Different Kinds of Writing

On Reporting vs. Journalism, some--okay, a lot of--very insightful words by one of this blog's favorite writers-at-large, the guy with the gay porn star name, Lance Mannion.

There's no real 'money line,' but here's a good one for writers to keep in mind:

And journalists, real journalists, don't go out into the world just to talk to people. They go out to see how the world is working. They have to collect data. Writers and poets and painters and most other people call this data the details that God is in. Journalists have to see the landscape, they have to see and be able to identify the flowers and weeds dotting the landscape. They have to observe processes and understand how those processes function to the point where they can explain them as well as any expert but in language non-experts can follow (and there's some of the writer's work that has to be done even before sitting down at the keyboard; gathering the details precisely requires finding the right words on the fly), they have to know so they can describe it later, as Hemingway said they had to be able to, how the weather was, the weather being both a metaphorical and a literal fact.