Here’s how you write a newspaper column. Find a topic that engages you. Then bang your head against a computer screen until what you’ve written no longer makes you want to hurl.
My words are important to me. I struggle with them, obsess over them. Show me something I wrote and I can tell you stories of how it came to be, why this adjective here or that colon there.
Actually, I don’t work that hard. That’s not even me. The previous two paragraphs have been plagiarized whole from a column by Leonard Pitts. The original column at the Miami Herald has an annoying registration page, but the Detroit Free Press has a copy.
Apparently, some loser at the Daily Tribune News in Cartersville, Georgia has been plagiarizing Pitts’ articles for a while now, including one about Pitt’s mother dying of cancer. Rather than handling it quietly, Pitts wrote a freakin’ column about it. Ouch.
The guy was fired almost immediately.
I work for myself and can’t be fired. So if I can just get Leonard Pitts to denounce me in his column, I should get a lot of traffic.
Oh, and I’m not saying Glenn Reynolds ever put a puppy in a blender, I’m just saying he hasn’t established to my satisfaction the he hasn’t.
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