YouSaid · the spoken record

Margalit Fox

lines on the record: 56
first: 2016-08-24
most recent: 2016-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would say don't feel you can or should specialize the child has not been born who comes home from first grade clutching a theme that says When I grow up I want to be an obituary writer be a journalist first go to journalism school that's what I did when I was thirty I chucked my unfulfilling jobs in book and magazine publishing and went to Columbia Journalism School got a master's and have been in newspapers ever since Go to journalism school, be a journalist, writing obits, and here we've come nicely full circle, writing Obits is just one way of doing journalism, a very satisfying narrative way.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Narrative nonfiction The great contemporary masters John McPhee, Miss Tracy Kidder plus the wonderful old masters of essays EB White Redsmith Twain, of course, always Twain People Twain is completely symptomatic for the people I love to read because you not only get the paramount stylists, the non par of stylists, but you can also see through the writing it's a window onto how the man's mind works and that I love.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's right. I'm passionately interested in heuristics. When I was a kid, my friends and I, you know, back when kids engaged in real play and didn't just sit with their palm devices, we used to make little treasure hunts for each other. And so it's all about heuristically following clues from A to B to C to get, and the goal is not the thing itself. The treasure was just some silly little prize or nothing at all, but it was just the chance to work through all the clues and see if you were on the right lines. And here too, unpacking a sign language that's never been analyzed, in riddle of the labyrinth, unraveling this Aegean script that was unearthed on clay tablets in nineteen hundred not solved for fifty years because they not only didn't know what the tablets said when they were unearthed on Crete, they didn't know what language.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a nonfiction book. My next book, which is my third after these two, is Narrative Nonfiction. I'm capable only, it seems, of writing nonfiction. I wasn't born without the fiction-writing gene, alas. So what underpins the two of my books that are out, the third book that's coming, my work at the times, is narrative. I care passionately about narrative. I care passionately about storytelling and the privilege of telling stories, albeit in the non-fiction genre.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dear Abby and her twin sister Anne Landers, both of whose obits I had the privilege of doing were fascinatingly important and remain so retrospectively as barometers of the way the country was going to go. They were both these very pragmatic women who, while not being firebrands in any sense, were just a little bit left of center because they embodied a kind of progressive mid-century humanism. And so they were very, very interesting index of the direction in which Progressives were trying to nudge the country in those years.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having real human contact rather than the social media that's become in our atomized postmodern lives a substitute for real contact.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think Liszt questions are overrated, if you'll forgive me. What in life is underrated silence, stillness reading real books on paper?”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think just what a melancholic he was. Now that's far from unusual for creative people, but it was his personal story was rather painful. He was someone who grew up poor, Jewish, knowing he was gay and this very repressive era. He was a deeply, deeply melancholy man, and of course it comes through in the work as well.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh again, can't rate him highly enough, and his legacy will endure again his Obit I had the privilege of doing times put it on page one. When is the Times ever going to put a picture book, author on page one? That's how magnificent he was and how newsworthy.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it depends on the genre. I like different jealous for different things, the great doomed Jacqueline Dupre, of course, was a wonderful cellist, Rosropovich, Starker, whose Obit I wrote.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true in light of modern sensibilities, you can certainly hear squeaks and occasional bits of strangeness in the Salz cello suites. I suspect he was older when he recorded them. He lived to be, of course, almost a hundred. Recording technology has improved since then. And I think he was on such an exalted plane that he gets a buy. He can be and should be forgiven any of these little transgressions that make him seem mortal.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wonderfully rated. I mean, I think he can never be rated highly enough, but it was he, and this is well documented through his series of televised masterclasses around the world in the very early 60s who really caused the instrument's popularity to soar. Most people had really not conceived of the cello as a solo instrument before. It was just sort of going oompa at the bottom of the orchestra. So, I mean, he was rated magnificently, but by the same token you can never rate him too highly because he was wonderful.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm coming from a position of extreme bias because I again did the obit of the inventor of the pet rock, a man named Gary Dahl. And it was neither overrated nor underrated. A beautiful example of what it was it was a totemic thing that caught the fancy of this kind of cheesy 70 pop culture. So with hindsight, overrated perhaps, but had it not been overrated, we wouldn't have gotten a story out of it.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A warm fuzzy feeling. You feel like you want to go home, take a shower, and have a good stiff drink afterwards, but it's part of the job, has to be done right.