Why Jonathan Bach wants to be a journalist, come what may

Here is a relevant excerpt from a recent op-ed feature in The New York Times:

"...the best journalists connect with readers, viewers and listeners by being open-minded and compassionate. That’s one reason so many people remain in the profession..."

The piece, written by Héctor Tobar, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, focuses on the importance of journalism while highlighting the journalism ambitions of one of his students, Jonathan Bach.

Read the thought-provoking article in its entirety here: Who'd be a journalist?

Surely "etc." has no place in a news report?

Here is a portion of a badly written press release (something I made up for a news-writing exercise at Commits):

The ten categories at the Ibda'a awards (Ibda'a means 'creativity in the Arabic language) were print journalism, print advertising, radio feature, television documentary, television advertising, animation, graphic design, analogue photography, digital photography and film feature, and students from many countries sent entries, including the US, Egypt, the UAE, South Africa, the UK, etc.

There are many things wrong with it, not the least of which is that abbreviation at the end. Journalists would not use "etc" in a news story because that could imply that they do not have all the necessary information at hand. And surely no reader likes to think that their newspaper has published an incomplete report.

But a case could be made for using "etc." for emphasis, for effect. As in this excerpt from a New York Times book review:

Sometimes reading the book feels like being trapped in a particularly dull town hall meeting — as on the ­pages that ­bullet-point Hillary’s accomplishments as secretary of state or the achievements of the Clinton Foundation: “More than 33,500 tons of greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced annually,” etc., etc. Sometimes it reads like a generic ad designed to introduce a political newbie: Hillary is “a woman with a steadfast commitment to public service, a clear political vision and a deep well of personal integrity.” Or the version that might fit on a bumper sticker: “America is so ready for Hillary,” because “she is so ready to lead.”

In the paragraph reproduced above, "etc." has been used (twice in succession) to convey to the reader that "this is all so much fluff". It works here, but I can't see it working in a regular news story. Can you?

Now, here, in the same vein, is an excerpt from the footnotes to a profile of Roger Federer by David Foster Wallace in Play magazine, which used to be published by The New York Times (this piece dates from August 20, 2006):

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously — it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter.

As for that badly written press release right at the beginning, here's an acceptable version:

Entries for the Ibda’a Awards, named after the Arabic word for creativity, were submitted by students from many countries, including the US, the UK, South Africa, Egypt and the UAE. The 10 categories this year were print journalism, print advertising, radio feature, television documentary, television advertising, animation, graphic design, analogue photography, digital photography and film feature.

Not an "etc." in sight.

Give me full names (at first reference), please

It is important to give full names (at first reference) in a news story. Or isn't it?

I have some difficulty in persuading a few of my students that journalistic pieces should contain the full names of people mentioned in the report. So here, for these students and for those who are interested in such matters (if you want to be a journalist, you should be interested), are examples of news reports with full names and examples of stories that have used only one name for valid reasons:

1. A New York Times report from Kabul uses full names at first reference throughout, except in the 23rd paragraph when it uses a quote from a particular university lecturer — see below:

“The main problem is that some people in our city are Taliban and some are local police,” said Sighbatullah, 25, an agronomy lecturer at Kunduz University, who like many Afghans uses just one name.

2. And here's an illustration from a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek:

3. In this story in Mint, the reporter gives us only one name for a source, but we get an explanation for this in parentheses. Take a look:

4. Now here's another example from The New York Times, this one a news feature about how San Francisco is changing the nature of AIDS treatment:

It wasn’t his first broken condom, so Rafael didn’t worry. But three weeks later, the man he’d met in a bar called to say that he had “probably been exposed” to H.I.V.

Rafael, a muscular, affable 43-year-old, went to a clinic and within 45 minutes learned he was infected. Although it was already closing time, a counselor saw him immediately and offered him a doctor’s appointment the next day.

At Ward 86, the famous H.I.V. unit at San Francisco General Hospital, the doctor handed him pills for five days and a prescription for more. Because he was between jobs, she introduced him to a counselor who helped him file for public health insurance covering his $30,000-a-year treatment.

“They were very reassuring and very helpful,” said Rafael, who, like several other men interviewed for this article, spoke on condition that only his first name be used to protect his privacy. “They gave me the beautiful opportunity to just concentrate on my health.”

In the intro, we get only one name. And why we get one name we are told only in the fourth paragraph. That makes sense, if you think about it. The structure and the flow of the story would be badly affected if the intro was written to include that explanation:

It wasn’t his first broken condom, so Rafael, who, like several other men interviewed for this article, spoke on condition that only his first name be used to protect his privacy, didn’t worry. But three weeks later, the man he’d met in a bar called to say that he had “probably been exposed” to H.I.V.

