Luckily for this site, the NFB has been up to other things that fit more cleanly into Storyboard’s mission. They got viral attention this winter when the release of their documentary “Pink Ribbons, Inc.” coincided with the maelstrom around the Susan G. Komen for the Cure/Planned Parenthood funding controversy.

But as “BLA BLA” indicates, some of the NFB’s most innovative work is in experimental storytelling, such as one new interactive documentary (yes, interactive documentary) with first-person narration from the point of view of … a bear. Set in the Canadian Rockies, you can enter “the uniquely modern territory where the wired world ends and the wild one begins.” Meet “Bear 71.”

Kony 2012

Along with everyone else, we’ve spent the last week watching the drama surrounding “Kony 2012,” a megaphone-ready campaign calling for the capture of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. Storytellers have been talking for some time about how stories get told, by whom, and in what context. And “Kony 2012” has hit a nerve, not only with photojournalists and political writers but also with with Ugandans themselves, several of whom took to open protest before screenings around the country were canceled this week.

For the record, the filmmakers have gained support for their viral approach from some journalists, including The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof; while outlets like Foreign Policy and writers like Dinaw Mengestu argue that it is fundamentally flawed. We’re fairly sure, however, that fodder for discussions of appropriating or benefiting from someone else’s misery has never before been as abundant as it is in this video from Invisible Children, which includes footage of a traumatized child as a lead-in to an extended dance performance by not only the filmmakers but what appears to be an entire high school.

On a less controversial front is a CNN story that offers minimal fanfare and hints at tremendous complexity. Alan Moore kicked his first extra point almost 50 years ago in high school, then headed off to Vietnam. After he was laid off from construction work in the Great Recession, this grandfather of five still dreamed of playing college football. And so he did. This extraordinary profile of a 61-year-old kicker for the Faulkner University Eagles includes inspiring elements without becoming manipulative.

Somewhere between “Kony 2012” and CNN’s profile of Alan Moore sits “The Road We’ve Traveled,” Davis Guggenheim’s video summing up President Barack Obama’s first term. Davis, known for his policy-focused documentary work, produced the film on assignment for Obama’s re-election campaign. News footage combines with heartwarming photos and narration by Tom Hanks as Guggenheim works to build a very simple narrative from the roller-coaster ride of a presidential term.

Guggenheim’s latest is not, and is not meant to be, journalism. But it’s useful to look at the way that these three videos – each of which was designed to evoke emotion in millions of viewers – approach their narrative arcs, and the degree to which complicating information is adopted or avoided. However necessary a strong grasp of narrative is for effective policymaking and good reporting, the question of “how simple is too simple?” seems destined to dog us for a good while longer.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll refer to linear narrative as a story with a beginning, middle and end. Think of it as going to the theater to watch a movie. You go into the room and the movie starts. You might be watching “Memento,” a traditional nonlinear screenplay, in which the movie goes forward and backward in time. But as a part of the audience when you see “Memento,” you go to the theater and watch a story, without interruption, regardless of how the story is told. It unfolds for you in a linear fashion.

Likewise, when describing nonlinear narratives, I’m not referring to their timelines but to interruptions of the story experience, as if you went to the movies to watch “Memento” and were interrupted in the middle by a documentary about the film itself.

Interrupting stories

Take a minute to think about a great lecture you’ve attended sometime in the past. What made it a brilliant storytelling experience? Apart from content and the speaker’s ability to deliver a good story, a good lecture is a linear flow of information, with a beginning, middle and an end. Those are the basics of a story; we’re familiar with them from an early age.

Let’s look a little deeper. At the beginning of a lecture, the speaker will introduce a subject step by step. Most talks these days are accompanied by visual aids, with the speaker sharing either the key points of her talk or visual information that clarifies the knowledge that is being shared.

Now imagine yourself in a lecture hall. The room is packed and the upcoming talk is the one you came to hear. The subject is something you are interested in, and the speaker is the best in the field.

The lights go out; the audience is quiet except for a cough here or there. The speaker takes the stage with an ovation.

She begins by introducing her subject. The speaker metaphorically takes the audience by the hand, strolling around. All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence – “and so we can conclude that…” – the speaker stops. She then says, “You know what? I’ve just remembered that I have this amazing picture somewhere on my computer that relates to this subject.” She finds the picture and displays it for the audience. It does make sense, and the picture has added another layer of information. But then, after she shows the picture, the speaker starts talking again, right where she stopped the sentence before.

Now imagine that this talk, the one you and the rest of the room were really looking forward to, continues to be interrupted again and again. The speaker keeps throwing in stuff that relates to the subject and the story, but with no regard for the interruptions.

The storytelling would be awful. The narrative would be a mess.

Here’s a graphic visualization of such a narrative:

This example likewise illustrates how we present or consume news on most distribution channels right now. In print, because of physical space constraints that pages impose and the way graphic design copes with them, the presentation and consumption of a story become a nonlinear narrative experience. Pictures, text, captions, etc., all relate to the story being told, but the way the bits of the story are laid out reinforces its nonlinearity.

Consider the following layout of a magazine story. It has some of the content you would expect from a magazine: flowing text in columns, pictures with captions, graphics and a box with a related story.

Every aspect of this story is related to and enhances the information being communicated. But since we are presenting all of this content on eight pages, some compromising must be done. Graphic designers must find the best way to make this story presentable, readable and compelling. Working within the physical boundaries of pages, the text is set in columns and flows from one spread to another without much control over where it breaks from one column to the next, from one page to the next, or even from one spread to the next.

Furthermore, in order to lay out all of a story’s elements, designers must ensure that a graphically “important” element is presented on each spread. This means that the pictures of the story will be placed on the spreads to favor visual enhancement. The same happens with the secondary story and the graphic in our example.

What does this mean for the reader’s linear narrative experience?  Since every bit of the story is laid out across the spreads, pictures and other relevant information will rarely be presented in the best place for the storytelling experience. Readers will have to stop reading the main text to absorb the picture information, or will have to read further until they find a “safe” place to stop reading the main text and thereafter read the secondary story, etc. The narrative is a broken one, and representing it in a graphical way would resemble the previous representation of the bad lecture.

