When Las Vegas Sun staffer Scott Den Herder saw Tony McDew at an area nightclub last year, he could tell by McDew’s “outrageous” 1980s outfit and high-top fade haircut that he’d make an interesting character in a story. What he … Read more
By Lauren Kessler “Listen to the people who are talking about how to fix what’s wrong, not the ones who just work people into a snit over the problems. Listen to the people who have ideas about how to … Read more
First there was Nathalie, an English language learner who whispered that she’d never done well in English, never liked it, but this course was different. And her writing was getting better. Then there was Nseandra, who avoided the news … Read more
Carrie Roy saw it in her head before the conversation was even over—a giant wooden sculpture of the back half of a cow, atop a square brown plinth of manure. She was sitting in a bar in Madison, Wisconsin, … Read more
Below is an annotated version of my syllabus for the class “Literary Journalism in America.” I’ve taught this class eight times: five as part of the SAGES program at Case Western University, where I was a teaching fellow … Read more
Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared in the Fall 2000 issue of Nieman Reports, the Nieman Foundation’s quarterly magazine. Narrative writing is returning to newspapers. No one has added up the reallocated column-inches to quantify this change, but there are … Read more
One day this spring, New York Times reporter Deborah Acosta left her reporting up to serendipity. She’d followed a trail of Kodachrome slides to a huge bag full of striking images, seemingly abandoned in a trash bin in New York … Read more
Want to know what kind of online storytelling is turning heads? Over the weekend, the Online News Association held its 2010 conference in Washington, D.C. Competing with the Rally to Restore Sanity just a few blocks away, ONA … 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
By Jacqui Banaszynski A sign of the times… or, to be wordier but more precise, a sign of my obsessed mind in these divisive times in these dis-United States … My closest friend’s husband reads comic strips. He has … Read more