New York Times media columnist David Carr died suddenly Thursday night.
If you want to aspire to something, you might go for being remembered the way Carr was when news of his death emerged. If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, it was almost nothing but tweets about David Carr once the news hit.
My stream is an almost unbroken flood of sadness and memories of David Carr and what a wonderful human being and journalist he was
— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) February 13, 2015
What you see in your Twitter feed now is how generous @carr2n was, how many lives he touched, how he represented the best of our biz
— Andrew O'Hehir (@andohehir) February 13, 2015
Vox collected some of Carr’s best answers from a Reddit Ask Me Anything. Much of it is great advice for writers. Carr, 58, was known for his generosity to younger writers.
My favorite among his gems of advice: “Keep typing until it turns into writing.” I’ve used that method myself on deadline.
Last year Carr was interviewed by Bloomberg’s Andrew Lack on a video that ran on Boston University’s BU Today site. In the last question, Lack notes that journalism can be a lot of things, but a get-rich-quick scheme is not one of them. Carr’s reply:
The dirty secret: journalism has always been horrible to get in; you always have to eat so much crap to find a place to stand. I waited tables for seven years, did writing on the side. If you’re gonna get a job that’s a little bit of a caper, that isn’t really a job, that under ideal circumstances you get to at least leave the building and leave your desktop, go out, find people more interesting than you, learn about something, come back and tell other people about it—that should be hard to get into. That should be hard to do. No wonder everybody’s lined up, trying to get into it. It beats working.
Here is Carr’s archive at NYTimes.com. There are 1,776 stories.
Here’s a fun keeping up with changes in media story: PBS MediaShift’s EducationShift spotlights a collaboration between Esquire magazine and the Northeastern University’s Media Innovation program.
As Jeffrey Howe, a Northeastern journalism professor, explains, students in the program are working as a sort of R&D department as they and Esquire explore new ways to tell stories digitally. This takes two forms: StoryLab, a course in “designing the future of magazine journalism,” and Storybench, a website that covers developments in the field.
StoryLab’s first project was for students to take Walking the Border, a 2011 Esquire piece in which Luke Dittrich chronicled his walk of the 1,933 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, along the U.S.-Mexico frontier. The assignment, Howe writes: “Blow up the traditional magazine story, then rebuild it from scratch.” The students formed four teams, each presenting Dittrich’s piece in a different way.
There are live links to three of the four demos. What do you think?
Wright Thompson of ESPN the Magazine is a great magazine sportswriter—or, to use the current term, which I don’t like, longform sportswriter.
Thompson talks about his career and craft as part of the Still No Cheering in the Press Box series at the University of Maryland journalism school’s Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism. We talked about that series last year when it ran a profile of the sports columnist I grew up reading, Jim Murray.
This is Thompson “in his own words,” his answers to a pair of student interviewers, according to the series overview. It’s a bit ironic because it reads as if Thompson is rambling uninterrupted on a bar stool, bouncing from topic to topic. That’s the very opposite of Thompson the writer:
When you’re a kid you think writing has to do with words and then you figure out that it doesn’t and that it has to do with structure. It’s architecture. That’s the whole job. It has nothing to do with words, really. It’s outlining, structure, it’s conflict and resolution …I go through notes, I outline and underline and I make note cards and reorganize the notes into like piles. And I cover walls of offices with post-it notes. I do whatever feels like is necessary to wrangle all of this information.
Pull up a barstool and listen.
See also
Felix Salmon of Fusion set off a little journalism nerdworld firestorm yesterday with his letter “To all the young journalists asking for advice.”
Salmon’s message was dark, as hinted at by the story graphic, a photo illustration that featured the words “We won’t pay you” superimposed onto newspapers:
I’m sure that many people have told you this already, but take it from me as well: journalism is a dumb career move. If there’s something else you also love, something else you’re good at, something else which makes the world a better place — then maybe you should think about doing that instead. Even successful journalists rarely do much of the kind of high-minded stuff you probably aspire to. And enormous numbers of incredibly talented journalists find it almost impossible to make a decent living at this game.
It goes on like that for quite some time, though Salmon also calls himself a “golden ager” and writes, “I think this is probably the greatest era for journalism that the world has ever seen.”
The problem, he writes, is that “Labor has almost no leverage over capital any more,” meaning it’s very hard to get paid.
Salmon makes a lot of good, tough points. I saw two responses that offered pushback on his bleak vision. This is my best advice to young journalists by Ezra Klein of Vox, and Advice for young journalists by “Sports Media Guy” Brian Moritz.
