If the first rule of nonfiction is “write what you know,” then Melissa Fay Greene has embraced this principle like few others. She has spent her career chronicling the interior lives of families on the outside — those often … Read more
Reporters are always hunting for timely news pegs to resurface evergreen stories. More than a year after Jennifer Gollan’s arresting investigation into labor abuses against caregivers, coronavirus has offered a sobering hook: the pandemic that has wreaked havoc on … Read more
When the quarantine began in March, the lifestyles production unit at GBH Studio Six in Boston — which is responsible for a range of programming content, from cooking and travel television to documentaries on social … Read more
Hiram Walker is a motherless young slave in Virginia, fathered by the lord of a plantation that is clinging to shreds of grace even as the land plays out from overplanting with tobacco, half-brother to the plantation’s dissolute heir. Read more
When she set out from Russian port of Murmansk on a 60-foot sailboat headed to Novaya Zemlya in August 2019, journalist Andrea Pitzer had few expectations. She hoped to visit historical sites central to the … Read more
The Pivot: A brief prelude On an early afternoon in early March in Upper Manhattan, a dozen graduate students in Columbia Journalism School’s Arts and Culture seminar gathered their notebooks and coffee mugs as class wrapped up for the week. Read more
Too many great-sounding story ideas never go beyond that. They stop with an impassioned chat at a favorite watering hole, or are grumbled about, again and again, by a disgruntled colleague who can’t seem to bust through whatever is … Read more
The Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP) was born from a situation of precisely that: financial insecurity. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the seminal 1996 work, “Nickel and Dimed,” co-founded the journalism non-profit … Read more
With transportation stymied by a pandemic, Wright Thompson couldn’t exactly hop on a plane to research a story on Michael Jordan. Instead, the ESPN senior reporter built a time machine, one interview at a time. The resulting story is … Read more
On Oct. 9, 1983, the body of Timothy Wayne Coggins, a 23-year-old Black man, was found in the woods off a power line easement in Griffin, Georgia. He had been stabbed dozens of times and an “X,” like the … Read more
