Welcome back for another installment of Ask TON. (Wondering what Ask TON is? See here for background information and our introductory post. Click on “Ask TON” above to see previous installments.) Today’s question: I’m a freelancer, and I want to move from doing straight news stories to features, but I don’t really know how to start [...]
Archive for January, 2012
Ask TON: Saving string
Posted by Jeanne Erdmann and Siri Carpenter on January 26th, 2012
Posted in Ask TON 
Tags: Ask TON, Features, Finding Ideas, Frederick, Greene, Maher, Pitching, Story Development 
2 Comments »David Tuller untangles the research history of chronic fatigue syndrome
Posted by Julie Rehmeyer on January 18th, 2012
David Tuller has never shied away from controversial stories. Writing for The New York Times for the last dozen years, he has covered a wide range of topics, including infectious diseases, gay men’s health, his mom’s 80th birthday, and most recently, chronic fatigue syndrome. Tuller recently wrote a long piece that painstakingly examines, in a [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Biomedicine, Guest Contributor, Pitches, Rehmeyer, Tuller, Writer Interview 54 Comments »Daniel Engber dissects the ubiquitous laboratory mouse
Posted by Siri Carpenter on January 11th, 2012
When Slate senior editor Daniel Engber took a month off from his usual duties to research a multi-part series on laboratory mice, he had a thesis — that although the ubiquity of mice as model organisms has clear advantages, it is in some ways damaging to biomedicine. What he needed was stories and characters to [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Biomedicine, Carpenter, Drafts, Engber, Historical Research, Longform, Notes, Slate, Tools, Writer Interview 3 Comments »Pitching errors: How not to pitch
Posted by Laura Helmuth on January 4th, 2012
Writing a good pitch is really tough. Writing a bad one is easy. Editors see the same mistakes over and over again, even from good writers. A few weeks ago, seven editors from a variety of publications participated in a round-table discussion, in a series of group emails, about how NOT to pitch. I started [...]
Posted in Elements of Craft Tags: Elements-of-Craft, Guest Contributor, Helmuth, Pitching 24 Comments »