See what I mean?

So, give me full names (at first reference), please.

Why ad guru Piyush Pandey cried, along with his clients

An excerpt from a thoroughly entertaining — and enlightening — book I finished reading in just a few hours on Tuesday:

(THE CHAPTER IS TITLED "UDNA AATA HAI? DO YOU KNOW HOW TO FLY?")
It was in the early 2000s that Ogilvy's Thought Leader, Madhukar Sabnavis, and his team, along with the Asian Paints marketing team, came to me with a new insight. They said that the focus of the consumer is on pride in their house, and paint is only an expression of that. This ground reality gave me the licence to fly when I wrote, 'Har ghar kuch kehta hai' (Every home has something to say).

I still remember having written that emotional piece on my pad — one shot, no change of word or punctuation. I read it to myself and cried.

I called up the clients, K.B.S. Anand and Amit Singhal, and said, 'Drop everything you're doing and come straight to my office.'

They arrived within an hour. I read out that piece. And this time all three of us cried. We knew we were about to take a flight together.

There are a couple of other instances in the book when Piyush Pandey talks about tearing up over ad copy. And there are many, many examples he gives us of the terrrific concepts he has come up with over the years for ads that continue to be fresh in our memories. What a great learning experience this book is for anyone interested in media! Get hold of Pandeymonium now. Commitscions: A copy has been placed in the Commits library.

SACHIN TENDULKAR SPEAKS AT THE LAUNCH OF PANDEYMONIUM; AMITABH BACHCHAN, WHO HAS WORKED CLOSELY WITH PIYUSH PANDEY, HAS WRITTEN THE FOREWORD.

•  ALSO READ: The inspirational story of the ad guru who brought the world's No. 1 agency to India
  

You can learn so much from listening to these fascinating podcasts

If you're an aspiring media student or a young journalist or a writer-in-the making, there are few better ways of learning the craft of non-fiction than by hearing from the experts how they did what they did. In this respect, the Longoform podcasts are an invaluable tool.

Here, just for starters, are 10 podcasts I have  listened to (some more than once) — and enjoyed thoroughly:

1. https://goo.gl/M0z4ao — Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor of The New York Times

2. https://goo.gl/RURwvy — Alexis Okeowo, a foreign correspondent, has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Businessweek. Recently wrote about Boko Haram

3. https://goo.gl/iQj3CG — Rukmini Callimachi, covers ISIS for The New York Times

4. https://goo.gl/MfepbH — Tim Ferriss, productivity expert and author of The Four-Hour Workweek and The Four-Hour Body

5. https://goo.gl/O5AaMo — Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, which was made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, and Tiny Beautiful Things

6. http://bit.ly/1jC9TSw — S.L. Price, senior editor at Sports Illustrated. He has written in his book, A Far Field, about his experience of covering the India-Pakistan cricket series

7. http://bit.ly/1RjtJNC — Carol Loomis, who retired last summer after covering business for 60 years at Fortune magazine. She continues to edit Warren Buffett's annual report

8. https://goo.gl/yhrusL — Ian Urbina, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, who recently published "The Outlaw Ocean," a four-part series on crime in international waters

9. https://goo.gl/7zoywA — Stephen J. Dubner is the co-author, with Steven D. Levitt, of Freakonomics. Their latest book, When to Rob a Bank, came out in May

10. https://goo.gl/YBMhmE — Ashlee Vance covers technology for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future 

What can we learn from listening to these podcasts?

• What it means to be a journalist/writer/reporter/editor/author
• How to deal with the issues that come up in the course of work
• How to conduct interviews
• How to ask probing questions, to listen to the answers and ask follow-up questions
• How to articulate your thoughts
• What you have to do to succeed in your chosen field

As of the time of writing, there were 164 podcasts in the Longform archive. So after you are done listening to the 10 listed above, go ahead and wade right in.

UPDATE (November 5, 2015): To understand better the craft of journalistic interviewing, listen to this podcast with the New York Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir, whose expose of worker exploitation in New York's nail salons was one of the newspaper's biggest stories in recent times. Maslin Nir worked for 13 months over her story, which was then published in two parts earlier this year. You can read the stories here:

1. The Price of Nice Nails

2. Perfect Nails, Poisoned Workers

And you can listen to the podcast interview with Maslin Nir here: #142.

