The Oregonian’s Anna Griffin wrote a story last Sunday about a small but rare and memorable moment in high school sports. Deadspin set it up this way: A young man named Davan Overton in unincorporated Oregon plays on his high school basketball team despite a tumor on his spine that has, since he was a toddler, hampered [...]
Tag Archives: Nieman Fellow
Work the problem: How to look at your own stories more objectively
February 14, 2013 – 6:40 am
Our storytelling advice column continues: A journalist asks a question and we find an accomplished narrative writer or editor to answer it. In our first installment, Dave Tarrant of the Dallas Morning News had a question about how to recognize stories with narrative potential. Jack Hart, author of Storycraft, gave him the answer. Today’s players: Robert [...]
Andrew Corsello on authorial empathy, the problem of goodness, the writer-editor relationship, the importance of rule-breaking, and naps
December 7, 2012 – 9:50 am
In yesterday’s post, guest curator Michael Fitzgerald wrote about the storytelling power behind “The Wronged Man,” a 2004 GQ piece by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello. Fitzgerald, a Massachusetts-based business and technology writer and former Nieman Fellow, caught up with Corsello by phone recently, to talk about the story. Here’s part of their conversation, edited [...]
Jeneen Interlandi on “When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind”
August 17, 2012 – 8:42 am
We’ve chosen Jeneen Interlandi’s recent New York Times magazine cover story about her father’s mental illness as our latest Notable Narrative. “When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind” follows a sobering episode in the bipolar history of Joseph Interlandi, revealing flaws in the nation’s mental health and criminal justice system. We caught up with Interlandi [...]
Buzz Bissinger on heart, luck, honesty, critics and the importance of switching things up
May 25, 2012 – 8:33 am
When Buzz Bissinger visited the Nieman Foundation last week, in some ways he was coming home. Twenty-six years ago, he finished his Nieman year inspired to do new and different work. He’d made his career in newspapers, most recently at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he, Rick Tulsky and Dan Biddle, also former Niemans, had just written [...]
“Why’s this so good?” No. 39: Gay Talese diagnoses Frank Sinatra
April 24, 2012 – 8:43 am
Just shoot me now. 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!” [...]
