The title of this series, “Audio danger,” is mostly tongue-in-cheek. But not in the case of Kelly McEvers. McEvers now works as one of NPR’s correspondents in the Middle East, and she’s opened the network’s first bureau in Beirut. But I first ran across her name in 2006, when she was a freelance journalist in Russia on an International Reporting Project fellowship. McEvers had been detained in Dagestan, a rough part of the North Caucasus along the Caspian Sea. Local officials with the FSB, the federal security services, accused her of traveling in neighboring Chechnya.

“They interrogated me for like 14 hours a day, and then at night they’d say, ‘You’re free to go,’ but they had my passport. And then they would follow me home. The car would stay parked out front for a few hours, and then they would call the next morning and say, ‘It’s time to go.’ ”

McEvers didn’t suffer any violence during the four-day ordeal, but the threat of it was very real. (She also had to surrender all of her notes and equipment before she was allowed to leave Dagestan).

These days, McEvers interviews many people who’ve been through horrible experiences: child brides who’ve survived rape in Yemen; protesters tortured in Syria. McEvers lets their stories unfold with an understanding of the way real danger – unlike the kind we often see in the movies – has deep effects that can make it hard to talk about.

“I can see when someone has experienced trauma,” McEvers says. “I think I’m able to empathize a lot more with people because I have been through some of this stuff.  Nothing like what they’ve been through – I mean, people aren’t cutting my relatives into pieces. But I know what it’s like to just be numb, or to blame yourself.”

McEvers’ patience paid off last year with this feature she pursued for months in Iraq. It introduces us to Uhud, a 19-year-old woman from a tribal area of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. Uhud fell prey to a sex-trafficking scam, the details of which we will never figure out. That confusion, in fact, is central to the story.

“Some of what we’re about to tell you might not actually be true,” McEvers says at the very top of the piece. “The reasons for this will become clear as the story unfolds.”

According to Uhud’s convoluted account, she was kidnapped at gunpoint while out shopping, then beaten and later taken to Irbil, in Kurdistan. There she says she worked in a Christian-owned café somehow affiliated with a brothel. A famous soccer player later rescued her, Uhud says, and a few months later she ended up back home in Diyala.

“When she first came, the whole family had one thing in mind: We assumed she had been raped. So we thought of killing her,” one male relative tells McEvers in a matter-of-fact way, via an interpreter. “She has a brother who would kill her as easily as drinking a glass of water. But then we calmed things down.”

Sort of. When we revisit Uhud a few months later, she’s basically living under family house arrest. She says an uncle spits on her whenever he sees her and threatens to slit her throat if her story doesn’t check out. As McEvers leaves Uhud, she’s up on the roof setting pet pigeons free. “They fly in the sky for a while, then they come back home,” McEvers translates for Uhud over the sound of flapping wings.

We’ll never know Uhud’s real story, but of course that’s not the point: By living with her for seven minutes, we viscerally feel the way shame and sex-trafficking thrive off one another.

Foreign correspondents for radio face special hurdles. The people they interview often don’t speak English, so we lose the direct narrative force that propels so many audio stories. And most of us have never been to places like war-torn Iraq, so even with great descriptive copy, our minds still tend to fill in the background with stereotypical images from TV news or “National Geographic”: deserts, burqas, bullet-pocked walls.

Of course, correspondents can’t only focus on personal narratives, and McEvers does her share of big-picture, geopolitical reporting. But stories like Uhud’s are one way to slice through the obstacle of listener confusion (and, let’s face it, indifference) when it comes to reports from abroad.

“I try to make those personal stories have a larger point, but just to reach that point through personal narratives. People in Dubuque are going to remember that more than a talking head,” McEvers says.

And radio has one major advantage when it comes to McEvers’ frequent focus on the plight of women in the Middle East.

“A microphone is so much easier than a camera,” she says. “You never get to take pictures of these women. Never. Especially those women with a shameful story.” McEvers sometimes spends a lot of time explaining to her sources how they will sound on the other end in America. “You know, ‘It’s just your voice – it’s going to be dubbed into English.’ I draw pictures of what it’s going to sound like, (their voices) fading under (the translation).”  Sometimes reluctant sources will agree to whisper, or speak broken English, to hide their identities further.

But especially as the Arab world changes so rapidly, McEvers says she can face a different problem – people so desperate for someone to hear their stories, they won’t let her leave. “In Iraq, there are so many widows, or mothers who’ve lost children. No one’s listening to them.”

These days McEvers’ own personal narrative is affecting the way she thinks about trauma and danger in her profession. She now has a 2-year-old daughter. Questions about her ordeal seven years ago in Dagestan elicit a snort.

“It should’ve been instructive, but it’s not. I didn’t learn my lesson,” she says. “But none of us do.” It’s something few foreign correspondents talk about openly, McEvers says: Simply put, editors – and by proxy, the rest of us – too often reward them for putting their lives at risk in pursuit of the story.

“When you have little children, you think a lot about positive and negative reinforcement,” she says. “And we foreign correspondents are positively reinforced for bad behavior.”

Julia Barton (@bartona104) is an editor, media trainer, producer and writer who spearheads the “Audio danger” series on Storyboard.

