A Journalism Lesson

On Monday, I had the pleasure of playing host to an English writer who was here in the states doing some research. Since I'm doing some writing for my local paper, it was also an opportunity to see a high level writer practicing his craft. During the course of the day, it came out that there was one person who had met the subject of his research. We were able to get the two of them together. I'm not sharing the details here, to avoid potentially compromising the project.)
The man who'd met the subject was reticent, claiming he knew very little, if anything besides what had been published. (He's also a journalist.) My guest had said prior to the meeting, "You don't know what you know until I ask you." (That's a sentence that you should read aloud to help it make sense.)
While much of the discussion was of mutual friends (both are long time residents of the track and field world), our guest was persistent returning several times to the topic. His questions came at the topic from several angles. Eventually, he came up with one nugget from the conversation, the only one, but one which will add a bit of both color and realism to the forthcoming book.

Good-Bye, Mr. Halberstam

I just read of the passing of one of my favorite writers, David Halberstam. While I was aware of him as a journalist during the Viet Nam era, my love of his writing really grew during the 1980's and later when he was working as an author, especially of some very fine sports books. During the mid-1980's, I was dating a rower, and his book, The Amateurs, came out. She loaned it to me, and I became a fan of his. A few years later, I read his Summer of '49, and became an even bigger fan. It also brought me up to speed on some Red Sox lore that I, having grown up in the NY metro area hadn't known. This year, I read his The Teammates, the story of four guys from that era and their friendship of many decades.
This was the article on his passing. As I wrote this, I checked Wikipedia, it was already updated with his death. The power of distributed writing is pretty remarkable.