Last year was an important one for memoir and manga (Japanese comics) in North America. To celebrate the 80th anniversary of Canadian diplomatic relations with Japan, Canadian digital media company Zeros 2 Heroes hosted the web 2.0 initiative … Read more
What might life without books look like, and how will the shift to digital texts and images change news narratives? Earlier this month, Nieman Lab staffer Megan Garber wrote about the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”—the idea that the reign of … Read more
We’re longtime fans of the work of video producer Travis Fox, creator of engaging Web projects combining video and interactive elements. With so many journalists pondering narrative in the digital era, we thought it would be interesting to highlight … Read more
photo credit: Martin Delisle We spoke this week with Marie-Claude Dupont, producer of the GDP Project, an effort to document the economic crisis in Canada. Funded by the … Read more
Storyboard is always looking for new approaches to storytelling that could be useful for journalists, so we were curious when a reader sent us a link to the How Are You Doing project, which invites people … Read more
[First in a series looking at storyboarding projects.] You’re almost done with your six-month narrative project, and you realize you have no multimedia elements. Or worse, you’re coming upon the end of your story, and there’s… no end. If you’re interested … Read more
[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 narratives on a daily basis. Founder Ben Montgomery, who is also a reporter with Florida’s St. Petersburg Times, talks here about his personal motivation for starting his site and what he thinks narrative journalism can do.
On what makes a good Gangrey story:
Does it have something that’s surprising? Is it entertaining? Will it keep my attention? Is there some device being used that I’ve never seen before?
And on the multimedia components for his latest print narrative:
I couldn’t have pulled that off if it had required more effort from me. We wouldn’t have achieved the same level of—I don’t want to say excellence—the same level of story for either of those things, if both [the print story and the video] had required my attention. If journalists are required to write the story and compose the multimedia elements going into it, both parts tend to suffer.
Read the full interview » Read more
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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Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression. Novelists can reveal great truths about the human condition, and … Read more