MetaFilter posts tagged with Writing and journalism

“Don’t go around asking the question, ‘Is this character likeable?’

Fizz — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:55:06 -0800

Claire Messud: “A woman’s rant” [National Post] "Over the last week, discussion surrounding Claire Messud’s new novel, The Woman Upstairs, has shifted from the book to an interview its author recently gave to Publishers Weekly, in which Messud took issue with the following question: “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.” "It seems every cultural essayist or literary critic has voiced his or her feelings over the past few days, with most agreeing that, yes, it was a dumb question."

one great sentence can equal one great post

Potomac Avenue — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:07:42 -0800

Stop Making Fun of Leaked Washington Post Blogger Job and Start Applying for It, Says Slate's Dan Kois

"Please don't use any less than a 16px base font-size for body content"

mediareport — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:53:47 -0800

Stop Using Small Font Sizes "I'm calling you out. All of you. The hackers, the designers, the code monkeys, the word-smiths, the editors, the CSS gurus, and everyone else who works on content management systems and style sheets for news sites. Stop using small font sizes." (The before-and-after examples at the bottom of the post from The Atlantic, Wired and TechCrunch might be useful.)

Why's This So Good?

AceRock — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:06:12 -0800

Conceived as sort of a companion to Longreads, Longform, Pocket, Byliner, etc., Nieman Storyboard's Why's This So Good? series looks at why some great long-form journalism and narrative nonfiction pieces are so great. There are over 60 installments of writers talking shop about writing. A good place to start is their Reader's Choice post which highlights installments on pieces by Malcolm Gladwell, Buzz Bissinger, David Grann, Gay Talese, and John McPhee. Other highlights include pieces on pieces by Calvin Trillin, J.R. Moehringer, Jeanne Marie Laskas, Michael Lewis, Katherine Boo, and Joan Didion.

If a reader ends up confused, it’s not their failure as a reader but yours as a writer.

metaBugs — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 10:55:07 -0800

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has named the 2012 winners of their science journalism award. The winning text, radio and TV segments -- which cover subjects ranging from bat ecology to nuclear power post-Fukushima -- are all free access. If you're in the mood for award-winning science writing, also consider checking out the winning essay in the Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize 2012, and the first winner of the new European Astronomy Journalism Prize. If you're feeling inspired to pen a few words yourself, here's Gaurdian science correspondant Alok Jha's advice on good science writing.

A Chat With Jon Ronson

the man of twists and turns — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 22:06:35 -0800

But I couldn't do it. I spent three months and I just couldn't do it. And the reason was because I kept on meeting people who worked in the credit industry and they were really boring. I couldn't make them light up the page. And, as I said in The Psychopath Test, if you want to get away with wielding true malevolent power, be boring. Journalists hate writing about boring people, because we want to look good, you know?

A Chat With Writer Jon Ronson Addicted To Weird - An Interview With Jon Ronson

I think there are themes and the biggest theme, for me anyway, is how everybody in the book, including me, feel in some way as if they’re lost at sea, and are grasping for something to get them through. And the thing that they often grasp for is something that’s kind of irrational, makes no sense, is ridiculous. But the book is never, I hope, condescending. It’s always kind of empathetic. And it becomes almost a celebration of irrationality as a human character trait to be cherished. Other themes come through which really interest me. People’s fear of humiliation is a weird recurrent theme. The number of times people in the book — I noticed this when I was doing the audiobook for Audible — the number of times people say, “The thing that I was most afraid of in life was being humiliated or looking stupid, and here it was coming true.”

Ronson is the author of Them: Adventures with Extremists, The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Psychopath Test and Lost at Sea. Jon Ronson also wrote 'Amber Waves Of Grain' - previously, 'DIY Science' - previously, and 'Clear Eyes, Full Plates, Can't Puke' - previously

So f*>%ing future

Potomac Avenue — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:43:33 -0800

"Yelp Reviews As Poetry". "A guide to the queer teen stars of YouTube." "Can a video game company save capitalism?" "In Defense of Ke$ha." "Playing golf inside Louisiana's largest prison." "What getting an abortion is like in a Red State." "We may have reached peak infographic." Here ye Here ye! The first (& only?) issue of Tomorrow Magazine [founded by fired Good Magazine editors] is out! Also: Fuck, Marry, Kill = Baby Boomers Good.is previously

You eat too fast, and I understand why your antidyspeptic pill-makers cover your walls, your forests even, with their advertisements.

