About Editing and Writing

Chris Jones describes himself this way: Idiot. Storyteller. Writing mostly for screens—including “Away,” coming to Netflix on September 4. Trying to make more corrections than mistakes. His tweetstorm story today:
—
Some followers and all of my friends know the story of my arrival at Esquire, but I wish to share it today, because it makes me happy. It’s a story about how much strangers can impact another stranger’s life. A janitor changed everything for me. He doesn’t even know he did.

From Delanceyplace.com:

Tom Hanks was a high school student and George Roy Hill an Academy Award-winning director, but that didn’t stop the young aspiring actor from writing to Hill about his future ambitions. Hanks was attending Skyline High School in Oakland when he wrote to Hill, whose niece and nephews were among his classmates.

Dear Mr. Hill,

Seeing that I am very close, dear, good, and long-lasting friends with your nephews Kit and Timothy, and your niece Kate, and that I have seen your fantastically entertaining and award-winning film ‘The Sting,’ starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford and enjoyed it very much, it is all together fitting and proper that you should ‘discover’ me.

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the 70th birthday of American cartoonist Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side, a single-panel comic that ran from 1980 to 1995 and became beloved for its anthropomorphic deer, birds, cats, dogs, dinosaurs, snakes, vipers, and cows, often drawn with cat-eye glasses and beehive hairdos.

In Larson’s world, a man sits on a bed in a disheveled room, staring at a chicken perched on his windowsill. The caption: “The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression.”

From an article on futurity.com headlined “Invisible words reveal a blueprint for all stories”:

When telling a story, these common words—a, the, it—are used in certain ways and at certain moments. In a new study in Science Advances, researchers recorded the use of these kinds of words across thousands of fictional and nonfictional stories, mapping a universal blueprint for storytelling. . . .

In a computer analysis of nearly 40,000 fictional narratives, including novels and movie dialogues, the researchers tracked authors’ use of pronouns (she, they), articles (a, the), and other short words, unveiling a consistent “narrative curve:”

A Notable & Quotable from the Wall Street Journal:

An August 5 National Aeronautics and Space Administration press release:

As the scientific community works to identify and address systemic discrimination and inequality in all aspects of the field, it has become clear that certain cosmic nicknames are not only insensitive, but can be actively harmful. NASA is examining its use of unofficial terminology for cosmic objects as part of its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

From an obit on npr.com by Terry Gross headlined “Linguist Geoff Nunberg, Who Explored Our Ever-Changing Language, Dies at 75″:

Fresh Air’s longtime language commentator Geoff Nunberg died Tuesday after a long illness.

Geoff was a regular contributor to Fresh Air since 1987, when we made the transition from a local radio program to a daily NPR show. I met him even before that, when he was the usage editor at The American Heritage Dictionary, and I interviewed him about the new edition.

From an exit interview with New York Times CEO Mark Thompson on mckinsey.com:

Over an eight-year tenure that began in 2012, Mark Thompson, president and CEO of the New York Times Company, has overseen a dramatic transformation of the storied institution into a digital-centric news brand. Under his watch, the Times’s digital readership has jumped to nearly 5.7 million subscribers, from half a million. Its annual revenue from digital-only subscriptions topped $450 million at the end of 2019. The Times has said it now has 6.5 million paying readers, more than halfway toward Thompson’s target of ten million subscribers by 2025. In late July, the Times Company announced that Thompson, age 62, will retire as CEO and be succeeded on September 8 by Meredith Kopit Levien, the Times Company’s executive vice president and COO, who was hired as head of advertising by Thompson in 2013.

From a New York Times story by Marc Tracy headlined “The Daily News Is Now a Newspaper Without a Newsroom”:

A tabloid once famous for its bustling, big-city newsroom no longer has a newsroom.

In a move that was unthinkable before the coronavirus pandemic, Tribune Publishing said on Wednesday that The Daily News, once the largest-circulation newspaper in the country, was permanently closing its newsroom at 4 New York Plaza in Lower Manhattan.

A note from Garrison Keillor about his future

The pandemic is a beautiful thing for an old guy like me. Young people do all the complaining so I don’t have to, I’m free to be cheerful. I detest physical exercise and now I have an excuse: heavy breathing spreads the virus. I also have a cover for not wanting to travel: Europe doesn’t want us. Even the Canadians don’t want us.

From a Detroit News column by publisher Gary Miles headlined “Subscribers must help preserve reporting that holds power to account”:

A great state deserves a great newspaper.

And that’s what we’re committed to giving you.

After 25 years of online evolution and innovation, far more of our readers now get their news “paper” on a device — whether computer, tablet or smartphone — than do in print. More than 6.1 million different visitors turned to detroitnews.com in June alone.

You’ve made us an integral part of your life. And we want to ensure we can keep giving you the most reliable journalism that Michigan has to offer.