Chip on Your Shoulder

At 4:40 p.m., Friday, Sept. 12, a Metrolink commuter train collided with an oncoming freight train in Chatsworth, Calif., northwest of Los Angeles. The crash, the Los Angeles Times reported, was "the worst in modern California history," killing 25 and injuring 135.

The following afternoon, LATimes.com, the paper's Web site, posted an interactive database of the first fatalities who were identified.

Having trouble getting the writing done?

I faced that familiar problem a few days ago. I had finished a chapter of my journalism textbook, patted myself on the back, and promptly felt myself shutting down. Starting the next chapter felt like standing at the foot of Mount Everest and contemplating the climb.

Fortunately, the block didn't last too long. I cut it short by turning to the single best writing tip I know: Just plant your butt in your chair.

I did just that; problem solved.

How can such a simple action be so difficult? Why must there be all this thrashing around? Why do I keep forgetting the power of this habitual behavior?

I found an answer in "The Mechanic and the Muse," my former blog that I visit weekly for posts worth updating.

I came upon a brief post, entitled "It's a bird, it's a plane; no, it's Super-Scientist/WriterMan." In it, I had linked to a Nova episode, the PBS science show, that profiled Karl Iagnemma, an MIT roboticist who also happens to also be an acclaimed fiction writer.

Okay, I admit, I was inclined to hate him -- young, gifted and knowledgeable about math -- until I listened to him talk about the discipline that both of his fields demanded:


It was comforting to hear that from a scientist-writer. But he's just one of a long list of writers who embrace the posterior-to-chair maxim to get their writing done.

Here are a few others from "Shoptalk: Learning to Write with Writers," an inspiring collection of writing quotes compiled by Donald M. Murray.


So, writing isn't brain science after all. Or maybe it is.

The brain has to stop generating pessimistic thoughts that block us, that chorus of downers whining in our heads: "You suck!" "You'll screw up this chapter." "You'll never finish your story, and even if you do, it will bomb."

Attitude follows behavior -- that's what we need to tell ourselves. Once we start typing, the sound of our fingertips on the keyboard will drown out those voices.

We lose a lot of time waiting for a Muse to show up. Time that could be spent drafting, organizing, rewriting and re-reporting. And in that process, we start to hear a voice that says, "You know, this isn't so bad."

Truth be told, there's a very good chance that when I finish this next chapter, I will find myself in the same motivational pickle.

I'll just have to re-read this, imagine I'm playing musical chairs, and get my butt in my chair as fast as I can. Wish me luck.

Got a single best writing tip? Share it here.

An earlier version of this "M&M" post appeared Oct. 7, 2006, on "The Mechanic and the Muse," a now-defunct blog I maintained from January 2006 to March 2007. I am updating and re-posting these items once a week.

CORRECTION APPENDED

Unread New Yorkers have been gathering dust lately — sprawled on the coffee table in the living room, perilously stacked on the bedroom bureau and resisting gravity in unstable columns on every unclaimed office surface.

Why am I foregoing the pleasure of one of my favorite pastimes? I'm certain there may be deep psychological reasons for this literary self-abnegation.

But discovering the reason doesn't demand much analysis. I just don’t have enough time.

Fortunately, there is "emdashes: The New Yorker Between the Lines."

It's been nearly two years since I stumbled across this fresh and imaginative blog created by Emily Gordon. She has dedicated herself to exploring where the em dash (a punctuation mark the length of the letter m) goes: in this case, between the lines and behind the stories of The New Yorker magazine.

emdashes, as with all good blogs, is fueled by obsession. "Like me, you read The New Yorker. With interest. Loyally, actively, critically. Ardently," wrote Gordon, an editor at PRINT magazine with an impressive freelancer's pedigree.

Two years later, she still fits that profile, and she has added a raft of new features for New Yorker aficionados. For the time-pressed, she provides a welcome service: sifting through the week's New Yorker for the best and brightest fact, fiction, criticism and poetry.

This week, emdashes points the way to a Huffington Post piece heralding the National Magazine Award finalists. Huffington Post provides links to the finalists, including The New Yorker's dozen. Among the magazine's finalists is its vastly improved Web site.

