In our Brave New Distributed World, journalists suffer from a disorienting lack of control. Lack of control over audiences, over time spent on page, over clicks… the list goes on. The most any digital reporter can do is hope that … 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
What does Shakespeare have to do with clickbait? How much in common did ancient indigenous peoples have with the Twitter community? Was Dante’s “Inferno” the original “explainer” story? Amy O'Leary … Read more
If coming off a long holiday weekend weren’t hard enough, there’s another reason this Monday may seem rougher than usual. There’s no new “Serial” episode to talk about. Gabe … Read more
Editor’s note: In her third and final dispatch from the recent Third Coast audio storytelling conference, radio producer Julia Barton examines a dilemma journalists in every medium face: how to create good narrative on deadline. In a session titled “Making … Read more
Editor’s note: In her second dispatch from the recent Third Coast audio storytelling conference, radio producer Julia Barton looks at the approach the producers of StoryCorps, the non-profit oral history project, take to invisibly piece together their compelling … Read more
Editor’s Note: Every other fall, hundreds of radio producers, journalists, documentarians and other audio artists gather in Chicago for the Third Coast conference to examine, explore and celebrate the world of audio storytelling. In the first of a … Read more
A story without sound lies too dead on the page. Imagine “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, without the pop … pop … pop of the operating-room sensors. Or Tom Wolfe‘s “The Girl of … Read more
Back in the distant 1990s, This American Life host Ira Glass described a recurring dream of NPR’s Scott Simon: Simon would shoot a basketball over and over, but then it would disappear. The ball never landed. That, … Read more
When Florian Thalhofer shows one of his interactive documentaries in theaters, he arms the audience with laser pointers. Whenever there is a choice of which clip to watch next, the crowd votes by aiming a glowing red dot, … Read more
