Kelechi Njoku

How can you make a survey when you don't have resources? Know your product. Know why it exists and what you're trying to do. Stick to that tone. Then talk to people like they're people. Storytelling. That's just one part. I know people who are really, really good at survey design and agonise over things like structure and flow. We're lucky in that The Continent News has a distinct voice. This helps us when we might not have the in-house skills, or budget, for better survey tools. Voice is key.

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#OnSynopsis Dear writers, when a publishing house tells you to send in your synopsis as part of their submission process please write it well. (Most especially if it's Ouida because we are very picky) Don't underestimate the power of a well-crafted synopsis. It's also a determining factor to if the submissions editor will ask you for a full manuscript or not. When I used to be a submissions editor, I used to have like 20+ manuscripts to get through in a week. Quite a number of submissions editors will likely not read the entire first three chapters you send, but one thing they will check before they send you an email will be the synopsis of your story. A strong synopsis is guaranteed to get their attention. Think of it as a captivating trailer for your story. Include spoilers! Don't hold back on the major plot points. Do not end with a cliff hanger, nobody has time for that. In fact, it's annoying. The goal is to give the editor a clear picture of your narrative arc and its core themes. This approach helps you 🎯 highlight your story's potential. A compelling synopsis showcases the heart of your work, piquing the editor's interest and making them want to see more. The first three chapters you submit showcase your writing style and sentence construction, but the synopsis allows you to condense those skills into a powerful summary. Please write your synopsis well. It's your chance to stand out from the slush pile! T for Thanks. #writing #manuscript #synopsis #publishing

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The Vouchsafe project for digital identities in Scottish public services has moved into its beta phase with the team beginning to explain its operation to the public. The idea of using social vouching in the verification of digital identities has won support on both sides of the border, but seems to be moving much quicker in Scotland. It has obviously been higher on the list of priorities, but it's also notable that the Scottish Government has allowed the small team at Vouchsafe, previously known as Interrobang, really run with the project. https://lnkd.in/epWwq66P #scotland #digitalidentity #publicservices #socialvouching

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Just had to answer a question around what I feel are the major barriers to reporting on climate change. This is, loosely, my answer. What do you think? "The Pew Research Center reports that 77% of newsroom staff are white, and 48% of them are white and male. And it's not just journalism. When Reuters put out a "Hot List" of 1,000 influential climate scientists, they had five from the whole continent of Africa, and four of them were white. When you ask what the major barriers are to climate change reporting, the first and greatest barrier is colonialism and its effects. Who gets to tell the stories and whose stories do you tell? When you look at the thought and person leaders in newsrooms, how many of them reflect the global majority and how many of them perpetuate biases towards privilege? As in the wider climate space, you cannot decarbonise unless you decolonise. Climate change disproportionately affects communities of colour. But when I address rooms of colleagues, campaigners and financial stakeholders, why do so few of them look like me? How can we then address climate change when we haven't centred climate justice?"

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You may notice what an editor missed … but you don’t see allll the mistakes and clarity issues they caught. Editors today do the work of what used to be multiple people. ✅ Developmental editing ✅ Copyediting ✅ Proofreading ✅ Often fact-checking too And we do it all on deadline. If we make a mistake, believe me, we hear about it. It’s the only thing we hear. Nobody ever says, “Hey! Great job on the editing!” How would they know?? We do our jobs in secret. 😎 So next time you notice a mistake in a publication, go ahead, pat yourself on the back about how good you are. Yeah, yeah. 😉 Then think about when you do a job nobody notices … until you mess up. And maybe don’t shame us too hard.

