Jim Morris was four decades into a successful investigative journalism career spotlighting environmental and labor issues. His storytelling — in newspapers, magazines and broadcast — was intimate and girded with data. He had more than 80 awards to his name, including the George Polk, the Sidney Hillman and two Edward R. Murrows. He helped edit a Pulitzer winner.

But he was feeling restless.

He began to think about starting a nonprofit news operation, one that focused exclusively on weaknesses and injustices in the nation’s public health infrastructure, exposing inequities and highlighting solutions. He met with advisors and was in discussions with a major university about his idea when the pandemic struck.

Morris worked as a senior reporter, project manager, managing and, in 2019, acting executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, the D.C. based non-profit started by former “60 Minutes” producer Charles Lewis. The organization’s mission was to “expos[e] abuses of power by government and corporate interests.” As part of that, in 2010 Morris built a team to cover environmental issues and workers’ rights. It soon became a self-sustaining, Pulitzer-winning unit known for its investigations into toxic air pollution, unsafe workplaces and industry influence on science.

Former CPI reporter, Kristen Lombardi, who worked closely with Morris, described his “knack” for finding stories that fit the mission, and filled a vacuum in labor reporting. Morris’s abiding concern for social justice, especially for workers, she said, is because “they’re forgotten as a population,” yet suffer harms “in so many different ways, at so many different levels.”

Part poet, part guardian, Morris’ stories turned statistics into people, as he did with a 2017 profile of Jim Spencer, a Nebraska plumber who died in a trench cave-in at a construction site. The 4,900-word story demonstrated the broad social costs of preventable tragedies:

When a worker dies of traumatic injury, gloom spreads like a webbed crack on an ice-covered pond, reaching far beyond the immediate family to touch former colleagues, lifelong friends and – in Jim Spencer’s case – waitresses, convenience-store clerks and other strangers he routinely engaged in conversation in this western Nebraska railroad town of 9,000 people.

But if conveying humanity is the means for Morris, accountability is the end. When “Carbon Wars,” which Morris led and edited, won the 2017 Society of Environmental Journalists’ prize for explanatory reporting, judges praised the series for “gripping… storytelling throughout,” calling it “an alluring mix of analytical and deeply human; reporters push[ed] the conversation forward, offering new thoroughly reported examples of regulatory weaknesses and cases of damaging pollution.”

The story about Spencer, the Nebraska plumber, spurred a change in state law, and gave families of accident victims access to law enforcement information they’d been denied. Another project that Morris edited, “Breathless and Burdened,” exposed how miners with black lung disease were denied benefits; it won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting and led to significant policy changes within the Department of Labor.

Yet Morris sensed his vision and CPI’s were beginning to diverge. “I wanted to keep doing in-depth public health journalism and felt I was ready to run my own organization,” he told Nieman Storyboard.

Despite setbacks brought on by COVID, Morris forged ahead. Public Health Watch went live in August 2021 with a promise to “inform, inspire and, when necessary, enrage, leading to impact in its many forms.” The site’s longform print and radio stories emphasize accountability, expose injustices, and aim to “press elected officials, regulators and corporate executives to explain why [for example] people who live within a few miles of an oil refinery or a petrochemical plant — most often, people of color — are still forced to breathe poisons known to cause cancer and other maladies.”

Morris told Storyboard about the why and how of his late-career pivot.

What was your biggest challenge in making the leap from a known news organization to a start-up?
Starting a nonprofit news site during a pandemic might seem ill-advised, and it certainly presented challenges. No face-to-face meetings with prospective funders, and people’s personal lives in varying degrees of upheaval. Fortunately, I didn’t listen. Given that the topic would be public health, I felt it was exactly the right time to launch.

Oddly, it worked in our favor. If people didn’t understand how important public health was before COVID-19 appeared, they certainly did after. Our message was that America’s public health infrastructure was in bad shape before the pandemic took off two years ago, and then got even worse. We reminded people that non-communicable diseases such as cancer and diabetes are responsible for seven in 10 deaths in this country. That will still be the case when the current crisis fades. The message seemed to sink in. We got our first significant foundation grant in the fall of 2020. I saw this as an endorsement of the idea. Other grants followed in the winter and spring of 2021, and I made the decision to launch.

What surprised you most, and what have you learned from it?
I was pleasantly surprised that eight foundations and several individuals were willing to take a chance on a journalism start-up at an extremely fraught time. I was also gratified by the high-quality writers, editors and advisory board members we were able to attract.

Who or what helped you most during the transition?
Our outstanding advisory board — a mix of journalists, academics and public health professionals — and our enthusiastic team of contributing editors and writers, only one of whom I knew well when we started out.

I leaned heavily on people like Chuck Lewis, founder of CPI., for whom I never worked but with whom I became friends, and Mike Kanin, then publisher of the Texas Observer. Its parent, the Texas Democracy Foundation, became the fiscal sponsor of Public Health Watch. I talked to other leaders of news nonprofits as well as  foundation officials and journalists with whom I’d collaborated over the years. Most were encouraging.