Writers and video producers live in dread of the wandering eye. Audio producers live for it. That’s what makes us, in our secret hearts, troublemakers. We want you to lose sight of everything in front of your face: to stare through that dish in your hand, ignore your children, drop into a glazed-over trance of our making. Maybe don’t drive off the road, but please do miss a few exits or get stuck in your car. Good audio should be dangerous that way.

But it’s very hard to accomplish, especially these days, when more and more audio comes to us via that distraction machine, the Web. Hence these posts. In the Storyboard spirit, I’ll be talking with audio producers and editors about how they accomplish their best stories, what obstacles they’ve overcome and the strategies they’ve learned along the way. I should point out that conversations about audio craft have long been underway on sites like Transom and airmedia.org. And there’s a great new podcast, “How Sound,” from longtime audio instructor Rob Rosenthal, who also interviews intrepid producers. In the posts I’ll be doing for Storyboard, I’ll simply be adding to (and sometimes echoing) all those worthy explorations.

I got my start in radio in 1995, while pursuing a master’s degree in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa. Doing airshifts at WSUI, the university’s then-analog AM public radio station, was for me just an amusing side trip on the way to a blurry future in magazine writing. But then we started airing a new show, “This American Life,” at 6 a.m. on my Sunday shift. I had a huge list of things to do during that hour, but I kept forgetting about my impending newscast and listening to the radio instead. The stories, at once mesmerizing and funny and surprising, actually endangered my work. So I had to start putting TAL on cassettes to hear later, like a portable, or pocket – or what’s the word? – cast.

Since those days, I’ve been a radio reporter, an editor, and contributor to such programs as PRI’s “Studio 360” and “The World.” Still, every time I sit down to craft a new audio feature, it feels almost as hard as the first time. Every piece is its own hellish puzzle.

That said, audio – especially broadcast radio – is a pretty conservative medium. Listeners appreciate familiarity and tend to punish experimentation (see below for one example). On the upside, I really don’t have to try anything new. On the downside: well, not to offend anyone, but there are plenty of places on the low FM band where, format wise, it remains 1979. That’s fine for many; I don’t want it to be fine for me.

So I sometimes go in search of the subtle shifts that amount to major trends in our hidebound world of audio storytelling. To that end, I talked with two people with their ears especially open: Julie Shapiro, the Artistic Director* of the Third Coast International Audio Festival (TCIAF) in Chicago, and Roman Mars, who was a judge for TCIAF’s awards competition this year – and who produces a successful and innovative podcast of his own, “99% Invisible,” about design. (Full disclosure: I’ve edited Roman’s work and also did a story for him).

Hundreds of aspiring Next-Big-Thing audio producers submit their best work to TCIAF from around the world. When I asked Shapiro and Mars what trends they’re hearing, most of their answers fell under one surprisingly simple category: the “Radiolab” Effect. WNYC’s “Radiolab,” in case you haven’t heard it, is an occasional broadcast and regular podcast about science, and it’s as highly produced as anything on the radio. Most “Radiolab” stories are crafted from hundreds of hours of audio, a ratio that that’s hard for even the most accomplished programs to pull off. Ira Glass recently confessed in Transom, “If they could do an hour of this every week, I think I’d have to quit radio.”

So Shapiro and Mars aren’t hearing a replication of of Radiolab’s labor-intensive production values, but they are hearing another trademark of the show, its conversational style. You’d think, since the talk radio format is mostly talk, that this would be a given. But radio evolved in the age of oratory, when a stentorian delivery helped pierce the broadcast static, and that’s what listeners still expect.

In the age of HD and earbuds, though, producers are finding they can sound more like themselves. “Radiolab” co-hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich break down complicated stories through a relaxed Socratic dialogue, an approach that’s also been popularized by NPR’s “Planet Money” and APM’s “Freakonomics.”

“People are starting to recognize you can have fun and talk about interesting things as well,” Shapiro says. Or as Mars puts it, “In America, we explain things a lot. So much that we need two people.”

Shapiro and Mars also hear a big “Radiolab” Effect in the deeper integration of music and storytelling, far beyond the musical scoring that’s a hallmark of “This American Life.” You can hear Jad Abumrad’s Oberlin music composition degree in the show’s use of original music to explain concepts (this segment from the episode “Loops” is a good example). That technique is showing up in more TCIAF award winners, like this independent piece, “Kohn,” about a man with a disability that causes him to speak slowly but also causes his brain to hear himself as speaking like everyone else. Producer Andy Mills reached out to the band Hudson Branch to compose a song about Kohn’s brain, and the spoken story acts almost as a setup for the performance.

TCIAF’s winning story this year, “The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt,” takes the musical approach a step further, remixing whole swaths of an interview with an underworld character who runs (or ran) a strip club out of his Detroit home. The nervous, disorienting result crystallizes at the point when Thunderbolt pulls a gun on his interviewers.

“None of us could stop listening,” Mars says of the piece. “It solved problems in really creative ways. Almost every step was chancy.”

“Chancy,” of course, thrills the veteran producers behind TCIAF, and it’s their job to reward it. Yet flagship programs such as NPR’s “All Things Considered” get a lot of flack when they showcase even mildly risky work. So it’s to the show’s credit that it teamed up with the independent producers at Long Haul Productions to air their story about the relationship between hydraulic fracking and earthquakes in rural Arkansas. The piece breaks many formats: it’s non-narrated, meaning interviewees and “found sound” do all the talking; and it features a commissioned song interwoven among the interviews. Listeners were quick to vent their fury at NPR. “I don’t want artsy, stylistic reporting; I want factual reporting,” said one.

