Personal without personalisation

When I was a feature writer on newspapers and magazines, my stories went out to readers I’d never met and would never meet. I didn’t know their names, or how they’d first come across my work, or whether they had read anything else I’d written. I couldn’t have sorted them if I’d wanted to.

And yet the writing – when it was any good – was personal. It addressed a real reader as a real person, without pandering or generic gloss. Some readers wrote back, and that was always welcome. The vast majority didn’t (obviously), and that was fine too.

But times change.

For the last decade or so, as a self-employed person, I’ve tried to hold two contradictory disciplines at once. On one side, the instincts I grew up with as a journalist: trust the reader, write well, don’t fuss about the “audience” as a category. On the other, everything marketing people have taught me since I became responsible for finding my own readers: segment, personalise, use the reader’s name, refer to what they bought, tailor the message.

I’ve sometimes believed a middle way was possible. Other times it has seemed obvious that these are two different jobs with two different ethics, and that trying to do both at once is a decent way to do neither.

I know the pull of the marketing approach, from both sides. A few years ago, at a low point, I paid real money to learn to write the way the marketing gurus said I should – and only noticed something had gone wrong when readers I knew wrote back, gently, to ask if I was all right.

Of course I know that this tension isn’t only mine, isn’t only felt by people like me who used to write for editors and now write to subscriber lists. Journalism itself has gone click-baity: headlines engineered for the swipe, first paragraphs engineered for the scroll. The two traditions have converged. The marketing view of what a reader is has sauntered into the newsroom and settled into the editor’s chair.

In a recent post I described how paralysing I can find it to send personal emails to subscribers if I haven’t first worked out who they all are: sorted them by tags, grouped them into meaningful segments. And this wasn’t even a new idea – two years ago I wrote a version of the same blog post, then never posted it.

Maybe I’ve been solving the wrong problem.

I’ve been assuming that “communicating personally” requires knowing each recipient in detail – the personalised marketing approach. But past a certain number of readers that becomes impossible.

I want to rebuild something like the relationship with readers that I had on newspapers and magazines. If anybody feels tempted to reply – great!

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