South Carolina reporter Chiara Eisner used public records and sensitive sourcing to tell stories of people who execute condemned prisoners. | Continue reading
Washington Post columnist (and aspiring musical theater composer) provides a short course of what made a Sondheim song-story work. | Continue reading
Washington Post columnist used her family's pie-making history to explore a larger story about the history — and loss — of American pie. | Continue reading
The origins and myths of American Thanksgiving, and turkey, are probed in a conversation about a story by a Washington Post journalist. | Continue reading
A reporter-photographer team from The Washington Post spent a week watching the vaccine politics that divided a family, and a nation. | Continue reading
An editor's questions led a data reporter at MinnPost to cover new territory in a well-trod event — and they event made music! | Continue reading
Current events often warrant looking back to where they came from and asking about future implications. | Continue reading
A 4-year-old offers her writer mother a bedtime lesson in the essentials of narrative. | Continue reading
Reporting with senses can bring universal language to your writing. Smell is intriguing for its connection to memory and emotion. | Continue reading
few words on social media. I’m not going to get mired in the meta-mess that is Meta, the New&Never Improved Facebook. That’s well-trod territory. I admire and envy friends — known and cyber — who swear off. (Although I am baffled by those who switch to Instagram, arguing that it … | Continue reading
When you pitch a story, you have to pitch yourself. What skills, experience, passion do you bring to a project that makes an editor pick you? | Continue reading
John Woodrow Cox of The Washington Post spent five months following the physical and emotional journey of a 5-year-old paralyzed by a gunshot. | Continue reading
Ocean Vuong's novel, "On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous," is an elegy to why we write. | Continue reading
An author and essayist navigates the click-bait world of black-and-white polemics and the complex world of competing thoughts. | Continue reading
Editors who teach offer quick and creative musings on finding the center of a story. Think porn, rock 'n roll, and fever dreams. | Continue reading
Three pros who took their reporting, writing and editing chops to the classroom explain how they help other writers find the nut of a story. | Continue reading
Three veteran journalists who now teach at the college level share short-course ways they guide students through ledes and nuts. | Continue reading
h, the nut graf. I had to mentally brace myself to write about it. After all these years, it’s still the hardest thing I write. I tell students that all the time. I want them to know it’s not just them. Here’s an outline of how I teach it in Reporting 1 at the University […] | Continue reading
Pulitzer-winning writer, author and teacher Tom French coaxes meanings out of reporters by asking questions, then listening. | Continue reading
A freelancer who teaches college journalism borrowed and then adapted a five-sentence template to teach students how to write a nut graph. | Continue reading
y assignment was to answer this question: “Do you have a method for teaching or guiding what we often call the “nut graf?” The request came from Jacqui Banaszynski, editor of Nieman Storyboard. She and I are old newsroom cellmates. Yet she dared ask me, an ancient narrative edito … | Continue reading
A highlighter and printout of stories can help writers and editors diagnose writing patterns and improve copy. | Continue reading
A culture and lifestyle writer who feels intimidated by Twitter has found ways to use it for finding fresh story ideas and sources. | Continue reading
n late August, Jim Tankersley, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, learned he was going to be the pool reporter following President Biden to Dover Air Force Base for the arrival of the bodies of 13 service members, the last to die in a 20-year war with Afghanistan … | Continue reading
Kim Cross used smart pre-reporting, creative hustle and a night on a trampoline to find freedom in a deadline essay assignment. | Continue reading
Esquire politics blogger attacks indifference to COVID-19 deaths with creative twists on classic writing techniques. He also knows history. | Continue reading
The Pulitzer Prize winner started asking for entry to a COVID-19 ward in April 2020. Eighteen months later, she got in. | Continue reading
Ed Yong of The Atlantic, who won a Pulitzer for his COVID coverage, takes the same approach when talking to scientists or frontline nurses. | Continue reading
A respiratory therapist who holds the hands of dying patients journaled her frustration into a cautionary tale about COVID denial. | Continue reading
Sheeler won the 2006 Pulitzer in feature writing for the profile of a Marine major who supported the families of fallen soldiers. | Continue reading
Writer Larissa MacFarquhar is drawn to stories that post questions without clear-cut answers. | Continue reading
A writer listens to her native Tamil and other languages to bring new rhythms, structures and metaphors to her writing. | Continue reading
Now an editor at The Washington Post, Lisa Grace Lednicer critiques an emotional essay she wrote in the wake of 9/11. | Continue reading
Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic uses a diary as the through line for a story about a shared loss, and splintered grief, from 9/11. | Continue reading
A memoirist reflects on what she learned about writing during Sept. 11 to uncover story possibilities during the pandemic. | Continue reading
Writing scholar and coach Roy Peter Clark reflects on lessons learned from helping his cousin, Theresa, tell her 9/11 survival story. | Continue reading
Author Jessica DuLong considered pointillistic art and readers' powers of abstractions to write of the largest maritime rescue in history. | Continue reading
As the chatbot romance between a grieving man and his dead fiance ends, it leaves questions about the role of A.I. in our future. | Continue reading
The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I. The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more? By JASON FAGONE | July 23, 2021 6:00 a.m. (EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of three annotated chapter … | Continue reading
Text exchanges between a grieving man and his dead lover become an exploration of the potential and problems of artificial intelligence. | Continue reading
Wall Street Journal sports reporter Ben Cohen saw the gem of a profile in the notes of another story, and followed an unlikely Olympic journey from afar. | Continue reading
Active verbs are the hallmark of visual writing. But sometimes passive is exactly the right choice. | Continue reading
At 72, Chuck Haga still retreats to the northern Minnesota woods when he can to ponder the stars, write essays, and meet other campers. | Continue reading
Freelancer Max Blau persisted to land an investigative project fellowship, then a staff reporting position | Continue reading
To gain support for a local reporting partnership with ProPublica, editors say reporters should focus on impact for their communities. | Continue reading
A reporting trip to Antarctica required writer Craig Welch to imagine a world as it had been and would become. | Continue reading
Brooke Jarvis' 2018 piece in The New York Times Magazine was one of many examples of how climate changed showed itself. | Continue reading
On the 76th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Hersey's deeply reported narrative still holds lessons in writing and humanity. | Continue reading