UPDATE (November 6, 2015): I have just finished listening to an eye-opening interview with Anand Gopal, who gave up a planned career in physics to go to Afghanistan to write about the situation there. Why Gopal did it and, perhaps more compelling for aspiring journalists, how he did it composes the bulk of his conversation with Aaron Lammer of Longform Podcasts. Listen to the podcast here: #125.

PS: I have aready ordered the book Anand Gopal wrote about his experiences in Afghanistan: No Good Men among the Living.

• Here you can read an interview with Aaron Lammer and learn how he and his partner Max Linsky went about building the highly popular Longform.org site: The Art of Podcasting.

Why American writer Dinty Moore is all praise for Indian speakers and writers of English

I have been reading an interesting and highly original book (pictured) by author, editor, and writing coach Dinty Moore.

Moore writes with humour and with intelligence. Here's the first paragraph from the introduction:

"Perhaps you are standing in the bookstore, scanning this introductory chapter, wondering just what sort of book you have in hand. You are a good-looking person whose minor flaws seem to only accentuate your considerable charm. You are intelligent. And immune to flattery."

So yes, Moore writes with humour and with intelligence. But we all make mistakes and I thought Moore made one on Page 18 in a four-page essay dedicated to teaching readers how to use an "em dash". So I wrote an e-mail to him on Sunday night.

Subject: A question regarding the em dash as used in your book, "Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy"

Hello Dinty,

This is Ramesh Prabhu in Bangalore, India.

I am a good-looking person whose minor flaws seem to only accentuate my considerable charm. I am intelligent. And immune to flattery.

In other words, I have bought a copy of your book.

Now that I have got that out of the way, let's get down to the nitty-gritty.

On Page 18 of your book, in the essay regarding Cheryl Strayed's letter to you about her love affair with the em dash, you give us this example of how to use this particular punctuation mark:

I have three goals for my day—measure an "n" and an "m", memorize the width of the two letters, and look up "obsessive disorders" on Wikipedia.

My understanding is that a colon, not a dash (em or en) should be used to introduce a list. So don't you think you should have used a colon instead of the em dash in that sentence?

I have three goals for my day: measure an "n" and an "m", memorize the width of the two letters, and look up "obsessive disorders" on Wikipedia.

I am a journalist turned journalism professor. I have been teaching journalism since April 2003 at a media college in Bangalore. My students and I hope to hear from you soon.

Cheers,

Ramesh 

And here's Moore's reply: 

Subject: Re: A question regarding the em dash as used in your book, "Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy"

 

Ramesh

I think you are correct.  I also think that, in general, Indian speakers and writers of English are far more precise and correct than the British are nowadays.  And for sure, you are better at this than we Americans, who tend to be immensely sloppy, informal, and inconsistent. Thanks to you and your students for the correction.

Dinty

***

ALSO READ:

An e-mail interaction with The New York Times — In 8 minutes, a response from The New York Times to my e-mail pointing out a typo in a headline

An e-mail interaction with author Mardy Grothe —  It all depends on the telling, sure. But surely who does the telling matters?

 

“More than 300 women were shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten, bludgeoned, or burned to death over the past decade by men in South Carolina, dying at a rate of one every 12 days while the state does little to stem the carnage from domestic abuse.”

Journalism guru Roy Peter Clark considers that to be the best lead, or intro, from among this year's Pulitzer Prize winners. Here he explains why: "The winner for the best Pulitzer Prize lead is…"

In the same post you can also read Clark's analysis of the next best leads.

For copy editors and reporters everywhere, Clark is a godsend. Check this out, too:

• "Three Little Words": A multi-part true story that keeps you wanting to read on. This is what journalism is really about"

• "How journalism guru Roy Peter Clark helped to turn a classified ad into a heartwarming newspaper story"

• "If you had to think up a six-word motto for journalism, what would it be?"

AND WHILE ON THE SUBJECT of the Pulitzer Prize, you should read this:"‘Investigative reporting is obviously alive and well’ and other observations from first-time Pulitzer jurors".

10 interesting — and relevant — articles to inspire media professionals, especially young journalists and journalism aspirants

1. "The best farewell address by a journalist":

‘At The [NY] Times, you can imagine yourself making journalism that changes the world’

• "This so inspiring," wrote Commitscion Barkha Joshi (Class of 2016) on my Facebook wall soon after I posted this link yesterday.

2. Taking magazine cover design to new heights:

How they did it: "Behind the Making of Our Walking New York Cover"

3. An essay adapted from Tales from the Great Disruption: Insights and Lessons from Journalism’s Technological Transformation, by Michael Shapiro, Anna Hiatt, and Mike Hoyt:

"The Value of News"

An excerpt:

... I can think of no better distillation of what exists at the heart of the relationship between journalism and its audiences than the phrase that Lisa Gubernick, a wonderful journalist at Forbes and the Journal, used to open every single conversation, professional and personal. She would ask, “What’s new and interesting?”

