What Makes Online Publications Super Successful

Editorially’s online publication launched a day or two ago. It’s made by people I pay attention to. I admire them because they’re so good at the things they do.

I’m in the middle of designing a big, exciting, new thing for us at Fizzle so I was extremely curious: what decisions did these people make about their online publishing thing?

  • what’s the reading experience like?
  • what bits about the author, pub date, twitter, comments, etc, do they show?
  • is there a sidebar? What’s in it?
  • what funky things do they do to show the reader “this isn’t some stock WP theme?”
  • of course they’ll have interesting people from that scene of theirs, Craig Mod is a good example.
  • of course there’ll be an editorial angle (it’s called “Editorially” fuggryanoutloud).
  • will it feel like they’re trying to ooze out between the html5 asides, “hey! this is big boy stuff, like the New Yorker, we promise, it totally is.”

Here’s what struck me: it’s fine. The design is the design. It’s fine. And this thing will survive not on the quality of the design or the decisions about the sidebar.

It will survive or not — for me, the individual reader — based on the ongoing relationship I have with what they publish. The “content.”

They probably call this the editorial voice… cuz they’re smart. I look up to them for words and ideas like this.

  • big ol’ background images on articles? Cool. didn’t really care for the article.
  • artsy illustrations that feel made and human and tangible. That’s interesting. And that one, about half way through the article, I was already glad I read it.
  • drop caps… good looking. Different colors, though? Hmmmm.

Investigating this site, the decisions of these lovely and smart people, makes me realize how much I already know about online publishing.

  • stewarding an audience.
  • caring or not caring about the audience.
  • serving them or being cool at them.
  • putting loads of work into a piece that’s immediately forgotten by the web.
  • putting loads of work into a piece that’s immediately forgotten by myself as I rush into the next piece.
  • work, numbers, eventual questions about “wait, why are we doing this again?”
  • revenue questions, ideas, strategies, and results

As people building our thing online it’s easy to get wrapped up in the skin of stuff. “Oh damn, i have got to figure out how to do that big ol’ background header thing. So cool.” But that skin is only valuable as a conduit for the guts. We don’t stay friends with superficial and beautiful people from high school if they stay superficial (unless we’re horny). They’re pretty, which is nice, but they don’t get MST3K, they don’t like to play cards, I don’t feel connected to them. And life is too short for that kind of disconnection.

Wishing the team at Editorially all the best. I hope they connect super hard.

Max Temkin on Business Strategy

Knowing what you’re doing is not nearly as important as knowing what you believe in and what your values are and understanding how to translate that into the decisions that you’re making.”

Max Temkin, Creator of Cards Against Humanity

Click the name and watch the talk. An excellent story of success found doing stuff you and your friends like.

Frank Chimero on Marketing

I don’t expect to reach or change anybody I don’t already know. I realize there’s potential for that, but I don’t expect it.”

Frank Chimero

This has been rattling around my brain since I’ve heard it. In Fizzle I keep encouraging folks to think small, small, smaller. If you think about women who ride unicycles to work in north portland you can a). find those people easily (there are 10 of them), b). study and serve them well in small and meaningful ways that c). make a serious impact on that crew.

But in our online growing stuff — marketing stuff — for Fizzle and ThinkTraffic and, shit, even this blog, my mind defaults to “i need more people” mode.

Getting in front of new folks.

Making a good impression on them.

Creating an emotional experience with them on the page.

Making it easier and more enjoyable for them to find us.

But when I heard Frank say this I knew it was True™.

We still need to grow (maybe that’s another question to explore), but we can do it more like a family or a neighborhood than a “startup.”

Frank Chimero on the Bounty of Success

I now know that the work doesn’t last—and if it somehow does, it lasting doesn’t have much to do with me. The work went far because other people carried it. Disabusing myself of the idea that I did anything important or special has been really good for me. If the bounty of success is attention, and you feel like you don’t deserve that attention, then you have no responsibility to it. It has no power over you. That frees you up to take risks. If those risks pay off, then great. If they don’t: c’est la vie. At least you’re alive, tried something, and lived a little.”

Frank Chimero

Wow, what a great read. I have liked Chimero’s words for a while. Hearing some of his story, how he’s processing grief as a creative worker, only makes me a bigger fan. Here’s some other Frank posts I’ve written about.

How To Innovate

“Innovation” is a word we hear a lot… most of the times from baby boomers in quasi-tech environments… like my dad.

My dad always had “innovation” in his company’s tag lines. The word, for better or worse, is carved into my conscious mind.

I always thought: man, what a hard thing to do, innovating. Making something from nothing. Doing something no one’s ever done before.

Now that I’ve been designing and making and “innovating” for a while I see I had it all wrong. Innovation doesn’t come from nothing.

