Deadline writing when the world is in chaos, your house is imploding and kids...
EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay first appeared in The Cabin, a center for writers in Idaho. It is used with permission. Tomorrow, Storyboard will publish writer Kim Cross’s Survival Guide: Tips for defying...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Writer’s Survival Guide: Tips for defying distraction
The first year I had to work from home, it was dictated by a crisis. During a weekend visit with me and my family, my mother contracted bacterial meningitis and nearly died. In less than 48 hours, she...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Building writing muscles — a postcard a day
With writing, as with most things, you get better with practice. Just ask an athlete. Or a sports reporter. Derrick Goold, baseball writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, guesses that he writes more...
View ArticleTake small steps to tell the big story: Make free writing a daily discipline
This column was originally published as an issue of Nieman Storyboard’s weekly newsletter. You can read back issues of the newsletter and subscribe here. Thoughts this week turn to the creativity that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where writers write when they can’t write where they like to write
Two-time National Magazine Award winner Tom Junod often writes from home. But not always, and especially not on deadline. In a recent Facebook post, he mentioned that when he is on deadline, he seeks...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“How was it I had let all wonder, all curiosity, seep from me?”
Esi Edugyan A little more than half-way through Esi Edugyan’s fine novel, we are with her protaganist at a rude boarding house in Nova Scotia. It is 1834, and Washington Black is a fugitive. He...
View ArticleCongratulations to the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winners
There are awards upon awards in journalism. But since its launch in 1917, the Pulitzer Prizes have set the gold standard for newspaper reporting, writing, commentary, photography and more. The 100-plus...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A “nut case” buys a mountain town newspaper to save it
Fantasies die hard, or so it is said. And perhaps they are more stubborn in the hard-knocks, real-life world of newspapering. Every reporter is rumored to have a novel tucked in some hidden file in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Triple profile: A mountain town, a beloved newspaper, and an unlikely hero
Were it not for “Citizen Kane,” the tiny town of Downieville, Calif., would be just the latest in a long list of communities without a newspaper. But one night late last year, Carl Butz was watching...
View ArticleThe path to excellence: Hard thinking, constant worry and “lunch-pail labor”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Storyboard can’t, alas, run tributes to every fine and influential journalist or journalism educator who dies. But some tributes do more than honor an individual at his passing — they...
View ArticleA poet’s distanced farewell to his students is an anthem for the times
EDITOR’S NOTE: Gerald P. Costanzo moved his poetry class online March 10 because of coronavirus. As the semester ended, he wanted to leave his students with “something more substantial than goodbye.”...
View Article“Execution is as important as vision.”
When I came across this line, it was in a recent interview between Esquire politics blogger Charles P. Pierce and U.S. Senator Angus King, an Independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats. The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Journalism lives at the check-out counter
The job I moved back to New Hampshire for was not Shift Supervisor at the local branch of a national drug store chain. Back in February, I folded up five years of full-time freelancing to take a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A displaced writer picks up a camera — and falls back in love with learning
We’re all reinventing ourselves in this suddenly sideways world. So here’s my reinvention story, and the theme that goes with it: Do it for love. The micro of what I did in the last 18 months was teach...
View Article“When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely.”
My wife, Karen, and I happen to have for more than a decade a good Catholic pastor, Msgr. Robert Gibbons. Among his many gifts, he is a news junkie and is endlessly fascinated with language and...
View ArticleReverse engineering your story or project
A friend reached out this past week, asking if I would chat with a friend of his. The second friend — I’ll call her J — runs a non-profit news organization on the West Coast. It was barely a year old...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The news joins the rituals of mourning
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is published in partnership with our friends at the Poynter Institute I was half-way through an essay on how the experience of news — especially in the midst of a pandemic —...
View Article“… the only true medicine I could provide.”
They are no longer novel, these personal stories the front lines of the coronavirus. Reporters are barred from the kind of immersion that allows eye-witness accounts from that expanding front. We can...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A day-in-the-life profile of a grocery store during the coronavirus shutdown
With a cell phone, an eye for evocative detail and 50 pages of notes, Brittny Mejia of the Los Angeles Times turned a day at a grocery store into a portrait of a community challenged and changed by...
View ArticleReading (Stephen King) to learn to write
Now for something fun and funky, or at least distracting, but these days I’m sure we could all use fun and funky, or at least distracting. A starter’s guide to Stephen King, courtesy of the New York...
View Article