But you don’t have to be a Nieman fellow to have connections at the Storyboard. If there’s an example of great storytelling that we haven’t covered, if you’d like to pitch an idea for a Storyboard post, or if you know of anyone who’s looking at narrative in new or unusual ways, please don’t hesitate to tell us all about it.

From “a really little town” in Berkshire County, England, Richard Dunlop-Walters hopes to give you something worth checking out at a site called, well, “Give Me Something To Read.” The site catalogs links to long-form stories online, including the usual suspects at The New York Times and The New Yorker, engaging pieces from The Chronicle for Higher Education and The American Scholar, and odd gems like “How To Spot a Spook” from the November 1974 issue of Washington Monthly and a 1996 game theory argument in favor of promiscuity.

“Give Me Something To Read” grew out of Instapaper, which allows users to download stories for later reading. In June of last year, Dunlop-Walters took over editing duties for the site from Instapaper founder Marco Arment—who is also lead developer of Tumblr. Most of the audience for the site comes via the Instapaper app and Tumblr.

Stories that appear on the site arrive via both crowdsourcing and individual human intervention. Dunlop-Walters explains the crowdsourced part: “Once users bookmark an article a certain number of times, it goes into the queue.” The number required to get in the queue goes up, he says, as the traffic on Instapaper increases. Sifting through the queue of stories to find ones that make an impression, he chooses material for the left-hand column on the site, which is titled “Editor’s Picks.” The Editor’s Picks that get the most positive feedback via Tumblr’s notes system of likes and reblogs make up the bulk of the links in the right-hand column, which is titled “Greatest Hits.”

In terms of his own tastes, he talks less of fidelity to individual writers than to publications. Asked for specific examples of favorite articles, he mentions “How American Healthcare Killed My Father,” a piece from The Atlantic, and “The Interpreter,” a story about the Pirahã tribe in Brazil from The New Yorker that he says is “largely responsible for getting me into linguistics.”

While the site invites submissions, Dunlop-Walters says “maybe three or four people a week” actually send anything. Though he tends not to include interviews, his only rule is that selections must be nonfiction. “And it doesn’t have to be straight journalism,” he adds. “I posted a blog post called ‘The Secret Lives of Professors.’ But generally they come from newspapers and magazine articles.”

While there is less of an emphasis on narrative nonfiction than can be found at Gangrey.com or even @longreads, the site boasts a clear personality. It’s fond of think pieces, especially about human cognition and national security issues, and offers a poke in the eye on questions of sexual conventions and history.

“Curation is kind of an interesting thing,” says Dunlop-Walters. “It seems the Web is largely moving toward automation and crowdsourcing. When you rely on the opinions of everyone, things tend to average out and become boring—well, not exactly boring, but very rote and not surprising. I think it can be helpful to keep an individual sense of taste. I don’t think there’s anything that can replace that.”

I was surprised by what I didn’t find. In the sessions I attended as an audience member, narrative journalism didn’t come up at all, and the few passing references to long-form writing were mostly made by American presenters. A session called “Literary journalism: the pen is mightier than the video” turned out to be about arts coverage, with a brief mention of the literary essay. (To be fair, Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard, who was supposed to be on this panel, was trapped in Britain by last month’s volcano-gone-wild.)

The festival included great documentary films and old-fashioned multimedia in the form of live performances of reported projects at the beautiful Teatro del Pavone. But I didn’t hear much discussion of multimedia storytelling online by Italian journalists. Alessandro Gilioli of L’Espresso, who also sat on the storytelling panel, offered some clues as to why.

After the very friendly tech support staff had difficulties getting even simple websites to load for our panel, Gilioli noted that Italy has been less than energetic about fostering digital access, not to mention innovation. During our discussion, I described a few of the more interesting examples of online storytelling I had seen. He noted that even the journalists who are interested in doing new kinds of storytelling and visualizations usually can’t, because “Italians can’t even upload a video without it taking an hour.”