Both offer plenty of solid practical advice, but not terribly much to rebut Salmon’s pessimistic view of anyone getting paid. “The Death of Journalism is really a kind of disruptive change in journalism,” Klein writes, “and that’s bad for incumbents, but you’re not an incumbent.”
The problem with that is that, if successful, you will be, and, as Salmon wrote: “If you get a job by competing on price against 40-year-olds when you’re 22, then the turnabout, once you reach 40, is only fair play.”
Moritz, playing off a quote from Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax,” writes, “If the students and young journalists care a whole awful lot, they will create the journalism the world needs—both as a business and as the news.”
The whole dustup spawned a Twitter hashtag #AdviceforYoungJournalists. There are a lot of attempts at humor to wade through, a few of them successful, and some good advice mixed in.
Laurie Penny, herself a young journalist but a brilliant one for the New Statesman and the Guardian, collected her thoughts on the hashtag in a Storify.
Bleacher Report’s Attribution Guidelines say that “All quotations, paraphrases, and statistical analysis from other published works must be accompanied by attributions to original source material.”
While quotations and paraphrases are fairly straightforward, it’s a bit more difficult to determine what type of statistical analysis requires sourcing. This involves distinguishing between basic stats (no attribution needed) and advanced stats (attribution required). The tips below should make that process easier to understand.
What’s the difference between a basic stat and an advanced stat?
Anything that can typically be found in a box score or basic league/team/player profile is considered a basic stat. These stats are widely circulated and available in plenty of places, so there’s no need to acknowledge which specific source you may have used to verify the numbers. These often rely on fairly simple arithmetic and can be calculated without too much trouble.
On the other hand, an advanced stat might be exclusive to one source, require intricate data-tracking, come from a complex formula, reside behind a paywall, be a result of a particular writer’s research—or all of the above. The source of such a stat deserves credit for leading you to that information, even if other outlets carry the same figure. That way you’re being completely transparent about how you’ve obtained information that might not be regularly referenced.
Here are examples of sites that may contain advanced stats. Keep in mind that not every stat found on one of these sites qualifies as advanced—we’ll get into that more later:
Multiple Sports: Sports-Reference.com‘s various sites, official league sites, ESPN.com, Spotrac.com, OddsShark.com
NFL: ProFootballFocus.com, FootballOutsiders.com, AdvancedFootballAnalytics.com
NHL: BEHINDTHENET.ca, HockeyAnalysis.com, war-on-ice.com
NCAA Basketball: kenpom.com
MLB: BrooksBaseball.net, FanGraphs.com, baseballsavant.com
World Football: WhoScored.com, Squawka.com
Why should I source advanced stats?
If you’re relying on someone else’s research, formula or data in order to supplement your own analysis, it’s proper journalistic practice to credit that source and be completely transparent about how you’ve obtained your information. Basic stats can be found in many different places across the web without too much trouble, so those can be incorporated without attributing a particular source.
How do I source advanced stats?
In the same way that you would provide a hyperlink for a quotation from another source, you should provide a link that leads readers directly to the stat you’re referencing.
Beyond linking, you should properly credit your source by acknowledging it in the text. There are a couple of options for doing so: Either name your source alongside the hyperlinked stat or include a tagline clarifying where your stats come from. The latter option is particularly useful if you have multiple advanced stats in an article—that way you don’t have to continue naming your source throughout the text.
An in-text citation looks like this:
According to Pro-Football-Reference.com, Aaron Rodgers leads the NFL in adjusted yards per pass attempt at 10.14.
If you choose to go with a tagline to cover all of your citations, it would look like this:
In the article: Aaron Rodgers leads the NFL in adjusted yards per pass attempt at 10.14.
Article tagline: All stats courtesy of Pro-Football-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.
Regardless of how you decide to name the source of your advanced stats, there should be a link showing where each of your stats is located. If the same link shows more than one of the stats you’ve referenced, no need to link it repeatedly.
Exception: If you’re using a built-in table to present advanced stats, naming your source in the required caption field is sufficient attribution since there’s no logical place to provide multiple links.
Sometimes a unique URL leading to your stat does not exist, in which case you should provide a hyperlink that takes readers as close to the stat as possible.
For example, if you mention where Kyle Korver’s true shooting percentage ranks league-wide, this NBA.com link is the closest you can get to showing that. While the stat won’t show up immediately upon opening that page, readers can click TS% in order to sort the players accordingly and see where Korver stands.
