Last week, a student asked for notable examples of the write-around, that subgenre in which the journalist had limited to no access with the story subject. The most famous examples are Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” … Read more
Pinned this week for your storytelling pleasure: pieces on a jailhouse boxer, an old triple homicide in Texas, a billion dollars’ worth of recovered European art, a one-day writing conference and organizational tips. From Recommended Reading: The Paris Review’s … Read more
In Part 1 of our recap of the Tow Center’s Future of Digital Longform conference, Emily Bell and Joe Sexton talked about when (and to what extent) a story should be snowfalled, and Josh … Read more
We’ve configured this year’s Best of Storyboard roundup by category* this year, as opposed to ranking them by readership, though we’ll say that in terms of pageviews the Gay Talese/Elon Green annotation of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” walloped … Read more
As if longtime Columbia J-school professor Michael Shapiro didn’t already have enough to do, with Big Round Table launching in September: Yesterday he put 17 of his students’ stories online in a pay-what-you want experiment. Project Wordsworth … Read more
Our storytelling advice column continues: A journalist asks a question and we find an accomplished narrative writer or editor to answer it. In our first installment, Dave Tarrant of the Dallas Morning News had a question about how to … Read more
David Finkel David Finkel of The Washington Post won a MacArthur “genius” grant this week for his body of long-form narrative journalism, particularly his coverage of the war in Iraq. In awarding him … Read more
In “Grace in Broken Arrow,” our newest Notable Narrative, Brooklyn-based freelancer Kiera Feldman unfurls an investigative story about child sex abuse and institutional accountability at a private evangelical Christian school outside of Tulsa, Okla. The piece ran … Read more
“The prosecutor wanted to know about window coverings. He asked: Which windows in the house on South Rose Street, the house where you woke up to him standing over you with a knife that night – which windows had curtains that blocked … Read more
The Pulitzer Prize for breaking news tends to go to a massive team effort, often one in which a dozen or more reporters feed material to one, two or even three writers, who pull together the main story. Papers like … Read more
