Posts tagged editing
What Miles Davis Can Teach Us About Writing
The New York Times’ Opinionator blog has an ongoing series called Draft about the art and craft of writing. Today, Aaron Gilbreath looks at Miles Davis and how the sparsity of his solos tell stories in their silences and how writers can do well by doing the same.
Where David Foster Wallace showed writers like me the possibilities of labyrinthine stories and digressions, Davis showed me how to be affecting without being opaque, lyrical without being verbose. Editing imbued each of Davis’s notes with more weight. It also let his melodic lines breathe, an effect that highlighted the depth and strength of his lyricism. No matter the tempo, Davis’s precise, deft touch produced solos whose moods ranged from buoyant to brooding, mournful to sweet.
Many writers fall prey to the quintessential American notion that bigger is better. They overload their sentences, adding more adjectives, more descriptions, more component phrases, tangents and appositives to form sprawling, syntactical centipedes (like this one) whose many segments and exhausting procession repeat themselves and say the same thing in different ways, with different words, and exhibit an entire ideology: that prose’s sensory and poetic impacts exist in direct proportion to the concentration of words.
Aaron Gilbreath, New York Times. Writing with Miles Davis.
Video: Kind of Blue 50th Anniversary, via Legacy Recordings.
We decided to credit editors because they live and breath the stories they work on, and I felt that some kind of recognition was due. It’s really as simple as that. The kind of work they do varies widely from story to story, it’s very difficult to generalize. What makes our editors so good is they know how to do a light line editing, when that’s all that’s required, and they know how to wrestle something to the ground, when that’s what’s required. Usually, it’s somewhere in between.
Hugo Lindgren, Editor, New York Times Magazine. Reddit. I’m Hugo Lindgren, editor of the New York Times magazine.
Hugo Lindgren spent time on Reddit’s IAmA board yesterday to answer questions about his career, magazines and journalism. Here, he’s talking about giving editors byline credits in the magazine.
His thoughts are great on other topics too, especially for those looking to get into magazines.
My head is still throbbing.
Over at Fuel Your Writing, Eric Kuentz takes Ernest Hemingway’s “write drunk; edit sober” edict to heart and sacrifices himself to a boozy experiment: where will a case of beer, a bottle of Chianti and some brandy bring his writing.
The Secret Lives of Fact Checkers
Fictional magazine Dictum has a crack Fact Checking Unit that’s on a mission to see if Bill Murray drinks warm milk before going to bed.
Starring Bill Murray, Peter Karinen, Brian Sacca, Kristen Schaal.
Directed by Dan Beers.
H/T: Slate.
Is that Sucking Sound Video Houses Abandoning Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro got a major overhaul last year with the release of Final Cut Pro X. Video professionals by and large weren’t happy. Editors with legacy projects were especially unhappy when they discovered that FCPX doesn’t support projects created in previous versions of the program.
Ars Technica surveys some of the video industry’s leading video pros. Here’s some of what they found:
Six months after the launch of Final Cut Pro X (FCPX), Apple’s major overhaul to its professional video editing software Final Cut Pro, video pros find themselves increasingly looking at other software options. The new version of Final Cut Pro was controversial—there were significant changes to the Final Cut interface, a plethora of editing features were taken away, and worst of all, Final Cut Pro X was rendered unable to import projects from previous versions of the software. For video editors and producers with years of work using Final Cut Pro, the launch of Final Cut Pro X made it seem like Apple no longer cared for its market of creative professionals.
Final Cut Pro X Tutorial
I’m sitting on a couch at my brother’s house outside Chicago, nursing a broken foot with some pain killers, and watching a great series of Final Cut X tutorial videos.
As a bonus, the narrator sounds like Bruce from Family Guy. It might be the pain killers, but he makes me giggle…
- Peter
Professional Video Editors Weigh In on Final Cut Pro X - NYTimes.com
The Bottom Line: Apple has followed the typical Apple sequence: (1) throw out something that’s popular and comfortable but increasingly ancient, (2) replace it with something that’s slick and modern and forward-looking and incomplete, (3) spend another year finishing it up, restoring missing pieces.
Professional editors should (1) learn to tell what’s really missing from what’s just been moved around, (2) recognize that there’s no obligation to switch from the old program yet, (3) monitor the progress of FCP X and its ecosystem, and especially (4) be willing to consider that a radical new design may be unfamiliar, but may, in the long term, actually be better.
