Public Sample of the
Online Ministries Community Blog

How to Write for Web Pages - Part 13 – The Curation of Story Ideas

From: 3/4/2015

Story ideas can be plentiful. However, the resources to develop story ideas into words, pictures and other media ready to place onto a web page are always in short supply. Webmasters never have enough editorial resources to develop everything they wish they could.

As a result, all editorial departments must have a process to select from the many possible story ideas those few that are worthy of using the limited developmental resources. The problem is a classical one of contention for valuable (and often scarce) resources and is similar to the contention for capital or other budget resources. Which set of story ideas will yield the best possible result for the websites’ missions, objections and strategies?

The homily, “getting the most bang for the buck” comes to mind.

The selection process is called curation and judges the relative merits of story ideas to determine if the idea is worthy of investing in the development of the idea into a finished story. One can’t develop everything, so which ideas, if developed, best fulfill our missions, objections and strategies?

Curation should be intentional, not accidental. Curation should be thoughtful, not based on whimsy. Curation is serious business and is worthy of some gravitas not just implementing the first story idea that come to mind or is the next on some list. The more limited a church’s editorial resources, the more thoughtful the curation process has to be.

Curation is not nearly as subjective as you might first think. While some subjective judgment does come into play, there are also plenty of objective criteria one can apply to the curation process.

Click here to read the public sample of this blog posting.

Register for the community to read the discussion of this posting among the community and add your own comments to the discussion.

How to Write for Web Pages - Part 12 – The Ideation of a Story

From: 2/5/2015

Deciding what to publish on a church website is often a gut-wrenching experience for many web teams, particularly for rookie church webmasters. To some, there never seems to be anything to write that would make an interesting story.

Nothing could be further from the truth of the situation.

Many rookies often don’t realize the number of content opportunities that are within all churches and surrounding them … everyday!

Churches using a journalistic approach to building websites must learn how to identify, appraise and select potential high-quality stories within their churches and around their communities. Webmasters must learn how to pick the best of the story opportunities and development them into great stories for their websites.

Again, as I have often mentioned in this tutorial, websites can use the established editorial analogs used in newspapers and magazines for guidance about how to select story ideas for development. There is no better example of this than if websites adopted the same processes that newspapers and magazines use to find stories to write. If so, webmasters would select stories in an intentional process perfected by the editors printed publications. The same craft that publication editors use to select stories for publication can also select stories for any website.

The process of selecting stories to publish on a church website is one of the most important functions performed by a webmaster and is critical to the website’s success. If the content is king, as the homily goes, the selection of stories for content development is a king-maker, the power behind the throne.

Stories come from story ideas. In the best practices of all successful websites, coming up with story ideas is an intentional process. Sources for story ideas within a church environment can be rich and diverse. Web teams have to be able to recognize potential idea sources and develop them into a steady flow of new content.

Websites' editorial staff collects stories ideas from all sources. In some internal process, all story idea are collected and, typically, formed into lists.

However, all ideas put on lists don’t automatically become stories. The selection of which story ideas to develop and publish derives from curation processes that evaluate the potential of each idea. From a list of collected story ideas, the editorial team of the website curates the ideas to select those for development. The curation process separates wheat from the chaff. The curation process allows the always limited resources that can develop ideas into stories to be expended only on the best ideas. The curation process isn’t as subjective as one might initially suppose. There are some widely-accepted objective criteria the editorial team can use to curate story ideas objectively. While one typically uses a certain amount of subjective judgment, stories should always be intelligently curated with sound journalistic criteria.

The stories ideas selected for development in the curation process are then ready for assignment. Once an idea is curated, the editorial team of a website doesn’t assign the story without first preparing the idea for the writer-reporter. In the assignment preparation phase, the editorial staff prepares a set of “givens” for the assignment and passes them along to the writer. The “givens” provide any available background materials as well as insight into the expectations of the editorial team. The givens of an assignment serve to get writers-reporters off to a good start as well as make the writers-reporters aware of the editors’ objectives for the story.

Next, the editorial staff gives the assignment package to writers-reporters or photographers for development of the idea into a story.

Taken together, all of these processes are the ideation phase of a story in the overall editorial lifecycle. In this installment of the tutorial, I will write about the entire ideation phase and how to use it effectively.

Click here to read the public sample of this blog posting.

Register for the community to read the discussion of this posting among the community and add your own comments to the discussion.

How to Write for Web Pages - Part 11 – The Lifecycle of a Story

From: 8/22/2014

In previous installments of this tutorial, I have written about various phases of content development and how the story moves through pages to it completion.

In this installment, I am writing about the entire lifecycle of a story and where each phase and process fit a complete birth-to-death model.

I have written about some of this material has been discussed elsewhere in this tutorial, with pieces often provided in depth. However, I am going to summarize the phases and process here to make it easy to see the whole lifecycle within one installment.

I believe understanding of the entire lifecycle model for content will help writer-reporters better understand the web publishing process. Most writer-reporters only work on the content creation phase of the lifecycle and have no visibility into what is happening beyond the submission of the completed manuscript.

In this installment of the tutorial, I will describe a conceptual model of the lifecycle and describe each of the major phases of the lifecycle and the processes contains in each phase.

Click here to read the public sample of this blog posting.

Register for the community to read the discussion of this posting among the community and add your own comments to the discussion.

How to Write for Web Pages - Part 10 - The Pagination of a Story

From: 8/16/2014

In the previous installment of this tutorial, I have written about the processes for developing a story for publication on the website. The story is written by one writer working as a solo writer-reporter or two or more people working as a collaborative team. The resulting work-product is a finished manuscript that is ready for publication.

