Editor Bill Keller on how The New York Times chooses Page 1 stories

The most important decisions in newsrooms all over the world usually involve the layout of the front page. So it will be interesting for aspiring journalists — and newspaper readers — to learn how one of the world's greatest newspapers goes about it. Here is Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, telling readers how he and his staff select stories and photographs for Page 1:

NUMERO UNO: "WE THINK IT'S OKAY TO INCLUDE IN OUR FRONT-PAGE PORTFOLIO SOMETHING THAT IS FUN, HUMAN, OR JUST WONDERFULLY WRITTEN. IT'S PART SCIENCE, PART ART, WITH A LITTLE SERENDIPITY," SAYS BILL KELLER.

There is no rigid formula to the selection of stories and photographs for the front page. We — an argumentative group of editors — try every day to assemble a selection of articles that are important and interesting, but many variables influence the outcome. Some days, we gather for our Page 1 meeting with no doubt about the main stories of the day. Sometimes an event that is undeniably important falls short of the front page because it is unsurprising. Conversely, an event that initially seems like more of the same can seem major when you take into account all the circumstances.

Indian newspapers sometimes feature as many as 20 stories — big and small — on Page 1; more likely than not, you will see a dozen items on our cluttered front pages. The idea seems to be to have something for everyone on the cover itself. But the NYT has a different philosophy:

Most days we have room for six stories and an "Inside" box on the front page, so every candidate jostles with competing news. We try, moreover, not to have an overly homogeneous page — ALL foreign stories, or ALL business stories, or ALL Washington stories. We think stories about how we live often outweigh stories about what happened yesterday. We think it's okay to include in our front-page portfolio something that is fun, human, or just wonderfully written. It's part science, part art, with a little serendipity.

Keller also talks about the evolution of the newspaper front page in this era of hyper-coverage on television and on the web and elaborates on how his newspaper treats a news event whose "factual outline" has already been widely available before the NYT goes to press:

The notion of a Page 1 story, in fact, has evolved over the years, partly in response to the influence of other media. When a news event has been on the Internet and TV and news radio all day long, do we want to put that news on our front page the next morning? Maybe we do, if we feel our reporting and telling of it goes deeper than what has been available elsewhere. But if the factual outline — the raw information — is widely available, sometimes we choose to offer something else that plays to our journalistic advantages: a smart analysis of the events, a vivid piece of color from the scene, a profile of one of the central figures, or a gripping photograph that captures the impact of an event, instead of a just-the-facts news story.

BILL KELLER

These fascinating insights into the workings of a newspaper come in a regular column, "Talk to The Times", in which The New York Times invites readers to submit questions for Times editors, reporters, columnists and executives. Just take a look at the long list of journalists who have interacted with readers and answered all kinds of questions. No newspaper in India cares to get so close to its readers. I wonder why that is.

Read the full Q&A with Bill Keller here.

PS: The New York Times policy is to not clutter Page 1 with ads. How refreshing.

"I am a college student who listens to music I download from the internet. This is probably illegal..."

There must be tens of thousands (millions?) of youngsters out there who qualify to make that statement, at least that first part. Should you continue to do it? That is, steal a work of art over which someone else has invested talent, time, and effort, not to mention money? What are the ethics involved, if at all?

RANDY COHEN

Here, in his response to an anonymous New York Times reader's question (quoted partly in the headline), are the views of Randy Cohen, who till recently wrote The Ethicist column in that newspaper:

To download music from the Net illegally is theft, depriving songwriters, performers, music publishers and record companies of payment for their work. It is not so iniquitous as tossing a canvas sack over Elton John's head and swatting him with a stick until he sings ''Candle in the Wind'' (or stops singing it, depending on your taste), but it is dishonest, and you should not do it.

Mind you, Cohen wrote this back in 2000 (hence the witty reference to Candle in the Wind), but what he says still applies, don't you think?

