In July 2011, Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) wrote a haunting story about the “disappearance” and death of a woman named Kathryn Norris. He did it partly by dumpster-diving for personal details … Read more
The best stories – even the written ones – have audio. Maybe it’s a sensibility: voice or style, which Ben Yagoda explores in his craft book The Sound on the Page. Maybe it’s a structural/pacing device (think of the … Read more
When students pitch their stories I first make them tell me the story out loud. They resist. They want to write it up, polish and perfect it, but I prefer starting with a raw delivery because sometimes Writing kills Story. Read more
Isabel Wilkerson closed out the Mayborn by describing the 15 years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns. The book chronicles the migration of 6 million black Americans out of the South and into the … Read more
Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and of 23 other books, delivered one of the keynotes at this year’s Mayborn Conference for Literary Journalism. Here are five top takeaways from that … Read more
In Part 1 of our coverage of this year’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, Kiera Feldman, a This Land correspondent, rounded up tips on documents and data, the latest in web research, source relationships, and other … Read more
At last month’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, in Boston, hundreds of reporters attended dozens of sessions on everything from analyzing unstructured data to working with the coolest web tools and building a digital newsroom. The conference, which started in the 1970s, … Read more
We’ll be talking to Michael Mooney again soon about a small body of his recent long-form journalism, but today we give our attention to “When Lois Pearson Started Fighting Back,” our latest Notable Narrative. We chose the … Read more
Before she wrote Silkwood, before she fictionalized her divorce from Carl Bernstein in the novel Heartburn, before she felt bad about her neck or put Sally … Read more