Writing for the City: A Medium Story
One Coro Fellow’s journey with a new social media platform and creative freedom
“What makes Medium Unique?” Medium is a cool hybrid platform — part social network, part publication. It has an incredibly sleek design with minimal formatting options so that readers can focus on the content of a post easily. Writers can incorporate all kinds of media types from videos to embedded tweets. And every post is incredibly interactive; you can comment, highlight, bookmark, follow, share, and send private messages.
But the greatest part is that anyone can use it and anyone can make a publication with friends or coworkers. It democratizes blogging and makes it easy for any individual or group to create a publication and increase their reach.
In August 2017, The Department of Innovation and Performance at the City of Pittsburgh decided to create a Medium account to tell residents about new digital services, events, and projects and increase civic engagement overall. And I was tasked with writing the first post about a popular speaker-series in the community, Creative Mornings. Since then, I’ve written fifteen posts for the City and edited many more. Here’s what I’ve learned.
Know Your Audience
You might hear this again and again throughout your life but it’s surprising how easily people forget to follow this rule. Just because you might be a veteran city employee who understands urban planning and zoning policies, doesn’t mean your audience does — they might not even care. Decide early on who your audience is, where their interests lie, and what you are trying to convey to them. This was a particularly difficult task since our audience was all residents in Pittsburgh and possibly even other local governments. That means we had an incredible diverse range of interests and knowledge bases. With this in mind, we narrowed in on a few buckets of topics: Community Events, Digital Services, Inclusive Innovation, PGH Lab, and Process Improvement.
- PGH Lab, Process Improvement, and Digital Services contains posts that explain some of the work we do here at Innovation and Performance such as optimize city services, improve work flow processes, and create partnerships between startups and local government. With these posts, we aim to tell the general public a little about what we do and how we are bringing the City of Pittsburgh into the digital age. We also hope to let other cities know what methods and best practices we are using here in Pittsburgh.
- Community Events and Inclusive Innovation posts are about highlighting key partnerships within the city and how we are working together to make Pittsburgh a more equitable city for all. With these posts, we aim to tell the general public about amazing work being done around the city and how they can be participate via events and more.
In both cases, we make sure to think of why a resident or partner would be interested in the story before we write it. It’s even better if you can include a call to action at the end.
Tell a Story
More than dates and partnerships, people want to hear a story about what the problem was, who came together, how they solved it, and what they learned along the way. No matter what new product or service is released, be sure to include the story behind it. It not only makes the story more memorable and easy to understand, but also emphasizes the learning process and humanizes city government. By exchanging narratives and lessons-learned, the publication feels like a strong mode of communication between residents and city employees.
Highlight Key Partnerships
It’s good practice to highlight partners and give people credit for their work. Not only does this demonstrate that your organization is collaborative and inclusive, but it also helps expand the reach of your publication through tags, links, and shares from partners.
Engage/Lead your Audience
There should be no leaps of logic in your story that may confuse a reader. Go slowly and explain each step (but also don’t get bogged down in the details). Ask rhetorical questions when necessary to help guide the reader through the problem-solving process and walk them through every decision. Personally, I like to bold questions at the end of a paragraph. What other methods do you use to engage your audience?
Be Concise and Not-too Formal
Medium articles are short. Our posts tend to be between a 5–8 minute read and the most popular posts of all time are around 7 minutes. You have to keep all the main points of a story and take out anything that seems too detailed or not quite related to the lesson or message you are trying to convey.
The most powerful sentences are simple ones. The tone and feel of Medium is informal, almost as if you are speaking to a colleague out-loud. That means no essay language, no crazy vocabulary (unless you explain it well), and no passive voice. But you are still representing the City of Pittsburgh so make sure to find a healthy balance of an informal but still appropriate and informative tone. Additionally, residents can be of any age or educational background so writing at a 6th grade level is good practice. Someone who has no understanding of government or innovation should be able to follow what you are talking about relatively easily.
Don’t be afraid to speak in first, second, or third person. Our publication has a range of different perspectives and authors so each blog is written a bit differently (See Christine’s more personal post on digital inclusion). Most of the time we use first-person and the royal (or governmental) “We.”
Mix in Media
Take advantage of the all the amazing things you can add to a Medium post. We’ve embedded videos, pictures, and tweets but there’s so much more you can do! Don’t be afraid to try new things and play around. On the other hand, don’t overwhelm people with things to click on, about 3 hyperlinks is ideal.
Our featured image banner for each post is 1400px × 513px and I usually use Canva to resize. You can also align pictures in multiple different ways in the body of the post.
Formatting
Medium is minimalistic but also functional.
You can italicize, bold,
play with 2 different heading styles,
indent quotes
in 2 different ways,
make a distinctive title and subheading, add captions, and create bulleted lists. Try to use all of these different options and styles to create a visual hierarchy within your post and guide your reader. It’s beautiful and effective.
Oh and I love the three little * * * at the end of our posts. We use those dots and the following blurb to frame the posts within a particular topic or series.
Metrics
Medium provides easy to understand metrics on each post and the publication overall. Make sure to keep track of the metrics every month and record the data in an excel sheet as they tend to disappear after a while. We have not used this data as much in the last year but we hope to use it more in the future. As important as it is to create meaningful content, we also need to make sure people are reading it. If I were to go back and do anything differently, it would be to create a strong marketing plan for our Medium posts. We need to make sure it is getting to residents, not just our usual non-profit partners.
Start Writing
Be creative and break barriers. This is one of the most informal and innovative social media outlets for the City of Pittsburgh so try new things (but first get approval from your supervisors). Good luck!
P.S. See how much better it looks with a little blurb at the end? If this is my legacy, I’ll be content.
