Five years ago (and some change — I missed this post by a week or two), I signed up for a Twitter account with only a vague idea of what I was supposed to do with it. At first, I was @meghanfrick. I lost it a few months later when I stupidly changed my handle to a nickname.

At the time, I didn’t have a smartphone, so all my updates were sent via desktop or SMS on my brick of a phone. I tweeted about my classes. Skipping classes. Meetings of clubs. That summer, I got sick and tweeted pictures of the view from my hospital bed — the artist Blue Sky’s Tunnel Vision. Continue reading →

Something lovely & a little strange:  “When I was a boy, I hated beets. I hope I can protect my son from beets until he’s old enough to hold in the tears. They’re not worth it. When the battery in my watch died, I still wore it. There was something about the watch that said: ‘It doesn’t matter what time it is. Think in months. Years. Someone loves you. Where are you going? There are some things you will never do. It doesn’t matter. There is no rush. Be the best prisoner you can be.”

The New York Times, Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss Continue reading →

By the time there was a decision for me to make about leaving news, my mind had been made up for months.

On March 17, I’ll report to a 20th-floor office in downtown Atlanta, start my career in public relations, and leave a whole life behind. It’s completely what I want and there’s no part of me that wants to stay. I wouldn’t be doing it if that wasn’t true.

I started my first post-grad job a little over a year ago in small-town, print-over-breakfast news. When I started, I thought it was going to be forever. Not the News-Topic, not Lenoir, maybe not even newspapers, but I defined myself as a journalist. Completely. 

I first read Allyson Bird’s “Why I Left News” sitting in the office late at night. “I finally came to accept that the vanity of a byline was keeping me in a job that left me physically and emotionally exhausted, yet supremely unsatisfied…”  Continue reading →

These are the words I’ve got scrawled on sticky notes on my bedroom wall, propped up around my desk at work and (in some cases) committed to memory, all on standby for the times when I forget why all this clicking and scrawling and immersion in words is worthwhile. I thought they  might inspire you as well.

Continue reading →

I still have some thinking to do about my broader goals for the new year, but here’s a collection of writing-related things I’d like to start (and stop) doing in 2014.

1. No more stale phrases. No more headlines with the exact same inverted, counterfeit-New York Times structure. Find a new way to say it.

2. Stop bogging down anecdotal leads with too much who, what, when, where and why. Become comfortable with saying it later and letting them wonder for a graf or two.

3. Enter more situations that make me uncomfortable, for the purpose of writing about them.

4. Write less emails, make more phone calls, knock on many more doors. Continue reading →

Here’s a quick list of what I read today and where I found it:

• A New York Magazine story on New York City’s soon-to-be-named schools chancellor, linked in an email newsletter on education
• A story about the “sriracha-pocalypse,” posted on Facebook by The Atlantic Cities’ social-media staff
• A collection of writers-on-writing anecdotes in The Atlantic, Tweeted by a journalist I follow
• A Nieman lab roundup of predictions for media in 2014, ditto
• A Salon piece, also writers-on-writing, one I’d posted a year ago that resurfaced in my daily Timehop update
• Four local stories in the newspaper I work for, accessed through our online e-edition

I went to no home pages except for my employer’s. Everything else surfaced, randomly, on social sites and apps. Continue reading →

When I was an 18-year-old journalism major, everyone was pinning their hopes on Patch.

For a quick blink of time, the pre-AOL Patch was expanding wildly. They were leading the hyperlocal charge and, more importantly, they were hiring. 

Among the young, yet-to-be-journalists I knew, that was the magic word. We whispered it in our Society of Professional Journalists meetings (which we held late, after the last evening classes, in the mostly dark building our department shared with the math majors): Hiring.  Continue reading →

This is Mamaw Hollar.

Mamaw Hollar’s full name is Augusta Townsend Hollar — a lovely, dignified name which, at the age of 10 or 12, I would have scribbled in a notebook as an idea for a future novel.

She celebrated her 92nd birthday on April 15, and her friends and family gathered at the Captain’s Galley (a seafood restaurant in Granite Falls) to celebrate. Continue reading →

“Every executive editor who has tried to shake the dust of tradition from the Times finds himself assaulted in other publications with blind quotations attributed to ‘senior Times employees’ who are usually not within a mile of knowing what’s actually going on. It is a mystery to me how so many of these reports, which are often untrue, can be so readily believed at the Times, whose newsroom is supposedly the most sophisticated and journalistically exacting in the country, and how no thought seems to be given to the quality of the source (for instance, the New York Post) or to the often well-known foibles and envious natures of media writers at publications that habitually stick it to the Times.”

From an essay Raines wrote for The Atlantic almost a decade ago, after losing his job over Jayson Blair. Adds a new layer to Politico’s piece on Jill Abramson — and the conversation around it — doesn’t it?

Full disclosure: Of all the types of journalism out there, all the important and civic-minded things I could be doing, I am really best at fluff.

I can’t help it. I mean, I can do other things. I can cover a meeting with the best of them. But when it comes to my actual specialty, the thing that comes naturally, the thing I do better (hopefully) than the guy next to me — it’s fluff. Fluff, fluff, fluff. Continue reading →