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 animal narratives, expressing his frustration that when it comes to stories about humans’ illegal interaction with wildlife, a “focus on animals (and their suffering) tends to give the criminals a bye.”

A high school-era Bryan Christy with pet Socrates

While most of the stories we featured didn’t involve illegal trafficking, it’s an interesting storytelling issue. In a January Huffington Post essay (“Wildlife Smuggling: Why Does Wildlife Crime Reporting Suck?”) Christy argues that “too often wildlife crime stories are little more than eco-tourism pieces with sad endings” and claims that that sloppy reporting for these kinds of narratives has real costs.

He notes a 2007 report from the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which suggests that widespread “gross exaggeration” from the media (along with other groups) doesn’t help the cause of getting more attention to and support for protecting wild animals. (And in fact, the inflated and inexact numbers Christy points to do show up in some major news outlets via Google search.)

But Christy isn’t arguing against a narrative approach to trafficking stories. In “The Kingpin,” from January’s National Geographic, he presents Anson Wong, one of the world’s major smugglers of endangered animals. While there are plenty of gripping details about victimized creatures in Christy’s story, the tale unfolds more as an expose of one man’s willingness to deliver any animal for money and a global system hard pressed to keep him from doing it.

While the lure of safari-style visuals might be hard to editors to resist, shifting coverage to the bigger picture could make for a more accurate story. Christy suggests that treating the issue with the same kind of rigorous reporting applied to other criminal enterprises might be the answer: “More time should be spent on paper and money trails, less on jungle adventures.”

Living in London after having grown up in Sierra Leone, Forna is in many ways perfectly placed to tell Jalloh’s story, although it is also her story and the story of the dogs of this small West African country. She gives us charming images, such as newly neutered patients sleeping off anesthesia (“the paw of one lies across another, strange babies sharing a bed”), but she challenges the reader’s expectations time and again.

A childhood dog returns after a disappearance with “his hind quarters split open to the bone by an axe wound”—a wound that turns out to be less a result of malice than a reader might think. Forna elegantly shows how deeply material circumstances and history have affected the lives of Jalloh, his country and his charges.

By incorporating her debates with Jalloh on the treatment of animals in Sierra Leone and in England, Forna considers an idea they both reject: that helping animals in the midst of human suffering is somehow frivolous. As she weaves the presence of international activists and the staff of the British High Commission into her story, her essay becomes a meditation on empire and colony and an argument that what seems like sentimentality in Jalloh and his compatriots may be something else altogether.

“I knew Roger was writing about the story,” Jones told us via email, confessing his hands had trembled when he clicked on the link to see what Ebert had written about his piece. “I mean, he’s a critic, right? And I really enjoyed spending time with him, and I hope he enjoyed spending time with me. I didn’t want him to feel regret for having let me in.

“So, when I read what he posted, I felt like 1,000 pounds had been lifted off my shoulders. I could have received a million letters from other people saying they liked the story, but if Roger Ebert had hated it, I would have felt bad about that, literally for the rest of my life.”

Jones’ moving profile of the film critic drew praise from Ebert, and also garnered a mention by Jim Romenesko and a post from the Cronkite School’s Tim McGuire, who portrayed the article as a call to the journalistic ramparts. And it’s true that the Ebert article is beautifully written, and that Jones is a national continental treasure (it turns out that the Canadians get credit for him, along with Sidney Crosby and Celine Dion).

But the thing that struck me about the story is how its online existence has transformed it. If it had come out as a print piece only, the profile of Ebert would have been read and praised, then perhaps used in some classes or maybe eventually, it would have found its way into a collection of Jones work. But what has emerged instead is a larger, living thing—a dialog of stories, if you will, between Ebert and Jones, and Ebert and Esquire.

The online version referenced Ebert’s journal on the Chicago Sun-Times site and described the movie expert expounding there on the “existence of an afterlife, the beauty of a full bookshelf, his liberalism and atheism and alcoholism, the health-care debate, Darwin, memories of departed friends and fights won and lost.”

