In our new installment of written work worth checking out, we encourage you to think about the history of the soccer ball, the awesomeness that was the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, the expanding ramifications of the oil disaster in the Gulf, … Read more
While it may not spark a revolution in newsrooms, Michael Hastings’ narrative profile of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal in this week’s Rolling Stone has already made history. “The Runaway General,” which depicts the general and his aides mocking … Read more
Readers familiar with the work of C.J. Chivers might know him best for his portrait of Vladimir Putin from Esquire or the writing that helped The New York Times score the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Lately, … Read more
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller thinks the death of narrative journalism has been greatly exaggerated—and he brought some examples to Boston University’s 2010 narrative conference Saturday to prove it: … Read more
Melissa Lyttle / St. Petersburg Times St. Petersburg Times reporter Meg Laughlin recently spent eight days in Haiti and the Dominican Republic covering the aftermath of the earthquake. Read more
Dispatches is a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio News weekly show of documentaries, essays, interviews and reports from around the world. Most are by traveling freelancers. Many are from CBC reporters on the trail of breaking news for our … Read more
[Part 1 of this series looked at the turn toward individuals telling true stories via comics, while Part 2 illustrated how comics began to use a subjective vantage point to record history.]
[caption id="attachment_1098" align="alignleft" width="239" caption="Le Photographe, Tome 3/Dupuis"][/caption]
Emmanuel Guibert’s and Didier Lefèvre’s Le Photographe moves the field of nonfiction comics toward narrative journalism by revealing the documentary potential of graphic storytelling. Guibert recounts the journey of a photographer (Lefèvre) who records the work of a Medecins Sans Frontières mission in northeastern Afghanistan in 1986. Released in France between 2003 and 2006, the three volumes span 260 pages and follow Lefèvre from Pakistan to Afghanistan and back.
Though its achievements are similar to those of Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde (discussed in Part 2 of this series), Le Photographe unfolds in radically different form. The series’ most striking aspect is the unusual combination of documentary photography (Lefèvre's original work) and highly stylized drawings.
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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 and recently launched his own editing site, and so I was curious what he would have to say about the current state of narrative journalism.
In our conversation, he dishes on a common mistake made by narrative freelancers, talks about the genesis of one of the best newspaper narratives ever written, and a offers up a considered defense of poop jokes. Here's a taste:
Where a lot of narrative journalism went wrong was that it became all about the writing, and not about the details for the story and the facts behind it. People felt they could throw some words at people and dazzle. But even good writers need to start with an exceptional set of facts.
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Smith writes in a folksy, manly voice—as if he were saying, “gather round, boys, and I’ll tell you a story about daring, heroism and doing the right thing, even when the world seems bent on doing wrong.” It’s a captivating … Read more
