We were at the start of a storytelling revival, trying to find our way back to craft, and Walt’s book “Intimate Journalism” had just been published.

In the book, Walt quotes Will Durant, a famous historian and philosopher: “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.”

Now ask yourself: How often do journalists write about what happened on the banks?

There’s a lot of life that never finds its way onto our pages – virtual or otherwise. Which leads me to Tom Hallman’s Oregonian story about an apology.

It has resonated with readers (nearly 26,000 people have recommended it via Facebook alone), and it’s not hard to see why. Who hasn’t done or said something they regret? And how powerful are the words, “I’m sorry?”

Tom’s story – about a man who agonized over his actions as a boy and wanted to make amends – has a level of intimacy that we should strive for as journalists.

What stops us?

Perhaps we question whether this kind of story is newsworthy. Maybe we’re scared to get too personal.

But as Tom explains:

As the days passed, I thought about this strange tale. There was no news. If no one ever heard a word about James Atteberry and Larry Israelson, it wouldn’t matter. 

Or would it?

A good feature story is about something universal. When it comes to apologies, no one gets a pass in this life. Everyone deserves one, and everyone needs to give one. When I mentioned this letter to people, I found a story more universal than any that I’d written in years. Everyone told me they had someone they wished they could apologize to. And they told me that by the time they realized that truth, it was too late.

In my case, it was something that has haunted me for decades.

Three things struck me about this story, from a writer’s perspective:

First, Tom recognized there was a story. That is such the battle sometimes, seeing what is right in front of us. There was no news as we traditionally define it but definitely something compelling. I suspect Tom mentioned the letter to others because it resonated so deeply with him, and my guess is that it was almost tugging at him to not be ignored.

Second, Tom’s use of the first person. Sometimes reporters become characters in a story and have no business being there. In this case, Tom was clearly an important figure, as he became the way one man found another.

But also, his own story brought home the universal truth:

Months later, the girl left school. I never saw her again. The school I attended has been torn down. I have forgotten the names of many of my old classmates. But not hers. For years I wanted to apologize.

Third, this story reminds us that is it never too late to revisit the past, and in fact, sometimes years must go by before people can work up the courage to expose – and confront – their weakest moments. Again, Tom explains:

The beauty of an apology is that everyone wins because it reveals not only who we are, but who we hope we are. 

I’d argue that part of the reason newspapers are in trouble is that people rarely get emotional when they read our work.

I cried at the end of this story.

Maria Carrillo (@havana58) is the managing editor of The Virginian-Pilot and a two-time Pulitzer juror.

For more from our collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

We caught Thompson on the road this week in our mutually native Mississippi. He was driving from his home in Oxford to a story in Alabama, but didn’t want to say, at least publicly, what the story was. It was kind of hard to hear each other, and Thompson kept yelling things like “Oh look! The Natchez Trace!” but we managed to cover everything from story conception to deadline music. You may want to think of Thompson’s comments as part master class on narrative journalism and part travelogue.

I had just re-read his great piece on Junior Johnson, the godfather of stock-car racing, and was saying how fun it can be, covering NASCAR, and so we started there.

Paige Williams: Those guys are just not like anybody else.

Wright Thompson: And the way Junior Johnson talks – those are poems. It’s “bored-out” and “stroked” and “cammed” – they’re like the best kind of poems because it doesn’t matter what the words mean, it’s just how they sound.

Those boys are smart, too.

Thompson at Hemingway's house during a reporting trip to Cuba. The line above his head marks Hemingway's height.

Junior Johnson has an innate understanding of physics. I mean if Junior Johnson had been born to your family or my family, Junior Johnson would’ve been, like, a particle physicist. The things he invented!

The best thing about writing about racing isn’t so much the tech stuff or who won or lost, it’s the characters. I remember this thing about Richard Petty rolling a car pretty good – he went over an embankment and out of sight and everybody ran over to find out if he was dead or alive, and he was sitting there in front of the smoking wreckage and all he said was, “Anybody got a Coke?” 

They’re like that! It’s unbelievable! Like Junior Johnson threatening a U.S. marshal – Junior Johnson is not someone you want mad at you, even at 80. Junior Johnson would whip my ass. I wouldn’t fight Junior Johnson – are you kidding me? Like, the story about him cheating in his son’s soapbox derby, hiding the lead in the floorboard of the car –

They figured out how to get by.

I talked to Mike Krzyzewski, the coach at Duke – the thing that’s interesting is that Junior has an eighth-grade education and is really embarrassed about it. The thing he wants more than anything in the world is for his son to go to college, and so they went and toured Duke. And to hear people describe – Junior Johnson’s father had a second-grade education, so to go from a second-grade education to an eighth-grade education to touring Duke? I mean, the look on his face.

What about your family, if you don’t mind my asking? 

My mother’s side of the family were well-to-do Delta planters. My dad’s side of the family was sort of the opposite; they grew up in South Mississippi, very, very small farm. My grandfather was a really smart man who had to go home and run the family farm – I feel like there’s a little Willy Loman there, had to go home and do this job. And so they were middle-class as that era of Mississippi goes, but my dad and his brothers all went to college. There’s a doctor, a lawyer, an advertising executive. So in some ways it’s from the farm to working for a media company, with a generation in between – a pretty standard story. From making things to helping people who make things to working with ideas. Oh, hey, “Welcome to Okolona: the little city that does big things!”

Is that Monroe County?

I do not know the answer to that. My father, who could name every county in Mississippi, would be very upset.

Chickasaw County. I’m Googling.

Oh, look at this! This is the high school football field! It is the Charles Faulkner Field, “home of the Chiefs.” Faulkner died in Okolona, I think, right?

Byhalia.

Oh, that’s right, at the sanitarium, drying his ass out.

And he’d had a heart attack.

It wasn’t drinking that killed Faulkner, it was stopping. It was like: Heroin didn’t kill Jerry Garcia, quitting did.

Faulkner died at the Wright Sanitarium, Wright.

And this is the 50th anniversary of his death. He died 2 1/2 months before Ole Miss integrated.

Oh, he was only 64.

Yeah, well, those were 64 hard-ass years. Did you read William Styron’s obituary about him in Life magazine? It’s incredible. (His niece), Dean Faulkner (Wells), who’s just died, she had this great collection of first editions because every single writer who came to town came by to kiss the ring. She had this Gideon’s Bible inscribed: “Dear Dean, I wrote this book for you. Love, Bill Styron.” You know.

It’s 11:15 in the morning. How long have you been up?

Today? I snoozed until about 6:30.

Morning is your best writing time, right?

I want to be in the chair writing by 6:30, and I want to be done writing for the day by 2. There are always five or six stories going at once so I need to sort of do the daily maintenance on them. I’m just much better right in the morning. And also, I can have a day ruined very easily, which I’m trying to get better about because it’s stupid to be superstitious, but, like, if I oversleep the day is shot for me. I can’t go start at 10. It’s ruined.

When did that start for you?

It was by necessity. At the Kansas City Star I wrote a 3,000-word takeout every week. We would have a meeting on Monday – we would go out to lunch and plan. I would either stay in town or be on an airplane that night or Tuesday; I would report Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, usually come home Thursday or Friday. The story would run on Sunday, so I would wake up Saturday and write live. Every hour counted.

Yeah.

The difference between starting at 6 and starting at 10 was the difference between having a story that worked and having a hot mess. So I just got in the habit. And I just do better if I have a long stretch of day in front of me. To the eternal annoyance, I think, of my editors, I don’t want to conference-call about the presentation of a story before I’ve written the story. I like the long stretch of a day in front of me.

What do you do to get yourself into that writing space?

I drink an absurd amount of coffee. And I have a song mix that I listen to that I’ve listened to basically for 10 years. I mean, I add songs as I find them, but I listen to music.

Wait, wait, wait – you listen to the same song mix that you’ve listened to for the past 10 years?

Yes. That started for a very specific reason, though: I wrote in press boxes, where it’s loud as shit. And so you need something to drown out the noise. So I had a mix that I made that was calm. If I had 17 minutes to write I wanted a little soothing music.

Now you know that I have to ask what’s on that mix.

Hold on. Okay. (Reading from his iPhone.) “Writing Mix: Charlie Daniels Band, ‘Mister D.J.;’ ‘I Don’t Like Mondays,’ Tori Amos; ‘Little Rock,’ Collin Raye; ‘Hallelujah,’ Jeff Buckley; ‘Brothers in Arms,’ Dire Straits; ‘Good Ol’ Boys Like Me,’ Don Williams; ‘New Orleans Ladies,’ (LeRoux); ‘Good Riddance,’ Green Day; ‘This Old Porch,’ Lyle Lovett; ‘Sunrise,’ Norah Jones” – fuck, that’s an odd one – “‘Lonesome Blues,’ Shooter Jennings; ‘Stuck on You,’ Lionel Ritchie; ‘Walking in Memphis,’ Marc Cohn; ‘Photograph,’ Charlie Robison; ‘The Wrestler,’ Bruce Springsteen; ‘Amsterdam,’ Coldplay; ‘Little Motel,’ Modest Mouse; ‘The Freshman,’ The Verve Pipe.”

Well, now I have to make the playlist.

That’s embarrassing! Why couldn’t I have said, you know, Motley Crue, “Home Sweet Home?”

No! It’s great!

I’ve stolen songs. “Amsterdam” is Tom Lake. “Little Motel” is Chris Jones. Somebody’ll mention a song that they write to and I’ll go, “Ooh, I like that,” and I’ll put it on the mix. Sometimes I’ll take things off. I took off Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” because I liked it too much. It was distracting.

(Charlie Daniels is playing out of position on that list for now − clearly he doesn’t like being told what to do − but the others should work.) What else is on your list, from other writers?

I’ll have to do a reconstruction of it.

Do some liner notes.

Exactly. Liner notes. The Green Day song got added because I was writing a story about Tara Peck, a high school soccer star in Kansas City who was killed in a car wreck. Her mom was a nurse. Her mom was in the car, tried to give her CPR. I basically spent several days between Tara’s death and her funeral with her family and her best friend. They put together a playlist for her funeral and her mom sort of went through her closet, the whole thing. I was basically embedded with the family as I wrote this story, and all I remember is the last line: “She would have been so many things.” That was 10 years or so I guess. So they played that song at her funeral – it was her favorite song – so I put it on the mix.

See, it’s all connected. It’s not just a playlist. It’s not just a mix. There’s important stuff at work there. I have “Shadow Boxing” up (in which Thompson tracked down the boxer Jim “Sweet Jimmy” Robinson) and was reading that before we started talking, too.

That’s my favorite story.

Why?

Well, the persistence. I like that it worked. I mean, I chased that story for seven years. That’s an exaggeration because that’s not all I did, but every couple of months for a couple of days I would go look for Jim Robinson. And the thing that broke it open was, I figured out that he was in Miami. I write about this in the story, but I set up a 305 phone number and made up a flyer and put it up all over town, the last place he’d been seen. And I went home. And four days later the phone started ringing. It was just really interesting in terms of what it means to exist. It’s sort of a story about the effacement of memory and the nature of loss. My editor and I worked on that a lot. His name’s Jay Lovinger and he’s unbelievable. He’s a lion. He’s edited Gary Smith and David Halberstam and Hunter Thompson and Richard Ford. He was the managing editor at Life magazine and the No. 2 guy at Inside Sports. I’ve said this a lot but it’s true: He changed my life. The experience of doing “Shadow Boxing,” sort of walking around the block in the Bronx, where he lives, and talking about it – that’s a very, very special story to me.

And there are echoes of it in the Jerry Joseph story. How do you pronounce Joseph’s other name, (Guerdwich Montimere)?

GURD-witch Mont-a-meer.

Okay.

Although I slip up and still call him Jerry. It’s weird.

These stories sort of echo each other. They’re quest stories but they’re also about identity.

Identity comes up a lot in my stories. Because I like to write about place and all place is, is a way to code identity. People love a place as a sort of construct to pass things on. I wrote this thing about Nazareth, Texas, about the girls’ high school basketball team, and I’m sort of obsessed with this idea of reverse manifest destiny. Frank and Deborah Popper are professors – one’s at Princeton and one’s at Rutgers, they’re married, and they do all this incredible research about Buffalo Commons, but essentially – you’ve seen the end of “Dances with Wolves” where they have the quote, something like, “In 1890 the frontier closed.” The thing that’s interesting, the frontier is reopening. I mean there are counties now that were settled in this mad rush West – all these places settled in this mad rush West, and some of them are drying up and blowing away. If the central core of American identity is manifest destiny and if it turns out that we didn’t actually settle the continent in the way that we say we did, what does that mean? This is just a really interesting time for identity in America. The little towns are drying up and blowing away. If you’re from a place like Mississippi, you see it – everyone moves to Memphis, they move to Birmingham, they move to Atlanta, they move to Charlotte. All of the ways in which we learned who we are, they’re changing, and they’re changing very, very rapidly.

