A man standing in line at a store, scrolling through Dexter Filkins’ 10,000-word magazine cover story on Afghanistan, for instance—on his Blackberry.

The lede of Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer-winning feature on parents who inadvertently left their sleeping children to die in overheated cars, which he read out loud during his Saturday keynote address . . . then defied a listener not to want to turn the page.

Keller also read Times writer Dan Barry’s 761-word sprint about a man who caught a baby from a two-story drop to save it from burning in a house fire in 2004, a story that stuck with Keller, even though Barry’s use of the words “wafting” and “roiling” felt too much like “writing with a capital W.” (Another Keller pet peeve: long anecdotes that scream, “Look at me! I’m writing!”)

He may not be outright cheerful about the fate of long-form journalism, but he’s hopeful. It’s maybe even time for people to quit asking him how he’s doing “in a hushed tone you use for someone who’s just been through rehab or divorce.”

Keller’s main qualm about narrative writing: There’s just so much bad narrative out there, stories that indulge the writer while ridiculing the subject; articles devoid of rigorous reporting, complexity, rich characters and scenes.

He held up David Barstow’s riveting 5,700-word account of the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller. It worked because it was full of “enlightening ambiguity,” with three-dimensional anti-abortion activists as well as a flawed victim.

Keller shot down what he called three “perceived existential threats” to narrative writing:

• The decline of publishing and economic stresses that have led to newsroom downsizing and the dumbing-down of copy. Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thompson may think there’s no more room for stories that “have the gestation of a llama”—which is a year, according to Keller’s research. But Keller declared au contraire, citing the Times’ collaboration with Pro Publica on doctor-assisted death in a New Orleans hospital post-Katrina, which won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting.

“We’re feeling a little more hopeful about our life expectancy,” he said. “Our ad revenues are beginning to rebound.” (Keller later worked in another jab at the WSJ: “Just because we’re nice to people we might want to partner with doesn’t mean we don’t want to kick the shit out of Rupert Murdoch.”)

• Steve Jobs’ claim that people don’t read anymore (a claim Jobs made in 2008). Keller cited the way his paper’s long-form stories routinely make the list of most e-mailed articles. “Not only has the Web not killed narrative, but it’s pushed it out to people who don’t have home delivery.”

Story link sharing via Twitter and Facebook help, too, as does the Times’ embracing of online storytelling. Here, he showed Tom Bissell’s “Climbing Kilimanjaro” interactive graphic as well as reporter/videographer C.J. Chivers’ “An Afghan Farmer or Bombmaker?” video.

“Jobs said people don’t read anymore two years ago—before he introduced the iPad. . . . But I see the iPad and imitators bringing about a renaissance in the kind of journalism we’re talking about.”

• The notion that newspapers’ authority is falling into disfavor as crowdsourcing and user-generated content trump professional journalism. While it’s good that the conversation isn’t as one-sided as it once was, Keller believes readers get what they pay for from citizen journalism. “If I need my appendix out, I’m not going to go to a citizen surgeon.”

What persuades him that Wikipedia and Digg won’t put narrative out of business is the ability of writers like Filkins to write in a voice that “no algorithm can imitate.”

“The human yearning for great stories, writing them and reading them, is just not so easily extinguished,” Keller said.
 
 
Beth Macy is a 2010 Nieman Fellow for Journalism at Harvard. Macy covered Gay Talese’s keynote speech from the same conference for the Storyboard, and she blogs at intrepidpapergirl.com, where you can find more details on the Boston University conference, as well as her thoughts on life, reporting and narrative journalism.

They were talking about the war, their ailments, what they were fixing for dinner; telling stories about their soldier sons landing on the beaches of Salerno. They were minor characters, unimportant people who wouldn’t merit a news obit in their hometown rag.

But to the young man who would go on to become what Pulitzer-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson described at Boston University’s narrative conference as “the closest we get in our field to God,” the customers of his mother’s dress shop were a revelation.

“They gave voice to the community. . . and you were getting the echoings of the major events of the day. And I thought, ‘By God, these are stories!’ ”

Ordinary characters are the soul of the 78-year-old writer’s work. They were the lifeblood of his Esquire magazine piece, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” considered one of the greatest profiles of the 20th century. It was authored without the subject’s input and made all the better for it because Sinatra’s entourage offered up a more nuanced version of the singer’s truth.

Talese himself was anything but a minor character when he sauntered into the conference Friday to deliver the opening keynote of the university’s 2010 narrative writing powwow—clad in a lime-green tie and a slender khaki suit, handmade by members of his still-tailoring family. He began by pulling his version of a Reporter’s Notebook from his jacket pocket: several five-inch strips of cardboard, which he hand-cuts from recycled shirt boards, carefully rounding the ends.

It was one of the many trade tools he shared during his talk, which veered elegantly between nitty-gritty how-to tips and big-picture inspiration:

• On how to land a job at The New York Times at the age of 21: Talese presented himself to then-managing editor Turner Catledge unannounced, with the only the name of a distant cousin to recommend him. But he was polite and he wore a nice suit and, within weeks, he found himself fetching sandwiches and coffee for the editors as a copy boy. Three weeks later The Times published his first story—a profile of the man who wrote out the newspaper’s headlines in lights on the exterior of a Times Square tower.

