Monday Readings Archive

A story to boost your faith in the Future of Journalism, and warm your heart

If you want to take a break from the ginned-up debates that dominate the Twitter feeds of journalists and journalism professors when they’re not being distracted by the latest shiny things from the widget mills — and God knows, we all need a break from that — I’ve got something for you. Something that can

Looking back from 1943, artist remembers days before ‘firing squads and economic chiselers in the newspaper business’

I dedicate this Monday Reading to the recently unemployed graphic artists of my acquaintance in particular, and in general to all the newsroom artists I’ve worked with. As newsrooms became more professional — in the worst sense of the word — and the tolerance for dealing with creative personalities declined, the art departments seemed to

Hemingway the reporter vs. Hemingway the author

I was doing some research for a presentation on narrative journalism and journalistic fiction when I ran across a 2012 blog post by Bill Henderson on Write a Better Novel. He put side by side a passage from a story Ernest Hemingway filed for the Toronto Star and the same scene in his first fiction,

The haunts of the bat and the mole: Horace Greeley’s ode to newspapers

I ran across Horace Greeley’s poem when I found an excerpt in the book I mentioned last week, Keen Rafferty’s “That’s What They Said about the Press.” Shockingly to me, it’s been anthologized many times, to judge by the Google Books results. Shocking because, as a journalist-poet, Greeley was no Carl Sandburg. Heck, he was

‘Almost holy’: 14 quotes about newspapers and journalism

My library is stuffed with books (remember those?) about journalism. From the shelves I plucked “That’s What They Said about the Press” by Keen Rafferty (Vantage, 1975). Rafferty was head of the copy desk at the Baltimore Sun after only three years in the business (or so his bio says) and head of the University