A few years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around the front porch of this crumpled old resort in the Catskills, knocking back drinks and talking shop. I can’t remember how it began, but when the sun went down we developed a game: Tell a story in a minute.
It started off cool enough, and [...]
Tag Archives: Gangrey.com
“Why’s this so good?” No. 18: Brady Dennis goes short
November 1, 2011 – 10:44 am
What we’re reading: in which we consider segregated high school reunions, the vanishing middle class, notes from a Pynchon conference and “death in the age of the Internet”
August 9, 2010 – 4:21 pm
As we try to get the mildew out of the swimsuits we left in the corner over the weekend, we wanted to leave you a pile of stories for when you take refuge from the baking heat of August and are looking for something to read other than the rusty box of Old Bay seasoning [...]
Thomas Lake on mythical storytelling and the editing process: “sometimes it’s hard to kill your darlings”
June 17, 2010 – 2:18 pm
We spoke by phone this week with Atlanta magazine senior editor Thomas Lake about his story, “The Golden Boy and the Invisible Army,” our latest Notable Narrative. Lake, who also freelances for Sports Illustrated and is a regular commenter over at Gangrey.com, has previously worked at the St. Petersburg Times and The Florida Times-Union. His [...]
C.J. Chivers in The New York Times on hitting the mark in Marja
May 5, 2010 – 1:32 pm
Readers familiar with the work of C.J. Chivers might know him best for his portrait of Vladimir Putin from Esquire or the writing that helped The New York Times score the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Lately, however, he has not only been writing traditional articles for print while blogging about Marines who shave [...]
Gangrey’s Ben Montgomery wants to grab you by the shirt collar
October 29, 2009 – 2:04 pm
[The second in an occasional series aimed at helping readers find online resources that focus on narrative journalism.]
For more than four years, Gangrey.com has rounded up the best print narratives on a daily basis. Founder Ben Montgomery, who is also a reporter with Florida’s St. Petersburg Times, talks here about his personal motivation for starting his site and what he thinks narrative journalism can do.
On what makes a good Gangrey story:
Does it have something that’s surprising? Is it entertaining? Will it keep my attention? Is there some device being used that I’ve never seen before?
And on the multimedia components for his latest print narrative:
I couldn’t have pulled that off if it had required more effort from me. We wouldn’t have achieved the same level of—I don’t want to say excellence—the same level of story for either of those things, if both [the print story and the video] had required my attention. If journalists are required to write the story and compose the multimedia elements going into it, both parts tend to suffer.
How Twitter’s @longreads helps readers cozy up to digital narratives
October 16, 2009 – 2:16 pm
[The first in an occasional series aimed at helping readers find other online resources that focus on narrative journalism.]
Plenty of people are worried about the future of long-form journalism. Not Mark Armstrong. In April of this year, Armstrong started a “longreads” hashtag on Twitter in an attempt to create a community of people who could find and recommend great long-form stories available online. I spoke with him today, and he shared what motivated him to find a Twitter fan base for great online narratives:
“I think right now is really a perfect time for long-form journalism because of the iPhone, because of these apps that are out there. It’s changed the online reading experience to going from little nuggets that you consume between doing other tasks to something you can sit back with to read in a relaxed setting or on a commute. These are really the places where long-form journalism can work.”
Providing this kind of archive has been a part of the mission of our sister site, the Nieman Narrative Digest, and online stalwarts like Gangrey.com for more than three years. And here at Nieman Storyboard, we want to cheer on anything that keeps the narrative nonfiction flame burning. So even if you don’t use Twitter, visit @longreads to find links to stories people are recommending.
