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, [...]
Tag Archives: print narratives
Wajahat Ali in McSweeney’s “Panorama”: the American financial collapse as sitcom
March 11, 2010 – 12:12 pm
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 [...]
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, [...]
Dan Koeppel and narrative tension—Popular Mechanics not for the faint of heart
February 2, 2010 – 12:54 pm
So what do you do if you fall out of a plane at 35,000 feet, as is apparently the case with “How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive” in the February issue of Popular Mechanics? I came across this story on TheBrowser.com and almost skipped it, thinking the “helpful hints for disasters” genre has been done, and overdone.
But reporter [...]
Poetry as narrative journalism? You’d be surprised.
January 21, 2010 – 11:00 am
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 [...]
Paige Williams on “Finding Dolly Freed”
January 15, 2010 – 9:45 am
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 [...]
Hello, Dolly! Radiohead journalism and the future of narrative
January 14, 2010 – 4:32 pm
When a journalist in love with a story gets turned down by magazine after magazine then sells a piece only to see it killed, what’s the next step? If you’re Paige Williams, you take a page from the guerrilla journalism handbook and publish it yourself.
Williams, whose “Finding Dolly Freed” debuted last week, installed a donation [...]
Charles Pierce on the future of narrative journalism: “anyone not concerned isn’t paying attention”
January 7, 2010 – 1:06 pm
I talked this week with Charles Pierce about the end-of-decade summary he did for Esquire. Pierce, who also works for The Boston Globe Magazine, talks (and perhaps writes—see end of interview) faster than any human being alive today. Here, he offers his thoughts on dystopian thinking, recent stories he’s liked, and how good writers get turned [...]
In defense of ignorance: Rob Nixon at the MLA on making room for readers
December 31, 2009 – 5:20 pm
Can less be more? The value of ignorance came up this week at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Philadelphia during a session titled “Literature and Journalism.” Rob Nixon, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, talked principally about nonfiction writing and scholars making forays into journalism. But some of his ideas are instructive for [...]
Adrienne Mayor on putting the story in history
December 18, 2009 – 11:10 pm
Adrienne Mayor was a 2009 National Book Award finalist for her nonfiction book The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy. Mayor, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, has made a career of writing about monsters, myth, and dirty fighting in antiquity. In this interview, she dishes with us on building [...]