The Whelk — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 09:36:40 -0800

In 1891 author and lecturer ”Max O’Rell” (being the pen name of one Léon Paul Blouet) published an amusing account of his travels through the States and Eastern Canada - "A Frenchman In America" - that, along with the charming illustrations, reflect on then popular national stereotypes and character and is presented on Project Gutenberg in its entirely. (via)

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."

Fizz — Mon, 28 May 2012 13:33:16 -0800

The Hemingway Papers: The legendary writer’s reporting from the Toronto Star archives, featuring historical annotations by William McGeary, a former editor who researched Hemingway’s columns extensively for the newspaper, along with new insight and analysis from the Star’s team of Hemingway experts.

"...whatever job you take, you're going to spend a lot of time there. You should try to make it fun."

zarq — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:57:49 -0800

In 2007, the Madison (WI) Police Department hired their first civilian Public Information Officer: former reporter Joel DeSpain. Over the last five years, Mr. DeSpain has reportedly combined "humor, a flair for the dramatic and sense of the absurd", and turned the mundane Madison Police Blotter into an "art form and a thing of joy." So Why Has Madison Wisconsin Has Become the Weird News Capitol of the Midwest? Meet the United States’ most whimsical police reporter. (Last one's a gawker link. If you dislike their site / interface, have no fear: all reports in that article (plus four extras) can be found after the jump.) Onion A/V Club Interview: Madison Police's Joel DeSpain on the art of writing police reports. Reports * Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop * The Rapture (News Report) * "Efforts to reach people who might be able to come over and give immediate help were unsuccessful. So, the officer and sergeant decided it would be best to make the woman a hot meal." * Thieves Pocket Dial 911. * Guy walks into a Dennys, claims to be the general manager and then makes his own cheeseburger and fries.... * Fowl Play? * Scrappin' * Lovely HEBA Shoplifter * “I saw a real donnybrook" * "However, he did hand the officer his "Letter of Commitment to Jesus" which he thought was important for her to see." * "During the flinging of the feces some ended up on Bell's clothes, and before the battle was over both women had squared off with the shovels" * Vikings, Pillaged * Patron of the Arts * Annie the ball python meets the Madison book club Also, if you're in Madison, don't do this.

The Craziest Magazine Ever

reenum — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:53:55 -0800

The Police Gazette had it all: misogyny, violence, racism, and venereal disease. It was yellow journalism concentrated into its purest form (SL Cracked List).

Janet Flanner

Trurl — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:31:41 -0800

Janet Flanner began her career at The New Yorker composing evocative and cogent dispatches from Europe, writing nearly seven hundred Letters from Paris under the nom de plume Genêt, from 1925 to 1975. In between these, she contributed Profiles, Reporter at Large dispatches, and other Letters from around the globe. In a Postscript published after she died, in 1978, editor-in-chief William Shawn wrote of his prolific correspondent: "Her eye never became jaded, her ardor for what was new and alive never diminished, and her language remained restless. She was a stylist who devoted her style, bedazzling and heady in itself, to the subtle task of conveying the spirit of a subtle people." Three years before the start of the Second World War, Flanner wrote a comprehensive three-part series titled “Führer”, on Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. She later told the fiction editor Katherine White, “The only job on the magazine that I am really proud of was the fact that I had sufficient apprehension … to propose to write about Hitler as an important man.” In Part III of the series, which ran March 14, 1936, Flanner superbly anatomizes Hitler’s dogmatic persona:
Lacking the cerebral faculty of creating new public ideologies, as a fanatic [Hitler] has developed his unusual capacity for adapting those of others. Being self-taught, his mental processes are mysterious; he is missionary-minded; his thinking is emotional, his conclusions material. He has been studious with strange results: he says he regards liberalism as a form of tyranny, hatred and attack as part of man’s civic virtues, and equality of men as immoral and against nature.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Houyhnhnm — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:13:42 -0800

"To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female. … Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. … Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old, her bag of tricks didn’t work anymore."

Janet Malcolm: The Art of Nonfiction

escabeche — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 05:54:57 -0800

"I can’t imagine a nonfiction writer who wasn’t influenced by the fiction he or she had read. But the “thriller-like pacing” you find in my writing may come more from my own beat than from thrillers. I walk fast and am impatient. I get bored easily—no less with my own ideas than with those of others. Writing for me is a process of constantly throwing out stuff that doesn’t seem interesting enough. I grew up in a family of big interrupters." Janet Malcolm interviewed by Katie Roiphe in The Paris Review.

Set aside some free time; you're gonna need it

Horace Rumpole — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:57:39 -0800

Launching today is Byliner, both a portal to the best narrative nonfiction from around the web, and a publishing platform for original works. Some additional background here.