The lesson being: “You have to show up in journalism—not by being impolite. . . but by being there rather than e-mailing or making phone calls or whatever the technology of the day is. You start by looking in people’s faces, whether you’re looking for a job, or a story, or [to learn] what’s inside them. No shortcuts.

“Stories are everywhere. All you need is curiosity, the ability to approach strangers and to sell yourself.”

• Being there, part II, which Talese refers to as the art of hanging out. Not unlike dating, the journalist-subject relationship is built on the development of mutual trust, respect and fairness—not exploitation or betrayal and never, ever by telling lies. All of which takes time, patience and a demeanor of sincere curiosity. “If you’re really interested in people, they look at your eyes and they can tell. You can’t fake that.”

• Leave the tape recorder at home. An honorable narrative journalist is looking for the truth of what the subject is trying to say, not the often-garbled, word-for-word replay. If a subject says something that startles him, he parrots it back by asking: What I’m hearing is this. Do you really mean this? “Sometimes I lose something juicy. But I don’t want something juicy; I want the closest I can get to the truth so the person is truly represented by my journalism.”

• On the power of empathy to navigate the fine line between journalistic intimacy and objectivity: For his 1971 book, Honor Thy Father, Talese spent seven years cultivating a relationship with a Mafioso who was desperate to talk to someone about the complicated role he inherited from his father.

“And here’s this Gay Talese who had a kind of sympathy for his situation. He didn’t know how to say no to his father, and yet he was comforted by his prestige. . . . So I had to be very careful.

“I never bludgeon people when I write about them; I don’t do hatchet jobs. There’s a way, with writing that is subtle and careful and thoughtful, to write about anything.”

• On those little shirt board cards: Talese uses them for note-taking, but he also literally draws scenes on them. “I try to think in scenes. Narrative journalism is really storytelling in pictures. So I think visually, and I want to start with a scene.”

He then writes his drafts in pencil, on a yellow-lined pad. “I rewrite a sentence four or fix, six times. . . until I think it’s the best sentence I can write. Then I write another sentence, then a paragraph. Five or six pages might take me a week.

“What I’m trying to do is, I want to achieve the greatest clarity with the minimum of words and the best scenes upon which I can project my prose style, which is understatement.”

One of his favorite stories, a piece about Muhammad Ali’s visit to Fidel Castro in Cuba, was done sans a single interview with Ali. Talese focused on the minor characters surrounding him instead, beginning with a scene featuring Ali’s close friend being hustled by a Yugoslav cigar-seller from the back of a Toyota, with a throng of winking prostitutes looking on.

“You’ve got capitalism in the back of a Toyota in communist Cuba. It’s about Ali, but it’s not.”

It all goes back to the plump ladies who frequented his mother’s store. “They gave me the belief that minor characters can be major, depending on what you do with them.”

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Beth Macy is a 2010 Nieman Fellow for Journalism at Harvard. She blogs at intrepidpapergirl.com.

Better than we used to. To hear photographers tell it, in the old days reporters routinely barged up to the photo desk and assigned a photo as if they were ordering a hot dog.

Photographer Josh Meltzer and reporter Beth Macy

I am guilty as charged. In the old days, the stories were ours to dig up and ours to produce. The photography was an afterthought, albeit an important one.

Individualism was in our journalistic DNA, having been schooled to be Lone Rangers out saving the community’s day with our enterprising ways and insights on the world. Witness Russell Crowe in “State of Play”: driving around in his notebook-strewn car, following leads. His boss has no idea what he’s doing, and the young Web-savvy cub reporter they’ve assigned to help him can write a mean personal blog, but she can’t report her way out of a press conference. Watching that movie, I couldn’t help but wonder:

Where’s the photographer? How about the videographer? Where’s the midnight call from the copy desk wanting to know why the spelling on the print version of the story doesn’t match the one in the audio slideshow?

What I’m here to tell the narrative storytellers out there is this: If your story’s going to get the ride it deserves on the Web and in the newspaper, you have got to learn how to share your toys. And(gulp) even your accolades.

As Charlotte, N.C.-based collaboration consultant Kittie Watson puts it: “Newspaper people are so used to working independently, and they’re also used to getting credit as an individual as opposed to a team.”

Watson, who has trained teams to work collaboratively at newspapers and in other industries, says the most common roadblocks to collaboration are distrust and a lack of appreciation for the work styles of others. Mutual disdain is another unspoken biggie I’ve encountered, especially as it relates to the intra-news divide between print and multimedia people.

By nature, most reporters have a pretty high emotional IQ, able to engender trust from their subjects, though not necessarily their other newsroom colleagues. Some new media people relate to computers but not necessarily people or, for that matter, words—they like to call the newspaper “the dead tree version” of the news (aka, that thing that is, albeit tenuously, still paying their salaries).

“No one will read this; it’s too long,” I remember a multimedia editor at my paper saying, as we put the final touches on a three-part series in 2005 that I had spent eight months reporting—and he hadn’t even bothered to read.

