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Category Archives: images

Story, interrupted: why we need new approaches to digital narrative

The way we tell stories in print has been mostly the same for some time now. Space constraints and graphic layout have made the narrative flow a broken one. With the advent of digital devices and rich new ways of shaping content, the pressure is on to rethink how we produce and present our stories. [...]

Old story, new media: David Dobbs brings family secrets to the Atavist

We recently talked by Skype with David Dobbs about the mystery that began with his mother’s dying wish. Dobbs’ years of efforts to solve that mystery eventually became “My Mother’s Lover,” which was published last month byThe Atavist.
Dobbs has written at many lengths in several formats: He’s completed three books on science and environmental [...]

Barry Bearak on vigilante murder: “I had to find out why this man was killed”

Our latest Editors’ Roundtable looks at Barry Bearak’s story “Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” from the New York Times. Bearak won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2001 coverage of the war in Afghanistan, and he has just finished a three-year stint in the Times’ Johannesburg bureau. In this email interview about his story, Bearak discusses [...]

Words about pictures: Errol Morris’ digital script

In our latest Notable Narrative, “Did My Brother Invent E-Mail with Tom Van Vleck?,” Errol Morris rejects many of the standard rules of narrative writing.
Best known for his films “The Fog of War” and “The Thin Blue Line,” Morris has more recently been building an eccentric, hybrid form of writing in his work for The [...]

Slow violence and environmental storytelling

How can environmental writers craft emotionally involving stories from disasters that are slow-moving and attritional, rather than explosive and spectacular? This is a particularly pressing question for our age, as the news cycle spins ever faster, as the media venerates spectacle, and as public policy is increasingly shaped around what are perceived as immediate needs.
Think of [...]

What we’re reading: a roundup of tornado stories

The next Editors’ Roundtable, which will run on Monday, looks at a story on the tornado that hit Rainsville, Ala., earlier this month. Unfortunately, tragedy has struck again, and journalists have had to write additional disaster stories about the devastation of Joplin, Mo.
Next week we’ll provide an in-depth look at just the Rainsville piece, but [...]

What we’re watching: musical fracking, award-winning photojournalism, and documentaries from Cannes

From a groovy explainer to a broken contortionist, here are some visual experiences worth a look.

“My Water’s on Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song),” by David Holmes, Andrew Bean, Niel Bekker, Adam Sakellarides and Lisa Rucker from @Studio2oNYU in collaboration with ProPublica. The most entertaining (and catchy!) explainer we’ve seen in a long time. It recalls the [...]

The 2011 Pulitzer Prizes: a sampler of narrative winners

Yesterday afternoon Columbia University announced this year’s Pulitzer Prizes in New York. So many journalists and writers were waiting online for the magic moment that the befuddled Pulitzer site was intermittently unresponsive after the list of winners posted.
There was, however, one problem with the list: It had no links. But we at Storyboard have solved [...]

15th Webby Award nominees depict armed conflict, overseas reporting, and unsettling looks at death by disease or design

The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences recently announced their honorees and nominees for the Webby Awards – kudos for achievement in websites, online film and video, mobile and apps, and interactive advertising. We highlighted a few honorees last week, but today’s focus is on the nominees – those projects still in the running for awards [...]

What we’re watching: highlights from this year’s Webby Awards honorees

For our latest roundup of visual storytelling, we’ve selected some entries from the 15th Annual Webby Awards Official Honoree Selections announced yesterday. The following stories made the first cut but did not cross the bar to become nominees. We thought, however, that among those projects left behind, there were some really engaging pieces we wanted to [...]