{"id":712,"date":"2012-01-11T11:30:36","date_gmt":"2012-01-11T16:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bly.com\/blog\/?p=712"},"modified":"2012-01-11T11:36:40","modified_gmt":"2012-01-11T16:36:40","slug":"the-death-knell-of-the-writing-profession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/general\/the-death-knell-of-the-writing-profession\/","title":{"rendered":"The Death Knell of the Writing Profession"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It was while working as a technical writer for Westinghouse in 1979 that I first heard the term &#8220;word smith&#8221; applied to writing.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s a pretty good word smith,&#8221; my internal client said, referring to an engineer I was supposed to interview for writing a brochure; the engineer felt a mere writer couldn&#8217;t understand the subject and it would be better if he wrote it himself.<\/p>\n<p>Now a relatively new term &#8212; content &#8212; further degrades writers and the status of writing.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Writing&#8221; sounds like a craft or skill. &#8220;Content&#8221; sounds like something you buy by the can or by the pound.<\/p>\n<p>I am seeing an ad in a lot of places on the web for &#8220;Writer Access,&#8221; an organization that promises to help you &#8220;get your content written.&#8221; They match you with a writer from a pool of thousands, again commoditizing the practice of writing.<\/p>\n<p>The only ways for writers to\u00a0avoid being a commodity: \u00a0(1) write a best-seller (2) write in a specific niche in which you are perceived as an expert and (3) write direct response copy where results can be measured.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was while working as a technical writer for Westinghouse in 1979 that I first heard the term &#8220;word smith&#8221; applied to writing. &#8220;He&#8217;s a pretty good word smith,&#8221; my internal client said, referring to an engineer I was supposed to interview for writing a brochure; the engineer felt a mere writer couldn&#8217;t understand the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":716,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions\/716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}