And, frankly, basing Public Health Watch in my home state of Texas, which ranks at or near the bottom among the states by almost every public health measure. The need here is acute for investigative reporting on topics such as environmental health, occupational health and safety, and women’s and children’s health.

What elements of your journalistic craft/values have you been able to hold onto, and which did you find you could let go of?
Public Health Watch is a product of my 44 years in journalism. Its mission aligns with my belief that journalism should be original, compelling and fact-based. I’ve always been attracted to complicated stories that many other journalists won’t touch because of the time commitment and storytelling challenges involved. Those are the kinds of stories we’ve done, and will keep doing, at Public Health Watch. Sometimes it can be hard to resist jumping onto the breaking-news bandwagon, but my feeling is that there’s plenty of excellent daily health coverage. We need to go in a different direction.

What are your priorities going forward?
As we begin our first full year of operation, my goal is to keep expanding our already-strong network of media and university collaborators and raise enough money to make Public Health Watch sustainable for the long haul. We’re off to a good start, having just received funding from a ninth foundation and started discussions with several more. We also hope to grow our individual giving. We have some great projects in the works this year, including a collaboration with more than a dozen outlets from around the country that will enable us to share content and amplify a health-access issue that badly needs more attention.

Some of our biggest and most complex stories have yet to come out — they should be published over the next month or so — but this piece, about a chronic air polluter in a low-income Texas community, is a good example of what we aspire to: A strong narrative backed by data, with an accountability angle.

There’s plenty of good journalism in this country on our imperfect health care system and on the pandemic. Public Health Watch fills a particular void: Deep coverage of subjects such as environmental and workplace hazards. Public health is about preventing illness and injury, as opposed to treating people who are sick or hurt.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Public Health Watch wants to reach as wide an audience as possible. You can send news tips or questions at tips@publichealthwatch.org or info@publichealthwatch.org. Follow their work and comment on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and sign up now for their newsletter.”

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Julia Shipley is a freelance writer and a TYPE Investigative Fellow. As a  former Columbia Journalism Investigations Fellow, she was on a team that covered the rise in worker deaths due to heat, which was published in partnership with National Public Radio , Texas Newsroom, California Newsroom and Public Health Watch.

The post A successful investigative career and a vision led Jim Morris to take a risk appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Isabelle Roughol has not gone quietly into this global pandemic. Quite the opposite. Each week she produces an episode of her podcast Borderline from her current home in London. Recent episodes include an interview with Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis on his nerve-hitting essay in Rolling Stone about the battered American image; a conversation with a Seattle-ite mom leaving the United States to provide a better life for her children; and a discussion about uncrossable borders with an Australian ex-pat prohibited by stringent quarantine laws from returning to say goodbye to her dying father.

With so much of the planet grievously impacted by COVID-19, if there was ever a perfect time to launch a transnational media project serving a worldwide community, or as Roughol sometimes calls them: “defiant global citizens,” maybe it's now.

However, as 2020 dawned, Borderline wasn’t even in Roughol’s imagination, much less in the works. She had recently left her high-level management job at LinkedIn, where she had worked for seven years. “I had zero idea what I’d do next,” she said in an email.

A French citizen, Roughol came to the U.S. as a high school exchange student in New Jersey. She returned to earn a journalism degree from the University of Missouri, where she embarked on her “mostly anglophone” career. After a stint at the daily Missourian, which is the j-school’s teaching newsroom, she became a reporter for the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and then scored a temp contract as a foreign desk editor for Le Figaro in Paris. When that expired, she freelanced her way into a job at LinkedIn just as the company was beginning to build its editorial team in 2012. Roughol helped the company grow from four to 70 editors. Promoted to lead LinkedIn’s international development, she moved Sydney, Australia, and later to London, eventually becoming the right hand to the editor-in-chief.

But by late 2019, she was ready for a new opportunity. While she was casting about, COVID exploded and the world went into lockdown. Or, as she’s put it, “the world went nuts.”

What to do? Maybe, as the wisdom goes, draw on what you know. Roughol combined her entrepreneurial mindset with her journalistic values to develop a podcast for and about global citizens. Her episodes tackle issues of global identity through geopolitics, as well as intimate issues pertaining to home, belonging and identity. “If you leave home to get home,” Roughol says in the trailer for her first episode which launched this past June, “Borderline is for you.”

To make it viable, Roughol serves as the entire staff of Borderline for now. She’s host, sound editor, distributor, and, happily, interviewer. The latter, especially, gives her a chance to draw on her journalistic training, which she’d been missing. To supplement her non-income, she’s also a consultant, offering courses on media strategy and newsroom leadership. As she wryly noted: “I believe they call it a portfolio career.”

A sure thing? Time will tell. But having found her niche as a journalist serving border-straddlers like herself, she’s relieved to have found “a sense of direction at last.”

We asked her what brought her to this juncture, and what lessons she’s carried with her.

