Why it’s great: Deadline reporting of natural disasters is a tightrope walk. Too little drama and events are reduced to factoids that don’t take hold … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: This is our second edition of Shop Class, a new Story Craft feature. The goal is to break down the work that goes into … | Continue reading
Why is it great? My mentor Ron Speer of the Virginian-Pilot liked the opening line of the Bible for Greatest Short Lede Ever. I go … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: Yesterday, we featured contributor Rebecca Boyle’s interview with Washington Post general assignment reporter Avi Selk about his intriguing, elegaic story of the … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: Writing about science and animals (creatures?) can be challenging. It is essential to get it right. It is also essential to make it … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: We have written about Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire profile of Mister Rogers before. The release of the documentary film, and the climate … | Continue reading
Why it’s so great: Tyler is a novelist, not a journalist. But the work of writing is the work of writing. In this New York … | Continue reading
American flag, somewhere over Lake … | Continue reading
The story started in one direction and ended up going in a jarringly different one. But when the time came to write a … | Continue reading
Maryland Capital Gazette deputy editor Rob Hiassen Joshua McKerrow, … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: We are trying out a new feature. Call it writing practice (with a nod to Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones,” where I … | Continue reading
WHY IS THIS SO GREAT? Or … is it? This might cause eyerolls as a “great sentence” pick. It’s not what most would call high … | Continue reading
Editor’s note: The tragic news last week of suicides by creative celebrities Kate Spade and Andrew Bourdain captured headlines and emotions. But despair does not … | Continue reading
Why is it so great? I have come to love bagpipes, perhaps because they conjur special moments in my life, perhaps because they are rooted … | Continue reading
Nigeria is a country rich in stories and in storytelling. Nigerians have long traditions of sharing their testimonies through literature and visual communication. The work … | Continue reading
Why is it great? I read Allison’s “Bastard Out of Carolina” when it was first published, about the time I was covering a range of … | Continue reading
Sex robots, violence in Mosul and the plan for Queen Elizabeth’s inevitable death. Those were among the subjects of the best stories last year … | Continue reading
I’m writing this from a mash-up of a magazine newsroom in Bucharest. The walls are smelly and stained from a recent flood in the apartment … | Continue reading
In the first half of my Nieman Fellowship, a great number of class discussions revolved around analyzing the outcome of the election that brought Donald … | Continue reading
The L.A. Times Book Festival, held over the weekend of April 21-22, is an annual celebration of reading and literary culture in a town often … | Continue reading
Fans of the PBS program “Frontline” are familiar with the news documentary series’ format: its staccato theme music, vaguely reminiscent of a typewriter; the sober … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Fresh from celebrating Earth Day, we’re focusing on the environment and climate change this week at Storyboard. What better than a … | Continue reading
Douglas Haynes spent nearly 10 years working on his book “Every Day We Live is the Future: Surviving in a City of Disasters.” So when it was finally published late last year, he was understandably gratified that his decade-long project following the lives of two Nicaraguan women … | Continue reading
Access is everything when it comes to documentary photography. Of all the challenges that immersion storytellers face in their work, perhaps none is more formidable. Being immersed in people’s personal lives is a visceral experience that brings unique depth and dimension to a sto … | Continue reading
Why is it great? You know how it seems like spring will never arrive, you wait and you wait, and it’s dreary and cold, and then suddenly, in one day, it seems to arrive? In New England they call it the greening, which is a wonderful. The rush of words in cummings’ poem is like [… … | Continue reading
Mother Jones is known for its hard-hitting investigations, like Shane Bauer’s 35,000-word undercover account of working as a private prison guard in Louisiana, which won a National Magazine Award for reporting last year. That doesn’t mean editors at the San Francisco-based magazi … | Continue reading
This week we pay tribute to London, a city that seems like it’s being pulled in two directions: toward its tremendous past and its wildly creative yet uncertain future. As the blogger known as “The Gentle Author” (see post below) says: “London is a very dangerous subject for a wr … | Continue reading
“We walk through life influenced by all sorts of weird stuff,” says “Letter of Recommendation” editor Willy Staley. His column in The New York Times Magazine offers a place to celebrate those obsessions, fascinations and private joys, in a tight 900 words. The brainchild of staff … | Continue reading
Why is it great? Well, first of all, it comes from the great Sarah Lyall, who was the longtime London correspondent for The New York Times. She has such a wonderful voice: charming, funny, intimate. This comes from her book about her years living in England (highly recommended). … | Continue reading
