We’re excited to announce a new feature that we’ll be rolling out next week on Nieman Storyboard. “Why’s This So Good?” will explore what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading.
Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, recently popped out with a suggestion on Twitter that the awesome catalogue of narrative that is Longreads [...]
Tag Archives: The New Yorker
“Why’s this so good?” – a collaboration on the magic of long-form stories
June 24, 2011 – 9:20 am
What we’re reading: baseball, life at Disney World, and strange summer stories
June 23, 2011 – 11:41 am
A man with advanced ALS heads out for a fishing trip with his wife. A reporter goes to Walt Disney World with his children and a reefer-addicted friend. A Korean-American sportswriter over at the intriguing new Grantland site reflects on his cultural confusion when Ichiro Suzuki came to play for the Seattle Mariners. (Should he be [...]
Slow violence and environmental storytelling
June 13, 2011 – 1:39 pm
How can environmental writers craft emotionally involving stories from disasters that are slow-moving and attritional, rather than explosive and spectacular? This is a particularly pressing question for our age, as the news cycle spins ever faster, as the media venerates spectacle, and as public policy is increasingly shaped around what are perceived as immediate needs.
Think of [...]
Life in the cave: highlights from Boston University’s “The Rebirth of Storytelling” conference
May 10, 2011 – 12:50 pm
What does it take to make a great story? Boston University’s “The Power of Narrative” conference, held on campus April 29-30, aimed to offer some insights. The event included the kind of writing techniques and “show don’t tell” advice you’d expect (and hope for) at such a gathering. But beyond hearing about the mechanics of narrative [...]
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 [...]
What we’re reading: underground art, sleepy shrinks and killings by a CIA contractor in Pakistan
March 22, 2011 – 2:44 pm
This week’s installment is a grab bag, offering both comedy (a courtroom debate over what exactly a copying machine is) and tragedy (the tsunami in Japan). These stories’ styles also vary wildly, ranging from a non-narrative yet suspenseful investigation into the killing of two Pakistani men by a CIA contractor to an unsettlingly intimate encounter [...]
“Long-form is absolutely not dead”: insights from ProPublica, “Frontline,” The New Yorker and “This American Life”
March 17, 2011 – 1:35 pm
The New School and ProPublica co-hosted a panel on long-form journalism last night at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City. David Remnick of the The New Yorker, Ira Glass of “This American Life,” Raney Aronson-Rath of “Frontline,” and Steve Engelberg of ProPublica sat down with moderator Alison Stewart (of PBS’ “Need to Know”) [...]
The future of long-form journalism: Frontline’s Aronson-Rath and ProPublica’s Engelberg on multimedia collaboration
March 16, 2011 – 3:16 pm
It’s always “The Future of Long-form Week” here at Nieman Storyboard, but we’re excited to note that this week, some key storytellers from different media are getting together in New York to talk about long-form, well, at length.
Tonight at 7.pm., ProPublica and The New School are hosting “Long-form Storytelling in a Short-Attention-Span World.” Alison Stewart, co-anchor of the PBS [...]
Lawrence Wright on Scientology, legal pads and creating a “universe of possible sources”
February 18, 2011 – 3:37 pm
The New Yorker put the “long” in long-form this week with “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology,” a piece by Lawrence Wright that weighs in at around 25,000 words. The article has generated a lot of buzz for its compelling storytelling as well as its subject matter: a week later the story [...]