COURTESY: STEPHAN PASTIS

Cohen also explains, again in an intelligently entertaining manner, why illegal downloading of music is also unethical:

Your temptation is understandable. In a perverse kind of social progress, the Internet makes it easy to steal songs right in your own home, while you're still in your pajamas. You might almost make a case that it is unethical of Time Warner, say, to tantalize honest music lovers beyond human endurance. This is a ticklish line of reasoning, however, perilously close to blaming the victim. That is, even if I sashay around town in a sport coat made of $100 bills, your robbing me is unethical. Unethical, but understandable.

Want to read more? Go here.

• THE VEXED ISSUE OF PLAGIARISM

What does Randy Cohen have to say about plagiarism by college students in their written assignments? Read his answer to this preposterous question posed by a parent:

When my daughter and her fellow college students handed in term papers, their professor had them submit their work to Turnitin.com, a Web site that detects plagiarism, something he had never done before. This has a whiff of entrapment. Shouldn’t the prof have announced in advance that this would be required, giving the class a chance to clean up its work?

Cohen replied: I’m astonished you believe a professor should help cheaters “clean up” — more accurately, “cover up” — their deceit. It should be needless to say that students ought not cheat in any case. If the professor provided a distant early warning each time he intended to actually confirm students’ honesty, he would in effect encourage them to cheat whenever he did not issue such a warning. He might as well send out an Evite: Feel free to plagiarize this week; I won’t be checking.

Read Cohen's full response here.

And to view, and read, the collection of Ethicist columns published in The New York Times over the years, go here.

What is the point of a "book review" section?

SAM TANENHAUS

If you have ever asked yourself this question, or if you have ever tried to articulate an answer to this question, you will appreciate what The New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus has to say on the subject:

Our mission is very simple: to publish lively, informed, provocative criticism on the widest-possible range of books and also to provide a kind of snapshot of the literary culture as it exists in our particular moment through profiles, essays and reported articles.

There are many, many books published each year — hundreds stream into my office in the course of a week. Our job is to tell you which ones we think matter most, and why, and to direct your attention to authors and critics who have interesting things to say, particularly if they have original ways of saying them.

At a time when the printed word is being stampeded by the rush of competing "media," we're here to remind you that books matter too — that reading, as John Updike's invented novelist Henry Bech says, can be the best part of a person's life.

Tanenhaus, in a Q&A with readers on the NYT website, also enlightens us on the nature of his job, on the "absorbing and stimulating" tasks of a section editor at one of the world's greatest newspapers:

I oversee what goes into our pages and also manage a highly talented staff of editors and collaborate with our brilliant art directors ... in putting together each issue. These are absorbing and stimulating tasks. Which review should we put on the cover the week after next? How can we strike a good balance of fiction and nonfiction, high culture and pop culture, politics and science, etc.? ... Should we emphasize illustrations in a given week or photography?

Tanenhaus then gives us a peek at specific responsibilities:

Of course I read a lot each day, but in the office my fare is reviews, reviews, reviews in their various stages, from "raw copy" through final edits. This is also the case for my colleagues. Their days are spent assigning and editing and, the bane of our collective existence, fact-checking. I can't emphasize just how much of it goes on and how many different dimensions it takes.

The most demanding fact-checking is required, oddly enough, by fiction. Does the reviewer have the character's age right, the color of her eyes, the sequence of events in her past or her parents'? Does she drive a minivan or an SUV, and does she park outside a mall or on a side street? ... Fact-checking is drudgery, but it has to be done. We all "do windows" at the Book Review.

But it's not all drudgery, he writes:

[There] are fun jobs too, like reading the letters we get each week (including the many that come in via email). Our letters editor ... combs through all the correspondence and selects the most promising (the best argued, best written, most provocative). Then she brings them into my office and several of us go over them together. We're all proud of our lively letters page.

