Writers and Editors

(Updated from a shorter 2016 list)  I assembled this alphabetized list of "best TV and cable shows of all time") for friends but got so many requests for it that I posted it here and update it periodically. Not all of the shows are current. I've added stars to shows that in my view are "must try" and I've provided links for many shows, but venues change. You can always google the name of a show and scroll down past the Google ads to see if and where the shows are streaming now. If you haven't seen it, start with Friday Night Lights (2006-2011, watch streaming on Hulu and maybe one other channel now). If the links below don't work, do a search on Google--they may be running on another channel now.

The rest, in alphabetical order:
• Absolutely Fabulous (Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video with BritBox) Fashion-obsessed, drug-addled best friends, total narcissists, and career women fumble their way through middle age.
• Accused (BBC streaming, aired for two seasons, 2010-2012). This award-winning drama anthology follows people accused of crimes as they await the verdict of their trial. (Watch on Acorn or Amazon Prime.)
• American Crime (ABC) Good actors take on different roles in compelling, sometimes depressing stories in anthology crime drama TV series.
• American Odyssey (NBC, Netflix) An elite soldier, a corporate lawyer and a political activist uncover a deadly conspiracy linking terrorists to a powerful American corporation.
• • • • The Americans (FX). Read Joshua Rothman's New Yorker piece, The Cruel Irony of "The Americans. As the NY Times writes, the week of its finale, "It’s a fabulous spy thriller and an even better domestic drama — a strange, awful love story set amid tremendous violence but also staggering idealism. This finale manages the nearly impossible: a meaningful and satisfying but still surprising conclusion to a sprawling, difficult story." I loved it although it did bog down a bit midseason.
• The Assets (an eight-part American drama television miniseries based on the real-life Aldrich Ames CIA/treason case--CIA counterintelligence expert Sandy Grimes is assigned a vital mission: identify the Soviet mole thought to be operating within the agency itself) Read More 

Scroll down for links to popular podcasts.

• How to download podcasts and listen to them on Android or iOS (Alina Bradford and Mark Jansen, Digital Trends, 7-31-19)
• 8 Types of Podcasts: The Complete Guide to Audio Content Marketing (Alexander Santo, Brafton) With pros and cons of each: Interview podcasts, Conversational podcasts, Monologue podcasts, Storytelling/Investigative podcasts, Roundtable podcasts, Theatrical podcasts, Repurposed content podcasts, Hybrid podcasts (mixing and matching to create your own style).
• How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know (Rowan Slaney, The Guardian)
• Listen Notes (an excellent podcast search engine)
• Hark Let Hark editors curate podcast moments into playlists around your interests.

• Best Podcast Directories to Help You Get More Listeners (Podcast Insights) Also useful to listeners.
• 31 Best Podcast Hosting Sites (Podcast Insights)
• The Atlantic podcasts
• CNBC podcasts
• Health podcasts (Covering Health's links)
• NASA podcasts
• New York Times podcasts
• Nickelodeon podcasts (podcasts for children, Podbean)
• NPR Podcast Directory
• PBS podcasts
• Publishers Weekly podcasts
• SBNation podcasts (sports)
• Slate podcasts
• TEDTalks podcasts
• Washington Post podcasts
• WNYC podcasts
• WSJ podcasts (Wall Street Journal)
• How To Upload A Podcast (To iTunes Or Any Other Directory) (Podcast Insights)

aka podcasts we, friends, or colleagues have enjoyed (and sometimes become addicted to)

in alphabetical order:

• 1A (NPR News) Joshua Johnson hosts with great guests, framing the best debate in ways to make you think, share and engage.
• Acquired. "Every company has a story." Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor. Mark Zuckerberg’s new production.
• Against the Rules Michael Lewis looks at what’s happened to fairness in American life through the lens of people who depend on public trust. After exploring what’s happened to referees and coaches, the third season of Against the Rules tackles what’s happened to our trust in experts and expertise.
• Armchair Expert Dax Shepard and Monica Padman interview celebrities, journalists, and academics about "the messiness of being human."
• The A16 podcast discusses tech and culture trends, news, and the future -- especially as ‘software eats the world’ (Andreessen Horowitz)
• Before Breakfast Host Laura Vanderkam shares time management strategies and scheduling.
• The Ben Shapiro Show
• Biographers International (discussions with biographers from around the country and the world)
• Blank Check with Griffin and David Hosts Griffin Newman and David Sims delve into the works of film's most outsized personalities in painstakingly hilarious detail.
• Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast  Read More 

• What the “Creator Economy” Promises—and What It Actually Does (Kyle Chayka, New Yorker, 7-17-21) A lattice of new platforms and tools purports to empower online creators. In reality, it’s turning digital content into gig work. "“Creator” is a term with a more wholesome air, conjuring an Internet in which we are all artisanal blacksmiths plying our digital craft. But what, exactly, the word implies beyond that is up for debate. According to Taylor Lorenz’s reporting for The Atlantic, the term was originally marketed by YouTube, as early as 2011, as an alternative to vocabulary like “YouTube star,” which seemed to imply that only a few famous figures could succeed on the platform. But it’s now used to describe practically anyone who is producing any form of content online.
• The Game Is Rigged: Rethinking The Creator Economy (Tara McMullin, Explore What Works, 1-27-22) “Building an audience to monetize and building a customer base are two different activities that are often conflated. The confusion between the two strategies is a large part of what ends up making so many would-be social media marketers miserable.”

