Recommended reading for April 9, 2010

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

Private Parts? If Only! – Before bloggers stole the show, sports writers took top honors for the gift of glib. Though many have been overshadowed by the enfants terribles at Gawker et al, when it comes to turning a phrase, they’re still some of the best. To wit: Richard Hoffer writing in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated about professional athletes’ indecent exposure – those infamous nekkid and nearly nekkid pix of Greg Oden, Santonio Holmes, etc., that went viral after being shared online. Hoffer writes: “Lately I’ve seen more packages than FedEx. I’ve seen more junk than on Hoarders. I’ve seen…well, you get the picture. Or maybe you already have.” Why write fiction when you can write like that about real life.

strong>Top Journalism Projects of the Decade – Sometimes writing is great not because of the prose, per se, but because of what the prose is about. That’s the case with this slate of journalism projects voted the top 10 of the past decade by a panel of judges at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. These days, great storytelling, at leat of the journalistic variety, isn’t just words on the page but the whole multimedia package. Included are tales of war, terror, disaster, greed and getting by:

• A Nation Challenged, a New York Times special section on the 9/11 attacks and their consequences.
• This American Life’s award-winning piece from May 2008 on the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, Giant Pool of Money.
• Coverage of Hurricane Katrina, from New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, August to December 2005.
• Barbara Ehrenreich’s seminal work on work, Nickeled and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By in America, published in 2001.