Articles

Nieman Fellowship application deadline approaches

What do Alma Guillermoprieto, Dexter Filkins, Susan Orlean, Rick Bragg and Anne Hull all have in common? Once upon a time, they all headed to Cambridge, Mass., as Nieman Fellows…
November 3, 2009
Andrea Pitzer
Narrative journalism’s future: fighting words in some places

Narrative journalism’s future: fighting words in some places

Blog posts and articles on narrative journalism pinged around the Halloween weekend like eyeballs at a zombie food fight—and according to Washingtonian.com, an actual fight broke out at The Washington…
November 2, 2009
Andrea Pitzer
Joel Achenbach and the storytellers' union

Joel Achenbach and the storytellers’ union

Lots of the usual suspects are blogging and Tweeting about Joel Achenbach’s piece on the future of narrative journalism that ran in yesterday’s Washington Post. Some people have excerpted interesting…
October 30, 2009
Andrea Pitzer

The Moth’s Lea Thau on storytelling

In some places, the spoken story is thriving. Last night in Boston, that 800-pound gorilla of live storytelling, the Moth, put on an event at the Tsai Performance Center. We decided…
October 30, 2009
Andrea Pitzer

Gangrey’s Ben Montgomery wants to grab you by the shirt collar

[The second in an occasional series aimed at helping readers find online resources that focus on narrative journalism.] For more than four years, Gangrey.com has rounded up the best print…
October 29, 2009
Andrea Pitzer

Tom Shroder, former Washington Post Magazine editor, on dinner plates and well-done narrative

This week, I had a chance to talk by phone with Tom Shroder, who took a buyout from The Washington Post earlier this year. Shroder specializes in long-form narrative stories…
October 28, 2009
Andrea Pitzer

Tommy Tomlinson: making words work for a living

A few years ago an intern did a study of the writing that showed up in our newspaper. He ran our stories through a computer program that measured the reading…
October 27, 2009
Tommy Tomlinson

GQ and The New Yorker: two takes on brain damage from football

For a primer on different approaches to storytelling, take a look at two recent narratives on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In GQ, Jeanne Marie Laskas’ “Game Brain” follows a pathologist…
October 26, 2009
Andrea Pitzer

Hilton Als and Michael Jackson: do we really need another story?

The best print narratives often take the form of either movie or metaphor. The first approach hinges on complete scenes, allowing a story to unfold as it would in film,…
October 23, 2009
Andrea Pitzer

Sexual Warfare in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Our latest Notable Narrative comes from The Sydney Morning Herald. Photojournalist Kate Geraghty and reporter Jonathan Pearlman have assembled striking still images, video and reported summaries to document the systematic…
October 23, 2009
Andrea Pitzer