So we have an Esquire piece that points to nearly two years of entries in Ebert’s online journal, followed by Ebert using his online journal to comment on the Esquire piece. But the story doesn’t stop there. Ebert talks about his work with Esquire decades ago and mentions “the best interview I ever wrote” for the magazine. And that interview, “Saturday at Lee —-ing Marvin’s,” is now posted on Esquire’s site as well, linking back to Ebert’s response and the original profile. Jones explains how the Marvin interview came up:

“In the course of my research for the story, Tim Heffernan at Esquire photocopied a bunch of Roger’s stories for me out of the paper archives. One of those stories was the Lee Marvin story. I brought them to Roger to show him—there was also one on Groucho Marx, and one of Hugh Hefner’s daughter—and he lit up and said that the Lee Marvin story was the best story he ever wrote.

“I mentioned them in the article and told my editor, Peter Griffin—you talked to him about the helicopter piece—what Roger thought of the Lee Marvin story. A little while ago—maybe two weeks ago—Peter asked if I thought Roger would mind if the story was posted. Roger was fine with it, and someone at Esquire typed it into the system. Voila. A piece that’s nearly 40 years old is suddenly given new life and a new audience.”

These posts and stories work particularly well together because of the talent possessed by both writers. But their connection also illustrates how a standalone story can evolve into a larger narrative by picking up prologues and codas as it finds echoes and responses in the world.

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.

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.]

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.

The McKerrow Brothers

The title evokes a tradition in which sideshow oddities and wonders are used to titillate readers and draw them in, a tradition not entirely unfamiliar to journalists. Novelist and blogger Moody slides elegantly into his story, using “us” in the first paragraph to join the crowd of readers watching what will happen as Kimberly Reed meets up with Paul McKerrow, her high school identity.

Moody later cuts to the first person (“let me pause to observe”) when recording his personal reaction to Reed’s beauty. This clever move offers a hint that we might want to check our own responses.

It turns out that two McKerrow children graduated in the class of 1985—Paul (now Kimberly) and her brother, Marc, who was adopted. Adding another layer of tension to the upcoming reunion, Moody relates that early challenges and a later accident have made Marc’s life even more complicated than Kimberly’s. Combining surprise links to Hollywood royalty with Mark’s ongoing efforts to handle everyday life, Moody shows us how identity is both changing and fixed, and how the boundary between the very strange and the absolutely normal may not exist.

As the story turns back to the high school reunion, Moody manages to draw all his elements together and make each part relevant. The piece reveals a different kind of spectacle than readers might have tuned in for, yet more of a reunion in every sense of the word: a meeting, an encounter with the past, a family gathering, a making whole of the self.

[Prodigal Sons, Kimberly Reed's award-winning film about her family life, will be shown in a number of U.S. cities in the coming months.]

After a failed career as a television news intern and eight successful years as a print reporter, Solomon left her newspaper job on the West Coast to return home to Boston. Holding down a day job as an editor of a start-up Web site, she began to devote her free time to blogging at The Small Story.

As a reporter for The Seattle Times, Solomon wrote small-focus narratives about everything from displaced survivors of Hurricane Katrina to ”Flash Mob” kissing. The Small Story has a similar bent, centering on “the lives of everyday people in Massachusetts—the challenges they face, the celebrations they make, and the communities they like to call home.”

Solomon has found most of her subjects herself but notes that on occasion, someone will give her a tip, which is how she found our personal favorite on the site. “Low Price Lenny” recounts details of the 2009 Ms. Senior Sweetheart pageant and the kazoo-carrying businessman who founded it. Solomon told us via email that she found Lenny via by posing her favorite question:  “Who’s the most interesting, un-famous person you know?”

Only one or two narratives appear each month, and some months have been skipped altogether. “It’s my own labor of love,” Solomon says, noting she’s a Lone Ranger on the project for now (she hopes to involve other journalists and photographers in the future).

