After some months spent planning to write about Gene Weingarten’s story “The Peekaboo Paradox” for this site, I caught up with the two-time Pulitzer winner in Texas this summer at the Mayborn Conference. And when I say caught, I mean caught. I had never met Weingarten before, but I saw the highly recognizable, highly mustachioed [...]
Tag Archives: David Von Drehle
Gene Weingarten on “the god of journalism,” compulsive editing and “The Peekaboo Paradox”
September 28, 2011 – 7:33 pm
Time’s David Von Drehle on narrating tragedy and the evolution of his Tucson story
February 2, 2011 – 3:41 pm
Yesterday, we posted our first Editors’ Roundtable, in which a group of word wizards did their magic on a piece of narrative nonfiction. Our debut story for consideration was “The Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy,” written by Time magazine Editor-at-large David Von Drehle. While the prospect of having a group of editors poke around in [...]
February Editors’ Roundtable: Time magazine takes on the Tucson shootings
February 1, 2011 – 10:49 am
The narrative selected for discussion by our first-ever Editors’ Roundtable is “The Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy” by David Von Drehle. Appearing in Time magazine five days after the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and so many others, the piece draws on reporting from six reporters who fed Von Drehle material from Tucson, New York and [...]
Tom Shroder, former Washington Post Magazine editor, on dinner plates and well-done narrative
October 28, 2009 – 2:03 pm
This week, I had a chance to talk by phone with Tom Shroder, who took a buyout from The Washington Post earlier this year. Shroder specializes in long-form narrative stories and recently launched his own editing site, and so I was curious what he would have to say about the current state of narrative journalism.
In our conversation, he dishes on a common mistake made by narrative freelancers, talks about the genesis of one of the best newspaper narratives ever written, and a offers up a considered defense of poop jokes. Here’s a taste:
Where a lot of narrative journalism went wrong was that it became all about the writing, and not about the details for the story and the facts behind it. People felt they could throw some words at people and dazzle. But even good writers need to start with an exceptional set of facts.