Gilioli talked about government distrust of social media, citing a leading politician who recently claimed that Facebook is more dangerous than the terrorists of the 1970s. In an article from last fall about Internet access in Italy (whose title translates roughly as “This is No Country for the Internet”), Gilioli mentioned political fears about the digital world and reported that only half of Italians have ever laid a hand on a computer. (For purposes of comparison, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that more than three-fourths of Americans are not only familiar with computers but also have some kind of access to the Internet.)

Nieman Lab staffer and panel organizer Megan Garber wrote about related concerns expressed by Vittorio Zambardino of La Repubblica. Young journalists who were interested in and engaged with new media voiced frustration with the guild-style limits on who is permitted to produce news at official outlets. Gilioli encouraged them not to struggle for access to past forms of journalistic power but to seize the future and create their own ways of telling the stories they want to report.

The Italian newspapers I looked at while I was at the conference (warning: not a scientific sampling!) offered a number of stories with narrative ledes, especially in arts reporting, but not much in the way of full-on storytelling. Our audience members, however, seemed platform and format agnostic, and were curious about all kinds of future narrative forms, as well as the larger meta-narrative questions related to Twitter, YouTube and social media stories. One ambitious attendee even sought advice on the replicability of The New Yorker.

A man standing in line at a store, scrolling through Dexter Filkins’ 10,000-word magazine cover story on Afghanistan, for instance—on his Blackberry.

The lede of Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer-winning feature on parents who inadvertently left their sleeping children to die in overheated cars, which he read out loud during his Saturday keynote address . . . then defied a listener not to want to turn the page.

Keller also read Times writer Dan Barry’s 761-word sprint about a man who caught a baby from a two-story drop to save it from burning in a house fire in 2004, a story that stuck with Keller, even though Barry’s use of the words “wafting” and “roiling” felt too much like “writing with a capital W.” (Another Keller pet peeve: long anecdotes that scream, “Look at me! I’m writing!”)

He may not be outright cheerful about the fate of long-form journalism, but he’s hopeful. It’s maybe even time for people to quit asking him how he’s doing “in a hushed tone you use for someone who’s just been through rehab or divorce.”

Keller’s main qualm about narrative writing: There’s just so much bad narrative out there, stories that indulge the writer while ridiculing the subject; articles devoid of rigorous reporting, complexity, rich characters and scenes.

He held up David Barstow’s riveting 5,700-word account of the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller. It worked because it was full of “enlightening ambiguity,” with three-dimensional anti-abortion activists as well as a flawed victim.

Keller shot down what he called three “perceived existential threats” to narrative writing:

• The decline of publishing and economic stresses that have led to newsroom downsizing and the dumbing-down of copy. Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thompson may think there’s no more room for stories that “have the gestation of a llama”—which is a year, according to Keller’s research. But Keller declared au contraire, citing the Times’ collaboration with Pro Publica on doctor-assisted death in a New Orleans hospital post-Katrina, which won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting.

“We’re feeling a little more hopeful about our life expectancy,” he said. “Our ad revenues are beginning to rebound.” (Keller later worked in another jab at the WSJ: “Just because we’re nice to people we might want to partner with doesn’t mean we don’t want to kick the shit out of Rupert Murdoch.”)

• Steve Jobs’ claim that people don’t read anymore (a claim Jobs made in 2008). Keller cited the way his paper’s long-form stories routinely make the list of most e-mailed articles. “Not only has the Web not killed narrative, but it’s pushed it out to people who don’t have home delivery.”

Story link sharing via Twitter and Facebook help, too, as does the Times’ embracing of online storytelling. Here, he showed Tom Bissell’s “Climbing Kilimanjaro” interactive graphic as well as reporter/videographer C.J. Chivers’ “An Afghan Farmer or Bombmaker?” video.

“Jobs said people don’t read anymore two years ago—before he introduced the iPad. . . . But I see the iPad and imitators bringing about a renaissance in the kind of journalism we’re talking about.”

• The notion that newspapers’ authority is falling into disfavor as crowdsourcing and user-generated content trump professional journalism. While it’s good that the conversation isn’t as one-sided as it once was, Keller believes readers get what they pay for from citizen journalism. “If I need my appendix out, I’m not going to go to a citizen surgeon.”

What persuades him that Wikipedia and Digg won’t put narrative out of business is the ability of writers like Filkins to write in a voice that “no algorithm can imitate.”

