead where you can do some word play or waltz into a feature with an imaginative lede, you need to get to the point more quickly. Imaginative writing is still possible, just sometimes you have to use choose one place where you might have played in three. You used to be able to use longer quotes, whereas now you lean more heavily on paraphrasing.
Heds and deks and photos are part of the assignment
I used to be just the body copy person, coming up with the story and leaving others to adorn with headline and subhead (heds and deks in journalism jargon). I’d throw in a hed and dek as a courtesy, but now it’s something mentioned in assignments. In a recent one, I was even asked to select a pullquote and a fun fact.
Once infrequent, the request to chase after photos from the interview subject is now a regular ask from an editor, alongside the approval of quotes for corporate journalism. While I don’t usually push back on this, I do wonder when it became my job and if anyone has thought of paying me more to do it.
More detailed understanding of audience
On the upside, all the new platforms and analytics seem to have given us a better understanding of the audiences we’re writing for. Painful as it is to hear, when your story got no clicks you know that something went wrong. Analytics also help to know which topics are performing better than in the past, and editors can adjust to plan more stories in a promising direction. Since we all serve the reader, it’s a good development.
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