opinion | If a tree falls in a forest...

It's 11:30 at night.

I'm on the bus as it rattles its way through the Lincoln Tunnel, wondering why I'm always drawn to rallies and protests. Yes, they're inherently newsworthy. Something is happening right here, right now, you're in the thick of it and you're the first person to know. Yes, it's our constitutional right. The liberty to think, then to talk, to spread these ideas, to assemble, and in doing so enact change.

But the rally and the protest happen for a more fundamental reason: passion. People feel strongly about the cause, something that makes it worth fighting for. It's passion that makes the cold bearable. That compels people to march down streets. Passion ignores rain and fatigue, the summertime heat and the stares of strangers.

Covering rallies is difficult. Sometimes you see something remarkable. Other times nothing happens. And you're always on your feet, one eye peeled for something newsworthy.

But it's worth it because of the result. Passion looks beautiful on camera and in print because it's real, raw emotion. Passion is what makes us human. You're out there because you want to capture that passion. You're out there because you know they want their voices to be heard. Is that not what we're here for, what journalism is all about?

opinion | Security through obscurity: hiding the unpleasant through bad writing

Verbal camouflage.

In his aptly named seminal book, “On Writing Well,” William Zinsser extolls the virtues of simplified, well-crafted prose. He crusades against the cloudy and the obtuse, which is used to both hide inadequacies and inflate the importance of people in power. “Clutter,” he writes, “is the disease of American writing.”

The State of New York might want to see a doctor.

analysis | Not all data journalism is created equal--here's why.

The surge of big data, on the backs of the Facebook, Gmail, and Instagram generations, has led to an explosion of information available from every corner of your life. It’s here, it’s most certainly going to stay, and it’s something journalists have been quick to catch on to. Learn it. Use it. Love it.

But not all data journalism is created equal.

meta | The Tenet and The Future

Know more. Fear less.

The tenet that Six Past Twelve was built upon, the very essence of its journalistic credentials, distilled into four simple words.

It was a phrase I had hastily scribbled down on a hot pink Post-it one morning amidst the swirl of cases, a note pinned to my wall for so long the blue-tack holding it left a dark grease spot against the paint. It was a promise to myself, to be bold in seeking the truth. It was a promise to my readers that business news didn’t have to be inscrutable, and an allusion to the core economic principle my writing was founded on: the most rational actor was the most informed actor. It became the spirit that defined my writing and my purpose. A motto proudly posted on the top of my blog.

Six Past Twelve in the evening. The perfect time to write.

Write.

The purpose of writing is to communicate ideas, but the trick is to present these ideas in a clear, concise manner. Writing shouldn't lose the interest of the reader, be distracting, difficult to swallow or incomprehensible. Good writing is a precision machine in which every word serves a purpose.