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means I'm paid to have no discernible politics and also no discernible religion, and whether or not I am a religious believer in my private life is non-germane. Metaphorically indeed there is an aspect of writing obits where one feels one is charged with the rather weighty responsibility of ushering people out. Now these are not always people to whom flights of angels will sing to rest. We are obliged to write news obits not only of the great heroes of history but also the great villains. I wrote the obit of Jim Clark, Sheriff Jim Clark, the great enforcer of segregation in Jim Crow, Alabama. It was his Billy Club that was coming down on demonstrators heads as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge. I've written Obits of Nazi war criminals, so we run the whole gamut again the salient question is did this person make history for good but also for ill? And so we have to usher those people out too. And in those cases you don't have”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it does give one a sort of carpe dium sense, often when I lecture particularly to young people they who are so far from death are kind of obsessed with it, and they always ask me what's the weirdest cause of death you've ever had? And I say, well, one of my colleagues had a man who was eaten by a crocodile. And indeed, he was a naturalist going down a river, a crocodile just leapt up and grabbed him. It's a pretty horrific way to go. But it for me, it became kind of a metaphor. You never know as you go through life whether or not that crocodile is around the next bend in the river, so you might as well try to live as good a life as you can and enjoy the hell out of life before you get to that crocodile.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would have to be a physician, a psychologist, a philosopher, a cultural anthropologist to answer that. Again, that's beyond my ken. I'm not going to take on something that's beyond my ken. It would be horribly inappropriate.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But again, think of what was just said, it's not tragedy. That's my point. Writing about It's not the case that writing about Obits is life affirming because it's tragedy. Writing about Obitz is life affirming because it's not tragedy.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, no, the reverse, if anything, I'm very often asked Oh you write obit, you're around death every day. Isn't that depressing? And I must admit when I started the job full time in 2004, I worried about that a little bit going in, and to my great joy and great relief I found out right away it's almost never depressing for all these reasons we've discussed in an orbit of perhaps a thousand words were you writing about someone fascinating who did something really interesting often really wonderful maybe a sentence or two will be about the death and the other 98% of the story is about the life so in a strange way with a rare exceptions writing Obitz is a kind of very life affirming thing to do and also wonderful because my colleagues and I are paid to tell stories and it doesn't get much better than that”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's anything I've learned that any of us wouldn't know. What I've learned is death sucks, but I think I pretty much knew that before, and I think you pretty much know that too.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my oldest childhood friend actually has two degrees, one in journalism and one in counseling, and she says the elicitation of information, that process is identical, where they diverge, of course, is what you do with the information once you have it. And indeed, we need to be very careful we're calling families at vulnerable times. They're grieving. They're exhausted, they're sleep deprived. They have a million things to do. We need to be very careful that we not, however unwittingly present ourselves as their friend, their advocate, their grief counselors. Now that said, it behooves us both journalistically so they feel comfortable enough to talk to us and be candid and in purely human terms to treat them as well as possible within allowable professional limits.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Children calling you up the day and orbit runs understandably in tears saying, how dare you write me out of my father's story? And the only answer you can give is we were never told you existed. So we learned to ask all kinds of preemptive questions to try to forestall omissions like that.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we're not in the veneration business. If we're not eulogists, we will occasionally get families, particularly families who are not conversant in dealing with the press who say, oh, please put in he died surrounded by his loved ones. Please put in he touched the life of everyone he ever knew. And apart from the fact that we would never use such hoary Victorian cliches, we know that's the first thing to go on the cutting room floor. It has no place in a modern news obit. A modern news obit is a news article like any other, and the particular subtype it is, it's a profile and just as a profile of a living person you'd read in a newspaper or a magazine has to be balanced so too do our portraits. Indeed, you sometimes get families who withhold information on dad's earlier marriages, other children, and you'll get”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, I've not been involved with either, but I can make an educated guess as to what one would do one would comb the clippings. This would be an advance object where the reporter would be given the comparative luxury of time, which means a week or even two weeks instead of four or five hours to put something together combs the clippings. Of course, makes every attempt to get to this elusive person, which is probably going to be impossible, but you have to try. And then you interview around them. You interview their editors. You interview friends, you interview neighbors, you interview old lovers, you interview anyone and hope they haven't been forbidden to talk or if they have been, they don't take it seriously. And you assemble the best you can. made sure that his life was obscure. Here's what we know.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was not involved with that in any way, nor was the obituary department directly. I would beg to differ with the contention that a large number of high profile people died on 9-11. They became, in a sense, high-profile people because of the way they died, but very few of them were famous in conventional terms. That was one of the great heartbreaks. It was these ordinary working men and women, the people who had to be at work at a quarter to eight here in New York. The times, of course, did this marvelous, very moving series of little capsule obits on almost all of the three thousand cold portraits in grief, but that was not handled out of obits. A special team was convened in Metro to deal with that. And this was long before I was on the Obid desk in any case.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because it may be useful to us for study purposes. We're not going to tell them whether we're going to use it or not. And we do get, not for advanced orbits so much, but for daily orbits on deadline where the subject has actually died. If a person has been in public life all of his or her life, and we usually see this for either politicians or particularly Hollywood people, and he or she has had a publicist in life, that publicist will occasionally send us this glossy press kit, and I find it quite fascinating that there is this one last act of spin control attempted in death.