Merchants of Truth

My ESSAY in The National Post on Jill Abramson’s new book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, which looks at the state of journalism today.   In the pre-internet world, journalism and advertising were strictly separated. (The term “church and state” was often invoked). Digital sites, however, grew rich through the use […]

The Library Book

As a child, I went regularly to the George H. Locke Public Library, on the southeast corner of Yonge Street and Lawrence Avenue in Toronto, usually with my mother. Years later, my mother told me that it was the place I most loved to go. (And not only because it involved a stop on the […]

Claas Relotius is an Outlier

Claas Relotius, an award-winning German journalist working for Der Spiegel, has joined an undistinguished group of fellow nonfiction hoax artists (see selected list below) at a most unfortunate time. Over several years, the more than two dozen stories in question — in which Relotius doctored or made up quotes and created composite, or entirely fictional, […]

Generating Ideas in Advanced Feature Writing

Many believe the hardest part of longform feature writing is generating story ideas that will sell to publications. What is a feature story idea? At its most basic, it identifies something that’s happening in the world (involving a person, an event, a trend, a place, an unfolding situation…) and puts it into perspective for readers. […]

The Gritty Lowdown on Success

I began teaching feature writing in the late 1980s and finally began to notice a pattern about a decade later. Students who were naturals, who could write with tremendous flair seemingly without much effort,  didn’t necessarily go on to become great writers. Others who weren’t the obvious literary stars, whose writing could be ponderous, perhaps […]

Always Take Notes

I’ve listened to every one of the more than 300 Longform podcasts, those interviews with nonfiction writers that the Longform site has been running for the past six years. More recently, a British variation, Always Take Notes (Always Take Notes podcast) has materialized. Co-hosts Simon Akam and Eleanor Halls (or Kassia St. Clair) have candid conversations with […]

Meet-&-Greet, MFA in Creative Nonfiction, MON, NOV. 12, 2018

Do you have a book you’ve wanted to write? Does the task seem daunting, there just isn’t enough time? If the answer is yes, or even maybe, come to the meet-and-greet on Monday, November 12 for the University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Here is a link to information about it: Meet-&-Greet, MFA in […]

Superman’s Super-Riter

Unlike my friends, when I was a kid reading Superman comics I remember being most attracted to reporter Clark Kent tapping away at a typewriter that looked not unlike my mother’s Remington No.2 portable, on which I was learning to type. In the “Adventures of Superman” TV series, it was, in fact, the aptly-named Remington […]

Lillian Ross: The Hollywood Reporter

A year ago, Lillian Ross, died at 99. Her reputation as one of the great literary journalists of the twentieth century is established, but not so well-known is the fact that she pioneered the inside-Hollywood expose in the early 1950s, long before such book-length projects were common. I wrote this essay in the excellent online […]

Advanced Feature Writing, Fall 2018

In Advanced Feature Writing, we’ll talk about everything from developing feature story ideas and writing effective query letters to the researching, reporting and interviewing process and writing the feature itself. It’s hand’s on. You’ll be expected to go and see interview subjects in their world, observing them, creating scenes that will drive the story. Then […]