On most websites, sadly, the same nonlinear experience takes place. Sites present stories using a top picture and a scroll-down text column. If the story has secondary pictures and texts, these items are presented alongside the long column of text or, in the case of secondary pictures, by making the top picture a slideshow. Even on the iPad, most publishers approach tablets using a print or a web paradigm.

Optimizing interludes

It doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s go back to the first example and imagine a good linear narrative for a lecture. Here’s a graphic visualization of what it might look like:

In a good storytelling experience, a linear one, each item that exists to aid the main story is placed in an ideal location. For example, imagine a story about a family facing economic stress. Suppose it includes a video of a family member talking about how having been fired made things worse. In a linear narrative experience, the video would only be presented to the audience at a certain point in the main narrative. When telling about how the family was facing stressful problems not only because they lost their savings but also because a family member got fired, that would be the place to show the video. Think about it as a part of a lecture: “Let’s see a video on why losing her job only made things get worse.”

The main narrative of a story can be imagined as a string of scenes or episodes, like a TV series, where every added item is placed either at the beginning or the end of each episode. Every episode is structured so that it can be interrupted without breaking the narrative thread.

With the story broken into scenes or episodes, you can then place additional material in the intervals. You can break the blocks to have the intervals where you want them – before and after scenes, wherever it makes perfect sense to add the story-enhancing media. Clever tricks exist in television to cope with the temporal “amnesia” that audiences face on consuming a story in sequential blocks. You can use similar solutions to create a linear flow, once you’ve used the spaces between scenes for added material.

Digital narratives

But how can we do this on a digital distributing device? The most important aspect of a story is the subject of that story, the content. It follows that if we want to change the way we tell our stories, we’ll have to start with that basic concept. Every storyteller must first come up with the content. She then will be able to break the story into blocks, or episodes of content – not only for the main narrative, but also for the added material. For each episode, the storyteller must decide on the best technique to communicate her story. In a digital narrative, storytellers aren’t obligated to choose text over audio, or pictures over video. They must choose the best way to communicate each part. The choice should flow from the content itself. Added material for a story must be presented in a way that can either be fully explored by a reader or moved through without losing the narrative thread.

The final linear narrative will be a flow of content, presented using every digital tool available. Using a TV series season approach, the storyteller will present her story, one episode after another, in a way that will not break the flow of the narrative, regardless of the technique used for each episode. Each part will be placed after the previous one, at an exact point in the story that best maintains flow. Intervals will be used for added material. Readers will be able to choose the amount of time they take to consume each episode of the narrative.

We need to radically change the way we tell our stories. It doesn’t make sense to keep using old paradigms on new devices. Our main goal is to learn the best way to tell a story and stop using techniques that worked only for one platform (be it text and pictures in print, video on TV or audio on radio). With digital distribution we can mix all these techniques in a way that enables our storytelling. Those of us in newsrooms also need to change the way we plan, produce and present our stories.

Here are a few iPad applications that do a great job nailing this kind of storytelling:

France24’s “Rape in Congo: Peace Violated” is more than a year old. It comes from the early days of the iPad but provides a nice example of a linear narrative. You can see the TV documentary roots of this application, but it also draws from the feel of a magazine.

The narrative begins with examples of rape stories and allows users not only to read information but also to hear, firsthand, stories from the victims themselves. Using strong pictures to set the mood, every now and then readers encounter audio or video. Text introduces each chapter of the story.

Users learn about the rapes, the medical and psychological support given to victims, and the medical and judicial efforts to find and punish rapists. There’s a look inside a court hearing on a rape, a visit to a Congolese jail and, finally, a look at how things are outside the big cities. This application delivers a powerful, terrible story.

The second application I want to highlight is “Money & Speed – Inside the Black Box,” by VPRO (a TV broadcaster) and Catalogtree (a data visualization studio), both from the Netherlands. This app takes us inside the finance world and the fastest and deepest U.S. stock market plunge ever.

“Money & Speed” uses video as its core narrative medium, but what’s really innovative about its storytelling approach is the ability to stop the video and explore interactive data graphics about the stock market plunge. Every time a new data set is discussed on the video interviews, the app allows readers to open and explore it. Yet if someone doesn’t want to explore the data visualizations, the video chapters by themselves suffice to tell the story.

The project that comes closest to the approach I’m advocating is the Atavist, a publishing house for long long-form articles (described as 6,000-30,000 words). The Atavist offers the possibility of enriching a narrative with supplementary text, pictures and videos.

These added elements can be presented in a linear fashion – on a screen by themselves – or within the text via highlighted words. This approach to producing (mostly) text-based narratives allows for a wonderful storytelling experience on a digital device.

Let’s take one of the Atavist’s articles, “Lifted,” as an example: the tale of one of history’s most elaborate heists and the race to unravel its mysteries. The storytelling experience begins with a video of the robbers in action, filmed by surveillance cameras on site. The video helps to set the mood of the story. Swiping the page, the user can start reading the article. Important relevant details – such as a Google map with the locations mentioned in the article – appear when users touch a word in the text related to the information.

The story is written in chapters (episodes), and between these chapters at strategic points, users are presented with pictures related to the previous chapter. In “Lifted,” the storytelling is enhanced with videos, related texts and pictures. Users can also opt to hear the author narrate the story.

The final app I want to share is “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore,” by Moonbot Studios. A simple kids’ story about people who love books and the way books return their love, this application offers a digital narrative approach that goes beyond what is usual on iPad book apps. Each page is filled with a big picture and some text. Most of the pictures offer interaction and animation.

Furthermore, sometimes users must interact with the picture and discover small “secrets” in order to turn to the next page. At other times, such as with a playable piano, the interactivity on a picture is there just for user enjoyment and does not directly advance the narrative. This moving story is filled with wonderful illustration and animation, and is one of the greatest examples of thinking outside the box when it comes to digital storytelling for the iPad.

The fact that a few storytellers have taken advantage of digital opportunities to structure great linear narratives that flow – narratives whose possibilities we could only have imagined in the past – should encourage us all to rise to the possibilities of these new platforms.