What was the biggest challenge you faced during the disruption to your career?
Ha, which one? I’ve likened my career to constantly running ahead of a tsunami. (I realize Chris Jones talked about "outrunning collapsing ground” in a previous Pivot interview. There’s a pattern here.) I graduated from journalism school into the global financial crisis and the collapse of newspapers, and then I went into what I thought would be an innocuous sabbatical weeks before the pandemic. Every newsroom where I’ve worked has had layoffs or been shut down since.

At LinkedIn, I had found high ground. I learned, I was challenged, the people were incredible… and it was safe from the tumult. It took me the better part of two years to accept it was time to go. There was no rational justification for going back onto low ground, except that I didn’t want to be safely doing the same thing forever. I never did. That’s what I love about journalism; it lets you enter infinite worlds.

The hardest part is accepting not just that the world is changing, but that you are. I had to allow myself to no longer want the things I’d worked so hard for. It was the case for every pivot I’ve made, and never more than the most recent one. It humbled me. But once you gain that clarity, everything else comes much easier. In my experience at least, the interior journey is more of a challenge than any external obstacle.

What has surprised you most, and what have you learned from it?
Perhaps what I’m doing right now. I’d listened to podcasts for 15 years, but I never put much thought into starting my own. I didn’t leave my job to be one of those solo newsletter/podcast operations you keep hearing about. I just wanted a rest. I think I was properly burned out. I had no idea what came next. Maybe eventually write a book, and return to a real job when my savings ran out. I wanted nothing and I didn’t think I had a creative idea left. Then one morning, the idea came and with it the energy to pursue it.

When I work on Borderline, time disappears. I skip dinner and only stop when sleep wins. If you told me in April I’d feel this way in October, I wouldn’t have believed you. I learned that the dark patches do end, but there is no shortcut through them. It softened me in a good way. In my 20s, I didn’t have a minute for people who weren’t striving. Now I know life is long... Pardon the accumulation of clichés. I only say this because I know it would have helped me to hear it.

What elements of your journalistic craft/values have you been able to hold onto, and which did you find you could let go of?
This pivot is a return to my roots in many ways. I’m reporting, interviewing, writing and editing more than I had in ages. I was rusty at first, but I reconnected with the joy of it. I’m also learning a whole new layer of craft in audio as a solo producer.

I was always a bit militant about defining my role at LinkedIn as that of a journalist; our industry can be pretty close-minded about who gets that label. But in recent years, I had spent a lot more time on strategy and hiring than producing. I’m super grateful to that experience for all the skills you hardly get in typical journalism jobs — leading people, building products, running a business. I use those muscles every day on Borderline, which I approach as both a storyteller and an entrepreneur. I refuse to choose between art and business.

Who or what helped you most during the transition?
It’s always people. Too many to thank. I tend to make decisions on guts, but I like data to back me up. I had back-to-back Zoom calls long before that was a thing. I learned that what I was feeling was far more common than I knew. I’m especially grateful to women who helped relieve me of the feminist guilt that comes with leaving a fast-track corporate career. Many who’d pivoted before said it was the best thing they’d ever done. Now I can say the same to the next girl who comes knocking.

My editor-in-chief, Dan Roth, was an unwavering sponsor during my time at the company and even when I chose to leave. We had very open conversations. He was a once-in-a-lifetime boss and the main reason I stayed as long as I did.

Now in the podcasting world, it’s the same. I find people to be very generous with their advice and experience. That’s how I like to work — collaboration over competition, always. There are enough people tearing journalists down from the outside. We can’t do it to one another. If you want to launch your own version, come in, the water’s warm. Reach out for help.

What plans or priorities do you have going forward?
I’m all in on growing Borderline. I’m clear-eyed about the reality of making a living from a solo media enterprise; I think there are going to be a lot of sore heads in the so-called “creator economy” in a few months. My choices now are subsidized by years as a workaholic in the tech industry, and that’s a privilege. It can’t last forever unless I make Borderline a viable business.

Consulting will likely always be a part of the equation, but I also resent it taking me away from what I’m creating. It’s a hard balance most small businesses will know. It’s hard to see more than a couple months ahead this year, but I’m at peace with that. I have a to-do list worth several months of work on my desk right now. As long as it makes me feel as good as I do now, I’ll keep at it.

***

Julia Shipley is a freelance writer and frequent Storyboard contributor.

The post How a top LinkedIn journalist quit with no what’s-next ideas, then woke up to a big one appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

It wasn’t that long ago that Anne Christnovich vowed never to take another job in journalism. It was the spring of 2018. She was the managing editor of the Standard-Examiner in Ogden, Utah — a position she’d been recruited for at the tender age of 26.

She’d begun her career as a crime reporter for a small newspaper in South Carolina, an outlet with high staff turnover and frequent furloughs. After two years there, she was offered a job as a digital producer at the Elkhart Truth in Indiana, so packed her ancient Buick Century and moved 900 miles northeast to begin working at a 125-year-old family-owned newspaper. Within two years, Christnovich had risen to the position of assistant manager editor. All good — until the paper was sold to Paxton Media Group, a privately owned newspaper conglomerate with a recent history of making deep cuts to keep papers alive. Anticipating layoffs, Christnovich accepted a job offer from the Standard-Examiner in Ogden, Utah.

