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Want to Start a Publication? Start with One Article
Why it’s okay to crawl before you can run
It’s easy for gravitational pull — fear, doubt, uncertainty, lenience, confusion — to draw a project out longer than it needs to take. Especially at a large company, it feels like the more time and money you have, the better it’ll turn out.
Of course, that’s not true; I’ve done projects with plenty of time, and some with tighter timelines, and there’s usually no correlation with how it ends up turning out. What does change is the quickness to test and displaying momentum. Let’s say a trusted agency or in-house team takes six months to ship a project, and you want to see results sooner. They won’t budge. Can you scope the project down and meet your own sooner deadline?
If the project is important enough, you’ll focus on it. Let’s say you’re working to build a publication: maybe, write up one investigative article yourself or with a collaborative writer (AI or human!), editor, and researcher. If you can do one post, you can do a series. You can also promote that draft or post to some of your target readers; it’ll be a good reason to meet actual people. If you can do a series, you can then turn it into a zine. If you turn it into a zine, you can turn it into a publication; you can also work with a designer to make a print version of the…
