Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The most direct way is to catch readers’ eyes is with a provocative headline. We’ve looked at headlines before, looking at how publishers can optimize theirs for social and the best practices for headlines on Facebook.

Knowing the headlines that work gives your content the best possible start to attracting attention on social.

Armed with years of social media metrics, we turned to NewsWhip Analytics to analyze how headlines of ten top publishers has changed in just the past two years. Let’s take a look....

Last Saturday I had the honor of teaching at a public writing conference at The Washington Post. After I finished my part of the program, I spent the day listening carefully to four of the Post’s most accomplished writers and reporters: David Finkel, Bob Woodward, DeNeen L. Brown, and Ezra Klein.

I took copious notes, wrote down anything that struck me as wise or useful, and want to share with you what I learned from them. Please don’t take these as direct quotations, but as handwritten paraphrases containing the gist of their advice. Particularly notable were the shared values of craft and sense of mission and purpose in a gang of four that ranged from the 70-year-old Woodward, still cranking out books, to the young phenom Ezra Klein, who is trying to re-invent how to make policy stories interesting and relevant. I’ll take them in the order of their presentations...