Dr. Don Ranly Gets Rave Reviews

Instantly loved by everyone in the room, Don Ranly Ph.D., professor emeritus, Missouri School of Journalism, said that his challenge today would be squeezing a whole semester of information into one hour. His first lesson of the day: "Refrigerator journalism."
 
"We want to make our publications useful," Dr. Ranly said. "The opposite of useful is useless. Once readers find your publication useless, why would they pick it up again?"
 
He said that for publication success, we need to present information in a usable way, a way that makes readers want to clip it out, keep it in their pockets, post it to their bulletin board or to the front of their refrigerator.
 
Quickly changing gears, he made a request of the room.
 
"Never begin a headline with a word ending in -ing," Dr. Ranly insisted. "It's too lazy and too simple and very seldom exciting."
 
Writing for the web
People have no time. People are surfers. People seek information that is quick and easy to get. People are both verbal and visual. People like short copy. People like lists and bullets. People choose chunks of information they need or want. People want to be heard.
 
Dr. Ranly encourage attendees in the room to write specifically for those people.
 
"Write for the skimmers and surfers," he said. "You want to stop them, you want them to stop and dive into the content."
 
A quick review
Several attendees to the Association Media & Publishing conference this week submitted magazines for critique and review during Dr. Ranly's presentation. Dr. Ranly spent several minutes offering his input on various covers, tables of content and feature leads. But within his entertaining critique, he offered several sounds words of advice.
 

• Put the cover blurbs at the left or the top. That's where they'll get the most attention.
• If you're going to have pictures and text within your table of contents, place the corresponding text with the image. Don't make readers work to match them up.
• Allow people to be heard. Publish the editors' and writers' contact information in the magazine. Your members and readers want to be heard. Invite them in.