WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show recently touched on “America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns,” and it got me thinking about the form that first drew me into journalism.
In another time (i.e. five years ago), I wanted to be a newspaper columnist more than anything else. Some of my models were obvious ones —
Covering the tornadoes in Springfield, Mass.
One of my former professors, Steve Fox, asked me to take part in a quick Q&A about what I’ve been doing since Wednesday, when two tornadoes ravaged the city where I work. It was the first time I stopped to reflect on what was going on around me, so I’m posting it [...]
I went to a reading by literary journalist Ted Conover at Amherst Books this week. Conover has developed a distinctive style that draws on the American narrative journalism tradition and the anthropological method of participant observation.
I first read Conover on the recommendation of one of my professors at UMass, Norm Sims, [...]
We really can’t call it archaic — gubernatorial is only 300 years old, and thriving — but American critics have called it some other names along the way. Richard Grant White, a hugely popular 19th-century language maven, denounced the word in 1870 as ”a clumsy piece of verbal pomposity…pedantic, uncouth, and outlandish.” [...]
Shortly after the St. Petersburg Times announced Mr. Smith’s death on its website, a reader posted a comment stating the following: A man who is working as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack at the age of 48 is surely better off dead.
Web editors removed the comment, deeming it an offensive and insensitive insult [...]
Minuteman Marching band director George Parks, from an interview I did in 2008.
The whole world knows by now that George Parks, director of the UMass Minuteman Marching Band, passed away late Thursday. It might seem odd to the uninitiated that a marching band director’s death would get [...]
Let Us Now Praise…
“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; [...]
I’ve spent finals week kidding myself that reporting on the various ways students distract themselves during finals was not, in of itself, a distraction.
On Dec. 15, Collegian assistant multimedia editor Chris Shores and I covered a flash rave at the W.E.B. Du Bois library that Chris had heard [...]
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S.P. Sullivan is a writer, producer and multimedia journalist based in Northern New Jersey. Read more »
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