Why is it so great? I recently watched the movie “Network” again, and it could have been written in 2018 instead of more than 40 years earlier. This line almost sums up the last presidential election, doesn’t it? And the depravity of the network execs (Faye Dunaway actually gleam … | Continue reading
Jennifer Sahn, executive editor of Pacific Standard, understands why writers sometimes feel frustrated when editors take weeks to respond to their pitches or don’t write back at all. But she wants writers to see the other side, too. “Every editor is now doing the job that two or … | Continue reading
Why is it so great? The writing in this famous passage is so good that George Orwell wrote a parody of it designed to ridicule the bloated writing of his day: “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activiti … | Continue reading
How many journalists regard the Watergate scandal as a love story? Peter Landesman does and that is, arguably, the key to his success as a screenwriter. Landesman was sitting in a Chicago bar when he heard on the television news that Mark Felt, second-in-command at the FBI in the … | Continue reading
Is participatory journalism a good thing? Burkhard Bilger may have pondered that while clinging to the subject of his recent New Yorker profile as the twosome zoomed through Paris on a scooter. Although the seasoned staff writer doesn’t believe in engaging in risky behavior for t … | Continue reading
This week’s One Great Sentence by Susan Orlean, referenced in the headline above, could be my journalism mantra. Yes, we must know about the great events and people of our time. But to closely examine an “average” person and see the greatness there is a gift, and has created some … | Continue reading
Peter Stark’s second-person rendering of a hypothermic near-death experience took its 1997 print headline from the closing quatrain of an Emily Dickinson poem that, depending who you ask, is either an immortal bummer of a ballad to the totalizing anesthesia of grief or a Trojan H … | Continue reading
Why is it great? This line is beautifully constructed, yes, but what stands out for me is the sentiment conveyed. It could be my journalism … | Continue reading
In just over three years of existence, The California Sunday Magazine has emerged as one of the best magazines in the country. The San Francisco-based publication has been a finalist for 10 National Magazine Awards (including for General Excellence, Reporting and Single-Topic Iss … | Continue reading
This could have been a week of love — at least of the commercialized Hallmark variety. But hearts and flowers didn’t prevail for even one day before yet another person with a gun ran amok at a school. On Valentine’s Day. Below, if you can bear it, is some of the best literary jou … | Continue reading
It wasn’t the sensational headline — “The Real-Life Mad Max Who Battled ISIS in a Bulletproof BMW” — that grabbed my attention. It was the next bit. “When Ako Abdulrahman bought a used, bulletproof BMW in 2014, it was the Kurdish soldier’s way of standing out from the crowd, not … | Continue reading
Why is it so great? For Valentine’s Day, we had to go with One Great Sentence on love (even if the holiday makes you go harrumph). This one is a doozy. It’s uplifting — love makes you brave enough to come out of hiding and reveal yourself. But it’s also complex, because the use o … | Continue reading
William Langewiesche is known to readers of The Atlantic and Vanity Fair as a kind of Jack London figure, a writer of sturdy, authoritative tales of modern life at the moral, technological and geographic margins. Among his subjects have been the U.S. presence in Baghdad; the bla … | Continue reading
This is a very “audio” week on Storyboard, and I’d like to have more of them. Storytelling has so many forms, and sometimes we hear stories better than we read them. It’s almost like you’re a child and listening to bedtime stories again, the familiarity of it. In this case, one o … | Continue reading
Jay Allison is a pioneer in the world of radio storytelling. Nearly 25 years ago, he founded Atlantic Public Media, which in turn birthed WCAI, the public radio station for Cape Cod and its surrounding islands; the Public Radio Exchange (PRX); and Transom.org, an indispensable to … | Continue reading
Why is it great? The great presidential biographer Robert Caro has proved countless times that he understands the power of a short sentence. His description of the instant in Dallas that changed LBJ’s — and America’s — life forever is told in just six words “There was a sharp, c … | Continue reading
You might not think of consumer columnists as narrative storytellers, or investigative reporters. But journalist Dave Lieber, “The Watchdog” for the Dallas Morning News, is a big fan of the creative-writing techniques of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and says the bigge … | Continue reading
This week on Storyboard we spotlighted some wonderful journalism (and songwriting) about immigration. I know I might be biased, because I spent the bulk of my career at the Los Angeles Times, but I think it has produced unparalleled literary journalism on the subject. For instanc … | Continue reading
I remember first hearing Francisco Cantú’s story sometime last year, spooling out from my car speakers as I wound through mountain curves many hundreds of miles from the border he writes about. He was telling a story of his time in the Border Patrol, a job he took after college t … | Continue reading
Why is it so great? Springsteen’s eternal theme of the runaway American dream runs through this song and the entire album it’s on, the Nebraska-esque “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” This song could be the immigrant’s version of any song on “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” with its enduri … | Continue reading
Stories about anti-immigrant raids and deportations can take on a sheen of the generic: a series of action-movie snapshots coupled with thousand-foot views of policy, statistics and ideology that tackle the facts but miss the eye-level truth. As conversations about undocumented i … | Continue reading
This week we spotlighted the storytelling of the Middle East on Storyboard. Too often the coverage is of the bird’s-eye-view variety, either because of dangerous conditions or cultural differences. But these posts highlight the humanity that kind of reporting misses: the little m … | Continue reading
Six years ago, in the early days of the Syrian uprising, a group of anti-government activists in a Damascus suburb decided to start their own newspaper. “At that time, the international media couldn’t have good access to Syria to cover the news, and a lot of things were happening … | Continue reading
Why is it great? This story was part of the late writer’s Iraq coverage that won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. | Continue reading
