4 posts tagged “journalism”
My content are to help me learn something about a topic. The last content read was The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers. My current content read is Under the Banner of Heaven.
In between the two was my read for style. These selections are of notably good writers either in nonfiction or fiction or even books on how to write better. (Of course, the content selections may be by great writers as well).
My first style selection was a book by Susan Orlean suggested by my friend and expert advice giver. The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup is a collection of profiles Orlean wrote mostly for the New Yorker.
Technically, she always has a paragraph where she describes the way her protagonist looks, usually listing details. She has a gift for listing, sometimes listing activities the protagonist participates in to further paint a picture of their life.
She also uses mystery as a hook in the opening paragraph. She'll make a pronouncement that seems to make no sense like the intro to her profile of Colin Duffy, a ten-year-old boy. "If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter." Throughout the essay, these mysteries are explained.
She explains in her introduction to the book that she often spends days or weeks with a person to do her reporting. My one wish for this book is that she put this kind of detail and reflection on writing the piece at the front of each essay so that I, a person reading her for style, could understand the challenges or techniques she used to write the essay.
Overall, a great read that I finished in a week!
What is going on here?! I don't care if they taunted the tiger. No one should be at risk of being chewed up by a tiger while at the zoo!
My friend, a former zoo employee, has first hand knowledge of the stupidity of the general public. Shoot, even I taunted the monkeys (or were they apes) while on an honor's field trip to the zoo in sixth grade, just because we heard that it would get them to throw shit at us. It worked.
I'm disgusted at how several media outlets report on their criminal record. Even if they beat up a cop in the past or smoked pot before they came into the zoo, they shouldn't get attacked by a tiger!
My hero, David Zirin, wrote about how the media were quick to criminalize Redskin Sean Taylor, saying he "had bad judgment."
How different would the coverage be if my group of honors students, comprised mostly of whites and East Asians, had been mauled instead of South Asians and a Latino?
I'm reading William Zinsser's writing bible, On Writing Well and while I'm picking up pointers on how to be a better writer, this short segment on following my own pace offers relevant advice in my post-application phase.
I cleared my plate several months ago to focus solely on my application to journalism school. At other points in my life, I didn't produce for new outlets because I took on a part-time job at a public radio station. Prior to that, I had a full-time day job and worked on an award-winning documentary series.
I can make a list of reasons I haven't filed for various radio outlets but the bottom line is I just haven't filed with them. And as I hear that people who started working in radio after me are diving head first into the public radio system, I start to feel like a tortoise. And while I told myself I'd keep December project-free, I start to feel like I need to start pitching to new outlets immediately!
Zinsser sends this gentle reminder:
Every writer [or journalist] is starting from a different point and is bound for a different destination...Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Ultimately your only contest is with yourself.
My friend Pauline just filed a story for the SF Bay Guardian about the affordable housing crisis in San Francisco and while reading it, I tried to pay attention to structure.
While the four-minute long radio pieces I work on are generally made up of three characters at most and maybe three scenes, this story has many characters (though the most prominent is the Luz Moran, the person the story opens with. She quotes someone fighting eviction, someone from the Tenants Union, the US Census, the San Francisco Association of Realtors, a broker at the TIC Group, and a TIC owner.
She takes us to a tenants apartment, the Tenants Union office, a "spacious" TIC group's office, and a wonderful scene at a neighborhood protest.
As I try to read more, I'll be paying attention to style and structure, so stay tuned.
