One drawer of my desk – the largest – contains a mound of stories, the best I’ve found in newspapers and magazines over the last 20 years. In addition, three or four “great writing” folders float around the top of my work space; faux-wood fragments of the desktop are seldom visible.
Then there are a handful of individual stories [...]
Tag Archives: Los Angeles Times
“Why’s this so good?” No. 27: Christopher Goffard tracks love in flight
January 10, 2012 – 11:52 am
“Why’s this so good?” No. 26: Moehringer KO’s a mystery
January 3, 2012 – 11:38 am
The hell with my lede. Let’s start with his:
I’m sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, waiting for a call from a man who doesn’t trust me, hoping he’ll have answers about a man I don’t trust, which may clear the name of a man no one gives a damn about.
That’s how J.R. Moehringer [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 17: Meyer Berger delivers on deadline
October 25, 2011 – 11:32 am
The Pulitzer Prize for breaking news tends to go to a massive team effort, often one in which a dozen or more reporters feed material to one, two or even three writers, who pull together the main story. Papers like The New York Times and L.A. Times used to call this the “swarm” approach to [...]
Dorothy Parvaz released from detention in Iran
May 18, 2011 – 8:57 am
We’re thrilled to hear this morning that Iran has freed detained journalist (and 2009 Nieman fellow) Dorothy Parvaz. Alan Cowell and J. David Goodman reported in The New York Times that, without advance notice, Dorothy called her fiancé, Todd Barker, from customs as she arrived back in Doha, Qatar. A wonderful surprise for him, no [...]
What we’re reading: marking time, bugging Franzen and the gaming culture of jihad
April 26, 2011 – 9:46 am
Here are a set of recent stories for your reading enjoyment, gathered from Los Angeles to London. They each deal with the collision between one understanding of the world and another: in traumatic experiences, literary encounters and visions of jihad.
“The Possibilian” by Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker. Researcher David Eagleman drops study subjects from 110 [...]
Awards season begins: narrative highlights from ASNE and Polk awards; announcement of CRMA finalists
February 23, 2011 – 11:42 am
Looking for some quality narrative journalism you might not have noticed before? As awards season for newspapers and magazines gets underway, we wanted to share links to stories recognized for their writing and storytelling. Here are some of the more narrative categories and entries from the 2010 Polk Awards in Journalism, the list of finalists [...]
What we’re reading: gay culture in the Middle East, stories for a body held hostage, and an athlete dying young
December 2, 2010 – 1:50 pm
Our latest “what we’re reading” draws on the stalwart print newspapers and magazines that have carried the banner of long-form narrative for so long. From a 5-part investigation of a shipwreck to a story of an athlete’s final months, these narratives show that traditional storytelling lives on.
NEWSPAPERS
“Laura Hillenbrand releases new book while fighting chronic fatigue [...]
Statistics vs. storytelling: the grudge match?
November 19, 2010 – 11:09 am
Narrative journalism has been dogged for years by the idea that it is too subjective or somehow less capable of conveying hard numbers to the public than a traditional news story. In a world where data mining and visualizations have become more fluid and accessible, it’s no surprise that the tension between numbers and narrative [...]
