Mandela’s South Africa
Even when it’s expected, death still surprises. Prior to Mandela’s death, I had numerous conversations with editors about content that they wanted to have at the ready. It’s standard practice for news organizations to prepare obituaries of well-known people on file, but the preparations for Mandela were extreme. In the hours and days after the […]
Pistorius sentencing and reporting come to an end
Since February 2012, when Oscar Pistorius killed Reeva Steenkamp, USA Today has asked me to go out and speak with those so-called regular people to get their take on the unfolding facts. Cell phones make person-on-the street interviews tough. Look around any public area: the people by themselves are invariably chatting on their mobile, or […]
Real success, real failure, real people
On the ever growing list of “Who Remembers How These Things Worked Before the Internet?” is the finding of so-called real people for articles–that is, people who will speak on the record about their own personal experiences. Rather than an expert trend analyst who comments on data, these people are in fact a single data […]
Vanity searches and Danzy Senna
Whenever Google finds somebody with my name (such as me, or the real estate agent, or the OB/GYN, or the Chicago English lecturer) doing something new, a message alert pops up. The main purpose of this is to catch new articles when they are published online. Sometimes vanity searches turn up reprints or references, such […]
Wole Soyinka turns 80
Over time, most interviews, be they phoners or even in-person, start to blur together. Some stand out in your memory because of a great conversation or odd location; Wole Soyinka was a bit of both. When I met him for lunch a few years ago, it was with a small group of other journalists, so […]
A story killed and resurrected
Throughout my years of freelance writing, there is one recurring situation that is genuinely tricky to prevent: the story that gets killed because the assigning editor leaves the publication. You might think that the new editor would be so busy trying to get up to speed that the last thing they’d do is kill a […]
The reporting for this story stinks
Move over, grass-fed beef. Insect-fed fish have arrived. Standing in a room of one million flies, my senses were at full alert. Each cage undulated with wriggling waves of the buggers, and the stench was powerful. Ostensibly all the insects were secured into compartments, but if even a half a percent were free, that’s a […]
Face in the Kenyan Crowd
These have been boom years for cartography geeks, and talking with Juliana Rotich–the Kenya-based, MIT-trained innovator behind crowdmapping sensation Ushahidi, as well as many other BAFA projects–was one of those interviews that makes it easy to love being a journalist. The creation of a healthier ecosystem in Nairobi’s Silicon Savannah where entrepreneurs can thrive depends […]
Better successful than sorry
I grew up in the US, and to South Africans I sound, as I am told, “very American” (more specifically, as if I’m from the Northeast). But I have picked up some local South African/English usage, such as saying “sorry” when I’m not actually sorry at all, but want somebody to move out of my […]
What I wish I had known about freelancing (and how it helped me get into this Sunday’s New York Times)
When Tiffany Markman asked what I wish I had known about freelance writing when I started out, I had to think about it. I had the tremendous advantage of first working as part of an editorial team at a publication that paid and treated its freelance writers well. One brand-name type journalist handed in sloppy […]
Chicken stalker
For a forthcoming feature about food in Cape Town, I stalked this rooster for the better part of an hour.
Can a writer take pictures too?
Recently a writer made a crack on freelance message board about how the quality of the publications must be poor if they let the same person handle both words and images. I understand the reasoning behind hiring specialists to focus on the area that they handle best, but when for whatever reason the publication isn’t […]
Vote early, vote often
Recently, the conversation about whether journalists should vote or not came up again with some writer friends. We all voted to keep voting. The arguments I’ve read against the idea tend to hold up an idealized notion of an unbiased, neutral journalist, rather than making the case that democracy is no more valid than communism […]
The In Thing
One of my business decisions back in January was to write more often about, well, business. When Balanced Life magazine (which goes out to Foschini account holders in South Africa) asked me to write about introverts and extroverts in the workplace for their careers section, I found it to be a hotter topic than I […]
Braai baby braai
With no fewer than five public holidays over the next three weeks (yep, that is one entire work week), South Africans are sure to be getting their braai (barbecue) on in a big way. It’s a distinctly local culinary tradition, and unique that it cuts across race and income groups. At my first braai invitation […]
Zakes Mda
For quite a few years, more people found my website searching for “Zakes Mda” than for any other term; this interview with him, originally published on the now-defunct Africana.com, has been cited in a number of scholarly works about Mda. I first picked up Zakes Mda’s novel She Plays With Darkness at the Grahamstown Arts […]
New world headquarters
Nobody else photographs writers and their workspaces like Jill Krementz, although I also like the Guardian series and Pinterest collections. The view here at this rental is stunning, though weather permitting I prefer to get outside into the green rather than look at it through the glass. And if I’m writing longhand, I’m more likely […]
The Raitt Stuff
Perhaps my biggest-name interview is Bonnie Raitt. (Though amongst us English major types, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is right up there.) Hers was a hard interview to secure, but once we began, she turned out to be one of the easiest and most gracious (can I just say “best”?) interviewees I’ve ever spoken with. I […]
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