For the first Roundtable of July, our editors looked at “Diving headlong into a sunny paradise” by Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times. The story follows a young Wisconsin couple on their first day starting a new … Read more
Adam Hochschild, a longtime supporter of the Nieman Foundation’s narrative program, published a new book last month, “To End All Wars.” A former editor of Mother Jones magazine, Hochschild lives in San Francisco and teaches writing at the … Read more
In our latest Notable Narrative, “Did My Brother Invent E-Mail with Tom Van Vleck?,” Errol Morris rejects many of the standard rules of narrative writing. Best known for his films “The Fog of War” and “ … Read more
We’re excited to announce a new feature that we’ll be rolling out next week on Nieman Storyboard. “Why’s This So Good?” will explore what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading. Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at The … Read more
In our last post, the Editors’ Roundtable looked at a Seattle Times column about a record-setting Girl Scout cookie-seller who got to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a Seattle Mariners game. Today, we hear from the Times’ … Read more
We’re fine-tuning our Editors’ Roundtable, moving toward more frequent postings and smaller groups of editors looking at each story. As part of those changes, today we highlight our second June Roundtable (if you missed the first, you can see it … Read more
How can environmental writers craft emotionally involving stories from disasters that are slow-moving and attritional, rather than explosive and spectacular? This is a particularly pressing question for our age, as the news cycle spins ever faster, as the media venerates spectacle, … Read more
For the first Roundtable of the month, our editors looked at “Ala. tornado twists two families together” by Stephanie McCrummen from The Washington Post. The story, published early in May, covers an unusual connection between strangers after a … Read more
A bevy of biographers gathered in May in Washington, D.C., at the second annual Compleat Biographer Conference to discuss how to chase down subjects and make their lives into great stories. Last week we covered Robert Caro’s … Read more
Our latest Notable Narrative turns cliché upside down to see what will fall out of its pockets. Maybe you can’t go home again, but Esquire’s Scott Raab wants to see what happens when you try. Raab’s … Read more
