At The Editors Forum, the talks on “Mastering Multi-Platform Content: Writing for Print, Web, and Social Media” and “Audience First: Understanding What Readers Really Want” gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the new rules shaping beauty storytelling today. From the nostalgia of glossy magazine pages to the cold-hard truths of performance metrics, lifestyle writer and editor, and Pineappleversed founder Chonx Tibajia and digital journalism expert Sasha Lim Uy Mariposa discussed the future of editorial and showed us what it means to adapt without losing your voice.
Stories That Click and Stick
The way we write—and the way readers engage with stories—has come a long way in the last two decades. Initiating the series of talks, Tibajia took the audience on a thoughtful, and at times nostalgic, journey through the evolving media landscape. With refreshing candor, she unpacked the wins, the growing pains, and the constantly changing rules that come with writing for both print and digital platforms.
Chonx started her career back when print magazines were king. Stories were crafted with incredible care, typically involving a whole team—photographers, models, assistants—all working together to bring features to life. She shared a memorable experience from 2002: a four-page spread in Seventeen magazine about gayuma, a faith healer’s remedy. “We treated our stories so seriously, regardless of the subject,” she recalled. “And, I’m not saying that we’re not treating them seriously today, but there’s a stark difference in how we would go about it.”
“This was four pages in Seventeen magazine. Can you imagine?”
Today, this process might be unrecognizable to many. With digital, researching and publishing such a story can happen within hours. Tibajia explained, “If I was going to write the same story for digital, today, I would just Google, ‘What is gayuma?’ ‘How does gayuma work?’ ‘What is gayuma made of?’ And then submit the article within the same day.”
Tibajia traced the media’s evolution from the early static websites of the 1990s to the dynamic and SEO-driven digital landscape we navigate today. She pointed out key moments: the decline of beloved print glossies, the rise of search engine optimization, and the shift from long-form narratives to punchy and clickable content. Along the way, she touched on the blogging boom and the arrival of social media platforms like Friendster and Multiply, which paved the way for today’s giants: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. The pandemic only sped up this digital surge, while print, she mentioned interestingly, is making a bit of a comeback, alongside emerging AI tools and algorithm-powered content.
Though print and digital share a love for storytelling, they ask very different things from writers. Print readers tend to slow down, savor stories, and appreciate deeper narratives. Digital readers, on the other hand, scroll fast and want immediate value. Writing for online means grabbing attention in the first few lines, breaking text into bite-sized paragraphs, and using clear headings that make content easy to scan. The tone shifts too—from the more formal style of print to a conversational voice that fits the platform and appeals to algorithms. And while print layout is fixed, digital content needs to adapt to different screens and formats.
Print also offers writers something digital doesn’t always: a sense of permanence. “Because most print stories have bylines, the writer feels a sense of ownership,” Tibajia said. “They [writers] leave a piece of themselves on the page and cherish it until it yellows. Most of digital stories are either not byline or not created out of personal connection with a subject.” Digital writing, while fast and data-driven, are usually more tied to real-time metrics like shares, likes, and comments. The editorial calendar for print is slower and more deliberate, whereas digital demands constant updates. More than that, monetization has shifted from print’s traditional ads and subscriptions to digital’s paywalls, sponsorships, and targeted ads.
Tibajia therefore stressed that writers today need to be “multilingual,” able to work across different media. While much of the craft remains the same, she emphasized the importance of knowing your medium and platform inside out. As she puts it, “Know your medium, know your platform. Understand it. Understand your style guide, understand what the goal of your publication is.”
Beyond that, she pointed to the crucial role of understanding your audience. “Understand the reader. What do they like? What makes them interested? What makes them tick? What makes them move to action?” And finally, she highlighted the importance of commitment to the work itself. “The third is respect the craft. Whatever kind of writer you are, you have to respect what you do.”
“Understand the reader. What do they like? What makes them tick? What makes them move to action?”—Chonx Tibajia
Even with the rise of digital, Chonx still has a soft spot for print. “Is this romanticizing print? Yes,” she quipped. “But to be fair, it’s really difficult to romanticize algorithms and numbers…it’s just not fun or sexy enough,” she confessed, laughing.
In the end, what Chonx Tibajia’s talk made clear is that while the tools, platforms, and pace of publishing may have changed, the heart of great writing hasn’t. Whether it lives on a glossy magazine spread or gets published in a tweet, storytelling still matters. Today’s writer needs to be agile—able to switch tones, formats, and platforms without losing their voice or their grip on what resonates with their audience. Beyond writing well, writers these days need to learn how to write smart. And in this landscape that moves faster than ever, that balance of craft, curiosity, and adaptability is what will help keep the story going.
Reading Between the Metrics
Sasha Lim Uy Mariposa knows the value of a good hunch. “Instinct is really a terrific starting point,” she pointed out during Audience First: Understanding What Readers Really Want at The Editors Forum. “But it can no longer compete in a world where your audience is literally telling you what they want.” In other words: intuition is not outdated, but without data, it’s incomplete.
Data, she explained, doesn’t make gut instinct obsolete. It simply enhances it. It shows you what’s working now, not just what might work. And when used well, it allows editors and writers to meet their audiences with more relevance, more resonance, and less guesswork.
“Instinct is really a terrific starting point. But it can no longer compete in a world where your audience is literally telling you what they want.”—Sasha Lim Uy Mariposa
“Why shouldn’t we use data when we have it already? Why wouldn’t we use all that information?” Mariposa asked. “It’s like you’re lost and you have a map. And you threw it out because I might as well freestyle it anyway. It’s really foolish.”
She broke down just how much data can do. It can tell you what stories work but also why they work, which parts your audience actually engages with, and how they’re behaving on your site. Including bounce rates, click-throughs, pages per session, and open rates, these metrics turn gut feeling into informed decisions. Whether it’s realizing your readers only get through the first scroll of a page (hello, inverted pyramid!) or seeing that video performs better than long-form, data helps finetune your output. As Mariposa put it, ““It doesn’t just tell you what to write, but how to write it.”
“Brainstorming takes a lot of guesswork,” Mariposa said. “But data sharpens that guesswork.” Without it, you’re left wondering why something didn’t perform. Was it the headline, the visuals or the story itself? Data might not give you all the answers but it gives you better questions to ask and clues on where to tweak and improve.
She also emphasized the role of SEO in connecting even niche topics with a broader audience. “Even if it’s not a topic that they’re looking for, thanks to the availability of data, you can kind of configure it in a way that it becomes more appealing to what your audience wants.” This becomes especially important in a media environment where clicks are currency and attention is fleeting. “Because again, we want to be read, right? Most of us aren’t writing for personal blogs.”
To illustrate just how much of an impact data can have not just on content, but on revenue, Mariposa cited real examples. She shared how major media brands—from The Atlantic to BuzzFeed—have used data to grow subscriptions and boost engagement. And instead of overcomplicating things, she encouraged everyone to revisit the basic journalistic framework—the five Ws and one H—with a digital twist. Who is your audience? What are they really engaging with? When are they online? And how are they consuming content—mobile, desktop, or social?
To help decode all this, Mariposa shared a shortlist of tools her team uses. Some, like Google Analytics and Google Trends, are widely known. Others, like Parse.ly and Chartbeat, offer more nuanced real-time insight.
Ultimately, one of the main takeaways from Mariposa’s talk was that data isn’t the opposite of creativity. It helps give it direction. When you really understand your audience—what they’re looking for, when they’re looking for it, and how they prefer to get it—you’re not just throwing ideas out and hoping they stick.
Photographs by Angelou Luque
