What Makes This Piece Good, Vol. 1: Buster Olney on Mariano Rivera's cutter

Can a teacher hand out copies of an article to a class for discussion?

If I'm wrong, show me.

Read Washington Post v FreeRepublic.com. It was the wholesale posting of full articles that was found to be in violation.

 

Do your own research. And this for-profit message board is not a classroom.

 

Why screw up this thread that DD started in good faith as a much requested
discussion of good writing?

 

Many schools are for profit.

Has SportsJournalists.com ever received a single cease and desist letter over this kind of post?

If the copyright holders have never expressed a concern, I'm not sure why you're so worked up about it.

 

As a young writer still trying to mold his writing style, I appreciate you posting this. Thanks.

 

The ladies must be climbing over themselves to sit next to you at dinner parties. He posted LINKS to stories, grandpa; he didn't copy and paste the entire article. If you've lost your job in the industry bc of young bucks who learned how the Internet works, I'm sorry. But maybe you can now go get a law degree, bc you sure as shit don't know anything about copyright infringement.

 

Devil posted an entire article.

 

Olney does a fantastic job of telling the story through the eyes of players, which is a credit to his interviewing style and his rapport with sources. He clearly asks that "one more question" necessary to properly draw the picture.

 

More than anything it's well-sourced by the players who faced him most at the time. If you want to know why he's so devastating you ask the batters he's devastating.

Too bad John Brenkus wasn't around then to provide Sports Science stuff. The Yale guy provided a pretty colorful quote but Brenkus could have provided some cool "Why it happens" evidence.

And yes, the O'Leary favorite bat thing seems like such a simple piece of information but he hangs the story on it.

 

Ok, all. The story in dispute is not the subject of this thread. Devil, with respect to me, please delete the full text of the Insider piece about Swisher. Just give us a link. No need to bog down a worthwhile thread that:

1. Isn't going to be resolved.
2. Has the potential to make it so I can't post here.

So, back to Olney on Rivera. How many people do we think Buster spoke to for this piece? How do you know when you've interviewed enough people for a story like this?

 

DD, thanks so much for starting something like this. I was in funk this morning because I wrote a subpar gamer, and finding this Olney piece was great.

That lede is one of my favorites. You'd think it'd be a short little feature, but it actually sits at 1,994 words (I didn't think it was that long, either). So that's roughly at 66 inches if you use the 30 words/inch method, and I know every shop has their own measurements.

The fact that it reads much quicker is nothing but a compliment to Olney's writing here. He also uses some really strong verbs that helps move the piece along.

 

I think you've interviewed enough people when you're absolutely out of clock to try to reach somebody else. Because Olney did such a great job interviewing, he probably didn't have to *write* much. It's a classic example of a story telling itself. Which only happens with great reporting.