By Herbert Lowe In my favorite moment of the 25-minute documentary, “Reporting From the U.S. Civil Rights Trail,” one of my students is descending church steps in Alabama to do a TV standup: All eyes were on Birmingham, … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski Imagine the directive in the image above is not an end game, but a prompt. What if you added something more descriptive? Read more broadly. Read more thoughtfully. Read more openly. Or, my mantra: Read more … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski According to my pre-Wordle morning scans of social media in recent days, it’s back-to-school time. That seems awfully early to me (What happened to waiting until after Labor Day?), but my own teaching career found me … Read more
By Lauren Kessler “We’ve got a paper to get out.” That’s the matter-of-fact directive from Zoe Toperosky to a roomful of reporters and editors. She is talking through a mask in that just-loud-enough, crisply enunciated way that veteran mask-wearers … Read more
By Madeline Bodin After reading a remarkable work of nonfiction, have you ever wished you could learn exactly how the writer created what you just read? I don’t think I’m alone in being intrigued by how the stories that … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski Do anything often enough and long enough and you probably, at times, fall into the occasional rut. I don’t know of any fellow journalist, no matter their age or experience, who hasn’t lamented that their work … Read more
By Katharine Gammon Roy Peter Clark says he never meant to write another book about writing. Clark, a senior scholar at The Poynter Institute, had already written or edited 20 books about reading, writing and language. Read more
By Howard Sinker The news reporting class I teach probably isn’t what you’d expect. The college where I teach doesn’t offer a journalism degree — and I’m good with that. My hope is that students learn a little about … Read more
By Chuck Haga The students file in and suddenly some remember the day’s assignment: Bring in a favorite song lyric, something with magic in the way words work together. Out come the phones and they search, trying to remember … Read more
By Jacqui Banaszynski It was a favorite diversion of mine, when I was teaching at the Missouri School of Journalism, to wander down the hall from my office to the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian. I would plug into … Read more
