In July 2011, Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) wrote a haunting story about the “disappearance” and death of a woman named Kathryn Norris. He did it partly by dumpster-diving for personal details … Read more
The best stories – even the written ones – have audio. Maybe it’s a sensibility: voice or style, which Ben Yagoda explores in his craft book The Sound on the Page. Maybe it’s a structural/pacing device (think of the … Read more
Nora Ephron was a writer of many gifts. She was fearless. She was blunt. She was dazzlingly perceptive. She was writing at the right time. Her connections were fascinating. She could turn coincidence and happenstance into substantial proof that … Read more
Jon Franklin’s “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” which in 1979 won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, ran 33 years ago but never loses its power to captivate or instruct. Franklin followed a brain surgeon through a tense operation … Read more
Five from the field: 1. Rachel McAthy’s recent roundup of eight long-form digital projects included sites you probably already know about, like The Atavist, Byliner and Longreads, but also Matter, which recently met its … Read more
Around the turn of the millennium, big changes swept Hollywood. Suddenly and as never before, screens were clotted with the teen-fodder likes of Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Titanic and Dawson’s Creek. Where other journalists saw the business … Read more
We’ve chosen Jeneen Interlandi’s recent New York Times magazine cover story about her father’s mental illness as our latest Notable Narrative. “When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind” follows a sobering episode in the bipolar history … Read more
Our latest Notable Narrative, “When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind,” is Jeneen Interlandi’s New York Times magazine story about an episode in her father’s debilitating bipolar disorder, and about deficiencies in the mental health system set … Read more
Politics should, in theory, be the subject of some of the most compelling narrative journalism. There’s built-in drama! There are winners and losers! The stakes are high! That’s why it’s so depressing that most politics stories, even those of the … Read more
Whenever I go out on an assignment I get a few of the same questions from onlookers who see me with my tripod and my reasonably large video camera: “What channel are you from?” or “When will this air?” But … Read more