About Editing and Writing

From a Times Insider column by Sarah Bahr headlined “A Critic Who Captured the Moment”:

Wesley Morris was ready for his medal.

In 2012, he had just won his first Pulitzer Prize for criticism, as a writer for The Boston Globe, and was at the ceremony at Columbia University with his mother. But when he wondered out loud where he could pick up the award, he got a surprise.

“Oh, sweetie,” Tracy K. Smith, that year’s poetry winner, told him. “We don’t get a medal, only the public service winner gets that. We get a paperweight.”

From a Washingtonian story headlined “30 Essential Books About Washington”:

This Town, by Mark Leibovich
In theory, Mark Leibovich’s report from glittering post-recession Washington could have been a you’ll-never-eat-lunch-in-this-town-again moment for the writer. After all, his book—a combination of reporting, anthropology, and comic slicing and dicing—skewered people by name, hitting everything from how they threw parties to how they made money to how they mourned. But what would be the fun in that? If there’s anything Leibovich’s insidery depictions of status-seeking and celebrification taught, it’s that a guy whose book became a meme would never go hungry in #thistown.

By Jack Limpert

1. Pay me enough that I feel rewarded for my best efforts.

2. Give me enough time to do the needed reading, reporting, and thinking.

3. Be helpful but give me the freedom to write the story the way I see it.

4. Be reachable if trouble arises.

5. Protect me from others–fact-checkers, sub-editors, accountants, etc.–who make unreasonable demands.

6. Keep me in the loop if big changes are being made to the story.

7. Keep me in the loop on the story’s headline and the types of photos or illustrations that accompany it.

From a New York Times By the Book interview headlined “Eddie Glaude Jr., an Expert on James Baldwin, Reveals His Favorite Baldwin Book”:

Glaude, the author of “Begin Again,” says that “No Name in the Street” (1972) “tries to offer an account of what happened between Little Rock, Dr. King’s assassination and the emergence of Black Power. Trauma and wound saturate his sentences, and his memory fails him in places. It is a masterpiece at the level of form and substance.”

What books are on your night stand?

From a Washington Post obit by Matt Schudel headlined “Ron Rosenblith, Democratic political strategist and Hotline co-founder, dies at 75”:

From a post on axios,com by Sara Fischer and Nicholas Johnston headlined “Journalism’s two Americas”:

From a post on cjr.org headlined “My career path: How some of journalism’s all-stars got where they are”:

Mary Norris
Copy editor at The New Yorker for more than 30 years, author

• Tried and failed to be a waitress twice, and was fired from both jobs after two days and two weeks, respectively.
• After college, worked for a costume company and then drove a milk truck, the “best job I ever had.”
• Landed an entry-level position at The New Yorker in its editorial library and steadily moved up the ranks, working at the magazine on and off for more than 30 years.

From a Washington Post obit by Matt Schudel headlined “James Polk, Pulitzer winner for Watergate reporting, dies at 83”:

From a post on theringer.com by Bryan Curtis headlined “Dale Hansen Is Signing Off, Taking the Anchorman Era With Him”:

The best thing about Dale Hansen stories is that they’re usually true. Take the Louie’s bar story. It took place in 1988. Hansen, Dallas’s top local sportscaster, did the 6 p.m. news broadcast. Then he went to Louie’s bar to await the 10 p.m. news, his second assignment of the evening.

Here are the winners of the 2021 AAN Awards. The winners were chosen from a field of 598 entries submitted by 54 alternative publications in the U.S. and Canada.

Held every year since 1996, the AAN Awards recognize the best in alternative journalism and graphic design and are a unique chance for alt-weeklies to compete directly against the work of their peers in cities across the continent.