Articles

Change Starts Small: The Texas Tribune Chooses Efficiency Over Size

Photo by Todd Wiseman“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” These words, from the…

Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: Nicco Mele on the End of Big News

Photo by Eden BrackstoneI am not a journalist. I’m a digital guy. I am well versed in the trends of newspapers’ decline, but at the age of 35 I’ve never…

Calm at the Kitchen Table: A Start-up Tracks Murder in Washington, D.C.

Photo by Douglas SondersThere’s an energy to big, busy newsrooms that’s unlike any other. Reporters and editors tapping away on keyboards, muttering through copy, interviews taking place, police scanners crackling,…

Playing Big: From the Chicago Tribune to Bloomberg News, Big Organziations Can Do Big Work

The battle raged over 29 words.In 1999, the Chicago Tribune published a five-part series, “Trial and Error,” that for the first time documented the incidence of prosecutorial misconduct nationally. One…

Staggering Drunks and Fiscal Cliffs: How Bloomberg Businessweek Uses Metaphors in the News

Illustration by Harry CampbellIn 2008, the year of the financial crisis, BusinessWeek magazine pictured Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke as a driver careening down a mountain road, then as Vladimir…

Stop the Press: Rupert Murdoch, the Leveson Inquiry, and Press Freedom in the U.K.

Photo of Murdoch by Kirsty Wigglesworth/The Assoicated PressOn a late March afternoon in 2002, 13-year-old British schoolgirl Amanda Jane “Milly” Dowler called her dad from her cell phone after school…

Face to Face with the Enemy: Photos from the World’s Wars

Click the image to meet the fighters. Photos by Karim Ben KhelifaUp until a few years ago, I had spent a decade and a half of my life behind the…

Poetry: The News that Stays News

The most famous statements about poetry and journalism hide an equation inside an opposition: “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for…

Writing Naked: Donald Hall on Poetry and Metaphor in Journalism (Extended Transcript)

Donald Hall. Photo by Finbarr O’Reilly Donald Hall, former U.S. poet laureate, has lived at Eagle Pond Farm, with its white clapboard farmhouse and weathered barn, in Wilmot, New Hampshire, since…

Writing Naked: Donald Hall on Poetry and Metaphor in Journalism (Video)

The Complete InterviewOn March 29, 2013, retired Concord Monitor editor Mike Pride, NF ’85, sat down with his friend Donald Hall, the former U.S. poet laureate, for a videotaped conversation…