I wish I could say I responded maturely.

“[Expletive] you!” I shouted across the design desk. Had I been holding a stapler, say, instead of a set of page proofs, I would have thrown it at him.

Watson calls this the paradox of team life. “You see the value of working as a team; you’re drawing in people with skill sets you don’t have. But once you’re on the team it drives you crazy.” The more the team leader does upfront to establish goals, deadlines and expectations, the more effective the team will be, she adds.

Below are some project collaboration tips I’ve amassed the hard way, after breaking every rule in the book—but not (yet) my stapler.

Team up as early as possible with a photographer you trust and enjoy scheming with. Photographer Josh Meltzer and I had already worked on three narrative projects together before we began casting our respective nets for subjects who would allow us to show the challenges of caring for our community’s elderly. A few months after each of our earlier projects, we started colluding on what our next one was going to be—and figuring out ways to get our respective editors to assign us together to do them. For the 2008 aging series, between other assignments and often on our own time, Josh started hanging out in churches; I made the rounds to adult care centers and support groups. We identified families as potential subjects before we made our project pitch.  (Hint: If you pitch the story jointly, they’re more likely to let you work together on it.) 

Find a partner with a similar work ethic. Bonus points if you both have a shared predilection for dark chocolate, strong coffee, hoppy beer and spouses who don’t freak out that you’re editing video and copy and pictures together in each other’s home offices at all hours of the day and, when it’s crunch time, late at night.

You’re a writer, and you don’t yet have a favorite photog? I suggest glomming onto one. It’s also a good idea to approach collaboration as you would dating: Begin slow, with smaller stories and mini-projects, so you can work out your interpersonal kinks when the stakes aren’t as high. As journalism moves from the print to the Web, mark my words: The smart photographer who can shoot video and do interviews on top of that is going to be the one ordering the hot dogs. 

But realize that one of you will soon step on the other one’s feet. Josh and I have an unspoken rule: No more than one come-to-Jesus moment per project. For our last series, it came when we were both trying to be flies on the wall at a subject’s family gathering. Because Josh was shooting video, I was unable to interact with family members without getting in his video. It didn’t help that it was a one-time event or that the house was small. We made a vow later to communicate better beforehand, to plot out how we could both be flies on the wall—without one of us feeling stuck on a fly strip. We also coordinated most of our remaining visits to the subjects separately—spread out so they wouldn’t get interview fatigue—and we constantly shared what we were seeing along the way. An interview wasn’t over until I got home and typed an e-mail to Josh explaining what I’d learned from it.

A little competition is healthy. I sent Josh transcripts of my interviews and alerted him when I thought a photo- or video-worthy event was happening. He invited me to watch hours of the video he’d been shooting and included me in what he was doing by asking for sequencing feedback and text for his videos. It didn’t occur to me how much reporting help I was getting from him until I left his house armed with an entire notebook full of new details about our subjects—and new questions to ask. I had been feeling a kind of competition with him, I realized, born out of my own insecurity. “Imagine if I showed up and suddenly started taking pictures, and maybe even did it better than you,” I finally said.

It helps to have an organized editor who believes in advance planning for multimedia projects and isn’t afraid to call the shots as the disparate pieces of the puzzle begin to come together. We try to meet monthly at first, more often as the publication date draws near. We’ve learned from previous projects that it pays to have one Web-savvy copy editor edit the text for both print and online for consistency’s sake. Our rule is, copy is due one month minimum before publication, which is good because the interactives, graphics, videos and audio slide shows are due soon after that, and those people on the team who seem to have been ignoring you during your months of reporting now need you constantly: Where is the data for that interactive graphic? Can you write the “uber graf” (intro copy) for the Web site’s main page? Will you find the animator a good pull-quote? The marketing department needs a photo for the in-house ad. And we still haven’t settled on a series name. . . .

Step back, put the stapler down—and cool it on the expletives. If a team member persistently refuses to play nice, Watson suggests addressing it privately but head-on, asking: We haven’t worked well together in the last couple of projects; what can we do differently this time? Conversely, it’s good to begin a project by discussing the best practices of past projects: What worked well the last time we collaborated together? “Some people may have never had to work collaboratively on a large team before,” she says.

It’s good to check in along the way with your colleagues—even if you think things are going well. “If you can work through a conflict with a person, that leads to a closer relationship,” Watson says. “All the literature says that relationships, especially during times of turmoil, are the most important things going for people. It’s ironic that reporters want readers to listen and understand, but sometimes they have a hard time doing that with their own coworkers.”

As newsrooms struggle to reinvent themselves, experts believe collaboration will become more important than ever—not just with coworkers but also with readers (and potential content-sharers) and even competitors such as neighboring newspapers and radio and TV stations. (Examples: The Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times recently merged their Tallahassee bureaus to save money; PBS’ Frontline now regularly collaborates with The New York Times and The New Yorker.)

Poynter Institute teacher Bill Mitchell, now a fellow with the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, is researching new business models for journalism and sees creative collaborations emerging at the forefront. “In the big picture of the way journalism will unfold,” Mitchell says, “collaboration will be an adjective attached to whatever happens.”