Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Errol Louis: What I Learned from Wayne Barrett

 
Like a whole generation of city reporters, I was learning from Wayne Barrett long before I ever met him.

As an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1980s, I co-edited a student-run weekly magazine called What Is To Be Done that featured culture and commentary modeled on the Village Voice. Ambitiously churning out a stream of opinion articles, I took seriously the old adage that good writers borrow but great writers steal, and closely studied the style and swagger of the Voice’s great columnists.

I would pore over Nat Hentoff’s ringing defense of the First Amendment, chuckle over Alex Cockburn’s slashing attacks on his colleagues in his “Beat the Devil” media column and absorb the way Stanley Crouch taught us to listen to jazz.

Click here for the full article. 

Source: The New York Daily News (via The Empire Report) 

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