The bigger issue is that journalists are completely innumerate. I can count on one hand the number of journalists who have any understanding of mathematics.
Not to totally excuse David Brooks here, but his editors share the blame here. A good editor is a reader advocate, and should be adding up and questioning these figures during the editing process.
This is a particular problem with opinion pieces; we’ve all read columns that are chock full of outrageous, untrue bullshit. Editors who let this stuff through typically do it with the excuse that “this is an opinion piece.” True, but facts aren’t a matter of opinion, and a publication has abdicated its role if it allows its opinion writers to publish things that are simply wrong.
(via markcoatney)
Long-form journalism—nuanced, rigorous, eloquent, and reasonable—is a mode of writing quickly being swept into the ashy dustbin of history.
The previous sentence, punctuation included, is 140 characters long, which is the maximum length of a tweet and—according to media scholars, news anchors, and frustrated teachers—the maximum attention span of anyone with a computer. Facebook status updates, overflowing RSS feeds, and smartphones are symptoms of a deeper malady, a hunger to consume more and more information. It would seem that painstakingly-crafted essays and deeply-researched journalism stand no chance in this hyperactive environment.
On the contrary, Wired’s Clive Thompson argues that info-nibbles like status updates, tweets, and news briefs increase our appetite for in-depth, long-form writing.
You are not writing to impress the scientist you have just interviewed, nor the professor who got you through your degree, nor the editor who foolishly turned you down, or the rather dishy person you just met at a party and told you were a writer. Or even your mother. You are writing to impress someone hanging from a strap in the tube between Parson’s Green and Putney, who will stop reading in a fifth of a second, given a chance.
Lessons in Narrative Journalism
With bells, whistles and technologies oh, my, we sometimes miss the forest for the trees, forgetting that good journalism is good facts wrapped with good storytelling.
Steve Buttry, Director of Community Engagement at TBD, walks us through one of his favorite reported pieces and gives the following tips on creating engaging narrative journalism:
- Write as you report
- Get tapes where you can
- Get records where you can
- Identify story elements
- Use dialogue instead of quotes
- Keep you lead brief and enticing
- Identify your key moments
- Keep your beginning in mind when you write the ending
- Read your story aloud
For details on each of these bullets, visit Steve’s blog.
Pictures of people about to die, less final than images of death, capture a particularly powerful moment in the middle of a sequence of action—a child about to keel over from starvation, a woman about to be engulfed by a mudslide, a dirigible about to explode—and freeze it for repeated display and engagement. Focusing on the human anguish of people facing death, they replay this moment in news and beyond without necessarily showing visual evidence that the people in fact died. Viewers thus can and do go in many directions with an image’s interpretation—refuting death, debating its particulars, providing multiple and often erroneous contexts for its understanding.
Pictures of people about to die, less graphic than pictures of corpses and body parts, also play on different parts of a viewer’s psyche. Where images of dead bodies often push viewers away, creating a sense of distance and objectification, images of impending death do the opposite: They often draw viewers in, fostering engagement, creating empathy and subjective involvement, inviting debate.
Last Friday, North Carolina’s Winston-Salem Journal said goodbye to its copy desk when parent company Media General moved forward with its decision to consolidate the copy desks of three metro papers it owns.
As John McIntyre writes at the Baltimore Sun:
The Winston-Salem Journal is losing its copy desk—all eighteen people—to a consolidation of resources in Media General. It is a tremendous blow to the paper: the loss of institutional knowledge, the loss of local knowledge, the loss of resources to ensure accuracy and clarity. The War on Editing has claimed another cluster of casualties.
Adds Tommy Tomlinson of the Charlotte Observer:
Copy editors are the umpires of the newsroom — they’ve done a great job if you barely notice they’ve been there.
Most everything that goes into our paper is edited at least twice. The first editor is what we call a “line” editor — usually the reporter’s boss. The second layer is the copy editor. The copy editor usually writes the headline, and always does the fine-tooth-comb editing to make sure street names are spelled right, dates match up, we’re not saying DUI when we mean DWI. Copy editors know more about the city, state, region and world than anyone else in the newsroom. Copy editors have saved me so many times I lost count long ago. All reporters make mistakes — it’s inevitable on a constant deadline — but a good copy editor is an All-Star catcher, snagging every wild pitch.
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