Battlefield Chronicles #6 - Publish or Perish

In the month of April, I ended up writing and publishing no less than 31 articles or news pieces - 22 of those on The Gateway Pundit. While I have written professionally in one way or another since 1994, I had never had such an intense experience before.

Don't get me wrong - around 2018-2019 I could spend 18-hour days online in the information war. But that was more relaxed in nature, and mostly short posting - and not the relentless nature of this work, in which I feel the strong need to perform and to source things properly at every step.

As I have written before, the actual challenge in the process is to be constantly on the prowl for stories that I can and that I want to tackle very quickly and effectively.

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The month of April was a hit and miss affair. I found a lot of stories, but nearly a fourth of them flopped - in the sense that they did not attract readers like they should.

It's important to understand that when joining The Gateway Pundit (TGP), I have tried to see how best to serve the news site. They already have many good people doing the mainstream American news. It would be wrong to try and do that, too.

So I try to work the 'international desk', with news from around the world - that have relevance for the American Public - and, also, try my hand at space and tech news as best I can.

That also means I'm not working on the primary center of interest in the TGP. It will always take some skill to find relevant and appealing bits of story that can speak to the imagination of its conservative audience.

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In April, I had two news pieces with 42k and 46k readers, which is a very good increase over March where I had 25k as my top performance.

But, as I mentioned in my Battlefield Chronicles #5 - How to write a 'hit', what I'm really gunning for is to sometimes have 'over-100k' stories. Not all of them, of course, but to be able to hit the nail on the head every so often.

The month of May started with me a bit confused - it happens a lot - and struggling to find stories that I could write. By then, I had 75 days of experience writing for TGP, and I knew that some kinds of themes and writing strategies just don't fly.

Maybe I was being over-picky, so on the first 10 days I was WAY behind in my projected number of stories. And worse, my choosing was not so great, and the flops kept coming.

Of course what I'm calling flops are still numbers of readers quite bigger than I can reach on my own here on the War Blog. But still - I want to tap into the BIG readership base of the GP, that scores multimillion numbers of accesses daily. So, a job well done has to mean tens of thousands of readers per piece.

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Meanwhile, in May I have been doing good work for the Frank Report, with 3 good articles, one of them scoring well above 20k readers, which for an independent blog - even one headed by dragon-slayer Frank Parlato, the nemesis of NXIVM - is still a very respectable result.

Here, in the War Blog, besides the incessant parade of 'reposts' from TGP and the Frank Report, I also wrote quite a bit, so far in May, this being my fourth offering to date.

So, mostly things are going pretty well, but still I needed a few good, well read news pieces on TGP for me to feel like things are progressing as they should.

I have said often that, when it comes to writing, the most important part (and sometimes the hardest) is the reading. The daily grind against the merciless news cycle was killing me.

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On the day of his most important military victory, in Austerlitz, Napoleon Bonaparte woke up in a foul mood. On the other hand, on the day of his defeat and demise in Waterloo, the emperor was reportedly a very happy camper.

What I mean by that, is: the result of the work - of the war - is not linked to how we feel, and sometimes can be the exact opposite.

It was on a rainy day, I was feeling lonely and tired and - worse - drowsy, longing for a siesta that I had not earned yet, when I found one.

A clear-cut, great fucking story that was easy to write and that - most probably - no other TGP writers would be focusing on. It was right there, easy picking - low hanging fruit. An explosive, compelling story that would go to gather 2,700+ comments from readers, that went viral on Twitter, TS and Telegram. A story that was 'pinned' as 'featured' on the top of the TGP Website.

At the very least, a minor 'hit'.

Sure enough, it was a horrible and unfortunate situation on the other side of the planet - but a lot of journalism is exactly that.

It takes around 36 to 48 hours for Google Analytics to deliver the complete readership stats - yes, they take their sweet-ass time - so it was a nice suspense. I knew it was going to be my most well read article to this day.

And it is. At 72,6k, it spells progress to me. It was the 42nd most well read piece in the last 28 days, out of 2,8k posts in the same period.

My next effort was also well read, over 15k, and I feel like I can do better and better - as long as I keep finding stories. I hope to develop better skills at that, and at writing lightning-fast pieces, which is far from my usual pace.

I better stop chatting here and go back to reading the news. Thank you so much for caring about my work!

Here you can read all my articles on The Gateway Pundit

Here you can read all my articles on the Frank Report

Here you can read all my articles on the War blog

UPDATE: as I waited on the consolidated Google Analytics numbers above to close and publish this article, another piece of mine was also 'pinned' as 'featured' in TGP website for a good chunk of the day. A real confidence boost that'll make me redouble the efforts.