Category — Jobs & Careers

As anyone who’s read the news anytime recently knows, the marketplace for print journalism is taking its most severe beating in decades. Newspapers from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to the Chicago Tribune to even the vaunted New York Times are hitting perhaps their hardest economic slumps ever, and it’s resulting in layoffs at papers and magazines across the country.

One segment for print journalism, however, is enjoying unexpectedly flush times: trade publications and industry newsletters. As this story on NPR’s evening drivetime “Marketplace” show reports, journalists who formerly would have spent their days chasing stories for general interest newspapers are now covering stories in much greater depth and detail, though for far smaller audiences than the papers they once worked for.

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The job title “content strategist” is one that has evolved over the past decade or so as the interactive agency business has grown and with it the need for people who can think strategically about the kinds of content that websites should publish.

Content strategists combine the skills of writers, editors and publishers to think in a holistic way about what users should see when they visit a site — are they looking for articles? Audio or video clips? Calendars of upcoming events?

They also give a lot of time to thinking about how content should be presented on a website, the order in which users should see it, and the editorial voice and tone it should speak with consistently across a site.

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Anyone who’s ever worked in an advertising agency is familiar with the role of the copywriter. Responsible for everything from coming up with concepts to writing the copy that fills brochures, billboards, direct mail pieces, magazine advertisements and scripts for radio and television spots, copywriters perform one of the most sought-after jobs for new graduates with degrees in advertising, marketing and communications every year.

Within the interactive agency world, what copywriters do on a day-to-day basis is very different, however, from what their counterparts in the traditional ad agency world. While those in traditional ad agencies write for print and broadcast media — and strive to meet the expectations of readers, viewers and listeners paying attention to those kinds of media, who can be expected to follow a story or commercial from beginning to end — those working in interactive agencies write most often for websites and online advertisements, which call for a different approach to writing.

Web pages, promotional text & banner ads

Copywriters who work in the interactive agency world (or the web design agency world) are part of a creative team that builds an interactive site experience on the Web. This means that rather than creating an ad that is a self-contained unit, they have to think of how Web users will browse content online, and how what they write can support the goals or the tasks a user is trying to achieve.

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