The site bills itself as “a slower-paced look at the everyday people who make up America.” And though the stories are created for digital consumption, there’s something nicely newspapery, even retro, about Solomon’s voice and her subjects. Perhaps it’s the narrow focus or the optimistic bent, but maybe it’s just the small story that likes to stay small.

How would you describe what you do?

I do new media art with a focus on decentralized, episodic storytelling—I’m thinking of the things I’ve done very recently, which are the Twitter projects @adelehugo and @enoch_soames. And I’ve done some what I guess you would call walking tours with augmented reality that either involved sound pieces or 2D barcodes, where you take a picture with your phone and then it brings up a web page depending on where you are. It weaves itself together into a kind of a narrative. I’ve done that in Boston and Nevada and a couple of different places. So they’re all stories told in little bits at a time, with a lot of gaps.

You’ve worked on stories in just about every medium—even PowerPoint. How do you think about the idea of story?

I’ve always been a lover of anecdote and telling a good tale at a cocktail party or family Thanksgiving. I’m attentive to oral tradition, making that as good as it can be. But that feeds into the fact that I’m the kind of person who walks around, and in my head, I’m captioning things. I see a funny thing, and I come up with a one-liner to describe it.

If I had worked at a newspaper back in the day, my ideal job would have been to write the comments under the pictures. I don’t know if it even was a separate job, but I would have been a caption writer. So these two strains appear in my life and my personality: the raconteur/tale-teller and the captioning person. The reason I’m drawn to experimental storytelling is that it brings those two things together.

The augmented reality stuff and the Twitter stuff, and the PowerPoint, and the animation that I did at SXSW in 2006, which was an old-style slide show—those are all telling stories in a list of captions or sentences. I find that appeals to me when I do it in these media, but I don’t want to read a book that’s all lists.

I know some authors do that quite well. But for myself, I’d rather use all this other stuff than just see a list printed on a page. I guess because I want to play with the rhythm. There’s a strong comic strain in my work, and comedy is often very dependent on the pauses you take. Maybe that’s the appeal to me—but then also I’m attracted to what’s new.

Tell me a little about the two Twitter feeds.

@adelehugo is what I’m calling a Twitter movie, but it could also a Twitter novel or a re-enactment. It’s based on a true story. Adele Hugo was the youngest daughter of Victor Hugo and was also a very talented writer and musician, very popular, and a proto-feminist. At a crucial point in her mid- 20s, she met a guy who was a kind of a player, and she really fell for him, and she never lost that obsession that he was the one. She spent the rest of her life hatching these very creative, elaborate schemes to get him back.

She essentially lived a very virtual life. So I thought I’d bring her back to the 21st century and see how she fares here. My idea was that I would open a Twitter account in her name and essentially tell her story from her point of view, as if she was Twittering it. I expected the project to go for about a year, and it looks on track to do that.

What about @enoch_soames?

Adele Hugo is “history” history. Enoch Soames is kind of intellectual history. He was a character in a short story written in 1919 by Max Beerbohm, in which Max Beerbohm is also a character in the story. He meets this guy Enoch Soames. Enoch is upset because he’s a writer and no one is paying attention to him—he thinks he’s a genius, and he’s not recognized. A lot of the famous people of the day are woven into the story as ignoring Enoch.

Enoch decides that he’s going to make a deal with the devil. He’s going to go 100 years into the future, read all about himself in the reference materials at the British Library. He’ll get that five minutes of satisfaction that people are paying attention. He makes the deal, and off he goes. He comes back, and just before the devil whisks him off, he says that he’s very upset with Max because the only reference to himself that he found in the British Library was as a character in a fictional short story written by a guy named Max Beerbohm.

So I thought I’d bring Enoch back as a Twitter character, and that way he gets a little more reality than he had before. He was a real fictional character, and now he’s going to be a real virtual character. He’s kind of an ongoing project. He’s going to tell his story, but he might continue on.  Whereas Adele is going to finish her story and then she’ll be done.