Why do we characterize true shooting percentage as an advanced stat? Because it comes from a complex formula—that formula is: points / [2 x (field goals attempted + .44 x free throws attempted)]. As you can see, it’s not exactly the type of figure found in a box score or one that’s widely circulated. So even though the same stat (both category and actual value) is available at other sites like Basketball-Reference and ESPN.com, meaning the formula isn’t proprietary to one source, you should show exactly how you know it to be true considering it’s somewhat obscure.
Still, an advanced stat is not always the result of a complex formula.
If I write that Giancarlo Stanton hit 16 home runs after facing a count of zero balls and one strike, that stat comes from simple arithmetic. However, it clearly took intricate data-tracking by somebody else—like Baseball-Reference—to determine his performance split up by specific counts. You should credit that source for their research and for making it available to writers like yourself to bolster your argument. You might have gotten the same stat from ESPN.com’s database, in which case that’s the source you’d acknowledge in your article.
Take-Home Note
If you’re unsure how a stat would be characterized, err on the side of caution and provide attribution while keeping the following notes in mind.
Advanced stats could be one of the following:
- behind a paywall
- calculated through complex formulas that require more than basic arithmetic
- only available at one or a few sports outlets, not most of them
- unlikely to appear in standard box scores
I think that even now, as deep as we are in the digital revolution, it’s important to keep reminding each other that the upside of all the disruption is that jobs might sprout up in the most unexpected places.
This piece at CJR.org asks “Is hiring journalists such a good idea for Instagram?” Author Damaris Colhoun is a little skeptical given the disappointing results of such efforts at both Twitter and Tumblr.
That debate aside, it’s probably news to you, as it was to me, that Instapaper is hiring journalists, and that Tumblr and Twitter have done so in the past. So has Facebook. As Colhoun points out, the jobs mostly involve helping the companies’ branding efforts. They’re much more public relations or marketing jobs than journalism jobs.
So not all journalists will want them, and those who do take them should do so with their eyes open, knowing they’re not being hired to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But they’re jobs, and that’s a good thing to know about.
Here’s Digiday on Instagram expanding its “editorial” team.
Where have you seen journalism jobs, or at least jobs that leverage journalism skills, popping up where you hadn’t expected?
Bleacher Report U.K. has been building up the World Football coverage team. Here’s a rundown of who’s covering what in the Beautiful Game.
NATIONAL LEAD WRITERS
Alex Dimond: Staff writer who pens Monday Morning Hangover and Friday’s Premier League Notepad plus features. Profile | Twitter
Jonathan Wilson: Revered writer and tactical brain. Author of six books, including the acclaimed “Inverting the Pyramid.” Profile | Twitter
Graham Ruthven: Scottish writer who has appeared in such outlets as the New York Times and ESPN, among others. Profile | Twitter
Andy Brassell: An authority on European football. Writer and broadcaster—now a Team Stream Now regular. Profile | Twitter
Sam Pilger: Experienced sportswriter who has written for over 70 magazines and newspapers in more than 20 countries. Profile | Twitter
FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS
Guillem Balague: Spanish Football insider who has written biographies on Pep Guardiola and Lionel Messi. Profile | Twitter
Stan Collymore: Former Liverpool, Nottingham Forest, Leicester and England striker offers the pro’s perspective. Profile | Twitter
Ross Edgley: Former coach at the English Institute of Sport who covers Sports Science-related topics. Profile | Twitter
LEAGUE LEAD WRITERS
Premier League: Sam Tighe
La Liga: Karl Matchett
Serie A: Colin O’Brien
MLS/USMNT: Joe Tansey
Liga MX/Mexico: Karla Villegas Gama
Gameday Correspondent: Jerrad Peters
TEAM FEATURED COLUMNISTS
Arsenal: James McNicholas
Chelsea: Garry Hayes
Liverpool: Matt Ladson and Max Munton
Manchester City: Rob Pollard
Manchester United: Rob Dawson and Paul Ansorge
Tottenham Hotspur: Thomas Cooper and Sam Rooke
Barcelona: Jason Pettigrove
Real Madrid: Rik Sharma and Nick Dorrington
Atletico Madrid: Tim Collins
Milan: Sam Lopresti and Anthony Lopopolo
Juventus: Adam Digby
Bayern Munich: Clark Whitney
Borussia Dortmund: Stefan Bienkowski
PSG: Jonathan Johnson and Andrew Gibney
NATIONAL FEATURED COLUMNISTS
Daniel Tiluk
Mark Jones
Tom Sunderland
TRANSFERS FEATURED COLUMNISTS
If you follow people on Journalism Twitter, you may have seen some chatter recently about blogging being dead. I’ve ignored it, because “blogging is dead” is one of those things people have been saying since around 1973. Evidently this round of it happened in the wake of Andrew Sullivan’s announcement that he’s retiring from his paywalled blog.