Placing a story on a web page is a key part of the web publishing process but the story itself isn’t the sole content component on a web page. The story is only one component of a web page, albeit the most-significant component, but here are others too.

In this tutorial, I’m going to define the term “pagination” as the process of making a unit of content called “a web page” and the placement of all of the content components that makeup the page. Pagination is also about the synergy that results from the interworkings of the various components.

It will help writers-editors to know how their stories will work with the other elements of the page and other pages within the website.

In this installment of the tutorial, I will write about the components of the web page and how the pieces fit together.

Click here to read the public sample of this blog posting.

Register for the community to read the discussion of this posting among the community and add your own comments to the discussion.

How to Write for Web Pages - Part 9 - Write for Your Calendar

From: 8/13/2014

In the previous installments of this tutorial, I have written about the techniques best-practices of writing and the editorial process of that put stories onto web pages.

People typically think of writing only in the context of developing traditional web pages.

However, there are other ways that you can harness the ability to write in order to accrue additional benefits for your church.

In this installment, I will be writing about an almost totally overlooked area of church websites that offer great opportunities for writing: writing for your calendar!

Click here to read the public sample of this blog posting.

Register for the community to read the discussion of this posting among the community and add your own comments to the discussion.

How to Write for Web Pages - Part 8 - The Nut Graf

From: 8/12/2014

While many “civilians” know about the lead in a story, few will have heard another journalistic term, “nut graf.” In this installment of the tutorial, I will discuss the use of this important element of the story.

In the previous installment of this tutorial, I wrote about how to write a lead. I also made the assertion that the lead is arguably the most-important journalistic component of your story. Many of the stories that you will write for websites will indeed be news stories where writing a direct lead in subject-verb-object construction will be appropriate. However, you will also write a large number of feature stories too, and these will require another specialized journalistic element in addition to a lead.

Feature stores often use longer leads, written in narrative or antidotal style instead of as a direct lead. Due to their length and style, they may not immediately drill to the heart of the matter like a news-type direct lead does. A writing mechanism is needed to do some of the same functions as a lead but placed after the creative narrative lead. This special writing component is called a “nut graf”, or also called a perspective paragraph. A nut graf is a summary of the essence of a story often used in feature stories with narrative leads, typically near the top of the story but below the lead.

Similar to a lead, the nut graf is also high-stakes writing with specific objectives. It is perhaps the second most important piece of text in your story.

This installment of the tutorial will discuss how to write nut grafs.

Click here to read the public sample of this blog posting.

Register for the community to read the discussion of this posting among the community and add your own comments to the discussion.

How to Write for Web Pages - Part 7 - The Lead, a Learning Laboratory for Writing

From: 8/8/2014

A purist would say that all of your writing is important. I take a more pragmatic view for people just beginning to develop their writing skills.

As I’ve written about elsewhere in this tutorial, you learn to write by practice, you write to learn to write. Many of you reading this tutorial will be rookies, writing for publication for the first time. The process of learning to write for your website is, in a very real sense, on-the-job training. You will be writing for your websites as you learn and improve your craft. Your first stories may not be very good. However, as you learn by doing, your second stories will be better and the third better still.

This on-the-job training of learning to write is classic even in newspapers.

Hopefully, if you are this far along in this tutorial, you are writing for your website. In the previous installments of this tutorial, we covered the high-level basics in of the writing and editorial process. My theory is that you should get started, even if you are a green rookie just learning to write.

With you now writing, it is time to circle back to focus on specific in-depth study about how to write. You will have a lot to learn, but there are some areas of study that will make your writing effective even early in your learning cycle.

In this installment of the tutorial, I will address the first in-depth study: how to write a lead. 

Click here to read the public sample of this blog posting.

Register for the community to read the discussion of this posting among the community and add your own comments to the discussion.

How to Write for Web Pages - Part 6 - Elements of a Basic Web Story

From: 8/7/2014

In the previous installments of this tutorial, I have discussed the processes of writing a story for your website.

In this installment of the tutorial, I’m going to discuss the basic structure of the story itself, including how arrange each writing elements in the overall story.

Please note that there is no absolute way to put a story together, but there are some rules of thumb that provide basic guidance for a story.

Click here to read the public sample of this blog posting.

Register for the community to read the discussion of this posting among the community and add your own comments to the discussion.

How to Write for Web Pages - Part 5 - The Pre-Publication Editorial Process and Publication

From: 8/3/2014

In part four of this series, we discussed the writing of the main body of the story and all of its meta data. This phase ended upon the submission of all of the story-related files to the webmaster.

There is one more phase that happens before the story is published and made available to the public. The webmaster and any supporting editorial volunteers  will perform the vast majority of this phase. However, they may ask the writer a couple of questions in this phase.

It will help if the writer knows what happens in this phase and is prepared to help.

In this installment of the series, we will discuss the remaining editorial and publication processes.

Click here to read the public sample of this blog posting.

Register for the community to read the discussion of this posting among the community and add your own comments to the discussion.

How to Write for Web Pages - Part 4 - Do the Writing

From: 8/2/2014

In the third installment of this series, I wrote about the very important process of preparing to write. We begin this installment assuming that you have completed all of your preparations.

With all of your givens of your story researched, information collected and confirmed and with your field reporting completed, and quotes gathered, you are now ready to start writing your story.

The writing phase is where you bring everything together and compose the text of your story. It is the payoff of all of the past preparatory work.

In this installment of the series, we will discuss the process of writing your story.

Click here to read the public sample of this blog posting.

Register for the community to read the discussion of this posting among the community and add your own comments to the discussion.