This is a good -- but wholly American -- list of the best magazine articles ever

Much excitement in the Twitterverse about a list of what are said to be the "Best magazine articles ever (in English)", compiled by the website Cool Tools.  The list contains 27 articles from The New Yorker over the years, 17 from Esquire, 9 from Harper's, 8 from The Atlantic Monthly and 8 from Wired and ones and twos from more than a dozen other magazines. Nothing very surprising; these are all

Poems and projects and themes, oh my

Stuart Ross, in his back-page column for the current issue of  subTerrain magazine (the piece is not yet online) considers why so much of work of Canada's "emerging" poets and other writers seem to be themed "projects". (He speaks as someone who was this year a Canada Council juror.) "Shouldn't writers who are learning the trade be trying out everything they can, creating a tangle of eclectic

When it comes to freelance writing, there's "good free" and "bad free"

[This post has been updated] Montreal freelancer Craig Silverman has made us aware of a presentation this weekend at an event for Montreal freelancers by Montreal media executive and longtime freelancer Mitch Joel. He replicated his speech in a blog posting called "The part of social media that freaks out freelance writers".
He maintains that blogging frees freelancers, letting them supplement

Chronicling The End, a superb piece of long-form magazine journalism

(photo illustration by Ji Lee)If you ever want to know what good magazines can do to make sense of the world, I can recommend to you the article The End by Michael Lewis in Portfolio. It's long form magazine journalism at its best and explains what went wrong in the financial markets by exploring who knew it was going to go wrong and how they profited by it. Lewis, who wrote the excellent book

Major awards to be made to journalists researching, writing about health issues

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research is encouraging journalists in Canada to engage in research and creation of projects that promote health research. Five $20,000 awards and five $10,000 awards are to be made and the program is open to all working journalists in Canada and Canadian journalists working abroad, in all mediums.Projects are expected to include a period of investigation to

Why "creative non-fiction" is a term whose time is over

It had never occurred to me before what the genesis was of the term "non-fiction" for everything that is not fiction, including magazine articles, essays and journalism. This was brought home by a thoughtful, somewhat mischevious essay "Tilting at Windmills for Literary Non-Fiction" by Ken McGoogan in the Globe and Mail Books section, published Saturday.This is an important topic for magazines to