Book-reading, the great reward of the job, becomes at times a guilty pleasure, reserved for evenings and weekends. Since my own taste is for fiction, it's exciting to get early copies of the new Bolano, Pynchon, Sebald, Lethem, Eggers, or Mailer, or to see maturing novelists like Jennifer Egan or Claire Messud develop their talents in a surprising new way.

There are many interesting topics covered in this Q&A, including the selection of the "Ten Best Books of the Year" and the issue of bias in book reviews. Read the column in its entirety here.

What is it like to be a writer?

In preparation for the long Independence Day weekend, I ordered three books from Flipkart last Sunday, three books that I think I'm going to absolutely love reading: Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology Of Humor Writing From The New Yorker, by David Remnick and Henry Finder; Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens; and The Big Bookshelf: Sunil Sethi In Conversation With 30 Famous Authors by Sunil Sethi.

The Big Bookshelf and Hitch-22 arrived by courier three days ago. The first book I opened was The Big Bookshelf and Sethi's introduction itself — alone worth the price of the book — offered these fascinating insights into the world of some of the world's best-known writers:

The Bengali writer and social activist Mahasweta Devi felt the urgency to explore the oral legends surrounding the life of the Rani of Jhansi for her first book, a biography of the warrior-queen, with such intensity that "I borrowed money from relatives, got into a train, left behind a small baby with his father and went to Jhansi".

***

Whatever the motivation or their chosen route to writing, most authors professed an abiding passion for books from childhood. Reaching across to tap my knee, the novelist Nadine Gordimer, whose early education was patchy, admonished: "Reading, my dear, is the only training for a writer from a young age. You only become a writer by being a compulsive reader."

***

Asked what his advice to a young writer would be, the American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux offered a tip: "Go away. Yes. Leave home, leave your parents and leave all the comforting things that hold you back... because if you stay... people will ask you what you are doing — what you are writing, what you are publishing. They ask you questions that you can't answer."

***

Here is the best-selling thriller writer Jeffrey Archer's regime that he briskly rapped out: "I write up to seventeen drafts. I get away for two months and I wake up at 5.30 in the morning. I write from six to eight and take a two-hour break, I write from ten until twelve and take a two-hour break, I again write from two until four, followed by another two-hour break, then I write from six until eight, light supper, go to bed at 9.30 or 10 and begin again at 5.30 the next day. Fifty days of that in a row."

***

The novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee, who leads a double life as a senior civil servant, sets himself a certain number of words a day, or how to resolve an idea or a problem in the plot, as a daily target. He writes every morning before leaving for office.

Returning home in the evening, "I sit down and peg away. Sometimes I achieve that target just before I go to bed."

Chatterjee takes about five years to complete a novel but there are others who take longer. It took Kiran Desai nearly seven years of a sequestered life to finish The Inheritance of Loss.

A more extreme example is that of the British-Pakistani fiction writer Nadeem Aslam who took more than eleven years to complete his prize-winning novel, Maps for Lovers.

Aslam grew up in a small town in Pakistan, attending an Urdu-medium school till the age of fourteen, when his family was forced to migrate to Britain to escape political persecution. "When I arrived in England my English was, 'This is a cat,'... My life was broken in half."

Instead of going to college, for many years he eked out a meagre living, working on building sites and in bars so that he could read in libraries. He would retreat into a private world to be able to write. "There were times when I draped the windows with black cloth. There was no phone, no TV, no radio, no newspapers and I just filled up the freezer with food and didn't leave the house for two and a half months."

***

IT'S RAINING BOOKS

You know how one thing leads to another.

Here I was, having lunch at the college yesterday and checking the "Writing Tools" blog on Poynter. I saw a reference to the new New York Times beta site, where a grammar link popped up. On the grammar site I saw a reference to some grammar blogs; one, especially, stood out and I noticed a little feature on a book, The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself).

As I have noted, one thing led to another — the book is now being shipped to me by Flipkart. Make that book No. 4 ordered on Flipkart in five days.

