About Editing and Writing

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.

From a New York Times story, by Alex Williams, titled “As Men Are Canceled, So Too Their Magazine Subscriptions”:

The boys’ club of glossy publishing confronts an identity crisis.

Imagine if Kodak had answered the threat of digital photography by pivoting from film to outdoor grills. Imagine if Blockbuster had taken on the challenge from Netflix by shifting from DVDs to fast food. Imagine if men’s magazines stared down the post-#MeToo manpocalypse by disowning men.

Maybe the last one isn’t so hypothetical?

From a November 4 online chat with Washington Post sportswriter Tom Boswell:

This was certainly not the most EXCITING World Series. There was one GREAT game–Game Six. Game Seven was close, tense and with a shocker of a finish. There have been better Game Sevens that went down to the last pitch–but it was a very good one.

Journalism in the last 15 years has become ever more dominated by its digital side, which increasingly tends negative—it’s been proven that bad emotions have more impact than good emotions. Bad news thus tends to be much more effective clickbait than good news.

And at the Washington Post, under the ownership of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the paper has become more national and less local—the Post is now driven by getting more national and international web traffic at the expense of covering local news. So it’s harder now to find Post stories—except in the sports section—about local people leading interesting lives. This is especially true in the paper’s obit section—almost all the obits now are about national and international figures. They’re interesting people but not someone a Washingtonian ever has encountered or connected with.

From a story, Philip Roth’s $2 million library gift,  in the Wall Street Journal:

Philip Roth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, quietly arranged to give at least $2 million of his estimated $10 million estate to the Newark, N.J., public library before his death last year.

Friends say he intended his bequest to aid not just the library but the struggling city, where he grew up and which featured prominently in his writing. Before he died, the Newark Public Library announced that Mr. Roth had decided to give it his personal book collection. . . .

From the book, My Paper Chase, by Harry Evans. A longtime British editor, Evans moved to the United States in 1984 and edited The Atlantic Monthly Press and then U.S. News & World Report. In 1986 he was the founding editor of  Conde Nast Traveler and from 1990 to 1997 publisher of the Random House trade group.

In 1968, when Ben Bradlee took over the editorship of the Washington Post, I’d been editing the Sunday Times [of London] for a year, so we got together to compare notes and become friends. Later on, the timing in our personal lives was the same. He fell in love and made a second marriage with his paper’s intrepid and glamorous young Style writer, Sally Quinn.

From a column by Roy Peter Clark of Poynter on a debate over apostrophes:

What really matters to my readers is punctuation and AP style. There was that issue of the Oxford comma, you may remember. Then the semicolon emerged from its cage, seeking attention. The dash made a dash for the front of the stage.

So, desperate for readers and attention, I give you the apostrophe, the possessive and, yes, AP Style. A firestorm of controversy—a cliché I have condemned countless times—has been sparked by the AP’s announcement that it is considering a change in the way we use the possessive apostrophe. . . .