You could argue that a writer has no business critiquing the work of one of his closest friends. Knowing the person behind the words influences the reading experience, making it impossible to approach the writing with fresh eyes. Yet proximity … Read more
We may as well begin the way Gary Smith begins – with a question, and near the end. Why is it that when you finish reading “Lying in Wait,” Smith’s 2002 profile of coach George O’Leary, you feel the … Read more
Two AP reporters and an editor on three continents produced the story that we’ve chosen as our latest Notable Narrative. Kristen Gelineau (Sydney), Ravi Nessman (Delhi), and Mary Rajkumar (Miami; she’s the AP’s international enterprise editor) … Read more
A 5-year-old boy and his older brother, who live in a slum of India, board a train to go beg in a nearby city. The boy wakes up and his brother is gone, and the train has taken him nearly a … Read more
I often tell students, both undergraduate and graduate, that beautiful stories are everywhere. You can head off to Iraq and Afghanistan and pen a riveting war epic, but you can also discover scintillating stories much closer to home – … Read more
In Part 1 of our coverage of this year’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, Kiera Feldman, a This Land correspondent, rounded up tips on documents and data, the latest in web research, source relationships, and other … Read more
At last month’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, in Boston, hundreds of reporters attended dozens of sessions on everything from analyzing unstructured data to working with the coolest web tools and building a digital newsroom. The conference, which started in the 1970s, … Read more
When the Winter 2005 issue of The Oxford American arrived, I flipped through the pages, glimpsed the reptilian close-ups accompanying Wendy Brenner’s profile of Dean Ripa, creator and caretaker of the Cape Fear Serpentarium, and shoved the magazine out of … Read more
We’ll be talking to Michael Mooney again soon about a small body of his recent long-form journalism, but today we give our attention to “When Lois Pearson Started Fighting Back,” our latest Notable Narrative. We chose the … Read more