Good reads: Quitting the newsrooms, following your instincts, and more

To do good writing, read good writing. Here’s the good writing I’ve been reading this week:

The last couple weeks as seen a handful of stories from writers sharing about how they’ve opted out of traditional news careers, stories that are catching a lot of buzz.

First, Michael Winerup, the New York Times writer who oversees Booming, the paper’s boomers blog, shared his reaction to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s recent edit ending telecommuting for the ailing tech companies employees.

In an essay on Booming, He Hasn’t Had It All Either, Winerup says he has accomplished a lot in his career and family life over the past 30 years, and it wouldn’t have been possible had he not worked for employers who were OK with him working from home.

Then came a particularly gut-wrenching post by ex-newspaper reporter Allyson Bird on why she quit the news business. She’d started in newspapers at 16, worked seven internships during college and even left school early “so that I could lug my 21-year-old life to West Palm Beach and work the Christmas crime shift alone in a bureau.”

But at 28 she couldn’t hack being a hack anymore, and left for a job writing for the fundraising arm of a hospital, a job that paid more and wasn’t as mentally or emotionally taxing.

I too made a voluntary decision years ago to opt out of a traditional news career. If you love what you do — and I did and do — it’s one of the most difficult decisions to make. I left so I could do what I loved and have a family.

As I’ve written here many times, though, leaving the newsroom doesn’t mean you stop being a newsman or newswoman. If the news is in your blood, it’s stays there, and can inform whatever path you choose, whether that’s freelancer, blogger, hospital fundraising writer, PR practitioner, or working in some other writing related career.

Here are some other good reads from the past week:

The story behind ‘Playing With Fire’ (Nieman Reports) – When a source says something that doesn’t sound quite right, do you follow your instincts and investigate? Chicago Tribune reporter Patricia Callahan did, and it helped her win the Neiman Foundation’s 201w Taylor Award for Fairness in Newspaper. Callahan was listening to a burn surgeon’s testimony at a trial about how a seven-week-old baby died after her mom put a lit candle in the child’s crib. Callahan, a mom of three, thought that sounded odd — what parent would put a candle in a baby’s crib?

She and a fellow Tribune reporter followed up, looking through 16 years worth of country records on infants who’d died in fires, but couldn’t find any that matched the details the doctor shared. Eventually the reporters caught up with the doctor, who had retold stories of similar events in other cases involving fires and lack of flame-retardant chemicals. The doctor admitted to making up the anecdotes, not surprising given he was being paid by a supposed grass root consumer group that was controlled by several large chemical manufacturers to appear as a witness at hearings supporting the chemical retardants they made.

The pair’s six-part series showed that chemical manufacturers had lobbied for “regulations requiring flame-retardant chemicals in furniture for nearly 30 years without evidence proving the effectiveness of the chemicals,” according to Nieman Reports.

It isn’t rocket science: Tin House and Granta editors on how to run a publication that isn’t sexist (Flavorwire) – Once a year VIDA, an organization for women in literature started in 2009, publishes a report called The Count, on the ratio of male and female bylines appearing in major literary magazines such as Harper’s, The New Republic, The Atlantic, New Yorker and New York Review of Books. Not surprisingly, at least not to me and a lot of other women writers, the predominance of bylines have been and continue to be male. Inevitably, after the annual Count comes out, editors at said magazines promise to put systems into place to do better at achieving gender balance. Well, it looks like a couple of them have.

One is Tin House, a Portland, Ore., literary magazine.

We did a thorough analysis of our internal submission numbers and found that the unsolicited numbers are evenly split, while the solicited (agented, previous contributors, etc.) were 67/33 male to female. We found that women contributors and women we rejected with solicitations to resubmit were five times less likely to submit than their male counterparts. So we basically stopped asking men, because we knew they were going to submit anyway, and at the same time made a concerted effort to re-ask women to contribute.

Read the rest of Spillman’s response on Flavorwire.

Harry Stamps obituary (SunHerald.com) – A well-written obituary should make you feel like you know the person. This one, written by the daughter of the former Mississippi community college dean, does exactly that. RIP Mr. Stamps, you were a piece of work. Read more on obituaries:

When journalists cross over (DigiDay) — An inside look at long-time Businessweek reporter Steve Wildstrom’s new freelance career as a contributor to a tech news website run by Cisco, one of the latest examples of journalists who’ve made the switch to branded content. BTW, can we please figure out a better term than “branded content,” “brand journalism” or “content marketing” to call this new hybrid?