First, a quick look at last year: Julia Barton started covering audio narratives for us, and we brought the New York Times’ Sean Patrick Farrell on board as our Viewfinder columnist, covering video journalism. We added a tips category to help you find craft guidance more quickly, and broadened our speaker series coverage by including the narrative nonfiction legend Buzz Bissinger and National Magazine Award winner Luke Dittrich, and Pulitzer-winning fiction writers Paul Harding and Junot Diaz, all visitors to Lippmann House, Nieman headquarters. We expanded our popular “Why’s this so good?” series by bringing in dozens of new writers, including Eli Sanders, Jennifer B. McDonald, Pam Colloff, Ann Friedman, Wesley Morris, Ben Yagoda and Peter Trachtenberg, who, along with other contributors, covered the work of everyone from Joan Didion and Nora Ephron to Dan Barry and Roy Blount Jr.

And now, some new columns and features to tell you about:

>Just One Question, by the stellar Tampa Bay Times and Grantland reporter Michael Kruse, poses a single question to a single writer, either about a specific piece of work or about reporting/writing in general, and delivers the answer. Kruse started JOQ on his personal blog and kindly agreed to let Storyboard adopt it.

>Liner Notes, by Sports on Earth writer Tommy Tomlinson, looks at the elements of narrative journalism via songs. His 2012 breakdown of “Ode to Billie Joe” was such a hit with readers, we’re developing his idea as a regular column. Narrative works best when you tune up all the senses, so get ready for a multilayered reading experience.

>Work the Problem allows writers and editors to ask top narrative journalists for help unraveling an issue. Maybe you’re grappling with a structural situation or wish you’d written better descriptions in your last piece, or maybe you take all the wrong notes, or maybe you’re wondering how to jump-start narrative culture in your newsroom – tell us your problem, we’ll try to help you solve it. Email:  contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

>Annotation Tuesday! explores one writer’s winning story line by line, with Storyboard asking the questions and the author giving precise, in-text answers. The series recently had a popular Tumblr following and now moves to Storyboard, with upcoming annotations by the science writer Mary Roach, GQ’s Amy Wallace, National Magazine Award winner Ben Ehrenreich, Esquire’s Chris Jones, and more.

>How’d you find that story? Ever wonder where writers find certain great stories? We ask, they answer, with a little something extra. The sources may surprise you.

Don’t forget to stay connected by following us on Twitter and Liking us on Facebook, and subscribing to our free newsletter. In the meantime, if you’d like to contribute to “Why’s this so good?” or to suggest a story for annotation, or to see coverage of certain narrative issues, ping us here.

Happy New Year!

AUDIO

Chosen by radio producer and editor Julia Barton, who writes Storyboard‘s Audio Danger column, and Julie Shapiro, artistic director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

“Poetry, Texas”

Producers: Pejk Malinovski and Falling Tree Productions

Pejk Malinovski is a New York-based, Denmark-born radio producer and poet, and he’s found his ideal subject in Poetry, Texas. His half-hour documentary for the BBC takes a wide-eyed look at a small East Texas community and finds much to wonder at. Malinovski’s narration is sparse but just right, as when he interviews a lonely man outside the town’s only gas station. The man, Malinovski tells us, has been diagnosed with cancer. Soon after we find out the man is clutching a pack of cigarettes. When he says “dime,” it drawls into “dawm.” “I wonder if anyone ever recorded this man’s voice,” Malinovski says. “And I shiver with the thought that this might be the last time that anyone does.” (nominated by Third Coast International Audio Festival artistic director Julie Shapiro)

“Retraction”

Producers: This American Life

This brutal self-takedown on the part of Ira Glass and This American Life also makes for gripping audio. Earlier this year, TAL achieved its most-downloaded episode when it excerpted Mike Daisey’s monologue about working conditions at Chinese plants that manufacture iPhones and iPads. But his story turns out to be conflated or downright false. Glass cedes much of the episode to Marketplace’s China correspondent, Rob Schmitz, as he does the shoe-leather reporting that rapidly takes apart Daisey’s account. It’s brave, truthful, and a model of transparent journalism –  though it begs some larger questions about why we fall for fabulous narratives over messy reality time and again.

“Grumpy Old Terrorists”

Producers: Pat Walters and Radiolab

Like This American Life, Radiolab struggled with its own ethics controversy this year: Hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich were excoriated for treatment of a Hmong interviewee in this episode (though to their credit, they did something rare in public radio and aired an interview gone awry). In general, it’s been fascinating to hear the show expand beyond science and take on the wider world with its trademark embrace of risk and ambiguity. Producer Pat Walters’ podcast short “Grumpy Old Terrorists” raises all kinds of questions about how our government, and all of us, respond to people who seem to be planning horrible things. (And for more on host Jad Abumrad’s insistence that the program grow and change, read his manifesto, punks.)

