Arts Vanity: Seven Stunning Tips for Boosting Arts Readership

1. Space your content out over as many pages as possible. That way everyone has to click through multiple pages to read the whole article, and clicks are life. As your content-to-page ratio approaches zero, your article’s value approaches infinity. All right, not infinity, because the industry’s in rough shape, but probably a bit more than it was before.

2. Apparently Arts also comes out in print? Hm. Figure out how to make Arts more useful for constructing papier-mâché parade floats or whatever it is people are doing with the print issue. (Side note: Figure out what people do with the print issue.)

3. Most art is kind of boring, so try to find pictures of something that’s not boring and make that the image for the article. Readers who don’t speak English will be fooled and think the article is actually about the exciting photo! What do a concert in Boston and this adorable cat have in common?

By Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Nothing, and also I don’t really like cats, but statistically a lot of you clicked just to find that out.

4. Your titles should be exactly seven words, because seven is the best length to get your article clicked on. Short enough for readers to gulp down like shots in Arts’ “Shrek” drinking game (drink every time you see Shrek!); long enough that they feel like they learned something. Not six, not eight. Seven words. (Side note: Seriously, though, where are all these print issues going? They seem to be everywhere, and I’m very confused.)

5. Apparently your writers and fellow execs don’t really like BuzzFeed journalism, but they also want to boost Arts readership. This is a problem because your main plan for boosting Arts readership was to plagiarize BuzzFeed. Tell everyone that you have a secret plan to boost Arts readership without using any kind of clickbait journalism.

6. Uh-oh, now you’re chair and you forgot to come up with a secret plan! This is very embarrassing and also looks like it’s going to be a lot of work. You’d better try to sneak out when no one is looking. You can camouflage yourself with some of the spare Crimson print issues lying around.

7. Outline before you write your title. If you promise seven stunning tips for boosting Arts readership, be sure you can actually deliver seven, rather than just six. (Side note: Frankly, six sounds pretty good to me. No need to get greedy.) If you do promise seven and only come up with six, however, console yourself with the knowledge that nobody is going to click all the way to page 7 to find out.

—J. Thomas Westbrook is the outgoing Blog exec and incoming Arts Chair. He claims to do some actual journalism in his spare time, but if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, can it really be fact-checked? (No.) Please direct all administrative questions to elizabeth.keto@thecrimson.com.