Read on Twitter
I& #39;m plucking this @jonkay — wait, sorry, j*n k*y — tweet out of a broader thread to make a somewhat out-of-context point (I don& #39;t assume he& #39;d endorse it). Column writing is itself a particular skill, and it& #39;s more art than anything else. So you find it in weird places. + https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1283081613543460865">https://twitter.com/jonkay/st...
Anyone, with good instruction and practice, can learn to write a decent article. But becoming any good at *being a columnist* is, to my view, something you can do or you can& #39;t.
And let& #39;s be clear what I even mean by good. I mean "good" in a very lowest-common-denominator way. +
And let& #39;s be clear what I even mean by good. I mean "good" in a very lowest-common-denominator way. +
Maybe all your takes are bad and you& #39;re consistently wrong about everything. (Setting myself up, I know.) For our purposes here, that doesn& #39;t matter — it& #39;s still only a small subset of the smart, news-consuming population that can put together 800-word arguments on deadline. +
The ability to do that doesn& #39;t matter for every kind of column — long-lead deadlines are possible in some fields. But if you& #39;re a news columnist, or even write generally on current events, you need to be able to react relatively quickly, and pull together lots of info, fast. +
Part of what I do is constantly seek out new contributors, and it& #39;s not hard at all to find people who& #39;d be valuable addition for any number of reasons. The hard part is to find one of those people who can do that kind of contribution regularly on deadline. +
There are lots of people who have all the right stuff — the credentials, the intellectual knowledge, the lived-experience, the authentic moral authority — to make spectacular columnists, but they don& #39;t have whatever it is that would allow them to ... regularly write columns. +
Other people, who may only have some of those things, or absolutely none of them, but are good at the part of writing columns that actually involves WRITING COLUMNS, have a huge advantage.
And I have no idea what it is that those people have. +
And I have no idea what it is that those people have. +
With a lot of time and practice, this is definitely a skill you can develop. People who aren& #39;t natural writers can become entirely decent oped contributors. I love those people. But even a lot of those people couldn& #39;t do it every week, or even several times a week. +
I really don& #39;t think "columnist" is a skill you can teach, in the sense of taking someone who doesn& #39;t have it and then, at the end of the process, they have it. I think it& #39;s more like an artistic ability. You& #39;ve got it or you don& #39;t.
+
+
To, put another way, as I just recently told someone, "Look, I can teach you to read music and how to play a piano. I can& #39;t make you Mozart."
So who ends up being the columnists you read consistently? The people who can write columns.
- END -
So who ends up being the columnists you read consistently? The people who can write columns.
- END -
