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Kelli Polson

Tips to improve your reporting, writing and editing.

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Tips for 'alts'

Designhawg.com gives tips on how to create an alternate story form, or "alt," whether it's a Q&A, bio or fact box, timeline, chartical or by-the-numbers box.

Harvest your ideas. Coming up with great ideas on the fly is an incredibly hard task to do on-demand. You have good ideas all the time, so start writing them down, start sketching them out.
Think reader. Anytime a content idea comes along, immediately make informing the reader quicker and with greater clarity your primary objective. How fast can you ensure that the reader will "get it"? Next on the list, give it attitude.
Get involved now. Just because you've been inundated with a ton of daily work doesn't excuse you from getting involved with long-term projects. Staff meetings, brainstorming sessions, e-mail, individual conversations...all great ways to help drive ideas further and make great ideas happen.
Stop, collaborate and listen. Now that you're in the loop, make sure that you and the team (which can be one or 100 people) are pushing the idea. Don't let their title of section editor keep you from considering their design ideas and don't let your title keep you from making content suggestions. This is a great time to start picking directions for the presentation.
Sketch and sell. The best friend of your time will be your ability to rough out ideas on a piece of paper to quickly share with peers. Remember, when in doubt, show them.
Create and Recreate. Never settle for your first solution. Most of the time you will get close to the optimum solution on your first try, but you almost always will need to adjust something in the content or the delivery of the content to tell the story properly.
Finish. If you start a project, see it through unless you're ordered to hand it off. If you are planning to hand a project off, get them involved at step 3. Otherwise, you're just becoming part of the problem.
Don't get discouraged. Not every project that you work on will make it through completion. But the time spent on a project is never completely lost as you have been building bridges to your peers and forging lasting bonds that will help in future projects.

-- Kelli Polson

Posted at 1:11 PM October 26, 2007

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