I read a lot of nonfiction, literary and otherwise, and I recently finished one of the better books I’ve found on American culture and media in the middle of the 20th Century. “The Race Beat” not only chronicles the coverage of the civil rights movement and its effects on American society, it offers a few […]
From time to time, you read about journalists being imprisoned in far-off countries for doing their jobs. Only rarely do you recognize their names.
Yesterday, Barry Bearak of the New York Times was arrested in Zimbabwe and accused of “practicing journalism without accreditation“. I made Bearak’s acquaintance a few years ago when he was teaching at […]
Before attending a job fair to interview journalism students and aspiring reporters, be sure to update your Web site. Reporters these days know how to Google.
When feasible, finish updating the Best Practices section of this site.
Take a deep breath, and enjoy spring.
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Some people spend years trying to learn our craft, spending thousands on graduate schools. Others just go where the news is, roll up their sleeves and give it a shot.
I can’t say that my friend David Lang’s method is the best way to get into the business, but it’s not the craziest either. David is […]
On Tuesday, we lost a colleague and an accomplished journalist when Jonathan Maslow died.
Plenty of others have already shared their memories and their sadness much better than I can. All I’ll say is that his humor and his passion for life and the newsman’s craft will be sorely missed in this newsroom. And those traits […]
I’ve been putting off posting here for weeks, hoping inspiration would strike, or I would suddenly find a bounty of free time to think of something really insightful.
None of this happened, so I’ll drop a few tidbits of news and links to some friends, and hope I can get things rolling here again shortly.
First, I’m no […]
While I use Google News fairly regularly–particularly its e-mailed news alerts), I never noticed the new “comments from people in the news” function that it apparently launched last spring. It’s a fascinating idea that the NY Times recently took a look at (thanks, Slashdot for bringing it to my attention).
Let’s set aside for a moment […]
My former colleague Yoni Greenbaum has entered the journalism blogging arena, and he recently added his philosophy about the obligation of newspapers to make their corrections as easy to find online as they are in the print edition.
As a longtime fan of Regret the Error, I couldn’t agree more. Look, nobody wants to make a […]
I’ve been out of the daily reporting loop for months now as I fill in as an editor, but I have been involved in one cool project. One of my reporters is now in the Dominican Republic reporting a project on the destruction caused earlier in the month by Hurricane Noel. While she’s there (without […]
One of my grammatical pet peeves is the abuse of quotation marks. I see it often in my daily life, but as I’ve been editing lately, I’ve noticed it popping up more and more in the stories I coach. A lot of young reporters think that quoting just one word an official says lends […]
