The Power of Leads

Re-used with kind permission from Poynter Online for Journalists: www.poynter.org   When journalists talk about beginnings of stories the word they use is lead. Sometimes it’s spelled “lede,” a throwback to the precomputer age when the word for first paragraphs had to be distinguished from the word for the molten lead used to print newspapers. […]

The Power Of Good Questions

For those of us interested in the craft of interviewing, last week’s prime time presidential news conference was an example of missed opportunities and a lesson in the power of questions. Most of the questions provided vivid and dispiriting evidence that White House reporters sorely need a lesson in interviewing from John Sawatsky, the Canadian […]

The Iceberg Theory of Writing

Re-used with kind permission from Poynter Online for Journalists: www.poynter.org “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated […]