ISSUE

Spring 2002

Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference

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 days of interactive seminars, lectures and readings with many of the nation’s leading practitioners. By the end of the conference, there had been 26 seminars, four plenary sessions, and three group readings, and it is from words spoken at these sessions that Nieman Reports compiled the report that follows. — Melissa Ludtke

Articles

Journalist’s Trade

‘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…

Jacqui Banaszynski

Journalist’s Trade

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…

Journalist’s Trade

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…

Adam Hochschild

Journalist’s Trade

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…

Journalist’s Trade

‘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,…

Journalist’s Trade

Historical Writing and the Revival of Narrative

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

Journalist’s Trade

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…

Journalist’s Trade

Serial Narratives

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

Journalist’s Trade

An Unexpected Ending

“What Price the News” was written a couple of years ago but certainly resonates today because of the subject matter. The writer is a young man named Ian Stewart. And…

Journalist’s Trade

‘Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.’

Tim O’Brien had the bad fortune to be caught up in the Vietnam War, and he’s written about it several times, and he wrote a book called “The Things They…

Jacqui Banaszynski

Journalist’s Trade

A Love Fest on Narrative Elements

It’s the voice, you fool. No, it’s the theme, dummy. No, it’s the story, you buttonhead.

Bruce DeSilva, Chip Scanlan, Jon Franklin

Journalist’s Trade

Endings

‘The inverted pyramid makes endings impossible.’

Journalist’s Trade

Reporters Read From Their Narrative Articles

During the conference, there would come a time each day when writers would share their narrative writings with participants who wanted to listen. And many did. The hundreds of chairs…

Isabel Wilkerson, Rick Bragg, Stan Grossfeld, Steven A. Holmes, Thomas French

Journalist’s Trade

Scenes, Suspense and Character

‘Everything really boils down to one or another of those three things.’

Adam Hochschild

Journalist’s Trade

‘Writing is all about rewriting, which means you’ve got to get something down.’

Steps for Managing Your Stories Lower your standards. Get something down. Swallow the bile that rises in your throat when you write a first draft. Print out early. Read aloud.…

Journalist’s Trade

Finding Time to Write

Hold yourself accountable. Get your work on paper.

Stewart O’Nan

Journalist’s Trade

‘Very few writers understand that a story has an arc, not just a beginning, a middle, and an end.’

Jim CollinsThese are things I have learned from my best writers, and now I pass them on to you in 10 lessons.Voice is important, seductive, subversive and can be crucial.…

Journalist’s Trade

‘Reporting is the key to good journalism.’

Steven A. HolmesIn daily journalism, you often don’t get a lot of time. But in trying to cover the lives of ordinary people and make it news, your best friend…

Steven A. Holmes

Be a Reporter, Not a Guest

Journalist’s Trade

Be a Reporter, Not a Guest

Interview time is not social time, and a mistake that younger narrative reporters frequently make is to be too nice and too obliging and to act too much like the…

Journalist’s Trade

Peeling the Onion

Seven Steps of Interviewing

Journalist’s Trade

Writing About Ordinary Lives

‘I wanted to move the realm of curiosity into the lives of people who had been ignored….’

Journalist’s Trade

Filling a Notebook With Narrative

Select a good topic. Secure good access. Find good narrative runs. Find character hints in action. Find the right scene details. Find emotionality for your subjects, not for you. Do…

Journalist’s Trade

What Happens Next?

Tom French’s talk was an argument for the power of the slowly unfolding story—the wait, the suspense (though I don’t think he ever used the word cliffhanger). For him, the…

Journalist’s Trade

Editors and Reporters

‘Quite frankly, we need each other.’

Jacqui Banaszynski

Journalist’s Trade

Reporting Differently

How to come back with a notebook full of narrative.

Journalist’s Trade

More Tips for Editors

A collaborative relationship at The Oregonian

Jack Hart, Richard Read

Journalist’s Trade

Conference Participants Whose Words Appear in This Issue

Jacqui Banaszynski is the assistant managing editor/Sunday at The Seattle Times and holds the Knight chair in journalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Her series, “AIDS in…

Journalist’s Trade

Indulging Curiosity

Talese and Michel MarriottNew York Times reporter and 2002 Nieman Fellow Michel Marriott introduced Gay Talese at the Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference. Excerpts of their comments follow:Michel Marriott: As a…

Gay Talese, Michael Marriott

Journalist’s Trade

Tips for Editors

‘Pick three things and just keep working on them, keep reinforcing them.’Think of each of your reporter/writers as a one-year investment. Match the assignment to the writer, but stretch it…

Journalist’s Trade

A Bunch of Tips for Reporters

‘You can break the action at times and give us background.’Say you’re writing about the Little League team winning the Little League World Series and you’re doing a narrative. That’s…

Journalist’s Trade

Sharing the Secrets of Fine Narrative Journalism

Those who do it well explain what it is they do.

Journalist’s Trade

Interviewing Sources

‘The center of the onion is what you want.’

Isabel Wilkerson

Journalist’s Trade

‘The voice is you.’

