Longtime Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wishes to apologize to the editors he has vilified over the years: "I do recall sometimes feeling frustrated in my kill-the-editor campaign by the fact that every time I wanted to take a flame thrower to the copy desk, one of its tireless drones would find a hideous error I’d made in a story and save my ass." He praises one editor by name — and misspells his first and last names (now corrected).
From the lighter side
From the trenches of the modern freelancing markets, here's an odd email exchange between an editor at the Atlantic and journalist Nate Thayer. The editor inquired about publishing an adaptation of a piece Thayer had published elsewhere and added, "We unfortunately can’t pay you for it, but we do reach 13 million readers a month." Thayer shot back that he was "perplexed how one can expect to try to retain quality professional services without compensating for them."
Maybe you'll recognize somebody (yourself on a bad day?) in this "How to Work Like a Writer" post on the writing life from The Pessimist: "There’s a word for people who work with words and still manage to have fun and maintain a healthy self-image, and that word is 'sportswriters.' Forget them. You’re in it for the art, and it’s not art unless it hurts, badly." It's from the people at Despair, Inc., which sells those warped (but funny) "demotivational" posters.
If this doesn't draw an audit — or worse — it will be a miracle. Michael N. Marcus offers innovative tips for cutting your income taxes: "If you are an author or a journalist, the key to creative tax avoidance is to write about things you like … If you smoke, write about pipes, cigars, tobacco, hashish or marijuana — and deduct the cost of your research. A trip to a cigar factory, a bong or nickel bag can be as important to your writing career as Microsoft Word."
What's an up goer? Well, it started with the idea that you should stick to the 1,000 most-used words, so as to make your writing better. Then came a funny drawing about outer space. Now there's a place where you can try it yourself, and another place where you can see how doctors might use it, and also one where you can read about another world in up-goer words.
You know who you are. You took typing in high school and you still put two spaces after a period, because that's how you were taught. Well, cut it out, says Slate's Farhad Manjoo: "Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left."
It used to be that the telephone and mailbox were the primary tools for oddball readers to reach busy newsrooms, but now there's email. Kate Galbraith writes in Nieman Reports about the makeover pitch and other doozies that have crossed her screen: "One person, upon seeing that my mini-biography on The Texas Tribune website included a degree from the London School of Economics, rambled on about Queen Boudicca's destruction of Londinium (London) in the year 60 A.D."
M.J. Rose offers a list of 11 "Don'ts" to complement the usual "Do's" in this post on a blog called Buzz, Balls & Hype. A sample: "Don't plan readings for bookstores that include you reading all 20 pages of the first chapter unless you're a stand up comic and there is only one joke on each page." Also: Don't spend all your money on a marketing trailer, or a website, or "an antique sports car, diamonds by the yard or a bottle of wine from Thomas Jefferson's cellar."
Did you hear the one about the reporter who found sanctuary in a tiger cage? Or the one who stripped down to interview clothed organizers of a nudist conference? Those are two of the "odd situations" recounted by reporters in Columbia Journalism Review: "As I was asking the deputy secretary of agriculture why the new guidelines did not limit sugar levels in the meals, I was holding a couple of deer forelegs in my hands, waving them to make my point more forcefully."
Usually we try to come up with our own headlines for these posts, but this one from the Columbia Journalism Review merits repetition. Ann Friedman tackles one of journalism's most pressing issues and mixes in a few Associated Press stylebook jokes for good measure.