In case you missed it, our first Community Writing Workshop was a success!

This will all make sense if you watch the video

We held our first-ever Daily Kos Community Writing Workshop! This is something we’ve long talked about doing and finally made happen via Zoom on Sept. 22. Thank you to everyone, Community and Staff, who showed up to learn, support, and ask smart questions. It was encouraging to see how many people were interested in forming groups on Daily Kos to support each other’s writing—I hope that’s something you all make happen, because as we emphasized in the workshop, the more support and eyes you can have on your writing, the better. 

In case you missed it, we recorded the panel portion (though not the Q and A that followed) so folks can watch it after the fact. 

You’ll see:

• Our Managing Editor of Community Content, Jessica Sutherland, laying out the basics of storytelling—where to start and how to craft a story.
• Our Content Strategist, Cara Zelaya, sharing why your writing at Daily Kos matters, with some data and fun examples to back it up
• Our Managing Editor of Trending News, Jen Hayden, providing some tips on how to get better engagement on your stories, including writing strong headlines, choosing the right images, how to embed media, and more.

We talked about a lot of different stories and links in the presentation, so I’m going to highlight those below as well in case you want to follow up and dive in deeper:

• Community member Charles Jay’s fantastic guide on choosing a topic for writing, something he wrote in the lead up to this workshop.
• The Masterclass on the Inverted Pyramid that Jessica referenced in her presentation.
• Though it didn’t make it into the workshop, Jessica recommends another piece from Columbia Journalism Review called “What Is Political Writing For?”
• That time a “The Fortress,” a series of Daily Kos Community stories by GretchRHammond, was named a finalist for the Chicago Lisagor Journalism Awards, and the link to the story itself.
• That other time when beloved Community member freewayblogger made $10,000 from a satirical story he published here about dealing acid at Jim Morrison’s grave in 1982 and meeting Vladimir Putin.
• A roundup of powerful abortion stories—all written by Daily Kos Community. 
• An easy-peasy video tutorial on how to use the Image Library that Cara mentioned.

And here is the video:

This workshop is the first of what I hope will be many to come, so if you have any ideas for what you’d like more guidance on or a more in-depth session about, we would love to hear from you. Feel free to drop suggestions in comments below or reach out to any of us Staff who led the workshop.