A cool addition to emdashes is Gordon's "Rossosphere," the blogroll of her favorite blogs that she named in honor The New Yorker's legendary founder, Harold Ross. It includes a link to a fascinating description of The New Yorker records collection at the New York Public Library. (Ever wanted to know who was J. D. Salinger's agent?)

emdashes also refers readers to the new Web site from Ben Yagoda, who relied on the New Yorker archive to write About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. (He's also a favorite writer and teacher of mine.)

Perhaps now that I have Emily Gordon as my guide, I will find time for a magazine that rarely disappoints.

An earlier version of this "M&M" post appeared July 23, 2006, on "The Mechanic and the Muse," a now-defunct blog I maintained from January 2006 to March 2007. I am updating and re-posting these items once a week.

This post was published with the incorrect name of the founder of The New Yorker. It has been corrected in the text.

I've never played chess. It always seemed too hard to learn. But a story in last week's New York Times has me thinking about giving the game another shot.

The story focused on plans to introduce chess into every second- and third-grade classroom in Idaho next fall. That move, the Times' Dylan Loeb McClain reported, "will make Idaho the first state to offer a statewide chess curriculum."

"One of the things that we hear is that too much of what we do is based on rote memorization," Tom Luna, the state's superintendent of education, said in the story. "The part I really like about this program is that kids are thinking ahead."

The United State is several moves behind the rest of the world. Chess is part of school curricula in
"nearly 30 nations around the world, include Venezuela, Iceland and Russia," according to the nonprofit America's Foundation for Chess.

The chess in schools program, called "First Move," is the brainchild of the chess foundation. Here's a good summary of research into the value of chess in education, which supports the benefits cited by America's Foundation for Chess.

Among the information on the foundation's site is a list of 25 answers to the question, "Why Play Chess?" As I read the list, it struck me that, if true, just half of them would be a boon for writers. boon for writers. Chess:

• improves concentration
• develops critical thinking
• inspires self-motivation
• helps you plan ahead and foresee consequences
• develops self-confidence
• develops memory
• is cheap
• helps you live a longer, healthier life
• promotes imagination and creativity
• teaches that success rewards hard work
• builds self-esteem
• increases patience
• encourages respect for ones self and others

Could it be that easy?


Your move.

On January 17, 2006, I launched "The Mechanic and the Muse," a blog that would, I hoped, track my continuing quest to master the writing craft and share the lessons that every act of writing contains -- from fact-gathering to revision.

There were other, more personal reasons, why I felt compelled to replace "Chip on Your Shoulder," my weekly writing advice column, with a blog. I laid these out in "Why I Blog," an essay that will reappear in "The New Writer's Handbook 2008."

Fourteen months and about 120 posts later, I was ready to put "The Mechanic and the Muse" to rest and return to writing "Chip on Your Shoulder" -- first as a column and now as a blog. I never knew how big the audience for that blog was, but now I realize that once a week I could glean a useful post from that collection.

I think of them as "M&Ms," an allusion not only to the blog's name, but to that chocolate candy encased in a rainbow of sugar shells. My aim: refresh these "Mechanic and the Muse" posts with new lessons and links -- fresh, colorful shells -- and share them with the larger audience of Chip on Your Shoulder."

Today's post, "The Smell of War," is the first in the series of M&Ms.

We know all about the fog of war, but what about its smells?

In newsrooms I've visited I usually offer a bounty to anyone who can locate a story with sensory details that require the nose. I've never had any takers.

But Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, must know their value. My nose for olfactory news sniffed out a pungent line in a story from Beirut, where a war between Israel and Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based Islamic political and paramilitary group, had been sparked by the capture of two Israeli soldiers. Shadid quotes a Lebanese victim of an Israeli air strike:


Not a pleasant combination -- peppers and smokeless gunpowder -- but coupled with visually vivid details, it helped Shadid put readers on the scene.

Our olfactory sense is arguably our most evocative even though it takes up a minuscule amount of space in our brains. For instance, I can't catch of whiff of patchouli without being drawn back to 1974 when I was in Quebec, learning how to speak French in preparation for a Peace Corps assignment in French West Africa.

And why else would real estate agents advise sellers to have cookies baking when prospective buyers arrive, other than to evoke pleasant childhood memories? (Some have found that a couple of drops of vanilla on a burning light bulb will trigger the same memories.)

Yet newswriters rarely take advantage of this powerful sense.