“How Sound” podcaster Rob Rosenthal later interviewed the producers, Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister, about the experience. The upshot? It sucked, but ATC’s editors are standing by the team, and maybe next time they’ll make more effort to explain experimental formats ahead of time.

At least the angry ATC listeners were, well, listening. And maybe catching a whiff of how dangerous that can be.

*Julie Shapiro was initially described as the head of the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Her title has been corrected to Artistic Director.

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Using juxtaposition to manage tone:

Dudley Clendinen’s essay is about his impending death. Yet the piece is neither depressing nor horrific to read. It is a delight. One of Clendinen’s secrets is the graceful way in which he delivers his message. He is gentle in tone, and he is a master at juxtaposition – pairing something dire with something surprising to temper the grimness and break the tension. Sometimes, even in the midst of such grimness, he makes us laugh.

The lede is a good example.

“We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.

“Yes, Sweet Thing,” I said, with a smile. “We do.”

I loved him for that.

The smile, the “sweet thing,” the love – all are unexpected. They tell us that he’s going to have a very different take on all of this than we expect. And it offers us a little breath of relief.

Or look at this paragraph, in which he does it twice:

At the moment, for 66, I look pretty good. I’ve lost 20 pounds. My face is thinner. I even get some “Hey, there, Big Boy,” looks, which I like. I think of it as my cosmetic phase. But it’s hard to smile, and chew. I’m short of breath. I choke a lot. I sound like a wheezy, lisping drunk. For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying.

He shows you the ravages of his disease – he’s wasting away, losing weight, can barely eat, can barely breathe. And yet two short sentences – “I think of it as my cosmetic phase” and “For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying” – are funny and filled with character. They make it impossible for you to feel sorry for him, though you do feel great empathy.

In the body of the piece, he stays serious. He recounts the early days of his illness – how he coped, or how he watched relatives linger far beyond their time. It’s tough reading, but he has already charmed us, and so we keep going. And then he gives us another little gift, two surprising sentences placed right up against terribly bleak ones. After listing the many ways he could commit suicide (which makes it clear that he has thought this through), he writes of helium that it “would give me a really funny voice at the end.”

And, in the next graf, he assures us: He no longer has to be careful about what he eats or having enough money. And as we realize the enormity of what he is saying, he reassures us: “I am having a wonderful time.”

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On short sentences:

I first suggested to Andrea that I write about Clendinen’s simple sentences, but as I looked again and again at the material I realized what I meant was short sentences. The power of this piece rests upon the poetry of Clendinen’s sentence-level brevity.

The result easily could have felt choppy or self-indulgent. Some writers prune their sentences in an effort to mimic Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never used.”), with the sole result of showing all the puppet strings. The stripped-down approach often grates – we see the underdeveloped writer, focused more on Self than Story, sweating all over the page in an attempt to impress and manipulate. Which is why it’s so remarkable that every one of Clendinen’s sentences is full of the personal yet devoid of writerly ego. The collective rhythm and unpretentious sentence structures suggest he sees no point in adornment, no time for fat. The subject matter and line-by-line delivery remind me of Beckett (“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”).

In his book on sentence craft, “How to Write A Sentence,” Stanley Fish asks writers (and readers) to first consider form. “The form is more important than the content, and if you master the form and understand what it’s doing and what can be done with it, then you can produce content endlessly,” he recently said on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

Clendinen’s piece beautifully represents that idea. If you data-crunch this story in terms of sentence structure you find, by my rough count, that 116 of the 124 sentences contain fewer than 20 words. The four-word sentence appears most frequently (18 times), followed by the seven-word sentence (13), the five- or 12-word sentence (nine each), and the eight-word sentence (eight). The longest sentence contains 51 words; the shortest, one (“Why?”).

All 28 of his paragraphs obey the Writing 101 rule to vary one’s sentence lengths whenever possible. In paragraph one: 4 words in the first sentence followed by 9, 8, 10, 4, 12, 21, 7. In paragraph 17: 12, 6, 36. Paragraph 12: 9, 28 (“I began to slur and mumble in May 2010. When the neurologist gave me the diagnosis that November, he shook my hand with a cracked smile and released me to the chill, empty gray parking lot below.”).

Overall, the predominance of short sentences serves the story because:

The good short sentence is a coiled rattlesnake. It does not mess around.

The pacing reflects the subject matter. Together the sentences behave almost like a fusillade, imparting urgency.

The reader doesn’t get lost. Committing to a long sentence can be like entering a maze – we run the risk of forgetting where we are. Unless you’re the next Dickens or Faulkner, step away, por favor, from the steroidal word count.

I wondered whether Clendinen speaks the way he writes, so I listened to some of the wonderful interviews he mentioned, from the “Maryland Morning” program on Baltimore’s main NPR station. Listen to this: “The first thing I notice every morning is the voice,” Clendinen said on March 7, referring to his illness’ effect on his enunciation. “Some mornings it’s better. Some mornings it’s sloppier and slurpier, and I think this morning it’s a little sloppy.” [And that changes day to day?] “It does. Two hours from now it may be better. Tomorrow it may be better. Having a progressive total disease is a little bit like playing chess with a computer: You know the computer’s always thinking, it’s always advancing, it’s gonna make some move – it may be a little one, it may tease you and be good to you one day and then trick you the next, but it’s always moving.”

