Categories
Being Creative & Ideas

Are you part of the trend?

The web is offering research and insight into what people like to do – so make use of it!

Google Trends and Google Adwords are two of the search giant’s tools any writer can use free of charge to get an idea on what people are interested in, and, if they are savvy, what phrases to use to pick up traffic to their blog or Amazon page.

Categories
Research

Columnists – opinionated or sentimental?

Newspapers have become more opinionated. Not’s not my opinion, it’s a fact as proved when I spent a long time in the British Library’s newspaper section going through past opinion columns.

In this sense, opinionated means ‘having more opinion columns’. Back in the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s there were just a handful of opinion columns, by the early 2000s newspapers appeared online, but as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine records shows, Comment lacked its own navigation on the Guardian just a decade ago.

But has the sentiment and tone changed too – are papers becoming more opinionated?