"Smell is the stepchild of the senses, the one that many think they could do without," writes Robin Marantz Henig in "Something's Off," a 2004 essay in The New York Times Magazine that eloquently chronicles two years of odorless life following a bad fall. "But when I couldn't smell things, I couldn't fully inhabit the world, and my movements in it were somehow, almost imperceptibly, more clumsy."

For more on the subject, see my column "Writing with Your Nose," featuring the olfactory writing of novelist Richard Price (Clockers, Freedomland), various ways to use smells in your writing and a brief explanation of how smells work.

For your next story, put your nose to your notebook, and to your keyboard. When you note how the scene looks, sounds and feels, keep your nostrils attuned for a detail that conveys what it smells like, too.

When Marantz Henig lost her sense of smell, she employed a "smell therapy" regimen suggested by a neuroscience-savvy colleague:

Every day a writing quote appears in my inbox from The Writer's Lifeline.

Sometimes it strikes a chord, sometimes not.

The one that chimed its arrival late Thursday is one I will keep close. The quote is attributed to Donald Hall, America's Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2007 and still a working writer as he enters his 80th year:


I often say, and sincerely believe, that if I thought my best work was behind me, I'd be devastated.

Instead, I try to behave as if every writing day is the beginning of my career, not another fleeting 24 hours closer to its end.

Until Thursday night, I never thought of it as endurance, just simply the way that anyone who's lucky enough to enjoy working with words spends the days.

I guess that's why Hall's observation jumped off the screen -- a message of hope as twilight heralded the close of another writing day.

If you have a favorite quote that keeps you going, please share it.

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Get Me Rewrite Chip Scanlan discusses a free NewsU course that, like some desktop widgets, can improve your writing. Listen | Download Drag to iTunes Read a text version of Chip's podcast. Enroll in the "Get Me Rewrite" course.

Combine the World Wide Web and a software gadget and the result is a widget: a mini-application designed to do one or two things really well.

Widgets for every purpose one could imagine are available for computers, Web sites, and even mobile phones. There are hundreds, if not thousands, out there, free (or nearly free) for the downloading and appealing to every niche from Sudoku to "The Baby Countdown Pregnancy Ticker."

Lately I've been thinking that there's another way to look at these byte-sized helpers.

Just substitute "writing" for Web, and widgets take on a new meaning, as programs tailored for writers.

Here are some of my favorites:

Countdown timer
Designed to remind people to deal with "single events, lunch breaks, weekends, paying your monthly bills or birthdays and holidays."

I've found it ideal to set the date and time of deadlines, whether for writing, teaching or consulting trips. One of my timers tells me I have just 8 days left to complete an interview for the "Best Newspaper Writing" anthology; another gives me 85 days before I teach time management at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

Word counter
Sure, you can use the word count feature in Word, but this widget offers writers much more beyond word, character, paragraph and line counts. It also tallies:

• Instances of particular text in a case-sensitive or case-insensitive manner. Ideal for someone like me who often repeats the same word in a paragraph.
• All words or only words above a specified length. Consider this the digital version of a writing maxim attributed to Mark Twain: "Never use a 50-cent word when a 10-cent word will do."
  

Other widgets I rely on

Wikipedia search

Enables me to scan this user-generated encyclopedia, and more important, look for the primary sources the entry relies on.


Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Pronounces words as well as looks them up.



Note: The Countdown timer and Word counter I use are Mac-only, but Windows widgets are also available.

David Folkenflik spent more than a decade as an award-winning newspaper reporter at The (Baltimore) Sun. In 2004, he says, he "took a leap of faith across media platforms," taking a job as a National Public Radio correspondent. He's NPR's media correspondent, now based in New York City.

Folkenflik says he "seeks stories that haven't been widely told, such as the multimedia innovations of a small Kansas company and the decision by the owners of a crusading Alabama paper to make it not-for-profit." He's a digger too, breaking stories about the Chicago-based Tribune Co's financial woes, and a skillful profiler of figures in the media world.

I'd long been a fan of Folkenflik's media coverage at The Sun, and curious when he surfaced on NPR. I wanted to find out more about his decision and the lessons he's learned from the transition -- matters not only relevant to those who make such a change, but also to print reporters who contribute audio storytelling on their Web sites. What follows is our e-mail interview and links to some of his favorite stories.

Chip Scanlan: When did you move from print to radio?

David Folkenflik

David Folkenflik: I left The Sun in October 2004 and joined National Public Radio late the next month.

Scanlan: Why did you make the move?