4. Journalists talk about what is perhaps their greatest fear:

"Fear of screwing up"

An excerpt:

To be a journalist, you have to be afraid. Fear makes you triple-check your work. It makes you sharper, faster, more focused. It wakes you up in the middle of the night, or drops in unexpectedly at that party or dinner. Fear demands that you be absolutely sure you want to say every little thing you’re saying. 

"I have enough fear to do my job well. Brilliant article," wrote Commitscion Abira Banerjee (Class of 2015) on my Facebook wall the day after I posted this link.

5. Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron on journalism’s transition from print to digital:

“Journalism’s Big Move: What to Discard, Keep, and Acquire in Moving From Print to Web”

 

6. Rolling Stone magazine and the controversial university rape article:

Do scandals like Rolling Stone’s do lasting damage to journalism?

An excerpt:

While many agreed Rolling Stone’s failure harmed the media’s reputation, they also said it and the industry could repair the damage. The larger threats to journalism, many of them added, are more gradual systemic changes, from the implosion of business models to false balance in public “controversies.”

7. "A year after the firings of two top women editors, four journalism leaders discuss the challenges of editing while female."

"Can you think about rising?"

8. "Many writers are fond of semicolons; we use them a lot; even when we shouldn’t; and we often don’t know how to use them. (One clue: not the way we just did.)"

"To semicolon, or not to semicolon"

9. A well-deserved tribute to veteran journalist P. Sainath and his team:

"Documenting India's Villages Before They Vanish"

An excerpt:

So far, Sainath has recruited more than 1,000 volunteers for the archive project, ranging from 30-year veterans of the journalism business to software engineers who’ve written nary a word. They’ve documented some fascinating characters. One of them is a 73-year-old librarian who manages a trove of 170 classics, mostly translations of Russian masters, in a tiny forest village frequented by wild elephants.

Also read: A savvy, must-watch documentary on the peerless P. Sainath

10. "Copy-editing can be a great job. I’ve always been grateful for the work and especially for the people I’ve met, copy editors, fact checkers, editors, and writers alike."

"Workers of the word, unite"

• Also read: All hail the Comma Queen!

All hail the Comma Queen!

When a copy editor of the Salon e-zine chats up the copy editor of New Yorker magazine who also happens to have published a book about her profession, what results is an interview that puts the spotlight on a vital job: editing.

Here is a sample Q&A: 

Q: Schools are teaching grammar a lot less and relying on technology and word processing programmes to “teach” it by default, pointing out grammar mistakes. Do you think this, not to mention texting and tweeting, will have a significant effect on the grammar and spelling of future adults? 

A: That’s not a very nice way to learn, just by having your mistakes pointed out. But there are fun ways to do it: “Schoolhouse Rock,” for instance, and pop music. Lately, Weird Al Yankovic has been singing about grammar and usage. Texting and tweeting shouldn’t really affect grammar, though spell-check programmes and autocorrect will have an effect on spelling. I believe that the only way to learn English grammar is to study a foreign language.

MARY NORRIS: COPY THAT!

Q: Your profanity chapter is full of hilarious examples of language writers are competing to get into the magazine. One piece by Ben McGrath debuted “bros before hos” in the New Yorker, creating a spelling dilemma with “hos”—hmm, I see that Webster’s gives the plural of “ho” as either “hos” or “hoes.” Where do you turn if it’s not in the dictionaries of record? 

A: When a word is not in Webster’s or Random House, I will look online. There are many dictionaries of slang, but you have to choose your source carefully. One of our sources is the New York Times, but of course it’s no good for profanity! One feels so silly looking up “jism,” say (though there are variant spellings), and even sillier querying it. You try to find a respectable source for the profanity, and it is a bit of a challenge. Rap lyrics, especially.

Read this fascinating feature in its entirety here: New Yorker copyeditor dishes on the wacky side of her (quite dignified) job: “One feels so silly looking up [profanity]” 

• ALSO READ: "Workers of the Word, Unite"

• ADDITIONAL READING: Why subs, or copy editors, are the lifeblood of a news organisation

"Make social media work for you (not against you)"

What I have been telling my students for many years now: "Recruiters are looking at your social media posts."

Here, writing in Mint, Infancia Cardozo explains how you can ensure that potential employers like what they see and how to improve your hireability.

 Read this instructive and enlightening article in its entirety here.

• ALSO READ: "Facebook: Boon or bane?"