I just write stuff for the paper

Bloody tough gig these days, journalism. Papers are closing, the e-nvironment is saturated with news sources and getting anyone to read your stuff is harder, these days, than getting planning permission to build a dog house.

You really need to be able to grab the reader's attention with a spectacular revelation or sensational scandal.

There are two things standing in your way:

Firstly, spectacular revelations require research which, in turn, require time and money. Unless you work for one of those egg-head, low salary boring places that has an interest in the facts, your editor is not going to allow you the luxury of time or money.

Secondly, life is fairly dull. In fact, the universe around is endlessly fascinating but not in ways that interest most readers: it’s not wearing see-through dresses on the red carpet, it doesn't have a hit single that is musically indistinguishable from everything else on the charts, it isn't using plastic surgery to disguise its age (after all, 13 and a bit billion years gives you more fine lines and wrinkles than even the most audacious snake oil anti-ageing cream manufacturer could credibly claim to disguise) and, while sex in nature is abundant, it tends not to be illicit and is generally only of interest to people who are using David Attenborough as their sexologist.

You are going to need a way to dress up the tedium of daily human happenings in such a way that you can attract readers without attracting actions for libel.

Thank God for me and my sarcastic blog.

Start with headlines phrased as questions. "J-Lo is having an affair" needs proof. "Is J Lo having an affair?" needs an answer, which you can invite the reader to provide for themselves by supplying a judiciously edited selection of facts, gossip and speculation.

Your next best friend is "reportedly": "J Lo has reportedly been seen with..." Now you're not asserting the fact of the affair, you're stating the fact that the fact has been asserted by someone else’s report. If needs be, you can create that report yourself by having a friend post something on Facebook.

“Reportedly” has a couple of good mates you can rope in to help you out:

“Speculation is growing that …” means you heard a couple of people chatting about it at the bus stop.

“It is thought that …” means you dreamed it up in the shower.

If you’re struggling for subject matter then helping people with their first world problems is always going to be a winner. Here are two good safe fall-backs to get you started:

Health and wellbeing. At first glance, this looks like dangerous territory because you don’t actually know anything about medicine. But look harder. We’re not talking about home-tonsillectomy instructions here, just general advice on imaginary problems. The same basic tips (drink more water, eat more fruit and veg, get some sleep, get some exercise, don’t smoke and drink) can be presented as ways to treat all manner of ailments: office stress, low libido, depression, obesity, feeling unpopular or a little bit ugly.

Office etiquette / career help tips are also good. You work in an office so just find the things that annoy you most about your co-workers and broaden them out into general advice. It would appear that there are a great many people out there that need constant reminding that picking your nose in public, eating garlic sausages at your desk, sending rude messages about your boss on the company email system and/or stealing other people’s lunch from the fridge are bad for your reputation and standing in the company. You can always trot that one out.

And people are suckers for lists. Headline your work “Top 7 tips for …” and you’ll get thousands of clicks from the huge number of us that consume bullet points like ecstasy pills.

Don’t worry about reader feedback too much. Almost all of your stuff will be published online these days and 95% of your readers are just trying to fill the day by reading ‘news’ articles because it looks slightly more like work than playing Tetris, and the company’s firewall has blocked access to their usual research material. You’ll find that most most people don’t actually read each word that you’ve written, they just take in the general gist, so any feedback you get will be so far off-topic that you can safely ignore it. In fact, you can ignore it all anyway. Web 2.0 with its blogs and message boards and Twitter feeds has always been about giving people the impression that someone is listening to them when, in fact, articles go from “open to comment”, through “closed for comment” to “comments ridiculed over staff drinks and then deleted” in the space of twenty-four hours.

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