Journalist’s Trade

News in the Land of the Giants

After many years as a TV news reporter and producer, Tom Wolzien has for the past 10 years provided financial research on large publicly traded media companies to institutional investors…
June 15, 2002

In Defense of Journalism as a Public Trust

In March, journalists from 24 countries and the European Union at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria discussed the impact market pressures are having on the quality of journalism. At the…
June 15, 2002

Societal Influence Model for the Newspaper Industry

Creating a Different Message About QualityPhilip Meyer, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former reporter and market researcher for Knight Ridder, is working…
June 15, 2002

Should Newspapers Offer Internet Access?

Why would the family owners of a small rural newspaper group in Tennessee have chosen to enter the Internet access business in the mid-1990’s? There were several reasons, but uppermost…
June 15, 2002
Gregg K. Jones

‘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
Jacqui Banaszynski

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
Melissa Ludtke

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
Adam Hochschild

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
Ellen Sung

‘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
Dan Mathers

Historical Writing and the Revival of Narrative

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