About Editing and Writing

From a New York Times obit by Neil Genzlinger headlined “Jill Paton Walsh, 83, Author Who Scoffed at 19 Rejections”:

Jill Paton Walsh was greeted with acclaim in the 1960s when she began writing young-adult books that challenged her readers in both plotting and messaging. There was “Fireweed” (1970), a story of two British adolescents who set up housekeeping in a bombed-out building during World War II. There was “Goldengrove” (1972), about two youths who navigate the transition from childhood to adulthood during an eventful summer.

From a New York Times story by Media Equation columnist Ben Smith headlined “Biden Aims to Be Boring. Woe Is Media.”:

One afternoon in the spring of 2009, Jon Meacham sat in front of the freighted wooden bookshelf in his office and talked to me about a job writing for Newsweek.

I was by then not so sure about the future of print, but Mr. Meacham, the magazine’s editor in chief, told me that his corporate masters had a plan: Newsweek would rid itself of most of its existing, middlebrow subscribers and charge the remaining ones more for a highbrow product. The plan didn’t make much sense to me and, obviously, did not work. The next year, Mr. Meacham, once described as the “oldest 34-year-old journalist in the world” — left to write and teach at Vanderbilt.

From a story by Alison Flood in theguardian.com headlined “Oxford Dictionaries: 2020 has too many Words of the Year to name just one”:

For the first time, the Oxford English Dictionary has chosen not to name a word of the year, describing 2020 as “a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word”. Instead, from “unmute” to “mail-in”, and from “coronavirus” to “lockdown”, the eminent reference work has announced its “words of an ‘unprecedented’ year”. . . .

From a story by Patrick Sloyan in the May 1997 issue of the American Journalism Review:

It was November 22, 1963, in the UPI Washington Bureau. There is a global generation of men and women who froze, gasped, and forever remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing on that day. It was when the first news came that President John F. Kennedy was fatally wounded by gunfire in Dallas.

Neil Gaiman on breakthroughs in the Wall Street Journal Magazine:

“There’s an old woodcut drawing I saw as a teenager, I think in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, that really affected me, of somebody pushing through the walls of the world and seeing the gears behind. That’s the heart of any breakthrough, that point where you are looking at an existing world, and you push a bit harder and you lean and you crawl and you realize your world is not quite your world.

From a column in the New York Times headlined “A Headline (or Five) for History: As Election Day approached, print editors at The Times were ready for anything. Or so we thought.”:

A funny thing about print journalism is that the most momentous events often call for the simplest headlines. MEN WALK ON MOON did not require any great turn of phrase or judicious selection of information, yet it had a crisp power that endures decades later.

But which two or three words would declare the winner of the 2020 presidential election atop The New York Times? The debate went on for days in a chain of emails among more than a dozen editors from various departments.

From a New York Times story—called An Appraisal— by Dwight Garner headlined “Jan Morris, a Distinctive Guide Who Took Readers Around the World”:

Jan Morris was, one suspects, more prepared for death — to face that moment when one’s agent becomes one’s executor — than are many others. For one thing, she lived a long and eventful life. . . .For another, she was forward-thinking enough to leave a book behind to be published upon the news of her pegging out. That manuscript, she cheerfully told an interviewer in 2012, is “with the publishers, waiting for me to kick the bucket!”

Journalist Jan Morris: “It changed my writing from places to people.”

From a New York Times obit by Jonathan Kandell headlined “Jan Morris, Celebrated Writer of Place and History, Is Dead at 94”:

Jan Morris, the acclaimed British journalist, travel writer and historian who wrote about history’s sweep and the details of place with equal eloquence and chronicled her life as a transgender woman, died on Friday in Wales. . . .

As James Morris she was a military officer in one of Britain’s most renowned cavalry regiments and then a daring journalist who climbed three-quarters of the way up Mount Everest for an exclusive series of dispatches from the first conquest of that mountain, the world’s highest.