Clarity and power begin in the mind. Even when Clendinen speaks, one never feels him straining to write (and certainly not to pose) but rather to reveal. The man is dying of ALS and he wants us to know what that’s like. His shrine to this impulse is a simple one but, like a good pine coffin, strong.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On attention to universal theme:

In his essay, Dudley Clendinen goes beyond the traditional nut graf, hitting upon a universal theme.

Facing death can be a freeing experience.

I think it’s important to say that. We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative – not governing – in order to be free.

And that’s the point. This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.

While a traditional nut graf tells the reader what the news in the story is, the universal theme graf (or grafs) tells the reader the broader meaning of the story – or at least hints at it. The graf gives the reader what I call a glimpse of wisdom.

You’re not necessarily going to need a universal theme graf for a straightforward news story; the report’s main purpose is to convey information. But a universal theme graf can strengthen the setup of a narrative, essay or feature story – it signals that your piece is going to be about a larger idea, one that will hopefully resonate with readers.

Chip Scanlan, a longtime mentor of mine, provided a road map for crafting a theme graf in his classic 2003 Poynter column, “Selling the Power of Focus.”

Inspired by journalist David Von Drehle, Chip described a set of five questions that can help writers determine the focus – and theme – of their stories: Why does the story matter? What’s the point? Why is the story being told? What does the story say about life, the world and the times we live in? What’s the story really about – in one word?

Chip argued that readers, overwhelmed by information, are hungry for meaning.

He quoted Jack Fuller, the former Chicago Tribune editor and publisher who wrote in News Values: “People come to a newspaper craving a unifying human presence – the narrator in a piece of fiction, the guide who knows the way, or the colleague whose view one values. Readers don’t just want random snatches of information flying at them from out of the ether. They want information that hangs together, makes sense, has some degree of order to it. They want knowledge rather than facts, perhaps even a little wisdom.”

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On the power of the personal essay:

Many reporters would rather eat nails than write about themselves. It’s ironic, really, because we’re happy to intrude on other people’s lives and ask personal questions and hope for dramatic insight. But exposing yourself – figuratively – can be terrifying.

In this case, Dudley Clendinen is up against something even more frightening – ALS – so maybe it’s not so hard to open up. I’d argue that more writers should give it a try. Readers need to be reminded that we are, despite what they may think, human.

Of course, a gifted storyteller can relate any experience better than most. But consider the biggest advantage of the personal essay – you’ve already done a lot of the reporting. After all, it’s your life, your experiences, your take.

In this case, Clendinen got to choose from everything – his past, what he’s facing now, what he’s been thinking about, what people have done for him, what he’s done for others, conversations he’s had, how he looks, what he’s learned about the disease, what choices he’s made, what regrets he has, what he’s happy about. You’d be lucky to have that much material on any story.

Then you have to have the courage to share. Remember, we ask people to do this all the time. To lay bare their worst moments. We try to pull out of them what it’s like to learn that you’re going to die. How do you make peace with that? What are you scared of?

Do we get honest and/or complete answers? I suspect that it rarely happens, because most folks will only go so far with total strangers.

But Clendinen took us right up to the crossroad we’re all going to reach someday. He wrote with personality and humor, so it wasn’t a downer, despite the topic. And writing about himself allowed Clendinen to make a convincing argument for why we should think more about death than we do. Because it was his story, the message also carried more weight: “Lingering would be a colossal waste of love and money.”

For more on Dudley Clendinen, read the Storyboard Q-and-A with him. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

Immersion journalism was the theme of this year’s Mayborn. Attendees heard accounts of journalists being pushed, falling or jumping into stories, courting the unexpected consequences that make immersion narratives riveting – and sometimes problematic. We’ll be writing up several of the sessions in the coming days and weeks, but here are a few highlights:

Gene Weingarten presented the audience with real-world ethical case studies, using moments from two stories in his own career. In one he said he was offered (and took, and smoked) a source’s hash pipe, which he knew constituted a firing offense. In the other, he extracted evidence of corruption and bribery from a delusional patient in the hospital, a man who believed Weingarten was a doctor even after he had explained that he was a reporter.

Joshua Foer entered a memory competition for a story he was working on – and unexpectedly won the contest. “I had been approaching it thinking I was writing about this bizarre subculture of weirdos,” he said. “And now I was their king.”

Mandalit del Barco played an NPR piece that rose out of her carrying letters and gifts between Haitian and Los Angeles County schoolchildren after the 2010 earthquake. Using storytelling soundscapes, she showed how audio paired with a story script can carry listeners into another world. “If you close your eyes now, what can you hear?”

Ted Conover talked about traveling an unpredictable path from observer to participant: riding the rails with hobos, crossing the border with coyotes, and getting slugged by an inmate during an undercover stint as a prison guard. “This doesn’t require an advanced degree,” he said, “just the willingness to do something crazy.”

We think the subtitle for this year’s conference should have been “When Things Get Messy.” Stay tuned for in-depth posts on these presentations and more.

