Reading Narrative Journalism (2024)

For much of my time in universities, I taught standard literary-history courses—mostly American literature from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. But a funny thing happened when I started teaching narrative journalism: I learned that students in my classes would often investigate, online, what had eventually happened to… Read More

It’s a cliché that failure is often the best teacher. But that goes for journalism, too – that is, nothing so clearly clarifies the rules of narrative journalism so much as rule-breaking can. By “rule breaking,” though, I mean two very different things. First, there are those… Read More

Students have often asked me: what’s the best way to see narrative journalists “putting it all together?”— that is, how do leading reporters move from (1) getting a story idea, to (2) deciding on the legwork they need to do, to (3) actually writing a story? In… Read More