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3 GREAT STORIES: Starring Putin, Times Square, & rollercoasters

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

Putin’s friend profits in purge of schoolbooks (11/1/14, New York Times): The day after this article was published, it ranked among the most viewed stories on NYTimes.com.

And it should have. This is the type of hard-hitting, well-researched journalism that is claimed by so many to be missing.

New York Times writers Jo Becker and Steven Lee Myers present a sobering situation taking place in Russia: the country’s Ministry of Education and Science has cut more than half of the 14 million books allowed to be used in school, with one lone exception: a publishing house, Enlightenment, whose newly appointed chairman once worked very closely with President Vladimir Putin.

The whole article is fascinating, but the most powerful paragraph comes early on:

“The country is now run by a few families, or clans, close to Putin,” said one publisher, who like many others spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “They used to focus on the very biggest businesses: oil, gas, big infrastructure projects, the banks. But now that they have eaten all the food in that cupboard, they are eating the mice, and the mice’s food, going after smaller and smaller markets.”

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3 GREAT STORIES: Starring James Brown, Times Square, & airports

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

The whitewashing of James Brown (8/5/14, Huffington Post): Each of the “3 Great Stories” this week were alerted to me by others, each through social media.

I read about this article from one-time “3 Great Stories” honoree Tina McElroy Ansa, who Tweeted about it a few days ago. I became a big fan of Ansa’s when I discovered a speech of hers on The Moth, and she recommended a powerful piece here.

Screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard pens an op-ed for the Huffington Post about the startling lack of black voices behind biopics of black figures. Using the new James Brown movie as a starting point, Howard dissects an all-too-familiar situation =:

Indeed, all the producers, writers, and the director of the James Brown movie are white. No black people were hired until a few weeks before the cameras started rolling, the actors. In fact, several of the people involved in this whitewash are British.

The opening of Get On Up has triggered several articles to this effect, and they make powerful and valuable statements. Howard does several things here: (A) fight for his idea about Brown’s legacy, (B) lament the “Hollywood apartheid” against black filmmakers, and (C) provide enough background and hard data to make both points. (more…)