Real writers do their d@mn homework

Happy Friday,

Right now the looney tunes are running the circus over at Medium. There’s a lot of dumb posts floating to the top now that Ev stepped down and Tony took over. It will taper off in time, I know.

But also? It’s not unique to Medium. Writers screw this up everywhere.

Dumb post #1. Some woman wrote a post losing her mind and and telling Tony not to bring in paid ads or people will leave. Droves of comments with other people also losing their minds and saying if he brings in ads, they’re going to leave, too.

Wah, wah, that’s why we pay membership fees. Talk about greedy. On and on.

I read the post to see if she knew something I didn’t. Turns out she read that Tony agrees writers should be paid better and said he’ll look into it. She said there’s only “one way” to increase earnings and that’s to sell advertising so “obviously” that’s what he’d going to do. Total assumption on her part.

They were all losing their minds over an assumption. I kind of wish those people would leave. It would be a good start towards cleaning up the place. Clearly, they don’t know rule #1 of being a writer.

I’ll get to that in a minute. But first…

Dumb post #2. Someone posted a hurray, Tony is going to pay for external views piece. All the comments were people celebrating and talking about posts that didn’t earn squat because they mostly got external views. We all have some of those. Me included.

Except, sorry. No. That was meet Tony video #1.

In video #2 he said they can’t pay “everyone” for external views. It’s not even feasible. But he’s considering picking a handful of people, 50 people or so, that consistently get a lot of Google traffic and throwing a little extra bonus money at them.

So I posted that in a comment. Wow. Did I rain on their parade. People got real mad. They went from woo hoo to boo hoo and wtf in a heartbeat.

Dumb post #3. This is Tony’s story. He said some guy submitted a post to one of his “Better” publications. Said it was a great piece. Really compelling writing. Engaging. Fantastic reading. Problem was, the underlying “fact” had been debunked years ago. So despite that it was a great reading he rejected it. Said there’s no value in a great story if it’s told around an untruth. What value is that? None.

You know what they all did wrong, right?

They didn’t do their homework.

They didn’t fact check.

It’s just one story, I know. But writers build their reputation one story at a time. 50 or 100 stories later, our reputation precedes us. People get to know what to expect.

That woman who made an assumption about paid ads? Most of her posts are like that. You should see her assumptions about Amber Heard and Johnny Depp. lol. Making assumptions and jumping to conclusions seem to be her specialties.

Everywhere you go, there you are.

Fact checking takes time, that goes without saying.

But it pays off in credibility. Because here’s the thing… if someone doesn’t care about earning a reader’s trust or their own reputation and credibility, can they even call themselves a writer? Needless to say, I muted them.

I’m curious — what do you do when people post garbage?

Do you reply or mute?

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What I wrote this week…

• One Stubborn Woman Might Have Proof Marilyn Monroe Was Murdered

• Six Harsh Truths I Learned From 2 Million Views Here

• Shakespeare Created The Witches Of Macbeth For A Horrible Reason And It Backfired

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xo,
Linda