PureBlogging

A quick post for a busy week:

Right outside my apartment building, just around the corner on Hollywood Boulevard, is a huge advertisement for Grand Theft Auto IV. Not being a video game guy, I had no idea this game was coming out, so the billboard was my first exposure to it.

“Oh for the love of god,” I thought. “Here we go again.”

Every time one of these games comes out, there’s a bevy of opinions flying about: Concerned parents ask if someone won’t please Think Of The Children; feminists complain that the games are insensitive to women; gamers complain about everything, claiming that it’s Just A Game and we should all Get Over It. I’m not a gamer myself, and for the most part couldn’t care a whole lot less about the matter, but I know I’m going to see posts about it for at least the next week or so.

Well, I shouldn’t be so morose. It’s a pain, but it’s also a blessing.

The great thing about popular topics is that they’re popular. It’s potentially a direct line to a popular post; if you’ve already managed to garner a decent audience, your readers are naturally going to be interested in what you’ve got to say about the Next Big Thing. It doesn’t have to be as big as a video game that gets its own billboards on one of the most traveled surface roads on the West Coast; it could be some new app that’s popular in your niche, or a development that’s set to change the way people do business in your field.

Here are a few approaches you may want to take when there’s something everyone is talking about:

Resist the urge. If you run a political blog or a gaming blog, it might make sense to talk about GTA. But if you don’t, it doesn’t — it’s that simple. Offering your opinion on every possible issue doesn’t make you a pundit, it makes you a loudmouth.

Make the complexity work for you. Too often, we boil the issue of the day into something binary: Either video games are too violent and misogynistic, or they’re not. And even though just about everything is more complex than that, we still tend to reserve our creative thinking for the rationale we use as to why we picked the side we did. But if we just spent a few more minutes brainstorming (instead of rushing to get a post up), chances are, we’d find a unique take on the situaiton.

Use it as a segue into something more relevant to your niche. See what I did there? I wasn’t about to write a post about what I think of Grand Theft Auto — it doesn’t matter to this blog’s readers, and as I said, I don’t really care about the whole issue anyway. But it did give me a great lead-in to this week’s post. Which, you’ll notice, is about a wholly unrelated topic.

It’s like your mom used to say: If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too? Okay, actually I don’t think anyone’s mom says this anymore. Mine never did. But it’s true. And what would you rather do: Jump off the bridge, or try to figure out why everyone else is jumping off, and give a wry and humorously incisive analysis of it?

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