Want to know more about The Subversive Copy Editor? Go here.

The morality of mortality

English poet and novelist Stephen Spender was staying with fellow poet W.H. Auden when the latter received an invitation from the Times (London) asking him to write Spender's obituary. He told him as much at the breakfast table, asking roguishly, "Should you like anything said?"

Spender judged that this would not be the moment to tell Auden that he had already written his obituary for the same editor at the same paper.

— This little gem is from Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens, who writes in the book that he himself has never written an obituary of a still-living person because "I cannot, not even for ready money, write about the demise of a friend or colleague until Minerva's owl has taken wing, and I know that the darkness has actually come. I dare say that somebody, somewhere has already written my provisional death-notice".

(What a striking phrase that is about Minerva's owl taking wing, a reference to the philosopher Hegel's oft-quoted line: "Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly.")

• Another must-read: Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview: In a eulogy written for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens recounts "his last visit with the tempestuous Italian journalist, and her last — never published — scoop, a sit-down with the Pope".

• UPDATE (December 16, 2011): Christopher Hitchens died yesterday in Houston, Texas. Read the New York Times obituary here: "Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, Dies at 62".

Like crime novels? Here's a wide-ranging list...

...compiled by Jerry Pinto for Time Out Bengaluru: "Bloody murder".

I loved the nifty descriptions for each book in the list, but none more than this one for Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest:

You read this. Or you are reading it. Which?

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the final book in the Millennium trilogy, which kicked off with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and continued with The Girl Who Played with Fire. All three books have been phenomenally successful and each one has also been turned into a movie (they were telecast on HBO just last month). What makes this publishing feat poignant is the knowledge that the author died shortly after submitting all three manuscripts.

It is the stupendous popularity of the Millennium trilogy, then, that led to Jerry Pinto's writing that nine-word description for the last book in the series. How ingenious!

• Want to know more about the Millennium series and Stieg Larsson? Go to "Marked for Life" and "The Man Who Never Slept".

Are movie critics totally out of touch with popular taste?

This is the question posed by veteran film critic Anupama Chopra in a recent issue of Open. She writes in her regular column for the magazine that this question struck her after she gave Salman Khan's Ready a two-star rating because "the craft was shoddy, the plot was incoherent and the jokes, cheerfully low-IQ. It was Hindi cinema at its laziest best". Afterwards, she says, she was soundly abused on Twitter by Salman fans. She continues:

Meanwhile, the film reportedly made over Rs 13 crore in India on its first Friday — the biggest non-festive opening for a Bollywood film.

Which made me wonder: are we critics totally out of touch with popular taste? After years of watching movies, do we evolve into curmudgeons who are unable to enjoy anything? What is the function and relevance of our reviews?

She tries to answer those questions by elaborating on the role of the reviewer but she admits there is a disconnect between viewers and reviewers:

Leading critics thought The Hangover 2 was a tired rehash of the first film — it grossed around $ 338 million globally. [At] least one leading critic — Peter Travers in Rolling Stone — described Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides as a ‘giant turd’. It grossed over $700 million worldwide.  Or closer to home, most critics think that Anees Bazmee, the creator of Ready, No Problem and Thank You, is single-handedly lowering the bar in Bollywood, but that has never stopped audiences from flocking to theatres (refer to earlier grosses for Ready).

And then she rests her case by stating unequivocally that box office and quality are not necessarily linked. "My job is to be unconcerned with the former and consumed with the latter," she writes. "The rest is dross."

Every filmgoer should read this column to understand the angst of our serious movie critics. How depressing it must be to write for an audience that does not get it.

WATCHING READY, SAYS ANUPAMA CHOPRA, WAS A "SQUIRMY" EXPERIENCE.

• ALSO READ: "Anupama Chopra's favourite film critics". And pick up her book, too: First Day First Show: Writings from the Bollywood Trenches (a copy has been placed in the Commits library).

