Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. ntil I read “The Good Girls Revolt,” I had no idea that, practically yesterday, women weren’t really allowed to write for magazines. I’m so g … | Continue reading
hen she got the story assignment, ESPN senior writer Elizabeth Merrill could hardly believe it: A Villanova basketball star, Shelly Pennefather, won the 1987 Wade Trophy as the top female player in college hoops, then went abroad for a lucrative professional career. She was belov … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. [dcI’[/dc]m thankful to the editor who introduced me to “Bird by Bird.” Who made it ok for me to consider and then conquer that voice in yo … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. teve Ronald, one of the top editors at the Star Tribune most of the time I was there, smiled at me one day when I apologized for turning in … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. hankful for my mother, who read Greek myths to me and my sister during summer vacations in Cape Cod. We stayed in a bare-bones cottage, but i … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. ’m thankful for my friend Andreea, a brilliant sports journalist in Bucharest, who’s been my advisor and sounding board on all writing-rela … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. am grateful to Knight-Ridder’s Jim Batten who delivered — essentially posthumously — on his promise to provide me “a graduate education in … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. (And full disclosure: I’m one of those people who has a thing about pictures of spiders and snakes, so I erred on an image of a green eyeshad … | Continue reading
ast month, journalist, filmmaker and military veteran Zack Baddorf made a plea, in an essay for Nieman Reports, that more veterans consider careers in journalism and more newsrooms hire veterans. Besides more accurate subject expertise, he wrote, “vets bring with them objectivit … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: This month, we bring you brief reminders from pros around the world about what or who helped them forward in their careers. y editor at the City News Bureau of Chicago, my first real, full-time journalism job, who told me as I stood in the freezing cold on a paypho … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: As promised, we will spend December offering brief daily notes from fellow journalists about something or someone they are grateful for in their career. Here is the starter sampler from Thanksgiving Day. We’d love to hear yours, whenever they occur to you. Because … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: It’s Thanksgiving, that singular and, for many, favorite American holiday. We welcome you to hunt around for stories of the true origins of the day, rather than the many mythical versions framed over the years. Here, we just wanted to spend a moment doing what the … | Continue reading
our centuries ago this year, a privateer named the White Lion anchored off Point Comfort, an English colony in what is now Hampton, Virginia. In its cramped hold, it carried 20 or so human beings kidnapped from an ancient kingdom in Africa by Portuguese slave traders who sold the … | Continue reading
efining a writer’s “voice” has always stumped me. It came up again recently, when a journalism professor put me on speaker phone with her class of college freshmen, who had a straightforward question: What is the difference between personal style, and voice? I did what I usually … | Continue reading
t is widely believed that storytellers can turn almost anything into a good story, which gives them a bottomless well of topics. But even the celebrated ones, like Romanian-Moldovan writer Tatiana Țîbuleac, who won the European Union Prize for Literature this year, can struggle e … | Continue reading
t takes many held-breath pages and held-breath sentences and held-breath thoughts to reach Page 407 of “The Testaments” where, in something of an epilogue to the main story, you come across this line. And then you hold your breath some more, thinking about everything that has com … | Continue reading
he Internet of 2019 is rife with social-media influencers and articles about them. Much of the coverage is fawning and superficial: how to become one, how to make $3,000 per Instagram post, how to make your house look like nobody lives in it, how influencers are the future of me … | Continue reading
e all love a good hero story: Spiderman swooping in to save the day and the girl; Batman brooding towards a better tomorrow; The Avengers joining forces to save the planet. In journalism, we often profile admirable people who have hero-like qualities: leaders who risk all to forg … | Continue reading
t was probably aimed more at the American public than its media, but one message embedded in former Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr.’s recent prepared remarks to a Congressional impeachment panel should have been unmistakable to reporters and pundits: You folks have been burying … | Continue reading
hen Reuters, the venerable global news agency, hired narrative veteran Kari Howard to be its first Storytelling Editor, she brought three principles to guide reporters in the field: Examine closely. Connect with people. Don’t rush. To see those principles come to life, we analyze … | Continue reading
ou no doubt know Reuters, the global financial news giant that is now part of Thompson Reuters. But you might not know that when it launched more than a century ago, it was with the help of a flock of pigeons. According to Tom Standage, author of “The Victorian Internet” (a book … | Continue reading
he Financial Times is not typically linked with literary or narrative journalism. But Robin Kwong, head of digital delivery for the global news organization, is pushing to expand the approaches to traditional news in ways that get disaffected readers to re-engage and to give comp … | Continue reading
hey say every good narrative is a journey. Los Angeles Times reporter Thomas Curwen starts his by looking down. Literally. Here’s the lede to his unexpected story about boots, which is really, as the headline notes, a story about “love, death and leather:” All my life I’ve looked … | Continue reading
n the seven years since Max Linsky founded the Longform Podcast, he has interviewed hundreds of storytelling luminaries: journalists, non-fiction writers and public figures. That includes “Wild” author Cheryl Strayed, author and New Yorker writer David Grann, “This American Life … | Continue reading
unday, December 28, 1986. An ordinary day, much like any other. Except in two operating rooms at Fairfax Hospital in suburban Virginia, where something extraordinary was about to happen. In one lay a young man, his body split from neck to groin. There was a single bullet wound in … | Continue reading
