Filmmaker David Layton isn’t a stranger to the newsroom. Before he produced and directed documentaries, he was a newspaper reporter, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his next project, “The Newspaperman,” is a film about one of the 20th century’s … 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
Narrative legend Buzz Bissinger, whose books include A Prayer for the City and the No. 1 New York Times best-seller Friday Night Lights, visited his alma mater the Nieman Foundation last week for a long talk … Read more
We talked this week with Andrew Rice, whose “The Fall of Niagara Falls” is our latest Notable Narrative. Rice’s career has included stints at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Observer. He has also written a book, … Read more
This story received the AAAS best science writing award in 2006 for newspapers and appears in Best Science Writing 2007, edited by Gina Kolata. It’s a fine example of both matching hard science and human narrative and using strong writing … Read more
Shiffman and his editor, Avery Rome, made a very complicated story readable and highly engaging by sticking closely to narrative technique. Read “Drugnet,” by John Shiffman … Read more
As we read this series, we thought of Chip Scanlan’s discussion of using private records for insights into characters. This entire series is, in a sense, based on the private records of struggling kids. Through Snyder’s reporting on a … Read more
We found the level of action detail in this gruesome series remarkable: Bowden traces what happened when—who got shot where, shrieked, said what, shot whom, with what—with striking clarity. We imagine that spelling out each thread in the bloody narrative … Read more