SoloJourno

Via Mashable:

Very often, when I’m engaging people on Twitter, I think of my undergrad journalism professor, a crusty but kindly man named Charlie Ball.

“Class!” Charlie would bark at all of us, and our fingers would collectively pause over the keyboards of the electric typewriters that passed for a journalism lab 20 years ago. Charlie would wave an unfortunate someone’s liberally marked-up news manuscript in our direction and bellow, “This is what I mean! Never use a 10-cent word when a nickel word will do!”

What Charlie meant by that is that news journalism works best when it’s simple and direct, at least in the story’s lead sentences. And simplicity (and other tenets of good journalism — like brevity, and clarity, and immediacy) are now cornerstones of how many businesses, brands and individuals communicate on Twitter.

Here’s how some of the mantras from my undergrad days now inform the best tweets.

Read the full article.