[We recently met Benjamin Chesterton at the Frontline/ICP symposium, where he participated in a discussion on the future of visual narrative. He had some strong opinions about photojournalists and storytelling, and we thought our readers would be interested in hearing his ideas. —Ed.]
One surefire way to irritate blind people is to think that you can put a blindfold on [...]
Tag Archives: The New York Times
Duckrabbit’s Benjamin Chesterton on the Blindfolded Photographer
March 18, 2010 – 12:08 pm
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 [...]
Interview: Brenda Ann Kenneally on recording the lives of “Upstate Girls”
January 22, 2010 – 3:09 pm
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 [...]
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 [...]
Statistics as story: narrative journalism by the numbers?
December 15, 2009 – 4:07 pm
Earlier this year, at the first TED conference in India, Hans Rosling predicted the year and month that India and China will overtake the West and return Asia to world dominance. He began in classic storytelling mode with a personal anecdote.
“Once upon a time, at the age of 24” Rosling said, “I was a student at [...]
The end of the line for the Lone Ranger? A how-to guide for narrative collaboration
November 24, 2009 – 12:12 pm
When The Roanoke Times “Age of Uncertainty” won Documentary Project of the Year from Pictures of the Year International, it wasn’t the narrative writing or the photography or the Web design they wanted our insights on. They asked us to speak at their 2009 conference about a topic more nuanced and, I would argue, more important [...]
The New York Times Magazine and the moral essay
October 15, 2009 – 1:41 pm
Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine included a personal essay from novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, “Against Meat,” which recounts his struggles with whether or not to eat (or teach his child to eat) other creatures. As I started reading, I wondered what a wunderkind novelist might really add to the “Meat Is Murder” playlist.
The essay [...]