Pedro Monteiro is a graphic designer who has worked in the publishing business for more than 14 years, mostly at the Portuguese newsmagazine Visão. Named one of Businessweek’s 21 Heroes of Data Visualization in 2009, he blogs at Digital Distribution and is a consultant with Innovation.

Monteiro would like to thank Barry Sussman for his edits, Vasco Ferreira for his “lecture” insight, and Joana Maciel for her assistance with this article.

Dobbs has written at many lengths in several formats: He’s completed three books on science and environmental topics. He’s contributed similarly-themed pieces to The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine. He blogs for Wired at Neuron Culture. But for this particular story, he ended up turning to the new world of long-long-form publishing, working with Atavist co-founder Evan Ratliff to realize his 12,000-word account of a World War II affair kept secret for five decades. In these excerpts from our talk, he discusses the long struggle to find the right way to tell his story, what rich media added to his words, and the importance of a unifying question.

Did you ever pitch “My Mother’s Lover” to some of the traditional outlets you’ve written for, or did you know you wanted to do something new with it?

I didn’t know right away, because when I conceived of the story in February 2002, there were not these alternate outlets – there were only conventional print options. My first thought was to write a book about it. I had just finished “Reef Madness,” my third book, and this story grabbed my attention – this story about my mother and her secret World War II lover.

I ran it past my agent and my editor at Knopf. My editor wasn’t wild for it. My agent said, “You should do this book someday, and if you have to do it now, you should do it now.” But as a career thing, it didn’t quite seem right. So I didn’t pursue it then, but I kept doing the research off and on, partly because most of the people involved were quite old, and I was afraid all the sources would pass away.

Then more recently, I pitched it in different forms to a couple places. I pitched a story to Wired that was mainly about the recovery outfit of the government, which is now called JPAC – they’re the ones that go find the bodies of dead soldiers going all the way back to the Revolutionary War. So it was going to be a story about that, with my mother’s story used to hang some human interest on it. They didn’t quite bite.

I sent a 7,000-word memoir to the New Yorker, and they chewed on it a little bit but ultimately passed. Both of those were in the last three years or so.

Was this your first experience doing something not only non-sciencey but also this personal?

It was the first time I’ve written something really personal at this length. It’s not the first time I’ve written about something other than science, because I really first started writing about science eight years ago, and wrote mainly about environmental things before that. I’d written other kinds of stories, but this was definitely a different sort of thing.

Not to suggest that your other work doesn’t make use of storytelling, but this piece relies very heavily on narrative. You have to recreate your mother’s relationship with her lover as well as her relationship with you. Did you have to develop any techniques or skills you hadn’t used before?

I wouldn’t say skills, but I had to approach writing differently. I always try to put a huge weight on story. I think hard about voice, about distance from the story, and about structure.

In a sense, the problems here were very similar to the problems I faced in writing long articles about science. I think readers will carry a lot of weight in a piece about science if the track in front of them is alluring, if the story is interesting. I think the problems were the same sorts of problems I’d dealt with before: What is the right distance for me to have from the story? What do I leave out?

That’s always the hardest thing to decide in a story. There were tons of things that I left out of this story.

You mentioned in an email that the digital long-form format permits some alternative narrative strategies. What strategies were you thinking of in terms of that?

I wouldn’t say it affected my writing strategies hugely. There were places where I could lean on things. There were some freedoms there – a few things you wouldn’t have to describe as much as you would have to normally, but I didn’t try to take advantage of those in the writing.

The story ended up in two formats. It ended up on the iPad, which is a very rich multimedia experience and can add a tremendous value – and does in this case, I’d like to think. But it’s also in a Kindle single, which is a more conventional format. So I had to write it basically as a story that would have a few photographs along with it, but not a whole ton. And in that sense I had to write it as I would for just about any print publication. The value added by the iPad was extra-textual, if you will.

For our readers who won’t have seen the story on the iPad, can you talk about what that rich media included?

The Atavist has its own software for creating these stories, its own kind of content management system. What it does is that you can open a story on an iPad and just read it clean text all the way through. It’s very easy to read. You swipe sideways to move one chapter to the next. You slide your finger up to read down on the page. But there’s a little button on the screen that lets you turn on the extra elements, like the timeline and bios for characters.

The larger thing is that it allows for as many photos as you want. There’s a passage that describes two kinds of planes – a B-17 and PBY – that the rescue crews used. My mother’s lover was a flight surgeon in World War II, in rescue crews that got airmen who had been shot down out of the Pacific. They would land on the water and pick them up or drop a boat to them. I can describe those planes in the text, but in the iPad version, you can punch some links and see pictures of the planes, or in one case link to a web page that shows pictures of how the B-17s can survive extraordinary damage in the air and still keep flying home.

Dobbs' mother with her lover, Angus

What the Atavist does that I like a lot is put photographs or some visual element between chapters. When you swipe to go from chapter 1 from chapter 2, you have a picture there, or if you want, a video or dynamic illustration. In this case, most of the between-chapter elements are just photographs.

But at one crucial point, about halfway through, I describe these rescue crews of my mother’s lover, whose name was Angus. They found a film, a training film for one of these rescue services – squadrons, they were called. The Atavist folks also found a separate audio file from an oral history, in which one of Angus’ squadron mates, someone who was in his squadron, described the history of the squadron and some of the things that happened in it, including an attack by Japanese soldiers on the squadron’s barracks on Iwo Jima.

So they laid that audio over the training film, and I find it creates a powerful element right smack in the middle of the story. I’ve described in the text the sort of dangers that the crews underwent, and what their experience was like as they followed MacArthur’s forces across the Pacific toward Japan. But on top of that textual description, there’s this little movie they made, with film from one source and audio from another. It’s only about three minutes long, but the mix is very powerful in bringing home to the reader in a visceral way, if you will, what was going on out there in the Pacific.

So here’s a love story about a man who is lost in the war and in a lot of danger. I made a decision not to play up that part of it too much but just get it in there. The film sort of amplifies that in a graceful way and also gives the reader a break right about halfway through a 12,000-word story. These are the kind of things about these enhanced e-books that could really be used in a neat way in all kinds of stuff, including science writing.

