No News Is The Worst News

It's been one of the slowest news weeks of the year, which means it's been one of my busiest weeks of the year.

Let me explain: when a week has a lot of big news, it's easy to find topics to cover, and my job is a breeze. When it's a slow news week, finding content is torture. Summer has been the slow season for as long as most can remember (that's why the default lead story on the news every summer night is the weather), and the summer-fall transitional weeks are the news nadir for the year. Nothing is happening.

While trawling the Internet floor for treasure and pearls, a lot of things turn up that are interesting, possibly even useful, but not headline (or Headlines) worthy. Still, just becuase we don't run it doesn't mean no one wants to read it. Here are a few of the articles that didn't make it into our newsletters this month that I thought may be of interest.

Writing Lessons Learned from Social Media - "Like a good PR or elevator pitch, an effective tweet, Facebook status update or Google+ post is compelling, finely-crafted, tightly-edited and impossible to ignore. Social networks are a great place to test messages and hone your writing to the sharpest of points."

PR Newswire's vice president of social media, Sarah Skerik, discusses some of the insights she's gleaned about writing for various social media services, and how to tailor your message to a variety of audiences. Online writing is still a relatively new phenomenon, with social media being the latest wrinkle, and a lot of the ground rules and best practices are still up for debate. Skerik's brief analysis hews closely to what I think makes sense, and offers great tips for anyone looking to start or expand their social media presence.