“Pike County, OH – As Black as We Wish to Be”

Producers: Lu Olkowski and State of the Re:Union

Independent producer Lu Olkowski stumbled upon a remarkable story in southern Ohio: a town where most people identify as “black” – and suffer N-word treatment by surrounding communities – although generations of intermarriage have rendered most residents completely “white” looking. Olkowski and State of the Re:Union host Al Letson take what could be just an absurd, uniquely American curiosity and go deep, letting us hear how the residents of Jacksonville, Ohio, have to make tough choices about identity and family.

“Artists Disturbed And Inspired By Syria’s Violence”

Producers: Kelly McEvers and NPR

It’s hard to highlight only one narrative out of Kelly McEvers’ coverage of the Middle East this year. Whether in Bahrain, Yemen, or Syria, she’s able to make us really feel what people are going through in this traumatized part of the world. One piece of hers I can’t get out of my head is a simple report on a performance in Beirut – a late-night, secretive set of monologues based on letters and stories from Syria’s war zones. And don’t miss the accompanying web feature on an artist who satirizes the Assad regime with finger puppets, at huge risk to himself.

MAGAZINES

Chosen by Paige Williams, writer, Storyboard editor, and Nieman Foundation for Journalism narrative writing instructor.

“Animals,” by Chris Jones, Esquire

At last count, journalists had produced four long narratives of the weird news out of Ohio – that a suicidal zookeeper had freed scores of tigers and bears and other animals before shooting himself – but none more poetically, or with more narrative tension, than Jones.

“The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador,” by Karen Russell, GQ

You may know Russell as the author of the short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swampladia!, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, but in her first long magazine narrative she proves herself an equally compelling teller of true stories. She doesn’t gild her sentences; she wires them.

“The Innocent Man,” by Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly

Colloff has become a one-woman justice league with her stories about wrongful imprisonment. With this two-parter, about a man accused of killing his wife, she continues the work, laying out the whole saga in straightforward prose that you can’t put down.   

“The Throwaways,” by Sarah Stillman, The New Yorker

It’s impossible to talk about the year’s most important work without including Sarah Stillman’s remarkable piece on the law enforcement community’s growing reliance on young confidential informants. Stillman focuses on the death of a 23-year-old drug informant named Rachel Hoffman (“She had never fired a gun or handled a significant stash of hard drugs. Now she was on her way to conduct a major undercover deal for the Tallahassee Police Department, meeting two convicted felons alone in her car to buy two and a half ounces of cocaine, fifteen hundred Ecstasy pills, and a semi-automatic handgun.”) but covers an entire American subculture of pawns.

“The Yankee Comandante,” by David Grann, The New Yorker

It’s a love story, a war story, an expat story, a mystery, a history lesson, music.

NEWSPAPERS

Chosen by the Tampa Bay Times‘ Ben Montgomery and Michael Kruse and Sports Illustrated’s Thomas Lake.

“Never Let Go,” by Kelley Benham French, the Tampa Bay Times

Not because we know her and love her, but because Kelley Benham French lived an amazing story and had the good sense to recognize that, and to go back and report the hell out of it.

“In Rust Belt, a teenager’s climb from poverty,” by Anne Hull, the Washington Post

Because Anne Hull is back on the Post and we missed her deep and empathetic immersion reporting so much.

“Former Black Panther patches together purpose in Africa exile,” by Christopher Goffard, the Los Angeles Times

Because of Goffard’s very last paragraph and all those that led to it.

“At the Corner of Hope and Worry,” by Dan Barry, New York Times

Because Dan Barry is the Homer of Americana.

“A teacher, a student and a 39-year-long lesson in forgiveness,” by Tom Hallman Jr., the Oregonian

Because a good feature story is about something universal, like an apology, and Hallman knew when to pay attention.

“Caballo Blanco’s Last Run: the Micah True Story,” by Barry Bearak, the New York Times

Because Micah True’s was an almost perfect death, if there is such a thing, and Bearak handled it masterfully, and the New York Times gave it the space it deserved.

“Life of a salesman,” by Eli Saslow, the Washington Post

Because this story about the shifting myth of the American dream made every last one of us wish we had thought of it and done it so well.

“The Princess of Matamoros,” by Mark Collette, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times

Because Collette found a love story, full of change and redemption, in a washed-up hell-raiser and told it with skill.

ONLINE

Chosen by Mark Armstrong, founder of Longreads and editorial director for Pocket.

When I started Longreads in 2009, more than 70 percent of the stories shared in the community were pieces that started out in a print magazine or newspaper. That’s changing, slowly. Print publishers are still responsible for the vast majority of the deeply reported pieces that are online, but it’s heartening to see so many online-only publishers, new and old, embrace in-depth storytelling on the web. Here are a few favorites from this year, in no particular order:

“Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, the Biggest Troll on the Web,” Adrian Chen, Gawker

Chen spent much of 2012 tracking down the real humans behind some of the anonymous and/or despicable characters of the web. And Gawker and sister publications Gizmodo and Deadspin already have an impressive track record with these stories.

“How A Career Ends: Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Olympic Swimming Gold Medalist,” Rob Trucks, Deadspin

The first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next.