“The human yearning for great stories, writing them and reading them, is just not so easily extinguished,” Keller said.
 
 
Beth Macy is a 2010 Nieman Fellow for Journalism at Harvard. Macy covered Gay Talese’s keynote speech from the same conference for the Storyboard, and she blogs at intrepidpapergirl.com, where you can find more details on the Boston University conference, as well as her thoughts on life, reporting and narrative journalism.

Gene Weingarten won the prize in feature writing for a Washington Post piece about the guilt and grief of parents who inadvertently killed their children by leaving them in cars. It’s a powerful story, but if you want to read slightly less harrowing fare, you can see our take on a different Weingarten story from 2006, “Peekaboo Paradox,” which may now be the only piece for which Weingarten did not win a Pulitzer.

We also did an interview with Tom Shroder, who edited both of Weingarten’s Pulitzer winners. He talked with us about working with Weingarten and the future of narrative journalism (and recently also wrote his own post on the surprising backstory for this year’s prize winner).

T.J. Stiles won both the National Book Award and this year’s Pulitzer for biography for First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. In this interview from last year, Star Tribune books editor Laurie Hertzel interviews him about his approach to research and the mechanics of a readable story.

Dan Barry was named a finalist in feature writing for a ”portfolio of closely observed pieces that movingly capture how the great recession is changing lives and relationships in America.” Read our treatment of his “This Land” series for The New York Times, and our interview with him about story structure and the dangers of sentimentality.

Local reporting Pulitzer finalists Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore talked with us last fall about their St. Petersburg Times project uncovering a century of abuse at the Florida School for Boys. We also heard from Montgomery last fall about his writing and Gangrey.com, the site he founded years ago to highlight great narrative reporting.

These are just a few links to note finalists or winners whose narrative work we’ve highlighted in the past. But don’t let us stop you from checking out some of the other impressive pieces that won or almost did.

Tell me a little about the weekend you have planned.

We’re excited because we have Gay Talese, who is a legend. We have Bill Keller, who is executive editor of The New York Times and is actually a wonderful writer in his own right—in addition to having a great say over the future of narrative. And we also have Adam Hochschild, who is a steadying force in our work as well and just a wonderful man.

And we’re excited about being able to mix things up a little bit. We have one panel in which we are going to put a novelist and a nonfiction writer on the same stage to talk about what is it that one discipline can learn from the other, how narrative is in some ways the glue, the thing that we all have in common as we try to reach that greater truth and connect with readers.

It should be really interesting, because each side often thinks in terms of the limits on possibilities of what they do. This way, we’ll get a chance to hear both sides talk about it. That panel will have Gay Talese and Adam Hochschild on the nonfiction side, and we’ll have Ha Jin and Allegra Goodman as novelists talking about the challenges they face. Both of them have done work in nonfiction, too, so it will be interesting to see the difference in approach.

Obviously, the main difference is that we have to—and are happy for the opportunity to—write about facts. But the challenges of telling a story are probably quite similar when it comes to structure and character and pacing. All those things have to be thought about whether you’re doing nonfiction or fiction. We’re excited to see what happens when you put the two different disciplines on the same stage.

What do you hope to accomplish with the conference?

The conference is an opportunity to have a small and intimate celebration of what it is that we do: the challenges, the hard work and the joy that comes from all the hard work. It’s not a big mega-conference. This is intended to be a boutique conference, you might say. We don’t have a huge roster of speakers all speaking on concurrent panels. We have a series of discussions and conversations where one segueways into the next in a more intimate way than at many other conferences. It gives people a chance to talk with and get to know the speakers, for the speakers to interact with attendees, and for the speakers to get time with each other.

A lot of times at these events, you come in and you’re at your panel, and it can be hard to get to see other people. The way we’re doing it will ensure that everyone will get a chance to mingle.

Who are you hoping will come? Who will most benefit from the schedule you have set up?

We’re looking for people who are serious about the work, people who are doing the work and people who are interested in beginning the work. We’re interested in people who are at all stages of reporting and writing narratives.

