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4 Things Content Marketers Can Learn from The Onion’s Editorial Process

4 Things Content Marketers Can Learn from The Onion's Editorial Process

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Several weeks ago I was listening to a This American Life podcast in which their host, Ira Glass, took an inside look one of the editorial meetings at the The Onion. I was fascinated to learn that for every 16 stories in their bi-weekly paper, they brainstorm 600 headlines. While this level of editing isn’t feasible for most B2B content marketers, there is a lot we can learn from The Onion’s editorial process. (Hat tip to The Beaverton Style Guide for this nice set of articles directly related to this.)

How the process works

First, here’s a great explanation of the general process from Joe Randazzo, the Editor-in-chief at the The Onion:

Basically the way it works is on Monday everybody pitches 15 headlines. We have about 10 people on staff, plus about 20 contributing writers who also pitch 15 headlines. If two people in the room vote on it, it goes on the to the next list. So we narrow them down from about 600 headlines to about 100 to 125, and we talk about them at another meeting on Tuesday.

From those, we choose the 16 or so headlines that make up the whole issue. We assign them and brainstorm what the stories will look like. When we put together every issue, we are trying to find a good balance of stories that are national and international in scale along with local or smaller things, or observational humor. We spend about an hour or so brainstorming those stories on Tuesday afternoon, the writers spend Wednesday writing them, and then we have draft meeting Thursday where we go through first drafts and rip them apart. Then they write second drafts on Friday, which the editors go through on [the following] Monday, and we go through a first round of editing, make notes, there are rewrites and then a second round of editing. On Friday, I’ll go through [the] final issue and make a last pass. I usually don’t have to make too many changes, but I might punch up something that needs it.

As content marketers, what can we take from this?

Read full article via savvyb2bmarketing.com

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