
Article Club: Reasons Why You Need to Start an Article Club
You should start an article club with your friends and acquaintances for so many reasons!
Keep reading to learn all the reasons why you should start an article club and NOT a book club.
What is an Article Club?
An article club works like this. It’s just like a book club, except for the “rules and expectations” are much more flexible and that’s much less of a time commitment.
It’s a group of friends and acquaintances who meet up every month or so to talk about an article or articles that they’ve chosen, rather than a book which would be the case in a book club.
The size of the article club can be whatever you want it to be. A nice, intimate size for the article club is about 10 people and under.
There’s normally wine (obviously – if you want to know why obviously check out my other post) and everyone usually brings 1 bottle of wine to the person’s house who’s hosting.
The person who’s hosting usually starts the event around 7:30 p.m.. That way, everyone’s had dinner and kids are in bed. Everyone can come over for some appetizers, like a fruit tray, a vegetable tray, meat and cheese plate, candy dishes, etc..
Article club is anything you want it to be. You can get creative with whatever theme you want to have for the meeting or theme you don’t want to have.
With an article club, you normally choose around two or three articles at the most and then make sure that they’re short enough for people to be able to read before the meeting.
Two people who are not hosting, but attending, would generally choose the articles for discussion. The person who’s hosting ordinarily would nominate two people who choose articles for that week, keeping in mind that it would normally be someone who hasn’t chosen articles lately. There’s no formal running list for this unless you wanted to do that.
It’s an excellent personal development, professional development and relationship building activity.
Who am I?
If this is your first time to the website, I’m Ms. OYP (Owning Your Profession) and am a lawyer in private practice in Canada, who has been practicing for about 6 years now. I think it’s fair to say I have some stress in my life and there are A LOT of things about practicing law that can keep you up at night.
If you want to read my story click here and if you want to read about how I paid off $98,500 of student loan debt and a car loan in 3.5 years, click here.
If you’re curious and want to know if I have kids, you can click here to find out.
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Why You Should Start an Article Club Instead of a Book Club
Article clubs are the best for SO MANY reasons. Here is a list of the best things about an article club, in no particular order:
- It’s WAY less time consuming than a book club. No one has to read a whole book or be stressed by the fact that they haven’t had time to read the whole book before they show up.
- The discussion is much more varied. At an article club, the group of attendees choose several articles for the article club meeting and so the discussion ends up being more varied than 1 specific book. We’ve even pick videos or clips from SNL. At a book club, the topic of the meeting focuses on just the book and you spend so much time committing to reading a book, and then after you meet for that one evening or afternoon session, you move on to something else at the next meet up.
- There’s less of a commitment for preparation. We lead busy lives. So, readings articles or watching videos before the meeting is probably around a 15 minute commitment, whereas reading an entire book or novel, can take hours (depending on how fast of a reader you are). I’m a slow reader, so book clubs have never really interested me because of that but article clubs are perfect.
- Anyone can attend, and they can attend last minute. Usually, anyone is welcome at an article club meeting because there’s no huge time commitment of having to read a specific book before you come. You can read or skim the articles online on your phone quickly, and you can even show up at the article club without having read them. Someone at the meeting will be happy to summarize the articles for you or you can watch the video before the discussion starts.
- When new people are invited to the article club meeting, it’s pretty easy for them to engage in conversation because they can get caught up by skimming the articles or getting someone to summarize it for them.
- The venue switches about once a month with your turn only coming about once a YEAR (assuming there are 10 people in your article club). I’ve found that more people are interested in coming to an article club when there’s more people because you can switch off hosting responsibilities – making it less of a time commitment (showing up vs. hosting and showing up). If you’re lucky, you can host in the summer and host it outdoors. You could do a BBQ, serve sangrias or make a signature drink. Sometimes the wine bottles turn into tequila shots or whiskey tasting …
- It’s a perfect way to catch up with your friends, or to meet new people that you wouldn’t normally meet. As you get older, I find that it hard and harder to meet and make new friends. With article club though, you get to meet friends of friends who come to the article club and either you connect or you don’t. Sometimes you find you connect really well with some people and maybe you want to go out for coffee or go for a run together. Others, however, you hope that they never come back to article club! (Both have happened to me.)
Final Thoughts
I haven’t been going to article club as much lately. The reason is because I’ve been trying to focus on using my spare time to write and maintain this blog, which if anyone tries to tell you any differently — BLOGGING IS NOT PASSIVE IN TIME OR INCOME AND IS A LOT OF WORK!
I also found that as the women in the article club had children, the focus of the conversations became overtaken by their kids and how hard the parent life was and how I didn’t understand because I was only a lawyer. I didn’t have any dependents and owned my time, so I didn’t understand. It’s not that I didn’t want them to talk about their children, it’s that I didn’t want them to talk about it the ENTIRE article club.
Anyway, I got kind of tired of hearing that month after month and seldom find myself wanting to listen to that on a Friday night. So, I’ve kind of tried go to article club less. All in all, though, if you have the right mix of people, being part of an article club is an amazing experience and opportunity.
I highly recommend it, both for personal development and professional development. Who knows, your next client could come from this meeting or your next best friend. It can be a worthwhile experience because not only do you meet new people, you get to engage on controversial topics and eat good food, drink wine and have much less of a commitment than having to read a book before the meeting. What could be better?!
If you have any questions or want to know more about starting your own Article Club, feel free to:
email me at owningyourprofession@gmail.com or send me a DM on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/owningyourprofession/
I’m happy to help in any way that I can. When I first heard of the concept of an article club, I thought it was GENIUS and I’m here to spread the word about them!
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