Dr. Spaulding

Full text available for free: The Seven Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine. Several of the writers we’ve discussed in class are here, including Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Richard Ben Cramer. The list includes classic works you should be familiar with like “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and “What Do [...]

“Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry the dialogue.” That should sound familiar to all my MCOM 257 students. The NY Times article the book is based on: “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.”

I caught an interview with John McIntyre on WYPR today. He’s the former Sun copy desk chief who was among the editors, reporters and photographers laid off in 2009. He’s working at The Sun again as night content production manager. He said something I’ve been thinking about all afternoon: in your writing, accuracy is first. [...]

Here’s what’s on my reading shelf these days: The Press and the Cold War by James Aronson and Joe McCarthy and the Press by Edwin R. Bayley Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism by W. Joseph Campbell. (He’s blogging about the book over on Media Myth Alert.) Elmore Leonard’s [...]

By now you’ve probably seen Mark Luckie’s list for journalism grads, 30 things you should do this summer. It includes blogging, tweeting, designing a website, shooting video and gathering audio, all things you should be practicing. But there’s one more I’d add to the list: get off the computer and read a book. If you [...]

This summer I will be moving my syllabi and course materials here. Syllabi should be posted by July. In the meantime journalism majors, check out this list of 30 things you should do this summer.