by Margot Lester | What-Not
I've been a magazine writer and editor since 1988. My last W-2 gig was serving as editor and lead writer for an alumni magazine at my alma mater and shortly after I left that job, I got on as a freelancer with Business: North Carolina. From there I wrote for Playboy,...
by Margot Lester | Work Samples
Whew! Pulling off a double issue requires a lot of coordination, stamina and words! In the June-July edition of ICG Magazine, a lot of those words are mine. Join me behind the scenes for the making of Your Friends and Neighbors Read my interview with one of the show's...
by Margot Lester | Marketing, Advertising & Promotion
Updated May 2024 We know by now that the best way to get good answers is to ask open-ended questions. But that's there's more to getting the information you need from the people you interview. Folks on the PR side may have a slight edge here, if they've sat in on...
by Margot Lester | Content & Content Operations, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion
If you've got a big content project ahead of you, a little planning can help save time and ensure quality. We just wrapped a large-scale brand journalism project for Staples [see the results here], who needed the content on a tight turn-around. One of the ways we were...
by Margot Lester | Best Practice, Content & Content Operations, Public Relations/PR practice, Writing/How to Write
We’ve all seen them. Heck, some of us have written them. Those news release quotes that are cumbersome, boring and … contrived. They generally show up when we're writing: For publicly traded and highly regulated industries, our friends in Legal want to make sure we...
