Author Archive

News is a fungible commodity. That is to say: News of the sort provided by daily metro newspapers consists in large part of information that readers can easily replace with similar or identical information obtained elsewhere. This has dire implications for many of the models for saving newspapers. Let’s look at a common counterargument: Newspapers

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

Popular Science shuts off comments on its website; cue the Comment Wars again. I can’t help myself. So: my counterarguments to the comment critics. (The executive summary: The problem with online comments isn’t the commenters. The problem is lazy, cheap, cowardly or clueless site bosses.) People say nasty things in comments People say nasty things

I spent the last few days reading over many pieces of narrative non-fiction, to talk to a creative writing workshop about the mutually parasitic relationship between literature and journalism. I found myself stumbling over the same things, mostly in newspaper narratives. 1. Dialogues with the unseen, unheard extra character You’re used to filtering your interviews

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,