Do you look for stories that allow you to explore that, and are you interested in exploring that idea in a longer-form way, like in a book?

Not really. I mean my attention span is such that I’m sort of over it when I’m over it. You know?

Yeah. I do.

Maybe that’s bad but the last thing in the world I want to do is go revisit Jimmy Robinson. I mean that just sounds crushing to me.

It’s like you put all your energy into it for this one amount of time and burn yourself out on it.

Yeah, and then it’s over. And I want to move on to the next thing.

Jerry/Guerdwich: A lot had been written about the guy but no one had done a long-form narrative until Michael Mooney’s GQ piece – what did you want to do with your story that had not been done?

I love Michael’s piece. I thought he did a great job. And he also had a mission and I thought he nailed it. Everything that’s in the story I had, basically, when his came out, but I kept trying to fill the gap. I was really relieved that he didn’t have a couple of (my) people, because that would have killed (my) story. I remember when it came out – I was at dinner, I got a text message that it was out, I drove up to Off Square Books, I bought it, I drove back to Snackbar and I read it in the parking lot. And I immediately thought, “Wow, he nailed this.”

I was also relieved. There were so many different stories to tell and I think all of them are good. I just had to make sure he didn’t tell mine. That was the thing I was worried about. I was always locked into the twin-brother narrative. That was going to be my story no matter what.

The other thing was, I was coordinating with a television producer, so this was a TV piece too – I went to Texas as a print reporter, I went to Texas as a TV reporter, they went to Texas without me, I went without them, and so we were working on the story the whole time with Drew Gallagher, the producer, and then the people who shot it, the Texas Crew.

So it was a logistical challenge because the story existed – right now it exists in three forms. There’s the television story, the dot-com story that we’re talking about, and there’s the magazine story that’s totally different. The hardest part was sort of bringing it to the finish line in all of its manifestations. I’m glad we did. I could be wrong about this but I don’t think there’s anybody in media who’s doing it like this. Honestly, I think this is the first integrated newsroom. It’s not like having a photographer go shoot some video. It’s world-class producers and camera crews – it’s just an interesting thing that’s happening, and it’s cool to be a very small part of it.

The New York Times interactive team is doing some interesting stuff, but taking smaller pieces of big stories –

Yeah, but these are television networks. So it’s a little unfair. We have an enormous news-gathering operation – the walls are gone. Everyone talks to everyone. It’s totally exciting. It’s hard sometimes because you end up being the center of the hub and some of the logistics are difficult, but it’s fascinating if for no other reason than I have found out that a shot of tequila perfectly fits between the wings of an Emmy.

Good to know.

And you can spear the limes on the lightning bolts. It’s perfect.

So anyway, you knew you wanted to lock in on the twins narrative.

I wasn’t interested in “what happened in Texas.” I was interested in why. And then once I figured out the why it all sort of fell together. I thought the most interesting thing was that these two brothers switched lives, and I became obsessed with that. I have no idea whether that was the right call.

Not sure there is a right or wrong. You go with the line that speaks to you. At least it’s yours. It’s unlike anything else that’s out there –

Two people wrote really long magazine stories that didn’t overlap at all, which is a sort of testament to the complexity. The other thing that killed me on this, I wanted it to end with the trial. So we were waiting on the trial. I had a plane ticket for Texas and was all set, and two days before (I was supposed to leave) they pled it out. So the thing I had waited to be my climax was now gone.

You can never bet on a trial, though. They can always plead out.

I’d flirted with that thing, the trial, being the structure. None of this was written and I actually was lost for a while, trying to figure it out. The outline of this was especially difficult.

What did you do?

I had five or six hundred pages of typed notes and a huge stack of letters that (Montimere) and I had written back and forth and then, I don’t know, three, four, five hundred pages of public documents – I just carpet-bombed South Florida with (open-records) requests. The twins were juveniles, so their names were redacted, so you couldn’t search that way. So I basically got every address of where they’d ever lived and then filed (open-records requests) for every police call for every address where they’d ever lived.

I went through all the notes. The thing I always do is, I underline, I tab. I kept trying to go through the notes and write down on note cards everything I’ve underlined, but it just wasn’t working. I was 100 pages in, and I already had 300 note cards. I’m like, this is a disaster. So I went back to the Word doc of the notes and started making separate Word docs for everything that was related to either a certain idea or time period or character – they were all cross-referenced. I ended up with 30 different Word documents. Then I printed them all out and went back through them again and was able to outline. I mean, this was a nightmare.

Touch of the voodoo, maybe.

Voodoo’s one of those things I don’t believe in but that I don’t want to mess with, just in case.

In terms of structure, design played a cool role because your personal narrative plays out on the bits of “taped-up paper.”

Yeah, and thank God for that because in the outline those were called “Reporter’s Notebook.” Which I never liked. But you know how things happen – they’re in the outline and then they’re in the draft and then all of a sudden you’ve filed it and you’re like, “I hate these things.” It sounded cheesy, so I asked (the ESPN designers), I said, “Can you make them an actual notebook?” They’re like, “Yeah of course we can do that.”

The visuals flow nicely, whereas if you’d had a “Reporter’s Notebook” subhed –

It would’ve been needlessly meta.

Yeah. This solution is perfect because the “torn paper” is a visual cue that lets us know we’re back in your narrative. And then you can keep the other subheds, with the twins’ names and dates, which anchor us in chronological time. Easier on the reader.

And if you’ll notice we’ll call him “the twin,” instead of Guerdouin, because we worried about everyone getting confused. (Guerdouin and Guerdwich) had two names that were very strange but also similar. Somewhere an Associated Press editor died a little inside, because we went through every single reference to Guerdouin and changed it to “the twin.”

The change also sets up this eerie echo self, which is what a twin is.

Yeah. And it’s written as if they are one person.

In your opening sentence I like how you cue readers about exactly what kind of story they’re going to be getting with the phrase “weird true-crime story.”

This may be way too literal but I wanted people to know right off the bat that there was a crime and that it’s weird and there are gonna be twists and turns, and that it’s a mystery.

It’s a declaration. You’re establishing expectations: This may be a difficult story to unpack but at its essence it’s this.

You’re referencing a genre that they’re familiar with, so they’re on board from the beginning.

And the kicker of the opener – “In the beginning there was an impostor” – is kind of Biblical. It’s creation, it’s about self-creation. Echoes of identity.

The story was always called, when we had meetings or conference calls about it, “The Impostor.” On the whiteboard in my editor’s office in Connecticut, under my list of stories it was, “The Impostor.” Every time you can be reductive and simple, you should be it.

That’s what’s interesting about it – I don’t think you’re being particularly reductive with that line. What’s great about that seven-word sentence (seven also being a mystical number, by the way) is that there’s so much behind it. It’s a complicated idea.

A lot of things have to be true for someone to be an impostor. And it immediately poses a whole bunch of questions that you don’t have to ask because everyone else is already asking them, from “what is the nature of identity?” to “what the fuck?” I over-ask questions in stories – I go through and cut a lot of them, but I just think the beginning of a story should ask a question that the rest of the story shows the answer to. Sometimes I’m just so evangelistic about that. There are sentences in there that you’d want back after it runs, but in this one, I thought, made people ask questions.

You set up Part 1 with a short section called “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a string of bumped quotes that functions almost like confessionals. You’ve got different people sort of stepping in front of the camera and saying who they think Guerdwich is. Everybody’s saying something different and it works.

I’d love to lie to you right now and take credit, but that was added just before we filed it, and it was entirely my editor’s idea. That was never the first section.

Really?

Yeah, and it changes the whole story. (Jay Lovinger and I) were on the phone and he said, “Something’s not right.” He called back later and said, “Here’s what you need to do: You need to pull a bunch of contradictory quotes that in effect put all of these different characters, like the blind men and the elephant, in a room arguing with each other. Because that’s what the story is.”

Yep.

He said it and I was like, “Oh my God.” Honestly, I did (the section) in 15 minutes. I knew what those quotes were gonna be. And then he flipped the order. He ended it with voodoo. I had ended it with the quote from the old basketball coach, about the JFK movie.

Why did he want to end with voodoo?

I think it was the punch in the face that he liked. If there’s a sentence he says to me more than any other it’s, “You’re stepping on your ending,” either in a paragraph, a section or a story. He’ll say, “Just stop. Don’t explain it.” And I have this sort of urge – I worked at a newspaper for a long time. I’m a newspaper guy. And so I think, “Well, what if they don’t get it?” He says, “Clarity isn’t God.” That’s not me. I want to hold somebody’s hand and explain it to them.

In newspapers we’re trained to close it out. But in this case, if you’d moved the voodoo line up somewhere within that montage and ended “I don’t think you’ll ever get a why,” the story shuts down, dead-ends. To me the reader could say, “Well, why am I even reading this then?”

Yeah, what’re we even doing? It’s funny, I’ve never even thought about why (Lovinger) said (to end the section that way), because when he says do something I just do it. You know how this works: Writers don’t trust editors up until the moment they earn the trust, and then you trust them implicitly. I’m so thankful for that relationship. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.

What was the original Part 1 opening?

“The Blind Men and the Elephant” was just inserted, so –

Oh, so the original start, just after the intro, was, “Two of the few certainties about Guerdwich Montimere are that he has a twin brother and that they are nothing alike.”

Yeah. Exactly.

The elephant sets up all the different possible answers and also creates a sense of chaos.

You’re getting questions. If you look at it, the story answers every one of those questions posed.

There’s a quote under “February 2007” – “The ball stops bouncing.” That’s sort of a transcendent quality of the whole thing: You’re gonna get found out, you’re gonna get old, you’re gonna die. It’s shorthand.

Yeah. What is it, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”

Nice.

There has to be a transcendent quality, some subtlety. What’s that Steinbeck quote? Something like, “A story has to be about everything or it’s about nothing.”

You hired an investigator in Haiti for this story. Why?

I’d just been to Haiti and wasn’t really looking to go back. I was gonna go to Haiti depending on what (the investigator) found. I just wanted someone to check first, before I flew to Haiti fishing.

How did that work? Did he send you tapes, or?

He sent me transcribed tapes and documents. He was unbelievable. He went to two different places and found me every family member in Haiti. He’s the one who got me the cellphone number for the dad. I wanted to know if someone could tell me for sure if the mom took Guerdouin to see a voodoo priest in Haiti right around the moment Guerdouin and Guerdwich started changing lives.

The mom is such an interesting character – now that you’ve had time to process all of this, what do you make of her?

There’s something odd that came through, and I still don’t completely understand what went on. From talking to sort of third-party people, she wasn’t really involved, but I don’t want to get in the business of insulting mothers. You know what I mean? Everything’s complicated.

Juxtaposed with Jimmie Wright (the Texas woman who took Montimere in as her own) she’s an especially interesting character. I wondered if you were tempted to make more of Jimmie.

I wrote the entire (earlier) magazine story only about Jimmie Wright. I didn’t leave stuff out of the main story, save it. She’s a fascinating person. She and (her husband) Danny are the only untarnished people in this whole thing.

And there’s interesting complexity and tension even within that relationship: She believes one thing about Jerry/Guerdwich and Danny believes another. That stuff about the lighthouses was great. She’s obsessed with lighthouses and the backstory is incredible. How’d you get it?

I was there and the house was covered in lighthouses and I asked why. I’m just like, “What’s up with all the lighthouses?” I’m a real Woodward and Bernstein. I’ll ask anything.

Not every writer asks, though.

You just cover yourself in the blanket of cute nosiness. You know? The true genius of Chris Jones is that he notices things and he always asks. So you end up with the girl in the flowered dress, or Roger Ebert’s wedding ring.

A lot of people notice details but don’t say anything, or, worse, they assume they know what the details mean. That’s dangerous, assuming that the lighthouses –

Yeah, that she always wanted to live in Nantucket, or something.

You reference a South Florida paper’s timeline of events –

To me there’s nothing more disingenuous than media, the most powerful force of dissemination of information in the world, pretending it doesn’t exist. People interact with the media. And to think that that doesn’t drive these things – this is my little diatribe but it makes me crazy. So you have the thing like with the Cambridge cops and Dr. Gates – you have satellite trucks camping out in each of their yards, yelling questions at them and their families, so somebody says something and then they air these things next to each other as if they’re arguing with each other, and then you have 6,000 television stations calling the mayor of Cambridge to give a press conference, and so he decides to do it all at once, and then the commentariat talk about should he have had a press conference. It’s not even an estate anymore, it’s a weather system. (Media presence is) driving the whole thing and pretending it doesn’t exist.

