COMM 337, 386: Sweet Potato Pie

Here's a perfect little jewel of a story. It's by Mark Danner, longtime staff writer for New Yorker magazine and journalism prof at the University of California Berkely, and it's an on-the-scene report of a Barack Obama rally in suburban Philadelphia. It appeared in The New York Review of Books, a magazine we'll see more of before the semester's over.

If you're taking COMM 337 (journalistic writing), ask yourself:

• Is is public affairs reporting? Yes. Again my opinion: I think it's beautifully reported. Danner chose just the right details to convey what it was like to be there. That takes reporting.
  
• Is it an opinion piece. I think it is, although I couldn't boil it down to a thesis statement. You decide.
  
• Is it a feature story? You bet. Especially if you buy my definition that a feature is anything that isn't spot news like a crime brief, a cut-and-dried speech story, a fire, a wreck or a city council meeting.

More evidence of why I don't like neat little categories.

Except this: It's typical of the journalism you find in magazines like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Once we get the election out of the way, we'll talk some about solutions to the (preceived?) dumbing down of political discourse in America. And ...

I'm running out of time, and I've got to get up to school.

Let's read it in class.