About Editing and Writing

In a Wall Street Journal story about the firing of Canadian hockey legend Don Cherry from his broadcasting job, Peter Mansbridge, the dean of Canadian newscasters, was described as “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.”

A good line—I wondered if it had been used before. Like many good lines, the answer is yes.

George Will in 2011: “Elizabeth Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts.”

Jon Franklin, the Baltimore Sun journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting, on Facebook:

“I’ve been searching for decades for an opportunity to use the old medical caution about zebras. Young doctors are warned, ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.’ It means that your mind will trick you, and fill your head with exotica, like in the textbooks you’re reading. Your patient might make you think of Tibetan ivostabible neural atrophy, but what ails her is a common cold. You gotta know when to think zebras and when to think horses.

“Good advice for journalists, too.

From a Wall Street Journal column, “What We Can Learn From Oscar the Grouch,” by Colin Fleming, author of the book Buried on the Beaches: Cape Stories for Hooked Hearts and Driftwood Souls.

A creature emerged from a trash can 50 years ago, on Nov. 10, 1969. The creators of “Sesame Street” blessed Oscar the Grouch with a searching spirit. His can is a kingdom of wonders. . . .

Oscar charms audiences with irrepressible bonhomie. True, he’s not the sort to suffer a fool, he’s not desperate to make a friend, but if you’re also of a questing spirit, he’ll take you to his grouchy bosom. Oscar’s a real friend. For life. Not one for social-media back-scratching. . . .

As a followup to the post about how serving in the military can develop a bullshit detector—something ever more needed in journalism— another way to get smart about the world comes from the late, great Marquette basketball coach Al McGuire:

“I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.”

With so much name-calling these days, this short excerpt seems timely: It’s from the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk:

Scott Burns and Annette Bening.

From a story, “A Filmmaker Who Finds His Muse in the Headlines,” by Don Steinberg in the Wall Street Journal:

Some screenwriters find their source material in comic books. Scott Z. Burns found his in the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture—and turned it into a movie.

“The Report,” which Mr. Burns wrote and directed, is his latest project that converts current events into popcorn dramas. The film, which opens Nov. 15, stars Adam Driver as Daniel Jones, a real-life former Senate investigator, and Annette Bening as Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Mr. Jones spent five years assembling the report on abuses in the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program, including torturing detainees in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.

From a Poynter interview with Randi Rossmann—her husband hoped she’d retire from The (Santa Rosa, California) Press Democrat in September. After 38 years of covering breaking news at her hometown paper, it was time. But Rossmann wanted to stay and help out through one more fire season.

Rossmann has a few pieces of advice to young reporters.

First – You have to understand human nature. What makes people tick? Why are they willing to talk to you? Figuring that out will get people to open up and offer insights into their motivation, she said.