Journalist’s Trade

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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

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…

Their power comes from ‘that delicious sense of enforced waiting.’