We recently talked with Aminatta Forna about her Granta essay “The Last Vet,” which follows the work of Dr. Gudush Jalloh in his clinic at Freetown, Sierra Leone. Forna, who has produced television programs, written a memoir and penned … Read more
Yesterday’s Storyboard post was on “Finding Dolly Freed,” an innovative approach to narrative journalism. For that story, we shared comments on the project from Tanja Aitamurto, a researcher at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, who did a case study on Spot.Us and has a … Read more
When a journalist in love with a story gets turned down by magazine after magazine then sells a piece only to see it killed, what’s the next step? If you’re Paige Williams, you take a page from the guerrilla journalism … 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
When The Roanoke Times “Age of Uncertainty” won Documentary Project of the Year from Pictures of the Year International, it wasn’t the narrative writing or the photography or the Web design they wanted our insights on. They asked us to … Read more
In WIRED’s recent take on Somali piracy, “Cutthroat Capitalism”, Scott Carney leads what might have been a meaty narrative straight into a piranha-infested stream. What he pulls out on the other side is a story picked clean of … Read more
Excerpts from an August 2009 interview with Michael J. Mooney, reporter for Florida’s New Times, whose stories won a slot in the Best American Crime Reporting and Best American Sports Writing anthologies for 2009: When did you first get interested … Read more
Excerpts from a July 2009 interview with Tom Friend on his story “The Disposable Superstar”: How long did you take on the Chauncey Billups story? I spent a week in Denver and I interviewed Chauncey and his parents. I … Read more
This is an edited version of a talk Laurie Hertzel gave at the 2005 Nieman Seminar for Narrative Editors. Her remarks were part of a joint presentation with Rick Meyer, who spoke about developing characters. Scenes are the backbone … Read more
This essay is based on presentations given in advanced feature writing seminars the author taught at The Washington Post. On Thinking About Intimate Journalism It’s the kiss of death for anyone aspiring to do intimate journalism to think … Read more