There’s this passage that functions as a sort of nut graf:

All these questions coalesce into one − crazy or con? − and in that reduction I finally understand that the most important thing Guerdwich Montimere and Jerry Joseph have in common is the reaction they inspire. People see what they want to see, maybe even what they need to see, and the longer they spend thinking about it, the more the focus turns inward. What does a name and a number mean? Do we really ever know anybody?

Up until very shortly before the story ran there was another sentence on the end of that, and it was, “Do we ever really know ourselves?” And I cut it because it just didn’t pass my own smell test. I could feel myself rolling my eyes at myself. Maybe I chickened out – I’m not sure that was the right call or not, but I just thought, this is just psychobabble –

The preceding sentence is enough.

Yeah, to me, that is the whole (story) – everyone was trying to see (Joseph/Montimere) through their own prism. I mean this may sound crazy but sometimes I Google his picture, just to make sure any of this was real. I go back and forth on the crazy or con, still.

A little of both, maybe.

Probably, as is everything.

Did those insights drive the narrative or did they bubble up out of you as you reported?

They were bubbling up out of me. None of that stuff was outlined, those sort of things. It would’ve just been “crazy or con?” in the outline. The reason I was wary about taking that (aforementioned) line out was because that’s what came out in the moment, and I sort of think that you should defer to how you feel in the moment. I had been thinking about all of these things.

There’s a layering of thinking here that gives the story heart.

Covering a bullfight in Mexico.

I try to seek out stories that make me think about things. Sometimes I’m drawn to ideas that are hard to wrestle into shape. Sometimes I kick myself because I’ve avoided a story because I thought the arc was too simple and I go back and read what someone else has done and they’ve just crushed it. And I realize I was wrong and the story wasn’t simple at all.

So if you did miss the meaning, or failed to think about it in the way you wish you’d thought about it, what happened there? Where did the breakdown happen? That’s happened to me too. You look back on some stories and think: I blew it.

It’s when you’re tired.

Yeah.

It’s when you’re tired.

Yes.

I’ve had a real long run – I’ve been on the road a lot. I have a vacation scheduled at the end of this month, and I’ll be a roaring freight train when I come back from vacation. But if you’re just tired, you just miss it. I just missed a great story and I’m so pissed at myself. Sugar Shane Mosley is a boxer who’s been a champion, who’s had doping things going on. I think he’s fortysomething years old and he fought sort of the younger version of himself Saturday night in Las Vegas. I watched that fight and you realize that you’re watching someone at the end or near the end of his career and at the end it looked to me like – he wasn’t even fighting to win, he was fighting just so he could walk out of the ring. There was something inspiring about it. I should’ve seen it. If I’d seen it two days before that, I could’ve been at that fight.

Totally get that. Don’t know what to say to make you feel better about that, so back to the thinking, which is probably 80 percent of writing: In all of your stories, not just this one, there’s something deeper at work than the basic arc of events.

You’re looking for stories about the larger human condition – that’s the prerequisite. It needs to be about something. It needs to be about something to me.

*The conversation has been edited lightly for clarity, length and, occasionally, for words that might displease our mothers. 

This mystery isn’t about the lives of Guerdwich Montimere and Jerry Joseph; it is about how other people perceive those lives. It’s the tree falling in the woods thing. What does it mean to exist? Is identity based on how you feel or how other people see you? Is the story Jerry told the newspaper a lie? What if the facts are false but the emotions are real? Would that make it partially true? Fiction written about combat is often more real than any journalism, so which has a greater connection to the truth: fact or emotion?

With more than 1,000 pages of typed interviews, notes and documents, Thompson might’ve found himself lost in reporting that stretched from the mountains of Haiti to Florida to Texas. Instead he pulled off the triple narrative of Montimere and his troubled twin brother, Guerdouin, and of Thompson himself, a journalist deeply intrigued by the nature of identity. Thompson’s appearance in the story gives readers a handhold, a point of entry, a relatable guide when we’re not quite sure where to put our alliances or trust. His skill for staying calm in the face of complexity shows in the consistent grace notes of his writing:

He paints a picture of South Florida hallways full of kids from Haiti, from Cuba, from the Caribbean and Central America, people with no past and no paperwork. Communities don’t care if someone is too old; a few years seems like a silly reason not to get an education. Entire neighborhoods become a haze of facts and dates. People learn to differentiate between the real you and the you that is constructed to make it through the world. Identities are fluid.

Other magazine writers, including Thompson himself, have told the Jerry Joseph story well, but “The Kid Who Wasn’t There” takes the story “to the finish line” for Thompson, as he puts it, by exploring the twin relationship and therefore the shadow self. We may never fully know why, or how, this man Montimere became a boy again, but as Thompson so beautifully shows, sometimes it’s enough just to ask the questions.

Coming Friday: Check back for our conversation with Wright Thompson about this story and his other work for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com.

If the flight attendant was concerned about my tears, or if the little girl in the pink hoodie across the aisle was curious: Reading at 13,000 feet makes one susceptible to mood swings. It’s a scientific fact. It couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that Skip Hollandsworth of Texas Monthly had done a bait-and-switch on me.

Rehagen

On its surface, “Still Life” is “the tragic story of John McClamrock, a high school football player paralyzed during a violent tackle.” Hollandsworth plays to our expectations with the obvious construct of innocence approaching doom, particularly on the day leading up to John’s accident. The physical description − the bell-bottom jeans, patterned shirt, the red El Camino, the “china-blue eyes” and the long black hair − drops us into the 1970s and sets us up for loss. No longer will John be a 17-year-old boy eating a Whopper and cranking the volume on the Allman Brothers and going on mini-golf dates with girls who like him, not after that shattering moment that sounds like “a tree trunk breaking in half.”

Over the next 35 years, the media disappears along with John’s high school friends. Mac dies. Henry grows up and builds his own life. Only John and his mother are left. Suddenly Ann’s name appears in the story as often, if not more, as her son’s. In the archetypal details and routines of her life − the pantsuits, makeup, trips to the grocery store, monthly appointments at the J.C. Penney hair salon − we understand more and more of her character. Hollandsworth cleverly hints back to her first spoken line, that invocation of faith, with the subtle repetition of her favorite prayer of thanksgiving: “Lord Jesus, may I always trust in your generous mercy and love…”

Instead of pitying Ann, we begin to admire her because her actions − kissing John’s forehead, telling him how proud she is − so clearly illustrate her resolve. Together mother and son age, but Ann’s is the decline that we experience as readers. Hers is the true “still life” of the title:

Instead of getting dressed as soon as she got out of bed, she spent her mornings in her nightgown and her favorite green terrycloth bathrobe. She was having trouble hearing, and her eyesight was weakening. She began to wobble when she walked and once fell while cooking breakfast. A doctor told her that she had a type of vertigo and that she needed to stay off her feet. “Absolutely not,” she replied.

John becomes almost a supporting actor, even as he makes the decision his mother cannot:

“You have to admit, my body held up for a long, long time,” he said when Henry dropped by to check on him.

“Come on now, you can get through this,” Henry said, using one of their mother’s phrases. “All you have to do is keep fighting.”

“Why don’t you bring Mom over?” John said. “Have her look pretty. She’d like for me to see her that way.”

“John, are you giving up?”

There was a long silence. A food cart rattled down the hall and a nurse’s sneakers squeaked on the hallway floors. From other rooms came the beeps of heart monitors and the deep whooshing sounds of ventilators.

“We know about her prayer,” John finally said. “We know she doesn’t want to go first.” He looked at Henry and said, “I need to go so she can go.”

Henry takes Ann to get her hair done before taking her to see John, who is now back in a rehab facility:

“Mom, it’s okay,” John said.

She smoothed John’s hair along the temples. She touched his forehead, and she slowly ran her hand down one side of his face, past his cheekbones and the curls of his hair. She said, as if she knew what was about to happen, “Johnny, we’ll be back together soon.”

The action soon turns again, and then again, Hollandsworth’s camera all the while on Ann, knowing that this story is hers, that she will be the one who haunts us.

Tony Rehagen (@trehagen) is a senior editor at Atlanta magazine. His stories also have appeared in Men’s Health and Indianapolis Monthly. He has been a finalist for the City & Regional Magazine Association Writer of the Year in each of the past three years.

For more from our collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

Mauritania’s endless sand dunes hide an open secret: An estimated 10 to 20 percent of the population lives in slavery. But as one woman’s journey shows, the first step toward freedom is realizing you’re enslaved. (photo: Edythe McNamee/CNN)

Slavery 360°

For the CNN.com multimedia narrative “Slavery’s Last Stronghold,” reporter John D. Sutter and photographer/videographer Edythe McNamee spent eight days in Mauritania, the last country to abolish slavery but one in which an estimated 3.4 million people still live enslaved. Sutter and McNamee ferreted out an ugliness that the government denies still exists:

We ducked into the shade of a tent to muffle the sound of our potentially dangerous conversation. Within eyeshot was another tent camp, slightly larger. There, we met a man who appeared to be Fatimetou’s master. Mohammed, an older man with a toothy smile and slightly lighter skin, told us in a nonchalant manner that he holds workers on the compound without compensation.

“We don’t pay them,” he said through a translator. “They are part of the land.”

Moulkheir Mint Yarba, an escaped slave living in Noakchott, Mauritania (photo: Edythe McNamee/CNN)

Sutter and McNamee produced a prose narrative, photo slide shows and a 23-minute documentary film that tell the story of Moulkheir Mint Yarba, a slave who believes her baby was left outdoors to die:

The usually stoic mother … wept when she saw her child’s lifeless face, eyes open and covered in ants, resting in the orange sands of the Mauritanian desert. The master who raped Moulkheir to produce the child wanted to punish his slave. He told her she would work faster without the child on her back.

Trying to pull herself together, Moulkheir asked if she could take a break to give her daughter a proper burial. Her master’s reply: Get back to work.

“Her soul is a dog’s soul,” she recalls him saying.

The project’s massive audience – within the first three days of launch the piece received 2 million page views – owes to the importance of the subject matter but also to the powerful presentation. CNN.com broke from its regular design for this package, as Justin Ellis pointed out recently, with a magazine format that works: “big photos, big, full-width text, type treatments, dropcaps, integrated slide shows and video, and a general design depth that indicates this isn’t just another CNN.com story.” We’d add that the rapid-read sidebars wrap the story in quick (but not shallow) context. “Why slavery still exists in 2012” breaks down the politics, geography, poverty, religion, racism and education in one-graf nuggets. The sidebar on ethnic groups explains – sometimes in as few as 36 words – the interrelationships of white Moors, black Moors, black Africans and Haratine.

Altogether, as a model of multimedia narrative journalism, it’s hard to do better than this.

Fantasy baseball’s first pitch

In “The Lost Founder of Baseball Video Games,” from Grantland, Bess Kalb tells the story of John Burgeson, a Midwesterner who coded an early version of fantasy baseball for an IBM 1620 computer and who, at nearly 80, Wikipedia’d himself some credit. (Good for you, dude.)

Here’s Kalb:

The only 1620 in the country available for viewing is in a storage hangar at an IBM office complex outside Fishkill, New York. The complex is a sprawl of identical, brutalist buildings with labyrinths of corridors that lead to clean rooms and windowless offices and locked doors marked with biohazard signs. There, I’m greeted by Paul Lasewicz, IBM corporate archivist, who leads me into an enormous storage hangar where the old machines live under plastic tarps. It’s an eerie place, inert, echoing, cold.


A hundred or so grandfather clocks retrofitted with oversize rotary dials hang in rows from ceiling to floor on the far wall. Dissected typewriters are splayed out on shelves. There are old power cords peeking out from under the tarps, and Lasewicz tells me several of the machines could be fully operational if switched on. This is electronic computing’s zombie graveyard.


We step around a forklift parked in the middle of an aisle and stop in front of a covered mound the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Lasewicz looks pleased. “That’ll be your 1620. Almost mint.” He unveils the machine. It’s a desk mounted with a cockpit dashboard attached to a typewriter. Nothing about it screams, “Play baseball on me.” Next to the “IBM 1620” decal on the mainframe, in faded pencil, someone had drawn a smiley face.

A cool story, well told.

Robert Caro, squared

Chris Jones has been such a Storyboard regular this past year we’re about to give him his own archive. Last July, he dissected the classic W.C. Heinz story “Death of a Racehorse” as one of our first installments of “Why’s this so good?” Last December, he visited Nieman Narrative Writing students as part of the class’ speaker series and hosted Gay Talese in conversation at Harvard. In February, we selected his Zanesville zoo-massacre story as a Notable Narrative. Just when we assumed him to be collapsed on a beach somewhere with a cold one in each hand, he turned out a magnificent profile of Robert Caro in the May issue of Esquire.

As it happens, the New York Times magazine published a stunningly good profile the same day. The Times magazine piece, by Charles McGrath, came with “Robert Caro’s Painstaking Process,” a slide show. And in a “Behind the Cover Story” Q-and-A on the Times magazine’s blog, The 6th Floor, McGrath was asked what attracted him to Caro as a subject. McGrath: Caro’s patience for “spending this much time on any one thing,” a trait not often found among newspaper writers. “He doesn’t need the crackhead fix of seeing his name in print,” McGrath said.