We would expect that there would be many journalists who are interested in and have done longer pieces and want to get inspiration to do more. We’re looking for people who are at different points in the journey. I think that the people on our panel represent that.

We have Gay Talese, who is clearly someone we grew up reading and admiring—maybe some might say worshipping. We have others who have been doing the work for a long time and have established a name for themselves as well. I just completed my first book, and I’m going to be there behind the scenes. I’ll be doing some work, but I won’t be delivering a keynote. So we have people at very different places along the spectrum of this very difficult, challenging and joyous thing that we call narrative.

I see you’ve got David Himmelstein, a screenwriter, as a presenter, but it looks as if you’ve kept the focus of the weekend largely on print narratives. Can you talk about that decision?

We clearly have a roster of people who have done a lot of things in print. But in today’s world, The New York Times is one of the companies that is setting the standard for multimedia, because it’s one of the most effective Web sites of all media companies, so we feel like we are going to be able to touch on different genres.

By bringing in David Himmelstein, we wanted to see how you might take the same topic and see how it is approached as narrative through different genres. That’s why he is on that panel and Larry Tye is on that panel. We’ll talk about the different ways that narrative is used across platforms.  

One of the things about nonfiction books is that many times we find ourselves working with documentary filmmakers anyway. You have a lot of books that then get translated into other media, which is where Buzz Bissinger comes in, for example. There’s still a lot of cross-germination and translating that goes on. A piece may start as a book and then migrate into something else. That’s all a wonderful thing. It’s storytelling, wherever it may appear.

The discussion wasn’t aimed at forming a consensus on the future of story. Instead, participants highlighted a number of narratives that made the most of new technologies or represented novel approaches.

We’ll cover more of the roundtable in March, but for now, I’ll highlight a few of the projects that were discussed.

“Thirst in the Mojave,” from Zach Wise, ran in the Las Vegas Sun (Wise is now at The New York Times). At the top of the homepage, a panic-inducing counter runs off the remaining days until Lake Mead will (possibly) run dry–which is only one small part of a dazzling array of information available for visitors to the site. The video follows a traditional, linear approach, but additional elements supply context in unusual ways. To read an explanation of each feature, see this post at digitalartwork.net.

“Digital Nation,” from Frontline, combines a documentary with a Web site. The site offers viewers a chance to share their own stories of digital encounters, to see longer interviews with experts and to participate in roundtables. According to director and producer Rachel Dretzin, one unforeseen consequence of creating a dedicated Web site for the project has been the difficulty of deciding how and whether to update it now that the documentary has aired.

“Law & Disorder,” a collaboration among ProPublica, Frontline, and New Orleans’ own Times-Picayune newspaper, is billed as “an online investigation into questionable shootings by the New Orleans Police Department in the wake of Katrina.” Frontline Senior Producer Raney Aronson-Rath and Executive Producer David Fanning talked about the open-ended nature of this project, noting that they still haven’t decided on the final form it will take. Transparency and ongoing rollout of new information make for particularly challenging storytelling when the focus is a series of shootings that could turn out to be murders.

Living Stories from Google Labs, the least narrative of the projects from the symposium, aggregates all the content on a site related to a particular story. A brief summary and a timeline cover the broad sweep of events to date. Google Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen distinguished a topic from a story, with a story representing evolving events. Since the Google source code is now available to people wanting to use it on their own Web sites, it’s worth considering how Living Stories might incorporate more crafted storytelling approaches in the future.

Some of the most experimental and interactive projects had relatively small audiences, even those projects produced by established organizations. It remains to be seen whether viewers will be more hesitant to welcome new approaches from sources they associate with very specific kinds of storytelling, or if it’s just a matter of experimenting with innovative storytelling until viewers and storytellers click.

The Society of Professional Journalists is hosting one-day workshops with Tom Hallman, who will address not just long-form narrative but also how to “apply narrative techniques to your daily reporting.” (For a sample of his thinking on story, check out our Storyboard post by Hallman.) He’ll be at the University of Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., on April 3 and at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif., on May 8.