They were the ones who found this film and the audio for the rich media, so there was a little bit of a collaboration there?

Very much so. I enjoyed that aspect of this going in. It did feel a little bit more like a collaboration, not to exaggerate it too much. My main job obviously was writing the piece, and I did that pretty much the way I always do it: which is alone in a room, ruminating, trying different things and sharing it with a few friends to get feedback, and then after fixing it, sending it to the editor.

That leaves out a couple things. One is that Evan [Ratliff] is an extremely good long-form writer himself. And knowing that, and knowing that they did one piece at a time, I had the luxury of going over several different options for the story with him. I sent him two previous forms of it: a book pitch that I had written but had not shopped, and the 7,000-word story I had sent to the New Yorker. He knew the material, and we discussed different ways to approach the material. It was very complicated. I thought of six different ways to structure and tell the story.

Once I sent it in, they were extremely active in putting together the multimedia package. I think it’s one of many strengths they bring to this. I had looked, but I had never found the things they had. I found a lot of things but not that stuff.

How would you characterize the structure you ended up using versus the ones you discarded?

The problem with this story was, do I start at the end? Do I start in the middle? Do I start at the very beginning? What’s the main nugget of the story? Is it a love story, in which case you can stop just after the war ends, because all you really need is an epilogue? That’s not the story I told.

Is it mainly a memoir? Yes, it’s mainly a memoir, but … I think every good story has a main strand or a question that’s driving it. So what unifies these different stories that I was thinking about telling? The thing that unified the stories was chasing Angus. People trying to find this one guy, my mother’s lover.

There’s a story about a son trying to reconstruct his mother’s past. There’s a story about my mother wanting to return to Angus. The story begins with my mother surprising her six children by asking to be cremated and have her ashes returned to where her lover is in the Pacific Ocean, because he was shot down toward the end of the war. There’s her, looking for Angus, to return to him. There’s me trying to figure out who he was. There are his children, whom I ran into but didn’t know existed at the start of the story – they’re trying to figure out who he was. So all these things are going on, and ultimately they’re placed in a structure that is fairly conventionally chronological, within a frame.

It opens with a funeral, my brother spreading her ashes in Hawaii. Then there’s a slight backtrack. After that, it goes back to a roughly chronological account, starting with when she was a baby and growing up and then quickly getting to how she met Angus, their time together and then what happened after that, what the reverberations of his disappearance were. And that doesn’t end until the very end of the story, with an action that ends the story, an action taken by me.

There’s a moment in the story where you go to California expecting to find something, and it’s not there. It’s a lovely moment, because it really got me wondering what would happen next. It underlines that not only is historical information hard to come by, sometimes even the facts we think we have are wrong. It gave a wonderful sense of just how complicated this chase was.

That’s why I put that episode in the story. You think you finally have something in your hand that you’ve been looking for a long time, aaaaand… no. It slipped away again. I think all of us who write heavily reported nonfiction, we experience it all the time, but that doesn’t go into the story. What you put in the story is when you finally found it. Or if you didn’t find it, it just doesn’t show up at all.

In this case, it can go in and sort of be an actual event in the story that helps underline the central problem of the whole story that is my mother’s lover. How hard it is to grasp these things, how you’re trying to pin things down and it’s very difficult. This man in particular, Angus, proved elusive to just about everyone.

Is there anything else you want to say about the narrative challenges of writing the story?

I did find it a particular luxury to have a choice of length. Usually, if I get an assignment from The Atlantic or the Times Magazine, they have a range in which they want the thing. They’ll say, “We want five, and you can write it at eight [thousand]. If we love it, we’ll run the longer version.” So there’s a range, but it has fairly distinct borders.

The Atavist said, “Take as much room as you want; just make it the right length for the story.” It really freed me up because I could choose any narrative strategy I wanted, and not have to discard it due to reasons of length.

For more, check out an excerpt of “My Mother’s Lover,” or read a longer talk with Dobbs about his story over at The Open Notebook.

You mentioned that you’re moving. Are you leaving South Africa and your position as the Times bureau chief in Johannesburg? If so, is this story on the murder of Farai Kujirichita your last from the region?

My wife, Celia Dugger, and I are co-bureau chiefs for southern Africa, a territory that includes South Africa, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Angola, Mozambique and several other countries. And yes, we are in the final weeks of a 3 1/2-year posting.

The magazine story was not my last one from the region but it did allow me to sum up much of what I’ve learned about South Africa: the horrendous legacy of apartheid, the stunning inequality of wealth; the multiplying numbers of informal settlements; the appalling violence in many of those shantytowns, the brutal attacks against immigrants who are easy scapegoats.

You wrote of seeing the video of Farai’s death and how watching led to an obligation to answer questions about it. The story unfolds almost like a police procedural that seeks to answer those questions. Did you find what you were looking for?

After seeing the video, I knew I had to find out why this man was killed, whether it led to a story or not. Even though I was watching Farai’s death secondhand, I felt an obligation. Who was going to get to the bottom if I didn’t?

But after months of digging, I was still only partially satisfied with what I understood. Three of the people who delivered the deadlier blows went on the lam almost immediately and still haven’t returned. So I never got to speak to them. I doubt that they’d have talked anyway. A key person in handing Farai over to the mob was someone I’d known from before. We’d sat in his shack once and drank beer. But this was a murder, and he was crafty enough to avoid telling me the whole truth. Had he done so he’d have probably gone to jail.

Many people in Diepsloot believe mob justice is the right thing to do, and even if they kill someone innocent, they consider it collateral damage in a worthy cause. I know a tavern owner in Diepsloot named Walter. He was robbed and beaten one night, and the thieves got away with not only all his money but some of his clothes, including a favorite T-shirt. The next day a mob killed a man who was found wearing that shirt. Later in the week, I asked Walter if the right guy was dead. “I’m not sure about the man,” he told me, “but it was the right shirt.” He said he felt OK about it.

