Web Writing for a Progressive Audience

Though the professionals at Salon TeeVee make it look easy, producing this endless stream of histrionic, self-righteous demagoguery is actually anything but.  Effective web writing for an audience made up of the intellectual and cultural elite demands the mastery of a great number of complex creative skills.  This three-hour course will examine the tools of the craft required to successfully compose thoughtful, probing, one-sided indictments of all aspects of Western culture, just like the gaggle of hacks we employ.

Topics will include:

• News versus Opinion: Is there really any difference?
• How to make every single thing that happens at any time, anywhere sound like the final nail in the coffin of enlightened civilization.
• How to trace responsibility for every single thing that happens at any time, anywhere back to George W. Bush.
• The delicate art of applying the same set of criticisms to hundreds of different subjects, whether they actually apply or not.
• Going Beyond the Facts: From hard statistics to wild speculation in three easy steps.
• Meeting your readers' expectations by repeating their own opinions back to them.
• "I Can See You're Wrong From Up Here": Describing the view from the Moral High Ground.

Danny Tarbell has been a freelance Internet writer for over six years, and has contributed to such influential web sites as Salon, Slate, Nerve, Suck, Trash, Phlegm, Wonk, Spite, Meta, Meta-Meta, Dung, and fogdog.com.  He also writes frequent updates to his own online journal, The Tarbell Papers, and is the author of a forthcoming book, Postcards From the Web, which is basically a bunch of stupid blog entries that he somehow managed to convince some idiot to publish.

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