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Writing and publishing a quality book demands so many things: a great idea, a writer who can turn that idea into a compelling and fascinating story, professional editing to ensure the final manuscript is errors free, cover design that fascinates readers and gives a foretaste into the tone and story elements within, expert interior formatting among others. But it is all worth it when you hold your finished copy and can tell the world you have published a great book! AuthorPad is here to help you get it done. ☎️ +256 706477376, +256 771830435 📧 authorpad.ug@gmail.com, publish@authorpad.ug 🌐 www.authorpad.ug #InscribingLegacies #TogetherWeCan #AuthorPad

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This is a good article highlighting the barriers for reuse of public domain content. Life could be made a lot easier for researchers/authors with a consistent approach. https://lnkd.in/etQETs66

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Good, relevant press releases can sometimes feel like gold dust to journalists. I wrote a little guide to getting them noticed for the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s content hub (click the link below). Top tips: 🗞 Consider whether what’s in your press release is really news 😃 Remember your audience. The first person a journalist thinks about is the reader 📧 Sell the story in four or five words – that’s all you get on a smartphone email subject line ✍ Get to the point in your first sentence ❓ Anticipate the questions the journalist will ask and be ready to answer CIM | The Chartered Institute of Marketing #writing #journalism #mediatraining #pr #pressrelease #email #communications #copywriting https://lnkd.in/eC5ZpQxZ

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Oooh! I made the cover! 'Why training and CPD never get old' is by yours truly - my reasons for not stopping training just because you've been doing your job for a long time. Last year my article for Communicator on how nasty and invidious perfectionism is was voted readers' favourite. Can lightning strike twice in succession?? 🌩🤞🏻 #ISTC #Communicator #amwriting #CPD

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A question for researchers, history nerds and especially archivists. I'll be at The National Archives, UK at Kew next week, looking at 16th-century records of the dissolution of religious houses to understand how women were impacted by the sudden elimination of their roles in the English Church. Fascinating stuff (to me at least). But it's made me think about the bizarre gatekeeping attitude of so many archives, something that's baffled me since I started studying history last year. Too little is digitised, which is understandable given the mass of documents. What I cannot understand is the resistance to letting some of us help. Some archives make you pay exorbitant fees to photograph documents, even just for personal later reference (thankfully, not the National Archives, thank you folks). Others won't let you photograph them at all. When you can take pictures, you are strictly forbidden from publishing them. Why? We are talking about public, tax-funded archives here and documents that are centuries out of copyright or privacy concerns. So you have to spend days physically present at archive sites to manually transcribe documents... then selfishly keep that to yourself. You end up traveling longer than the few opening hours they've got. It's fun but it's not cheap or accessible. I'm only able to do this because I'm self-employed and deprioritised paid work for a while, not without tremendous privilege. Another classmate is taking PTO. A third simply gave up on primary sources; her research and her grade will suffer. With a bit more openness and imagination, we could crowdsource archive digitisation and advance knowledge. Instead so much is restricted to a few well-funded professional researchers and time-rich pensioners. Historians, archivists, researchers, what am I missing? Is there good reason to keep things so close to the chest, or is it just institutional reflex? #history #archives #research

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AI is developing very quickly, which means the governance around its use will have to be ready to change as gaps occur. That emerges as the key message of a report published just before Parliament ended from the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. One disturbing detail is the suggestion that the AI Safety Institute - a key feature of the existing governance arrangements - has not been able to get access to some developers’ models to carry out pre-deployment safety testing. It suggests there is already a tension between commercial interests and the effort to provide safety in how AI is used. https://lnkd.in/er9-BXxC #ai

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Editing pet peeve: the goofy obsession with the Oxford comma. Oxford enthusiasts—whom I often refer to as "Oxfordnistas"—insist that the serial comma is the ultimate arbiter of clarity and slayer of ambiguity. And they demonstrate this overstated power through a series of reductionist—albeit humorous—memes. Below on the left is one such example. Again, this meme assuredly suggests a moment where a lack of a serial comma may confuse readers. Rather than express a list of the three, the Oxford-less sentence seems to imply an appositive suggesting the exotic dancers are, in fact, Stalin and JFK. But what happens if you change strippers (plural) to stripper (singular). One good contrived strawman argument deserves another, right? On the right is the counterpoint. Here, the sentence with the Oxford comma introduces ambiguity. Is that JFK on stage three collecting singles, or is somebody else? The trick is simple: When in doubt, rewrite. "We invited JFK, Stalin and the strippers." See how this is clearly a list of three? See how I didn't need the comma to do so? Ultimately, the Oxford comma is a stylistic convention, so it is a matter of personal preference. You can also write, "We invited JFK, Stalin, and the strippers." That *also* works. Either way, stop pretending that your prescriptivist take on the Oxford comma is holy writ. #Oxfordcomma

