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From who's telling the stories to what they're about: Nieman Reports looks at foreign correspondence

From who’s telling the stories to what they’re about: Nieman Reports looks at foreign correspondence

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the fall issue of Nieman Reports for the skinny on “Reporting From Faraway Places: Who Does It and How?” Inside, you’ll find…
September 13, 2010
L.A. Times reporter Christopher Goffard on structure, sympathy and how to make a story go: "The same thing that’s going to make people sit through a movie will make them sit through a 10,000-word series"

L.A. Times reporter Christopher Goffard on structure, sympathy and how to make a story go: "The same thing that’s going to make people sit through a movie will make them sit through a 10,000-word series"

For "Project 50: Four walls and a bed," our latest Notable Narrative, reporter Christopher Goffard spent two years following a Los Angeles-area program aimed at finding the most at-risk homeless…
September 10, 2010
Christopher Goffard's "Project 50" and the hard-core homeless of Los Angeles

Christopher Goffard’s "Project 50" and the hard-core homeless of Los Angeles

How do you take people -- ones whom your readers would cross the street to avoid -- and make them compelling enough to follow through a four-part series? Christopher Goffard…
September 9, 2010

Tommy Tomlinson on Ze Frank, newspapers and what comes next

Tommy Tomlinson has been a local columnist for The Charlotte Observer for the past 13 years but recently announced that he's switching jobs to embark on a storytelling experiment for…
September 7, 2010

What we’re reading, back-to-school edition: prison voices, the failure of imagination in storytelling, and the secret diary of a hedge fund manager

Teenage lifeguards abandon their perches to leathery veterans. The county fair's bounty of funnel cakes and fried beer peters out. Corduroy shopping starts in earnest. The academic year begins. In…
September 2, 2010

In with the new: the 2010-11 Nieman fellows arrive

The new group of Nieman fellows has arrived in Cambridge and will be spending this academic year diving into Harvard courses and research opportunities. I’ve taken the time talk one-on-one…
September 1, 2010

USA Today’s Joshua Hatch on digital storytelling, Katrina and using technology with "a narrative purpose"

We talked last week by phone with USA Today interactives director Joshua Hatch about "Five Years Later: Hurricane Katrina," the paper's attempt to document the recovery and continuing struggles of…
August 25, 2010

USA Today’s Katrina anniversary project: stories from the second line

When clicking across the digital universe, we like new bells and whistles as much as the next Twitter jockey. But with big multimedia projects, we want to feel the bones…
August 24, 2010
Hank Stuever on story structure, really reporting Christmas and the problem with the "sacred space" approach to narrative

Hank Stuever on story structure, really reporting Christmas and the problem with the "sacred space" approach to narrative

Washington Post reporter Hank Stuever writes in a variety of  narrative forms, from books to punchy television reviews and features. His latest book, "Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present,"…
August 20, 2010
Laurie Hertzel on growing up in newspapers and what she learned from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Laurie Hertzel on growing up in newspapers and what she learned from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

In "News to Me," Laurie Hertzel writes about life as an ink-stained wretch during nearly 20 years at the Duluth News Tribune. Now books editor at the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune,…
August 18, 2010