Tag Archives: iPad

Is journalism boot camp worth $500?

Posted on February 2, 2011 | 3 comments

From mediabistro:

Not included in the cost: the price of eternal rejection

sorry but if you have $500 to spend, you are way ahead of the game already:

In this changing media climate, it’s more important than ever to stand out as a top writer. This class will give you the edge to land more assignments.

Each week, you’ll push yourself to research, write, and pitch a new piece. Classes will begin with your instructor’s lectures, but will primarily be devoted to workshopping student writing.

Assignments include a service/how-to piece, an arts and culture review, a profile, a metro section piece, an editorial, a business/news article, a personal essay, and at least two pitch letters.

In this class, you will learn:

  • How to write a pitch an editor can’t turn down [uh-huh-Ed.]
  • Which print and online publications are most freelancer friendly
  • How to work with editors so they’ll want to work with you

By the end of class, you will have:
A complete portfolio of 7 publishable articles that will impress any editor, the ability to work under tight deadlines, and the know-how to create the career you want.

What say you? Is this kind of information worth half a grand? Is it possible to teach? For the record, other things you can get for less than $500: a stint at Ladies’ Rock Camp, an iPad to read Rupert’s new paper, approx. 76 Chipotle burritos, the food my own journalism education was entirely fueled by in college.

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This Week in Great Sentences

Posted on January 29, 2010 | 3 comments

On death, immortality and slipping into the future:

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A few days later, Patient No. 93 was hoisted up on a forklift head first, like a hibernating bat, beside invisible cats, inside a seven-thousand-square-foot building in an industrial park in the heart of America, where some of the sorriest ideas of a godforsaken and alienated modern culture endure.

Jill Lepore, “The Iceman,” New Yorker, Jan. 25, on Robert Ettinger, founder of the cryonics movement.

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Why, within the clerk’s small store alone, there were notepads and gauze pads and corn pads and sanitary pads and heating pads and cleansing pads. He also knew, making his living in a slightly medical field, that periods happen, and sanitary pads exist, and that neither of these facts is worth getting all giggly and red-faced about.

Kate Dailey, “The iPad: Love It or Hate It, but Leave Periods Out of It,” Newsweek, Jan. 27

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These schools of thought, if that is the right word, are politically correct and value vacuous, citing social purpose as the purpose and yet violating the basic principle of reporting, which is that we should genuinely have the objective of being objective. Many of these individuals would be far better servants of society if they joined an NGO or charity in which they could more coherently expiate their bourgeois guilt.

Robert Thomson, (editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal), “End of the World As We Know It,” The Australian, Jan. 23, taking jabs at J schools, googles, aggregators and bailouts.

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The more that TV pundits reduce serious debates to silly arguments, big issues into sound bites, our citizens turn away.  No wonder there’s so much cynicism out there.

Barack Obama, “State of the Union,” Jan. 27

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I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except

sticking me in a goddam cemetary. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.

J.D. Salinger, “Catcher in the Rye,” 1951

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