How do the two pieces compare? First, some basics plus analytics, as of this morning:

We included social media because it’s hard to talk about story power without considering reader connection, and Twitter and Facebook figure hugely in the metrics of impact and reach. We’d argue for the inclusion of visible social-media analytics on more stories, in fact. Comments, not so much. Sometimes reader feedback reveals true impact but other times the Comments section behaves more like a cesspool.

We also could compare the craft elements, or the story-building decisions each writer made, such as structure, voice and the use of first-person authorial presence (Jones: no; McGrath: yes), but instead, just have a taste of each.

Jones, in Esquire:

His research is finished, he says. “Mostly, anyway.” His outline is pinned up on the wall, and it will not change. He even has some sections of it written, first drafts — including the first of two chapters on Bill Moyers (“He wrote a lot of memos,” Caro says, “so I got him”) — and he knows what to do with the rest. Nobody believes it, but he writes very fast. “I think I can write the next book in two or three years,” he says. He tries not to think that people are waiting, the way he tries not to think about many things, but he knows that they — Mehta and Gottlieb and Hourigan, and Andy Hughes and Lynn Nesbit and Carol Shookhoff the typist, all the people who have touched his books from the beginning, who are touching this one now — are out there waiting all the same, just around the corner.

McGrath, in the Times magazine:

One reason Caro’s books are so long is that he does keep burrowing through the files, and he keeps finding out things he hadn’t anticipated. Before beginning the first volume, he thought he could wrap up Johnson’s early life in a couple of chapters, until he talked to some of Johnson’s college classmates and found out about his lying, conniving side, which no one had previously described. That volume also includes a mini­biography of Sam Rayburn, Johnson’s mentor in Congress, and a brilliantly evocative section about how electrification changed the lives of people in the Hill Country, much of it based on interviews conducted by Ina, who visited the women there with homemade preserves and eventually won them over, she says, because she was as shy and nervous as they were.

So, who “wins?” With two great writers on one legendary subject, readers do.

So, is it working?

We asked Evan Ratliff, an Atavist founder, that question the other day when he dropped by the Nieman Foundation for a visit. Here, edited for clarity and length, is some of the conversation between Ratliff and fellows, staff, guests and Paige Williams, who teaches the foundation’s Narrative Writing seminar.

Williams: Let’s start with an explanation of how The Atavist works.

Of the three people who founded it, two of us came from the magazine world, so we have a very magazine-heavy perspective on how we approach things. One of them is myself – I was a freelancer for 10 years – and the other one is Nick Thompson, who’s an editor at the New Yorker and was my editor at Wired. The third guy, Jefferson Rabb, is the most crucial person. He’s the guy who actually builds everything you see. He’s the coder and the designer and he’s the person without whom we couldn’t do any of this because we’d just be assigning stories and not have anywhere to put them.

Our original idea didn’t have that much to do with multimedia. We just wanted to find a place to tell long stories. You’ve all probably experienced or are intimately familiar with the decline of word counts. I’ve only ever worked in magazines. I never worked for a daily newspaper except in college, so I came into journalism wanting to write 10,000-word stories. That’s what I thought everyone got to do when they got to a certain stage of their career. Come to find out that what used to be the 10,000-word story, if it ever existed, was now the 3,500-word story.

Ratliff (photo: Jonathan Seitz)

I had just done (“Vanish”), about when I tried to disappear. It ran at about 14,000 words, and I just felt like this is what I want to be doing. But there was no place to do it. So we thought, “What if we created something online that would allow us to (publish longer stories)?” We started looking at these phones and tablets. I had just moved to New York and I was reading on my phone on the subway. We started saying, “Maybe there’s something we could build for this.” We ended up with (The Atavist).

We assign stories basically just like a magazine. People send us pitches. The outside limits are 5,000 to 35,000 words. Everything is heavily narrative. The multimedia component also grew out of (“Vanish”). Over the course of it I gathered a lot of media, but in the end there was nothing really to do with them because the magazine just didn’t have the resources to build some elaborate construction that included the videos as part of the story. So we had this idea, “What if we took that approach with stories but integrated it into the narrative?”

So what you’re looking at now is our iPad app. The one for iPhone looks the same. We also sell the stories as text-only on Kindle. So we sell them on Kindle, we sell them on Nook, basically as books. “The Kalinka Affair” is our most recent. It looks just like a short book. It’s probably 30 to 50 pages. It’s designed like a book. There are no images in it except for the cover, for a variety of highly technical and financial reasons. The multimedia versions we only sell in our app, or in iBooks we sell a version.

Dina Kraft: So you call it an e-book.

Yes, an e-book.

Carole Osterer: Is the text-only version available in the multimedia version? It wasn’t clear on your website.

Yes and no. This will answer that question. So, “Lifted” is a story that I wrote when we started out. It’s about this robbery in Sweden. These guys stole a helicopter and broke into a cash depot with $150 million in it.

Carlotta Gall: I bought that on my Kindle.

Ah, so you read the text.

Gall: I bought some photos as well.

Early on we were putting photos in the Kindle (version) but we stopped doing that because they were charging us fees for how big the file is, which we didn’t know until we got the (financials) back and said, “Why aren’t we making much money on this?”

So in the Kindle version it would’ve started (with the text-only) Chapter One. In the iPad/iPhone version it starts with the actual surveillance footage from the robbery, which I got from the Swedish prosecutors when I went to report the story. They gave me a DVD with all the footage on it, and I edited it into this sort of condensed version of the guys breaking in. They use a sledgehammer. For some reason the cash depot with $150 million in it has a skylight, which they just smash their way through. And they had a ladder; they had measured it to fit. They’d designed it all based on a heist movie that they’d watched. It’s very dramatic. There were actually cameras inside the cash cages. And so our idea was that this is the real lede to the story, this is the lede as we really want it to be. If you think of this as a lede that’s going to hook somebody and never let them go, it’s hard to do better than this. You can, of course, (do it) with brilliant prose; it’s just a different approach to how to tell the story. (After the video) you’re dropped into Chapter One, where it’s a month before, and two guys are sitting on a bench, plotting this.

To answer your question, (on the iPad/iPhone version) you can get clean text and photos all the way through without links, without any distractions. It’s all about the story. If you see on the side here, there’s a little gray triangle and this thing on the left that says “online extras.” If you tap those you get little bits of text that raise up, which can be anything. Predominantly for us they’re characters, footnotes, maps and timelines.

Anna Griffin: Are you planning that kind of thing as you’re writing or do you think about it afterward?

Generally we do it afterward. Our approach is so new and strange that we have reporters treat it different ways. Some of our writers really get into this stuff, so they’ll show up with everything they want to go into the story, and then other ones could care less.

Griffin: What’s your preference as an editor?

I like it when they care. So I’ll just show you a few other things in different stories. “Piano Demon” is about a jazz musician from the 1920s and ’30s whose name was Teddy Weatherford. He was at one time one of the most famous jazz musicians in the world. And then he was this kind of lost character who went abroad, and he was very famous in China, and then he went to India and he died. This reporter Brendan Koerner had come across him and found all this research on him and spent months and months and months researching, and he also found his music. So his music is laced into the story. It’s the soundtrack, which can play along with the story.

Adam Tanner: Do you have to buy the rights to the various pieces of music?

In some cases yes and in some cases no. These are orphaned works, so for these we’re in some way taking our chances. But because Brendan Koerner probably spent more time trying to track down this guy than any person on earth I’m pretty sure (Weatherford) has no descendants.

Tanner: What about the classical piece (of music) at the start of the heist thing?

That was composed by Jeff, one of my co-founders; he’s trained in music composition. There are audio clips laced into “Piano Demon,” so if you see him talking about ragtime there’s a clip of him playing ragtime. That’s an example of where Brendan was sort of like, No I don’t want that clip there; there’s a better 15-second clip. We had days and days of back-and-forth about what were the appropriate clips.

from "Mother, Stranger," by Cris Beam

Sometimes we’ll do just fun things. “Island of Secrets” is by a writer named Matt Power. He writes for Harper’s and other magazines. This is about – he went to Papua New Guinea to track this guy who was trying to find tree kangaroos on this island in New Britain. We made a kind of in-house animation that’s this sort of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” style. So we try to mix it up. We did a memoir, “Mother, Stranger,” by a writer named Cris Beam. She teaches at Columbia and she’s written about juveniles, and we got her to write about her upbringing, which was very, very dark. Hermother was a prostitute and (Cris) left home when she was 14, never saw her mother again, and she only took a few things with her. One of the things she took with her was her diary from when she was 7 years old. (In the multimedia version) you can flip the pages of it. People are really moved by her talking about the names her mother called her.

We also have audiobooks in every (story), so there’s an actual audio version of the author reading the story. And you can flip back and forth between the audio and the text, and it keeps your place. That’s something you can’t do in print. Book publishers do it, but there’s this sort of legacy thing where book publishers have two revenue streams, the audiobook and the prose book. In (the digital) medium there’s no reason why you shouldn’t put them together and give people the option to do one or the other.

We’re trying to find ways to both integrate the media and to layer in all this other information but also to preserve the power of the story first and also preserve the journalism. Every story is fact-checked, every story is treated like a story at The New Yorker or Harper’s or any other magazine.

In terms of the (fee) model, it’s different than either magazines or books. It’s really like grabbing parts from both. We’ll pay the writer a fee plus 50 percent of the royalties. The royalties come after the platform takes its percentage. Most of these platforms will take 30 percent. After that, whatever we get, we give the author half. Which means that if the story doesn’t do well, the authors end up getting paid maybe what they’d have gotten paid to write for Harper’s. A dollar a word is the standard. But the story also has the possibility to do very well and for the writer to get paid, in some cases, several times what they could’ve gotten even at the highest-end glossy.

Williams: Someone ran a story the other day about what authors were earning. (David) Dobbs was in there, some others.

David Dobbs is a science writer, but the story he wrote for us was this thing called “My Mother’s Lover.” It’s a reported memoir. His mother, on her deathbed, revealed that she’d had this affair 60 years before, during World War II, that had altered her entire life in this very dramatic way. So (Dobbs) spent almost a decade figuring out who the guy was and finding his military records – he disappeared during the war – and contacting his family, and then unspooled this whole narrative.

Williams: What’s the (most recent) story?

It’s by Josh Hammer, who used to be (Africa) bureau chief at Newsweek. It’s a story so well known in France and Germany but less so here. It’s sort of complicated, but this French guy was married. He had a daughter. His wife left him for this German doctor and took the daughter with them. And some years later the daughter suddenly died and it came to light that the doctor had probably raped and killed her. This father then spent three decades trying to bring this guy to justice. The German government wouldn’t deal with him – they basically said there’s not enough evidence – so he essentially hired a kidnapper to go kidnap the guy and – well, I don’t want to spoil the end.

As far as the pay model – David Dobbs pitched his story, actually, to Wired. That’s the way I found out about it. He pitched it as: There are these guys who track down World War II remains all over the world and they use all this high tech. It was a very Wired story but they said no. One of the editors told me about it and a tiny kernel of the pitch was, “This is kind of relevant to me because my mother had this affair in World War II and I contacted these people,” and I said, “Well that sounds like a better story to me than the one you’re trying to pitch.” And if he had gotten it in Wired, he’d have been paid, I’d say, a quarter of what we’ve paid him. And that’s just so far.

Gall: Do you know how many subscribers you have?

We have a weird situation when it comes to subscribers because when we’re selling on Amazon we’re selling single-copy sales. On the iPad, we know how many people have downloaded the app, but it’s very, very difficult to tell who is buying what. We actually don’t even have subscriptions yet. That’s something we’re launching in the next couple of months, where people can subscribe to get 10 of these or 12 of these.

Kraft: Over how long, half a year, a year?

Probably over a year.

Kraft: And there’s no advertising on the pages.

There’s no advertising on the pages.

David Skok: Do you keep data on the users? What they click on and their favorite interactives?

We have analytics on everything that everyone does but it’s fully anonymized. In fact we couldn’t not anonymize it because, as I say, they don’t tell us who the people are. We’ve actually never looked at it.

Skok: Really?

Yeah, and it’s because – it’s experimenting. We’re experimenting with different types of storytelling. It’s entirely possible that nobody watches a video that’s an interstitial chapter, but I’d rather try a larger sample size before I know that. I just feel like we’re putting it all somewhere and building a visualization tool for it, and at some point we’ll go look and see.

Jonathan Blakley: Do you find authors are writing stories with more media in mind?

Now they are. In the beginning it was like pulling teeth to get people to pitch me a story at all because I was saying, “This thing doesn’t exist (but) please pitch me a story.”

