…readers not only want to know what we know, they also want to know how we’ve come to know it, and the practical limits of our knowledge.
Roy Peter Clark, in an essay about transparency in narrative journalism, on Poynter today. (via poynterinstitute)
Dig this.
Pizza is the currency of newsrooms. Very classy, Chicago Tribune.
More than a dozen times a day, doctors sew up patients with sponges and other supplies mistakenly left inside. The mistake costs some victims their lives.
A USA TODAY review of government data, academic studies and legal records suggests that far more people may be victims of lost surgical objects than federal statistics suggest. And the medical community’s inaction comes at a high price.
There’s no federal reporting requirement when hospitals leave sponges or other items in patients, but research studies and government data suggest it happens between 4,500 and 6,000 times a year. That’s up to twice government estimates, which run closer to 3,000 cases, and sponges account for more than two-thirds of all incidents.
Read more of our special report: When health care makes you sick: http://usat.ly/15C6Cq7
Gene Sloan oversees cruise coverage at USA TODAY and also is executive editor of USA TODAY-owned review site VacationCruisesInfo.com. An admitted travel junkie, he has sailed on nearly 100 ships.
Don’t you tell me there aren’t interesting jobs out there.
Newsroom jobs for the win!
‘It’s comforting to write that way’
One of my favorite regular features is the Times’ Modern Love column, and the curator has lately been sharing submission tips and archived columns via the Facebook page. I really enjoyed this entire tip today, which also explains in part why I like the columns so much:
Ideally, writing a personal essay is a process of discovery. You only understand the point of your essay after you’ve spent a lot of time and effort working on it. When you come up with a “pitch” for an essay, however, you must figure out that point at the start. The ensuing writing process often then becomes less about discovery than execution. You feel you must hew to that point. Any detours into new and unexpected terrain might threaten to derail or even undermine your point, so better not go there. Better snuff out that idea before it takes over the whole thing. Better not acknowledge that wayward truth or you may have to start all over.
I don’t accept pitches because with personal essays I feel almost anything can work or not work, and nearly every pitch sounds shallow and overly familiar to me anyway, even if it would make for a great essay in its particulars. But I still end up reading many essays that read as though they were written with a pitch mentality. They don’t seem to have grown organically or stumbled into surprising places or reached a place of heightened awareness. Instead, they feel constricted and workmanlike, hemmed in by a need to execute a pre-conceived point. Often this leads to an essay that consists of a series of examples in support of the controlling idea, like: Why our marriage is a study in contrasts but still works (or something along those lines).
It’s comforting to write that way, to not let yourself get lost, to write by following the essayist’s equivalent of a pre-set GPS device. And it can be scary and inefficient to careen off the road into the deep woods. You might waste all kinds of time and energy and still wind up totally lost. But you also might discover a place that can’t be boiled down into a two-sentence pitch. It just can’t. If someone wants to understand, they’re going to have to read the whole thing. And if you’ve done your job well, they’re going to want to.
Fact-checking the debate
We take a look at:
- private-sector job gains
- tax cuts
- the middle class
- taxes for the wealthy
- energy independence
- Medicare cuts
Full fact-check: http://usat.ly/QRIo64
Burma abolishes media censorship
Reporters will no longer have to submit work to state censors before publication. But strict laws remain in place that could see journalists punished for what they’ve written.
Paul McCartney appeared singing “Hey Jude.” As Sir Paul began, the Romanian reporter grabbed me, belting the lyrics. I grabbed the Indonesian journalist to my left, also singing the song. For five minutes, 4,000 miles from home, the world seemed really small and wholly intimate.
Also: Serena Williams now has a USA TODAY pin, for the collection she puts around her medals.
… and more Olympics memories from USA TODAY Sports staff in London
Not that we’re jealous or anything.
OK, maybe a little.
The AP’s North Korea bureau
North Korea was just two weeks out of a national period of mourning the death of Kim Jong Il in January when two Associated Press journalists opened the AP’s Pyongyang bureau. For those two journalists, it was a project with very new, very real challenges, one that would make the AP the first international, independent journalism agency with a full-time, full-format bureau in the North Korean capital.