      "The first way the game is rigged is that we’re playing a game that wasn’t designed for us....The second way the game is rigged is how these platforms manipulate unpaid labor. The reason posting more, learning what people like to share, trying out every new tool the platforms create, and responding to every comment seems to be the answer is that the platforms depend on our labor. They rely on us to fill the feeds with things that keep people scrolling, clicking, and viewing ads. The platforms care about us at a group level–they need those super users to stay on the factory floor. But they don’t care at all about us at the individual level."
• The Real Difference Between Creators and Influencers (Taylor Lorenz, The Atlantic, 5-31-19) From 2011 to 2016, YouTube worked hard to promote  "creators," a term it applied to independent YouTube stars who could grow their audience (go viral) and monetize. In 2014-2016 Instagram grabbed attention with its Instagram stars or Instagrammers, and the term "influencer" gained in popularity. An infuencer is "anyone who leverages social media to grow a following and exerts influence over that following in order to make money."
• Why Women Are Called 'Influencers' and Men 'Creators' (Emma Gray Ellis, Wired, 5-29-19)
• TikTok and the Vibes Revival (Kyle Chayka, New Yorker, 4-26-21) "Increasingly, what we’re after on social media is not narrative or personality but moments of audiovisual eloquence....Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience. That pre-linguistic quality makes them well suited to a social-media landscape that is increasingly prioritizing audio, video, and images over text. Through our screens, vibes are being constantly emitted and received."

by Pat McNees (updated from original 2017 post)

On the "Top of the Morning" page of the Center for Health Journalism, prominent health journalists and experts write what sites, newsletters, and social media feeds they turn to first every morning and why. Here below are links to those sites and others, in alphabetical order. Feel free to comment. See also Why Bolstering Trust in Journalism Could Help Strengthen Trust in Medicine (Vineet M. Arora, David Rousseau, and Gary Schwitzer, Trust in Health Care, JAMA Network, 5-13-19) and 7 ways journalists can access academic research for free (Denise-Marie Ordway, Journalist's Resource, 9-21-18) In addition, of course, journalists get original material by interviewing experts, witnesses, victims, and other participants in world and daily events.

• Ag Insider Daily (Food & Reporting Network) FERN's morning brief offering daily reporting and analysis on food, agriculture and the environment. 
• Alerts about embargoed studies from various journals and organizations, including JAMA, Pediatrics, the American Heart Association,  Newswise (a free service for journalists that offers access to embargoed papers in fields ranging from climate change science to specific medical fields.
• American Heart Association newsroom.
• Association of Health Care Journalists AHCJ keeps up on important health trends and offers tips on  Read More 

Updated 11-5-22
• A Primer on TV & Film Adaptation for Writers (Where the Rules Change Often) (Jeanne Veillette Bowerman on Jane Friedman's blog, 11-2-22) The elements of a great pitch package, logline, synopsis, treatments, the book, pitch deck. Do you need the screenplay written in advance?
• How Does a Book Get Adapted for TV or Film? (Chaya Bhuvaneswar, LitHub, 5-20-21) A Roundtable Conversation with Laura Van Den Berg, Daniel Torday, Melissa Scholes Young, and Stephanie Beard
• How Are Books Adapted for the Screen? Two Agents Demystify the Process (Sangeeta Mehta on Jane Friedman's blog, 8-10-22)
• What Hollywood Wants (and How to Give It to Them): Intellectual Property Adaptations (Ken Miyamoto, Screencraft, 4-5-22) What types of screenplays are most desirable in the eyes of Hollywood insiders and decision-makers?
• The best book-to-film adaptations ever, ranked (Marc Chacksfield, ShortList)
• How to Adapt Jane Austen, and Why It's So Hard to Get It Right (CNN, 8-7-22)
• The Best Movie Adaptations of TV Shows (IMDb)
• 31 Movies Based on Short Stories (Emily Temple, LitHub, 10-1-18) Or How to Turn a Nine-Page Story into a Feature Film
• 10 Best Movies You Didn't Know Were Originally Short Stories (Amber Nuyens, CBR, 5-14-22) Many great films have their origins in the short story medium.
• 10 Books You Should Still Read Even After Watching The Movie Adaptation Ajay Aravind, CBR aka Comic Book Review, 4-22-22) Though movie adaptations of books are exciting, they tend to leave out interesting information and moments.      

  The Color Purple by Alice Walker

  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

  The Help by Kathryn Stockett

  One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

  The Call of the Wild by Jack London

  Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

  Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

  Dune by Frank Herbert

  To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• 10 Things The Game of Thrones Series Changed from the Books (Ajay Aravind, CBR.com, 5-3-22)
• 40 of Our All-Time Favorite Book-to-Movie Adaptations (Jeff Somers, BookBub, 4-22-21)
• 15 Must-See Book-to-Screen Adaptations Coming Out in 2022 (Melissa Flandreau, BookBub, 1-6-22)
• 29 Best Movies Based on Books That Are Actually Worth Watching (Anna Moeslein, Glamour, 5-19-21)
• 100 best movies based on books (Jacob Osborn, Stacker, 8-29-20)
• 50 movies that address the history of racism in America (Elona Neal, Stacker, 1-23-21)
• The 19 Best Movies Based on Books of All Time (R. Eric Thomas, Elle, 4-17-20)
• Lists of works of fiction made into feature films (Wikipedia)
---List of short fiction made into feature films (Wikipedia)
---List of plays adapted into feature films (Wikipedia)
---List of non-fiction works made into feature films (Wikipedia)
• 25 Best Movies Based on Books: Read It Then See It (Yen Cabag, TCK Publishing)