“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…

EDITOR’S NOTE: Storyboard recently revisited the long-standing debate over the ‘nut graf’ — variably called the summary nut, the billboard, the transition, the significance graf, the so-what passage, the foreshadow. Veteran writer…

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the sixth in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of…

Every August when I was young, my mother would take me to the store to buy some back-to-school notebooks. Maybe some pencils. Sometimes even a plastic pencil sharpener.This was a…

 Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac” turns 70 this year. At a time when writing about ecological emergency is emotionally and politically fraught, the “Almanac” is a balm of wisdom…

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fIfth in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of…

Editor’s note: We’re looking at the never-ending debate over what is called, in journalese, the “nut graf” — that so-what paragraph or section that pulls out of the news or…

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

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

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a…