Building a story from social media, NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin started a Storify timeline just two hours after the shooting began. Early on, NPR and several other outlets mistakenly posted that Giffords had been killed, which is reflected and then corrected in Carvin’s Storify account. (There has been a lot of discussion of the error since, including criticism of NPR and the station’s apology.)

The next day, The New York Times and The Washington Post sites posted text narratives of that deceptively sunny morning outside a Safeway in Tucson. In “Tucson shootings: How Gabrielle Giffords’s event for constituents turned to tragedy,” the Post’s Philip Rucker and Marc Fisher give readers some background on Giffords and her normal schedule, recapturing the feel of what started as a mundane event. When the shooting begins, readers feel the shock and horror of the moment. “A Single, Terrifying Moment: Shots Fired, a Scuffle and Some Luck,” Adam Nagourney’s piece in The New York Times, focuses more tightly on the chaos and violence, opening with a dramatic struggle between bystanders and the gunman as he attempted to reload.

And hours before the Post and the Times had posted their narratives, The Arizona Republic’s Jaimee Rose and Mary Jo Pitzl had turned on a dime to get their own angle by following Daniel Hernandez, Giffords’ brand-new intern, who may have saved her life. “Daniel Hernandez, intern, stays by Gabrielle Giffords’ side,” the brief story of events from Hernandez’s view, added a new perspective on not only the shooting but our understanding of Giffords’ condition in the moments just afterward.

[Update: Here are some comments from Jaimee Rose of the Arizona Republic on getting Hernandez's story just hours after the shooting:

We got lucky. Reporter Mary Jo Pitzl was working her sources in Phoenix and got tipped that there was a young man who helped Gabrielle Giffords immediately after she was shot. I was at the hospital in Tucson, and my editor texted me to look for "someone young named Daniel." While I was interviewing Giffords staffer Mark Kimble at about 7 p.m., Daniel Hernandez was mentioned and happened to be standing a few feet away. He agreed to speak with me. I sat with Daniel Hernandez in the hospital cafeteria while he told his story to his fellow staff members for the first time. It was so early that no one had heard his full tale.

The narrative style was a natural outcome of the way Daniel told his own story that night, with myself and Giffords' staff members huddled around that cafeteria table. We were riveted, asking "and then what, and then what," which of course is the narrative base. Chronology is also the fastest way to tell a story, and we were on deadline. I circled back for a few details to help readers see, such as the image of him checking the pulse first on the neck, and then the wrist. He also recalled that great detail about squeezing her hand, and feeling her squeeze his back.

At that point, Daniel's account was the first we'd heard of Giffords' condition on the way to the hospital, and we wanted it out there as soon as possible. Next, I called my editor, Laura Trujillo, and we wrote it together on the phone: I talked, she typed, and it probably took 20 minutes. I think it was online by 9 p.m. The next day, we had the exclusive, and Daniel's media circus began.]

We’ll continue to compile storytelling approaches to the tragic events of this weekend. Please send us links to any related narratives you see.

In “Modern-Day Slavery: A Necessary Beat – with Different Challenges,” E. Benjamin Skinner offers a well-written account of reporting on the sex trafficking beat, weighing storytelling with ethics, action, and the needs of his subjects. Melanie Hamman’s “Visual Stories of Human Trafficking’s Victims,” a partner piece to Skinner’s, discusses visual documentary of criminal, exploitative activity, and wounded subjects. “Merely by retelling her story,” Hamman writes, “a victim can be retraumatized, severely complicating her recovery.”

Storyboard contributor (and longtime narrative journalist) Beth Macy offers a sample of the kinds of stories she balances on the family beat at The Roanoke Times and how that beat has changed in her many years there. Looking to the future, Macy says that when it comes to stories, “If we tell them well, it won’t matter what medium we use. They can be our saving grace.”

Very different opinions emerge about new media’s effect on the sports beat, including storytelling in sports. Former Wall Street Journal tech columnist Jason Fry discusses sportswriting as a blogger and ponders what’s most important in reporting. Lindsay Jones, who covers the Broncos for The Denver Post, explains how Twitter works for her. But in excerpts from the 2010 Red Smith Lecture on Journalism at the University of Notre Dame, sportswriter Frank Deford (a senior contributing writer with Sports Illustrated and commentator for NPR) worries about what the digital revolution has done to sportswriting:

“The Internet – or to be kind, the influence of the Internet – is reducing the amount of storytelling in sports journalism … the story – which was always the best of sportswriting, what sports gave so sweetly to us writers – the sports story is the victim. Sportswriting remains so popular – one word. Sports stories – two words, are disappearing.”

Gay Talese might well agree. In an excerpt from an October talk in Boston celebrating the release of “The Silent Season of a Hero: the Sports Writing of Gay Talese,” he answered a question from the audience by saying that reporters are behind their laptops too much. Arguing for being present with subjects and occasionally unplugging, Talese said, “Sometimes I think reporters should waste some time. Good journalism is wasting time.”

The winter issue includes many other stories, from reviews of books about the status of women journalists and the work of legendary writers to a look at whether news organizations have some obligation to tell stories whose audience size may not sustain the resources required to report them. See the full roster here.

photo credit: Jay Paul

When you went into Haiti with Travis Fox last month, what was your assignment?

