Check It Out: Back-to-journalism-school edition
Since a week of journalistic writing is near and dear to my heart, I decided to go back to my very first sources: My journalism professors at the University of Maryland, College Park. Go Terps!
Not only did it give me a chance to catch up with said professors, but I also got a chance to wring a bit more education out of those degrees I got at UMD. I mean, I'm still paying them through student loans, I might as well get my money's worth, right?
Carl Sessions Stepp, whose course on the history of journalism I took in my freshman year, is the senior editor of the American Journalism Review. He has worked with many journalists as a writing and editing coach at The Oregonian, USA TODAY, The Washington Post, and Toronto Globe and Mail. His pick? Patricia Cornwell.
"One of my very favorites is Patricia Cornwell, a police reporter for the Charlotte Observer when I was the city editor in the 1980s," he wrote in an e-mail. "Now she's a best-selling fiction writer with a dozen or so top books to her credit."
And I think my aunt has read every one of them, too.
One of my favorite professors was Ira Chinoy, who was part of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning team at The Washington Post that covered the use of deadly force by D.C. police. And he's funny, too.
He was kind enough to give me an extensive list, including Ernest Hemingway, Elliot Jaspin, Michael Dobbs, Haynes Johnson, James O'Shea and Vietnam War correspondents such as Michael Herr and David Halberstam.
"And no list in the Sun would be complete without Sun alums Jon Franklin and David Simon," Chinoy continued. "I'm sure there are others. I'm getting these by looking around on my shelf."
The next time you're looking around your shelf, I think you'll be surprised how many journalists you see.
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
Comments
Nancy,
I once taught a college class about writers who'd moved from newspapers to fiction. We read old newspaper stories and fiction by those who'd done both. The syllabus included Dan Fesperman of the Sun, but also William Kennedy (P-Prize for Ironweed; worked for the Albany paper and in San Juan), and Deirdre McNamer, a novelist from Montana first published by the Associated Press. A big part of the class involved considering the different values and sensibilites of the journalist and the fiction writer. The main difference, we discovered, was that journalists can never be satisfied with good questions, but need answers. As Richard Ford wrote in a story about a reporter, "In his line of work, the actual was everything." And novelists/short story writers have to exist amidst questions that can never be answered. Turns out it's not an easy transition to make ...
Posted by: Michael Downs | November 22, 2008 12:17 PM