About Editing and Writing

From The Writer’s Almanac:

Today is the birthday of novelist Barbara Kingsolver, who rose to fame with her first novel, The Bean Trees, about a young woman from rural Kentucky who decides to drive west toward a new life and ends up taking care of a Cherokee toddler named Turtle.

Kingsolver began her studies at DePauw University thinking she’d be a classical pianist, but then discovered how little money they made, so she switched to biology. It wasn’t until she was a graduate student at the University of Arizona that she tried writing, winning a short-story contest for a Phoenix newspaper. She kept writing and eventually had something resembling a novel, which she sent to an agent, who sold the book. Her first book contract arrived the same day she brought her first child home from the hospital.

From a Washington Post story by Paul Farhi headlined “The Trump White House provided reporters with a gusher of leaks. With Biden, everything’s changed”:

After two and a half months of Joe Biden’s presidency, something is missing from the news coverage of his administration: leaks.

Juicy details about the president’s behind-the-scenes conduct and decision-making? No one seems able to dig up anything interesting.

Early forecasts of major policy proposals on the horizon, a.k.a. the grand tradition of the Washington trial balloon? A story we’re not getting to read these days.

From a Barron’s press release:

We are pleased to share that David Cho will be joining Dow Jones as the Editor in Chief of Barron’s.

David joins Barron’s after spending 20 years at The Washington Post, where he most recently served as Business Editor. In this role, his digital-first focus led to aggressive expansion, both journalistic and geographic, as well as substantial audience growth….Under his leadership, the Washington Post’s business desk won a Gerald Loeb award for commentary last year.

From a column in the New York Times by Margaret Renki headlined “Thank God for the Poets”:

NASHVILLE — When the poet Amanda Gorman stepped to the lectern at President Biden’s inauguration, she faced a much-diminished crowd of masked people on the National Mall, but she was speaking directly to the heart of a bruised nation:

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew,
That even as we hurt, we hoped,
That even as we tired, we tried.

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It is the birthday of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the American conservationist and writer who told the world about the Florida Everglades. She was born in Minneapolis. Her parents divorced and she grew up in Massachusetts with her mother’s family.

She graduated from Wellesley College as Class Orator, and soon afterward her mother died. She drifted around the country working department store jobs, failed at marriage, and eventually reunited with her father who was editor of the Miami Herald. There she became what she wanted to be: a writer. She produced novels, books of short stories, plays, poems, and hundreds of articles. And she won an O. Henry award.

From a Wall Street Journal column by Lance Morrow headlined “Joe Biden’s American Grandstand”:

The country reinvents itself from time to time. Reinvention is what Americans have instead of revolution, which Karl Marx called the “locomotive of history.”…

The country started with people coming across the ocean to reinvent themselves—a project that was either glorious or genocidal, depending on how woke you are….

Now the Biden administration, headed by a man a few years too old to be a boomer, entertains ambitions to take a great leap forward. But wait….By what mandate does the Biden administration undertake the work of irrevocably altering American society?…

From a story on sfexaminer.com headlined “San Francisco Examiner names Carly Schwartz editor in chief”:

The San Francisco Examiner has named Google’s Carly Schwartz as the 156-year-old publication’s next editor in chief.

Examiner owner Clint Reilly announced the hire to Examiner staffers at their regularly scheduled editorial meeting Monday morning, explaining to employees that Schwartz will oversee The Examiner newsroom, along with editorial operations at The Nob Hill Gazette and SF Weekly….

Following up on yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story headlined “New Bidder Emerges for Tribune Publishing”:

The New York Times has a story by Katie Robertson headlined “Tribune Publishing Considers New Offer From Surprise Bidders.”

The Washington Post has a long piece by Elahe Izadi and Sarah Ellison headlined “The battle for Tribune: Inside the campaign to find news owners for a legendary group of newspapers.” From the story:

Last year, as a group of Baltimore Sun reporters embarked on a long-shot endeavor to find a new owner that could save their paper from a hedge-fund takeover, a former Maryland politician gave them a piece of advice.

From an AP obit by Jerry Schwartz headlined “Sharon Cohen, much-honored AP national writer, dead at 68”:

Sharon Cohen, a matchless reporter who told American stories with great skill and compassion over more than four decades at The Associated Press, died Monday at her Chicago home.

At her death, more than a year after she was diagnosed with brain cancer, Cohen was a national writer, a position she had held for 20 years. From her base in Chicago, she unreeled an array of stories about the triumphs and tragedies of people both ordinary and extraordinary.

From a New York Times “Inside the List” story by Elizabeth Egan headlined “Walter Isaacson’s New Book Celebrates Three Notable Women”:

Voracious bibliophiles have a funny habit of grazing the fine print — dedication, epigraph and acknowledgments — before tucking into the main course of a book….

Consider Walter Isaacson’s latest opus, “The Code Breaker,” which is now No. 2 in its second week on the hardcover nonfiction list. The star of the book is Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who helped invent CRISPR, a revolutionary gene-editing tool that has played a role in the fight against Covid-19. But on the dedication page are two bright lights from the publishing solar system: Carolyn Reidy, longtime head of Simon & Schuster, and Alice Mayhew, who was Isaacson’s editor for 40 years. Both women died in 2020.