“The Wedding,” Katherine Goldstein, Slate

The story of Will and Erwynn, the first gay couple to marry on a military base.

“Imagining Myself in Palestine,” Randa Jarrar, Guernica

A Palestinian-American writer attempts to fly to Israel to visit her sister.

“The Glorious Plight of the Buffalo Bills,” Ben Austen, Grantland

A forever disappointed fan base, a team that’s threatening to leave town … and Zubaz.

“Lost in Space,” Mike Albo, Narratively 

I have complicated feelings about Kickstarter and journalism – it feels like a sugar high for niche publishers – but I guess it works, because love Narratively, and I loved Mike Albo on navigating the online hookup scene.

“A Mormon Reporter on the Romney Bus,” McKay Coppins, BuzzFeed

This year, the most restrained, thoughtful story about Romney’s religion came from BuzzFeed.

“Grandpa Was a Baller,” Matt Kallman, The Classical

Another Kickstarter-backed publisher, still doing great work after its first year. Kallman digs into his grandfather’s past as a pro basketball player for the Chicago Stags in the 1940s.

Other online publishers I loved this year: The Rumpus, The Hairpin, SB Nation, The Verge, The Awl, The Billfold, The New Inquiry, Splitsider. Looking forward to in 2013: Matter.

Thompkins

Take Barry’s October 2011 story about the crow problem in Terre Haute, Ind. Now, we’ve all read stories about murders of crows that descend on communities and cluster in a creepy, sort of vermin-like way. Crows cluster and creep for many reasons – not least of which is that people often pave over traditional crow haunts. So when the birds come back from wintering, they descend on a new wilderness of box store parking lots. Or they perch on nearby trees and caw crow epithets at civilization and its discontents.

Barry’s column hangs on the Terre Haute Crow Patrol, which enforces “a kind of avian nimbyism.” Check out the lede:

Her Cadillac glides slowly through the rain-glossed streets of this traumatized city, her gat within reach. The ominous evening sky has yet to turn black, but it will. Oh, it will.

Stylistically, Barry has written about Terre Haute’s Crow Patrol as pulp NON-fiction. It’s an unexpected approach used to great comedic effect. It’s also terrific journalism. Because, no matter what you think you know about crows, this story is a great read.

Barry follows Joy Sacopulos, a 72-year-old retired school teacher who carries a launch (fireworks) pistol and drives her own sedan. Sacopulos stops and shoots at birds on her watch. “Crow patrol” she quips to passersby, after firing. Does Sacopulos actually drop a crow? Unclear. But she aims to make them nervous enough to leave town. There’s lovely detail here – especially when Barry likens Terre Haute’s situation to the crow troubles of Auburn, N.Y., and Lancaster, Pa., reminding the reader, as fewer and fewer national writers do, that there are other cities in the U.S. besides metropolises. And yet, no matter where you live, can a sentence like the next one hit any closer to home?

Last year, a crew shoveled 4,000 pounds of crow droppings from the roof of a building used by the Clabber Girl baking powder company.

Try making cookies from scratch and NOT thinking about poor Miss Clabber Girl.

Barry embraces the hilarity of the situation with gusto. After all, an old lady is “packing pyrotechnic heat.” She’s shooting at birds that aren’t exactly attacking her. She’s doing what old folks tell youngsters never to do. And clearly, she’s enjoying the responsibility and authority that the Crow Patrol affords her.

Another beguiling detail of the story is that Sacopulos doesn’t presume to judge the crows. Like Will Munny (Clint Eastwood) in the movie Unforgiven, she confronts her adversaries while still managing to recognize their shared traits.

In the end, it’s Barry who crows last. The high comedy of his portrait of Terre Haute’s Crow Patrol leads us to understand that this story goes deeper than launch pistols and birds; it’s about something more than suburban sprawl or Hitchcockian allegory. We come face to face with an unequivocal truth about American life in the 21st century, a truth that census figures can only paw at: In a nation of rapidly aging Americans and in an era when older people find themselves more idle than they would ever wish to be, Joy Sacopulos is doing something of value. She’s engaged and aware. And there’s no greater satisfaction in society than feeling useful.

The crows don’t scare for long. The final image is of Sacopulos as a tough old bird who may have met her match. And yet, the larger message of the tale seems far more comforting. Way down in the autumn of life, it’s still possible to course with the thrill of purpose.

Gwen Thompkins is a freelance journalist and writer in New Orleans. She began her career at the Times-Picayune, then moved to National Public Radio, where she worked as senior editor of Weekend Edition Saturday and East Africa bureau chief. Thompkins, a 2011 Nieman Fellow, continues to write stories and commentaries for NPR. She is also the creator and host of a weekly radio program on WWNO (89.9 FM) called Music Inside Out with Gwen Thompkins.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” see our archives. And check back each Tuesday for a new shot of inspiration and insight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The firefighters stop and bow their heads.

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

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

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

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

What comes next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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