• UPDATE (September 2, 2013): On Outlook editor Krishna Prasad's blog: Do readers and viewers care for film reviews?

Chetan Bhagat on how to take your English to the next level

CHETAN BHAGAT

I am not a big fan of Chetan Bhagat's books. 

I have to say this about Bhagat, though — he has got young people reading. That is reason enough to admire him.

He seems to have his finger on the pulse when it comes to knowing the minds of young people and knowing what they like — that is a real gift. And young people seem to identify with him. They seem to like the thought of a best-selling author who writes for them, not for a so-called elite readership.

In this context, advice from Chetan Bhagat on how to improve one's English is sure to be taken seriously by his numerous fans. Which is why The Times of India recently published Bhagat's five tips on how to take your English to the next level. If you think your English skills need polishing, these tips are sure to help:

1. Read something in English you enjoy. People may prescribe classics and you may look good reading them, but if you don't enjoy it, you won't absorb it. Typically, you will enjoy something that is slightly above your current level of English. And if that means comics instead of classics, so be it.

2. Watch English movies with English subtitles. Many TV channels have this now. Listen to the dialogue first. If you can't follow it, read the subtitle. Keep doing this until your dependence on subtitles declines.

3. Spend time with friends, relatives or colleagues who often speak in English. While you may not feel confident enough to keep pace with them, at least you can listen and understand them.

4. Create a group of people whose English is at your level. Meet every week and debate a current topic, making it compulsory to use as much English as possible.

5. Work on your inner confidence. There is a stupid arrogance in people who know English well and they often make fun of people who don't know it. Let that not deter you. Every mistake is a lesson learnt.

Remember, English is not a monster. It is a silly little language that is easier to learn than making good paranthas or driving a car in rush-hour Indian traffic. And once learnt, all the benefits of the globalized world it offers are yours — for life!

Easy-to-practise advice offered in easy-to-understand language. That is the hallmark of Chetan Bhagat's writing. Is it any wonder he is so popular?

• Photo courtesy: Chetan Bhagat's official website

Is Rupert Murdoch really the villain we make him out to be?

Perhaps, yes. But, as Aakar Patel points out in his Mint Lounge column, there are a few — actually, quite a few — good things journalists (and media students) will remember Murdoch for "even as he is attacked, rightly, for the sins of his employees at the News of the World".

Here is Aakar's intro:

To those who love and understand this profession, Rupert Murdoch is the world’s greatest newspaperman and its finest editor. Among those who have crafted newspapers, a rare and beautiful talent, he is without equal. He has defined without question all modern tabloid journalism but arguably also most of its broadsheet trade. This might appear strange, but he isn’t prejudiced in that sense and doesn’t discriminate between short, fun-loving newspapers and tall, prudish ones.

After that 24-karat intro, who will not want to read more? Go to Rupert Murdoch's lust for newspapers and learn why Aakar says Murdoch is the hero in the story of 20th century journalism.

• Also read: The best coverage of the News of the World scandal.

• Plus: Aakar Patel on how the lack of a reading habit can be a serious handicap.

• ADDITIONAL READING: The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch — read a review of the book in the New York Times and, then, borrow the book from the Commits library.

Murder your darlings...

...and other great advice on writing from ten writers ranging from American journalist Dominick Dunne to writer and cartoonist Scott "Dilbert" Adams. Here's what they say:

1. Write one inch at a time
2. Finish your first draft
3. Get over it
4. Simplify
5. Murder your darlings
6. Lead with your best
7. Write with authority
8. Stand out as a real person
9. Remember to play
10. Show up for work

If you are interested in becoming a better writer, you are sure to benefit from paying attention to what the experts have to offer on the subject: Ten writers recall the best advice they ever received.

Which piece of advice is your favourite? My students know I'm a big fan of No. 5.

• Re: "Murder your darlings" — British literary editor and novelist Diana Athill has a slightly different take:

You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings—those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page—but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect—it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)