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When the bounds of conventional journalism are too tight
I’ll go great lengths not to affect a story during the reporting process. Journalists are supposed to be the observer, not the actor, right? Our job is to witness and question a story — not to create...
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How the “Beyonce of earthquakes” uses storytelling to explain science
Call her the “Beyonce of earthquakes” or simply “the Earthquake Lady.” But when the foundations get shaky — whether it’s during a temblor or, now, a pandemic — Lucy Jones is a rock bed of science and...
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The enduring power of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”: the first “nonfiction novel”
Seventy-five years ago today, on Aug. 6, 1945, a plane called the Enola Gay, manned by a crew from the U.S. Army Air Force, flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped the world’s first atomic...
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Extraordinary access: A reporter follows a police officer on a mental health...
The street actions rolling through American cities have aimed a spotlight on police. Sometimes the light is harsh: police seen as militarized enforcers who act with impunity in a culture of racism....
View ArticleWriting rituals: Superstition or productivity?
I’d heard the story many times before, but I still couldn’t believe it: Gay Talese pinned his manuscript pages to the wall of his office. He then walked across the room to his desk. On it rested a pair...
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Bearing witness inside a funeral home at the pitch of the COVID pandemic
Josh Sanburn went deep into a place of death — and found a story that teems with life. In “The Last of the First Responders,” published in June in Vanity Fair, Sanburn and photographer Peter van...
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Two veteran newswomen learn podcasting to retell the story of women’s suffrage
Today marks the centennial of the 19th amendment, which says “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any other state on account of...
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Rewriting the “hero’s journey” to fit a feminine narrative
The announcement of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket was barely two minutes old when sitting President Donald Trump called Harris “nasty.” He followed...
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How a high school journalist geared up to cover protests in Portland, Oregon
As federal law enforcement officers descended on Portland, Oregon, last month and clashed with protesters demanding an end to police brutality, Eddy Binford-Ross — who lives in Salem, about 45 minutes...
View ArticleThe power of a pronoun
It would be folly to follow the thousands (millions?) of sentences that have been written since Tuesday (Aug. 11, 2020), when presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced that U.S....
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One cold case murder. Two narrative forms.
On Oct. 9, 1983, the body of Timothy Wayne Coggins, a 23-year-old Black man, was found in the woods off a power line easement in Griffin, Georgia. He had been stabbed dozens of times and an “X,” like...
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How reporting through time and place reveals character
With transportation stymied by a pandemic, Wright Thompson couldn’t exactly hop on a plane to research a story on Michael Jordan. Instead, the ESPN senior reporter built a time machine, one interview...
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Economic Hardship Reporting Project seeks story pitches that personalize poverty
The Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP) was born from a situation of precisely that: financial insecurity. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the seminal 1996 work, “Nickel and Dimed,” co-founded the...
View Article7 Fatal Flaws of Story Pitches
Too many great-sounding story ideas never go beyond that. They stop with an impassioned chat at a favorite watering hole, or are grumbled about, again and again, by a disgruntled colleague who can’t...
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Introducing “The Pivot,” in which journalists find their way through industry...
The Pivot: A brief prelude On an early afternoon in early March in Upper Manhattan, a dozen graduate students in Columbia Journalism School’s Arts and Culture seminar gathered their notebooks and...
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What challenged Andrea Pitzer to write what she calls her best work ever
When she set out from Russian port of Murmansk on a 60-foot sailboat headed to Novaya Zemlya in August 2019, journalist Andrea Pitzer had few expectations. She hoped to visit historical sites central...
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“They told me their stories, gave them to me for keeping, which I did, always...
Hiram Walker is a motherless young slave in Virginia, fathered by the lord of a plantation that is clinging to shreds of grace even as the land plays out from overplanting with tobacco, half-brother to...
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How limitations — COVID, budgets, access and more — can spark fresh ideas
When the quarantine began in March, the lifestyles production unit at GBH Studio Six in Boston — which is responsible for a range of programming content, from cooking and travel television to...
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How Reveal investigated the systemic abuse of America’s caregivers
Reporters are always hunting for timely news pegs to resurface evergreen stories. More than a year after Jennifer Gollan’s arresting investigation into labor abuses against caregivers, coronavirus has...
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Wisdom from Melissa Fay Greene about deep reporting on sensitive subjects
If the first rule of nonfiction is “write what you know,” then Melissa Fay Greene has embraced this principle like few others. She has spent her career chronicling the interior lives of families on the...
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