Required reading of publishers, content marketers, and social media dorks

Every once and a while I’ll share an article on the Offbeat Empire’s Slack, and tell everyone that they need to read it. It’s usually something about the future of publishing, or content marketing, or social media. I find all these things fascinating (if a little cynical-making, sometimes), and that in mind, I thought I’d re-share a few of the things I’ve made staffers read recently:

My private shame: you’ve fallen for my clickbait headlines
A writer for Elle.com confesses the writing sins of her past. Girl, we’ve all been there and realistically? It’s how the game is played. It’s gross, and you’re right to feel gross, but I forgive you. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Forget click-bait. We’re living in the world of share-bait now.
“It prioritizes the content that people are most interested in reading, but it’s unclear if what people are reading is informative or constructive in any traditional sense…”

The Awl’s Content Wars posts
Every single one of these posts is brutal but important. The most recent post explores the cold hard truth that most readers don’t follow publications these days. They follow platforms. Therefore, publishers are now chasing platforms to get their readers. It’s a weird time to be a publisher.

How moms won the Internet — and what that means for the rest of us
This post gets +10 points for this quote from one of my publishing icons, Neetzan Zimmerman:

If you ask Neetzan Zimmerman, a sort of one-man, proto-Viral Nova who defined the viral news genre in the early days, he’ll tell you that the momification of the Internet is something we should have seen coming a long way away. For one thing, moms own Facebook, statistically speaking, and Facebook owns the viral news industry. (“Facebook was obviously always going to be co-opted by moms,” Zimmerman said. “It’s all about gossip, baby photos, schmaltzy stuff — it’s so mom already.”)

But then it gets -5 points for the term “momification” when MOMETIZATION was right there, just waiting to be used.

Ok, my fellow content nerds… what did I miss? What else should I be reading?

About the Author: Ariel

@arielmstallings

Author of three editions of the Offbeat Bride book and From Shitshow To Afterglow, Ariel Meadow Stallings acts as the publisher of all the Offbeat Empire websites.