Lots of the usual suspects are blogging and Tweeting about Joel Achenbach’s piece on the future of narrative journalism that ran in yesterday’s Washington Post. Some people have excerpted interesting bits, such as the great line that “story is the original killer app,” while others have attempted to respond.
Today on the Storyboard, we wanted to [...]
Monthly Archives: October 2009
Joel Achenbach and the storytellers’ union
The Moth’s Lea Thau on storytelling
In some places, the spoken story is thriving. Last night in Boston, that 800-pound gorilla of live storytelling, the Moth, put on an event at the Tsai Performance Center. We decided to ask the Moth’s executive and creative director, Lea Thau, for her thoughts on storytelling. While some of her answers show the unique aspects of [...]
Gangrey’s Ben Montgomery wants to grab you by the shirt collar
[The second in an occasional series aimed at helping readers find online resources that focus on narrative journalism.]
For more than four years, Gangrey.com has rounded up the best print narratives on a daily basis. Founder Ben Montgomery, who is also a reporter with Florida’s St. Petersburg Times, talks here about his personal motivation for starting his site and what he thinks narrative journalism can do.
On what makes a good Gangrey story:
Does it have something that’s surprising? Is it entertaining? Will it keep my attention? Is there some device being used that I’ve never seen before?
And on the multimedia components for his latest print narrative:
I couldn’t have pulled that off if it had required more effort from me. We wouldn’t have achieved the same level of—I don’t want to say excellence—the same level of story for either of those things, if both [the print story and the video] had required my attention. If journalists are required to write the story and compose the multimedia elements going into it, both parts tend to suffer.
Tom Shroder, former Washington Post Magazine editor, on dinner plates and well-done narrative
This week, I had a chance to talk by phone with Tom Shroder, who took a buyout from The Washington Post earlier this year. Shroder specializes in long-form narrative stories and recently launched his own editing site, and so I was curious what he would have to say about the current state of narrative journalism.
In our conversation, he dishes on a common mistake made by narrative freelancers, talks about the genesis of one of the best newspaper narratives ever written, and a offers up a considered defense of poop jokes. Here’s a taste:
Where a lot of narrative journalism went wrong was that it became all about the writing, and not about the details for the story and the facts behind it. People felt they could throw some words at people and dazzle. But even good writers need to start with an exceptional set of facts.
Tommy Tomlinson: making words work for a living
by Tommy Tomlinson |
October 27, 2009
A few years ago an intern did a study of the writing that showed up in our newspaper. He ran our stories through a computer program that measured the reading level you would need to understand each piece. It turned out that my stories were written at a fifth-grade level. If I remember right, I [...]
GQ and The New Yorker: two takes on brain damage from football
For a primer on different approaches to storytelling, take a look at two recent narratives on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In GQ, Jeanne Marie Laskas’ “Game Brain” follows a pathologist who discovers CTE through an autopsy on a football player. The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell also addresses the current science of football head trauma in [...]
Hilton Als and Michael Jackson: do we really need another story?
The best print narratives often take the form of either movie or metaphor. The first approach hinges on complete scenes, allowing a story to unfold as it would in film, through a discrete series of moments or events. This style often works best when a reporter gets out of the way and brings a world [...]
Meanwhile over at Nieman Lab…
Josh Benton has a post about online narratives at our sister site, the Nieman Journalism Lab. Here’s an excerpt from it, describing a story that appeared on Gawker:
“Thomas’ story is about 2,000 words, and it’s a narrative. It spends a fair amount of time spinning backstory before getting to the juicy stuff. It was compelling reading [...]
Confessions of a podcaster
by Clark Boyd |
October 20, 2009
Long-form, narrative radio—that’s the kind of radio many of us dreamed of doing when we started in the business, before so much of it, for reasons both economic and stylistic, became four and a half minute chunks of airtime filled with cribbed wire copy and bad phone tape.
Both the great radio and the mediocre get turned, often auto-magically, into mp3 files. Those files are then shoved up on a server somewhere for you to download to your PodBerry or whatever.
And this, they will tell you, is podcasting. Or maybe they’ll be a little more truthful and call it “time-shifted” radio. I sometimes call it “recycled” radio.
Don’t get me wrong. Recycling is good for the audio planet. It’s great that you can stuff hours of potentially quality stuff onto a minuscule machine, encase it in a sweat-proof nano-sheath, and then listen to Diane Rehm while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. (Remember, the p-o-d in podcasting stands for “Portable On Demand.”)
But that’s it? Seriously? That’s all we are going to do with this amazing new medium for engaging unsuspecting audiences in unexpected ways?
Abducted in Afghanistan: David Rohde’s story
This weekend, The New York Times began running a five-part series from reporter David Rohde, who was kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2008 and remained in captivity for seven months and 10 days. In “Held by the Taliban,” Rohde uses first-person narration to recount the ordeal he faced with Afghan journalist Tahir Luddin and their driver, [...]
