To do great writing, read great writing. Here’s the great writing I’ve been reading this week.
With my son’s high school football team playing in the OSAA 6A semifinals next week and the Oregon Ducks looking to play in the BCS championship – if they can take care of the Beavs first – I’ve got sports and sportswriting on my mind. So my reading recommendations from the past week are sports related.
But first, some props to sportswriters. They’re the unsung heros of the news business. They have to write about the same time all the time while still making it fresh. They’re always on deadline. They’re prolific – basketball and baseball writers especially. And the good ones write as much about what happens off the field as on it. When I still worked at a newspaper, I envied the sportswriters because they were the first reporters on staff to get their own portable computers; I could imagine a time not long from now where sportswriters file copy from the iPhones, if they don’t already.
The Courage of Jill Costello – Michael Vick is on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s Nov. 29 issue, and the story about him is good. But the profile of Costello is even better. Shortly after finishing her junior year as a promising coxswain on the UC Berkeley women’s crew team, Costello found out she had stage four lung cancer. But it didn’t stop her.
When she asked her doctors about rejoining the team, they looked at her as if she were crazy. Crew? She’d need all her strength just to make it through each day. Jill didn’t care. She told her mom she saw cancer as “just another thing on my plate.” Besides, she’d had three goals for the better part of her adult life: to graduate from Cal, to cox the first boat and to win nationals. She saw no reason to change them.
John Canzano – Love him or hate him, the Oregonian columnist is by far one of the best around. Not afraid to ask the hard questions or express unpopular opinions, he also writes about fans and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, reminding us that after all, it’s still just a game.
Some other items about journalism or the media business you might find interesting:
Mobile Journalism Tools – If mobile journalism is the future, as UC Berkeley Ford Foundation Media Fellow Richard Hernandez has said, then this is the place to find the tools you’ll need for the job. This mobile reporting research project was created by j-school students and Will Sullivan, a a 2010-2011 Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Fellow at the University of Missouri, interactive director of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and one of the Online News Association’s newly appointed directors.
Media industry tweeters – Interested in keeping up with the times? Follow these media industry on Twitter
- @spj_tweets – Society of Professional Journalists
- @journtoolbox – Journalist’s Toolbox
- @NiemanLab – Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University
- @Mediaite – Mediaite, the self-proclaimed “site for news, information and smart opinions about print, online and broadcast media.”