Siphiwe has the opening and closing scenes, though I could make an argument that the story is really about Farai (the murdered man), Diepsloot (the settlement where the murder occurred), or even post-apartheid South Africa itself. What do you think is at the heart of the story?

You’re right about that: I wanted the story to be about more than this one incident. But if your question is multiple choice, I’d say the heart of the story is Diepsloot itself, and all the heroes and villains who live there, including so many people who are a little of both.

I wish I’d had space to weave in more characters. Before I began working on the story of Farai’s death, I was considering a piece about Mama Jaq, this amazing woman who runs a makeshift orphanage. She has a roomful of tiny babies, and it seems more of them arrive all the time. Desperate women in Diepsloot call her when they’ve discarded their newborns, telling her where they’ve left them, in the road or wherever. If I had to wait around for awhile, I’d sometimes go to Mama Jaq’s and hold the babies.

Your piece feels both epic and granular. The descriptions of the murder are almost cinematic, offering sweeping views of the mob on the hunt. Yet you include these memorable close-ups of tiny details: the different color laces in Siphiwe’s tennis shoes, the girl in the pink top raising a block of cement over her head. How did you think about pacing the movement between close-ups and more sweeping perspectives?

Good storytellers – and I hope that includes me – have a feel for pacing. I sometimes think of readers as prisoners during a jailbreak; they can’t wait to escape through any open gate. If you bore them even a little, they’re gone.

Sometimes, by necessity you have to include some information that’s on the dry side; it may contain interesting facts but it’s a side trip from the narrative. That’s when I envision the readers rushing away, and I know I need to hurry to get back to the storytelling or I’ll lose too many.

In this particular piece, the bigger problem was selecting what material to use. I only had space for a fraction of what I wanted to include. The story ran close to 8,000 words. That may seem a lot, and in most cases it is. But I really regretted all the description, characters and dialogue I was leaving out. There was a guy named Mashamplan, who was sort of a warlord in the squatter camp where the murder occurred. I spent a lot of time with him. He was very colorful, probably too colorful. Some of his enemies murdered him toward the end of my reporting. When I sat down to write, I would never have thought that Mashamplan would end up on the cutting room floor, but that’s how it worked out.

I saw that video of the murder appears on the Times site. Do you think including that video adds to the overall story?

I think video always helps, as do photos; I’ve written for newspapers since the 1970s and I wish I could redo every story I’ve ever done with some multimedia component.

One thing to emphasize: The Diepsloot article may be built around a video of the actual murder, which was taken by my friend Golden Mtika, who lives there and who witnessed the event. But the video that ran with the magazine piece is quite different. Though about six minutes long, it shows only 12 to 15 seconds of the actual beating that Golden recorded. These snippets are gruesome and alarming but their use is very restrained; the content was carefully calibrated by editors at The New York Times. This is hardly a “snuff film.”

The video was done by Dave Mayers, an American colleague in Johannesburg. He’s excellent. Dave joined me in a lot of the reporting, and the video benefits from his own knowledge of Diepsloot as well as his strong relationship with characters in the story.

You place yourself in the story as an American journalist who lives in a community that is affluent and secure but has some knowledge of the settlements. How did you weigh and use your presence in the narrative?

I am a reluctant practitioner of first-person journalism. But in this story, it seemed unavoidable. Farai’s murder was not a widely reported crime, and I needed to explain how I came to know of it and why I felt compelled to discover what had happened. The affluent community where I lived, Dainfern, is only a 10-minute drive from Diepsloot, and mentioning the disparity of circumstances between the two places was an easy way to get at the level of inequality in South Africa, which some economists say is the world’s worst.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about the story or writing it that we might not know from reading it? Any particular challenges, setbacks or surprises?

Foreign correspondence very often involves the guiding hand of one or more local individuals who serve as interpreters not only of language but of culture. I hope the story successfully conveys the important role Golden Mtika played in the reporting.

Many of the interviews were conducted in Shona, Xhosa, Pedi, Zulu or Tswana, and Golden’s fluency in all the languages of the region was vital in connecting with people. I went very few places without him, and while the nature of our questions made many people uneasy, it’s fair to say that without Golden being there very few would have been helpful at all. He was also a walking lie detector machine. When we’d finish an interview, he’d help me parse through the whole truths, half-truths and no truths.

Image of Barry Bearak by Steve Connors.

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 New York Times’ Opinionator blog. His latest five-part series only dips a toe into the lyrical scene-setting or expository arc readers might expect from a standard essay. When he does adopt a traditional rule – “Use dialogue” –Morris bends it to his will, plugging in whole conversations, sometimes allowing the script of a phone call to run continuously for thousands of words, morphing his essay into an interview.

We’ve looked before at the role of words in multimedia storytelling, but Morris turns this frame back on itself by doing written narratives largely about visuals. His approach injects an investigative reporter’s sensibility into earlier conceptual thinking about pictures, such as John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” or Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.”

Morris’ forthcoming book, “Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography),” will gather several of his New York Times pieces and offer autopsies on visuals from theaters of war spanning more than a century. In a post this month on The Boston Globe’s “Ideas” blog, Leon Neyfakh describes these objects of Morris’ fascination:

His essays tend to focus less on people than on objects, documents, and historical events. But as with his films, you can detect something unmistakable at work: a mind wrestling with what looks like intractable uncertainty — with questions others thought too hopelessly ambiguous to ever resolve, or too open-and-shut to bother with.

If Morris breaks with standard approaches to narrative nonfiction, he does retain a few underlying tenets. This latest series starts with a mystery, in which a former acquaintance posts online that Morris’ brother Noel, who died long ago, invented email. Everything that follows is an attempt to understand whether and how that statement could be true. But in answering it, Morris himself learns – and teaches readers – about the social history of the computer and coding, from diners to hacking. And he recovers a piece of the brother he lost decades ago.

Think of the narrative challenges posed by these examples of what I call “slow violence”: climate change; the thawing polar icecaps; the slow toxic drift of agricultural nitrates from the heartland down the Mississippi to the Gulf’s deep delta, creating a vast dead zone larger than New Jersey. Think of oil spills, deforestation, and a host of other slow-moving environmental disasters, like the ongoing chemical and radiological legacies of wars that officially have been concluded. Under such circumstances, slow violence often fuels social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions incrementally – rather than suddenly – erode. But the long-term emergencies that result are readily marginalized or ignored by hard-charging news organizations in pursuit of quick, eye-catching stories.