Innovation doesn’t come from thin air. It’s not something from nothing. Ex nihilo. (all that money on a theological education really paying off, right there).

Innovation comes from discovering what a thing actually is. It always starts with something and then goes deeper, closer to the core of what that thing is.

It’s not blue sky solutioneering or spit-balling. It’s, “hmm, I think people will actually behave this way, not that way…”

And that phrase shows up wherever innovation happens.

“People don’t want that. They ACTUALLY want this.”

“It’s not about that. It’s ACTUALLY about this.”

This is what happens in good stories. Darth Vader isn’t just a bad guy. He’s ACTUALLY (spoiler alert) Luke’s dad and deeply troubled about being a bad dad.

Crash Davis in Bull Durham isn’t an all star player. He’s ACTUALLY an all star coach.

It also happens in our own stories as we do the self discovery thing. In the Enneagram (ask me about it sometime) I thought I was the achiever but I’m ACTUALLY the enthusiast… that changed so much about how I saw myself.

We think we want freedom, but we ACTUALLY want connection and intimacy.

I thought the loss of my infant son would siphon the color from the world and grind me to a halt, but it ACTUALLY brought life into stark contrast, making me bold about what I wanted for my family.

And it happens in real businesses. I know we’re not supposed to use Apple as a business example… but whatever.

At the core of Apple is a delusional visionary yelling “people don’t want ____, they ACTUALLY want ____.”

People don’t want a computer. They ACTUALLY want to DO THINGS with a computer.

People don’t want to have to learn how to set this machine up. They ACTUALLY want to simply turn it on and start using it.

I’m remembering something Steve Jobs said in an interview about when he brought one of the first Macs to a party at John Lennon’s house (like you do). He said the old people wanted to know how it worked and the young people wanted to know what it did.

Apple did it again with the iPod. People don’t want CDs. They ACTUALLY want all their music with them wherever they go.

Innovation comes from understanding what the thing actually is in a new way. Ideally, it’s getting closer to what the thing truly is.

That’s why design is so important to all of us, because the discipline of design is the process of making a thing what it is. Design, according to Frank Chimero, asks us, “what does it want to be?”

With Apple the problem was the distance between humans and computers. Design is how you shrink the delta.

As a writer I design my story. First this. Then that. Redact this bit. Why? Because it’s not what the story is. Editing is design. Or vice versa.

Innovation through the design process is also in great advertising. The story you use to tell others what your thing “is” is critical… it’s the first impression, the handshake, the bit that clues someone in to if you you’re like them or not.

Those Chrysler ads with Eminem (I loved them so much) were saying: you think it’s just a car but it’s ACTUALLY the reclamation of american manufacturing.

This is a story. You don’t have to believe it, but that’s the hypothesis they posited.

Apples hypothesis was people don’t want to and shouldn’t have to learn anything. They want a cute and intuitive easiness. It was a hypothesis. There was no proof it would work.

It worked. It manufactured love. It altered the course of an industry.

What’s your hypothesis? What are you saying? Have you dug in deep enough to know what your thing is? What does your thing want to be?

I wish I had a secret for discovering what your thing is. Some people simply know when it’s not there yet. It’s a sense that it won’t come off the right way yet, we’re not at the heart of it yet. I think this is my only real great skill… I know when it’s not there yet. I don’t necessarily know how to get it there, but I usually have some ideas.

I don’t know if this is “taste” as Ira Glass put it, but I suspect it’s in the vicinity.

Innovation isn’t creating out of thin air. It’s always developing upon something, getting closer to the heart of something. Be disciplined in the process of exploring what a thing is. Not this, that. Over and over again.

When you discover — through the work — what the thing ACTUALLY is… that’s when your product begets the story begets the love.

And maybe more importantly: that’s when you’re standing on something solid and true… like the way I imagine the humans who invented the first tools to stand.

Shawn Coyle on The Known & Unknown Motivators

We don’t know that we’re searching for something called “self-actualization,” we just find ourselves perplexed by the fact that we have every “need” checked off our list, but still we find ourselves lacking. No matter what we chase as a “want” to solve that emptiness, we’re left unsatisfied. What Steve calls Resistance is a force that pushes us away from the big questions. […]

So stories of depth and meaning are those that progress to this ultimate mystery, this ultimate need. The lead character may consciously desire a want, but it is his unconscious need for self-actualization that pushes him to the limits of human experience. […]

But remember, like their human counterparts, your fictional protagonists will distract themselves in innumerable ways from contending directly with them. They chase wants not needs. And in most instances, they will not consciously understand or reconcile the need to know themselves (who they really are) until the very end of the story.”

Shawn Coyle

I love studying story so much because it a) helps me understand my own motivations, needs, and wants, b) helps me understand people in general better, and c) helps me make things and communicate about those things in better ways, ways that resonate harder.

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