It was pretty broad. We’d been talking to Frontline for a long time about ambitious ideas for hour-long documentaries that would take a year to make. And we thought, “You know it’s never worked. Let’s just do something manageable and small.” I was going to Haiti anyway for Planet Money, for NPR. I suggested we just try some of the stories I was thinking of doing for NPR anyway and do them for Frontline as well.

They were sending Travis down, and we had the idea: “Let’s do something Planet Money-like, something that might not be an economic story explicitly, but something using economics as a backdrop to understand an issue.” I think the excitement all round was about working together. The actual stories we would do were a secondary concern.

You ended up doing a piece on the tap-tap buses and small businesses in a tent city. How did you find those stories?

I had been to Haiti a few weeks before. The tap-taps are ubiquitous, and I found them fascinating. I was puzzled—Haiti is genuinely a desperately poor country. Most of my reporting was about how every person, every business, the government—everybody in Haiti, more so than every country I’ve been in before—is cutting costs down to a real bare-bones subsistence level.

And then you see these buses that are so expensively and elaborately painted. And I was like, “How can that be happening?” I loved them and thought they were so beautiful.  I’ve been in the Middle East, other places where you see painted trucks and painted buses, but I’ve never seen them so cool and awesome.

But I’m a hard-hearted economics reporter, so I never believe that people do anything, especially in very poor countries, just for art’s sake—especially very expensive art. I genuinely had a puzzle I wanted to understand. We also had the question of “if we’re going to work with Frontline, what’s a visual story?” That struck me as such a visual story.

And then “The Economy of a Tent City”—I was driving around Port-au-Prince, seeing these tent cities all over. Most of my work right then was not focused on life there, but I noticed an Internet café in a tent, and I thought “Wow. What’s going on with that?” I thought they must be developing such complicated economies. I think many of the best stories come from wandering around a city and wondering what the hell is going on.

The audio for the Planet Money radio piece was very different from what we hear in the video. How do you think about collecting audio for the same story on different platforms?

That is the key lesson to me of multimedia. At least in my experience, it is not really possible to do one set of reporting for both video and audio. The demands are very different. I sit right next to Alex Blumberg, who has worked a lot on This American Life TV show. He’s helped me understand these issues. For example, radio is primarily people talking about things that have already happened, and TV is not very good when it’s just people talking about things that have already happened. It’s much better when it’s people actually doing stuff and seeing things happen. That right there is a major difference.

A big part of public radio storytelling and This American Life storytelling is creating a visual sense—getting people to describe things. Some of the most common questions we ask people we’re interviewing are “What are you looking at? What does this look like?” And often they say, “What are you talking about? You’re sitting right here.” We say, “I know, but people are going to hear this on the radio who are not sitting right here.” With TV, you don’t have to ask anyone what something looks like, because the audience can see what it looks like.

There are different demands for creating a sense of intimacy with the subject. If you take the woman in the beauty parlor, the salon—I just feel like with her smile, her look, you kind of fall in love with her. You don’t need a lot of help getting to like her. But with radio, especially when she’s talking in a foreign language, it’s much harder to create that sense of intimacy.

But other times, it’s exactly the opposite. Something that really influenced me was a radio series that Ira Glass did 15 or more years ago about gang kids in L.A. That was a case where you really fell in love with them on the radio, but if you saw them, you would instantly kind of hate them, because they look dangerous and scary.

Either way, there are very different demands. And then there’s just weird stuff. I’m very naïve about TV, but in the tent city, we had to sit around waiting for “magic hour,” waiting for just before sundown, because that would be much better to shoot in. That was frankly a little annoying. I’m thinking, “Come on, I got my tape. Why are we sitting here for four more hours?”

Did you have a checklist to make sure you had enough to do both kinds stories?

Yes, definitely. In that case, Travis had the TV checklist, and I had the radio checklist. I just don’t know enough about TV yet to know what that checklist is.

Travis and I got along great, and it was fun and a good collaboration, but there were moments of tension. We had very little time, and that by the way was the biggest lesson. I really just booked the trip, created my schedule based on what I had to get, without even consciously realizing it. I was thinking it was an 11-day trip.

I now know that I should have added three more days, at least, for TV footage. As a result, we had very little time. I like Haiti a lot, but it’s a very difficult place to work. There’s traffic, problems with phones. We were both kind of scared wondering if we would get everything we needed. In the end, it worked out, but there were times where it felt like it would be radio or TV—that we couldn’t do both.

My trip was being funded by NPR, so it was clear to me if something had to go, it would be TV. Travis’ trip was funded by Frontline, so obviously he needed that TV to happen. We had some growing pains. I like Travis a lot, and we get along great, but there were just moments where I was like, “Come on, forget about ‘magic hour.’ We’ve got a whole other story to do.” And he was like, “We want this to look good. We want this to work.”

The angles you’ve chosen were a little unconventional: in your pieces, there are no amputations, no talk of the dead. Was that a conscious choice?

I think that’s just intuitive to me. I spent a year in Iraq doing stories, and I never once did a bombing or violence. Not that that stuff isn’t important, obviously it is, but I feel like that’s pretty well covered. When I covered the tsunami in Indonesia, I did a lot of that kind of coverage.

