Why's This So Good?

What the “Insect Apocalypse” reveals about faulty human memory

Brooke Jarvis takes windshield wipers to environmental blindness

By Ben Goldfarb • February 19, 2019

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Short Takes

Newsroom Ode #7: Desperation calls the consultant

A dead-tree dinosaur writes from the edge of extinction

By Don Nelson • February 18, 2019

Story Craft

Forget the chocolates. Tell a story instead

A Valentine's Day sampler of non-cliche love stories

By Jacqui Banaszynski • February 14, 2019

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Investigative Reporting Short Narratives Tom Junod Poverty Narrative Journalism
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One Great Sentence

“I work like a watchmaker or an old-fashioned silversmith: one eye screwed up, the other fitted with a watchmaker’s magnifying glass, with a fine tweezers between my fingers, with bits of paper … in front of me on my desk on which I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one of these particles, these molecules of text, carefully with my tweezers, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub it or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving.”

By Curt Brown
February 13, 2019

As journalists, we strive for terse, pithy sentences. Then comes this sprawling description of writing in which the writer becomes a silversmith, watchmaker, weaver and, ultimately, a chemist. Using the word “carefully” twice, Oz takes this creative magic we call writing and strips it down to… Read More

Story Craft

More on nut grafs: A sweet addendum

By Thomas Curwen
February 12, 2019

Nuts need not be tough or bitter, but should match stories in size and tone

Short Takes

Newsroom Ode #6: Sitting pretty at the top

By Don Nelson
February 11, 2019

A dead-tree dinosaur writes from the edge of extinction

Digital Storytelling

For the love of analog in a digital world

By Greg Bowers
February 6, 2019

Small businesses in a small town join the retro revolution to paper and pen

Notable Narratives

A prescient voice speaks for the Earth

By Erik Ness
February 5, 2019

Seventy years after "A Sand County Almanac," Aldo Leopold's message grows in relevance

Short Takes

Newsroom Ode #5: Pity the poor publisher

By Don Nelson
February 2, 2019

A dead-tree dinosaur writes from the edge of extinction

Story Craft

A nutcracker suite

By Jacqui Banaszynski
February 1, 2019

Primas of storywork on how they interpret the dance of the nut graf

Story Craft

A nut graf by any other name might taste sweeter ~ and be more digestible

By Jacqui Banaszynski
January 31, 2019

A defense of the summary nut as it is used in variations by Ken Burns, the Beatles and Shakespeare

Story Craft

Nut grafs: Overused, misused — or merely misunderstood?

By Chip Scanlan
January 29, 2019

When a summary nut beeps like the back-up horn on a truck or blinds like a searchlight, it can ruin the magic of a narrative

Short Takes

Newsroom Ode #4: Don’t shoot the photographer

By Don Nelson
January 28, 2019

A dead-tree dinosaur writes from the edge of extinction

5 Questions

From a Kickstarter about avocados to conviction as an American spy

By Jan Gardner
January 22, 2019

How Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian turned 544 days in an Iranian prison into a story about love, journalism and a broken homeland

Annotation Tuesday!

Shining light on a “shadow” special-ed program in the Georgia public schools

By Linda Shaw
January 22, 2019

Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker uses the narrative of one child in one school to reveal the widespread costs of "separate and unequal"

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