Boston will host two events in close succession. “The Power of Narrative: Timeless Art in an Urgent Age,” will take place April 23 – 24 at the Boston University Photonics Center and will include veteran storytellers Gay Talese, Adam Hochschild, Buzz Bissinger and Isabel Wilkerson, among many others. As of this morning, online registration was not yet in place, but a list of presenters and conference fees is available.

Grub Street will host “The Muse and the Marketplace 2010” conference May 1-2 at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. Listed sessions embrace a mixed group of writing styles and genres but will offer writers Jennifer 8. Lee, Michael Downing, and Pablo Medina, as well as a discussion of the current nonfiction market.

Lastly, this summer, you can head south for the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference taking place July 23 – 25 in Grapevine, Texas. Conference keynoters include memoirist Mary Karr, sports writer Gary Smith and journalist Mark Bowden. See this year’s conference schedule, and read our wrapup of last year’s sessions. Registration will open later this month.

All of the above, excepting the Boston University event, list participatory sessions and opportunities to get feedback on your work as part of their schedules. So if you’re interested in classic storytelling, have a look.

So what’s it like? Workshop coach Neil Swidey (whose day job is with The Boston Globe Magazine) describes looking at submitted stories in a supportive but intensive setting:

“There were late nights spent talking about war stories and the stories people had brought with them, conversations continuing through breakfast. It was great to have a focus, something concrete that [participants] were working on. We were actually talking about not just ideas but how to make their stories better.”

Swidey is returning for a second year at the workshop. The roster of other coaches for this year includes Lee Hill Kavanaugh of The Kansas City Star, along with Ben Montgomery and Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times, among others.

Who was Mike Levine? He served as a reporter, columnist, then executive editor at the The Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y. Levine died in 2007 at age 54. For a more detailed history, you can read Gregory Favre’s tribute post on Poynter.org or visit the webpage maintained in his memory by The Times-Herald Record.

The workshop is open to working journalists who have between 3 and 12 years of experience (though there is some flexibility in the guidelines). Asked if attendance were limited to print journalists, spokesperson Barbara Gref sent a note saying, “We are open to any kind of media. We’re of the mind that the story should be told in whatever media does it best.”

Gref and all the workshop coaches volunteer their time, in the interest of promoting quality journalism and remembering Levine. According to Swidey, “Those of us who lived and worked with Mike Levine know that he was a guy who helped spot the flight of young writers so that they could reach greater heights. This workshop is for people who think they can fly and want some help getting airborne.”

For more information on the experience, check out Michael Kruse’s blog from last year’s sessions and Ben Montgomery’s December call for entries on Gangrey.com. The deadline for applications is February 7, and the workshop site says limited funding is available for travel scholarships. Apply here.

The Lake homestead in Ludowici

The Auburn Chautauqua—named for the educational movement that brought cultural and entertainment programs to rural America—drew a dozen or so reporters and editors from a half-dozen states to Auburn, a rambling old house filled with family photos and mementoes. The house sits on 170 acres at the head of a teardrop driveway, nearly hidden from the highway by the greenery that grows so well in the sandy soil of that part of Georgia.

Thomas e-mailed us links to a fascinating range of work submitted by participants, who ranged from writers still developing narrative voices to veterans with decades of storytelling experience. And in what may be a first in the history of narrative conferences, his e-mail warned us not to wander off into the swamp at the back of the property without a pistol, on account of the feral pigs.

My husband and I arrived that Friday morning hoping to catch a glimpse of the pigs and eager to talk about something other than the fresh buyout offers we carried in our backpack. The others trickled in for breakfast, having had a most excellent time singing into the wee hours of the morning.

We spent the next two days discussing reporting and storytelling, and devouring Brunswick stew, homemade biscuits, and other feasts prepared by Thomas’ family. We retired to the back yard each evening to play guitar and sing.

In the following e-mail Q&A, Thomas writes about how the Auburn Chautauqua came to be—just in case you’re inspired to launch your own narrative conference. (If you do, Storyboard readers, please let us know about it.)

Why did you decide to hold your own narrative writing conference?

