Take a gander at some of the more interesting writing we’ve seen lately. These pieces are more or less narrative, and come at storytelling from different angles, but are all are worth checking out.
An Indian narrative journalism magazine called The Caravan launched this month. Or perhaps re-launched might be the better term, as publisher Delhi Press traces the [...]
Monthly Archives: January 2010
Sherman Alexie, Garry Kasparov, The Caravan and more! It’s grab bag Friday…
Yahoo! Sports’ Dan Wetzel on digital narratives: “you’ve got to fight for every reader”
Storyboard contributor (and Charlotte Observer columnist) Tommy Tomlinson recently sent us a link to a sports narrative by Dan Wetzel, describing it as a great example of a story done on deadline. Tomlinson noted the pressures faced by newspaper reporters covering athletic events, adding that Wetzel’s story made him “wonder if newspaper people should change their strategy on this kind of story—maybe [...]
National Book Award winner T.J. Stiles on telling good stories and asking big questions
T.J. Stiles, author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, won a National Book Award in November for his second biography, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. In an hour-long interview with Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minn.) books editor Laurie Hertzel, he talked about the difference between research and investigation, building [...]
Interview: Brenda Ann Kenneally on recording the lives of “Upstate Girls”
Earlier this week, we talked with Brenda Ann Kenneally, an independent photojournalist who chronicles coming of age in post-industrial America. Her project, “Upstate Girls: What Became of Collar City” won first place at the World Press Awards for Daily Life Stories in 2009, and provided the basis for the collaborative multimedia project “Women of Troy,” our [...]
Interview: Studio 360’s Lu Olkowski on multimedia, poetry and the working poor
We talked by phone last week with Lu Olkowski, a contributing producer with public radio’s Studio 360 and co-creator of our latest Notable Narrative, “Women of Troy.” Here, Olkowski describes how the Troy story came together and looks at its parent project, “In Verse,” which combines photography, sound and poetry to create a new kind of multimedia.
How [...]
Interview: Ted Genoways on journalism and documentary poetry
Poetry may not be the first vehicle journalists come up with when they think of reported stories—in fact, poetry may not be on most journalists’ list at all. Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways hopes to change that. In addition to garnering three National Magazine Awards for VQR during his reign, Genoways has a book of poems [...]
Poetry as narrative journalism? You’d be surprised.
When people talk about journalism tottering off into quaint irrelevance, there is a tendency to compare journalism to poetry. In a post this week at PBS Idea Lab, Spot.Us founder David Cohn considers whether journalism, like poetry, might not be sustainable.
Cohn notes that there is nevertheless no shortage of poetry. And it’s true that people are still writing it in droves—as [...]
Notable Narrative: the expansive, defiant “Women of Troy”
An ambitious effort to present working-class women in down-at-heel Troy, N.Y., “Women of Troy” brings the hard life front and center. The project is the first installment of “In Verse,” which bills itself as a collaboration between poets, photographers and radio producers trying to create a new model of storytelling journalism.
“Women of Troy” casts its [...]
Tanja Aitamurto on crowdfunding and the future of narrative journalism
Yesterday’s Storyboard post was on ”Finding Dolly Freed,” an innovative approach to narrative journalism. For that story, we shared comments on the project from Tanja Aitamurto, a researcher at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, who did a case study on Spot.Us and has a particular interest in crowdfunded journalism. She had additional interesting thoughts on the future of long-form reporting in the digital era, and [...]
Paige Williams on “Finding Dolly Freed”
Yesterday on the Storyboard, we looked at a new approach to narrative by focusing on Paige Williams’ self-published project “Finding Dolly Freed.” That post considered the possiblities for crowdfunded narrative journalism, but we were intrigued enough with the rest of what Williams had to say to offer more of it here. Below are excerpts from this [...]
