Dr. Spaulding

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. It’s pretty simple: take the book you are currently reading, randomly flip to a page, select a few sentences from that page (being careful not to reveal any major spoilers, of course) and post it as a Facebook note or on [...]

If you can’t remember it, post it where you’ll see it: Are you studying your commas? If so, consider making a bulletin board near your workspace to post the most troublesome rules. Read them everyday and I bet you’ll begin to remember them. And consider posting writing quotes that inspire you or make you laugh: [...]

A short meditation on writing and reporting to start the week. Since we just read it in class, seems fitting to include it here. From The Elements of Style by Strunk & White: Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a [...]

Newspapers must define a niche audience of dedicated and affluent readers if they are to survive in the digital age, Washington Post book critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Yardley said at the annual Mencken Memorial Lecture Saturday. Yardley argued that newspapers should stop measuring success by the size of mass circulation or the number [...]

Mencken quaffs a legal beer just after the end of Prohibition at a bar on Saratoga Street. Happy birthday to Baltimore newspaperman Henry Louis Mencken (Sept. 12, 1880 – Jan. 29, 1956) who said his early career as a reporter was “the maddest, gladdest, damndest existence ever enjoyed by mortal youth.” Sunday marks the 130th [...]

Congrats to Mike Miller, who landed his first byline in The Sun today: Morgan State’s Brewer once had interest from Maryland

Don’t just interview the guy who sees the sign. Find the guy who sits on top of it.

Last week in class I talked about one of my pet peeves: the “when asked” transition. Here’s another. Scrolling through Google Reader today on my iPhone, I ran across an interesting headline. I clicked on it only to find a completely redundant lead: The lead provides no new facts and tells me what I already [...]

Here’s a few good examples of student reporting and writing from the MCOM 257 and MCOM 407 stories I looked over today: Baltimore beer week excites local home brewers, by Michael Miller Living aboard (on the benefits and drawbacks of living on a boat), by Amy Lakis Prepared for the worst (on Towson’s preparedness for [...]

Patch.com scored a big scoop against the Sun and other local media with the news that County Council candidate Gordon Harden accumulated a debt of $144,000 in unpaid state and federal taxes. Also, Towson alumnus Nick DiMarco provided an entertaining visual of Beiber-mania at the state fair Sunday. Towson adjunct professor Monica Lopossay is also [...]