Author

Southeast Asian Media Struggle to be Free

Many journalists confront intimidation and government control but for some more freedom brings awareness of the need for better investigative skills.
June 15, 2002

Summer 2002: Introduction

Journalism is on a fast-paced, transformative journey, its destination still unknown. That the Web and other media technologies are affecting mightily the practice of journalism is beyond dispute. Less clear…
June 15, 2002

‘Don’t try to squeeze the dress of narrative over the wrong form.’

David Fanning talks about finding the story in TV documentary.Learn the rules and the conventions of your craft so you can break them. That’s how you wing walk. That’s how…
March 15, 2002

Spring 2002: Introduction

On a late fall weekend in 2001, the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism convened its first conference. More than 800 journalists traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts to take part in three…
March 15, 2002

Deliberating Withholding Information to Create Suspense

McPhee’s New Yorker article, “Travels in Georgia,” is a joint profile of a man and a woman. McPhee is following them along through the state of Georgia, watching what they…
March 15, 2002

Pick compelling characters. Think in scenes. Create suspense.

Adam Hochschild focused on the basics of writing narratives. Pick compelling characters and breathe life into them. Think in scenes, as if you were a filmmaker. Create suspense by strategically…
March 15, 2002

‘The idea of meaning is central to storytelling.’

Jon Franklin got me to sit up right away as he talked about things like “character” and “plot”—words I’d associated with novels and short fiction, not journalism. These, he said,…
March 15, 2002

Historical Writing and the Revival of Narrative

‘…the line between scholarly and popular writing is now much more difficult to discern.’
March 15, 2002

Conference Diary

Ideas and insights, opinions and suggestions—all of these surfaced again and again in the swirl of presentations. What follows are snippets from these sessions that didn’t find a home on…
March 15, 2002

Serial Narratives

Their power comes from ‘that delicious sense of enforced waiting.’
March 15, 2002