(laughter)

But now, yes. At the very least they’ll acknowledge it. They’ll say there’s some great TV footage of the arrest, there’s this, there’s that. We have a guy doing a story in New York who’s a Vietnam vet who’s had a very, very strange life who’s now trying to put on this Shakespeare play. The writer had this whole plan about this video that had been shot and how it will all mix together. I love it when they do it. The rub, though, is they still have to sit down and write a text. They have to be able to write because we have to sell the text version.

The thing I try to stay away from is sending a reporter out who’s sort of juggling all these (multimedia recording) devices and doing everything worse than if they just focused on one thing. I mostly just want them to go report the way they’d normally report. Like when we sent Matt Power to New Guinea, I said, “At some point gather some high-quality digital audio of the jungle.” We already had an idea that we would use that as the soundtrack. So when you start the story, it’s like a 10-minute loop of jungle sounds. You could debate all day whether it adds anything to the story, but I like it. It’s fun.

Williams: What’s also cool is that it’s original to the piece. You didn’t just pipe in some random jungle sounds.

Yeah. Yeah.

Kraft: And in a case like that, the photos are very lush and beautiful. Did (the author) take the photos?

Yeah, but as it turns out there was a guy who was sort of incidental to the expedition – he was a herpetologist who was along – who was a really, really good photographer. So we ended up buying his photos.

Jones: Compared to like Harper’s or The New Yorker, can you describe what’s a story that you’d want that you know they wouldn’t want?

I don’t think there’s that much difference. We get pitched lots of stories that have already been to The New Yorker, have already been to Harper’s.

Jones: I wondered that about Brendan’s.

Brendan’s was different because he wanted to do it as a book. The other type of story we get is one where there’s not enough there for a book, where the agent might say, “You know, it’s a great story but you’re not gonna spend two years on this and write 200 pages.” I mean I don’t care about a news peg at all. We’ll do historical pieces. We’ll do pieces that are sort of newsy but that don’t have a news peg. The one that was a (digital National Magazine Award) finalist for reporting was about the Egyptian revolution, but we sent the author, David Wolman, there a month after everything had happened. It just so happened that he’d done a story a couple of years ago about some of the activists when they were completely unsuccessful. He had been tracking them all this time, so we sent him back to reconstruct their role in all the events. It was too late to do an Egypt story in the magazine sense. But I don’t really care about that. The main difference for us is, it’s always narrative first. It’s never topic first.

James Geary: Do you know anything about your demographics? Who’s buying? Are they hard-core magazine subscribers? Are they lapsed magazine subscribers? Are they book buyers? Are they not book buyers?

I’d say we only know anecdotally because we don’t have data on who they are. The Kindle people, which are the majority of the people who read our things, are book lovers, because up until recently if you had a Kindle you just had it to read books. I mean that’s why it’s so much easier for us to sell on Kindle, because people are buying books and then suddenly there’s this thing called the Kindle Single, which is way cheaper and hopefully of the same quality. We’re very much in this community of – I don’t know if you’re familiar with longform.org or Longreads, which is this hashtag on Twitter. They’ve grown really large followings of people who love long magazine stories. We get a fair portion of those. We try to go after people who love magazines.

Skok: I’m very curious about your actual team on the development/design side of things. Also, are you licensing what you built to other organizations or publishers as an additional revenue stream but also so they can take advantage of the multimedia?

The answer to the second question is yes, which will illuminate the size of our team. Our team for a long time was me and this guy Jefferson, who made all this stuff, and an intern, who was the only paid person for a long time. In fact, when we started the only people who got paid were the writers, the fact checkers and the copy editors. Now we have two editors, myself and a part-time editor named Alissa Quart – she teaches at the Columbia J-school and writes for the New York Times magazine – and we have two producers who are full time. They do all these multimedia things and also run all of our social media, our Facebook, our Tumblr. We do promotion around each one of these stories when it launches. We place excerpts and go to blogs. Our copy chief is the copy chief at Outside magazine, who’s an old friend of mine who lives in Santa Fe. Fact checkers: We have a rotation of freelancers. A lot of them have worked at Harper’s and The New Yorker. And then the rest are contract people that we bring in, like an animator or a radio producer, to do sound.

On the business side, which is related to licensing the platform, we have three full-time programmers, and a business development person who sells the platform. So this guy Jeff that I was saying is such a genius, he didn’t just build the actual app, he built this whole software platform that allows us to do that, which we do indeed license to other organizations. That’s like our version of advertising. That’s what pays everyone’s salary while we get to do the thing that we really want to do, which is create stories.

Skok: Has anybody approached you to buy you?

Yeah, at the very beginning but maybe we gave off strong signals that we were not for sale. We never raised any money at the beginning. We started with our own money, and part of the reason was that we went to see a venture capitalist and showed them this software, the first thing they said was, “Why are you wasting your time on content? Why don’t you sell this (platform) and make a bunch of money and then you can do whatever you want?” And we just thought: We never want to deal with that again.

(laughter)

Williams: The platform allows you to make changes: add pop-up corrections or updates, epilogues.

And it creates these very interesting new-media dilemmas. I don’t know if any of you saw that Jonathan Franzen said e-books were evil, and everybody made fun of him, but actually the thing that he was really talking about was the fidelity of the text and the ability to change it over time. Which we completely have here. We could change anything and just whitewash whatever happened, so we have to have our own editorial standards. If we correct something we put one of those pop-ups in: “This has been corrected for such-and-such.” Not for typos and things like that, but for substantial corrections. We’ve added epilogues, so like in the Swedish heist case some of the guys went to trial and prison, and so I had an epilogue about that. There are all these things you can do. You can have an open-ended ongoing story or book, and some of the people that we license to are looking to do those sorts of things. They also use it for educational textbooks. TED conferences are producing a line of books.

Raquel Rutledge: What sort of volume are you dealing with and where do you anticipate being in the next year with the number of stories?

Right now we have a pretty good pipeline of assignments. We have 12 pieces assigned, I think. Even when we get a bigger pipeline we won’t accelerate too much because we do like to give (each story) a little publicity, a little runway, like they’re small books. I don’t want to start shoveling them out. I’d like to keep it monthly. We don’t want to overdo it. I recently had to justify that we were a magazine because we were submitted for the National Magazine Awards. Nobody said anything. And then we got picked as a finalist and people said, “It’s not even a magazine, they’re like books!” And my argument is, It’s like a magazine where one story has taken over the feature well. Which has happened: Hiroshima and things like that. I think it’s an okay argument.

Tyler Bridges: The different ways you’re bringing in money – can you elaborate on that?

Editorial revenues are predominantly from Kindle and Apple. Nook, they’re not keeping up right now. Kindle launched Kindle Singles, so they’ve really created a forum for this length of work. They’re assigning their own stories and those (writers) are also doing well because they get the whole percentage. So, Kindle and Apple. And then our licensing revenues are probably five or six times the size of our editorial revenue. Most of what we do runs on the licensing revenues, and pays for the editorial. In terms of growing, we’re kind of in the middle of trying to figure out what we’re going to do this year, but we’re really, really conservative. We sold over 100,000 copies last year and it would be nice to double that, and we’d like to double what we do on the licensing side, so that’s kind of our goal this year. We’re doing okay so far.

Williams: Is there editorial quality control with Kindle Singles? Do they fact-check?

I’m pretty sure they don’t fact-check. I actually don’t like to discourage people from doing Kindle Singles, though, because the guy who runs it is a longtime magazine writer, was an editor at the Village Voice, is a good friend of mine, and they do edit and they certainly copyedit. If you go there, you’re getting 70 percent of the royalties. It’s exclusive to Amazon, so you’d have that, and I don’t know what their fee situation is. I don’t think they pay a fee to most (authors), so if you want to cover your reporting costs, then it’s a matter of how much you want to lay out of your own money. Sometimes we’ll cut the royalty and pay a much higher fee. So writing for us is more akin to writing for a magazine whereas Kindle Singles is closer to a book model.

Tanner: We had Gay Talese come to speak some months ago and we did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on his latest New Yorker story as to time invested to the fee he received –

Never do that.

(laughter)

Tanner: – and we concluded he’s better off working at McDonald’s.

I usually say Starbucks.

Tanner: So based on your experience, is it ultimately just a labor of love that never pays off big time?

I mean it just depends on what your standard of living is, I guess.

Tanner: So if you love extreme poverty this is the way to go?

Extreme poverty? I feel like anyone who says, “I want to be guaranteed a six-figure salary,” they probably didn’t get into journalism in the first place. But if you were to do – well let’s take this new story, “The Kalinka Affair.” (Hammer) is an incredibly professional guy. He knocked that thing out, did all the reporting, all these interviews, all these court documents, and turned in a clean copy, and the whole process took probably three months overall. And he was probably working on two other stories at the time. He could make 35 grand off this story. And if he does another four features this year … I think that’s a pretty good salary, for my standard, but that’s not for everyone. And then again we might have (stories) that continue selling for a lifetime. There’s ones now that sell 1,000 copies a month and they’ve been out for six months.

Williams: To me, that’s part of the attractiveness of this: There’s potentially no end point.

I definitely don’t want to make out like I think it’s some panacea for long-form writers to make a living. Hopefully it’s something alongside of – these writers are all writing for Wired and Harper’s or have a book contract, or they’re working for this sort of set of magazines or websites, and (this is) something that fits in with whatever else they do. But it’s always true for these type of reporters, including myself, and including Paige I’m sure, that you end up getting obsessed with it and you end up spending twice the amount of time than you should have, for the amount of money you’re being paid.

Gall: We had some publishers come recently and they said they’ve tried to do the multimedia for their books and so far they’ve found the expense is not worth it. Are you doing it because you think it’s the future or just because you like it, or do you think you can make it pay?

I would say the reason we’re doing it is mostly that we like it. I would also say, though, that we hear publishers say that all the time. The main reason is because when the iPad first came out and when apps first came out publishers were paying 50 to 100 grand or more to people to build an app around a book, and shooting all this video for it and doing interactive games, all these things. You have to sell an incredible amount to make your money back. There was this Al Gore book by this company called Push Pop Press, which was our biggest competitor on the platform licensing side, and it got bought by Facebook after they produced this one book. It must’ve sold 500,000 copies, because it’s really, really, really elegantly done in terms of the interactivity. They spent a lot of money and definitely made it back many times over. So it’s just a matter of how you allocate your resources. If you do it without too much overhead then you don’t have to sell that many to make your money back.

Gall: And then why did you go into this? Is it because you feel magazines were going to finish, or is it because you wanted to be an editor?

Neither of those. I still don’t want to be an editor.

(laughter)

Although maybe it’ll make me less neurotic if I ever were to get back to writing. It was more out of frustration. It wasn’t that doomsday: “Magazines are dead.” I actually don’t think that. I think magazines are viable, partly because a lot of them have gone back to doing longer pieces, in-depth pieces. That’s what they can actually sell. The short stuff is harder to sell because you can get it for free online everywhere. I did it because if you want to pitch a story that’s just a great yarn and you think maybe it should be 10,000 or 15,000 words, there’s five magazines you can pitch it to and, in the case of The New Yorker, there are hundreds of people pitching them every single day, and they take like two freelance stories at best. The web has infinite space.

Osterer: Did you say who’s licensing your platform?

It’s kind of a motley collection. We license it to journalism schools, so Columbia (licenses it), and Dartmouth Business School licenses it to do case studies. Pearson, which is the gigantic textbook maker that owns Penguin, they’re building a big educational thing with it. TED conferences is launching a line of books. And we have some start-up magazines, so people are actually launching a new sports magazine on it.

Kraft: What’s the appeal, do you think, of this specific format, and how many pitches are you getting per month and how many are you taking?

The appeal to me or to the public?

Kraft: To the public.

I think the appeal to the public – it’s like inverting this question that I used to get all the time. People would say, “Well don’t you think attention span has declined and people don’t really want to read this long stuff?” I was always having to say there’s no real evidence that nobody reads anything anymore. Then I realized we could just turn that on its head and say, “They’re short books.” I actually think that is the appeal, especially on Kindle: (stories) at their appropriate length. As a nonfiction writer and as a person who loves nonfiction books (I think) some nonfiction books are too long. A lot of nonfiction books are (published) because (a writer) gets a book contract out of a magazine story and they’ve got to just pump it up.

So the length has a certain appeal. The multimedia is still unclear.

And then pitches: We have a story meeting once a month and generally 40 or 50 (pitches) have come in. We usually talk about 15 or 20 of them at the meeting and then we’ll probably pick two. Sometimes none. Sometimes five. In some ways, as I said, I set this up because I was so frustrated because I was pitching places and it was always like, No, no, no, but we’re so small we’ve created another version of that problem and we have to say, No, no, no.