I feel like we have an ability to do something a little different with Planet Money. I hate the word “economics” in this context, because people think of bankers or boring things with interest rates. For me economics is about how people on the ground try to get resources for themselves and their families, and how resources are distributed, for better or worse. In my experience, when I’ve covered war and disaster, the people on the ground several weeks or a month after the crisis, they’re not sitting around every day saying, “What a terrible disaster.” They’re trying to get food for their families and develop a system that works for them, so that they can try to create normalcy and some kind of life that works. That’s what’s actually happening. I don’t want to say the other stuff isn’t happening, but the other stuff is disproportionately covered. At the same time, I don’t want to beat up on any other reporters—that stuff is important to cover.

And selfishly, I find this much more interesting. I like doing stories where I don’t know what’s going on, where I’m confused. It’s powerful to learn that someone was really injured, and this doctor helped them. But as a storyteller, I don’t know how much I’d learn from that. I feel like I kind of understand that story. There’s no mystery there, no puzzle to solve.

Do you actively look for stories in counterpoint to what’s already covered in abundance? Or do you really just follow your curiosity?

By definition, if there’s a real puzzle that I’m curious about, then it’s just unlikely that that’s the thing that’s being covered in a big way. If I can criticize our media for a moment, I don’t think we’re great at “big picture” explanatory stories. You can read an awful lot of stories about health care and not really understand the fundamental questions undergirding health care or the financial crisis or how Haiti’s society might change as a result of this earthquake.

It’s not just me. It’s not that I have a particular kind of curiosity. My hunch would be if you asked the vast majority of people what they’re curious about, what puzzles them, they would ask, “Is this a good idea? A bad idea?” And even after all the coverage of say, health care, that’s been done, most people still have that question: “Is this going to work?” It’s the same with “Why is Haiti so poor?” or “Did the banks screw us all?” My hunch is that the vast majority of people have these questions, and so do I.

I do think that there’s this big explanatory hole in a lot of coverage—not that there aren’t wonderful reporters who do great work in these areas, but I don’t think we’re fully satisfying the curiosities of the American people.

I don’t know that I deliberately set out to zig when the rest of the media zags. If you start from the premise of “I want to figure out what’s puzzling me, and I want to explain some basic ideas,” then you’re probably not going to be reporting the same things that are on the front pages.

This is where it’s good to have a reporting partner like Alex or Chana. I do have an abstract brain—I would be perfectly happy to discuss this stuff in abstract, academic ways. Chana, Alex and David Kestenbaum are good at making sure that any story we tell is grounded in a real story with real characters. That’s a wonderful thing about being part of a team like this—they keep you honest and keep your storytelling good.

Is there anything else about this project you want to say, especially with regard to storytelling?

There are things you can only do in radio, and there are things you can only do in visual storytelling, and then there’s something fun and challenging about trying to figure it out. What’s a radio story? What’s a video story? How can we help each other out? I find that very exciting. It’s tough—it’s not obvious.

I used to always think radio is about intimacy, and video is about spectacle. But I’m now seeing, okay, TV or video can create a different sense of intimacy in ways that radio can’t. There’s something very cool about that. Frontline certainly has a similar sensibility and commitment to good storytelling about important issues and pursuing core curiosity in an interesting ways. I hope we do a lot more together.

[For more on this project, read our commentary on the Haiti videos from Frontline and our interview with producer Travis Fox. You can also check out a Nieman Lab conversation with Frontline executive producer David Fanning.]

When Frontline sent you to Haiti, what was the assignment?

The assignment was to do this coproduction with NPR’s Planet Money and Adam Davidson. It was up to us what we came up with. Frontline wanted two Web pieces to pair with the broadcast on March 30, and they also wanted us to do a longer piece that will air this summer.

I met with Adam a little bit before, and we talked about ideas, but it wasn’t until we got on the ground that we decided what we’d do.

I love that opening footage from the tent city during the church service, where you get a shot of the woman’s feet, and then the story turns toward pedicures. Did you already have that footage before you knew the story would take that turn?

The technique of shooting is that you shoot in sequences. You deconstruct a scene. So if the scene is the people singing on the hillside at the church, you get the wide shot, then you get a series of details. So I got hands, faces, lips moving, the person holding the Bible with the cross. Getting the feet is a logical thing. I do feet especially when it comes to dancing—they’re a way to signal dancing. But certainly later when we talked about feet I was sure that that stayed in there.

In a lot of ways video editing is like a question and answer with the audience. It gives you a visual preview, then you deal with the scene later in the piece.

The stories are not necessarily the kind of images people picture when they think of recovery from natural disaster in such a poor country. What, in your mind, was the story you were hoping to tell?

The videos were paired with the March 30 Frontline broadcast. That’s a very serious documentary—the earthquake was of course very grim. We wanted to do something complementary and different, to come at it a different way. We didn’t want to produce fluff—Adam is an economics reporter, so we wanted to deal with economic issues. We wanted to have fun with it as well, to create some sort of a contrast.

Visually, I feel like my style is more or less the same, though. I ‘m not sure I did anything different in terms of how I shot it.

Adam Davidson talked about you waiting for the “magic hour” of day to film. Was it important to the particular story you wanted to tell to get the tent city in a certain light, or is that just standard practice?

