It was the mid-1990s. I was sitting across a white damask table-clothed table at a midtown Manhattan steak house watching my editor, Bob Loomis, alternately cut into a ribeye and sip a dry Martini. This was … Read more
For well over a decade, my memoir was a perennial backburner project. I would vow to carve out time to write each week, but work or life always took precedence. I kept a blog where I posted personal essays, … Read more
You’ve written that gripping long-form story, and you’re champing at the bit to get a book deal. What do you do? My own journey started with a lot of wrong turns and even more learning, which I wrote about … Read more
All the great writers have proffered wisdom on the craft, the best-in-show quote being Norman Mailer’s: “Writing books is the closest men come to childbearing.” But the literary sages have offered scarce advice to serious long-form journalists on plotting, … Read more
Two months into my just-the-facts-ma’am, inverted pyramid life as a novice reporter assigned to cover every commission had that ever been formed anywhere in any municipality on Earth at any time (planning, zoning, parking, library, arts, historic preservation, downtown … Read more
Maybe not 99, but at least a few dozen bottles of beer are along the wall. We take one down, pass it around, make sure the barcode on the bottle matches the form on our computer screens, and pry … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This tribute is shared with permission from our friends at The Poynter Institute. Frank Clines arrived at The New York Times in 1958, one year before the death of that most brilliant Times writer … Read more
Great story ideas are everywhere, and Corinne Purtill spotted a gem on a family trip to the Los Angeles Zoo, where she learned the story of a celebrity with a checkered past. Purtill had just joined … Read more
Sometimes the words just don’t work. I don’t mean they don’t come together easily or work well or string together in pretty rhythms. Those are annoyances we seldom get to indulge in deadline journalism. I mean they simply don’t … Read more
For all my life, I’ve been a baseball agnostic. The thing I like most about baseball is that, by and large, it is played outside in the summertime, generally in the cool of the evening. Johnny … Read more
