What a newsroom taught me about B2B content

I started my career in newsrooms. I reported and blogged for the Columbia Missourian, edited a department at Vox Magazine and later served as its managing editor, all while studying at the Missouri School of Journalism. I didn't know then that I was training for B2B marketing. I know it now.

The discipline of a newsroom maps almost exactly onto the problem technical firms have with content: a great deal of expertise, a limited amount of attention, and a deadline that doesn't move.

Lead with what changed

A news story earns the next paragraph by telling you, right away, what happened and why it matters to you. Most corporate content does the opposite. It opens with the firm, its history and its capabilities, and gets to the point three paragraphs later — if at all.

The fix is a reporter's question: what's new here, and who needs to know? A regulation changed. A project reached a milestone. A method solved a problem that used to be expensive. Start there.

Verify everything

Fact-checking was part of my job at Vox, and it's a habit I've never lost. In technical industries it matters even more. The audience includes people who know the subject better than the writer does, and a single wrong figure costs credibility that took years to build.

• Check every number against its source.
• Have the subject-matter expert read it — for accuracy, not for style.
• When you aren't sure, say less.

Edit for the reader, not the org chart

Editing a department taught me that most drafts are too long because they are trying to please too many people. Every stakeholder wants their sentence in. A good editor protects the reader from that, and a good content lead does the same inside a firm.

Clarity is a discipline, not a talent — and like any discipline, it needs someone whose job is to enforce it.

Run it like an editorial calendar

A weekly magazine ships every week whether or not inspiration strikes. That rhythm — story meetings, assignments, deadlines, a flow of copy from draft to proof to publish — is exactly what a content program needs. Without it, content happens when someone has time, which in a busy professional-services firm means almost never.

Mentor the writers you have

As managing editor, part of my job was helping reporters get better at the craft. In a firm, your best writers are often engineers and scientists who don't think of themselves as writers at all. Treat them like reporters: help them find the story, give them structure, and edit with them rather than around them.

The throughline

Journalism and B2B marketing share a job: take something complicated and make it clear, accurate and worth someone's time. The tools haven't changed much. The newsroom just made me practice them every day, on deadline, until they became instinct.

Sources and further reading

• Inverted Pyramid: Writing for Comprehension — Nielsen Norman Group, Amy Schade, 2018
• How Users Read on the Web — Nielsen Norman Group, Jakob Nielsen, 1997