The words appear on a blank white screen, accompanied by an atonal, ominous peal of music. “One frosty October morning, a newborn baby boy is found inside a plastic bag inside an Oslo graveyard. The baby is about to die.” … Read more
“I don’t know what we were thinking.” “Well, what do you think?” “You tell me. I have no idea.” When Aleksandr Gorbachev decided to research the business models of digital longform publications for his master’s thesis at the University of … Read more
It isn’t often that a narrative journalist’s retirement makes the news, but when Sports Illustrated announced this spring that longtime writer Gary Smith would be leaving the business, the public eulogies — and the “ … Read more
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
The magazine world suffered a deep loss Monday with the death of writer Matthew Power. An adventure-loving contributor to Harper’s, VQR, Outside, GQ and The Atavist, among others, Power died, reportedly of heat stroke, while on assignment for Men’s Journal, in Uganda. He … Read more
On New Year’s Eve, The Big Roundtable published a piece that you might have missed. Steve Kandell, the features director at BuzzFeed, wrote about the freedoms and challenges of working in digital narrative. The “50 or so” … Read more
The Grantland/”Dr. V’s Magical Putter” controversy morphed into a debate today over the nature and value of longform after the New York Times‘ Jonathan Mahler argued, in an op-ed, that “when you fetishize — as opposed to value … Read more
Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism hosted a daylong Future of Digital Longform conference recently, and it was full of good stuff. (They kindly invited Storyboard to appear on a panel, and although we couldn’t make it, … Read more
Each year, the current class of Nieman Fellows chooses a winner of the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism. Winners have included reporters who’ve put … Read more
The magazine story behind Sebastian Junger‘s celebrated nonfiction book A Perfect Storm ran in Outside magazine in October 1994. “The Storm” (4,765 words) told the story of the Andrea Gail, a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Mass., that sank amid … Read more