Other people are also starting similar (platforms). There was another one that started after us, called Byliner. And people out in San Francisco just raised $100,000 on Kickstarter to do a long-form science thing. So I think there’re going to be a lot more of these slightly different models but in the same genre, giving the author a cut of what they sell.

Williams: What do you look for in pitches in terms of the perfect narrative? What elements need to be there for you to say yes?

I feel like after all this time of saying narrative, narrative, narrative, I should be better at articulating what that means, but I’m not, so I come up with tricks for how I describe it. The typical New York Times magazine story, to take an example: They do what people call narrative stories but they’re actually very topic-based. So they’ll pick something like pregnancy, say, and then find a character, and (a reporter) will follow that character, and the lede is about that character and their experience, and then there’s a broader section about science, and then one about policy, and then you get back to the character. That’s not really what I mean by narrative, but a lot of people refer to that as narrative.

Williams: Those are news features.

Yeah. And we get a lot of pitches like that, so I’m always trying to find ways to explain why I said no. The best way I’ve come up with to describe it is: If someone is telling me a story and then they stop in the middle, and I say, “Well, what happens next?” That’s the kind of story we do.

The kind of story where you say, Well, there’s a lot of adoption of Chinese babies in Oklahoma – that’s a really interesting topic, and there’s probably a magazine story in that, but that’s not a narrative the way we want to do it. So we’re always saying characters first, plot first. So, “A” happens, “B” happens, “C” happens.

Jones: And no nut graf.

No nut graph. We don’t want the kind of “Here’s what this story’s about” (graf) but sometimes we’ll have it. Because we can go too far in the other direction, which is just characters doing crazy things. You do want some sort of gravity, significance. We have this story called “Baghdad Country Club,” which was a bar in Baghdad during the war that this British paratrooper opened in the Green Zone. It’s a little bit “M*A*S*H” and a little bit “Casablanca,” in the movie sense, and it’s very light relative to the environment in which it’s set, so we did have to insert these sort of heavier passages about the Green Zone and its relationship to the rest of Baghdad. Otherwise it just read like the writer was ignorant of the significance of the Iraq war.

Alysia Abbott: Have you thought about if a film studio were to say, “We want to make this into a movie?” Has that happened yet?

Yes. We’re actually represented by CAA in L.A. I should’ve said that when we were talking about the author model, because that’s another unique aspect of what we do, which some writers don’t like at all. We split any film and TV options 50-50 should they happen. We have this representation in L.A., so they’d be responsible for shepherding the story in that environment. The good thing for the writer is that they know their story is going to get looked at by some at least marginally powerful person in Hollywood. The downside is, Michael Lewis is never gonna sign up for that, or David Grann. We have one (story) that’s in legal negotiations now and another one that may have some interest. But it’s so random. I know writers who’ve made an excellent, excellent living on top of their journalism by optioning things, and (the films) never get made. It’s something you hope for but don’t really count on.

*Ratliff appeared as part of the Narrative Writing class’ speaker series. A contributing editor at Wired magazine, he also writes for The New Yorker and National Geographic. This conversation was edited for clarity and length. (Disclosure: Williams is an upcoming Atavist author.)

Oney

The piece, which appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1973, possesses many virtues, among them its substantial length. Clower, a regular on the Grand Ole Opry, was the kind of humorist who liked to spread out, and Blount gave him 10,000 words in which to do so. Some reference works refer to Clower as a “stand-up comedian,” but that’s not quite right. More accurately, he was a teller of tall tales in the tradition of Mark Twain and Davy Crockett. Clower developed his storytelling skills while employed as a fertilizer salesman in Yazoo City, Miss. (customers were more responsive to riotous yarns than to dry recitations regarding crop yields), and he perfected them on the sports banquet circuit. He did not do schtick. He did rousing narratives designed, in his words, to “fling a cravin’”  on an audience. This is a craft that requires space.

Blount begins the piece with a simple scene-setter. After giving a description of his 270-pound subject (“a startling apparition”) on the dais at a post-dinner speaking engagement and, importantly, establishing that Clower had played defensive tackle for Mississippi State, he essentially gets out of the way. Three-fourths of “Knock ’im Out, Jay-ree!” consists of Clower stories. By my count Blount includes 20 of them, and he lets Clower tell the majority in his own voice. This has to be a record for stories within a story, and Blount appears to flat-out relish it:

The stories Clower tells are more or less true… Clower compares himself favorably, and aptly, with such country-humorist predecessors as Andy Griffith and Brother Dave Gardner when he says, “I don’t tell funny stories. I just tell stories funny.”

He tells them all over, not just at sports banquets. In his time he has enlivened many a broiler festival and county fair, at least one tobacco-spitting contest and an armadillo festival. He has appeared at the Grand Ole Opry several times, on the David Frost and Mike Douglas television shows and on stage with country-music stars as far north as Boston. His two record albums have together sold 650,000 copies and he says with a characteristic lack of false or even true modesty that he has never had an audience that did not warm up to him eventually.

Some of Clower’s tales involve the antics of the Ledbetter siblings (Ardell, Bernel, Raynell, Marcell and W.L.). Others, including “Knock ’im Out, John!” from which the article takes its title, concern coon hunting. Most, however, are devoted to Southeastern Conference football. Clower wasn’t very good at the game, which, it turned out, was a boon to his career as a humorist. Success stories aren’t funny, but embarrassing ones are. A player from a religious college, for example, once knocked Clower down face first in such a way that he ended up eating dirt. This warrior for Jesus then declared: “The Bible says the meek shall inherit the earth.” Clower should have written him a check right there. Here, as Blount presents it, is the whole thing:

“This Preacher Mayfield forearmed me back of my head. He shoved my face down in that dirt and that grass, and my bottom lip and bottom teeth just scooped up a big mouthful of that dirt like a dragline.”

Clower sticks out his bottom lip and teeth and assumes such a graphic dirt-biting expression that his rapt audience can taste turf through the three-color ice cream. He shudders and makes a series of massive, agonized mouth-pawing motions. “I jumped up spittin’ and knockin’ the grass and the dirt out of my mouth, and I said, ‘Fella, you the dirtiest thing I ever played against in all my life. And you supposed to be a Baptist preacher!’

“And he stood up erect − they had done throwed the ball for a touchdown − he stood up erect and popped his hand over his heart and he pointed his long finger right in my face and he said, ‘The Bible says, the meek shall inherit the earth.’

“And I had just inherited a mouthful of it.”

A few readers may feel that Blount lets Clower go on a bit too long about old times, and in truth some of the stories regarding now-forgotten athletes do feel a little dated. But by and large, they hold up. Not only was Clower a spellbinder, but he was also something more. He imbued his yarns with insights into a fast-disappearing rural society, and my sense is that Blount realized as much the instant he first heard Clower open his mouth. That is why he generously quotes Clower’s account of calling home from the site of an away football game. Such a call required someone to fetch Clower’s mother from her house and take her to a country store where the neighborhood’s only telephone was located. Just that deftly, Blount uses Clower to establish that there was a day in America when many families did not possess what now is considered a basic. Academics talk about oral history. Journalists practice it.

I first read “Knock ’im Out, Jay-ree!” shortly after it was published, and only upon recently rereading the piece did I remember that Blount inserts himself into it early on as “the interviewer.” At the time the article was written, nonfiction writers were becoming more and more enamored of omniscient narrative. But before they could run, they had to walk, so occasionally they’d appear, as Blount briefly does here, as a rhetorical device to authenticate their material. They didn’t want readers to think they were piping it. In Gay Talese’s “The Silent Season of a Hero,” the author is “a man (Joe DiMaggio) didn’t want to see.” Tom Wolfe, with typical panache, referred to himself in several stories as “the man in the brown Borsalino hat.” By the mid-’70s, these writers had largely disappeared from their work. The craft had reached its seamless apogee.

Now, the trend is going the other way, especially at The New Yorker. Even in pieces in which the author’s involvement is immaterial, New Yorker writers feel compelled to declare that their subjects “told me.” Not only is this an annoying tic, it’s an indication that in our atomized age many magazine writers distrust the very notion of omniscience. To them, New Journalism is old and suspect journalism. The fact is that New Journalism at its best requires a depth of reporting that fewer and fewer contemporary practitioners are willing to pursue.

“Knock ’im Out, Jay-ree!” does something I wish more profiles did – it surprises you. Although Clower grew up in a part of Mississippi where segregation was rampant, and while his humor appealed chiefly to white audiences, he was pro-civil rights. Blount hints at Clower’s progressivism near the top of the article, then elaborates at the conclusion. Clower’s children attended integrated public schools. In the late ’60s, Clower shopped at a store boycotted by racists – a gutsy decision at the time. Not that Clower mentioned any of this in his act. He didn’t want to convert audiences. He wanted laughs.

Blount’s greatest achievement in “Knock ’im Out, Jay-ree!” is that he wrote a funny article about a funny man. Blount, of course, is a pretty fair humorist himself. His 22 wittily sagacious books include “Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor,” part of the Norton Anthology series, and he’s a panelist on NPR’s “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me.” Still, it’s hard to translate what works on stage onto the page. A lot of it goes under the heading: You had to be there. Yet Blount, by letting Clower do what he did – and there’s more art to this than might initially be apparent; I particularly admire the deft way Blount paces Clower’s stories – pulls it off. To put it as Clower would have: Blount “flings a cravin’ on you.”

Steve Oney is the author of “And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.” His articles have been anthologized in “The Best American Magazine Writing 2008” and “The Best American Sports Writing 2006.”

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, check out the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

You were dealing with a huge amount of complicated information. Could you talk a bit about how you organized it, and how you presented it in such a graceful, moving way?

To report “60 Lives,” the New York Times’ Sean Patrick Farrell, Kevin Sack and Nicole Bengiveno scrubbed in for surgery after surgery.

It sounds a little silly to say that a story like this wrote itself, but to some extent the material was so compelling that it made the job a little bit easier. There were certain things that I knew were going to have to be included in the roughly 5,000 words I was allotted. Pretty much from the beginning I felt there was going to be a certain logic to writing it in a roughly chronological way, or at least with an emphasis on the first link in the chain and the last link, and with the rest of the story composed of equal parts explanation of how the chains work – the medicine, and what I witnessed in the operating rooms – and the history of these chains, and the best human stories that I could find from within the chain. Before I started reporting, I assumed that at every link there would be a great narrative tale. By definition there had to be: Somebody’s giving up a part of themselves for a loved one. How uninteresting could it be? The challenge was gonna be to find out about as many of those links as possible in the time allotted, given the other things I was going to have to accomplish, and then picking out the best tales. When you look at the story there’s only a handful of stories in it, out of the 30 transplants. There were a lot of great stories left on the cutting room floor on this one, sort of by necessity.

The biggest decision I had to make in terms of how to structure and write it – I longed to simplify the story by focusing on a smaller number of people. I was concerned all along that even if I minimized the number of characters there would be too many characters. I didn’t want it to get bogged down in a long list of names. People wouldn’t be able to keep it straight. And the stories would start to dilute each other. Ultimately I decided that that was wrongheaded.

What do you mean?

The central character was the chain itself. And by definition the chain consisted not of a handful of people but of 60 people. What made it miraculous was that there were 60 participants and that these kidneys flowed relatively seamlessly from one link to the next. And so I decided that to focus on a central character kind of undercut what the story was all about. Once I wrapped my head around that, I think I got more comfortable with the notion of doing it the way I did, with a number of central characters. I kind of dip in and out of each of their tales rather quickly, mainly because I have to. As I was reporting the story, Amy Harmon’s great piece about the autistic couple in love ran, and I was envious because she was able to tell a story that essentially was about the socialization of autistic people through the eyes of a single couple. I was a little jealous and wanted to find a way to do that, but then quickly decided that the point of the (kidney) story is that there were 60 characters, not that there were two.

Where did this story come from?

I’m certainly not the first person to write about these chains. There was a New England Journal of Medicine article in, I think, ’09 that was about the first of these chains that were structured this way, with a Good Samaritan starting a donation to the waiting list and then non-simultaneous operations. So there was a flurry of stories after that, about these chains. I was covering Obamacare at the time. We were sort of in the thick of legislative battle, and it wasn’t something I was going to be able to get to at that point but I filed it away as being interesting.

I had a change of jobs back in the fall, where I got assigned to this new team of reporters created by Jill Abramson to do enterprise stuff on lifestyles. It was sort of broadly defined, and my part was that I going to continue to write about health-related issues. I had a list of story ideas that I put in front of my new editor, Adam Bryant, and he quickly got interested in the kidney-chain story. So I went out to see sort of what had been written, whether there was any room left to do something interesting, looking for, you know, an angle that would sort of give us a reason to do it, and to do it in a big way. My third or fourth call was to Garet Hil, whom I’d started to hear about and read about. He was in the middle of what was going to be the longest chain ever constructed. So I suddenly had my angle. I took it back to Adam and to others at the paper and there was a lot of enthusiasm about it and resources put into it quickly.