Folkenflik: Perhaps the central reason has to do with NPR itself. I've been a listener -- first involuntarily as a child, then by choice -- for as long as I can remember, so I have a strong affinity for it.

Once I learned NPR was creating this position, it seemed a natural way for me to continue covering an intriguing beat while adopting a completely fresh approach to the job. And that held a strong appeal.

But I might not have had the confidence -- or the imagination -- to take this leap of faith across media platforms had it not been for the presence of my former editor at The Sun, Bill Marimow, who was a senior editor here at NPR at the time and is now the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. It assured me that this very different kind of medium can adhere to the fundamental principles that drew me to journalism in the first place.

Scanlan: What did the transition entail? What did you have to learn and master to report and write the news for radio? What's the difference between writing a newspaper story and a radio story?

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Some of David Folkenflik's favorite NPR stories "Seizures Hurt Memory, Ex-‘Times’ Reporter Says" "Small Paper Uses Profits to Train New Reporters" "Mad Money: Stocks with a Schtick" "Danger for Journalists in Baghdad's Green Zone" "The Art of the Interview, ESPN-style" "Lawrence, Kansas: Convergence Capital USA" Part I Part II

Folkenflik: Joining NPR from the world of print was a little bit like entering the Marine Corps at Parris Island. You're completely stripped down and then built back up.

The journalistic tools and techniques I relied on for articles often help advance the reporting of my stories here -- but they're not enough. The basics are the same. But the way you structure stories on radio is very different.

For one thing, you give the host who reads the introduction to your stories many of the best lines. In the body of the story, you really need to guide listeners by the hand -- there are a lot of external distractions as they hear the stories. So you have to convince them this is worth listening to and you can't expect them to remember everything as the story moves along.

You need to think very consciously about sound. You want to minimize or avoid the noises that interfere with your ability to hear people's voices -- the refrigerators, flourescent lights, computers, leaf blowers, and so on. And yet you want very much to capture the clatter and chatter that make up the soundtrack of real life.

You need to honor the way people speak, to let their cadences unspool and thoughts unpack, more than I did for written articles. You have to learn to get out of the way more. And I had to cast aside my ignorance of (and relative lack of interest in) technology to recognize its importance in conveying the stories I want to tell.

Because you simply have fewer words in which to tell stories, you have to economize. In a newspaper article, you might include all five damning episodes or illuminating anecdotes. This is much more like haiku. You generally have to choose one or two.

"In a newspaper article, you might include all five damning episodes or illuminating anecdotes. This is much more like haiku. You generally have to choose one or two." -David FolkenflikFor many of the same reasons, it's been a complete blast. It's fascinating to have to learn a new form of journalism. It's been great to try to use the medium to give my stories a little turbo boost; when I did a piece about a small paper in Alabama that's going to be owned by a not-for profit foundation, I interviewed people at a general store -- the sound of the owner (a county commissioner) bantering with customers as he scooped beans out of a barrel evoked small-town life of the Deep South far more powerfully than my hitting listeners over the head with it.

In the hitting-listeners-over-the-head category, I did a story on CNBC's bombastic Jim Cramer that allowed him to explode through the microphone. But in another piece, about former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, the power came simply from allowing Eichenwald to speak at length about his struggles.

One last point about that: I think the learning process continues, and the mastery lies a ways off.

I've also found I can leverage material online in interesting and different ways. On longer stories, I try to include expanded excerpts of interviews with key players. I think it allows listeners to hear them in their own words in greater depth -- and as a practice I think it gives listeners who take the trouble to access those links enhanced trust that we're representing people fairly.

Also, on weighty stories where I can't include all the relevant stuff I've learned on the air, I'll incorporate that into a lengthier Web version. We can link to related material -- including the controversial stories that are at the heart of some of my reports. And periodically I write an online column for NPR.org that allows me to indulge my previous incarnation as a media critic and columnist. Others are also podcasting -- an area in which NPR seems to be doing pretty well -- but I haven't done that yet.

Scanlan: How does working for public radio compare to working for a major metro?

Folkenflik: I worked for two newspapers -- one pretty big, the Baltimore Sun, the other much smaller, The (Durham) Herald-Sun in North Carolina. (I also had an internship at what was then called The News and Courier in Charleston, S.C.) I love newspapers. I had a great time and learned a lot reporting for both.

