Fresh and tasty, or preserved and toxic? Do you have any idea what you’re eating?

Marion Nestle does. In her official life, she’s Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. She knows just about everything about food, and she knows how to tell people about it. Her book What to Eat is a bestseller, she’s on every food journalist’s A-List, and she’s booked solid with speaking engagements.

Marion and her publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), chose Names@Work to put together her new blog, which launched just yesterday, on the date of the release of the softcover edition of What to Eat. She’s eager to get going — her friends have been telling her to blog, she’s obviously a natural, and she has a lot to say about in-the-news topics. But she’s also apprehensive, though not for the usual anxious reasons. Marion is worried about the time commitment.

She is phenomenally busy, and the last thing she needs is something to eat up what little free time she has, as blogging can easily do. So we wanted to emphasize the time-saving benefits of blogging (yes, there are many), to help Marion communicate quickly and effectively, without getting “blogged” down.

To a professional writer, a blog is a very strange beast. It requires writing, but it’s very ephemeral. It’s conversational, but not spoken. It pretty much has to be written in the first person, which can be uncomfortable if you’re not used to it. The occasional error will surely creep in; there are no copy-editors. And (here’s where it eats time), it takes a while to strike the right balance between getting it right, and getting it out.

Marion is right when she says that this will create more people wanting her attention, and not fewer. But for all that, a blog can actually make a busy person more productive. Like many “productivity aids”, that may mean that it just allows you to do more with the time you don’t have — but that’s how busy people are.

Here are a few ways that a blog can help you if you’re already famous and overcommitted.

• A blog post can quickly answer a question of the moment that you don’t want to write into a million emails to a million reporters.
• A blog, because it’s written in the first person, can help satisfy those people who don’t want information, but want a personal connection with you. Commenting on blogs make people feel connected, especially if you participate in the comments yourself, even occasionally. This may cut down on those emails you feel guilty about not answering.
• Because they get picked up so quickly by search engines, blog posts (combined with credentials) let reporters know that you’re on top of stuff, and you can direct them there for quotes.
• A blog works like a website too, so you can post up commonly requested materials, like a speaking schedule, a curriculum vitae, a bio, and so on — without having to respond individually.
• You can use a blog for access control — for instance, you can ask people to write to you via your contact form. In the form, you can ask for things like people’s phone number, their full name, and all kinds of other information that’s useful to know when you’re deciding if you should call them back. A note to check the FAQ before contacting you may help too.

Luckily, I don’t have these problems!

I really enjoy helping people like Marion get started blogging, because she actually has something to say. How different from the drones who just post up links to other blogs they happen to have read! On the other side, I know some academics (you know who you are) who are absolutely scintillating in conversation yet turn out dry-as-dust papers that not even their mothers could love, and refuse very opportunity to engage with the unwashed masses. I’ve always attributed their reticence to a combination of fear (they’re not used to communicating that way), snobbery (it’s not real thought unless it appears in a peer-reviewed journal), and just an inability to understand how it’s done. It’s been great working with Marion because she’s not coy about it at all; she wants to get going.

For the next few weeks, while Marion criss-crosses the country giving talks, we’re going to put up some choice excerpts from What to Eat, about one a day, and then we’ll give her some help getting started, then sit back and watch her go.

I’d like to note that we worked on this project with the inestimable Rachel Cunliffe (and her new colleague Stephen Merriman) at Cre8d Design, located in New Zealand. People always ask me (as they did this time), “Can’t you find a designer in New York?” In response, I say (to myself), “Why? So I can pay for their expensive rent and swallow their attitude?” Thanks to the Internet, I can work with whoever I want to, and I love working with Rachel. She took the softcover design for What to Eat and reworked it into one of the most attractive blogs I’ve seen.

Tags: Marion Nestle, What to Eat, Farrar Straus and Giroux, FSG, Cre8d Design, Rachel Cunliffe, blogs as time-savers, blogs as productivity aids, link drones

Posted by Antony in: Media + Marketing, News