I believe we must address our inattention to environmental calamities that have staying power, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans – and outside the purview of a spectacle-powered media. To that end, I have tracked some of the creative ways that writers and filmmakers have risen to face the narrative challenges posed by such attritional environmental disasters.

The insidious workings of slow violence derive largely from the unequal power of spectacular and unspectacular time. In an age that venerates instant spectacle, slow violence is deficient in the special effects that fill movie theaters and boost ratings on TV. Chemical and radiological violence, for example, is driven inward, into cellular dramas of mutation that remain difficult to narrate. From a writing perspective, such invisible, mutagenic theater is slow-paced and open-ended, typically eluding tidy closure.

To address the storytelling challenges that slow violence poses is to confront the dilemma that Rachel Carson faced almost half a century ago as she sought to dramatize what she called “death by indirection.” Carson’s subjects were biomagnification and toxic drift, forms of oblique, slow damage that, like climate change, pose formidable imaginative difficulties for writers and documentary makers alike. In struggling to give shape to amorphous menace, both Carson and reviewers of “Silent Spring” resorted to a narrative vocabulary. One reviewer portrayed the book as exposing “the new, unplotted and mysterious dangers we insist upon creating all around us,” while Carson herself wrote of “a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure.”

To confront slow violence requires, then, that we plot and give shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time. The storytelling challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects.

If anything, such challenges are even more formidable today than they were in Carson’s time. For in our age of degraded attention spans it becomes doubly difficult to focus on the toll exacted over time, by the slow violence of ecological degradation. We live, writes Cory Doctorow, in an era when the electronic screen has become an “ecosystem of interruption technologies.” Or, as former Microsoft executive Linda Stone puts it, we now inhabit an age of “continuous partial attention.” Fast is faster than it used to be and story units have become ever shorter. In this cultural milieu, the intergenerational aftermath becomes a harder sell. So to render slow violence visible requires, among other things, redefining speed. We see such efforts in talk of accelerated species loss, rapid climate change, and in attempts to recast “glacial” – once a dead metaphor for “slow” – as a rousing, iconic image of unacceptably fast loss.

How, then, have environmental writers and documentary makers used their craft to bring home threats that take time to wreak their havoc, threats that never materialize into one focal, explosive, cinematic scene? This year’s academy award nominations for best documentary included two highly creative, very different responses to environmental slow violence as narrative dilemma.

Use striking visual imagery. Josh Fox’s “Gasland” tracks the poorly regulated perils that result from the rise of fracking, the Halliburton-developed technology that uses voluminous amounts of chemically-saturated water to blast open gas deposits sealed in shale. The long-term contamination of the aquifers and the chronic health problems that ensue are testing to dramatize. But, in a brilliant move, Fox creates an iconic image that gives those calamities an emotional focus. As he moves from one afflicted household to another, he gets the homeowner to take a cigarette lighter to the water coming out the faucet. Time and again, we watch the tap water catch fire. That’s the memorable take-home from the film: flames pouring from the kitchen faucet, a scene that offers us an emotional shortcut through an incremental calamity.

Reconfigure big stories on a human scale. Jennifer Redfearn’s documentary, “Sun Come Up,” depends on a different dramatic strategy, as she tells the story of the Carteret Islanders, who are about to become, en masse, climate-change refugees due to steadily rising seas. The challenge facing Redfearn is how to make audiences identify with the fate of a remote people (the Carterets live in the South Pacific) and with a threat that we’ve been led to believe is severe but not imminent. “Sun Come Up” makes climate change personal and tangible, by focusing on the individual journey of a Cartenet Islander who travels to neighboring islands in an effort to buy a homeland for his people who are about to lose theirs. The islander’s quest gives the longue dureé of the climate violence that ultimately threatens us all a palpable, individual, and immediate urgency.

Tell stories no one else can tell. Writers, not least many environmental writers in the global South, have also sought to give narrative shape to the long emergencies that afflict their societies. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni writer executed in Nigeria for his environmental activism, became a nimble, rhetorically versatile proponent of the rights of the minority peoples who inhabit the Niger delta. The delta provides 11 percent of America’s oil needs, but most Americans would be hard-pressed to put it on the map. Yet we are party to an ongoing ecological calamity: For over half a century the Niger delta has suffered the equivalent of an Exxon-Valdez sized spill every year. Saro-Wiwa – in his essays, memoirs, documentaries, and journalism – took it upon himself to become the teller of stories that before him scarcely ever reached the outside world.

Find powerful analogies that resonate. In her memoir, “Unbowed,” the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wangari Maathai, infuses a dramatic urgency into one of the most undramatic story lines: the incremental deforestation and soil erosion that have accumulatively jeopardized the livelihoods of millions of Africans. As Maathai observes,

during the rainy season, thousands of tons of topsoil are eroded from Kenya’s countryside by rivers and washed into the ocean and lakes. Additionally, soil is lost through wind erosion in areas where the land is devoid of vegetative cover. Losing topsoil should be considered analogous to losing territory to an invading enemy. And indeed, if any country were so threatened, it would mobilize all available resources, including a heavily armed military, to protect the priceless land. Unfortunately, the loss of soil through these elements has yet to be perceived with such urgency.

Maathai’s memoir offers the story of a quietly determined group of women, the Green Belt Movement, who draw attention to – and begin to reverse – the damage done by decades of brutally damaging environmental practices.

Refuse conventional narrative frameworks. Maathai’s approach to slow violence is to recast the question of urgency in a different time frame, one that challenges the dominant associations of two of the early 21st century’s most explosive words: “preemptive” and “terror.” The Green Belt Movement focuses not on conventional ex post facto conflict resolution but on conflict preemption through nonmilitary means. As Maathai insists, “Many wars are fought over natural resources. In managing our resources and in sustainable development we plant the seeds of peace.” Through her storytelling and through her movement’s collective example, she has sought to reframe conflict resolution for an age when instant cinematic catastrophe has tended to overshadow insidious violence. This, then, is Wangari Maathai’s contribution to the ‘“war on terror”: building a movement committed, in her words, to “reintroducing a sense of security among ordinary people so they do not feel so marginalized and so terrorized by the state.”

