Curious about how to get coverage your team’s work on our website? How to write for an online audience? Or even just how to put together a basic journalistic report?
When we speak to people directly, no one can change the story. Not the Oregonian, not FOX news, not Facebook, not the gas and oil companies or their Astroturf websites.
Approximately 2,000 people open each monthly newsletter that we can track. And additional people find each article on the website!
Web writing has the potential to reach huge, geographically dispersed audiences. But to engage these readers requires we write our stories to match their habits. Web readers are information foragers, hunting and pecking through the hypertext forest. They often read on phones or tablets in the moments between other activities, often multi-tasking, often distracted. How do we engage our readers despite these challenges, and to what end?
In this short workshop, we will review common best practices for writing for the web. We’ll practice and share our writing in situ, and review the nuts and bolts of publishing our articles to the 350pdx.org blog. We will discuss our communication goals as a Squad of Activist Writers. At the end of the workshop we’ll sign up for assignments, just like a newsroom!