Tag: writing
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Advice for writers, and everyone else
My favorite pieces of advice from writers, politicians, academics and other luminaries, ripped straight from my reporter’s notebook.
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Why teachers matter
A new working paper quantifies the difference good teachers can make in their students’ lives. My memory adds qualitative evidence to the authors’ findings.
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Recent work, 2020 edition
It’s been a while — five years, to be exact — since I took time to reflect on some of my favorite recent stories. I don’t often get a chance to look back on past work. As a full-time writer at Brown University, I’m always juggling a few stories each week. Most often, I’m immersed…
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Confession: I Document Everything
Six months into my college career, I came home for spring break and announced to a few of my friends that I was switching my major from music to journalism. I expected reactions of mild surprise, at the very least. Instead, I was met with impatient “duh”s and amused “I always knew it”s. “That’s not…
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Writer’s Block
I’ve always been quite an enthusiastic writer. From a very young age, I kept journals that I sometimes updated multiple times in a day. I wrote about everything: things I learned in school, classmates I liked and disliked, life in after-school daycare, friends’ deep dark secrets I promised never to reveal, and of course my…
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News flash: Journalists aren’t doomed
College journalists who haven’t entered the workforce yet have been trained to fear the very worst after they’ve secured a diploma, but Rich Gordon sees a much cheerier picture. According to Gordon, a professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, the modern era of journalism should be defined as a changing job…
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How local is too local?
I’m pretty sure that, of all the news in my home county newspaper, about .00001 percent of it mentions the street on which I grew up. I’m not terribly disturbed that more news about my street isn’t regularly published, not only because hardly anything newsworthy happens on my street and also because there are thousands…
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Stuffy news sources step it up with video
In 2004, the video was as much of a novelty as was the blog–in terms of covering the election. But traditional news was already losing its grip on public interest and advertising revenue four years ago, and newspapers in particular knew they had to change the way they presented the facts to the public–but how?…
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PR, personalized
As the 21st century dawns and the blogosphere takes over, journalists at print newspapers aren’t the only professionals who are worrying. Public and media relations journalists don’t quite know how to handle the new phenomenon either. Gone are the days when a standard, canned news release sent out to the same e-mail list day and…
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Blogs: What works and why
There’s no accounting for taste. My dad loves primitive, crackling old recordings of bluegrass singers that bore most people (my mom, for one) to death. My uncle loves the kind of jazz where anything goes, all improvisation and squealing saxophones and pounding piano keys. Some 80-year-olds can’t get enough of P. Diddy. Some 20-year-olds are…
Jill Kimball 