The news business is rarely funny. Much of what we do every day is report on devastating acts of nature, the plight of those without voices – the problems of the world. For most of those stories it’s best to rely on … Read more
Welcome to Storyboard’s first annual year-end roundup of top storytelling: 34 of our favorite pieces in audio, magazines, newspapers and online, with three of the … Read more
The first week of fall term ends today at Harvard, and the Nieman Foundation’s newest class of fellows is settling in. The Nieman fellowship, which next … Read more
Five from the field: 1. Rachel McAthy’s recent roundup of eight long-form digital projects included sites you probably already know about, like The Atavist, Byliner and Longreads, but also Matter, which recently met its … Read more
Phyllis Fletcher opens this wonderful piece of rescued history and solved mystery with a simple declaration: “Ina Ray Hutton was a stone cold fox.” The correct response to this kind of shared confidence – relayed by Fletcher … Read more
At last month’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, in Boston, hundreds of reporters attended dozens of sessions on everything from analyzing unstructured data to working with the coolest web tools and building a digital newsroom. The conference, which started in the 1970s, … Read more
Great story ideas come by luck but also with the hard work of searching, pre-reporting and thinking. From our archives, here are a few timeless pro tips for idea-mining. Follow the links to longer pieces on story craft. … Read more
In “Grace in Broken Arrow,” our newest Notable Narrative, Brooklyn-based freelancer Kiera Feldman unfurls an investigative story about child sex abuse and institutional accountability at a private evangelical Christian school outside of Tulsa, Okla. The piece ran … Read more
Boxing stories leave me cold. Like many sports stories, they seem to assume an audience of fans who will be thrilled − rather than sickened − by a narrative built on grueling workouts, bloodied lips and head injuries. So I downloaded “Teen Contender,” … Read more
It’s been a volatile few months for ethics in storytelling, what with the unprecedented “This American Life” retraction of monologist Mike Daisey’s Apple story, and with the unfurled furor over John D’Agata’s anti-accuracy screed in The … Read more