As the journalistic chestnut goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” And as a corollary, if it’s bloodless, slow-motion violence, the story is more likely to get buried. In the long arc between the emergence of slow violence and its delayed effects, both the causes and the memory of catastrophe readily fade from view. As a result, the casualties incurred often pass untallied. Such discounting makes it far more difficult to secure effective legal measures for prevention, restitution, and redress. The long dyings – the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological – are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Finding the stories that will break through such silences is inevitably demanding, not least because there are potent forces invested in preventing such stories from gaining emotional traction. Yet whether they make use of striking visuals, powerful analogies, or individual stories, I remain encouraged by the intrepid writers and filmmakers who, despite the odds, keep finding fresh, inventive ways to testify by devoting their imaginative energies to some of the most urgent yet invisible stories of our time.

Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. He has been a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and The Atlantic, among many other publications, and has written four nonfiction books. His latest, “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” arrives from Harvard University Press this month.

Next week we’ll provide an in-depth look at just the Rainsville piece, but for now, we wanted to highlight some other efforts to tell the stories of a shattered town and help readers understand what’s been happening there.

“When Everything Is Gone, Including a Sense of Direction,” from Dan Barry, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and A.G. Sulzberger of The New York Times (via @alixfelsing)

Heading south on Main Street, you pass intact buildings and a seemingly undisturbed way of life, save for the inordinate number of people wearing shirts that say Red Cross or Federal Emergency Management Agency or Army Corps of Engineers. An honor guard of flapping American flags urges you on.

All seems fine, until about 15th Street, when unnerving signs of damage come into view. It is slight at first, a blown sign here, a damaged roof there, laid out as if to prepare the visitor, however gently, for what is ahead. Five short blocks later, a wasteland.

The first of two YouTube clips from izelsg* shows the power of audio; it includes sound and (very little) imagery recorded as the Joplin tornado moved over about 18 people who had taken shelter in a convenience store. This second clip revisits the spot and lets viewers see the devastation that the people from the first clip survived.

*who appears to be Isaac Duncan, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter

“Torn Asunder: How the Deadliest Twister in Decades Ripped Through Joplin, Mo.,” from David Von Drehle at Time (via @tomshroder)

An EF-5 tornado pens a signature that makes no sense. You stare and ponder until slowly it comes into focus: that’s an upside-down, half-buried piano; a garage-door spring; the colored gravel from a fish tank; a car bumper entwined in a brass bed; a flat-screen TV with a door molding straight through it; the little man from the top of a soccer trophy; a Barbie shoe. Clean up suggests a return to an orderly past. In the coming weeks and months, Joplin will have to scrape bare a blasted hole in its heart.

“A gloomy night spent searching for life,” by Michael Overall of the Tulsa World (via @gangrey)

A dog barks in the distance. A helicopter rumbles overhead. And from somewhere deep under the rubble across the street, an alarm clock is beeping.

But nothing comes from the debris where the firefighters are standing, and after a few moments, the firefighters start to dig.

Five or six strain together to lift a bathtub, turning it on its side.

The victim apparently did what experts say to do. Seek shelter near the center of the house, perhaps a bathroom. Lie in the tub.

The firefighters stop and bow their heads.

“As it recovers from tornado, Joplin can take lessons from other cities,” by Eric Adler, Scott Canon and Rick Montgomery of The Kansas City Star (via @alixfelsing)

When the Kents emerged and looked at the devastation around them — some houses obliterated, others sheared in half — they stood, in many ways, in exactly the same situation as tornado survivors in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and in Greensburg, Kan.

Kent, 52, an environmental engineer, knew that from that moment on “everything is different.”

“It is like 9/11. There will be life before the tornado. And there will be life after the tornado.”

What comes next?

Where will Joplin be a month from now? Where can it be in a few years?

And finally, here’s Brian Stelter, Media Decoder at The New York Times, on the challenges of being a newly-minted disaster reporter in Joplin and how Twitter did and didn’t deliver the story in a pinch.

“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 clarity of 2008’s “The Crisis of Credit Visualized” by Jonathan Jarvis.

“The Amazing Amy,” by Espen Rasmussen, Finn Ryan, Terje Bringedal and Torsten Kjellstrand working with MediaStorm. A 56-year-old performer battered by the world invites viewers into her life – not a comfortable place to be.

“Dogs in the News,” curated by The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture earlier this month. Dogs working, sometimes in surprising occupations. Not your everyday LOLdogs pics.

“Symmetry,” a @madebyeverynone video produced by Brendan Lynch (via @koci). Not narrative, but a beautifully crafted conceptual video that can help beginners and pros alike ponder themes and echoes in visual storytelling. See the whole “Everynone” series for additional inspiration.

“The Shrine Down the Hall,” by from The New York Times Magazine. Winner of the 2011 Ellie for News and Documentary Photography. Ashley Gilbertson’s photos (accompanied by Dexter Filkins’ essay) create a visual record of the forever empty bedrooms of grown children lost in war.

And from the Cannes Film Festival, we’ve gathered a few trailers for documentaries being screened this month. They include “Bollywood: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told,” about India’s film industry; “Unlawful Killing,” a film on the death of Princess Diana underwritten by the family of Dodi Fayed; “Leadersheep,” the story of a decadelong battle between a group of French farmers and their government (trailer in French); and “At Night, They Dance,” a look at a family of belly dancers in Cairo.

There was, however, one problem with the list: It had no links. But we at Storyboard have solved that problem. We’ve gathered the winners and finalists who took a narrative approach and linked to their stories, so that you can sample them yourselves. Happy reading!