Most newspaper and magazine readers are comfortable with narratives that follow a very traditional path. In my head, it’s kind of a 19th century construct: a print piece with a classic, chronological, single major narrative arc—I’m generalizing here. Your work seems to take that apart, blowing up that traditional narrative. Do you worry about readers or viewers being able to follow the narrative? Do you worry about accessibility?

That’s been something that we’ve been talking about a lot in my artistic circle. I have not solved the problem for myself. I wonder how much to explain, and how to get people to really follow it. There’s a lot to be said for the traditional 19th-century narrative, and I enjoy that as well. I don’t see my work as trying to replace that, I see it more as accompanying that for the new media.

When I joined Twitter, I realized that the people who use it are checking it pretty consistently throughout the day. So I want to make an art project specifically for this medium that these people are checking anyway. I wasn’t thinking, “Okay, no one is reading The Atlantic anymore, so I’m going to substitute with something like this.” I was thinking, “Okay, people are using this a lot. It’s creeping up to be a bigger part of their day and more of what they’re thinking about.”

So I want to put art in there as well, so they’re not just getting another link to BoingBoing. To make a scripted narrative for this space. So in a way, it’s kind of  shoehorning the 19th century story idea into the new medium, one in which people are so fractured and they only have 15 seconds to look at something anyway.

Accessibility is a challenge, and I’m going to continue to work on that issue. When Adele is done, my next Twitter project involves a pretty well-known story that I hope will be another step toward comprehension and also people enjoying it. I want them to enjoy the experience itself and not just say “Well, it’s an intellectual project, and isn’t that interesting.”

Adele Hugo is a real person you’ve fictionalized.  Enoch Soames is a fictional character you’ve treated as real. Journalists can’t be that free in inventing content for their narratives. Do you have thoughts on how to keep the dynamic nature of the narratives you’ve created while hewing to what an editor would see as the facts?

News is already episodic. We can’t have all the news from everywhere and everyone all the time. There’s info overload and there’s compassion fatigue. We had been doing is corralling it into the daily or twice-daily paper or the nightly news or modes like that. Now, with Twitter and live blog posting, you can see it in a way as just faster episodes. But we still need the filter. We still need someone to construct the stories out of all the information coming in.

A lot has been made of the crowdsourcing of Twitter, with the airplane in the Hudson, the people standing on the wing, and the recent political upheaval in Iran—people posting their thoughts from being on the ground. And it’s great raw material, but it still needs to be made into a story.

All stories or narratives have aesthetic components. The beginning, the middle, the end. A climax in there. You don’t want to bury the lede. You want things in the correct proportion so you’re not making something more sensational than it already is. So the reporter, the writer, has a really strong role in constructing this artistic object that’s completely based in fact. He or she wants to make that construction so that the story is accessible and exciting but completely truthful. The structure of the story should be enhancing the truthfulness.

There’s also a thing with Twitter in particular. Say you’re on the street, and you’re posting to your Twitter feed as well as developing your stories for a news paper or your blog. Every Twitter account is a character, every Twitter account is a performance. Some people are less scripted: “I’m here. This is what I had for breakfast. This is what I’m doing now. Now I’m bored.”  Even then, all of those things are not really the person; they’re a part of the person. They’re emphasizing certain things and deemphasizing others, whether or not they’re fully reworking it or directing it.

There’s a quality of performance involved in a Twitter feed that may be mirrored a bit by the news anchor, or Barbara Walters doing a special show, but not so much by the person writing an article with just a byline. The responsibility for the reporter using these new forms is not only to do a fast, coherent narrative on the back end and then Tweet from that perspective, so that you’re actually telling a story rather than just whatever comes in whenever it comes in. Reporters also have to build their characters so that people know what they’re getting.

