This weekend, The New York Times began running a five-part series from reporter David Rohde, who was kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2008 and remained in captivity for seven months and 10 days. In “Held by the Taliban,” Rohde uses first-person narration to recount the ordeal he faced with Afghan journalist Tahir Luddin and their driver, [...]
Monthly Archives: October 2009
The curious power of storytelling (on the lighter side)
Two video clips recently came in over the transom from readers. Both illustrate the power of storytelling and qualify as good weekend fare for the Storyboard.
The first was forwarded to us by a reader of a post on Gigaom.com that looks at memory and story, with a focus on a career applications. In this first [...]
How Twitter’s @longreads helps readers cozy up to digital narratives
[The first in an occasional series aimed at helping readers find other online resources that focus on narrative journalism.]
Plenty of people are worried about the future of long-form journalism. Not Mark Armstrong. In April of this year, Armstrong started a “longreads” hashtag on Twitter in an attempt to create a community of people who could find and recommend great long-form stories available online. I spoke with him today, and he shared what motivated him to find a Twitter fan base for great online narratives:
“I think right now is really a perfect time for long-form journalism because of the iPhone, because of these apps that are out there. It’s changed the online reading experience to going from little nuggets that you consume between doing other tasks to something you can sit back with to read in a relaxed setting or on a commute. These are really the places where long-form journalism can work.”
Providing this kind of archive has been a part of the mission of our sister site, the Nieman Narrative Digest, and online stalwarts like Gangrey.com for more than three years. And here at Nieman Storyboard, we want to cheer on anything that keeps the narrative nonfiction flame burning. So even if you don’t use Twitter, visit @longreads to find links to stories people are recommending.
The New York Times Magazine and the moral essay
Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine included a personal essay from novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, “Against Meat,” which recounts his struggles with whether or not to eat (or teach his child to eat) other creatures. As I started reading, I wondered what a wunderkind novelist might really add to the “Meat Is Murder” playlist.
The essay [...]
Narrative reporting and the danger of the single story
Current Nieman fellow Hopewell Rugoho-Chin’ono recently pointed out this striking TED talk from July, in which Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks on the danger of letting one narrative define other people or places.
Adichie describes her own middle-class family’s servant in Nigeria and how her mother consistently characterized his family by its poverty. She felt [...]
The future of print narratives
by Tom Hallman |
October 13, 2009
The following comments are taken from a talk given by Oregonian reporter Tom Hallman on September 25, 2009, at the American Association of Sunday and Feature editors. Hallman won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for “The Boy Behind the Mask.”
For reporters, there has to be a change of attitude. Narrative was seen as being all about writing and having plenty of time to do stuff. Narrative reporters were seen as prima donnas. So for younger writers, they’re going to have to tell stories, to find stories that are going to be shorter…
The truth is that we turned out stories that were not worth 40, 60 or 90 inches, where the openings were about impressing other writers more than reaching the readers. But you cannot tell a scenic story in 15 inches. It’s going to require a different kind of narrative: The presence of a writer’s voice but without the heavy first person references. My feeling is unless you’ve witnessed a murder, you don’t need to be in the story. It will take a more disciplined approach to the story, the realization that some things are going to have to go by the wayside. You’re going to have to use quotes, whether you want to or not, to condense the story.
The story calling you: Todd Frankel connects with one St. Louis Cardinals fan
Some events cry out for narrative treatment. Take a look at this wire story about a St. Louis Cardinal fan injured in Pittsburgh and the assist he got from player Albert Pujols. And then read Todd Frankel’s “St. Louis Cardinals fan feels uplifted after fall,” which ran a month later in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
No one assigned the piece to Frankel, but he had watched the game on television that Friday and suspected there might be more to the story. By the following Monday, he still hadn’t seen any new information from beat reporters, so he spent a week getting the Pirates public relations staff to find out if the fan, Tim Tepas, was willing to be interviewed.
Tepas initially agreed to a five-minute conversation. But across several days, five minutes turned into five hours. And it was only at the end, Frankel reports, that Tepas mentioned the letter he had with him the night of his injury.
Environmental narrative: from reindeer herders to sustainable prisons
Between following firefighters in Washington’s Methow Valley and the semi-nomadic Sami reindeer herders of Norway, Sara Joy Steele and Benjamin Drummond are putting together some innovative chapters in their large-scale documentary project Facing Climate Change, in which they examine the world’s changing climate through its effects on local people.
Drummond’s photographs are often breathtaking motion shots [...]
Will KCET’s “Departures” set the pace for community storytelling?
Last week, the USC Annenberg School on Communications and the National Arts Journalism Program hosted a National Summit on Arts Journalism at USC, highlighting five public projects that are exploring new trends in journalism. One of the projects, “Departures,” from Los Angeles PBS station KCET, is focused on community storytelling, with students using images and audio [...]
Choosing Thomas
Our latest Notable Narrative, Lee Hancock’s “Choosing Thomas,” offers readers a spare account of parents who welcome a baby into the world despite knowing that he will not survive. The two-part serial, which ran last month in The Dallas Morning News, eschews the overwrought language of medical drama for a restrained recounting of family tragedy.
Hancock [...]