"I love newspapers. ... Yet when you met people socially, and they asked what you did and who you worked for, you'd as often as not get an earful. ... These days, if people ask what you do, and you tell them, you hear, 'You know what I love about NPR?' That's a gratifying shift." -David FolkenflikYet when you met people socially, and they asked what you did and who you worked for, you'd as often as not get an earful. And that earful would start like this: "You know what's wrong with your paper?" or "You know what I hate about your paper?" I don't see people doing this to dentists or utility company employees.

These days, if people ask what you do, and you tell them, you hear, "You know what I love about NPR?" That's a gratifying shift.

The reach is also pretty amazing. We have listeners all over the country, in big cities, small towns, red states, blue states -- all over. People are always surprised to learn our audiences are a lot bigger than those of cable news channels, and often rival the networks.

As a reporter, I find sources are more accustomed to dealing with newspapers, on a few levels. The sources figure they reach more people by going to one of the big newspapers -- even though any story we do is likely to be heard by far more people than would read it in, say, The New York Times.

And there's the inhibition factor -- when you talk to someone in person or by phone, all you need is a pen and a pad. To make a story that really leverages the power of radio, you need sound -- and so you have to whip out a microphone or ask if you can call back once you've arranged for time in a studio. Even if it's only a three-minute hiatus (we have booths set up for quick-and-dirty phone interviews), that can give sources a bit more time to second-guess their decision to talk. And people, especially lawyers, are nervous about talking on tape. I imagine if they misspeak, they feel it's harder to step away from those comments. It also makes it tougher for them later to claim they were taken out of context.

Scanlan: What was the greatest surprise?

Folkenflik: The pace is pretty different. On the whole, the days are more manageable -- but the deadlines for breaking news are like full sprints. "All Things Considered" kicks off at 4 p.m., so a developing story that I could have finished at 5:30 or even 7 p.m. for The Sun has to be done and ready to track -- that is, to record in studio -- by 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. at the latest. That means your reporting has to be done at least an hour before that. Your days can be really compressed.

On the flip side, because "Morning Edition" doesn't start until 5 a.m., you can spend long nights reporting and recording stories on things that happen too late in the day to turn for "All Things Considered." And, it means the show's producers can (and occasionally do) call you at 3 a.m. to update stories that are about to run with new developments -- or at 11 p.m. or even 5 a.m. to come into the studio to match someone else's piece. It doesn't happen very often -- but it's very much a round-the-clock mentality. Newspapers aren't so Web-crazed that they feel as much need to do that yet.

It is also a relief not to be worrying as much about newsroom budgets.

Scanlan: What role do producers, editors and others at NPR play when you are producing a story?

Folkenflik: It's an exceptionally collaborative place. I still do the loose-knit kind of consultations I used to favor with trusted colleagues at The Sun. But I'm in frequent discussion with my direct bosses, such as Laura Bertran, Steve Drummond, and Ellen Weiss, my arts desk colleague Sara Sarasohn and my fellow New York bureau crazies Robert Smith, Mike Pesca and Adam Davidson about possible approaches to the story. And that's been great fun.

So far, I haven't worked much with producers in the field; instead, I record the interviews and sound in the field, Alison Bryce and colleagues from the news operations desk help me identify and gather sound from public events (say, press conferences or speeches); either Laura or show producers "lay up" the piece, which means putting together the constituent sounds of the piece, from my narration to the voices of the people I've interviewed, to the background sound we use to represent life as it actually sounds when you're there. The sound technicians, the engineers, make sure the levels are strong enough to hear clearly but not intrusive -- they can work magic to make it all flow together. As digital technologies have become more sophisticated, though, reporters are taking on more production tasks and show producers are taking on more technical duties.

Scanlan: Did you have teachers or mentors who helped you become a radio journalist?

Folkenflik: I've found NPR to be an astonishingly collaborative and gracious place. Even aside from my bosses, experienced reporters such as Danny Zwerdling have gone out of their way to offer constructive tips on how to tell stories more simply but no less completely. Others such as David Kestenbaum have offered pointers on incorporating humor, or simply encouraged things they thought worked. That helps too. People here seem to genuinely revel in one another's successes and little grace notes. Jonathan Kern, a former executive producer of "All Things Considered" who's been an in-house coach, has been particularly patient with me. So has our former national editor, Ellen Weiss, who’s now our vice president for news -- although I was initially not one of her reporters.

