Get to the point. Make it clear from the get-go what your release is about. Don’t try to be cute. I used to get releases all the time from PR people who buried the news or tried to get creative with their writing. Sometimes, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what some…
Orla Reynolds Design.
I had already spent a couple hours today tweaking the smartphone version of my website, so this study was a welcome affirmation. Young adults – Nearly half of cell internet users ages 18-29 (45%) do most of their online browsing on their phone. Non-whites – Half (51%) of black cell internet users do most of…
Actually a rather dorky story, but I love the final quotes about the dog: “He’s not usually very smart. “He’s really dopey and just likes to chew socks.” —Choking dog saves its own life by dialling 999
How does this one site come up with so many simple ideas that people want to spread far and wide? What’s their secret? The answer, in short, is that BuzzFeed’s staff finds stuff elsewhere on the Web, most often at Reddit. They polish and repackage what they find. And often—and, from what I can tell,…
Even the things we do for fun – playing sports, joining a band, riding a horse, writing a story – you have made into a competition. You’ve taken our creativity and told us that it matters not because it fulfills us, but because we can sell it to a college and reap the returns on…
Great writing, introducing the backstory while simultaneously focusing on current events. Back then, the faculty called for the resignation of two prominent board members, and many on the campus called for the entire board to resign. Tuesday, crowds applauded when the name of Helen E. Dragas, the rector, or chair, of the board, was called…
Great satire from The Onion. Breaking Story So New Reporter Literally Has No Information
Writing, however, was a part of the game industry in the beginning. It’s most faithful legacy is now considered niche. Great game writers like Steve Meretzky and Tim Schafer are as memorable as writers in comparable genres; Robert Heinlein, Dashiell Hammett, H. P. Lovecraft. Today, you have to dig deep into the circles of game…
Ms. Sullivan emerged on the steps of the university’s white-columned rotunda afterward to address a whooping crowd gathered on the central lawn, and quoted something that Thomas Jefferson, designer of the building and founder of the university, wrote upon being elected president: “It is pleasant for those who have just escaped threatened shipwreck to hail…
I’m not kidding when I say I haven’t even thought about planning to watch a TV show since Babylon 5 concluded in 1998. I don’t say this to be an anti-TV snob — we watch broadcast TV and plenty of DVDs, and I got kind of hooked on websites devoted to Lost (even though I…
Good example of journalistic storytelling, delaying the ending of the story a bit to keep you reading, without appearing to be deliberately coy. (We know from the headline that the story ends happily.) This is a medical container. Inside is a trachea, a carefully constructed human windpipe, seeded with 60 million stem cells from a…
In November of 1964, Frank Plaskon, of McKeesport, was a 24-year-old Special Forces Ranger out of Fort Bragg, N.C. Frank was part of a team dispatched to the USS Requin now berthed on the Ohio River at the Carnegie Science Center. “And I can’t believe that 48 years later it’s right here in my hometown,”…
This is not encouraging. The scientists tested three types of soap dispenser, in both lab and real-world settings. Of the three variants, the dispensers that were refillable from a giant bottle of liquid soap were by far the filthiest, leading to a 26-fold increase in handwashers’ bacteria levels. —Health – Brian Fung – Soap: How…
I’m not reallye sure if the blogosphere works like that any more, though. I find blog posts in my rss reader or on twitter or Facebook and only rarely by following links from other blogs as I used to do. Maybe I exaggerate – but it seems to me that blogs link to each other…
Close enough is not good enough in journalism. One of those versions, which was broadcast on the ‘Today’ show, contained an erroneous repetition of a key question and answer – about whether Sandusky was sexually attracted to young boys, Nils Frederiksen, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania attorney general said on Sunday. The repetition, Sandusky’s lawyers…
See also: photos from the 2012 Westmoreland County Air Show (from the runway)
What happens to our books when we die? Many books disappear before we do, of course; they fall apart, or we put them out on the stoop for scavengers. A book like this one, however — a text that is still read and reprinted, that has played a notable role in the 20th-century imagination, and…
Traffic leaving the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport was awful. People who came late, and parked farther away from the airport, ended up with the advantage, as we sat in gridlock for 1.5 hours while people wheeled their strollers and coolers right past us, pulling out of their parking spaces way ahead of us, putting more…
From “global warming” to “climate change” to “ecosystem management,” the buzzwords have changed, but the issue remains: enthusiasm and hype are part of the PR machine that drives the public perception of science. When well-meaning activists rely on emotions as a shortcut to get the cooperation of the public, the fabric of civic discourse is…