BBC news persenter Jackie Leonard talks about the work that goes into a daily news podcast that reaches a worldwide audience. | Continue reading
A behind-the-scenes look at The Washington Post series that explored the complex societal issues raised by the life and death of George Floyd. | Continue reading
A Washington Post series dug past reactions to Floyd's death to probe questions about his life and what it reveals about society. | Continue reading
Story pitches are often an editor's first impression of your work. Even small mistakes can undermine their confidence in your professionalism. | Continue reading
Hall of fame sportswriter Dave Kindred discovers the power of "smaller," personal subjects in his episodic story posts. | Continue reading
2012 Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune talks about sensitive subjects, personal exposure and aging. | Continue reading
A veteran newspaper editor and journalism professor on his appreciation for a simple, declaritive definition of democracy, and what it demands. | Continue reading
ome writing comes together bit by bit, a mosaic of thoughts and observations gathered over days or months or years. Slowly or suddenly, a bigger picture emerges through a confluence of details and facts. Sometimes the writer doesn’t fully grasp what it means until the process of … | Continue reading
A veteran reporter in China finds it increasingly difficult to access official sources, while ordinary people can be eager to talk about their lives. | Continue reading
t has become a common refrain in these chaotic times: We’re not just reading history; we’re living it. That’s always been true, I suppose, for anyone living at any time. But I expect historians will look back on this particular patch of time and circumstances as notable — one of … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: Headlines on a story often change as the story is updated, or is published on different platforms. That apparently is what happened on a New York Times story published Nov. 4, 2002, about the mood of America on Election Day. An early online headline captured the at … | Continue reading
The backlog of untested rap kits led author, journalist and podcaster Pagan Kennedy to another mystery: Who invented the kit, and why? | Continue reading
A "lucky mistake" brought vanessa Friedman into the high-end world of fashion criticism, and how it shapes and is shaped by current events. | Continue reading
With newsrooms collapsing and contracting under her, a young journalist found a new non-newsroom life, only to be lured back. | Continue reading
Two sentences provide the nut graph — news, context and meaning — of a narrative without interrupting the flow or tone. | Continue reading
How an introduction to Jerry Jeff Walker and his kind of music reinforced enduring elements of great storytelling. | Continue reading
A challenging story about modern slavery of domestic workers in the UK was possible with a grant from the IWMF. | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: This installment of our occasional series on pitching highlights the work of the International Women’s Media Foundation. Tomorrow we’ll feature the annotation of a successful project pitch to the IWMF. ost freelancers don’t need to be told twice to follow the mon … | Continue reading
A key to putting policy issues in context is to track their origins and explore the likely outcom of those decisions in the future. | Continue reading
A Washington Post team went back to Kenosha, Wisconsin, after street riots to uncover a more complicated truth. | Continue reading
A single comment led to a year-long investigation which showed how a program meant to protect children sometimes went wrong. | Continue reading
Following the requirements of pitching guidelines shows professionalism, respect and your ability to be creative within a structure. | Continue reading
California Sunday told the story of the first COVID hotspiot in the U.S. by taking readers inside Room 10 through interviews and documents. | Continue reading
No matter the term applied to narrative nonfiction, author and editor Constance Hale finds it has echoes of other forms, including cinema. | Continue reading
A successful freelancer confesses how her "motor mouth" attempts at humor can turn off editors and tank her good ideas. | Continue reading
A Los Angeles Times reporter blends old and new reporting techniques to tell a timely and timeless story of family and race | Continue reading
How a small Oregon news staff covered breaking news of a deadly wilsfire, then teamed to deliver a narrative a week later. | Continue reading
Writers need to know the publication or outlet they're pitching to, and whether or how the story is a good fit. | Continue reading
30 years after thousands of Romanian orphans were adopted to U.S. families, an award-winning reporter asks about their fate | Continue reading
"Caregivers and takers," an investigative series by Reveal, exposed the entrenched practice of exploiting care workers for profit. | Continue reading
Studio Six, the production unit at Boston's GBH that is one of the top producers of content of PBS, finds ways to stay creative during COVID. | Continue reading
iram Walker is a motherless young slave in Virginia, fathered by the lord of a plantation that is clinging to shreds of grace even as the land plays out from overplanting with tobacco, half-brother to the plantation’s dissolute heir. Hiram dreams of his tenuous inheritance unt … | Continue reading
A trip by sea deep into the Arctic became part book research, part travelogue, part environmental study, part memoir — and all beauty. | Continue reading
The Pivot: A brief prelude On an early afternoon in early March in Upper Manhattan, a dozen graduate students in Columbia Journalism School’s Arts and Culture seminar gathered their notebooks and coffee mugs as class wrapped up for the week. Some lingered in the hallway to chat w … | Continue reading
Common mistakes can undermine even the best of story ideas. We introduce them here, and will follow up with essays about each. | Continue reading
he Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP) was born from a situation of precisely that: financial insecurity. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the seminal 1996 work, “Nickel and Dimed,” co-founded the journalism non-profit in 2012, as Americans were trudging through the wreckage … | Continue reading
ESPN writer Wright Thompson returns to an old subject — basketball superstar Michael Jordan — and finds a new story in his family roots. | Continue reading
A magazine writer and a documentary filmmater collaborated on reporting the same 34-year-old cold-case murder, then each told it through their own medium. | Continue reading
How advances in women's rights can be see through the use of the simplest of langauge: Pronouns. | Continue reading
A 17-year-old with a passion for civics and current events felt compelled to provide eye-witness coverage of clashes between police and protestors. | Continue reading
A writer finds that the classic story narrative is at odds with most women's reality. Even the "heroine's journey" needs new consideration. | Continue reading
Award-winning journalists Ellen Goodman (Pulitzer) and Lynn Sherr (Peabody) team up to tell the story of the 19th Amendment through the intimacy of audio. | Continue reading
A team from Vanity Fair profiled a staff of overwhelmed funeral workers who were determined to put dignity and humanity ahead of the grim toll of death. | Continue reading
Quirky habits — from the type of pencil to a candle on the desk — can actually help writers focus and summon the creative Muse. | Continue reading
Pulitzer winner Hannah Dreier of the Washington Post learns to trust events and find a deep narrative in a tight timeframe. | Continue reading
Hersey's account of survivors of the atomic bomb is still taught as the ultimate masterpiece in narrative reporting and taut, umvarnished writing. | Continue reading
A seismologist embraces storytelling techniques to relay messages about risk and response to disasters like earthquakes and coronavirus. | Continue reading
Marquee narrative writer Tom Junod delivers a Stephen King-esque mystery with "The Hero of Goodall Park," and rejects one-size-fits-all detachment. | Continue reading