And you learn just by listening to other stories -– such as those by foreign correspondents like Rob Gifford or the dispatches of StoryCorps, with its incredible initiative enabling people to tell their own tales.

Scanlan: What advice would you give someone who wants to make the transition from print to public radio or to a print reporter who wants to add radio skills?

Folkenflik: You have to be willing to overcome your own inhibitions about hearing your voice, and dealing with slightly cumbersome equipment. You have to be willing to collaborate to a greater degree. You have to tell complex stories more tightly -- but without losing any of the sophistication or vital context. You should be eager to have fun along the way.

In an article in Monday's newspaper, there may have been a misperception about why a Woodstock man is going to Afghanistan on a voluntary mission. Kevin DeClark is going to Afghanistan to gain life experience to become a police officer when he returns, not to shoot guns and blow things up.
The Sentinel-Review apologizes for any embarrassment this may have caused.

A headline in Monday's Daily News, "He regrets his role in 'postal' vid," implied that Richard Marino, the subject of a YouTube video, was sorry for an incident in December at a Brooklyn post office. Marino, in fact, is not sorry. The News regrets the error.

On 13 February we published an article headed "Who bum it?" reporting that two Premiership footballers and a music industry figure had a "gay romp" in which a mobile phone was used as a "gay sex toy." On 16 February we published a picture of Mr. Cole and his fiancee headed 'Ashley's got a good taste in rings.'

Some readers have understood that Mr. Cole was one of the two Premiership players involved in the gay sex and that Choice FM DJ, Masterstepz, was the music industry figure.

We are happy to make clear that Mr. Cole and Masterstepz were not involved in any such activities.

 

We apologise to them for any distress caused and we are paying them each a sum by way of damages. The Sun wishes Ashley all the best for next Saturday's World Cup quarter-final.

"...several recent studies stand as a warning against taking the platitudes of achievement too seriously. The new research focuses on a familiar type, perfectionists, who panic or blow a fuse when things don't turn out just so. The findings not only confirm that such purists are often at risk for mental distress -- as Freud, Alfred Adler and countless exasperated parents have long predicted -- but also suggest that perfectionism is a valuable lens through which to understand a variety of seemingly unrelated mental difficulties, from depression to compulsive behavior to addiction."

Reader alert!

Amazon.com today released its three-years-in-the-making electronic reader, "Kindle," which it calls a "wireless reading device."

Amazon.com

The word "book" has served well for centuries, but since "Kindle" can reportedly hold 200 books in its memory, tech-speak may be necessary.

I just learned about it and know little more than its price -- $399 -- and that according to Amazon.com it "is temporarily sold out." Even so, I want to dive into its stories, photos and spec sheets.

I confess to being an early adopter (computers are my sports, I've decided, so my enthusiasm for most things electronic often the rivals the devotion of Cub fans).

OTHER 'KINDLE' COVERAGE

The New York Times * Amazon Reading Device Doesn't Need Computer Engadget: * Amazon Kindle first hands-on Newsweek * The Future of Reading CNET * Review * Photo Gallery * Crave Blog * NewsBlog

What excites me most about Amazon's entry into a field littered with wanna-be electronic readers is that it allows you to highlight messages (if it doesn't let you store and e-mail them, I'll be less happy).

The ability to bump up the font is certain to turn on baby boomers like myself who struggle with presbyopia and the cost of reading glasses that I inevitably sit on. (Six pairs in the last month.)

So l invite you to join me on this quest for information about "Kindle" and to let me know what you think about it.

A homepage rollout letter from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos describing Kindle's access to 90,000 books (The New York Times bestsellers will cost $9.99), newspapers, magazines and blog. The product page features a video and 352 comments with more streaming.

I'll reserve judgment, and leave the business side impact to financial experts, until I know more.

Until then, what's your take on Kindle?

If you're an online news consumer, you already know what a blurb is, or you know it when you see it, even if you don’t have the vocabulary to name it. Here’s an example from a recent homepage of The New York Times.

The board of Merrill Lynch announced that E. Stanley O’Neal would retire immediately and Alberto Cribiore would serve as nonexecutive chairman.

To understand the role of the blurb, or summary, as some online journalists refer to the device, you have to see what comes on top of it: a hyperlinked headline.

Merrill Chooses Interim Leader, Begins Search for C.E.O.

The board of Merrill Lynch announced that E. Stanley O’Neal would retire immediately and Alberto Cribiore would serve as nonexecutive chairman.

