I started writing a column for Campaign last week. (First stab is above, if you have a Brand Republic account you can find it here.) I haven’t done something this nerve-wracking for a long time. You’d think I’d be blasé about writing stuff with all the blogging I do, they only need about 440 words a week, but it’s actually rather stressful. (You'll also notice that I chickened out of anything too original for the first one, rewriting some of the stuff from the Big Thinking conference. But I'm hoping to be more original from now on.)
It’s partly that there’s an actual immovable deadline, I can’t just stick up a closed notice. Or a picture of a tree. It’s partly that I’ve been reading Campaign for 20 years and find it slightly intimidating. And it’s partly that (in my own head) you lot are pleasant blog-folk willing everyone to do well and tolerant of mistakes and the readers of Campaign are vicious industry-insiders who can’t wait to pounce on any slip or dumb idea.
I know that’s ridiculous. And that more people probably read this than read Campaign and that there’s probably quite a lot of overlap between the two, but still, that’s how I feel. (Another difference is that if I’d been writing this for Campaign I might have felt obliged to go back and edit out one of those probablys). I should also say how excited I am to be doing it. One of the reasons I left Nike was to do more writing for money and it’s rather thrilling that I’ve got some writing work this quickly.
But writing these things is also teaching me how much harder writing for print is than writing for a blog. For me, anyway.
Firstly, you can’t just link to examples. If I want to mention some esoteric new thing I have to explain it, I can’t just point to it. And there’s the same problem with credit. Quite a lot of the thoughts in the first piece came from a chat with Richard. Linking to him is easy. Explaining all that (and who he is etc which you’d have to do in a print piece) eats up too many of my 440 words.
Secondly, it’s so slow. Since I was on holiday last week I sent them two pieces at once. The one for next week is about YouTube and mentions Coke and Mentos in passing. Then today I read about the new eepybird thing, which will be out on Monday. Which instantly had me panicking that maybe I should change what I’d written, though looking at it again, I think it’s fine. But, that’s the problem; print means you can’t just bounce off events, you need to think about bigger things, ideas that might last longer than a week.
Campaign have also been very accommodating about me wanting to blog about what I’m writing, I was very keen to do that, because I find sharing work on here incredibly useful, so the plan is this:
Campaign comes out on a Thursday. My deadline is the Friday before, so I plan to put a rough version of what I’m going to write about up on here on the Monday or Tuesday before that. I’m not sure yet what ‘rough version’ will mean, it might be just some early ideas, or a mind map, or a bundle of stuff that seems related. If anyone wants to comment on that I’d be hugely grateful. I’ll put the finished pieces up on here after they’ve come out, as jpgs and text, so they’re searchable. If people want to comment on the finished version that’d be excellent too. And I’ve created a Campaign category so you’ll be able to find all the pieces at once.
(Of course I say ‘all the pieces’ it keeps occurring to me that I might suck at this and my career as a Campaign columnist will only stretch to two weeks. Ah well. We’ll see.)
So I'm thinking I might start with this for my Campaign piece for next week. It's Jon Steel's new book. And since his last book was the best one you can read about planning, and he's a nice and smart man, I have to assume this one'll be brilliant too.