But endings are also beginnings, right? That was the mindset as Christnovich loaded her new Honda Accord —the Oldsmobile had literally fallen apart — and headed some 1,500 miles west for Ogden, where she led a newsroom of 25-30 people and spearheaded ambitious enterprise projects. Following the Parkland shootings, she helped guide a series examining the state’s firearms laws. Next she led a project investigating Utah inmate deaths which resulted in corrective legislation.

Then in May of 2018, the Standard-Examiner was sold and she was laid off.

Christnovich found herself buffeted by industry winds that showed no signs of abating. “Disruption has been kind of constant throughout my career,” she said. The loss of the Utah job felt like one heartbreak too many: “No matter how hard I tried to convince myself that I wanted to keep working in journalism, I knew instinctively that my heart wasn’t in it anymore.”

Then a friend and former journalist offered Christnovich a communications job at the Sightline Institute — an environmental think tank in Seattle, Washington. She sold the Honda and called her parents for some transportation back-up. They loaded some boxes, the dog and the three-legged cat in the family car, and drove 800 miles to the Pacific Northwest. Once in Seattle, Christnovich spent the remainder of her savings to secure a 580-square-foot studio apartment and began her first non-journalism job.

Having leapfrogged the continent, and settled into her fourth locale in seven years, Christnovich said she was determined to leave her newspaper career and dreams behind, “forcing myself to shed ‘journalist’ as the most prominent and important part of my identity.”

But as it turned out, that wasn’t the end of the story. We’ll let her tell the rest about where is now and what she learned along the way.

What surprised you the most during your multiple pivots?
That I failed.

Let me set that up a little bit: While I worked at Sightline, I wrote newsletters, edited some copy, did some social media and PR-type work and generally found that all my journalism skills transferred pretty well. Plus, it provided good benefits, great causes to work for, a fantastic work-life balance, and I liked and respected my coworkers. It was also about 1,000% less stress and responsibility than managing a newsroom.

There was life after journalism. And it was good. But adjusting to a slower pace was rough. I felt like a feral cat being brought in out of the wild. I was used to reporters bantering, loud phone conversations with readers, vending machine lunches, late nights, cussing, stale coffee and a nonstop competitive environment. My new office was quiet, polite, routine, health-conscious and generally calm. A big pendulum swing for me.

Then, out of the blue, a recruiter messaged me on LinkedIn about an audience engagement job in the newsroom at Crosscut, a nonprofit, member-supported local news site that’s part of Cascade Public Media. It was about 10 days between getting that call and getting an offer. It surprised me how quickly I had another change of heart. I leapt at the chance.

So I failed to shed the journalist identity, but I will say it’s a much smaller part of me now, and everything feels different this time around. I care just as deeply about the work, but it’s less of who I am. Jumping tracks out of the business for a while let me experience a version of a healthy, normal, everyday job for the first time in my life and it helped me bring boundaries and perspective to my new newsroom role. I try not to ever put the job above my well-being and I don’t let taking time off or acknowledging the occasional need to step away be a source of guilt. The work is incredibly important, but in the scope of life, it’s still just a job.

What elements of your journalistic craft and values have you held onto, and which did you find you could let go of?
I’ve held onto my reverence for the craft and the power of storytelling. I still think this job is one of the most interesting — and important — a person can have. I love the newsroom environment and the critical thinking challenges that come with it. And I just generally like being around other journalists — they’re witty, smart, interesting, strong people.

I’ve let go of my defensiveness for the industry and I try to avoid the ego that often comes with working in a newsroom. I’m more willing to interrogate the industry traditions and I’m better able to listen when our “standard practices” get challenged or criticized. A great example: I was in the process of interviewing for Crosscut about the time Northwestern’s student newspaper decided to apologize to racial justice demonstrators about an aspect of coverage. I respected many of the arguments flying around, but I was horrified by the number of utterly dismissive journalists who didn’t seem to think twice about accusing students of betraying some pretty antiquated rules. It’s a screaming double-standard to apply so much scrutiny to other powerful institutions, but not to frequently and aggressively question our own.

Who or what helped you most during the transition?
Being outdoors, away from my computer and deleting social media apps from my phone for a while helped a lot. When I worked outside of journalism for those 18 months, I tried to walk to and from work as often as I possibly could, two miles each way and, because it’s Seattle, uphill both directions. I worked on moving slowly, just to break that newspaper lifestyle of go-go-go from one edition to the next.

I also had a great network of journos and former journos I could talk to about making the leap out of the newsroom, and then leaping back in. It took me outside my comfort zone to talk about my doubts, my exhaustion and my heartbreak, but I thankfully found comfort or company in the people I turned to.