Blurbs are designed to drive readers to the story. They are words that click. In that way, they are combination of newswriting and marketing. Like so many online forms, they have their historical roots in earlier times and technologies.

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Until the advent of the World Wide Web, blurbs were usually found only on book jackets or movie posters. Their origins are generally attributed to Gelett Burgess, an American humorist; in 1907, he created a fictitious character, "Miss Belinda Blurb," to say nice things about his new book.

Old-style blurbs were a marketing device that heaped excessive praise on a book. Often they were written by friends of the author, who then returned the favor. An imaginary example:

Online blurbs serve the same function: They are intended to keep readers reading by engaging their interest enough to click the headline, taking them to the full story.

Their use is widespread, according to Poynter’s 2003 Eyetrack study, "Online News Behavior in the Age of Multimedia."

"The vast majority of news Web sites' homepages," the study found, "use a combination of headlines and accompanying blurbs to entice site visitors to click through to stories."

Here are examples.

From England, the online edition of The Guardian:

From the Los Angeles Times:

Last L.A. 8 defendants cleared
By Henry Weinstein | 6:00 a.m.
After 20 years, U.S. drops charges against men accused of ties to terrorists.

From Russia, a blurb drives readers to the story of a bombing in a central Russian city, killing eight, injuring about 50:

And, closer to home, from Poynter Online:

What Does a 'Data Delivery Editor' Do?
By Ken Sands
At The Roanoke Times, he turns a variety of databases into easy-to-use online content.

Some news organizations use the term "summary" instead of blurb -- a reasonable choice, I’d say, as the item sums up what readers will find when they click on the linked headline on top. That’s the case at nytimes.com.

To learn more about this device, I did an email interview with Jill Agostino, news editor of nytimes.com.

Agostino will be teaching in my new seminar, “Online Writing: Words that Click,” Jan. 27-30, 2008. She’ll be joined by Becky Bowers, a St. Petersburg Times copy editor turned graphic reporter, and other specialists in online writing. The seminar is geared to reporters, editors, online producers and other journalists who write and edit for print, broadcast and online-only news sites. The application deadline is Dec. 17.

Q: How do you decide what online story gets a blurb on the homepage?

A: Those are news judgments. Generally, the stories we deem most important are the ones that get summaries, and the next most important stories get headlines under "more news."

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At night, we will follow the paper's A1 (page) to some extent, but it also depends on what time news is breaking. We may have a summary for a story that the paper has played inside; maybe some of the other stories they have on A1 we've had up since 11 in the morning — for our readers it's sort of old news. I talk with the homepage producer at night about them.

Q: What length do you shoot for?

A: Usually no more than three lines. (The article template allows us to know exactly how many lines it will come out to as we write it.) We tell people that you usually don't want to them to be more than 23 to 25 words (which comes out to roughly three lines), but obviously there are exceptions.

Q: A recent summary reads like a lead, but one shorter than the lead of the actual story.

The Federal Reserve today approved a half-percentage point cut in its discount rate on loans to banks, saying that it now feels that "tighter credit and increased uncertainty have the potential to restrain economic growth going forward." Stocks immediately surged when trading opened.

Is that deliberate?

A: Often, the lead of the story can act as a guide for the summary.

Q: What guidelines, besides length, do you rely on?

A: We don't really have hard and fast rules on these things, aside from the obvious ones: They have to make sense, be grammatically correct and accurately reflect the story. We have done some training sessions with the producers, and I try to point out things to the producers at night, but it obviously depends on how busy we are.

Q: Is the blurb/summary an online creation? Is there an analog in the print edition?

A: There really isn't anything that is like this in the print edition But, remember, they can look at the headline and immediately read the lead of the story right under it — our readers have to take an extra step and click through the headline. Hopefully the summary entices them to do so.

Last March, a group gathered at Poynter for our first multiplatform journalism seminar, which will be held again in May 2008. Months later, the virtual conversation on the list-serve connecting that group remains robust. Among the messages that arrived in my inbox the other day was this thought-provoking one from Jane Briggs-Bunting, director of the school of journalism at Michigan State University. I thought it worth sharing with all of you:

Celebrate, celebrate, punctuate to the music!

Today is "National Punctuation Day," billed as "A celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotes and other proper uses of periods, semicolons and the ever-mysterious ellipsis."