“Whether it is fiction or nonfiction, the voice of the author is what keeps us going. If the voice does not capture the reader, the voice is silenced by the…

Journalist’s Trade

‘Learn how to see the world through an artist’s eyes.’

Emily Hiestand is a poet and a visual artist as well as a magical essayist. A lot of what she talked about can be summarized as thinking like an artist…

Journalist’s Trade

Spring 2002: Conference Introduction

Nieman Narrative Journalism ConferenceCambridge, MassachusettsNovember 30 – December 2, 2001Narrative journalism is in transition to a second phase. The first continues—the individual, dramatic phase in which lonely reporters get fascinated…

Journalist’s Trade

Why We Need Stories

‘Without them, the stuff that happens would float around in some glob and none of it would mean anything.’

Jacqui Banaszynski

Journalist’s Trade

Steps for Managing Your Stories

Lower your standards. Get something down. Swallow the bile that rises in your throat when you write a first draft. Print out early. Read aloud. Apply very critical standards.

Journalist’s Trade

Structuring Stories for Meaning

‘Your character gets to the point where something changes.’

Journalist’s Trade

Writing in a Personal Voice

‘Your training as journalists is a tremendous platform on which to layer or from which to develop a personal voice.’

Journalist’s Trade

Reporters Read From Their Narrative Articles

During the conference, there would come a time each day when writers would share their narrative writings with participants who wanted to listen. And many did. The hundreds of chairs…

Isabel Wilkerson, Rick Bragg, Stan Grossfeld, Steven A. Holmes, Thomas French

Nieman Notes

Documenting the Rhythms of Cuba

A photographer uses digital video ‘to capture the passion and grittiness of contemporary Cuba.’

Opinion

Examining Religious Paths Into and Out of the Middle East

Through the eyes of two journalists, the lives of Christians and Jews are explored.

Journalist’s Trade

Journalists and historians can learn from each other.

Roughly the first 20 years of my working life I spent almost entirely as a reporter for newspapers and magazines. The last six or seven years of it I have…

Adam Hochschild

Opinion

‘Monstrous Passions at the Core of the Human Soul…’

A journalist adroitly chronicles the catastrophes that were Mobutu’s Congo.

Opinion

Telling Stories on Radio, Just to Tell Them

‘Nearly all the stories are memorable, from the mundane to the miraculous.’

Journalist’s Trade

The Immersion Experience In Historical Narrative

In terms of the narrative style, as a reporter and as a writer, your job is to immerse yourself in this world and then immerse your reader in it through…

Opinion

Women Journalists Spurred Coverage of Children and Families

‘…I no longer had to approach my work as though I didn’t have children.’

Opinion

Spring 2002: Words & Reflections Introduction

“What does ‘good work’ in journalism look like?” This question is at the heart of a book written by three distinguished psychologists who set out to examine, through The Project…

Opinion

Spring 2002: Women and Journalism Introduction

In her 2010 Niemen Reports essay, the late pioneering journalist Kay Mills observed that “in 2009, women were 34.8 per cent of newsroom supervisors and 37 percent of newsroom employees,…

From the Curator

Threats to Press Freedom in Russia

At a first-of-its-kind conference in Moscow, problems are exposed.

Opinion

‘The Girls in the Van’

What happened when a lot of women journalists reported on Hillary Clinton’s campaign?

Opinion

A Pioneering Generation Marked the Path For Women Journalists

Today, women’s roles and numbers have increased but some key issues remain unresolved.

Christy C. Bulkeley

Opinion

The Value of Women Journalists

A journalist urges others to use their reporting skills to document gender discrepancies in their newsrooms.

Opinion

Salt Lake City, Utah, 1975

My friend D. reports that when the Vietnam War was winding down, his young son told him that he wanted to celebrate on the day the war ended. “How?” D.…

Opinion

Bicoastal

In the mid-80’s, I worked at an underground food co-op in Washington, D.C. One night when I was bagging raisins, I noticed that a woman was staring at me. Finally,…

Opinion

Examining the Vanishing Standards in Reporting

‘Now one source, however flimsy, was okay.’

Robert Sherrill

Opinion

Dangers Lie Beneath the Promise of the Internet

By using Web technology to tailor the news a user receives, does democracy suffer?

Opinion

What Does ‘Good Work’ in Journalism Look Like?

‘Simply put, what is the face in the journalistic mirror that the best practitioners want to see in the morning?’

Opinion

Redefining the ‘Private Lives’ of Public Officials

Women journalists have played a major role in this changing coverage.

Florence George Graves

Opinion

Women Journalists See Progress, But Not Nearly Enough

‘The shortage of women editors reverberates through the ranks.’

Nieman Notes

A Nieman Year During Difficult Times

A Jordanian journalist learns to listen and reflects on what he does and why.

Opinion

Bias Among the Media

Journalists share more liberal perspectives, but do those views impact their news coverage?

Opinion

An Internet News Service Reports News and Views of Women

For Women’s Enews, the challenge is to be able to finance the telling of these stories.

Rita Henley Jensen