Leaving the industry used to mean you could never go back, but I think that’s changing. And now that I’ve done it, I would encourage others who are feeling burned out or lost to consider it. (My support network gave that advice, and they weren’t wrong!) I learned an enormous amount at the think tank and I got to look at the news from the other side, which was insightful. I feel like I’m a better journalist now.

What plans or priorities do you have going forward?
I’d like to do what I can to improve the industry and make it a better place for young and future journalists. The media landscape overall has a problem with racism, representation, pay, gender discrimination — ugh. It’s a long list. But what journalists do is so dang important and so essential to society, we can’t keep neglecting the responsibility to improve representation and equality. I feel pretty lucky to work at a nonprofit newsroom these days because I think it’s generally a better business model than what so many news organizations are working with, and we have the space to set good examples.

Julia Shipley is a freelance writer and frequent Storyboard contributor.

The post How the road led out of and back into journalism appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The Pivot: A brief prelude

On an early afternoon in early March in Upper Manhattan, a dozen graduate students in Columbia Journalism School’s Arts and Culture seminar gathered their notebooks and coffee mugs as class wrapped up for the week. Some lingered in the hallway to chat while others bolted for the elevator. Unknown to any at the time, it was the last time they’d ever share a classroom, likely the last time they’d all be physically together, and perhaps the last time many of them would ever meet each other in person. None realized they needed to say their goodbyes.

A few days earlier, on March 1, New York had reported its first case of Covid-19. But by month's end, the city’s hospitals were overrun as the region swiftly became the epicenter of the nation’s pandemic. Columbia, like more and more places around the country and world, had emptied out — its approximately 31,000 students gone. When graduation rolled around in May, students in the J-school’s MS and MA programs logged onto their Zoom-mencement from six continents and several times zones.

I was one of them. I was already a few years into a journalism career that had been challenged by constant waves of  industry upheaval — but that I refused to give up on. Now I walked out of Columbia into yet another uptick in professional chaos and downturn in professional certainty.

I'm not wandering alone in this unmapped territory. Digital shifts, contracted or closed newsrooms, shrunken freelance budgets, COVID lockdowns, political assaults on the press — they force all in this profession to be poised at any moment to pivot.

That led me to propose an occasional series to Storyboard, interviewing journalists of all platforms, ages and positions about where they landed after their career plans were derailed, and what they learned along the way. If there's someone's journey you're particularly interested in, let us know.

Chris Jones: Outrunning collapsing ground to keep the dream

[dc]C[/dc]hris Jones was Esquire’s youngest “writer at large,” when he won two National Magazine Awards for best feature: In 2006 for “Home,” a 6,700-word feature about stranded astronauts; and again in 2009  for “The Things That Carried Him,” a haunting 17,000-word piece following the escort of a fallen American soldier as he brought home from war.

[caption id="attachment_158572" align="alignright" width="400"] Chris Jones[/caption]

Jones, known in the Twitterverse as @EnswellJones, chronicled his own journey from newspapers to near desperation to the big leagues of Esquire in a series of tweets he posted last month because, as he said in the micro-narrative, “It makes me happy.” (Spoiler: gumption, luck, a really nice janitor, and two boxes of donuts — Krispy Kremes — in that order.) Yet despite a pair of  Ellies and a position many writers covet, a decade later Jones was out of a job — one of the many star bylines left Esquire when their revered editor, David Granger, was let go. This time, instead of beating the pavement with pastries, he considered applying for work at a hardware store. A seasoned handyman, Jones loves manual labor because, at the end of the day, “you can stand back and say ‘I did that.’”

But now, after the debut of the Netflix original series “Away,”  Jones can sit back and say, “I wrote that.” Or at least part of that.

The series. which aired Sept. 4,  is loosely based on Jones’ last Esquire story, also called "Away." It anticipates the struggles and discomforts U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly likely would face during his unprecedented year-long solo voyage in space —  the longest single stretch an American astronaut had spent in space. In addition to the physical toll — feet softening, blood loss, lack of sleep — Jones probed what's known about the psychological strain of being beyond the reach and experience of loved ones.

The Netflix series it inspired stars Hilary Swank. Reviews since its release range from applauding it for moments of magic, to promoting it as a refreshing distraction from current real-world problems, to hailing it as a return of  the soaps and panning its emotional predictablility. You can make your own judgment, but what "Away" does do is celebrate human achievement, and the sacrifices they sometimes demand.

Until recently, the closest Jones had ever come to Hollywood was through his sensitive and unflinching profile of film critic Roger Ebert as Ebert, a passionate cook and foodie, he adjusted to life after a series of cancers that took out much of his jaw and mouth, including his ability to eat and taste solid food. That piece is anthologized in Walt Harrington and Mike Sager’s book "Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists."  However, those in search of the best of Jones’ “aftermath” journalism should also to check out “The End of Mystery,” about reaping answers and meaning from helicopter crash debris, and “The Nation’s Leading Expert in Picking Up the Pieces,” which is a profile, an explainer, a museum of recent American tragedy from a (human but rational) distance, and weirdly, a treatise about hope — and which makes it the perfect prelude to our interview with Jones, which introduces our new occasional series, "The Pivot."