AOHell

Horace Rumpole — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:30:40 -0800

One night, I awoke out of a dead sleep, and jumped to my computer, and instantly began typing up an article about David Letterman. I kept going for ten minutes, until I realized I had dreamed it all. There was no article to write; I was simply typing up the same meaningless phrases that we all always used: “LADY GAGA PANTLESS ON LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN,” or some such.

AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out.

Janet Malcolm

Trurl — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:51:42 -0800

The public pillorying of Janet Malcolm is one of the scandals of American letters. ... why is it Malcolm, a virtuoso stylist and a subtle, exciting thinker, who drives critics into a rage? What journalist of her caliber is as widely disliked or as often accused of bad faith? And why did so few of her colleagues stand up for her during the circus of a libel trial that scarred her career? In the animus toward her there is something almost personal. Though nowhere near representative of her best work, you can read online Malcolm's essays on J.D. Salinger, Gertrude Stein, and the Gossip Girl books.

The internet is too big to take on

mippy — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:45:54 -0800

Writer Cath Elliot, recently nominated for the Orwell Prize for political writing, posts about what are, sadly, often the occupational hazards of being a political woman online. (NSFW language; author has tagged post with a trigger warning fwiw)

VQR editor takes his own life

rdc — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:52:42 -0800

Heartbreaking news for people who care about reading. Founded in 1925, the Virginia Quarterly Review has become the standard-bearer for long-form narrative journalism - "the sort of articles that make readers want to become writers." "The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce" is a great example of what this kind of writing can achieve, but it's not the only one. The essential Bookslut has called the VQR "the best fucking magazine on the planet right now." Last week Mefi's own Waldo made the blog post we all dread having to make. His friend and boss, the VQR's genius editor Kevin Morrissey made his will, left his affairs in order, called the police to report a shooting that had not yet happened, and took his own life. Previously on the blue.

Profile of a Profile

defenestration — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:14:08 -0800

Storyboard is an almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature. The Birth of Storyboard is a (minimally edited) video of the conversation that spawned the project. The feature—that will be published in November—is about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. In the past he has woven the process of creating his work into the work itself, so Wired writer Jason Tanz thought it would make sense to do the same. Looking to promote his directorial debut, Kaufman has agreed to take part in the project.

journalist as writer

four panels — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 18:47:23 -0800

"Together they panhandled with Nam Vet Needs Help signs at the highway entrance, converted their proceeds into Icehouse beer and Rich & Rare whiskey, and shared their nights in the perpetual dusk beneath the elevated highway, taking turns seeking the full sleep that never came, so loud was the traffic above, so naked were they below, in addled vulnerability.

Every Sunday Dan Barry writes about America in his This Land column for the New York Times.

KSJTracker

grobstein — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:17:07 -0800

Knight Science Journalism Tracker is a new-ish blog (project of a program at MIT and Charles Petit) that follows science writing and reporting in a very wide range of publications. It's a good way to learn about how science news is reported, and an efficient way to keep up with the news itself. [some recent examples]

'I'm a fucking hero. A real one': New Games Journalism, the state of play...

nthdegx — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 03:25:08 -0800

New Games Journalism (a Wikipedia definition for the uninitiated), appeared on MetaFilter last December with a link to the now legendary 'Bow, Nigger' article. In the first quarter of 2005 the buzz surrounding the phenomenon grew. Articles like This is Why Your Game Magazine Sucks got the attention of the Guardian, who examined the role of NGJ in a February article. In March, they linked to ten unmissable examples. At about the same time, the movement got its very own publication, The Gamer's Quarter; and in June PC Gamer wrote an open letter to the gaming community requesting articles about, well, anything really.

The New Games Journalism

mkultra — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 09:01:31 -0800

The New Games Journalism is a manifesto written earlier this year in an attempt to re-shape the way that video game reviews are written, moving away from a stats-based view (these are the weapons, the graphics quality is X, the A.I. is as good as Y), and toward a more narrative approach. The goal, essentially, should be to convey to the reader what it's actually like to play the game. Be sure to follow the link to "Bow, Nigger" as an example. This review of Eve Online (pdf) is another good example. Are other areas of media criticism in need of a revolution?

I uppercased K.D. Lang’s name in a story... and it felt good.

chicobangs — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 10:36:52 -0800

Testy Copy Editors is a site run by WaPo Financial Copy Editor Philip Blanchard, with guest columns and discussions dedicated to blowing off steam for people in the occasionally tense business of making words fit, parse properly and make sense in print.

If you've actually edited copy under a deadline, or know someone who has, you know how thankless the job can sometimes be.