Jack Flufferton's Media Mogul 101

Day 683, 14:23 • Published in USA USA • by Jack Flufferton

After earning the Media Mogul award, I have been inundated with people asking for tips on achieving the feat, so I compiled some of that advice into this delightfully long mini-guide. I remember seeing some newspaper guides more than six months ago, but the advice was something to the effect of, "Make sure to put a bunch of symbols in your title. '~~~Media Mogul Guide~~~' is more attractive than 'Media Mogul Guide'". That's absurd.

I enjoy expressing myself through my newspaper rather than, say, the eUS forum. I already have to tone down my foul language and crudeness tremendously for these articles. The last thing I need is another set of other players censoring me, although I do understand that they have to - I just choose not to use it. Plus, this is a global game for a reason. Encourage that by sharing your ideas with everyone.

First of all, you probably won't become a Media Mogul. Most people aren't familiar enough with the game's history and current events to generate unique insight or opinions. Even more are just stupid and/or terrible writers.

Tone, Style and Content

Having a niche is important. I do op-ed/propaganda-style pieces and have a glorious mullet (/me blesses all Holy Church of Flufferton members out there with his majestic mullet). Most of the American Media Moguls also have niches. Mainegreen has his maps. Desertfalcon has his summaries. Joe has his patriotism. Buck Roger has the economy. HR has his boobies. Emerick is Great.

Read On Writing Well by Zinsser - it's widely heralded as the best basic guide to writing. It will drill concision into your head, which is required for eRepublik. I keep my articles short and filled with tits because people have minute attention spans, especially in eRep. If you write more than 800 words, you run the risk of tl;dr smeared all over the comments section. This article is a bit longer than usual, so bear with me.


Required reading for Media Mogul 101.

Also read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style - it will rid you of some dreadful bad habits. If an article is littered with grammatical errors (a few are fine, it's just eRep) your point will be muffled by your ineptitude. By reading the book, your performance in school or at work will improve and people will stop hating you for your writing and can continue hating you for being a boring person. I'm a chemist, not an English major. If I can write with reasonable proficiency, so can you.

It's fun to write for eRep because you get to bend the rules a bit. My style in a paper for the Journal of the American Chemical Society is strikingly different than this paper's style, as one would expect. Flare is encouraged. I strongly recommend adding some pictures in each article because it breaks up the text and makes the article seem shorter to the reader. Again, this is a good thing in eRep.

If you want to do the whole hai/bai/inorite-type shit, whatever, but be aware that plenty of people like me don't find it funny or cute or whatever the goal of it is. Don't have a stick up your ass either - it's better to err on the side of being conversational.

I vehemently hate people who overuse quotes - especially inspirational ones - but this one from Zinsser perfectly sums up why I write: "You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, you don't want them anyway."

What he said. If you don't enjoy your writing, it shows. I only write when compelled to do so (sorry), but it results in better content. Desertfalcon performs a good service for noobs by summarizing military events everyday, but even he admits his writing suffers when he's in a rush. The medal is cool and all, but I want subscribers because I feel my work is good enough that every single player in the game needs to read it.

I strongly discourage anyone from essentially reposting news that is easily found in the game - it's so unbelievably boring, but good for some noobs, I suppose. If you're going to do it, though, be sure you're improving on people like Desertfalcon and Aeros, otherwise you're wasting space and time. If you still want to do news, have a gimmick like Mainegreen's maps.

If you want to do op-eds, make sure you know what the hell you're talking about. Have a cohesive, cogent argument and don't ramble. As always, don't use real life phenomena or history to support your message - use information from the game. People will get very angry if you constantly talk about real life and they will run you out of the country. Your new country will not receive you well. You all know who I'm talking about.

Really hot articles are typically ones in which someone takes a dump on someone or some country. My first international hit was the one lambasting Ajay Bruno's homophobia, which went to number 1 internationally because everyone hated him and wanted a good laugh at his expense (PM me if you got a copy of that on Google Docs. I wrote it so quickly I forgot to save the text as a .doc file). You run the risk of gaining FPs as well, but meh, whatever. However, if all you do is act like a prick, people will sour on you. But if you want to do the funny troll thing, vary your targets and methods don't make it repetitious and predictable.

Do not write walls of text. Paragraphs exist for a reason. The bold is to emphasize this point.

Probably >96% of players are heterosexual guys, so tits and nice big, round asses help. The Jizz Chronicles and Rhode Island Bikini Watch blatantly exploit this technique, much to the delight of the masturbating masses. If you see one of their articles on your subscription list, proceed to get your pants around your ankles if you are so inclined.

Basically, bring something interesting to the table and present it in a coherent manner.

Publicity Techniques

Writing without many subscribers can seem like a waste of energy because it typically is. Most people have no potential. However, there are a lot of good techniques to raise your paper's profile. Most involve shamelessly whoring yourself out.

Immediately after writing an article, shout it out. Always utilize all three shouts per day, but space them out during three high-traffic times of the day. I usually shout in the morning, afternoon and evening to catch the different crowds. Don't just shout the link because people tend to click it less frequently. If your friends don't like you making three shouts per day, screw 'em. They can remove you from their list yet remain an actual friend.

Shouts don't make an impact without friends. Add them. Lots of them. This will get you votes, votes get you exposure, exposure yields subscribers. Very simple.


-1 friends? Clearly didn't read this guide.

I recommend advertising your articles when you don't have a strong base of subscribers - it's akin to a cold call in sales. I'm no advertising guru, but I have gone with the lowest possible CPI with one to two gold during two different times of the day. My first-pass thought process is it results in fewer views per second, increasing the total number of different people that see the ad. It doesn't do much good for one person to see the ad twenty times. Obviously, make the ad attractive to the eye.

Naturally, you gain the most subscribers when an article goes top five internationally or in a large country. This should be your goal with every article if you want a lot subscribers quickly. If you have an amazing article in the USA with a reasonable readership, try not to publish it on days where I, Emerick, Joe, Jewitt or Gaius publish - all our articles go top 5 and take up a potential spot for you. The DoD and DF publish every day and have so many subscribers that their articles make the top 5 every day through brute force, so you can't avoid them, only beat them. If you are up on the current events, you can often guess if an article is coming and will be voted hard (e.g. major PEACE fails). You can top all our articles with an exceptional piece, but it's just a little bit harder. Sorry.

Media mogul projects are nice, but you never know how long they will last or how much circulation the project will get. The gold paid to officially participate in the project typically goes to a good cause, but if you're poor, this may not be the route for you. Other than paying, your job is done. I probably got about 200 subscribers this way through Cynic Grim's project.

Jump on the IRC and post the link in a couple channels you frequent, but have some tact. I only post it about once and hour because it's annoying if people constantly do it. Try to wait for a lull in the conversation - it will be up on the screen for a longer time span anyway. It often kickstarts a good conversation, too. Again, don't be a dick about it.

Once you reach around 300 subscribers, you have enough readers that really good articles will get voted up quickly without copious amounts of advertising. Just keep writing good articles and it will come - the better you are, the quicker you will reach it. There are a few other strategies to use once you have a nice readership, but I'll keep them to myself.

Wrap-Up

These are some of the tips and tricks I used to get Media Mogul, but most importantly, people liked the articles. It only took me eleven different articles to go from 25 to 1000+ subscribers, so you do not need to publish every other day for word to get around about you.

If this was obvious to you, you're doing fine and I don't want to hear about it. There are plenty of ways to market yourself and your paper, so feel free to cherry pick my techniques and pair them with your own ideas. But please, please, please, if you don't have anything interesting to say, don't say anything at all.