ang out at a journalism workshop, anywhere in the world, and inevitably the subject comes up: We’re being asked to produce more and more, in less and less time. It was no different when I was in Helsinki a few weeks ago, at a workshop for the Union of Finnish Journalists. We spen … | Continue reading
wo days to deadline. You haven’t written a word — just scribbles and a few sad-faced glyphs in the margins of a skeleta outline. You’re surrounded by great raw material —a tower of notes, a transcribed interview, and three books authored by your subject — but your fingers remain … | Continue reading
f there were no Robert Caro, he could not easily be invented. Consider the job description: Commit your career to exhaustive research into the lives of two legendarily powerful men, produce a tome every eight or 10 or 12 years, and repeat. For several decades. Fortunately, there … | Continue reading
ou can almost smell the cedar-hewn totem poles and see them rise from the soil, so evocative is “We Didn’t Stand A Chance,” Joshua Hunt’s personal essay about opioid abuse among Native Alaskans. Opioid abuse is an imposing subject for journalists, and the resulting stories can ri … | Continue reading
n The Armies of the Night (1968), his “nonfiction novel” about the Vietnam War, Norman Mailer enthusiastically rejected the role of absentee author. “I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter needed to be objective and that was … | Continue reading
fter you watch Greta Thunberg’s speech a second or third time, after your heart rate slows, after your guilt subsides (a bit) — read the transcript. Franklin Foer of The Atlantic wrote about the counterintuitive power of her child-like appearance, her “jarring monotone” and her u … | Continue reading
m obsessed with structure. From John McPhee’s sketch for “Travels in Georgia,” which resembles a Fibonacci Spiral, to the lopsided bell curve of the classic story arc, there are examples everywhere to learn from and apply. As Nieman’s own Jacqui Banaszynski often says, “You can’t … | Continue reading
fall to pieces every time I hear a recording of Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” or “Sweet Dreams” — or “I Fall to Pieces” — and it’s not just because of the depth and sweetness and catch in Patsy’s voice. It’s those things, of course. But it’s also the words — how the words work toge … | Continue reading
Journalism’s most idealistic missions are well-known and, despite the sine wave of attacks throughout history and the economic disruptions of the digital age, remain immutable: Give voice to the voiceless. Hold power accountable. Serve the public without fear or favor. I’m adding … | Continue reading
ittsburgh. El Paso. San Bernardino. Las Vegas. Aurora. Orlando. Sandy Hook. Isla Vista. Gilroy. Colorado Springs.” David Montero’s voice trails off. “I just feel like there are obvious ones I’m missing. It’s been a lot…” If Montero stumbles as he ticks off the number of mass sho … | Continue reading
y early August of this year, 253 American cities had been added to the map of mass shootings. For a day or two after yet another event, officials in these communities — police and politicians — rise to prominence on a platform of shock, anger and unity in loss. They appear behind … | Continue reading
y mother’s reverence for education, a solid grounding in middle-school grammar, and a long career in old-school journalism has chiseled me into one of those people who honors language, and tries to be precise — at least when I write as a professional. If I break the rules, I like … | Continue reading
t’s that date again. The one we might even not think about for awhile, or at least send to a distant corner, until it’s upon us with the force and dread of our continued disbelief and altered reality. Is there a date we want to avoid, erase, endure, be past more than this one? Th … | Continue reading
t’s difficult to find a writer who isn’t haunted by a story. It could have been the quest that couldn’t catch a glint in an editor’s eye. Maybe one that got away when sources, or record keepers, wouldn’t cooperate. Or even those that were even published, but didn’t quite cut it; … | Continue reading
he ceremony was held in a gilded, 115-year-old opera house in Bern, Switzerland. A giant faux bear shared the stage with a prominent news anchor, who emceed the event in four languages. Theater troupes performed interpretative readings of journalist stories. And when the winner w … | Continue reading
t was an intriguing bit of crowd-sourcing: Police in Portland, Oregon, said they had “exhausted all resources” in attempts to find relatives or friends of a dead WWII veteran, and was asking the public for help. In response, an enterprise reporter at The Oregonian dove into publi … | Continue reading
n early December, 2016, a fire broke out during a concert at “Ghost Ship,” a one-time warehouse in Oakland, California, that had been turned, mostly illegally and in fits and starts, into a chaotic combination of artists’ collective, makeshift living quarters, and event venue. Th … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: We came across this interview with freelance journalist Barry Yeoman on the Creatives in Conversation site, run by Allison Kirkland, and are so glad we did. Because now we know about one more place to find a community of like-minded storytellers, and because Yeoma … | Continue reading
m not usually struck with writer’s block. I’ve been a journalist for 40 years; when you work for a daily newspaper you are not allowed that luxury. You report, you go back to the office, you pound it out on deadline. But the other day, working on a profile of a famous writer, I f … | Continue reading
he image is stark, hypnotic: a road, framed by towering pines, bathed in the blue light of late night or early dawn. The curve of a guardrail and a pickup truck’s headlights blur in the mist. Superimposed over the scene is a brief message: Over two decades, four women disappeared … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: This week, Nieman Reports magazine takes an unflinching look at domestic violence, and at the challenges and imperative of covering for what it is: not a “crime of passion” but a global social crisis. The magazine explores how the issue is being covered in cultures … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: Four hundred years ago, a Portugueses ship landed at a port in Virginia. Its cargo was “20 and odd” humans — the survivors of a horrendous crossing from Angola to the New World, and the first Africans to be sold as slaves in what would become the United States. It … | Continue reading