From Rachel Carson's writing on pesticides to documentary filmmakers focusing on climate change and fracking, covering what Rob Nixon calls "slow violence" environmental stories has always been challenging. Writing on Nieman Storyboard, Nixon reviews recent efforts to meet that challenge. "Fast is faster than it used to be and story units have become ever shorter," Nixon writes. "So to render slow violence visible requires, among other things, redefining speed."
Tricks of the trade
Advice from biographers of Ayn Rand, Clarence Darrow, and Mickey Mantle on what happens when it's time to write. Mantle biographer Jane Leavy tells how she realized after stalking superstar running back Earl Campbell that the real story lay in how he reacted to her. John Aloysius Farrell discusses what he left out of his Darrow book. Anne Heller talks about how Rand's mystery drove her reporting.
"Style matters," Ben Yagoda writes in "The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing." This post from Chip Scanlan at the Poynter Institute excerpts some practical advice for writers trying to develop their voices. They range from "Read aloud," to "Copy other writers — literally." From the latter: "Simply copying a passage is a great way — much better than mere reading — of internalizing an author’s sensibility and cadences."
Anyone can post news to Twitter, so distinguishing good information from bad is a huge challenge. Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Craig Silverman (editor of the RegretTheError.com web site), consults a half-dozen practitioners of social media verification and conveys their advice. Some of their suggestions: Examine the poster's history; find independent verification; and make direct contact with the poster.
From PR consultant and NASW member Denise Graveline, a collection of recent posts on the finer points of the media relations craft.
Biographer Robert Caro talks about the importance of place in his Lyndon Johnson biographies. Receiving a lifetime achievement award, Caro said that to understand Johnson's roots in the Texas hill country, he spent the night in those hills alone in a sleeping bag. To see Washington as Johnson did, he studied the Capitol in the brilliant morning sun. "The greatest of books are books with places you can see in your mind’s eye," he said in an excerpt on Nieman Storyboard.
Two new Poynter Institute articles examine Steve Kroft's interview with President Obama about the bin Laden raid, and suggest six questions that can help writers find the focus in their stories. Al Tompkins discusses the three basic types of interview questions: objective, subjective, and "the non-question question," while Tom Huang poses queries like "What’s the glimpse of wisdom we can offer?" and "How would you tell this story to a friend?"
What's Tumblr? It's the latest social media must-have, according to this post from Jojo Malig at the Poynter Institute. More than 160 news media organizations are using the image-heavy blogging platform. So are individual journalists. But what is it good for, and how do you get started using it? This “Tumblr for journalists” slideshow from Matthew Keys has plenty of quick tips.
It wasn't just the stories that won the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting for a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel series, "One in a billion: A boy's life, a medical mystery." Videos, photos, graphics and other online features also impressed judges, Poynter's Al Tompkins writes. Also, at Nieman Storyboard, a review of Pulitzer winners who took a narrative approach, including links to their work.
Henry Gee started off strong — "Write every day" — in the Guardian's Punctuated Equilibrium blog. "I've found that the best writers have been writing all their lives ... Writing simply bursts out of them — they can't help it." Never mind that rule 7 was, "There is no rule 7," his goal was to inspire entrants in a new British science writing prize from The Wellcome Trust.