Mathew Ingram of GigaOm has a piece arguing that blogging is alive and well. He cites a post by Ben Thompson, who runs the one man blog Stratechery, headlined Blogging’s bright future.
Ingram writes that online content success exists at two poles, one of which can be the classic one-person blog:
In a sense, the blogging world—or even the world of online publishing as a whole—has bifurcated to create what I call a barbell effect: sites or even publications like newspapers that are huge and broad and have powerful brands will likely succeed, because they can make advertising work. And those that are small and targeted (either by topic or by geography) will likely also be fine. Everything in the middle, however, is in for a world of pain.
You might not find this interesting if you’re not planning to start your own content company, but I think this analysis works on the individual level too.
Thompson writes that “an advertising business model demands huge amounts of inventory served to a large number of readers targeted with a massive amount of data.” And here’s Ingram with the flip side of that: “The core of Thompson’s argument is that the more niche and targeted your content is, the better off you are likely to be with a subscription model.”
That is, the way to get people to pay for your writing is to make it unique, specialized, targeted. If you’re running your own paywalled blog, the paying customers are readers. If you’re working in the larger media arena, the paying customers are editors. But editors are just people buying what you’re trying to sell. They’re asking the same question potential paying readers ask: Are you offering something that’s unique, that I can’t get anywhere else?
The American Society of Magazine Editors and Columbia Journalism School handed out the National Magazine Awards Monday night in New York.
As with any awards, it’s hardly a slam dunk that the winners were the most deserving. But it’s a good bet that the winners make up a reading list of top-notch magazine writing. Handy to have when you remember one of the best pieces of advice any writer can get: Read, read read.
Here is a list of the winners, leaving out photography:
Multimedia: Texas Observer-Guardian partnership, Beyond the Border by Melissa del Bosque
Video: Vice News, The Islamic State by Medyan Dairieh
Public Interest: Pacific Standard, Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet by Amanda Hess
Personal Service: O, The Oprah Magazine, Ready or Not: The Caregiver’s Guide
Leisure Interests: Backpacker, The Complete Guide to Fire edited by Casey Lyons
Reporting: GQ, Inside the Iron Closet: What It’s Like to Be Gay in Putin’s Russia by Jeff Sharlet
Feature Writing: The Atavist, Love and Ruin by James Verini
Essays and Criticism: The New Yorker, This Old Man by Roger Angell
Columns and Commentary: New York for Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?, Taking in Jeff Koons, Creator and Destroyer of Worlds and Post-Macho God: Matisse’s Cut-Outs Are World-Historically Gorgeous by Jerry Saltz
Fiction: The New Yorker, The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim
For even more reading, check out the full list of nominees, which includes the best piece of magazine writing I read this year, The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic.
I don’t know how I’ve missed this, but Niemanstoryboard.org has a feature called Annotation Tuesday! in which one writer interviews another about some recent or famous piece, and the questions and answers are interspersed throughout the story itself.
It’s like the audio commentary track on the DVD of a movie. I’ll wait here while you go ask your grandparents what DVDs were.
I was pointed to Annotation Tuesday!—which, alas, is not a weekly feature—by a tweet pointing to the latest one, Justin Heckert and “Lost in the Waves” by Matt Tullis. “Lost in the Waves” was a story Heckert published in Men’s Journal in 2009.
The name Justin Heckert jumped out at me because his his profile of comedian Kyle Kinane for Grantland had just been cited in this week’s Sunday Long Reads by ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr.
I love the format of Annotation Tuesday! It usually starts with a short Q&A, and then we get into the piece. You can hide the annotations if you want to see the piece in its native form first. Otherwise they interrupt the text, the questioner’s queries highlighted in one color, the writer’s answers in another. The questions might be about the writing, the reporting, the editing, even the conception and pitching of the article. I’ve only read a few Annotation Tuesday! pieces, but I have yet to read one and not learn something.
Most of them aren’t about sports, of course, but here’s one in which Elon Green interviews Roger Angell about “Down the Drain,” his famous 1975 New Yorker piece about Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Steve Blass, who had suddenly lost the ability to throw strikes.
With all the talk last week about Marshawn Lynch not talking to the media and how sportswriters reacted to that, you might find another annotation by Green interesting: Gay Talese and “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” was published in Esquire in 1966, and it is widely considered among the greatest magazine pieces ever written. It is, in the words of an editor’s note on the linked reprint, “a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.”
It’s relevant to the Marshawn Lynch story because it’s a shining example of what a writer can do with a reticent subject. Sinatra never spoke to Talese.