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

Searching around the web, it’s easy enough to locate very fine samples of syllabi focusing on the teaching of literary or narrative journalism. The IALJS has a terrific list of its own, and there are other excellent samples you can find, e.g. from Josh Roiland (annotated on the… Read More

A Teaching Thought:  I’ve often wondered why there isn’t more frequent “currency” between visual studies (particularly art history and photography) and the study of narrative journalism. Aside from the obvious synergy with documentary photography in Jacob Riis’ or James Agee’s work, or the example of Joan Didion’s… Read More