Newspapers and magazines produce some of the most unique and well-researched content in the world. As a rule of thumb, content that's printed in a newspaper is usually more carefully checked than content found on the internet.
Online, a lot of websites tend to have similar information. Often time's content writers do most of their research from other sources online.
Yet newspapers and magazines work completely differently. They're consistently able to produce highly unique content every single month that's unlike anything that's ever been published. How do they do that?
Here are some of the ways that newspapers and magazines find great content.
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Interviewing Real Experts
Instead of looking through medical websites, journalists will actually call up well-known doctors to ask for their opinions.
If they're doing an article on a particular car, they might call up the car manufacturer or a plant manager to talk about how the car was built.
As a smaller publisher, you might not be able to command the same respect as a New York Times reporter, but you'll be surprised at how many people are willing to give free advice if you just ask.
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Using Books and Offline Publications
Another common source of information is written books and other publications, especially academic papers, research papers or official studies.
By looking up studies and books written by experts in the field, you can get a much more in-depth look into subjects that you just wouldn't get from browsing internet websites.
There are several academic paper search engines out there you can use to find detailed source material for research.
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The Public at Large
You might be surprised at how much information can be gleaned from the public at large. Granted, this doesn't work for skill-intensive subjects like medicine or law, but for many subjects the public at large can be a great resource for content.
For example, if you run a financial blog and you want to write a post about how rent control affects the economy, where might you go?
Yes, you can research academic theories about rent control. You can Google “rent control” and see what else is written online about the subject.
But one fascinating place you could look is everyday people who actually live in rent-controlled places. Talking to just a handful of these people can give you more insight into how rent control really affects things than reading a dozen articles online.
As you can tell, newspaper and magazine writers tend to get their information from different sources than most online writers. Granted, these methods of researching content take a lot more time and effort. However, if you're willing to put in that time and effort, you'll be able to create content that'll blow your competition out of the water.