[dc small]W[/dc]hat was the biggest challenge for you when you encountered the disruption?
Ha, well, you mean other than the disruption itself? Change is hard—it’s emotionally hard. I experienced a lot of so-called “change agents” in short order. I left Esquire in April 2016 after working there for 14 years. (Long story short: Our editor-in-chief (David Granger) got fired, and we all quit.) Three months later, my marriage ended. So two of my life’s anchors were yanked out of the seabed. I was totally adrift.

I don’t know how to describe that time, exactly. I was not at my mental best. It was scary, of course. Sometimes I behaved like a wounded animal. Sometimes I was excited about the possibilities. It wasn’t any one thing. Having both of those calamities happen at once was unexpectedly beneficial, looking back. Change is risky, so it can be hard to make the corrections you have to make, even if you know you need to make them, because you don’t want to gamble the ground you’ve conquered over the years. But suddenly I had nothing to lose. Other than my kids, everything was gone. Forget the ship analogy. It was more like rebuilding after a fire.

Magazine jobs like mine don’t really exist anymore, not the way I want to do them, at least. I like to write and read on paper. I thought for a while about getting a job at Home Depot — that’s not a joke — but truthfully, I needed to find another way to write. Luckily, one of my last Esquire stories, “Away,” about living for a long time in space, had been optioned for TV. It was the thinnest lifeline. Most writers will tell you that their options never amount to much. They’re a little gravy money, a nice thing to think about.

But “Away,” the show, actually became a show, right when I needed it most. (The first season went up on Netflix Sept. 4.) I can’t claim I have much to do with that; I just paced around my tiny post-breakup house and waited for my phone to ring, hoping for good news. A TV show is made by hundreds of people, and I am just one of its many writers. Of everyone involved, however, I could make the argument that it means the most to me. I don’t want to sound like a weirdo, but the timing sometimes feels almost divine to me.

What has surprised you the most?
I guess I’m surprised by how much I enjoy screenwriting. It’s pretty different from magazine writing, which I loved. At Esquire, my editor, Peter Griffin, and I wrote stories together, and they were ours. My name was on them, and together we were responsible for every word in them. TV writing isn’t like that. It’s much more collaborative, a team sport. Eight of us sat in a room together and mapped out the show, and then we broke off and each wrote episodes, which were then polished by our showrunners, Jessica Goldberg and Andrew Hinderaker. So my name is on one of our episodes — the eighth episode lists me as the writer — but I didn’t write every word of it. And some of my ideas show up in other episodes, but no one will ever know they’re mine.

I’m okay with that. I’m surprised by how easily I let go of the idea of ownership. I think the summer of 2016 forced me to let go of a lot of things. I’m just so happy to go to work with people I like, and we get to try to make something hopeful and beautiful together.

I also have to say — I had all sorts of preconceived notions of “Hollywood,” and none of them have proved true. I mean, they might one day, but my experience so far has been only lovely.

What elements of your journalistic craft and values have you been able to hold on to, and which did you find you could let go of?

[caption id="attachment_158587" align="alignleft" width="550"] Hilary Swank plays Commander Emma Green, who leads an international crew on the first manned mission to Mars in the Netflix series "Away"[/caption]

In a lot of ways, storytelling is storytelling. The same things matter, whether you’re writing a true magazine story or a fictional television script: You need compelling people to do something interesting, and you need to tell their story in a way that’s entertaining and, hopefully, moving to the audience of strangers who are reading or watching. Structure, pace, restraint — all of those things still count. Writing for as long as I have, I’d say that I’ve developed an ear for language that’s maybe even more important now that the words I’m writing are spoken out loud by actors. (I’ll tell you what: That first day on set, watching Hilary Swank delivering lines I wrote… I was in the dark trying not to blow a take with my sobs.)

It took me a while to let go of “the truth.” My work had been governed forever by fact — I took that seriously, and when I was younger I’d make idiotic pronouncements like, “Novelists are just professional liars.” I felt a kind of superiority making my trade in true stories. So while “Away,” the show, is based on true things, it’s a fictional journey, and sometimes I had a hard time pushing my knowledge out of the way in favor of my imagination.

One other craft note: When I did journalism, I’d write in discreet chunks. I’d write my ending first, and then some other scene I wanted to write, and some other scene, and then maybe my top, and then I’d cut and paste and blend it all together. I don’t think that method works as well for me for screenwriting. It’s so important that each scene builds on the last, that every moment has an almost manic propulsion engineered into it; I think screenwriting maybe demands more that you start at the start. I’m still learning, obviously, so I could be wrong, but that’s my sense of it at the moment.

