An Internet Journalist Shares Eleven Breakthrough Moments
Published in
2 min readAug 3, 2014
- The Content Will Find You: For weeks I’d been wanting to write a straw man argument takedown, but I couldn’t find the right argument to oppose. Then my four year-old said something totally wrong about String Theory.
- Make it Accessible: Ukrainian unrest, the history of the Israeli-Hamas conflict, Ebola, legalized marijuana, recession investment strategies, immigration policy, affirmative action, abortion politics, and the current state of Al Qaeda and its various offshoots; all explained in one hilarious chart.
- Don’t Sweat the Details: Title: This App Will Change Your Life. (App and content TBD.)
- The Art of Clipping: I found a semi-interesting article based on dubious facts that was behind a paywall. Three words: Copy and Paste. (Actually, it only required two words, I copied the word and from the source material.)
- Structure, Structure, Structure: Topic (to be determined). Style (to be determined). Publication (to be determined). Format (Quiz).
- Extrapolate: One extremely unusual dude in a very remote place did something highly irregular that was hardly noticed by those in closest proximity. In other words, my next trend piece practically wrote itself.
- Drive the Conversation: Working title: What an article that hasn’t been written gets wrong about a topic I know nothing about.
- A.B.E. Always Be Editing: I completely reworked one of my old pieces by simply replacing its title with a question.
- Write, Don’t Think: In my next thought piece, I’ll describe my experiences as I think about another previously-written thought piece (Subject matter possibilites: Millennials still living with their parents, or the Kama Sutra).
- Find New Angles: A Statistical Analysis Of The Work Of Bob Ross. (Scratch this one, FiveThirtyEight beat me to the punch.)
- Last Resort: Forget writing an article. I’ll just write a list beneath a cool image I stole from the Internet.
Dave Pell is the Internet Journalist behind NextDraft. You’re a complete idiot if you don’t subscribe to it.
