Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage
Ordering this now for my News Writing class. The piece by Tom Piazza on Mailer’s Armies of the Night is what really sealed it for me. Tom is a friend of Sweet Briar’s and the VCCA.
Thinking Through the Headline
We try to teach each other here at the FJP and our latest learnings look at writing headlines and titles on Tumblr.
While Tumblr specific, I hope this document can also help others who are teaching or trying to learn how to write headlines and titles more generally.
The Google doc is here. You can download the PDF here. — Michael
(via poorerthandead)
In towns and cities where there is a strong sense of community, there is no more important institution than the local paper. The many locales served by the newspapers we are acquiring fall firmly in this mold and we are delighted they have found a permanent home with Berkshire Hathaway.
Warren Buffet, founder, Bershire Hathaway, in a statement announcing the fund’s purchase of almost all newspapers currently owned by Media General, 63 titles in all mostly located in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama.
Via Yahoo Finance:
A subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, BH Media Group, will purchase all of the newspapers owned by Media General, with the exception of the Tampa group, for $142 million in cash. Media General said it is in discussions with other prospective buyers for its Tampa print assets.
Under a separate credit agreement, Berkshire Hathaway will provide Media General with a $400 million term loan and a $45 million revolving credit line. The new loan will be used to fully repay the company’s existing bank debt due March 2013 and will mature in May 2020. In conjunction with this, Media General will issue Berkshire Hathaway penny warrants for approximately 4.6 million Class A shares, which represents 19.9 percent of Media General’s existing shares outstanding. In addition, Berkshire Hathaway has the option to nominate a director to Media General’s Board of Directors.
Possible Takeaway: It’s good to have one of the world’s richest people on your side.
(via futurejournalismproject)
It's a Facebook World
Via Experian Hitwise:
- Facebook.com received 9% of all US Internet visits in April 2012.
- Facebook.com received more than 1.6 billion visits a week and averaged more than 229 million US visits a day for the year-to-date.
- 1 in every 5 page views in the US occurred on Facebook.com.
- Facebook.com has received more than 400 billion page views this year in the US.
- The average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes.
- The Facebook.com audience skews more female (56%) than male.
Read through for nine more Facebook stats.
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
Warren Bennis (via thelittlephilosopher)
(via thelittlephilosopher)
On Chris Jones, On Twitter and On Kindness.
I DIDN’T REALIZE I wanted to get into longform writing until I was a junior in college, when I was abroad – traveling on planes, trains, buses and found myself consuming pages and pages and pages of creative non-fiction to combat boredom. It never occurred to me that it was something feasible: to write true, extensive and vivid accounts about people, about issues, about things that, for a lack of a better phrase, “really mattered.” One of the first pieces I read was “The Things That Carried Him” by Chris Jones. I read it because everyone told me to. Beside Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” “The Things That Carried Him” was one of those “must reads” every magazine journalist needed to have under their belts.
So I did.
I picked up The Best American Magazine Writing, flipped to Chris’ story and remembered thinking, “Jeez, it’s so fucking long.” It ended up taking me two to three days to finish, not because the piece was “so fucking long,” but because I ended up putting the book down throughout because I needed to grab a tissue, to take a deep breath, to remind myself not to tear up, again. It was one of those pieces that resonated with you –– not minutes, not hours, but days. You thought about it late at night, in the shower, or just when you’re walking. Certain phrases waft back into your memory. And they linger. I thought about Joey, about how his mom must’ve felt when she heard her “miracle” son had died, about how Chris must’ve felt when he wrote the story.
This was years ago.
On immersion journalism:
Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger feature writer Robin Gaby Fisher,
a two-time Pulitzer finalist, suggested that immersion journalism is
narrative taken to its highest power. “Narrative is the private story
behind the public story, and it takes time to get that.” Spending every
waking hour for nine months watching two burn victims fight for
physical and emotional survival was “stressful, emotional but so
incredibly rewarding.” Choking up as she detailed their struggle,
Fisher shares her own struggles with her subjects. “Give up yourself,
because you ask so much of people.”
She thinks too many reporters flaunt their own importance to, and
“talk over,” their subjects. Instead, “Be quiet, listen, let things
unfold, and you’ll get remarkable stuff.”
Fisher believes, “You can become a great writer -– or at least tell
great stories -– through immersion … Don’t just parachute in,
hang out and expect them to open their hearts to you. It’s being there,
being a reporter –- a reporter, not a writer … If you can get in
(subjects’) heads, you’re home.”
Practice immersion with “day in the life” profiles, she said. “You
can teach yourself, and if you’re passionate (about in-depth reportage)
your editors will be passionate with you.”
Programmers and journalists create similar value — or they could. Each makes sense of information. Technology brings order to the flow of information; journalists ask the questions that aren’t answered in that flow. Each brings new abilities to people — functionality (in software terms) or empowerment (in journalistic terms). But programmers don’t produce products so much as they produce ability: your ability to get what you want. Shouldn’t journalism act like that? Shouldn’t we teach them to?
Imagine a perpendicular universe in which an organization or community says: “We need someone to help make sense of this information, who can add context to it or find and fill in missing pieces or present it in a way that will make sense to people — as a narrative or a visualization. We need to get us a journalist.
