Two websites new writers should be reading now
As a journalism instructor, I read a lot. I read many different websites, blogs and printed newspapers and magazines. It is easy to be overwhelmed with all the different sites out there — I am and there is literally not enough time to read everything.
So, I try to sift through the chaff to highlight some gems that show good storytelling that is coupled with solid journalist-style writing and content.
Shrieks of “fake news” or “alternative facts” have no place here — make no mistake, I will call out nonsense as I see it, but I’m not going to dwell on those here.
We are in a new golden age of journalism. Even though the journalism industry is experiencing a disruption of its existence and business model, journalism schools have actually experienced an increase in enrollment as highlighted in several studies including this one published in the May 2019 edition of INSIGHT Into Diversity.
The interest in news, and accuracy is as desirable as ever. Some call it the “Trump bump,” certainly a clever moniker, but I think it’s part of a larger syndrome that has been with us for some time. It’s just manifesting itself in a more pronounced way because of current extreme circumstances.
More on that later.
FiveThirtyEight first appeared in 2008, and Internet years are like dog years — 12 years is a long time for a site to remain contemporary, relevant and just plain good. I’m not going belabored its history, you can look that up yourself.
What makes FiveThirtyEight a good read is the presentation of statistical analysis on political polling, economics and sports. It’s not without its faults and has made some pretty bad calls on occasion, Editor-in-Chief and founder Nate Silver always addresses the transparency of their reporting and analyses — that’s what good journalists do when a mistake is made — call it out and report the correction.
“One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening,” Silver wrote in his best-selling 2012 book, “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t.”
The diverse mix of content should be enticing for any reader and is a good model of how modern journalism should be presented. So often, sites are dedicated to one style of storytelling, hard news, entertainment features, or sports. FiveThirtyEight has a compelling mix of all and often explores angles that go beyond the surface of a story.
The second site, The Ringer, was turned on to me by colleague Andy Coughlan. We share an office and probably spend way too much time talking about what we’re reading at any given time.
Andy’s a heckuva writer, award-winning, total Renaissance man (don’t tell him I said that) and a lover of all sports things English (he’s originally from Brighton, England), but he at least has the sense to follow basketball.
The Ringer is a wonderful read in several ways. While it is very sports-centric, it is kinda like the more fun fraternal twin to FiveThirtyEight. I can’t exactly put my finger on it — maybe a bit more pop culture-ish? A bit more irreverent?
If we’re still using the dog year/internet year analogy, then The Ringer has just left puppydom after being founded by sports writer Bill Simmons. Simmons, I think, has been a disruptive innovator of what had been traditional sports journalism by being more conversational in his style and tone and that certainly became a part of how other writers created their work too, for the myriad of sites he supervised.
Also, for both sites, the visual aesthetics are superb — a great resource for brainstorming graphics for any story idea. I copied an idea for the graphic for this post.