About Editing and Writing

From a Wall Street Journal review by Diane Cole of the book by Richard Hurowitz titled “In the Garden of the Righteous: The Heroes Who Risked Their Lives to Save Jews During the Holocaust”:

In June 1940, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portugal’s consul general in Bordeaux, France, watched from his office window as a stream of Jewish men, women and children flooded his sidewalk. Hitler’s army had conquered France with shocking speed, and the Jews, now made stateless by Nazi racial laws, were at the consulate to plead for transit visas to Portugal—and to freedom.

From a Reuters story by Sarah Kinosian headlined “In Mexico, a reporter published a story. The next day he was dead.”

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Just after sunset on Thursday, February 10th, two men in a white Dodge Ram pickup pulled up in front of Heber Lopez Vasquez’s small radio studio in southern Mexico. One man got out, walked inside and shot the 42-year-old journalist dead. Lopez’s 12-year-old son Oscar, the only person with him, hid, Lopez’s brother told Reuters.

From an AP story headlined “Media group says it will start newspaper in southern Oregon”:

MEDFORD, Ore. — An Oregon-based media group has announced it will start a newspaper in a southern Oregon city that saw a longstanding newspaper abruptly close this month.

EO Media Group said it will open a news outlet that serves Medford and Ashland after the closure of the Mail Tribune, Jefferson Public Radio reported.

EO Media Group has 15 publications around the Pacific Northwest, including the Bulletin in Bend, Oregon. The new print and online outlet will be called The Tribune.

From The Washington Post Editorial Board:

As mayors from around the country gathered in D.C. this week, they were eager to trade ideas on a problem facing almost every city in the nation: dead downtowns. Tourists are back, but office workers are still missing in action amid the tall glass buildings that dominate so many American downtowns. Their restaurants, coffee hangouts, stores and transit systems cannot sustain themselves without more people in center cities.

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Managing Editor Leroy Chapman Jr. answers the question “Why we’re writing this story” about the Jan. 22, 2023, publication of “Strip club visit raises questions about fatal UGA crash.”

WE ARE PURSUING THE FACTS. Here is what we know so far. On Sunday, Jan. 15, our state woke to tragic news: Four young people — two University of Georgia athletic department employees and two football players — were in a deadly, single-vehicle accident. Two died and two were injured.

From a New York Times obit by Richard Sandomir headlined “Marion Meade Biographer of Dorothy Parker, Dies at 88”:

Marion Meade, who helped revive interest in Dorothy Parker, the celebrated writer and sardonic wit of the Algonquin Round Table, with her 1988 biography, die at her home in Manhattan.

Ms. Meade’s “Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?” detailed the vibrant if difficult life of a major figure on the literary scene of the 1920s and ’30s.

From a story on texasmonthly.com by Stephen Harrigan headlined “How to Keep a Great Magazine Going”:

I have two recurring dreams. One of them is about a movie theater from my childhood that was long ago torn down but whose luminous marquee I magically reencounter when I turn a corner onto an unfamiliar street.

In the other dream, the phantom is me. I’m reporting for work at Texas Monthly, on the sixteenth floor of the Austin office building at Sixth and Congress where the magazine’s first grown-up headquarters was located.

From a Washington Post review by Abraham Verghese of the book by Henry Marsh titled “And Finally: Matters of Life and Death”:

When he learns of his diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer at age 71, Marsh, a neurosurgeon in London and the author of two previous memoirs — “Do No Harm” (2015) and “Admissions” (2017) — is shocked. In one moment, he has crossed into another world, patienthood. As he comes to accept this new status, Marsh is haunted by the faces and ghosts of former patients: “Now that I was so anxious and unhappy, feeling abandoned, I realized how anxious and unhappy so many of my patients must have been.”

From a New York Times story by Peter Baker headlined “25 Years Later, Looking for Lessons in the Clinton Scandal”:

The story was as tawdry as they come: The president of the United States had been having sex with a former White House intern in the space off the Oval Office and now was being investigated for lying under oath and obstructing justice to cover it up.

The newspaper that landed on doorsteps around Washington that morning, 25 years ago Saturday, kicked off a furor that led to the first presidential impeachment trial in 130 years and transformed politics in the capital as President Bill Clinton battled for survival. A quarter-century later, the lessons are still being debated with each successive scandal.

From a story on axios.com headlined “How Apple dodged layoffs”:

Close to 200,000 tech workers have been laid off since the start of 2022, with a new, intense wave in just the last few weeks.

Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft have all shed employees.

But Apple — the world’s largest company — has thus far avoided letting people go.

“[Apple] added employees at a much slower clip than those companies during the pandemic,” The Wall Street Journal’s Aaron Tilley writes.

Apple “tends to run lean, with limited employee perks and businesses focused on hardware products and sales that have so far largely dodged the economic downturn,” The Journal adds.