That’s standard practice when possible. For news, you can’t always do it, especially when you have limited time in a place. The way we worked together was that I shot them all first before I brought in Adam. When I brought Adam in for the interviews, it was a matter of scheduling. If I had a choice, then I’d schedule that in the magic hour or in the late afternoon. It’s for light, and it’s also because of the heat. It’s hot in Haiti.

How we work together is a little unusual. Typically, I work alone on stories, but when I was working with Adam, we had to experiment. I went first and found the characters and did the shooting and the basic interviews. When I went back with him, I needed to go at the same time of day so all the footage would match up.

So you were the one that found the characters, the people you focused on?

We tried different ways of how best to work together, for him to go after a radio story and me to go after a TV story, and we figured out that was the best way. The way I work, I need lots of time to follow characters naturally and record scenes when I’m not interacting with the characters, the subjects.

For him it’s different, he needs a lot more time doing interviews and talking. The times we went out together we would do the interview and then I would need to get so much more, and so he would just be killing time waiting for me to finish stuff he didn’t need for radio.

Adam said you two were really pressed for time. Is there anything you wish you had gotten and didn’t?

When you’re in a place like Haiti, everything takes longer than you think. When you’re here planning it, you feel like you’ll get a lot done, but it doesn’t quite work. Ideally it would be great to work together from the beginning, to decide together who the characters are. I think it worked out fine, but the edit was a crunch. In terms of the edit, I would do a rough edit and a rough script. It would have been great to have him more involved in the edit from the very beginning. These pieces were pretty simple and straightforward, but as we go into more complicated economic stories, it would be great to have him more involved in the edit, so we can take advantage of his expertise.

How long were you there together?

We were there for just about two weeks. And we worked together on and off, probably 30 or 40% of the time. We edited back here in New York.

We ended up with ideas that work for radio and for TV—material not solely based on interviews but also seeing what people were doing and what their environment was like. The visuals matter; you have to have people doing things. While we were in the field, we talked about the edit. We got back here and did it in exactly one week.

These are simple, simple pieces, but those were intense days. What I did was pull the footage, pull the quotes I thought were best, and create a rough edit. So the editors at Frontline watched it, and Adam watched it—his editor watched it as well, I think—and we made our changes. He took my script, which was a placeholder script. He has a very distinctive style for Planet Money. He basically took my bad script and made it into a good script and then voiced it. And then it was just a matter of cutting, so we cut, cut, cut—down to five minutes.

Anything else? Thoughts on what makes a great short video?

I look at these videos as a really successful collaboration. Two people were able to produce a radio story and a TV and a Web story in a very efficient manner, whereas in the past it would have taken a crew of video people to create just a TV show. I feel like in terms of the manpower, it’s kind of a new way of working together. It’s not a traditional videographer-reporter relationship.

But to actually answer your question, great strong characters are always central in terms of video storytelling. I feel like we got pretty good characters. After that you have the other aspects of the story, a surprise, unexpected twists and turns. I think these were unexpected stories. Good writing, good photography, good editing are the other elements.

Let me preface that by saying that the story is the most important thing. But once you have a good story idea, in order to make it into a video, you have to have strong characters, surprises, scenes, that sort of thing.

I don’t mean to say that I start off with characters and figure out what the story is. You figure out what the story is and in order to tell that story, you find characters and visually interesting scenes. For longer pieces, you deal with character development. It’s almost like a feature-film way of looking at it. Your character has a conflict or has to overcome something and changes in the meantime. There’s some overlap with Hollywood—this is what quality video storytelling is.

I’ve collaborated with print reporters at The Washington Post, but I’ve never done anything with radio, so it was a new set of challenges. We’re not necessarily working together like a traditional TV crew would work. We were really collaborating. I feel like it’s a great model for the future, as budgets shrink and more is expected out of journalists. It’s a lot to ask one person to do everything, but if you can pair up efficiently with someone, it can work to everyone’s advantage.

[For more on this project, read our commentary on the Haiti videos and our interview with NPR’s Adam Davidson. You can also check out a Nieman Lab conversation with Frontline executive producer David Fanning.]

You might not expect to find these stories in a research and policy journal.  But since 1999, Health Affairs has quietly published compelling medical narratives. These essays, first-person stories with links to health policy, run in the journal’s Narrative Matters department. The entire 10-year collection is available free online thanks to funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which has sponsored the project from the beginning.

The essays undergo a peer-review process that hones accuracy and clarity. Narrative Matters editor Ellen Ficklen says the stories are geared toward policymakers, in an effort to show the human consequences of legislative decisions.

But they have found a broader audience. NPR, which has aired commentaries excerpted from several essays, has entered into a collaboration to produce more pieces derived from Narrative Matters essays. Audio links for the completed commentaries can be found with the text versions on the journal’s Web site, along with some podcasts, which will soon be available through iTunes U.

The most popular essay on the site, Jerald Winakur’s “What Are We Going To Do with Dad?,” was featured three years ago as a Notable Narrative on the Nieman Narrative Digest site and additionally ran in the Outlook section of The Washington Post. The Post has also started using some Narrative Matters essays in its health section, which recently lost staff reporters.

The essays range from well-done to riveting, but none of those I read got bogged down in policy or medical jargon. How does such clear and simple narrative find a home in a policy journal? “When you write for policymakers,” Ficklen says, “the person who’s actually reading it is a staffer. They have to get the story fast, and they have to get it easily. And that’s writing for everybody.”