To do good writing, read good writing. Here’s the good writing I’ve been reading this week:
On writing:
Dad Has Dementia – Want to know what an award-winning blog looks like? Elizabeth Shean’s blog about her father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s on Caring.com was selected as one of three finalists for the 2010 Online Journalism Awards in the small site online commentary/blogging division. The awards, given by the Online News Association and judged with help from the University of Miami’s journalism school, will be announced later this month at ONA’s annual conference. Shean’s chronicle of her father’s final months included posts about moving him into her home, finding hospice care, and after he died, dealing with the emotional aftermath.
On the business of writing:
- Small change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted (The New Yorker) – Malcolm Gladwell on Twitter, Facebook and social networks.
- For today’s journalists, landing a job requires a ‘startup’ mentality (International Journalists’ Network)
- The seven needs of real-time curators (Scobleizer.com) – Tech blogger Robert Scoble didn’t write this thinking only about how editors could use it, but he could have.
- Blogging is alive and well, says report (ReadWriteWeb.com)
Tech tools for writers:
- Storify – One of two apps I came across this week that allow a reporter (or anyone else for that matter) to create and publish an online publication on the fly by pulling together elements from blogs, news feeds, social networks, etc.
- Paper.li – The other tool for instant publishing, this one taken entirely from Twitter. According to the company’s tagline: “Paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag.” I used it to keep tabs on a human-resource conference I couldn’t go to. Like a lot of other information aggregation tools, how useful this is depends 100 percent on the sources feeding into it.