Remember when Oprah exposed James Frey’s Million Little Lies… er, Pieces? The latest New York Times best seller, Skinny Bitch, is following in those footsteps as public skepticism turns to anger at the self-proclaimed “know-it-all” author who is selling her biased opinion (along with misinformation) to a hungry audience desperate for weight-loss. (Can you tell that irks me?) I mean, the strong should protect the weak, shouldn’t they? Tell the whole truth, and nothin’ but? Who’s with me? I’m all for a good novel, but if it’s your opinion you’re writing about, be upfront and honest and let people know that they need to research what’s right for them. Don’t sell your opinion as the gospel of how to get skinny… that’s like waving crack under the nose of an addict. And SKINNY? Aren’t we trying to stop perpetuating the need for “skinny” to our young? Perseus Books publishing house should be ashamed of themselves (and renamed Cuckoo Books) for not vetting and fact-checking their non-fiction works. Gah!
Here’s an article titled, Setting the Skinny Bitches Straight, that made me shout Hells Yeah! after every paragraph. And it was written by a skinny bastard too.
Magazines were the original social networks. They filled a void for otherwise isolated individuals and the content transported them outside their community. Brands promoted their products through this early network with static advertising placement that shouted “LOOK AT ME. BUY ME. LOVE ME.”
With that in mind, let’s use Coca-Cola’s 70/20/10 content rule. 70% of your stories should be the low-risk, solid useful content your audience expects—appealing to all audiences. 20% of your stories should be higher-risk, solid useful content that is directed to specific segments of your audience—your loyal consumers. The last 10% of your stories are where you can set your hair on fire. It’s the content that reaches out to the edges, or comes at your idea in an entirely new way. Your audience might not be there yet or they might be right there with you. It’s the crazy, never-been-done-before-and-might-fail ideas. This is high-risk, but it has the potential to achieve the highest share rate and is also where your future 70-20% will come from.
A good example of a Brand leading their story through innovation is the grocery retail chain, Longo’s. They are telling you their brand story—quite literally. They are exercising their 10% and pioneering into new content configuration frontiers. They are bringing journalistic blogging together with traditional publishing techniques for a compelling story that is fun, engaging, and worth the attention of their audience.
I defied nothing at all.
In this business, we writers watch each other very carefully. We keep an especially twitchy eye trained on those corporate staff writers with their pages of accolades. It’s not their fault. The collective ego of society convinces us that there is value in those accolades. They need it to have value. But the new generation is on to them. They’re bored with them. The slow-acceptance of these primitive thinking newspaper executives allows them to keep ramming their ‘glory days’ references up our wazoos. They tote by-lines noting decades of combined newspaper writing experience—like that means something now. It doesn’t. There is no edge there. It’s just old news.
For those of you planning on travelling to Malawi, you might want to reconsider your diet. Government officials are slugging it out over the introduction of a new bill that is meant to battle pollution of the atmosphere in any place that might harm the public—and according to the Justice Minister—this means keeping your crack sealed. I suspect he’s read one too many livestock-versus-the-environment articles. Just to be clear Mr. Minister, it’s burping cows. Burping. 
Punctuation gets a bad rap these days. There is little concern for the art and mastery of grammar in an acronym-texting world. We don’t even realize how much we are missing. There are some of us who break out in the sweats when we see a sign in a storefront with incorrect grammar or a wayward apostrophe dangling dangerously off a newspaper headline. There are even those of us — in that select group — who sneak about at night with permanent marker stained on our fingertips, creeping through the city restoring the balance of commas everywhere. Proper punctuation is just good manners and truly good manners are invisible. As Lynne Truss wrote so freely, they ease the way for others, without drawing the attention to themselves. How many friendships and relationships have been broken due to fundamental flaws in correct punctuation? Take this letter for example — written to Jack — from Jill, with an obvious loving message.
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