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The Quality of Our Content: a Response to Stephen King
I have a confession to make: I love celebrity gossip magazines. You’d be hard-pressed to find me on a vacation without OK!, US Weekly, or Star magazine in my hands.
On business trips, I try to keep it a bit more professional, though on a long flight home after a busy business trip, I’ll admit I’m still not whipping out The New Yorker. On my latest flight, a trip home from Commission Junction (you can read more about it on my Twitter), I settled in with Entertainment Weekly, and read one of my favorite columns, Stephen King’s “The Pop of King.” After reading his latest column, “What’s Next for Pop Culture?” I had to respond. This global conversation about content and its quality is a discussion I am having on many different occasions. As many of you know, Shakespeare Squared has been creating quality content in various formats for various industries for the past 8 years, so I’m pretty well-versed on the issue—and I thought King’s article was brilliant!
Uncle Stevie has detailed an overall problem occurring in content – whether it be a book, a movie, or a TV show. He intimates that we as a society are slowly eroding storytelling. In each category that content is delivered, we are seeing technology and the bottom line dominate decision making in a place where the decisions should be dominated by the art.
I am a business owner, so I understand the Catch-22. I’m interesting in making money. Marketing, sales and PR are becoming a melting pot for content, and content can be communicated well through these channels. But these channels don’t require—or utilize—the creative, beautiful storytelling of books, music, movies and television. And unfortunately, such cursory content is leaking into these artistic avenues—will it spell the demise of each?
Next week I’m going to look at each category of pop culture that King discussed. Check back each day—I’d love to hear your comments!
Comments on this Entry
Most communication that originates from digital sources is governed by the speed at which a message is sent and the brevity that’s used to craft that message. Blogs, e-mails, and texts are all encouraged to include the least amount of words necessary in order to share thoughts and information. Twitter goes even further by imposing its specific 140-character limit. This does seem to fly in the face of storytelling, which focuses less on the number of words used and more on how the chosen words fit together to convey meaning.
By Andrea on 2009 09 18
Andrea makes a good point, but I also think that they *can* encourage you to be a better writer—when you have only 140 characters on Twitter, you have to be direct and to the point and can convey your meaning more fully.
When I started in journalism, the concise style of writing quickly taught me to whittle down my writing to be much more to the point. Description is still important, but you get to the heart of the story without 800 words about the color of the sky.
By Laura on 2009 09 21