What I like about this site, created by a former newspaperman Jeff Rubin, is that:

1. It features an official food dish: Punctuation Meat Loaf.
2. There is a game plan for National Punctuation Day. Among the choices:

• Take a leisurely stroll, paying close attention to store signs with incorrectly punctuated words.
• Stop in those stores to correct the owners.
• If the owners are not there, leave notes.
• Write an error-free letter to a friend.
• Take a nap. It has been a long day.

(I learned about this from "Today's Word on Journalism," a daily feature provided by Ted Pease, a j-prof at Utah State University. Thanks to Ted and his tipster, Alex Halsey. Subscribe by e-mailing tpease@cc.usu.edu.)

This just in, courtesy of our Anglophile-eyed British colleague, program coordinator Jacqueline Davies:

Hypens are history, at least for 16,000 words deemed hyphen unworthy.

Here, word-for-word and hyphen-for-hyphen is a report on this grammatical development from the BBC News Magazine:






   





So, what does that mean for the future of e-mail/email?

What's your reaction to the OED's decision? What words do you think could do without the hyphen?

• Be trustworthy
• Provide background and context
• Deal with a related subject but in a new or different way
• Be authoritative
  • Foundations
  • Government organizations
  • Individual or organization seen as leader in field
  • Your own stories
• Be credible
• Add understanding
• Expand on the topic — stuff you couldn’t fit in a news story
• Offer tangible information
  •     Locations
  •     FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
  •     How something works
• Be relevant
• Work
• Provide further detail
• Broaden content
• Describe content rather than point to it by linking from a noun, instead of phrases such as "Click here" or "Click this."

Your Turn
 
Please consider this a collaborative project.

• Suggest items that belong in "The ABCs of Online Writing." Define, if you want, and provide examples.
• Comment.
• Correct.
• Expand.

(Thanks to Dispatch staffers Ted Decker, Rob Messinger, Randy Ludlow, Doug Haddix, John Futty. Molly Willow, Alayna DeMartini, Tricia Rongstad, Monique Curet, Sherri Williams and George Myers for getting the ball rolling.)

Vacation alert: In a few days, my wife and I will drive our youngest to college. I've promised my wife I won't cry until the drive home. In the meantime, I'll be taking this week off.

Once a journalist needed nothing more than a pencil and paper to take notes and a typewriter to write a story.

In some ways that's all some reporters still need. "Even in these days of high-tech weaponry, the writer's most effective research and interviewing tools remain the humble pen and low-tech notebook," writes veteran editor David Fryxell, in "How to Write Fast (While Writing Well)."

There are countless reporters who bring nothing more than an empty notepad, a pen and an open mind to an assignment, and they produce compelling journalism.    

But today's journalist has available an array of other tools to choose, from digital audio recorders and video cameras to software programs that transform digital information into multimedia news and information for the World Wide Web. Changes in the way news is consumed have increased the demand for journalists to  gather sound, pictures and video, as well as words on paper. Whichever you use, never forget that it's not the tool that matters as much as the way it's used.

Says Michael Rogers, an online pioneer now futurist-in-residence at The New York Times, "It's trite but true: The fundamentals still apply. It all begins with writers, reporters and editors who can recognize and tell a good story. If you don't have those folks on your side, it doesn’t make any difference how good the widgets are."

But the fact remains that journalism's tools for gathering, distilling and present news, stories and information are a far cry from the pen, notebook and trusty Royal typewriter.

Given this new reality, I'd appreciate your help. You can consider this post as a cross between "Ask Chip" and "the ABCs of Online Journalism," two series I recently established. Except that I'd like to ask you questions about one letter in the online alphabet: T -- for tool.

I'd like you to look inside your journalistic tool box, and itemize what's inside, starting with the basic elements and progressing to any electronic devices, as well as the software programs, that you rely on to produce online journalism.

What devices and skills do you consider critical for today's journalists?

Why do they need them?

How can they learn how to use them?

Does every journalist have to include every device and skill in his or her toolbox?

What's the impact when so much attention is paid to new tools; will the journalism suffer?

I think our community will be excited to hear the answers. (I confess to an ulterior motive: I'm revising my journalism textbook and want to make sure I offer an accurate and complete picture of the state of journalistic devices and skills. If I'd like to quote you directly, I'll seek your permission, of course.)

Thanks for answering.

Chip