Who or what helped you most during the transition?
I was fortunate that earlier in my career, I’d made another big leap, that time from newspapers to magazines. That was in 2001, 2002. The Internet was rising like a wave, and I just thought: This isn’t going to be good for us. Newspapers lose on speed. Magazines seemed like they’d be more resolute, because they offered a different service to their readers. I was sort of right, or at least I was right for a while. Now TV seems like the safer space to me. In some ways, my career feels like I’m constantly trying to outrun the ground collapsing under my feet. I know how important it is to keep your feet moving.

But the more honest answer: people. I asked people for help, and they helped me. My life now has a much larger collection of saints than it did four years ago. Principal among them is Andrew (Hinderaker). He wrote our pilot, and our relationship began with a four-hour-long phone call — he called and was mining me for facts, for story and character ideas. I learned so much watching him work, reading each draft of his script, asking him why he’d made the choices he’d made. He’s become one of my best friends in the world.

After the show got picked up, I flew to Los Angeles and interviewed with Jessica, Andrew, and Jason Katims, one of our executive producers, for a job in the room. Jessica said that she thought the room would be good for me — just being out in the universe, with other people, rather than home alone. She was totally right. I was given a shot I probably didn’t deserve — not for the first time, incidentally — and loved it. I’m pretty sure I was the oldest person on our writing staff (I’m 46), and I had the least experience screenwriting: zero. It was thrilling to be the mentee for the first time in a while. It was fun looking up again.

What plans or priorities do you have going forward?
I used to be a planner. I had my whole life mapped out. After 2016, I don’t plan anymore. I rarely think more than 20 minutes ahead. That’s not hyperbole. I am the shortest-term thinker I know. I wake up each day and try to make the best of it.

If I dream a little dream, I hope I get to write more TV, maybe see a film script or two produced, made into actual movies. I’m also working on a book about creativity I think will be good; I would enjoy reading it, at least, and I just have to hope I’m not a freak.

I love writing. The form doesn’t really matter to me so long as it involves the written word. I’ve never wondered whether I’m doing the thing I’m supposed to. When you find that object of singular affection, you don’t really think about doing anything else. So what’s to plan? I want to write. Today I’m going to write. Tomorrow I hope I get to write some more. That’s it. That’s the dream.

Julia Shipley is a freelance writer and frequent Storyboard contributor.

The post Introducing “The Pivot,” in which journalists find their way through industry chaos appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When Reuters, the venerable global news agency, hired narrative veteran Kari Howard to be its first Storytelling Editor, she brought three principles to guide reporters in the field:

• Examine closely.
• Connect with people.
• Don’t rush.

To see those principles come to life, we analyzed a single project from a member of Howard’s narrative team. “The Cloudspotters’ Guide to Climate Change,”  by Mari Saito, also provides some insight to the challenges of covering a subject that garners responses that veer from apocalyptic to indifferent. In this case, How do you seduce crisis-fatigued readers into reading yet more sobering news about what is threatened or on the brink of being lost forever?

If you are Saito, working with Howard’s guiding ideas, you might begin with innocence — in this case — a grassy path and a stray lamb.

You invoke pleasing scenery, such as a gothic tower topped with a flag.

And then clarify: You’re visiting a place with “no paved roads, hardly any cars.”

Next, reveal: Lundy Island, 11 miles off the coast of England, was once a pirate hideaway. But assure readers you’re in good company, embedded with a bunch of cloud lovers, steeped in a setting “lifted straight out of a children’s book about a summer adventure in a world without care.”

As a guide to this mysterious world, you might select a woman of the cloth, Reverend Skinner, to be the first person portrayed in your story. Imply that her bearing is cloud-like without being explicit. Describe the way her “sturdy sandals peek… out from underneath her white robes.” Capture the question she floats to those gathered before her: “Majestic or wispy, solid yet ephemeral. Who could conceive of clouds?”

Along the way, you strive to make readers think they, too, have taken a vacation from hard news. But you deliver that news nonetheless.

Here’s a deeper look at how Saito uses her editor's guiding principles to produce a delicate and engaging narrative that still manages to create an indelible impression:

Examine Closely

Saito chronicles a long weekend spent with a small group of Cloud Appreciation Society members. Through gentle pacing we learn that the Society’s founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, intends the Lundy getaway as, “A weekend devoted to not taking for granted something that is around you all the time.” And courtesy of the charming scenery combined with serious science — this is exactly what transpires.

As Saito, a Reuter’s correspondent based in Tokyo, asserts, the act of cloud appreciation is itself expansive, contemplative. It’s a long step away from “TV shows looping through story after story of calamity and division.”

And yet, even as the group settles into a place that apparently escaped the 21st century — the “windswept island” is kept functioning by sometimes overtaxed generator — Saito hints at all there is to lose in an era of human-caused environmental change, an age now referred to as the Anthropocene.

Her spare observation of the sky doubles as a subtle thesis: “Thin feathers of clouds float high above, providing little shelter from the sun.”

Connect with People

At the outset, Saito lets us know the island-bound members of the Cloud Appreciation Society, a 15-year-old organization which boasts a worldwide membership of 47,000, will consider whether the organization should add climate crisis activism to its otherwise simple mission: “To bring people together who love the sky.”

