Why Some Experts Are Moving Away From Magazine Articles
Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.
As some of you know, I’ve stopped writing articles for our laboratory informatics industry magazines and have even started turning down the conferences that invite me to attend for free, which appears to be an increasing number, each year. In speaking with a few other senior-level consultants in a variety of areas who appear to be at about the same point in their career as I am, it appears that we’ve all run into the same issues.
For those of you who think writing articles is a good way to help our community and also to get your name noticed in order to build your company’s name recognition, I've become skeptical that either is true. Most people skim the articles and extremely few actually appear to read the article one would write. There are a number of factors that influence whether or not your article is ever read, and most of them are outside your control.
With regard to getting attention, there’s long been a rule of thumb that your name has to appear some multiple number of times in any magazine for people to recognize your name. I find that it’s a rare person that looks at the by-line. Here’s a story about an article I wrote that was one of the few I’ve put into a magazine that ever got any real attention. By the way, some of my cronies have the same story to tell, so some of you reading this who also write articles will recognize the story, sadly.
The Story
Several times over the years when I was at a conference speaking to someone about one particular topic, the person I was speaking to would spontaneously remembered a “great” article they read in magazine X and the conversation would go something like this:
Other person: You should read it. It was just the best article I’ve ever written on this topic.
Me: Well, thanks, because I wrote it.
Other person: Ummm…well…this was the one titled Y and in issue Z.
Me: Yup, that’s the one.
Other person: And it also mentioned important factors such as A, B and C.
Me: Yes, I remember it, well, as I put a lot of thought into which factors to include in the limited space I had.
This seems ridiculous, I know, but I’m telling you that it’s not just happened to me multiple times but others who write for this and other industries tell me exactly the same story. Not only that, but we realized we were giving all our best stories to the magazines where they’d probably never be read. If you wondered why so many industry experts now have blogs, instead, it’s for a number of reasons just like this (although some experts continue to do both, by the way). Additionally, those of us writing for these magazines happened to be reading them extremely regularly to know what articles had appeared on what topics and when. Also, whatever advice the writer would have given the person would be almost identical to whatever article was in question so the conversation before mentioning the article would be much like what was in the article, itself.
A Continuation of the Story
As to my little story, above, I usually let the conversation peter-out somewhat soon after that, because I'm not looking for recognition so badly that I'd spend a lot of time continuing to try to convince the person. However, I was once speaking with someone so convinced I was mistaken or joking or something that the conversation continued, as follows:
Other person: No, no, no, the one I’m thinking of was written by some guy and he REALLY knew what he was talking about.
Yup, I definitely stopped trying to convince that person, at that point! :-(
Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/