Friday, October 6, 2006

Many Lessons from Johnny Apple Obituary writing is an almost-lost art that we'll be talking about in my news writing class shortly. For good examples, we can start with this week's obits for The New York Times own star reporter, R.W. Apple Jr., who died Wednesday. His collected news clippings would be as good as any journalism textbook, and better than most. Mr. Apple's versatility as a writer was amazing, so his biography and the selections of his writing that the Times has pulled from the archives may help the students catch some of the excitement of a journalism career. He was the Times bureau chief in Albany, Lagos, Nairobi, Saigon, Moscow, London and Washington at various times, wrote from more than 100 countries, and covered 10 presidential elections. (According to the archive page, Mr. Apple considered Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate to be his most important article. That was in 1967, long before nytimes.com, so the paper provides a downloadable PDF photocopy of the story.) Pedagogical bonus: That archive page, along with the slideshow and video clip linked to it, will be good examples of "Web extra" features for my online journalism class. For a lesson on "localizing" a story, I'll ask the students how they would handle the story if Mr. Apple had been a UT grad and they had been writing the story for the Daily Beacon. (If they haven't jumped the gun and peeked at this blog, I'll send them to the Prince for one possible answer to the question.) And to show them that there's no one "right" lead for a story, I'll let them compare the Times (of London), Associated Press, UPI, Independent, Charleston Daily Mail, and Washington Post obituaries for Mr. Apple, as well as this full-length New Yorker profile written by Calvin Trillin a few years ago, and a short memorial from public radio broadcaster, blogger and podcaster Chris Lydon, who knew Mr. Apple when they were both at the Times. And, for one last sample of obituary writing, here's one by Mr. Apple, as written for his own school newspaper in 1957, on the death of the most prominent member of the faculty: Albert Einstein. Footnote: We tell journalism students to avoid the jargon of whatever field they're writing about, but newspapers have jargon of their own, from "slug" to "30." In the Times video, Johnny Apple says he couldn't write a "Q-head" that he didn't believe in, or something like that. Luckily, his boss defined the term a while ago in a short glossary of page-one terms. I'm still looking for a definition of a "lead-all," which also gets mentioned in the video clip. I could guess, but instead I'll be a journalistic role model and ask someone. 10:30:15 PM    comment []

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