the business of words

Congratulations are in order for my friend Jerry Portwood, who has been named the new editor-in-chief at the New York Press.
I laughed out loud when I read the Gawker post about his ascension, which quotes an unnamed source in describing Jerry as “very young and green.” During my time in New York, I had a love-hate relationship with Gawker—mostly hate, in the end. Although the gossip mongers do score some genuine coups with their inside coverage of NYC media, and sometimes shed necessary light into a few dark corners, I came to believe that sites like Gawker contribute to a truly loathsome culture of baseless snark and derision. Such sites, to me, quickly become trite in their arrogance and tendency to flog the same dead or dying horses on a daily basis. After a brief addiction, I simply stopped reading, and my life is better for it.

And make no mistake, Jerry may be young, but he’s certainly not green. Of the hundreds of journalists I've worked with in the past decade, Jerry is one of the very few who actually get it, and who still respects the power of the written word. That’s a rare commodity.

Moving on, it was Jerry who recommended that I read Stephen King’s On Writing, which I finally picked up last week and I’m loving. It’s not the book I expected from the master of mass market schlock, with truly moving insights into his childhood and also some damn fine tips on grammar and structure.
I’ve had writing books on the brain lately. My BF, who sometimes can still surprise me with his sweetness, came home the other night with a copy of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University for me, which has also been a treasure. It's the sort of thing I wish I'd read five years ago when I was a struggling reporter. I also believe that things happen when they're supposed to happen, and books like these have ways of finding you just when you need them the most.