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Hi fellow journos. I'd like to let you know about a specific opportunity for reporting on health or science innovation. It's for publication in local, regional or state outlets. You can be a staff journo or a freelancer. Here are details: We’re seeking proposals from freelance and staff journalists, partnered with U.S. local news outlets, who need support for their in-depth reporting on research and innovation related to global health-related topics.  Our goal is to bridge the information gap between the scientific community and U.S. local news audiences through high-quality journalism. Grantees will produce engaging, evidence-driven stories that enrich understanding, reduce public misperceptions, and raise awareness about vital public health R&D, medical research and innovation related to today’s top global health challenges.  We support the travel and hard costs of reporting and welcome proposals for all formats of storytelling such as broadcast tv/radio, multimedia, podcast, data journalism, photojournalism, digital and print. This opportunity is open to any staff or freelance reporters who will publish their reporting with U.S. local or regional news outlets.  For inspiration, go to the Pulitzer Center website to look for links to these center-supported projects: Shortages of Key Drugs Have Alarmed U.S. Medical Officials. Could Puerto Rico Offer an Answer? | Milwaukee Sentinel Journal A Flesh-Eating Bacteria Lurking in the Ocean Is Killing People in the Carolinas | Raleigh News & Observer Can Biotech Save Africa?  | The Des Moines Register

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Another advise to my media relations colleagues: Please do NOT try to write an opaque news release, omitting and hiding basic information, if that information is already in the public domain. You won't be able to conceal it, because a basic Google search will show what is all about, while you are making the reporter feel that time could be used in a more productive way. And if the information is already in the public domain because somehow taxpayers' money is involved, it is simply insulting.

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SEDUCTION BY STORY Like many people in the publishing industry, I have been experimenting with using AI tools as part of my daily workflow. The technology is without doubt a powerful aid. For example, being able to upload an audio recording of an interview and have the LLM transcribe it has been transformative for me. As a tool for writing, the results are more mixed. All too often, when presented with a set of facts that I prompt the AI to transform into narrative, the AI struggles to ascertain relevance or context and instead employs hyperbole or a false sense of urgency to impart meaning or relevance. It is much the same technique social media and advertising uses to grab your attention. My solution to working with AI to get the best results is a surprisingly simple one: I end every prompt with the instruction, “make it boring.” The results are more accurate, more true-to-life. (Try it, it works.) So, it turns out that after nearly two years of development—ChatGPT was launched just a few weeks after the 2022 Frankfurt Book Fair—what AI is worst at is exactly the one thing the publishing industry is best at: storytelling. Storytelling is at the heart of book fairs and literary events that take place around the world each fall. The exchange of stories between cultures and languages is itself facilitated by storytelling, between publishers and literary agents and right representatives, who sit in urgent conversation at small tables in 30-minute increments trying to seduce each other with stories, at events ranging from the Frankfurter Buchmesse to Sharjah International Book Fair | معرض الشارقة الدولي للكتاب to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. This same happens writers and audiences gathered at book fairs — from the Texas Book Festival to the Miami Book Fair. There have been numerous efforts to replace face-to-face meetings with video conferences and to automate dealmaking. Few have succeeded. Why? There’s something about human emotion that best tells—and sells—a story. The experience of traveling to a book fair or festival is about experiencing serendipity and surprise—two qualities that also evade the AI. Books embody something that is quite the opposite of what the AI can, at its best, offer—predictability—and at its worst—hallucination and hyperbole. What we want out of our experience of a book is something quite the opposite of boring. It is seduction by story. [A Version of this editorial previously appeared in the October 16 issue of the Frankfurt Book Fair Show Daily published by Publishers Weekly / Image produced with Ideogram] #AI, #bookfair, #literature, #literaryagent, #publishing, #books, #authors #publishersweekly, #ednawotka

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