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This grief is real, trailblazing women in media & copy resource of the week
Kimberly Houston
November 17, 2024
Hey, hi, howdy, and welcome to Issue #30 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 freelancing
✨ This grief is real
✨ Trailblazing Women in Media: Olivia Messer
✨ Copy Resource of the Week: Headline Analyzer
✨ Just for Fun
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This week in freelancing
Earlier this month when I looked at my client project schedule for November, I realized I would have to write eight articles in the span of the 10 business days between 11/11 – 11/22.
This is highly unusual for me, and mostly down to onboarding a new client plus having to get things done before the Thanksgiving holiday.
Unlike some of my freelance friends, especially some of the journalists I know, I am not a blazing fast writer.
Methodical, organized, and obsessed with the details? Yes. Lightning fast? No. But maybe this will be good practice for getting there. 😊
Send good vibes, friends!
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This grief is real.
I was doing some reading in the days after the recent U.S. election about grief and despair.
I knew that feeling this way after the result wasn’t unusual, didn’t make me weird, and in fact, was also felt by many thousands upon thousands of my fellow citizens.
I found this article in Scientific American especially helpful. If you too are feeling some level of grief about recent events, maybe this will help.
Understanding the psychology of ambiguous loss can help people struggling with grief and depression in the wake of the 2024 election results.
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Trailblazing Women in Media: Olivia Messer
Olivia Messer is Editor-in-Chief of The Barbed Wire, a recently launched digital news outlet in Texas. Focused on sports, food, culture, politics, and entertainment stories, the publication features aggregation, essays, columns, and original reporting, along with some (Texas) statehouse coverage and longer-form investigations.
While the focus is on Texas, The Barbed Wire aims to be both locally relevant and interesting on a national level.
Previously, Messer was a fellow at the Texas Observer, a local crime reporter at the Waco Tribune-Herald, and lead reporter at The Daily Beast in New York City, where she worked on breaking and national news. She’s also written for Rolling Stone, Slate, Marie Claire, Texas Monthly, and numerous other outlets.
She spent years reporting and writing about misconduct at the Texas State Capitol, including this stellar piece in Texas Monthly:
A revision of the upper chamber’s employee policy was supposed to address misconduct exposed by the #MeToo movement. In practice, it protects the institution, not the women who work there.
Here’s Messer on The Barbed Wire, in her own words. (I suggest reading that whole page if you have time; it’s a master class in laying out the publication’s raison d'etre and differentiating it from other media properties.)
“We would like to make you laugh and tell you hard stories. We want to inform, to engage, and to help you waste an hour. The Barbed Wire will have cultural coverage of Texas sports, food, pop culture, money, and power by some of your favorite Texas writers and comedians.
The Barbed Wire will punch above its weight, but we are also something different: a site that combines the best of savvy, new-model online journalism with Texas’ deep — and very old — association with progressive ideas. Gummy vitamins and brain worms, in equal measure.”
Oh, how I love a story about an ambitious woman launching a media company!
You can learn more about Olivia Messer and The Barbed Wire at the inline links above, and / or check out:
The veteran journalist discusses her return to local journalism and her vision for a new kind of Texas news outlet.
I’d like to do things differently here. And as the 39th governor of Texas, John Connally, once wrote: “There’s no better place than Texas to start over.”
Messer’s Muck Rack journalist profile, which features 1194 articles, as of this writing.
Her LinkedIn profile here and her personal website here
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Copy Resource of the Week: Headline Analyzer
This week’s Copy Resource is a replay of a handy tool I previously shared way back in Issue #3, on 11.05.23.
Which means if you’re new around here, you probably missed it, and if you were around all the way back to Issue #3, first of all, I love you (😍), and second of all, you might not remember it.
In any case, if you do any kind of writing online – and if you’re reading this, I suspect you do – then you know how critically important compelling headlines are to everything you write.
But only if you want folks to read your articles/blog posts/landing pages/sales pages/emails, and so on.
I’ve played around with many a headline analyzer over the years, but this one is an overwhelming favorite:
Simply enter a headline in the space provided and click on “analyze.”
You’ll be given an overall Headline Quality Score, along with individual scores for things like relevance, punchiness, clarity, catchiness, context and emotional impact.
And the great thing is, you’ll also get a breakdown of why you received the scores you did – which is super helpful for your writing going forward, so you’ll know what to replicate, what to improve and what to ditch.
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Just for Fun
I found this Joy Generator created by NPR to be especially helpful this week. I hope you will, too.
Feeling blah? Science shows you can boost happiness by taking time for small moments of delight. We’ve got ideas to try out right now. So let’s play!
(Once you click on the link above, the menu in the top right corner will take you to Soothing Sounds, The Power of Cute, Call of the Wild, Poetry Made Easy, and other joy-inducing delights.)
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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 December 1.
Warmly,
Kimberly