Feature writing

The 2011 feature writing prize, which has so often inspired narrative journalists, went to Amy Ellis Nutt of The Star-Ledger for “The Wreck of the Lady Mary.” Here’s a section from part 1 of the story of the Lady Mary:

Riotous waves pummel José Arias. In the frantic scramble to abandon ship, he zipped his survival suit only to his throat and now the freezing Atlantic is seeping in, stealing his body’s heat.

The cold hammers him, a fist inside his head.

Seesawing across the ocean, he cannot tell east from west, up from down. At the top of a wave the night sky spins open, then slides away. Buckets of stars spill into the sea.

Nutt, a former Nieman Fellow, was previously a Pulitzer finalist for “John Sarkin: The Accidental Artist.” This year’s finalists include current Nieman Fellow Tony Bartelme of The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., for his story of a doctor teaching brain surgery in Tanzania, and Michael M. Phillips of The Wall Street Journal for his collected articles on Afghanistan.

Here’s a snippet from Bartelme’s story:

A man lies in a hospital deep in the Tanzanian bush, dying of a head wound. His only chance is if someone opens his skull and stops the bleeding, but the hospital doesn’t have a bone-cutting saw. An American brain surgeon volunteering at the hospital has an idea: A villager next to the air strip is cutting a tree limb with a wire saw. That might do. He buys the wire saw for $15 and heads back to the operating room. Improvise. That’s what you do when you’re a doctor in one of the poorest countries on earth. This is the story of a brain surgeon from Charleston and his mission to teach Tanzanians his skills.

And here’s some of Phillips’ work:

Somewhere in this dusty town, concealed among the cornfields, irrigation canals and mud-walled compounds, is a man the Marines particularly want to kill.

They don’t know what he looks like. But they know he is a very good shot with a long rifle, and, every day he remains alive, he is drawing Marine blood.

In the seven days since the men of Lima Company, Third Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment arrived in town, the Sangin sniper has persecuted them with methodical, well-aimed shots, fired one at a time. His toll so far: two men killed – one American and one British – and one man wounded.

Explanatory reporting

Winning the prize for explanatory reporting was The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Mark Johnson, Kathleen Gallagher, Gary Porter, Lou Saldivar and Alison Sherwood. Their project, “One in a Billion,” chronicled the effort to diagnose the illness of a 4-year-old boy who ended up making medical history. We interviewed Gallagher and Johnson about the project earlier this year. Here they are dropping science in one explanatory section:

In Nicholas, however, the protein is made incorrectly. In his body, the immune system is at war with his intestine.

Since the human genome is composed of more than 3 billion base pairs, Nicholas’ mutation represents the smallest possible error in a vast blueprint. Imagine one letter out of place in the 55 million-word Encyclopaedia Britannica online edition.

Even this image does not do justice to Nicholas’ terrible luck. Not only is his misspelling unique among the human genomes examined, it is unique among the animal genomes Worthey checks. Fruit flies, rats, mice, cows, chickens, chimpanzees – every organism she can find makes cysteine at this position.

To Worthey, the extreme rarity of his mutation across the species carries an unmistakable message.

“If all of those organisms have (cysteine) at that position, then clearly it’s important because over all that time it has never been allowed to change,” she says, “(If it did) something bad obviously happened to stop that line from evolving any further. So everything has a cysteine.”

Except Nicholas.

Books and photos

Barbara Davidson of the Los Angeles Times won the feature photography award for her images of city residents injured by gang violence. The prize for breaking news photography went to Carol Guzy, Nikki Kahn and Ricky Carioti of The Washington Post for their images taken in the aftermath of last year’s catastrophic Haitian earthquake.

On the book front, the prize for general nonfiction went to “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” by Siddhartha Mukherjee:

On the morning of May 19, 2004, Carla Reed, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher from Ipswich, Massachusetts, a mother of three young children, woke up in bed with a headache. “Not just any headache,” she would recall later, “but a sort of numbness in my head. The kind of numbness that instantly tells you that something is terribly wrong.”

One finalist for general nonfiction also took a narrative approach: “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History,” by Sam Gwynne, whose conversation with Scribner editor Colin Harrison we covered at last summer’s Mayborn Conference.

“Washington: A Life” by Ron Chernow won the award for biography, while the history prize went to Eric Foner for “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.”

“When the Water Ends: Africa’s Climate Conflicts,” by Evan Abramson for Yale Environment 360. Tribes pushed toward famine and armed conflict by the shifting shoreline of Lake Turkana on the Ethiopia-Kenya border tell their stories plainly but movingly. Water scarcity gives rise to violence, illustrating the vulnerability of people who already live at the mercy of climate change.

“Burning Desperation,” by Lynsey Addario of The New York Times. Before she was kidnapped in Libya, Addario created this disturbing, haunting portrait of Afghan women who set themselves on fire.

“Saying goodbye with my camera,” by Briony Campbell for The Guardian. A father and daughter approach his impending death from cancer through an extended meditation on reasons to fight the disease, the temptation to surrender to it, and how much of his thinking centers on those he’ll leave behind.

“Above the Law,” by Clifford Levy and Ellen Barry for The New York Times. A series of videos and articles looks at corruption in Russia two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. From a human rights activist on trial for speaking out after a murder to strategic arrests and intimidation, it offers a dispiriting look at Russia today.

“Deadly Threats: Successors to the Paramilitaries in Colombia,” by Stephen Ferry (and Getty Images Grants for Good) from Human Rights Watch. Slide shows depict a military conflict in Colombia that continues despite the announced demobilization of paramilitary groups years ago.

We previously featured three of this year’s nominees on Storyboard. Read our Q&A with the creators of “Welcome to Pine Point,” which looks at memory and identity in a town that was wiped off the map. Hear from the makers of “Brèves de Trottoirs,” multimedia portraits from the streets of Paris. And see what Marie-Claude Dupont of Canada’s National Film Board has to say about “GDP,” a yearlong project documenting the Canadian economic recovery one person at a time.

While big names like Martha Stewart, Twitter’s Biz Stone and Arianna Huffington get to decide who will take home the official prizes in these categories, you, too, can make your voice heard by voting in the Webby People’s Voice Awards. (Voting closes April 28.)

Image detail from footage by Evan Abramson in the Yale Environmental 360 project “When the Water Ends.”