Today’s episode of Little Miss Know-it-All: Writing for your audience.

I am often asked about how to start blogging: what to say, what topics to cover, etc. The standard response most people will give is that you should write about the things you are interested in. I agree: you need to have enough material to keep publishing day after day, and you’ll only have that if you’re writing about things you’re interested in.

But I also tell new bloggers that they should think about who their audiences will be. The things you write will be shaped by your audience; not just in the topics you cover, but also in the way you cover them. The blog format is uniquely suited for this, because there is automatic feedback built in. (At this point, I could probably make an entire blog out of reader-submitted items.)

A blog that’s just for your friends and family will have a certain tone. A blog that’s written for a broader audience will be different. This one is somewhere between the two: I’m not writing for Google; I write for a small group of loyal readers, and most of them do not know me personally.

A newspaper, on the other hand, is written for the masses. A newspaper article or review shouldn’t feel like an extended in-joke. Anyone should be able to pick it up and understand it.

Which brings me to the story from the Toronto Star that has been going around Yellowknife lately. Here’s the link. It was written by Heather Greenwood Davis.

This is a restaurant review trashing Bullocks Bistro, one of the more famous restaurants in town. It’s probably to be expected that any big-city newspaper article that disses Bullocks is not going to go over well in Yellowknife, but I am comfortable saying that I do not like Bullocks, either. The food is overpriced and I don’t have much patience for sitting next to Toronto hipsters who are only there so they can tell everyone back home that they ate at Bullocks. (“We got OUR OWN DRINKS! There is WRITING ON THE WALL, like literally!”) Besides, I hate seafood.

Okay, that’s out of the way.

My problem with this article is not that it trashes Bullocks. I will defend Ms. Davis’s right to dislike the food there and to shout her displeasure from the mountaintops. My problem with the article is that it is not written for the public. It is written for snotty journalists who live in Toronto. (Redundant, I know.)

Toronto journalists often believe they are the coolest people around, and that drips from almost every paragraph in this story. It’s not the topic, it’s the way Ms. Davis discusses it. Note the details about who she’s with: other journalists, of course. They are seeking an “authentic local night out in Yellowknife” that will make a good story. They choose the restaurant on purpose because even though it’s not what a diner would want, it’s what a journalist would want. They are smirking as they arrive, because it’s going to make an excellent story. The waitress is rude, which bothers them even though it’s one of the reasons they wanted to eat there. The food is no good, but what’s really important is that PEOPLE FROM YELLOWKNIFE ARE THERE. What a great story!

This is why I never go to Bullocks: people like Ms. Davis are usually at the next table, and I might end up stabbing one of them in the eyeball. You can find people from Yellowknife at the playground, at the airport, and at the grocery store. You don’t have to go to Bullocks if you’re just hoping to spend time with locals.

That should really be “near” locals: generally these morons are not actually hoping to spend time with people from our fair city. Most of us have normal jobs and pretty average lives. That would ruin the stories they plan to tell people back home. And it goes without saying that the stories will follow a predetermined pattern. (I wrote about this in my blog post How NOT To Write About Northern Canada.)

I think what bothers me the most about this article is that it’s so self-absorbed. It’s not the sort of thing I hope to see in a restaurant review. Instead, it’s full of in-jokes and preening for the attention of a circle jerk of Toronto journalists. This is an extreme example of the tendency to forget who your real audience is.