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Tag Archives: Tom Junod

Pamela Colloff and Tom Junod talk storytelling

At the recent City & Regional Magazine Association conference in Atlanta, Esquire’s Tom Junod and Texas Monthly’s Pamela Colloff interviewed each other for an audience of narrative lovers. Atlanta magazine’s Tony Rehagen kindly recorded the session exclusively for Storyboard. You can hear the conversation in its entirety (an hour and 22 minutes) below, with an introduction by Steve [...]

Well hello there.

Welcome, new readers! Our audience has grown considerably lately, so we thought this might be a good time to recap Storyboard’s goods and services, and to invite you to follow us on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. We’re a Nieman Foundation for Journalism publication, with two sister sites: Nieman Journalism Lab, edited by Joshua Benton, covers the future of news with daily online posts and [...]

Work the problem: Story regret

Our “Work the problem” series continues with a psychological situation that every writer faces: How do you make peace with stories you wish you’d done differently? Fielding this one is Esquire legend Tom Junod, who lightly revisited his controversial 2007 Angelina Jolie profile this week after Jolie revealed, in an op-ed piece in Tuesday’s New York Times, news about a [...]

Annotation Tuesday! Chris Jones and “Animals”

By now you’ve probably heard the story: In October 2011, a suicidal man named Terry Thompson uncaged dozens of wild animals that he kept on his farm in Zanesville, Ohio, and then shot himself. The sheriff’s department spent a tense night tracking down the animals, killing all that they could find. Of all the inevitable [...]

What he gave: Richard Ben Cramer

When Richard Ben Cramer died Monday, at 62, of lung cancer, the outpouring of grief and gratitude began immediately. It’s hard to find a narrative journalist or a serious political writer that Cramer didn’t influence with What It Takes: The Way to the White House, his 1,047-page saga of the 1988 presidential race, or with [...]

Amy Ellis Nutt and the wreck of the Lady Mary, Part 2

In Part 2 of our annotation of Amy Ellis Nutt‘s Pulitzer-winning “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” Nutt, of the Newark Star-Ledger, explains how the investigative track of her five-chapter narrative unfolded. Yesterday, in Part 1, she walked us through the story conception and first two sections of the series, which chronicled the sinking of an [...]

“What’s on your syllabus?”

Every narrative journalist can point to a story or a book, or two, that changed their lives, and that made them want to tell true stories. What story does it for you? Where was your love born? When we asked about influential writing via Twitter, answers came in a flurry. Wright Thompson said North Toward Home, [...]

Jeanne Marie Laskas and Thomas Lake on sportswriting, voice, source love and more (Mayborn 2012, vol. 1)

If you were following the activities out of Grapevine, Texas, last weekend you might’ve seen tweets like this one: And this one: And these: Peter Simek of D magazine recapped this year’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference this way: The after-hours antics at the Mayborn are not surprising. Writers are, stereotypically, cocksure, socially starved, self-destructive sorts; booze ignites egos [...]

Michael Mooney on trauma detail, his reading partner, the internal critic and his “I ♥ (Vince Young)” notebook

We’ll be talking to Michael Mooney again soon about a small body of his recent long-form journalism, but today we give our attention to “When Lois Pearson Started Fighting Back,” our latest Notable Narrative. We chose the D magazine story, about how a 62-year-old Texas woman named Lois Pearson survived a horrifically violent kidnapping, for [...]

“Why’s this so good?” No. 23: William Langewiesche’s voice of experience

I’ve never met William Langewiesche, and I don’t know many of his secrets, but I know he and I have at least one thing in common: We’re guided by the same terrible fear. “You have this precious, incredibly privileged thing,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, “which is the reader’s attention for a [...]