Most semesters, I lead a section of Marist College’s communication major capstone course (which Marist calls “Capping”). This semester, as I have done previously, I have asked the students to run blogs and Twitter accounts to document their progress as the semester goes on. Students are working either individually or in small groups to develop […]

I felt a particular (and admittedly somewhat selfish) twinge of sadness when I saw on my phone yesterday that Nora Ephron died (and not just because I used to live across the street from the brownstone that Bruno Kirby tosses the wagon wheel coffee table out of). I was sad because even though I had […]

In mid-December, 2011, so almost exactly six months ago, Christopher Hitchens died. I didn’t know the man, so I couldn’t write much of a remembrance of him, but I did get to meet him once, so I typed up a little memoiristic essay about the time he smoked a cigarette in a Columbia journalism school […]

Several years ago, I saw No Country for Old Men with my parents and one of my sisters. I’m predisposed to like Coen brothers movies, but I came out engaging my parents in a discussion about how Javier Bardem’s character (the one with the bowl cut and the hydraulic cattle bolt) represents the inevitability of death […]

When I teach an introductory reporting and writing course, I devote roughly the first half of the semester to exercises and drills that let students sharpen their news writing skills before they have to go out and interview real people in the real world. The culmination of that is the “news drill,” which I didn’t […]

In the section of Journalism 2 that I’m teaching at Marist College this semester, I turned today into a Lincoln-Steffens-at-the-Commercial-Advertiser-esque experiment in group reporting. When my students got to class, I sent them off across campus to capture a snapshot (both in words and literally) of what was happening over the course of about a […]

Sometime in late 1970 or early 1971, J. Anthony Lukas took his friend Richard Pollak out for dinner and told him about his experiences covering the “Chicago Seven” conspiracy trial. Lukas had been frustrated by the editors of the New York Times, who wouldn’t let him quote the word “bullshit,” among other limitations on his reporting, […]

If John McCormally is to be believed, then his serving as a Pulitzer Prize judge in 1971 wasn’t eye-opening so much as hunch-confirming. When he won his own Pulitzer in 1965, he wrote, he had suspicions that maybe the award wasn’t all that special (Perhaps he wouldn’t want to accept any award that would have […]

Thirteen years ago this week, during the lazy spring of my senior year of college, I published a piece called “Valentine’s Gay” in the irreverent college magazine I used to edit. The story was about how gay and lesbian students at the University of Pennsylvania (which Newsweek later named the best school in the country […]

I find that most journalism students (and probably working journalists, too) favor one of the two main skill sets of journalism and fear the other. I know journalists who will talk to sources until their editors force them to sit down and meet a deadline, but who have nightmares about blank screens with blinking cursors. […]