All is well, plus trailblazing women in media and copy resource of the week

Hey, hi, howdy, and welcome to Issue #46 of The Subhead, a bi-weekly newsletter about copywriting, marketing & media, and a look at some of the women who make it great.

In today’s edition:

✨ This week in … work thoughts?

✨ Trailblazing Women in Media: Kyle Tibbs Jones

✨ Copy Resource of the Week: 13 Things to Remove from Your Website Immediately

✨ Just for Fun 

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This week in … work thoughts?

Until I figure out what this section is going to be about now that “This Week in Freelancing” no longer applies (and what to call it), I reckon “This week in work thoughts” it is … for now.

Nothing new to report this week. Everything is going well in the new job, and I feel very lucky to have landed there.

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Trailblazing Women in Media: Kyle Tibbs Jones

Kyle Tibbs Jones is the Co-Founder and Editorial & Communications Director at The Bitter Southerner & BS Publishing.

The Bitter Southerner is an Athens, Ga.-based independent media company, founded in 2013, that publishes expertly written long-form features, personal essays, reviews, profiles, and opinion pieces.

I’ve been happily reading and loving their newsletter for 8 or 9 years.

Both the newsletter and the website are gorgeously designed and full of compelling stories about diverse people living in the American South, including artists, writers, activists, chefs, farmers, musicians, bartenders, scientists, innovators, and interesting people doing interesting things from all walks of life.

As they say, “The Bitter Southerner exists to explore, from every possible angle, the duality of the Southern thing.”

Jones background before co-founding The Bitter Southerner includes working in advertising, television news, luxury travel PR, and for a corporative narrative firm, handling big clients like FedEx and Charles Schwab, where she met two of her co-founders.

She and her co-founders left that organization to launch a digital publication focused on long-form narrative. The goal was to tell stories aimed at correcting some of the misperceptions about the South, “to show the rest of the world that there were plenty of amazing people in the South doing amazing things.”

The result was The Bitter Southerner, one of my favorite weekly reads.

You can learn more about Kyle Tibbs Jones and The Bitter Southerner at the inline links above, and / or check out:

Jones’ LinkedIn profile here

The Bitter Southerner here

Subscribe to the print magazine, sign up for the newsletter, or shop their (absolutely fantastic) online store from the links on The Bitter Southerner About page here.

Listen to this conversation with Kyle Tibbs Jones about the genesis of The Bitter Southerner and the why behind the stories they choose to tell, plus a whole lot more behind-the-scenes of the publication on The Full Bleed podcast here.

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Copy Resource of the Week: 13 Things to Remove from Your Website Immediately

This 12-minute video shares “13 things to remove from your website immediately,” and though not all of them are strictly copy-related, all of them seem fairly quick and easy to handle.

Copy-related things to remove include:

· Vague homepage headlines

· Generic navigation labels

· Meaningless subheadings

· Long paragraphs

One thing I love about this video?

The rationale behind every piece of advice is explained succinctly and well, WITH real-world examples so you know why each suggestion is being made.

And if you’ve read any of my previous newsletters, you know I love me some examples!

Not only that, but the creator of this video, Andy Crestodina and Orbit Media Studios, has “20+ years of planning 1000+ website projects (and measuring performance in Analytics for each),” so they know what works and what doesn’t on websites.

Check out the video here:

13 Things to Remove from Your Website Immediately

Or for more details and context, read the accompanying blog post here.

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Just for Fun

Because I have a deep, abiding love for magazines, I thoroughly enjoyed this list of the best movies about them.

And it doesn’t hurt that some of my favorite movies make an appearance: Spotlight, Almost Famous, The Devil Wears Prada, and so on.

For each movie, there’s a synopsis, a mention of who stars in it, and what the media connection is.

Enjoy the fun here:

The 17 Best Movies About Magazines

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That’s it for this week, my friend.

As always, thanks for reading, I appreciate you!

Be well. Stay curious. See you again in two weeks, on August 24.

Warmly,

Kimberly