“In the midst of life I woke to find myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London.” The tagline for the wonderful London blog called “Spitalfields Life” resonated deeply with me, and not only because I woke in the midst of life to find myself doing th … | Continue reading
Point of view is a powerful narrative tool. Take, for example, the Newest Americans project that we spotlighted this week. For some politicians and hate-mongerers, immigrants are a scourge. But in this project, immigrants get to tell their own stories of their journeys to America … | Continue reading
You could say there’s a certain symmetry to the fact William Melvin Kelley, the black “lost giant of American literature,” as The New Yorker called him earlier this year, was “rediscovered” by a white writer. After all, Kelley’s first novel, “A Different Drummer,” published in 19 … | Continue reading
Why is it so great? When I was looking for a One Great Sentence dealing with immigration, I was struck by the differences between America’s two presidents named Roosevelt. In the one above, FDR reminds us of our common bond; it is a sentence of inclusion, not exclusion. And what … | Continue reading
When Mexican director Guillermo del Toro won his best directing Oscar recently for “Shape of Water,” he said: “I am an immigrant. The greatest thing our art does is to erase the lines in the sand. We should continue doing that when the world tells us to make them deeper.” Del Tor … | Continue reading
Looking back at this week’s posts, I was struck by the similarities between two of the writers we spotlighted. Ida B. Wells was a brave, pioneering investigative journalist who fought for women’s rights and campaigned against lynching. Born a century later, the writer Roxane Gay … | Continue reading
This year’s Power of Narrative conference seemed to capture the #MeToo zeitgeist, with speakers like author Roxane Gay and the Boston Globe’s Sacha Pfeiffer talking about the uncomfortable truths of sexual abuse. Judging from the line-up at last weekend’s gathering at Boston Univ … | Continue reading
Why is it so great? I found this quote from the absolutely amazing Ida B. Wells after The New York Times righted an old wrong by publishing her obit — almost exactly 87 years after her death. She was so fearless, and fierce. She took on those in power and fought to end the impuni … | Continue reading
When Amy Padnani moved from The New York Times’ news desk to its obits department last year, she was charged with the task of “exploring different ways of storytelling with obituaries.” The seven-year NYT veteran, whose new title was digital editor of obituaries, was up for the c … | Continue reading
This week we celebrated the vernal equinox, this moment of rebirth and hope as we ease out of winter. (Of course, New England got hit with another snowstorm, as if winter was all Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” and “I won’t be ignored!”) So we took one last look at some beautif … | Continue reading
The third-grade students in Misterbianco, a small town at the foot of Mount Etna in eastern Sicily, watched, rapt, as the heavy puppets moved on a school auditorium stage. The kids laughed, open their mouths with astonishment, then clapped. When the curtain fell, some sighed, ask … | Continue reading
This 1961 book has haunted me since I first read it about 15 years ago. Written at the birth of suburbia, and the accompanying conformity of such neighborhoods, it tells the story of a couple who believe they’re different from all their banal neighbors. They’re the “creative” one … | Continue reading
“Have you ever heard the absolute silence?” So asks a young lobsterman on Maine’s Matinicus Island, one of the handful of people who live year-round on the island, 22 miles out to sea and smaller than Central Park. Until I moved to Maine a few years ago, I would have protested th … | Continue reading
As a near-spring Nor’easter hit New England this week, we showcased two recent stories about polar exploration. What intrigued me were the very different perspectives of the writers and subjects. In David Grann’s piece on explorer Henry Worsley, the focus is on endurance and suff … | Continue reading
Adventure narratives thrive on the nearness (or near miss) of doom’s heavy paw, but Eva Holland gives readers something other than a saga of suffering and survival in her recent account of her slog across the frozen sea near the Arctic Circle. Holland, a freelance writer and edit … | Continue reading
I’ve held on to the entire March 20, 2016 “Voyages” issue of The New York Times Magazine because I can’t bear to part ways with Leanne Shapton’s story within, which includes this smart, hilarious sentence. Although Shapton maintains she is not a reporter, but visual artist, her f … | Continue reading
The lede came to David Grann a year before he would complete his epic story and a year after the events it describes: “The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness. Every direction he turned he could see ice stretching to the edge of the Earth.” It was February 2017, and G … | Continue reading
I watched the movie “Network” again the other day and was unnerved by how accurately screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky predicted today’s media and political environment. The line between news and scripted stories blurs, and truth is an old-fashioned concept. Middle-aged journalists wa … | Continue reading
The fog of war is especially thick in Syria, where access is nearly impossible for foreign journalists and accounts of the war often reach the outside world via social media. In the besieged Eastern Ghouta region, a blond, baby-faced teenager posting video selfies is the latest t … | Continue reading