Just a few minutes talking with Paul Nicklen reveals his compulsion to educate the world. Ask a question about his polar adventures, and he segues quickly into arthropods, krill and dangerous drops in the levels of polar sea ice. He carries within him the ghost of the marine biologist he nearly became.
Luckily, he found another [...]
Author Archives: Andrea Pitzer
Paul Nicklen goes to extremes with Polar Obsession
March 17, 2010 – 12:13 pm
Paul Nicklen’s Polar Obsession: “I had finally found a way to really connect with readers”
March 17, 2010 – 12:11 pm
Paul Nicklen, a photographer with National Geographic, was going to call his latest collection of images Bipolar Obsession on a lark, to reflect his trips to both poles. He settled instead on Polar Obsession and freely admits that he is, in fact, obsessed—not just with the animals and his pictures of them, but with getting [...]
Who rubbed out Arthur Kasherman? Noir, the Star Tribune and a senior thesis combine for multimedia storytelling
March 12, 2010 – 3:15 pm
A little shy of midnight on a January night in 1945, someone shot Minneapolis muckraker Arthur Kasherman as he sat with a friend in his Oldsmobile. Firing several more times, the gunman pursued Kasherman as he climbed out of the car. Kasherman died at the scene, and the killer—whose name he seemed to have known—was [...]
Wajahat Ali in McSweeney’s “Panorama”: the American financial collapse as sitcom
March 11, 2010 – 12:12 pm
When literary magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly jumped into the newspaper business for their winter issue, much of the buzz was about the concept. A literary quarterly does a newspaper? Layout was debated, along with cost and replicability. But inside “Panorama” lurked a delightful, messy nonfiction narrative by Wajahat Ali.
“Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What Hit You” stars Ali, [...]
Walk on the wild side: animal stories that don’t stand up
March 8, 2010 – 3:51 pm
When it comes to wildlife narratives, writer Bryan Christy wants more accountability from reporters.
Christy wrote us in response to our Friday issue of the Narrative Digest, which featured coverage of a zoo, a history of animal experimentation, and an essay on a vet in Sierra Leone, among other articles. He added another a item to the list of issues raised by [...]
Aminatta Forna’s “The Last Vet”: a dog’s life
March 4, 2010 – 2:23 pm
Our latest Notable Narrative traces relations between humans and animals in the poorest country on earth. In “The Last Vet,” which appeared in the winter 2009 issue of Granta, writer Aminatta Forna follows Dr. Gudush Jalloh, the last veterinarian in private practice in Sierra Leone, as he treats and sterilizes dogs at his Freetown clinic.
Living [...]
Chris Jones, Roger Ebert and the possibilities of online narrative (or “does this story ever end?”)
March 2, 2010 – 3:19 pm
When it comes to writing profiles, Esquire’s Chris Jones is used to getting the last word. But a few weeks ago, when Jones worked his storytelling mojo on Roger Ebert, he took on someone who had his own platform and his own audience.
“I knew Roger was writing about the story,” Jones told us via email, [...]
Paul Raeburn, Ira Glass, and just some of the ways a story can go wrong
February 24, 2010 – 6:15 pm
Yesterday, Paul Raeburn at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker took the stuffing out of a New York Times medical piece. The story, by Gardiner Harris, reveals a secret recording of a 2007 meeting between a cardiologist and executives at a pharmaceutical company. Raeburn dinged it for both structure and content, writing that “sometimes a poorly [...]
Narrative nonfiction events and conferences–is there something here for you?
February 22, 2010 – 1:54 pm
While tracking digital narrative experiments, we at Storyboard also aim to keep readers informed about the world of traditional print narratives. Today we’ve compiled a list of upcoming events for fans who want to hear from classic storytellers or learn elements of craft. Here are just a few of the opportunities available, in chronological order:
The Society of [...]
