The expansive projects that Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron announced today is good news for narrative journalists in two ways: The paper plans to expand the Sunday magazine (we hope it resurfaces as a home for deeply … Read more
Editor’s note: The Oregonian’s Simina Mistreanu spoke to seven narrative journalists for her University of Missouri School of Journalism master’s project on longform. Last week, we ran her setup, a piece on the challenges and importance of longform narrative, plus her conversations … Read more
Editor’s note: First, an introduction, by Jacqui Banaszynski, the Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism, and winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing: Whenever aspiring young journalists ask … Read more
This is the inaugural installment of Work the Problem, a storytelling advice column featuring everyday craft quandaries and a roving band of narrative sages. Today’s players: >Dave Tarrant, reporter, Dallas Morning News >Jack Hart, former Oregonian editor and author … Read more
Welcome to Storyboard’s first annual year-end roundup of top storytelling: 34 of our favorite pieces in audio, magazines, newspapers and online, with three of the … Read more
Years ago, the wonderful Walt Harrington came to our newsroom and fired us up. We were at the start of a storytelling revival, trying to find our way back to craft, and Walt’s book “Intimate Journalism” had just … Read more
Narrative journalism has been dogged for years by the idea that it is too subjective or somehow less capable of conveying hard numbers to the public than a traditional news story. In a world where data mining and visualizations have … Read more
While tracking digital narrative experiments, we at Storyboard also aim to keep readers informed about the world of traditional print narratives. Today we’ve compiled a list of upcoming events for fans who want to hear from classic storytellers or learn … Read more
The following comments are taken from a talk given by Oregonian reporter Tom Hallman on September 25, 2009, at the American Association of Sunday and Feature editors. Hallman won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for “The Boy Behind the Mask.”
For reporters, there has to be a change of attitude. Narrative was seen as being all about writing and having plenty of time to do stuff. Narrative reporters were seen as prima donnas. So for younger writers, they’re going to have to tell stories, to find stories that are going to be shorter…
The truth is that we turned out stories that were not worth 40, 60 or 90 inches, where the openings were about impressing other writers more than reaching the readers. But you cannot tell a scenic story in 15 inches. It’s going to require a different kind of narrative: The presence of a writer’s voice but without the heavy first person references. My feeling is unless you’ve witnessed a murder, you don’t need to be in the story. It will take a more disciplined approach to the story, the realization that some things are going to have to go by the wayside. You’re going to have to use quotes, whether you want to or not, to condense the story.
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Some events cry out for narrative treatment. Take a look at this wire story about a St. Louis Cardinal fan injured in Pittsburgh and the assist he got from player Albert Pujols. And then read Todd Frankel’s “St. Louis Cardinals fan feels uplifted after fall,” which ran a month later in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
No one assigned the piece to Frankel, but he had watched the game on television that Friday and suspected there might be more to the story. By the following Monday, he still hadn’t seen any new information from beat reporters, so he spent a week getting the Pirates public relations staff to find out if the fan, Tim Tepas, was willing to be interviewed.
Tepas initially agreed to a five-minute conversation. But across several days, five minutes turned into five hours. And it was only at the end, Frankel reports, that Tepas mentioned the letter he had with him the night of his injury.
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