It isn’t often that you open a book and leap into your childhood. A wave of nostalgia washed over me as I flipped through New York-based photographer Ayesha Malik’s book, Aramco: Above the Oil Fields. Her Pakistani father was an expat working for the oil giant Saudi Aramco in Sau … | Continue reading
The words “lyricism” and “Ireland” seem entwined. One of my favorite poets is W.B. Yeats (oh, his “Stolen Child”). More recently, the playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh, born in London of Irish parents, has stunned me with his beautiful writing, which reaches the peak of … | Continue reading
Few topics are as misunderstood by the media as mental health. Despite advances in treatment paradigms, reporters too often fall back on dated stereotypes, distort the nature of illnesses and recovery and rely on shaky sources. Those are some of the reasons behind the WHYY Behavi … | Continue reading
Why is it so great? This is not only one of the best one-word sentences in a memoir, it’s also possibly the only one-word chapter in a memoir. And the final chapter, to boot. So it also ranks up there in the best-last-line sweepstakes. (My personal favorite is the one in “Little … | Continue reading
If Dan Barry has a beat, it is humanity — humanity as it reckons with its triumphs and travesties, and, sometimes, its profound secrets. The veteran reporter and columnist for The New York Times documented pivotal moments in metropolitan lives in his early-2000s-era “About New Yo … | Continue reading
This week’s One Great Sentence, by the novelist John Cheever, has stayed with me all week. It’s an existential matter for writers and artists of all types, the battle between the introspective and mostly solitary process of creating and the desire to be part of the real world. Bu … | Continue reading
“The Uncounted,” Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal’s exhaustively reported investigation into the scale of civilian casualties in the U.S.-led coalition’s fight against ISIS, begins, like many disaster narratives, with a banal domestic scene. But in this case, the humdrum opening doesn’ … | Continue reading
In August 1991, I read John Cheever’s journal excerpts published in The New Yorker. I was a 19-year-old college dropout, a waitress, and in the half hour before starting my shift, I sat outside my local library, electrified by this candid, sordid, gorgeous prose. Wow! What a mess … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Weil, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Outside, says she doesn’t write about “super important” things. But her warm and captivating voice has animated every subject she’s chosen to tackle over her 22-year career writing for magazines. An inveter … | Continue reading
Friends sometimes tell me to take off my rose-colored spectacles, but I was determined to start out 2018 with a bit of inspiration on Storyboard — from some of our top literary journalists, and some of the narrative conferences and workshops on tap this year. As Pamela Colloff s … | Continue reading
The Power of Narrative: Telling True Stories in Turbulent Times March 23-25 Boston University Boston, Massachusetts It looks like the longest-running narrative journalism conference is making a point of spotlighting great female journalists and writers this year. The speakers inc … | Continue reading
This line comes from the last of Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and it is a sometimes terrifying poem, full of fiery images like this striking one: The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. Th … | Continue reading
As audience development editor at Longreads, it’s my job to encourage readers to find and share unforgettable stories. Stories that help us understand this world. Stories that imagine a better one. Reading and sharing some of the best narrative journalism out there was the most u … | Continue reading
Yes, it’s the time of year to look back on the good things that happened this year (and try to forget the bad, if only for a little while). First off: John McPhee wrote a book that gives lesser beings like us tips about the writing process. That has to be worth at least a […] | Continue reading
John McPhee’s great subject has always been work. From his first book, “A Sense of Where You Are,” which came out in 1965 and portrays basketball star and Rhodes Scholar Bill Bradley, to “Uncommon Carriers” (2006), with its truckers and its tugboat captains, he has long been obse … | Continue reading
It’s hard to cull just one sentence from Sedaris’ embedded reporting on being a helper at Santaland, a place he describes as “a real wonderland” … | Continue reading
Recession, shuttered publications, the rise of online media — Paul Tullis has weathered it all as a freelancer for the better part of 24 years. What hasn’t changed: Story idea is king. What has, in Tullis’ view, is the level of pre-reporting editors expect in pitches. “You have t … | Continue reading
The final half of this week’s One Great Sentence has stayed with me: “Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.” It’s about the winter landscape, but couldn’t it also apply to the craft of storytelling? When we pursue a story, often we’re motivated by this desire … | Continue reading
Freelance journalist and essayist Liana Aghajanian has hopscotched around the globe, reporting on stories as far apart as the first record store in Mongolia, an Arizona man looking for “the holy grail of botany,” and the Muslim undertakers of East London. A reader who follows her … | Continue reading
Why is it great? A few weeks ago I went to an exhibit of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings in Seattle (a strange experience for someone who lives half an hour from the places he painted in Maine), and I was struck by the poetry of his observations in the notes next to the artworks. Like t … | Continue reading
When Jack Hitt got an assignment to write about Jerry Foster, a daredevil helicopter pilot who worked for a TV station in Phoenix in the ’70s and ’80s, he thought he had a plum adventure story. It turned out to be much more – Hitt argues that Foster essentially invented live-act … | Continue reading
It was Poetry Week on Storyboard, which is pushing the envelope a bit for a site that explores the art and craft of narrative nonfiction. But I would argue that literary journalists can learn a lot from poets, especially their economy of form, where every word, every beat of the … | Continue reading
Just a stone’s throw away from the high-finance hustle of the World Trade Center in NYC, I came across a simple blue-and-white sign on a glass door that read: The Poets House. The first thing I noticed was the peacefulness that embraced me upon opening the door. I smiled at the w … | Continue reading
Why is it great? This gorgeous definition of poetry could easily apply to literary journalism. Some of the best stories aren’t about something we’ve never heard of, but illuminates something we pass every day unseen in our rush to and fro. This could serve as a tip for journalist … | Continue reading