Amy Cunningham, a magazine journalist who became interested in religion, spirituality, and death, was featured in January 21 New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece about the challenge of writing good condolence letters. Amy said, “Though I have studied condolence letters and thought about this, I struggle to sit down and write a letter myself.”

She went on to share a few condolence letters from famous literary and historical figures. “This is not a good letter, Charlie,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to Charles Scribner, the son of his late publisher. “But I still feel too sad to write a good one.” Cunningham awarded him points for completion. “Aiming for excellence is really only going to hold you up.”

USA Today and Gannett are the target of Digital First Media, a hedge fund-owned company known for stripping weakened media properties of whatever assets they still have.

USA Today was started in 1982 by Gannett and its boss Al Neuharth. It was a brilliant move at the time—a newspaper that would be available all over the country. By 1987 it has more than five million readers and Neuharth proudly showed off USA Today’s sleek new headquarters in Rosslyn, across the Pot0mac River from the nation’s capital.

CITY EDITOR, FRIDAY NIGHT

This story is too long, and way past deadline

And is not what I asked for.

It needs rewriting and re-reporting and rethinking.

The reporter has left for the day.

 

The copy desk is holding

A big space in the Sunday paper

On page A1, with photos and info-graphics and charticles.

They want it now.

 

My spouse wants to know when I’ll be home.

My boss won’t pay overtime.

I missed dinner and can’t take any more coffee.

 

—From Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, by Alan Rusbridger.

In any period of great disruption it’s probably desirable to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind: that the revolution will be less profound than it feels; and, conversely, that it will be much more radical.

If the former’s true it’s possible that, after a period of experimentation in our relationship with the reader, things will revert to a more traditional state of affairs. Most readers, it may turn out, don’t want to be involved in the news: they just want to read it or watch it. Some of them will be happy to pay for that. We will treat them like consumers.

I always had this saying: The first 10 ideas you get, throw them away. And that’s what we used to do, is to just keep going until it was something you hadn’t seen before or couldn’t anticipate.

Sesame Street makes fun of journalists:

Negotiating that new year salary increase like: pic.twitter.com/1fv2UMbqgY

— Sesame Street (@sesamestreet) January 7, 2019

Having grown up not watching Sesame Street, I couldn’t understand what the small character was saying: A younger journalist explained that it was the Cookie Monster saying, “We’ll give you a cookie.”