Narrative non-fiction textbook online

Gay Talese has come up in classroom conversations more than once this month, but it's just a coincidence that I stumbled on this link to one of his most famous articles, and more.

Best Esquire Magazine Stories - Top Articles in History of Journalism - Esquire: "Five years ago, we named 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,' by Gay Talese, the greatest story Esquire ever published. Here, as we close out our 75th anniversary celebration, are the top seven, with several republished online in their entirety for the first time ever."

Also included, for Media History students writing about Vietnam, John Sack's article "M," and for popular culture fans, Tom Wolfe's profile of stock car racer Junior Johnson. The others are great, too, even if the "Top articles in history of journalism" needs an "in Esquire" modifier.

However, I'm also intrigued by Esquire's 70 greatest sentences, starting with this one:

"Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well."
--Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," 1936

Your Newspaper on YouTube

My old neighbor Jack Lail from KnoxNews.com just pointed to this story...

To YouTube or Not To YouTube?, posted at the Newspaper Association of America, whose motto is "Advancing Newspaper Media for the 21st Century."

... He's even quoted in the story, which talks about newspaper Web sites managing this whole "multimedia" business with YouTube's help. Jack also points out this map of YouTube using newspapers.

Also quoted, Chet Rhodes, assistant managing editor, news video for washingtonpost.com, calling YouTube "both a curse and a blessing" for newspapers, cursed for competing with newspapers' own video efforts. "But the good side of it is that they've made video workable on the Web," he said.

Blogging does journalism; journalism embraces blogging

Across the Atlantic, Paul Bradshaw at Online Journalism Blog asks,
Are these the biggest moments in journalism-blogging history?

Since most of his list cites bloggers doing journalism, I mentioned a couple cases of journalists doing fine work with blogs, and tipped the hat to the cat in the middle... catalyst Dave Winer, with four nominations about professional journalism coming to accept blogging:

• 1999: Silicon Valley newspaperman Dan Gillmor starts blogging, encouraging tech community to think about journalism and journalism community to think about a new kind of "my audience knows more than I do" journalism.
  http://www.scripting.com/davenet/1999/10/25/danGillmorsWeeBlog.html#5
  


• 1999-2000: Jim Romenesko's MediaNews (now http://poynter.org/romenesko) introduces the newspaper industry gossip blog. (Can't believe I didn't mention this in the original post.)


• 2002: On the LongBets site, blogger, software designer and RSS visionary Dave Winer of http://scripting.com bets the New York Times' Martin Nisenholtz $2,000 that: “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.” http://www.longbets.org/2/
  
  
• 2006: Pulitzer Prize for Public Service cites the blog run by the New Orleans Times Picayune after hurricane Katrina stopped the press and the delivery trucks: http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/7072
  
  
• 2007: Five years after his LongBet, Winer is declared the winner. http://www.longbets.org/2/ By then, the Times itself had embraced RSS and blogging, converging on the present.