We asked 100 people what a copywriter does… Actually, we haven’t, but if we conducted a survey, there would certainly be a group in it who would say that this is a person who works with a copy machine. Others would say that this is a person who copies content from the Internet to put it somewhere else. The latter should be more like a “copy-paster”, which nowadays is often part of the work of… hmm, quite a few journalists, unfortunately, who don’t even bother to change a text before using it for the purposes of their media – whether it was “scraped” from another media outlet or from a press release.
Having said that, a journalist’s job is probably quite similar to that of people in the media, but it is also noticeably different. There are many commonalities, but also noticeable differences that distinguish the two professions – this does not make one better or worse than the other. They are simply two different crafts that require similar skills, but a different approach. A person who has practiced both types of activity could explain the differences (or at least try), as is the case for the writer of these lines.
The commonality between journalism and copywriting services is generally clear – both the journalist and the “copy” work with text. The difference is in the content, construction and focus of the text. With all the conventions, taking into account the specifics of the respective type of activity (press or internet agency, radio or television), with all the distortions of the profession in the Bulgarian environment, journalism primarily has the function of informing about current events and processes, as well as seeking the opinions of those participating in these events. I will not delve into the definition of the profession in more detail, since it would take up much more space than an article.
The copywriting approach to the text does not exclude information richness, but there is definitely a promotional element, which is often commercially oriented. The profession itself comes in different versions – people who create texts for advertisements, even slogans of one or two words, are called copywriters. People who write texts for online content, which in some cases has a volume of tens of thousands of words – too. copyvibes.webbies.bg/ leans towards the second type of copywriting activity. And in it , copying and pasting is not just prohibited – it is detrimental.
Here one of the characteristic differences with the journalistic approach can be pointed out. I am not talking about the cases in which, out of laziness or carelessness, clones of the same news appear in the media, along with spelling and factual errors in it – this often happens if someone has not bothered to at least touch a given text from an agency or PR. But in some cases it is quite normal for a given content to be identical or very similar – when using quotes, for example, when it is important to take the speaker’s words “one to one”. And again, I mean individual passages, not entire texts.
In creating online content, regardless of the balance between information and advertising in it (sometimes it is 100 to 0 or 99 to 1, sometimes 50/50), the condition of uniqueness comes to the fore. And this is not in the sense of “Buy this unique hand cream” , although such calls are also part of the work (it is called Call-to-Action and is used in more commercial texts). Uniqueness is sought in order to check whether a given text was written specifically for the purposes of the relevant online content, or was copied from somewhere “en bloc”. There is no point in using text stolen literally from somewhere if you want to generate traffic to your site, since in a random search the Internet user will most likely end up where you plagiarized from, and the chances of reaching your place in the web jungle are minimal.
If you are wondering how to check uniqueness, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of software solutions available. Some of them are paid, some are free, some are online-based, some need to be installed on the computer, some work well with English but not with Bulgarian, others are more universal in this regard. So copy-paste automation has nothing to do with copywriting, no matter how close it may sound to someone. This can already explain the title of this material – “Copy this” simply does not work in this profession. Rather, the idea of the copywriter is to write such content that even if it is plagiarized from somewhere else or rewritten, it is his text that will be in the top positions of the search engine. Keywords play a decisive role in this regard, but about them another time.
PS: I wonder if this text is now journalistic or copywriting?
Author: Radostin Spasov
