Customer Reviews

Newsthinking: The Secret of Making Your Facts Fall into Place

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As an editor at The New York Times, I have seen how even the best and smartest reporting benefits from careful organization and precise writing. This book shows how to do it, in terms that speak to young writers, veteran journalists or anyone who wants to communicate with authority and engage readers with lively prose driven by facts.

Newsthinking by Bob Baker is aimed at journalists, and certainly they will get more benefit out of it than they would from a
4 year college course. But even more important, the advice here is essential for EVERY type of writer, not just journalists.
Baker teaches us how to see things from the READER's viewpoint, how to hold their interest, how to make your material a "must-read". This shouldn't even be called a "textbook". It is the polar opposite: it's lively, fun, and totally unpretentious.If you have any aspirations of being any kind of writer, this book will give you the edge you need to succeed. It did for me.

This book attempts to help journalists figure out the thought process that goes into organizing stories. To that end, this is a helpful tool for anyone who has struggled to piece together all the facts of a complicated story as well as coaches who are helping writers organize their thoughts into a coherent, flowing series of sentences. The problem is that it also is a difficult read that is full of complicated flowcharts and takes a long time to get to the point. But if you can get through it, you will come away with a better understanding of just how it is you get from the notetaking stage to the printed page -- even if you've never thought about it before.

A comment from a former Los Angeles Times writer who has had the benefit of Baker's insights firsthand. This is a unique book whose author is known to insiders as both a top writer and the staff member the Los Angeles Times selected to help their top writers get even better. Baker is an author who realizes that good journalism isn't as just about stylebooks and grammar and accuracy, but also about identifying the core of real stories and how to extract strands of fact, quotes, and style on deadline and weave them together fast. it's helpful for future purchasers to know that this isn't a teacherly book, but someone who backs his recommendations with a real life understanding of how newsrooms move. how many other journalism textbook writers have their own rock bands?