There are a lot of different stances for reporters to take. You can be the voice of authority. You can be a kind of Hunter S. Thompson. You can be embedded. You can be the more emotional, in-depth “I’m going to go interview this one person or this one family that will be a metaphor for the whole story” kind of reporter.

You can establish an identity for your character in Twitter really fast—I’d say in maybe 10 posts, you can sort of be that person. I think the reporter who uses Twitter needs to do that in a quite conscious way, so that you’re not deconstructing yourself or confusing people’s expectations.

It’s also the way you draw readers. If someone is on there and I think they know everything about this topic, and they say it well, then I’m going to follow them. But if they’re sometimes really excited and sometimes really distant, I’m going to get confused about their voice. And I might not be so into it.

You can even see that on TV. Anderson Cooper has his fans, Morley Safer has his fans, and Diane Sawyer has hers. They develop an emotional connection to a character and a voice. You need to be very aware of voice in new media and use it to your advantage.

It gives a lot more responsibility to the reporter and less to the structure of the news organization that’s grown up around reporting. But in a way it replaces it with a new structure, one technology for another. Right now, it’s really foregrounding reportage.

Any other thoughts on where storytelling is headed?

This is a really exciting time to be a writer. You can still do so-called traditional formats. But then there are so many just-barely explored opportunities to tell interesting stories in new ways. These new experiments can sometimes just be experiments, and there are going to be a lot of stuff out there that’s not so good, that tries and fails, like anything else.

But I think these new experiments offer us a way to bring in additional voices and work the underlying journey that a reader is going to go through. Ideally, in the best possible world, we’ll help readers make the connections from what they’re reading online to real connections in their lives. Increasing information awareness and increasing compassion—that would be my ideal. I won’t get there, but you’ve got to have an ideal really far off, so you can push the work that much further.

[For more on new media approaches to narrative, see our post on January's Bookfuturists Meetup.]

The discussion touched on “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge,” created by veteran creative nonfiction writer Dinty W. Moore. Moore uses Google Maps to pinpoint the locations of a series of meetings with George Plimpton, including a short description for each encounter. The account straddles the line between being a series of funny anecdotes and a true narrative, with the visual component of the map creating a sense of time and distance between each encounter.

Moore’s piece recalls “Hard Times” from The Washington Post’s Travis Fox, who crossed the country before the 2008 presidential elections to record how economic challenges were or weren’t affecting people’s political sensibilities. “Hard Times” uses also uses Google Maps and provides brief text at each mapped point, along with short, semi-narrative articles and video or still images. Fox, who is now teaching a Multimedia Storytelling class at Columbia University, made frequent use of interactive maps for many of his Post projects, including “Crisis in Darfur Expands” and “Mexico at War.” (At present, the latter doesn’t seem to be working quite right in Explorer or Chrome.)

Bookfuturists also mentioned David Nygren’s spreadsheet narrative “Under the Table.” Nygren’s short story breaks down each element in a traditional piece of fiction, organizing it into columns of action, spoken dialogue, and internal thoughts for each character. In a post on The Urban Elitist, Nygren explains his strategy and links to the story, which is available as an Excel or Google spreadsheet, or as a table in Word. One of Nygren’s readers has dubbed this version of storytelling “novexcel.”

The novexcel seems to be a cousin of the much-discussed charticle, but offers several layers of information at once. The story can be read left to right and down the page, as with traditional text narratives, but it can just as easily be scanned for just one element—a single character’s thoughts or the physical events that take place. This approach brings to mind Scott Carney’s “Cutthroat Capitalism” project for Wired, which we featured last fall. The Wired story spreads a bare-bones narrative arc across several tables and presents more elegantly in terms of design, but Nygren’s spreadsheet approach draws all the story elements into a single place for readers.

It may not yet be obvious how journalists can fully exploit the possibilities, but it’s clear that a lot of interesting experiments are underway. For more on new media narratives, read our interview with Bookfuturist presenter Peggy Nelson, who takes elements from literary history and uses them to construct new stories on Twitter, Vimeo and lots of other places.