Such as?

A very quick decision to make it a big multimedia project. So: photographers assigned, graphic artists assigned, interactive designers assigned, a video journalist assigned. And sort of involvement from people on the masthead at the paper in terms of getting their attention and early signoff, an assumption that we’d probably do it at two pages long. All those things were in place pretty quickly.

Where in the chain was the transplant process at that point?

They were exactly halfway through. I found out about it in early November, and they were in the middle of this long bridge, as they call it, between donations. This was a point where a recipient had been transplanted – their paired donor had yet to donate, typically for some sort of logistical reason. This was the longest pause in the chain. It was from I think late September to early December, almost two months.

Which people in the chain? Could we look at it that way?

Identify which ones?

Yeah.

I think it was No. 16, Rebecca Clark. Yeah. John Clark, No. 15, had received his transplant, and his wife, Rebecca Clark, did not donate until Dec. 5. He had been transplanted on Sept. 28. My initial concern was, Well I’m not gonna be in on the beginning of this and that’s gonna be awkward, to do a narrative that way, because I’m gonna have some stuff that’s much more vivid than the rest of it. In retrospect, I think it ended up being an advantage. First of all, it cut the time of the project in half. For a project like this it was relatively quick: 3 1/2 months from conception to publication.

Wow.

And also, it made what I did see fresher, I think. It wasn’t that difficult to go back and reconstruct the first half of it. And the timing worked out kind of just right, because once I found out about the chain from Garet it gave me a month to get my ducks in a row before surgeries actually started again. So I was able to spend that time reconstructing the first half. I went to New York and spent a day with him at his office on Long Island. I interviewed a lot of doctors and people in the field, read a lot of journal articles, and also was able to get the rest of our team up and moving. They started collecting names and IDs and photos of people in the first half of the chain. Which was a process. So the timing worked out nicely.

I spent most of December kind of running. We had a sort of interesting decision to make: We had a meeting in New York with all the people involved – we had to make decisions about where we were gonna go in terms of actually being at the hospital and watching procedures and interviewing patients. Part of that was gonna be driven by who we thought was interesting given what I knew at that point about the chain, and part of it was gonna be driven by pure logistics. I knew that I wanted to be present for the end of it because I was going to highlight the last recipient. And there also was this great flurry of procedures on the penultimate day at UCLA. There were six surgeries from dawn to dusk that day. So I figured that would be a great place to be, and then fly with the last kidney to Chicago for transplant. But I was worried that what if the chain breaks before we get there, which definitely was possible.

One of the first things I did the first month was, Garet shared all the emails that he sent and received relative to the first part of the chain, and you could see all these different points where things had broken down for one reason or another, and he had had to repair breaches. So I knew that this chain that’s supposed to be 30 transplants long could end up being 17 transplants long and if I was going to be there for the last three or four I’d have nothing to write about. So we decided to pick a surgery early in December, when the chain first started back up, to go and eyewitness, and to focus on those participants so that if disaster struck we’d have something.

I don’t know if you’ve looked at all the stuff online or not –

It’s killer.

We ended up doing a video piece about Cesare and Josephine Bonventre – he’s from Brooklyn, she’s from Toronto, they’re mentioned briefly in the print story because they’re the only example in the chain of a compatible pair, meaning she could’ve donated to cousins, she could’ve donated directly to him, but by donating down the line instead he was able to get an even better matched kidney. Which is kind of the next wave in these chains: It expands matching potential by including compatible pairs. So the day before the surgery I went with a photographer (Nicole Bengiveno) and videographer (Sean Patrick Farrell) to his place in Bensonhurst and interviewed the two of them at length, went with him to his final dialysis treatment at a clinic in Brooklyn – again, with cameras in tow – and the next morning we all showed up at the hospital at 4:30 in the morning and watched them from the beginning of the day to the end of the day, including both their surgeries. Then we had something in the can that we could use to construct the story if we had to. They’re sort of highlighted on the interactive graphic.

You guys do interactive so well.

It’s great to work with them. It’s real value added to what we do, particularly for a story like this that’s so graphic in nature.

The permissions on this must have been tricky, getting all 60 to participate – well, 59 – for their names to be used, for their photographs to be used. How did you handle that logistically? And why didn’t that 60th person, the one in silhouette in the grid, want to do it?

HIPAA obviously prohibits hospitals from releasing these names or anything about these folks without their express permission in the form of a signed, written waiver. There are 17 hospitals involved. So I went to each of the hospitals. From Garet, I had sort of a spreadsheet that showed the course of the chain with some detail: the gender of the donor and recipient, the year of their birth, a code name – no real names – and the hospital that they were gonna be at on the day of the surgery. That’s pretty much what I had. So I was then able to go to the hospitals, explain the story to them, get them to go to the patients, get the waivers and then put me in touch with the patients.

Wait a minute, though. It’s a miracle that you got any of these people, much less 60. Anytime you have other people asking permission for you, you know how that goes –

Right. The one advantage that I had in this case was that the people doing the asking had incentive to get people to yes. If they got people to yes it meant that their hospital might be mentioned in the story. And these were the PR people who were usually involved. So most of the hospitals were eager to pursue it. And I obviously did some coaching, to fully explain the story to people and what we were doing and how the information would be used. The other advantage that we had, a lot of people who go through this process become real zealots about it – they want to spread the word. They feel that they’re saving lives and that (Good Samaritan donation is) an underutilized strategy and if more people knew about it more lives could be saved.

The person that said no was one of the first that I pursued, because I was basically going in order. I called this hospital in New Jersey, Saint Barnabas, and they were just sort of stunned that this person had declined. They thought maybe he was just having a bad day. They thought it was uncharacteristic and unexpected that he would say no, so I sort of maintained hope. We continued on and you can imagine what it’s like – it’s sort of clerical. You send out these requests and some come back pretty quickly and others you have to follow up on three and four times and eventually they started to come through. But yeah there are 59 pictures and one blank.

It does speak to some people’s reluctance and fear about this whole thing –

Right. I mean, obviously I have no sense for his reasoning for not wanting to disclose. It could be any of a number of things; I respect all of them. I was surprising that such a high percentage of people were willing to put their names and faces out there. Sometimes people just don’t want others to know that they’ve been ill or – I mean there are all kinds of reasons for them to not join in. They just cherish their privacy and understandably so. But there was a bit of a mission-oriented feeling for this, I think, for a lot of the participants.

Beautiful writing. There’s this one sentence: “On and on the chain extended, with kidneys flying from coast to coast, iced down in cardboard boxes equipped with GPS devices and stowed on commercial aircraft.” That’s a whole procedure that you just managed to collapse as one gorgeous sentence. You’ve collapsed time, you’ve made procedure easy for the reader to follow.

one of Sack's notebooks

One thing I did that I don’t always do, even for long narrative projects like this, is, I outlined. I sort of methodically over a period of days went through my notes, kind of made a list of key points and key scenes and key characters, and then roughly organized them. And pretty much followed that structure. It certainly was deliberate, to try to write it in a restrained manner because the material itself was so strong and emotional and so potentially prone to purple prose. You do enough of those and you come to realize that if your material’s good enough you just don’t need to overwrite it. Not that there’s ever a reason to overwrite anything, but you know what I’m saying. Beyond that, I really do feel like I just sort of followed the outline and constructed these scenes. I had to show discipline in terms of what we included and excluded. The original draft was not that much longer than the final one – I think just a few hundred words, and lots and lots of editors touched it before it got in the paper. I must say, all made really good suggestions and improved the story.

There’s one interesting tale about all this. The last line of editing is (Executive Editor) Jill Abramson. On the Friday before publication – and I think it was the Friday that she was rushing out the door to fly to Beirut to console Anthony Shadid’s widow and children – but before she got on the plane she ordered that I change the kicker on the story.

Oh!

So here we are, it’s been through umpteen levels of editing at this point and everybody’s signed off on it, and the executive editor is ordering up a change at the last minute. The issue was – the initial kicker had to do with this story that the final recipient, Don Terry, tells, that I just found irresistible, about how in late November, before he knows that he’s getting this kidney, he’s out with his cousin and her two young children, and they go to this sporting good store because they know Santa is gonna be there for photographs with kids. And the kids get on Santa’s lap and then as a goof Don and the cousin get on Santa’s lap and Santa says, “So, young man, what do you want for Christmas?” And Don says, “Well, Santa, the only thing that I want is a kidney. That’s all I want.” And Santa sort of plays along, looks him in the eye and says, “I think you’ve been a good boy this year. I think you’re gonna get that kidney.”

Ugh.

And two weeks later he gets the phone call from the transplant surgeon saying: “You’ve got the kidney.” Jill thought it was too much, that it was over the top and melodramatic, even though it happened and was real. Her point was exactly yours. The rest of the story had been written in this restrained sort of underwritten way, to some extent, and this was going to be jarring to the reader. This was all communicated to me through deputies but I think her sense was that I’d just sort of gotten to the end and I just couldn’t help myself.

(laughter)

I just couldn’t get all the way through without letting one rip.

That’s awesome.

So I sort of resisted and kicked the dirt a little bit, but in the end it didn’t matter because she’s the executive editor and I’m not. But in retrospect I think she was probably right.

I think so too.

And we found a decent alternate.

You found a great alternate. It’s forward-looking, whereas a Santa ending would’ve been a dead end.

I hate to say it but sometimes the executive editor of the New York Times can be a smart person.

So, the response to this piece – what has been the impact so far?

Well, they got a nice surge of offers of Good Samaritan donors both at the National Kidney Registry and at transplant centers individually. The National Kidney Registry had 426 donor registrations, Good Samaritan donors, in February, when the story ran. That compares to 120 in January, 81 in December, 79 in November, 70 in October. And then they had 300 patient referrals to member centers. These are patients coming in with paired donors, and that was more than three times the usual number. There was lots of sort of media follow-up. Diane Sawyer did a big piece on ABC. Lots of local TV. BBC did a piece.

And then there was a recent conference involving the debate about whether to create a national registry.

There was this consensus conference near D.C. where a bunch of specialists got together – surgeons, transplant coordinators, nurses, patients, insurers – to discuss the future of the field and look at ways to increase the number who get transplants this way. One of the key things on the table is whether there should be a single national registry, which the mathematicians and to some extent common sense tell us would presumably increase the number of transplants made possible. The bigger your pool the more potential matches you can make. A committee of this group recommended doing exactly that, which for the moment is likely to mean exactly nothing. It’s purely a recommendation. It’s a sense of direction of a committee of this group.

There’s a lot of transplant politics involved. These different registries compete with each other. They have different philosophies. They’re all virtually unregulated by the government at this point and there’s nothing constraining them from operating the way they want to. It’s not my sense that there’s going to be much change anytime soon. Garet Hil, the guy that’s featured in my story, has the most successful of these registries and he doesn’t see much of a reason to change the way his is working. He feels like he’s got a model that’s getting transplants done, and he’s concerned that any sort of merger, particularly a merger that puts him more at the mercy of government regulation and oversight, is going to decrease the number of transplants he can accomplish.

Speaking of Hil, this isn’t a traditional narrative in that we’re not following one or two main characters, we’re not using a ton of dialogue, but you are following, as you said, the arc of the chain itself and then looking at these little narratives along the curve. But there’s this sort of overarching hero in Hil – the former Marine recon ranger with a background in quantitative math, who started the registry after his own kid got sick. Another writer might’ve decided that that guy was the narrative and folded the chain around his story. It was a riskier and much more complicated piece of storytelling, what you did.

I think I was driven by my interests – and they were varied – in this subject. I was completely captivated by him. I think he’s a fascinating guy. But I thought there were other fascinating parts to the chain. And to some extent, because he very much deliberately distances himself for ethical and legal reasons from the participants in the chain, if the story had focused more on him it would’ve been at the cost of the other parts of the process, which were all pretty darn compelling. I mean, until I wrote the piece he didn’t have names for these people, for the most part. So more of a focus on him would’ve meant it would’ve been harder to humanize the chain. It would’ve been more about the math of what he does and his personal story.

When you described him as “Disney-hero handsome” which Disney character did you have in mind?

The one that I really had in mind – it ends up being the wrong one to have had in mind because as I thought about it more, he’s not a hero, he’s an oaf. In “Beauty and the Beast” I’m thinking Gaston, who is Belle’s pursuer. I’m extremely familiar with the story right now because I’ve just watched three performances of my stepdaughter in a middle-school production. But yeah, he’s got the same sort of cleft chin. Lots of hair. And he’s not heroic at all – he’s an anti-intellectual. Surely there were other heroes. Prince Eric maybe? In “The Little Mermaid?” I don’t know. Don’t you find Hil Disney-hero handsome?

Uh-huh.

He’s happily married.

