Copyright is Monkey Business
As writers, we worry about our work being reproduced without our consent. We Google ourselves to find out whether a publication or industry association or corporation newsletter is running one of our articles without contacting us and inquiring about a fee. Well, that challenge seems simple compared to the case of the professional photographer and an endangered […]
Kevin Sessums and the Celebrity Profile
Many of my friends don’t share my view that the so-often-maligned celebrity profile can be gloriously fun to read as well as well-researched and written. (Although granted there are so many poor examples that the skepticism is understandable.) Some of you may have read Rex Reed’s 1967 profile of Ava Gardner? (It earned inclusion in Tom […]
Become a Better Feature Writer
My Advanced Feature Writing night course is scheduled to run at Ryerson University this fall. It’s part of the Magazine & Web Publishing program in The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education. The class is usually small — often 12 to 15 students — and more than half of the people who take the […]
The Craft of Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”
“Like most scavengers, Sunil knew how he appeared to the people who frequented the airport: shoeless, unclean, pathetic. By winter’s end, he had defended against this imagined contempt by developing a rangy, loose-hipped stride for exclusive use on Airport Road. It was the walk of a boy on his way to school, taking his time, […]
What Every Writer Needs to Know
Now this is valuable information for all writers, drawn from a handy book, published in England in 1900, called How To Write For Magazines. The author, apparently a successful practitioner of the craft, chose the catchy pseudonym, “£600 A Year From It.” Should MSS. be Typewritten? “Should my work be typewritten or not ?” That is […]
Forty Years Later, the Power of Piers Paul Read’s “Alive” Lives On
Forty years ago, Piers Paul Read’s landmark work of nonfiction, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, was published. It’s the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, a chartered plane carrying 45 people — the Uruguayan rugby team along with family members, friends and a five-man crew — that crashed in the Andes in October 1972. A […]
The Art of Antique Typewriter Ribbon Tins
Vintage typewriter tins are a collectible form of advertising memorablia. These lithographed square or round tins were introduced around the late 18oos when a new technological innovation, at first called a “Type Writer,” used keys that struck paper through an inked ribbon. Like razors and blades, the typewriters lasted but ribbons had to be constantly […]
A Broadcast Psychologist’s Life-saving Call
In a lovely essay about the late Joyce Brothers in The New York Times Magazine in December, writer Kim Tingley reconstructed a memorable moment in the life of the psychologist best known for counseling on her own syndicated radio and TV shows. On January 4, 1971, Brothers took a call from a woman who said […]
Murder, He Wrote
In 1991, Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon published a best-selling nonfiction book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, about 12 months he spent with detectives from the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit. Hollywood director Barry Levinson turned it into a TV series, Homicide: Life on the Street, and eventually Simon quit his reporting job to write episodes for […]
Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “magic journalism”
Seven years ago this month, the great Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuściński, died of a heart attack at 74. I first came across Kapuściński when I read his remarkable book, Another Day of Life, an account of three months he spent immersed in the Angolan Civil War in 1975: “The whole Trivoli Hotel was packed to the […]