Next week we’ll provide an in-depth look at just the Rainsville piece, but for now, we wanted to highlight some other efforts to tell the stories of a shattered town and help readers understand what’s been happening there.

“When Everything Is Gone, Including a Sense of Direction,” from Dan Barry, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and A.G. Sulzberger of The New York Times (via @alixfelsing)

Heading south on Main Street, you pass intact buildings and a seemingly undisturbed way of life, save for the inordinate number of people wearing shirts that say Red Cross or Federal Emergency Management Agency or Army Corps of Engineers. An honor guard of flapping American flags urges you on.

All seems fine, until about 15th Street, when unnerving signs of damage come into view. It is slight at first, a blown sign here, a damaged roof there, laid out as if to prepare the visitor, however gently, for what is ahead. Five short blocks later, a wasteland.

The first of two YouTube clips from izelsg* shows the power of audio; it includes sound and (very little) imagery recorded as the Joplin tornado moved over about 18 people who had taken shelter in a convenience store. This second clip revisits the spot and lets viewers see the devastation that the people from the first clip survived.

*who appears to be Isaac Duncan, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter

“Torn Asunder: How the Deadliest Twister in Decades Ripped Through Joplin, Mo.,” from David Von Drehle at Time (via @tomshroder)

An EF-5 tornado pens a signature that makes no sense. You stare and ponder until slowly it comes into focus: that’s an upside-down, half-buried piano; a garage-door spring; the colored gravel from a fish tank; a car bumper entwined in a brass bed; a flat-screen TV with a door molding straight through it; the little man from the top of a soccer trophy; a Barbie shoe. Clean up suggests a return to an orderly past. In the coming weeks and months, Joplin will have to scrape bare a blasted hole in its heart.

“A gloomy night spent searching for life,” by Michael Overall of the Tulsa World (via @gangrey)

A dog barks in the distance. A helicopter rumbles overhead. And from somewhere deep under the rubble across the street, an alarm clock is beeping.

But nothing comes from the debris where the firefighters are standing, and after a few moments, the firefighters start to dig.

Five or six strain together to lift a bathtub, turning it on its side.

The victim apparently did what experts say to do. Seek shelter near the center of the house, perhaps a bathroom. Lie in the tub.

The firefighters stop and bow their heads.

“As it recovers from tornado, Joplin can take lessons from other cities,” by Eric Adler, Scott Canon and Rick Montgomery of The Kansas City Star (via @alixfelsing)

When the Kents emerged and looked at the devastation around them — some houses obliterated, others sheared in half — they stood, in many ways, in exactly the same situation as tornado survivors in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and in Greensburg, Kan.

Kent, 52, an environmental engineer, knew that from that moment on “everything is different.”

“It is like 9/11. There will be life before the tornado. And there will be life after the tornado.”

What comes next?

Where will Joplin be a month from now? Where can it be in a few years?

And finally, here’s Brian Stelter, Media Decoder at The New York Times, on the challenges of being a newly-minted disaster reporter in Joplin and how Twitter did and didn’t deliver the story in a pinch.

“A Year at War” from The New York Times. A comprehensive interactive project that follows the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division as it heads to Afghanistan. This reminds us of AP’s 2009 “Killer Blue” project on steroids. Videos from 15 seconds to several minutes show everything from a morning shave to personal reflections on leaving home. Visitors are invited to stay tuned all year to follow the battalion’s experiences at war, and to contribute letters, photos and video to the project.

“Torn Apart” from Dai Sugano of the San Jose Mercury News (via @koci). A wife and mother tries to stop the deportation of her husband and gets arrested, too. What happens to a family when six children stand to lose both parents?

“Ramadan 2010 – Your Images” from the Boston Globe’s “The Big Picture.” A vibrant photo essay marking the end of a month of fasting for Muslim communities around the world.

“The Week in Wildlife” from the Guardian (via @otolythe). A collection of animal pictures made more interesting by links to stories in the captions (though we’re less excited about clicking to a press release for the sea slug image).

“Where Good Ideas Come From” by Stephen Johnson on YouTube (via @mediastorm).  A four-minute video of an illustration-in-process explains a concept, start to finish.

“Meet Nelson, Coupland and Alice” three different possible futures for books. Do you love them, or do you wish they would go away?

No one, it seems, has time to read an article, never mind a book. Books, like fine art before them, have receded from the intuitive routine of everyday life. These days, we have to make a differentiated, focused effort to concentrate on reading. Like art set aside in a gallery or museum that requires a special visit, now books too require a special gallery of attention in your mind. You must set aside time, and set aside space, and of course set aside the Internet so you can’t just check your messages or update Twitter in between chapters. Or — who are we kidding? — in between pages. We’re getting our entertainment — or news, or information, or even our meditative moments — here and there, interspersed throughout the day, while doing other things.

Our short attention spans provoke much lamentation, but it’s really nothing new. According to a PBS documentary on vaudeville, an act was viable if it could manage to keep the audience’s attention for three minutes. Three minutes!! That’s a span we can understand — approximately the length of the average YouTube video, or a popular song.

A detail from "Blue" by Peggy Nelson

People have been complaining about the speed and fragmentation of modern life since well before there was a “modern” to complain about. And now that we’ve become modern, or even post-, it’s faster and more fragmentary than anyone anticipated, and looks to be going ever further in that direction.

