UPI

Good News, Bad News, And True Story on Blogging and Editors

November 12, 2010

The good news and bad news about blogging is editing and editors. Good news: anybody can blog without going through an editor as a gatekeeper. Back in the old days we used to strive to “get published.” Now we just publish. Hooray, we’re free. Bad news: nobody is so good that good professional editing doesn’t [...]

Read the full article →

Journalism and Blogging: Both Sides Now

July 26, 2010

Jolie O’Dell is a journalist who blogs. She cares about journalism, I gather, because of the way she writes about it in posts like How to Tell a journalist from a Blogger and Not all bloggers are journalists and not all journalists are jerks on her own blog. Most of the time, though, she’s a [...]

Read the full article →

Confessions of a Hypocritical Business Planner

September 22, 2009

Irony: I’m a business planner, and I have been for 30 years now; but the biggest decisions of my real life have been remarkably unplanned. I could rewrite my own history backwards to make it all seem like it had been planned, but it wasn’t. Going from hippy to business planner to entrepreneur, I tripped [...]

Read the full article →

Want to Write Well? Cut Mercilessly

September 4, 2009

Back in my distant past I had to learn to live with editing. I was in my twenties. It made me mad. Why change my stuff? But it also made my stuff better. “Berry, you write like a God-damned literature major.” (Norberto Schwarzman) So said the overnight editor at UPI back in 1972.  He did [...]

Read the full article →

True Story: ‘A Reason Why Not’ Isn’t Good Enough

March 13, 2009

I can’t say I liked my first boss. But I learned a lot from him. Some of it worth sharing. He was bureau manager of United Press International in Mexico City in 1971. He was about 45 years old, just…

Read the full article →

About Words I Won't Put in the Title of This Piece Despite the Temptation

May 29, 2007

“Tim,” Matt said, beer in hand, in a bar in Mexico City, “you have to learn about 50 words that will almost guarantee you play in the papers.” He swallowed. He looked at me and frowned. “But you’re so young,”…

Read the full article →