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Occasionally, although, of course, we would never let them, and it is absolutely forboten for anyone to see a draft of his or her of it. The Times is not permitted to comment on or divulge the contents of any forthcoming news story. And of course, if you think about it and advance Obit as kind of the ultimate forthcoming news story. So famous people, for reasons of ego, perhaps, can make an educated guess as to whether we have an Obit of them on file, but they're certainly never going to see it.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The journal does, and again I can't speak to that because I'm not in newsroom administration, I'm not a publisher, but of course you're an economist, it's economics, I mean sadly even many major papers are scaling back or even eliminating their open departments in this age of retrenchment in the age of the incredible shrinking newshole in the age where heartbreakingly newspapers are dying. I mean I fear the last one to turn out the lights will be writing the obit of whatever is the last newspaper standing.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was made, then. You just didn't know it. And in fact, it's, again, one of these. Unexpected twists for all concerned, no one more so than for Richard T. Gill, he discovered when he was in his forties that he had this really good voice started taking lessons and amazingly was good enough to sing at the men while teaching at Harvard.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, interestingly, there is one, as I said, my original training was in classical music, and so my editors almost jumped out of their skins with excitement when they discovered they could assign me the obituary of a Harvard economist named Richard T. Gill. Now why did they give that to me? Because, as we say in the lead of the Obit, Richard T. Gill, in all statistical probability, the only Harvard economist to sing eighty six performances with the Metropolitan Opera died, etc, etc.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I'm the wrong person to ask our section editors make those calls because we can write about so few people we are writing by definition about newsworthy people who either made news while they were alive or who quietly did something that made news. Again, and I will repeat myself until I'm blue in the face through no thought of anyone's Who is active in the world today, those people regrettably were overwhelmingly white men we are not in the revision business. We can't revise history no matter how much it may be painful to look on it with hindsight”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“were overwhelmingly white men. I'm happy to say that in the twelve years I've been doing this job as that window has slid up into the civil rights era and even the women's movement that page of ours has started to diversify I had the great privilege, for instance, of writing our page one Obit of Betty Friedan, knowing full well that it had not been for her writing the feminine mystique in nineteen sixty three and launching the modern women's movement, I would not very likely not be in the newsroom of the New York Times writing a page one story.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But remember, think about what ANOBIT is, it is not only the most narrative genre in the paper, it is the most retrospective. We are writing about the movers and shakers who made our world, I think of Obit's Obit writing as the act of looking through a sliding window onto the past, the kind of window that slides back along the rails of time, and when I first started the job in 2004, we were writing overwhelmingly about the people on either side of World War II. We edged up into the Cold War. We're now writing about the Vietnam and the civil rights era. And no matter how we feel about it in light of modern sensibilities, the stark reality of our world is pretty much the only people who were allowed to be actors on the world stage in the nineteen forties, fifties.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never kept track of it because it's not quite in my wheelhouse. This is the editor's headache. I have other headaches, but half of all the ones we have on file, half of all the ones we run, no. A very small percentage, I would say, of those we run in the print paper every year are advances. A number I couldn't tell you, I'm sorry.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no way to predict. Sometimes we can literally have a day where three of our advances drop at once and the editors get very busy trying to find either the original reporter or if that person's unavailable, someone else in the newsroom who can call the family, call the funeral home, get confirmation that indeed this person has died. Sometimes you can go for six months without having an advance drop. Again, this is all in the hands of fate, and we are only men and women.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, things happen, rockers OD, planes go down, things happen. But in general, we try to have a certain level of preparedness with the major figures. So we do indeed have the advance orbits, all but the top, as it were, written, edited, on file. We have about 1,700. That said, the vast majority of what my colleagues and I down in the trenches do, probably ninety percent of our working life are daily obits that are found out about, reported, written, edited, copy edited, put in the paper, all in the space of a single day, just like any other article in the paper.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In his case, it was the latter, and I believe it was both the local paper and the wire. It is indeed the case that Obitz for many of these major historical figures, presidents, Supreme Court justices, Members of Congress, old times silver screen stars, those are indeed written in advance and the selection criterion is does this person have a life that it was so long in the public eye, so rich, so complex and so deeply documented that we wouldn't want to get caught short writing his or her obit on deadline. Of course, very often we do because we're a small department and things happen.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do. I mean, perhaps had he not done it, someone else would have. But the point is, he did, and he was transformative enough, albeit in a perhaps campy way when viewed through a postmodern lens, the times put him on page one.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very interesting man, Massachusetts man with a wonderful and appropriate name of Don. He had the idea, and again, just in a stroke of inspiration, of making a creature that would connote the ongoing pleasure of endless summer. I think we say in the Obit, the saturated pink promise of endless summer. And it took off in ways that he never imagined sold millions and millions and millions and literally changed the landscape of America.