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20 years later, I still miss The National
Bud Shaw has a great story over at Mental Floss on the rise and fall of The National, a short-lived national daily sports newspaper. I read it regularly and loved it, before it died a year after it sprang into existence. It was supposed to be the USA Today of sports, covering both national and…
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Writing for peanuts?
Linda Formichelli at the Renegade Writer blog posted an interesting piece on “writing for peanuts“: freelancers working for sites like Associated Content and… um, Examiner.com. Interesting discussion of some of the arguments and bad logic about freelancers who sell themselves shows and work for pennies. She does an effective demolition of many arguments many freelancers…
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New media Sports Guy rises as old media sinks
A few weeks ago, New York Times did an interesting profile of one of my favorite writers, Bill Simmons, better known as ESPN’s “Sports Guy.” It includes some interest background on the early days and his rise to becoming a model of a new breed of columnist that broke a lot of the conventional rules…
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The Thanksgiving Narrative
The original Thanksgiving narrative is a semi-true tale about a harvest festival between American colonists and native Americans in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Reportedly, there was no pumpkin pie, only boiled pumpkin. Meh. The narrative usually stops there, leaving out subsequent massacres and wars. Anyway, the key storyline was about different people and cultures coming…
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Dissecting Gladwell’s take on Football and Dog Fighting
One of the writers I most admire is Malcolm Gladwell, a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the author of the Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. His insightful writing explores big ideas through deep research and reporting, linking together seemingly disconnected events and ideas. In one piece, he ties together the biblical story of…
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Headlines first?
There’s a lot to learn and know about the craft of writing well. There are the literary building blocks, or as Roy Peter Clark puts it, writing tools: things like word choice, structure, description, rhythm, transitions, details. But then there are the more technical, marketing-minded elements of the business, the stuff that separates unknown bloggers…
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Why I love “texts from last night”
One of my guilty pleasures is the site texts from last night, a site that posts random mobile text messages sent to and from anonymous people, mostly college-aged kids, usually drunk, high, or hungover. A few recent examples: (407): i went to disney world today with my friends, met snow white, then saw her later…
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Long-form narrative and the art of cooking slow food
In the Washington Post last week, Joel Achenbach wrote an interesting feature on the diminishing opportunities for long-form narrative nonfiction in the newspaper-death-spiral/Twitter/iPhone era. As seems to be the case anytime that I read about trends in the magazine and news business world these days, the outlook isn’t promising. There seem to be two lines…
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Sinatra’s Letter to Mike Royko
One of my earliest writing inspirations was Mike Royko, a legendary columnist who wrote for the Chicago Tribune when I was still attending school in the Windy City. He wrote short, punchy, entertaining columns three times a week that tackled everything from politics to social issues to the woes of the Bears. I popped into…
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The stories we tell
One of my favorite shows of all time was Six Feet Under. What made the show so great was that, even though every once in a while something extraordinary happened, most of the drama came from every day life decisions: where to go to school, whether to stay in a relationship, or when to change…