Good for her, is what I can say about that. I love how you de-glorified Ruzzamenti by mentioning his carousing, and his “unsmiling presence at work,” and his “surliness,” and his inattention to his parents and grandmother. He’s real.

That’s what I loved about him. He’s such a quirky guy and would be the first to tell you so. We had a really good time interviewing him. I talked to him a couple of times by phone and then spoke to him at his home when we flew out to UCLA for the last part of the chain. He lives in Riverside, which is an hour or two away, so it was convenient. He’s just a real character. I’m not sure that I give the reader a real way to understand him because I’m not sure that I completely understand why somebody, who by his own admission may not be the sunniest or most giving person every moment of every day, becomes an incredibly giving person at this one moment.

Maybe it’s redemption. Maybe if you’re an ass your whole life and you get the chance not to be, you take it.

Yeah. I think there’s certainly – he didn’t want me to overemphasize the notion of his Buddhism and its impact on his decision, because I think he feels he had this in him before he discovered Buddhism, but there’s a certain karma for him. I don’t think he felt, “I’m gonna go do a good thing and it’ll pay off in the next life,” but I do think he has a sense that the good things you do in life at some point have an impact.

The play-by-play of Conor Bidelspach’s kidney removal was so descriptively written: “The slush in the blue bowl turned fruit-punch pink.” And you wrote about a plastic bag knotted shut “like a goldfish brought home from the pet store.” Clearly you’re the father of young children.

(laughter)

You were there for that, though, obviously. You scrubbed in?

Yeah, from beginning to end I saw six different procedures at three different hospitals: the nephrectomies, which is the kidney recovery, and then the transplants. In each case I had photographers and video journalists in the O.R. with us. We scrubbed in, we were in scrubs, with masks and hairnets and note pads and cameras. The doctors seemed to be completely unfazed by the fact that we were there. They’ve done the procedure 100 times a year. And I think two of the hospitals required that we have TB tests. One of them required us to sign various waivers in case there was any havoc in the operating room, any trouble that we caused. But it was all fairly smooth. We just sort of took turns stepping up on a little stepstool just behind the surgeons, peering over into the abdomens as they did their work. With the nephrectomies, there were these screens all around the operating room, showing what’s going on, because it’s all done laparoscopically and there’s cameras inside the cavity, showing what’s happening.

Interesting that you wrote that someone “poured” a kidney. Interesting verb.

I’ve got this vague recollection that that wasn’t the first word I used. An editor may have come up with that choice. I may have said “emptied” or something like that.

“Poured,” with reference to a human organ, is odd in a good way. Unexpected in a good way.

It definitely helped to see the procedures multiple times. The first time out you’re just sort of absorbing it and each time you see it you may think a little more in metaphor and imagery.

Getting back to a conversation you and I were having earlier: We were talking about long-form narrative versus daily reporting.

I’ve never seen the disconnect between hard news writing and narrative reporting and writing. I try to use the same skills. If I’m covering a hard-news story I’m looking for the same narrative elements and the same imagery and the same way of describing something metaphorically that I would when I’m reporting a narrative. I mean, I have the same opportunities to use it, depending on the story and how much space I’ve got. It’s always seemed to me that even the hardest news story is helped by narrative elements. Obviously you deal with them in different ways depending on your format. But I’ve just never seen the distinction. Both ways of telling a story are equally credible in terms of getting at the truth, which is ultimately our goal and our mission.

*Photos courtesy of Kevin Sack

A man’s child needs a kidney transplant. Despite successfully enlisting an organ donor, the man finds the U.S. transplant network frustrating and ineffective. To spare other families needless anxiety, he sets up an independent kidney registry (the only kind of registry in this country, since there’s no centralized database) and uses his background in quantitative mathematics and data management to build specialized software that matches “Good Samaritan” donors to potential transplant recipients.

One chain of transplants grows, person to person, across the country, to an unprecedented length. And yet if just one individual changes his mind along the way, the chain breaks and someone could die. So, buried in the man’s algorithms are the fates of potentially hundreds, even thousands, of people, given the country’s escalating diabetes rate and demand for kidneys.

That single-protagonist scenario of the man and his chain has built-in narrative potential. Does the man succeed? Does he ultimately fail? Where does the story crest? How is it resolved? Whose lives are affected? Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that the man is an ex-Marine − an ex-reconnaissance ranger − with a Wharton MBA, and that he’s “Disney-hero handsome.”

Kevin Sack might’ve taken that predictable storytelling approach with “60 Lives, 30 Kidneys, All Linked,” a New York Times story that we’ve been eager to name a Notable Narrative since it ran in mid-February. But Sack, a two-time Pulitzer winner who covers health care for the Times, decided on a more surprising protagonist: the transplant chain itself. Between the first and last surgeries we meet women and men who literally gave pieces of themselves to others, a transfer of life that started, improbably, with a confessed curmudgeon who one day simply decided he wanted to give a stranger a kidney:

What made the domino chain of 60 operations possible was the willingness of a Good Samaritan, Mr. Ruzzamenti, to give the initial kidney, expecting nothing in return. Its momentum was then fueled by a mix of selflessness and self-interest among donors who gave a kidney to a stranger after learning they could not donate to a loved one because of incompatible blood types or antibodies. Their loved ones, in turn, were offered compatible kidneys as part of the exchange.

The narrative engine in this piece is both procedural (what function or dysfunction of the country’s kidney-transplant situation contributed to this chain’s success) and personal (desperate people, literally dying for a break).

Policy narratives, like investigative narratives, often focus on paper trails and bureaucratic breakdown at the expense of human emotion. Yes, you have to document the dysfunction; yes, go ahead and FOIA your little heart out. But the narrative journalist’s other job – the equal, and equally difficult, job – is connecting that reporting to the human experience. It’s not enough to simply find a family or an anecdote that represents the subject matter and then book-end the investigation with a couple of poignant scenes. The human factor demands equal consideration and reporting time if the overall piece is to reach its greatest potential. Some explanatory-narrative writers may consider the human reporting the lesser work journalistically and therefore spend less energy on it, but as Sack’s piece shows, the human reporting is entirely the point.

Coming tomorrow: Kevin Sack talks with Storyboard about how he and his multimedia team pulled this story off.

That might be a normal journalist’s reaction to news that the subject of a mega-profile for a magazine cover story has declined to be interviewed for the piece. But in the mid-1960s Gay Talese was anything but a “normal journalist.” When Frank Sinatra offered not so much as a “Buzz off!” in person, Talese kept reporting in his meticulous way as the persistent eyewitness, eventually writing a Sinatra story that caused a national sensation and pioneered a narrative style of nonfiction later dubbed the New Journalism.

“Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” appeared in Esquire in April 1966. In October 2003, for the magazine’s 70th anniversary, editors pronounced the Talese piece the best story Esquire had ever published. And of course the story appeared in Talese’s classic story collection “Fame and Obscurity,” which New York University’s journalism department named No. 43 among the 20th century’s top 100 works of American journalism.

Why’s it so good? I could point to any of the usual signposts for superb literary nonfiction – scenes, dialogue, characters, interior monologues, the beginning, the ending, digressions and a structure that suggests a larger meaning. The 15,000-word story is as finely crafted as Sinatra’s (and Talese’s) custom-tailored suits. I prefer today to praise the humble but honest work that should come with any journalism, new or old: reporting.

Talese’s curiosity fuels his research in such an expansive way that we learn the paradoxical tale of Sinatra the arrogant, tempestuous celebrity and Sinatra the lonesome, sentimental man, a part of whom, Talese writes, “no matter where he is, is never there.” It required prodigious reporting to write with such confidence a crystalline description that serves as the essence of this piece.

The mastery begins with Talese reporting on Sinatra’s origins and family life. Biographical details abounded. Sinatra had been the subject of published articles for decades. How could Talese bring something fresh to the task? First, he was Italian-American. He understood Sinatra’s culture from an insider’s point of view. He knew the relevant layers of cultural experience and where to mine the telling details, the “remarkable juxtaposition of the pious and the worldly” − the photographs of Pope John and Ava Gardner, the statues of saints and holy water, and a chair signed by Sammy Davis Jr., for instance, all in Sinatra’s parents’ home. Best of all, he landed an interview with Dolly, Sinatra’s mother, “a large and very ambitious woman,” an agile player in Hoboken’s Democratic political machine and not the sort of Italian mother who could be appeased “merely by a child’s obedience and good appetite.”

Without saying it outright, Talese underscores the region’s historical political tensions when he writes:

In later years Dolly Sinatra, possessing a round red face and blue eyes, was often mistaken for being Irish, and surprised many at the speed with which she swung her heavy handbag at anyone uttering “Wop.”

She threw a shoe at her son when she learned he wished to become a singer. “Later, finding she could not talk him out of it – ‘he takes after me’ – she encouraged his singing,” Talese writes. Such reporting on family history forms the foundation that allows us to savor revelations that Talese deftly introduces through scenes in Las Vegas, a New York saloon, a poolroom, a recording studio and a movie lot. We have context for our character because Talese has shown us the origins of Sinatra’s world.

Now pay attention to the minor characters. Talese assigns them illuminating roles to help us understand Sinatra. Here is how Talese deals with a dreaded story obstacle: the press agent. In this case, the anxious flack is Jim Mahoney, and we learn Mahoney has plenty of reason to worry:

Still, Sinatra seems ever present, and if Mahoney did not have legitimate worries about Sinatra, as he did today, he could invent them – and, as worry aids, he surrounds himself with little mementos of moments in the past when he did worry. In his shaving kit there is a two-year-old box of sleeping tablets dispensed by a Reno druggist – the date on the bottle marks the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. There is on a table in Mahoney’s office a mounted wood reproduction of Frank Sinatra’s ransom note written on the aforementioned occasion. One of Mahoney’s mannerisms, when he is sitting at his desk worrying, is to tinker with the tiny toy train he keeps in front of him – the train is a souvenir from the Sinatra film, Von Ryan’s Express; it is to men who are close to Sinatra what the PT-109 tie clasps are to men who were close to Kennedy – and Mahoney then proceeds to roll the little train back and forth on the six inches of track; back and forth, back and forth, click-clack-click-clack. It is his Queeg-thing.

We are wringing our hands by the time we finish reading about this poor guy and his woes. Yet by developing Mahoney as a character, even only slightly, we somehow see Sinatra more clearly.

And in the following passage Talese relays some old news, but settling his unerring eye on a nameless, minor character reveals more than the standard tattler fare:

He also wore, as everybody seemed to know, a remarkably convincing black hairpiece, one of sixty that he owns, most of them under the care of an inconspicuous little grey-haired lady who, holding his hair in a tiny satchel, follows him around whenever he performs. She earns $400 a week.

(Talese anticipated our curiosity about that paycheck. Today, her salary would be roughly $2,800 − not bad for toting hair.)

These minor characters surround Sinatra as agents who serve, protect and sometimes fear him. Examine each one, and you will come away impressed by the intense reporting that Talese had do to unearth their stories. He doesn’t overwhelm us with their presence; each one’s appearance, carefully placed, deepens our understanding of Sinatra he approaches his 50th birthday.

Talese’s gift for observing detail gives us immediate, vivid imagery that put us right there in the room with Sinatra. The tension is palpable as Talese recounts the poolroom scene in which one of “coolest” in the bar, writer Harlan Ellison, drew Sinatra’s ire for wearing Game Warden boots, “for which he had recently paid $60.” Talese has Sinatra gazing at those boots, turning away, focusing on them again and then firing questions at Ellison about the provenance of the boots. “I don’t like the way you’re dressed,” he tells Ellison. Throughout the slowly evolving, hostile scene, Talese conveys the precise action in the background −  from the man who was bent low with his cue stick and then froze, to the “hard tap of Sinatra’s shoes” as the singer made his way with a “slow, arrogant swagger” from his stool to face off with Ellison. In simply writing what he saw and heard, Talese built scenes around straight action, which builds drama, emotion. In one scene, Talese conveys the “kind of airy aphrodisiac” of Sinatra’s music through young couples moving languidly on a dance floor, holding each other close.

By giving us a portrait of Sinatra, Talese also gives us a portrait of L.A., “a lovely city of sun and sex, a Spanish discovery of Mexican misery, a star land of little men and little women sliding in and out of convertibles in tense tight pants.”

Without such relentless reporting none of this would have been possible. Who cares if the subject won’t cooperate? In the right hands, there’s always a story.

Maria Henson (@mariahenson), a 1994 Nieman Fellow, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1992 and edited the Sacramento Bee’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial series about Hetch Hetchy. She teaches journalism and serves as vice president and editor-at-large at Wake Forest University, which last month screened “Editor Uncut,” a documentary in production about WFU alumnus and Esquire editor Harold T.P. Hayes. Created by Hayes’ son, Tom, the film includes an interview with Gay Talese about “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

For more from our collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.