But maybe this is not bad. This is not good versus evil going 40 rounds for the title. This, I would suggest, is something more neutral. Fragmentation and absorption are models of interaction. And like all models they invite other perspectives.

For example, consider a book, back in the day when we had time for them. A nice, long book with hundreds of pages, one so good you don’t want it to end. You are completely immersed, looking forward to the end of the day when you can lose yourself in it again, staying up past your bedtime for just a few more pages. Good, right? Our lost Eden, right? But now consider: what may be absorption and focus from one angle could be irresponsible escapism from another. What are you doing with yourself while reading that book? Hiding from your surroundings, spending hours of time alone and immobile, emerging to measure real things in your life by the imaginary story? Replace “book” with “Internet” and this looks a lot like addiction.

Now consider a Facebook game like FarmVille, Twitter novels like @ARTGatz or my own @adelehugo, or a film or series broken up into short segments, such as the YouTube comedy series The Guild, perfect for viewing in a corner of your screen at work. What may be fragmentary and distracted frittering from one point of view might also be a way to integrate the experience of art into everyday life. When traveling I have seen microfilms in subway cars. The tiny TV screens in taxis show local news and weather updates, although they are heavily bracketed by advertising. Their problem is not that they are short but that they are using most of that minute or two to “sell” us.

I’m not advocating a complete replacement of long with short, nor am I claiming, with Pangloss, that “all’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” I don’t think that bullet points are or should be a substitute for an in-depth story. But I am saying these are models of interaction, and there’s always more than one way to look at, and use, a model.

In addition, there’s often a future concealed within the fragment. For example, take FarmVille: You check in every day for weeks, maybe months, as you tend your virtual 2.5D farm with your friends. It’s not a narrative, but it provides a location for a tentative community. Or consider what happens as you follow a Twitter feed: it accumulates over time to a portrait of an individual, and occasionally, may even develop into a relationship. Short pieces may be grouped in series and provide a long-form in aggregate; and they may be stepping stones to an eventual community or relationship, in which new stories are built on and relate to a shared history of previous ones.

Some good examples of short-form nonfiction series include The New York Times’ One in 8 Million project, The Globe and Mail’s “Behind the Veil,” Sundance Channel’s documentary shorts, or the short investigative clips on Current TV.

Online spaces are often considered in opposition to real-life communities, and suffer in the comparison. But it’s not so much that online community should be measured as a poor substitute for something more “real” – it is more that we use every space in which we interact as a location for community, and we use every available technology to do it – whether that technology is bricks and mortar, the Internet, the printed page or even language itself. The larger context for narrative includes not just the stories, or the tellers, but of course the listeners. Ideally, a story finds or activates a large audience engaged with the issues; in an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Jane Goodall touches on the importance of storytelling in changing both attitudes and behaviors.

So it’s not a single story we need to be looking at – it’s related stories, too, as well as the places where stories are collected and accessed. And we need to look at how people are using those places, and how we might better activate the narrative potential of all user behaviors, including some that may not seem to be directly relevant.

In other words, small increments, doled out consistently over long periods of time, can accumulate to — in *some cases — significance. Of course this does not happen with every interaction, every storyline, or every online experience. But it is happening. Within our short attention span theater we may be building long-term networks—and rehearsing new models for long-form storytelling.

[This post is an expanded version of a piece Nelson originally wrote for HiLobrow.com. For related thinking, read HiLobrow editor Matthew Battles’ look at how the Internet influences the way we read and learn, published in a series over at Nieman Lab.]

Looking a little more at the article, it seems like Raeburn’s critique about organization has a point. The story moves back and forth between 2007, 2004, the present, last week, and the future in a way that makes it hard to know where to stand to get a view of events. Which, in turn makes it harder to understand what the news, or even the story, is.

While the Times piece is only quasi-narrative, knowing what your story is and how to organize it go to the heart of narrative nonfiction. Randy Olson, a scientist turned filmmaker who writes at TheBenshi.com, had an interesting post on this idea this week. He interviewed Tom Hollihan of the USC Annenberg School for Communication about science and storytelling. While the interview focuses on scientists rather than journalists, Hollihan’s thoughts are universally applicable.

When it comes to your audience, says Hollihan, “You want to pique their interest, and you want to satisfy that interest that you’ve piqued. And if you fail in either regard, you haven’t had an effective message.” He goes on to say that without a coherent story to knit them together, facts sometimes have a hard time conveying an argument.

Ira Glass’ YouTube storytelling segments address some of the same issues more directly for journalists. In his first video, Glass introduces two building blocks of story: anecdotes and moments of reflection. He demonstrates how even boring events can gain momentum through anecdotal storytelling and explains the need to offer insight on why the story matters.

“Often, it’s your job to be kind of ruthless and to understand that either you don’t have a sequence of actions—you don’t have the story part that works—or you don’t have a moment of reflection that works,” says Glass. “You’re going to need both. And in a good story, you’re going to flip back and forth between the two.”

Even veteran storytellers have to keep these issues in mind. It’s easy to get so carried away with the narrative in your head, the one you know backward and forward, that you forget to leave a path for the reader to get through the story.

[*To be fair to the Times, we should note that Science Tracker gave kudos to two other health stories from the paper this week, including a interesting multi-part narrative by Amy Harmon on an experimental cancer drug.]