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are our section head Bill McDonald and his two deputies, Jack Cadden and Peter Keepnews, the editors are charged first and last with the responsibility of deciding who gets in every day and roughly the length to whom it's assigned. They often do it in consultation with the writers. My original training was as a cellist. I later trained in linguistics, so if they have questions on classical musicians, linguists, they say, is this person important? Is this person doing? I'm worth doing. I may weigh in. My colleagues weigh in similarly in their subject areas. The criterion we look for if we had to pick a single question that can be asked of every applicant at our gates is did he or she change the culture?”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no one cookie cutter model for who gets in and who gets out. How could there be? Lives are so different, and indeed, apart from the people who are the shoe ins, the presidents, the kings and queens, there is this whole other 90% of the iceberg that's hidden, but which we may want to expose in our pages. And these are these fascinating backstage players, the inventors of kitty litter and the lawn flamingo, etc. What we look for generally and the question that's asked by our three section editors who agonize every day over the volume of submissions we get from families, from funeral homes, stories we read in out of town papers, foreign papers, the wire services, things come flooding in and these decisions have to be made every day. Indeed, it's like a meeting of the admissions committee of the most selective university in the world.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do things for fame, the fame comes post hoke applied by people like us in the news media. So I don't think there's any incentivization of fame for the vast majority of people about whom we write. In fact, it never even occurred to me.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Edward Lowe in nineteen forty seven, as memorialized in the famous obituary by our late great obiter Robert McG Thomas was the man who because he had an idea one day invented the product that became known as Kitty Litter and it did indeed cause social change because it made cats much easier to keep indoors than formally. For the first time a few decades later, cats actually passed dogs as the most popular American pet. So again, here's somebody who did something spontaneously because he was inspired and who put a wrinkle in the social fabric. He changed the culture. Now he wasn't doing it to get famous. Andy Warhol hadn't yet said in the world of the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. I think very few people about whom we write.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are able to Put a really interesting gloss, gloss in perhaps both senses of the term on top of this basic structure that has to be there.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a huge question, and because I'm not a historian of journalism, I can't account for how it's evolved. That's beyond my ken. British obituaries and British journalism generally, it's that Fleet Street model are more caddy than news stories in almost any section of an American paper. Again, we have to have complete fealty to the truth. We have to have complete impartiality. We have to be disinterested in the pure sense of the term where we are detached observers. And an orbit is no different. But at the same time, because we have wonderful Marquis writers in our section Biff Grimes, Bruce Weber, Sam Roberts”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But all of the stuff is there. The trick is, if you want to make it good art but also have complete fealty to the tenets of journalism which we must adhere to, the trick is to disguise all of that infrastructure, all of those girders, and to make it where thematically appropriate to make it kind of light and frothy and dancing and a really good read.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, I don't know that I agree with your initial premise because there is also a pretty rigid structure to an obed. It's there to put it in Chomskin terms, in old-time Chomsky in terms. It's the deep structure. It's there undergirding everything, otherwise the story wouldn't cohere. There's a birth and a death.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the grave John Doe died yesterday, and that gives you a built in narrative arc and indeed Obates turn out to be the most purely narrative genre in any daily paper, and so the reason we have these great leads and we hope great kickers as we call them at the end is that we are exploiting very happily this inherent narrative potential that is anews of it.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It came about during Civil War battle coverage when they had the medium of telegraphy for the first time available to reporters. Like much new technology, it was balky. Lines went down, and reporters learned in a do or die sort of way get the broadest information through first so if the lines go down at least your readers back in Boston or Baltimore will have something and your editor will have something to put in the paper. That model has endured because it's how we process information. It's cognitively perfect. And so OBITs too were beholden to that model plus way down further by all of this boilerplate that has to be there so and so died when, where of what illness, at what age Obit's work considered one of the most boring sections of any Daily paper happily in the last 20 or 30 years, particularly we at the times, have reached”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as to what more parts of the newspaper do or don't do, I can't speak, but of course, as you know, there are very ironclad conventions for the structure of news articles and historically O bits were no exception to that. These conventions actually have been in place during the Civil War, and it's worth digressing about them quickly because they're quite fascinating. Anyone who's ever taken journalism 101 has heard about the inverted pyramid, which is this upside-down triangle that's supposed to be the model for the lead paragraph of any news story, and in fact for the structure of the news story as it flows along. Broad-based information first, then finer and finer, finer grain detail down to stuff at the end that you could possibly dispense with if you're short on space. And that model is an information processing model. It has endured for over 100 years because it's cognitively perfect.”
2016-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Margalit Fox on Life, Death, and the Best Job in Journalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source