This was something that Michael Kruse, Ben Montgomery, and I had been talking about for years, pretty much ever since we started trying to out-write each other at the St. Petersburg Times around 2006. We had gone to other conferences together, and we found that we had our best times outside the formal conference sessions. Like when a bunch of us all sat around a long table in a bar and took turns reading our favorite passages from Richard Preston or Hunter Thompson or whoever. Later, the three of us took a road trip to Alabama—almost a pilgrimage—to meet Rick Bragg, and the talks we had in the car were some of the best I can remember having with regard to what makes a good nonfiction story.

Then, we all got the chance to attend a conference in North Carolina called Word. This was put on by the narrative team at The Virginian-Pilot—Lon Wagner, Diane Tennant, and company—and held in a rented beach house in the Outer Banks. They had the idea of asking each participant to submit a story in advance, getting everyone else to read about it, and then talking in turn about each one. Sort of a roundtable, only without the table, and with a boat-sized cooler of beverages. What we found is that each story sent us on any number of useful tangents and got us talking about craft-related issues that mattered to all of us. I left there feeling energized, and I thought maybe we could try something similar.

Part of what made the weekend so interesting was the atmosphere of your family’s homeplace in Ludowici, Georgia. Talk about the conversation with your family when you said you wanted to have more than a dozen people over for the weekend?

Well, my mom, Elizabeth, is a writer herself, so she was sympathetic to the cause. And that old house in Ludowici has hosted any number of extended family gatherings much larger than this one. So I figured it was possible. But of course the preparation was a phenomenal amount of work, most of which I didn’t do. My mom and dad (Robert) and brother William and sister Liddy put in an unbelievable number of hours getting that old house ready. Months of preparation. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a family like that.

What kinds of reactions did you get when you invited people to attend?

To begin with, I kept the invitations as low-key as possible. Here, essentially, is what I wrote to potential guests:

“Basically it’s going to be about a dozen writers from newspapers and magazines having various roundtable discussions about the craft. The program won’t be very formal. It’s actually going to be at my old family homestead, a 19th-century farmhouse in what my mother likes to call ‘a comfortable state of disrepair.’ Anyway, we’ll sit around, talking about various storytelling techniques and that sort of thing, and we’ll eat some food that my mom cooks, and my dad will probably get out his guitar, and we’ll have a drink or two, and it should be a pretty good time. Accommodations will be a little rustic. There will be beds for some, but some others may end up crashing in what we call the Screen House, a nifty open-air structure that lets in the breeze and keeps out the mosquitoes.”

And this approach seemed to work. The whole thing felt sort of underground–the opposite of being overhyped. Anyone who couldn’t come seemed to really wish they could, and the others found a way to get there.

My main regret is that I couldn’t invite more people. I limited it to writers who are actively working on narrative journalism right now. Even then, there were quite a few I wish we’d had space for. But we had only so many beds, and the discussions would have gotten unwieldy with more than about twelve people. As it was, some of us had trouble getting a word in edgewise.

Participants took the conversation about stories seriously. They asked good questions and if they disagreed, they did it in ways that furthered the discussion. That can be tough to pull off. Why do you think it worked so well?

It probably helped that many of us were friends already and that most or all of us felt connected by the common goal of telling true stories as well as possible in a world where the craft is becoming more and more difficult to practice and still make a living. I think we all wanted the same thing: to be just a little bit better at doing the job we love, and to help others do the same.

What were you hoping to get out of the weekend? What did you learn, and what surprised you about what happened?

Mostly, I wanted everyone to have a good time. And based on the comments I got, that seemed to happen. There was an amazing collective energy all around the land that weekend. By day we talked about the craft, and by night we played guitars and sang. I wish I had the musical talent that some of our guests had. But I was happy just listening.

I guess I was surprised by how much this weekend meant to people by the time it was over. We all need some recharging every now and then, and our guests seemed to get that here. I know I did.

Any advice for others who might try something similar? 

Begin planning several months or a year in advance. Start with the location. If you can have it on private property in the country, you’ll save a lot of money. Even then, the costs will add up. Consider charging a nominal fee just to cover expenses. Think hard about your mixture of guests–it may help to have some established writers along with some of those who are a little bit newer to the field. That way you’re not wall-to-wall egos. Make sure to buy enough beverages. And hire my sister to cook for you.