How to Write, Lesson 7: Writing for Digital vs. Print

Here's the uncensored, honest truth, and why everything is being upended in 2025.

Listen to this lesson now by clicking the play button above!

Oh, how I miss the days of being able to work on a story for weeks at a time when I was at print magazines.

Now, I’m lucky if I get more than an hour when filing for an online pub.

While the fundamentals that you’ve learned in this How to Write series are the same, the process of writing for print vs. digital couldn’t be more different. And this year, both platforms are undergoing radical changes due to advancements in AI, pitiful advertising revenue, and the death of search engine optimization (SEO).

If you’re looking to publish your work in major national publications, you need to pay attention to what’s happening. In this lesson, you’ll learn how the craft is evolving across the entire media landscape and how you can tailor your writing to keep up.

Writing for Print

My three biggest pet peeves as an editor at Women’s Health and Cosmopolitan magazines?

Writers who missed deadlines.
Writers who ignored the word count (“wc”).
Writers who didn’t follow directions or absorb and address feedback quickly.

These qualities are crucial for a writer to allow a print editor to do their job effectively. If you’re a freelancer who fails at these more than once, pssh, get ready to be ghosted. It’s simply not worth it to work with you.

Why? Well, just have a look at the publishing sequence of putting together a print story. It’s a highly complicated orchestration that needs to be timed just right for the “book” (the industry term for a print issue) to come together all at once.

In my experience working at Westchester Magazine, Jane, Maxim, Women’s Health, and Cosmopolitan, the print process looked like this: