Takeout specialists?

The sad thing is takeout writing is becoming extinct. Newspapers don't have space for them any more and magazines are dying and people doing surveys have found that most people reading the internet have no attention span to read them so they are constantly pushing for shorters stories. That's a shame but by the same token it has made me a much better writer. I've figured out that longer isn't always better and that if you can tell the same story in 20 inches that you can in 35 -- with a little less detail obviously -- it might be a better story because it will likely be well written. If you don't have space to burn you are more likely to not waste words.

 

That's true for mediocre writers, not for really good ones. They don't have as much trouble with wasting words, and understand that keeping the reader moving is more important than writing pretty sentences. Shorter isn't necessarily better, just like longer isn't necessarily better.

I certainly don't think that a longer story should be written in a lede-quote-lead in-quote-lead in-quote formula for 60 inches. Yawn.

 

Lori Shontz, who is now in St. Louis but formerly in Pittsburgh, was a solid feature writer. I think she's gone to the desk though.

I aspire to become a full-time feature/takeout/enterprise writer. I'd like to write the daily enterprise, the 25-inchers that used to anchor Sunday sections, rather than the huge magnum opus multi-part series. (I don't think I have the patience to work on the same story for months!)

I squeeze as many "big picture" stories as I can in between the regular beat requirements. But I haven't had much training, nor do my stories get significantly line-edited, so I sometimes feel like I'm not getting any better.

Are there certain papers or editors who are known for grooming good feature writers?

 

Lee Jenkins does now what Dan Le Batard did when he had more time for his newspaper gig: Find better stories than anyone else and then write the everloving crap out of them.

(That was not a shot at DLB. Just saying.)

 

Fixed.

 

http://www.sportsmediaguide.com/12282006-EliSaslow.asp