As the Rev. Skinner explains to a newcomer, the current membership is broad, encompassing those with “extraordinary scientific knowledge and others who send in a photo from Australia saying, ‘Look, that’s a dog chasing a rabbit.’”

As the weekend drifts along, Saito introduces us to Carolyn Byrne, a Manhattan divorce attorney, who finds herself reacquainted with the carefree girl she used to be beneath the island’s wide sky. As “the tiny bars of signal on [Byrne’s] iPhone disappear,” Saito captures scenes of Byrne practicing the flute from atop the island’s lighthouse and conveys her experience of cloudspotting as “discovering that feels more like remembering.”

Saito also will introduce us to Taipo Schneider, a climate scientist in a lab halfway around the world at the California Institute of Technology, whose recently published findings based on his studies of stratocumulus clouds inspired dire headlines such as, “Climate change is eliminating clouds. Without them, Earth burns.”

Throughout, Saito’s reporting toggles between the easy beauty of Lundy, where landscape painter Lionel Playford is “mixing watercolor paints on a white enamel palette” in preparation to capture “the character of clouds” and then to the Cal Tech researchers who “posit that the dispersal of the stratocumulus will add some 8 degrees Celsius to the Earth’s temperature.”

In an age where clouds are frequently thought of as vessels for storing computer data, Saito offers refreshing clarification: Clouds are “vast assemblies of miniscule water droplets and ice crystals that cling to dust and are suspended in air.”

In prose that also floats gracefully, she informs us, “Out of the many clouds that help regulate the Earth’s climate, the stratocumulus, those low-lying, grayish-white clouds that are often mistaken for rain clouds, are especially significant. They cover around 20 percent of the tropical ocean, cooling the planet by reflecting sunlight back toward the atmosphere.”

So what hangs in the balance if scientists’ cloud model predictions prove accurate? Saito also speaks to Bjorn Stevens, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and a leading author of the IPCC’s chapter on clouds. He explains, “The biggest effect of clouds is to block sunlight, but as the world warms, we expect to have clouds change in a way that they effectively block less sunlight so the planet warms even more, but how strong this effect is remains uncertain.”

Despite ominous findings, Saito’s story wields a light touch, even as she places the society’s own literature — “Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day by day.” — near the scientists’ findings: “If emissions continue…stratocumulus cease by the end of the century.”

Don’t Rush

Saito’s most evocative passages come at the finale as the Cloud Appreciators prepare to leave and a new posse of visitors arrives.

Here Saito’s reporting allows for details such as the “soft wind ruffling the tops of the long grass and the children playing tag in a field next to the pub.” When Rev. Skinner pronounces, “It’s hard to see something so beautiful and transient disappear,” Saito pushes the expression’s poignancy, adding that it’s unclear “if she means the clouds or something more.”

And whereas Saito could have returned us to the “real world” — concluding with a scientist’s final concern or a cloudspotter’s anxiety for the threatened persistence of clouds amid the place once traversed by Reuter’s news pigeons — instead we’re left with a more nebulous moment: When a newcomer first learns of the group’s name and purpose, his initial reaction is to interrogate: “What constitutes [appreciation?] would you say?”

Saito leaves this unanswered, and thus the possible explanations subtly drift from the society’s purview to those of a reader’s.

The post Look at clouds from all sides now — before they’re gone appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

You no doubt know Reuters, the global financial news giant that is now part of Thomson Reuters. But you might not know that when it launched more than a century ago, it was with the help of a flock of pigeons.

According to Tom Standage, author of “The Victorian Internet” (a book about pioneers of the telegraph), German-born innovator Paul Julius von Reuter was employed to cull stories from European newspapers and translate them into different languages for redistribution. Along the way, he realized certain stories were more valuable than others. Furthermore, as Standage recounts, “businessmen in particular were willing to pay for timely information.” So in the 1840s, Reuter began his own news distribution company, deploying some 40 homing pigeons to expedite the delivery of proprietary information hours before it could arrive by rail. Initially Reuter’s project operated between Aix la Chapelle (called Aachen in Germany) and Brussels, with correspondents posted throughout Europe. In Standage’s telling: After the daily stock markets closed, Reuters representatives copied the latest bond, stock and share prices “onto tissue paper, and placed them in a silken bag” fitted to a pigeon who flew the news to headquarters.

It is precisely details like these — the tissue papers, the silken bags — that Kari Howard, Reuters’ first Storytelling Editor, prizes, especially when they add meaning to the stories she helps shape for the global enterprise team.

To many Storyboard readers, Howard was known as the music-art-and-book loving editor of this site between 2016 and 2018. Others familiar with her long career at The Los Angeles Times may know she served as the assistant foreign editor there until becoming the editor of Great Reads/Column One.

According to journalist Patt Morrison, who introduces “How Far Can a Piano Fly” — a collection of narratives from the column’s first 30 years — Column One was a unique enterprise among newspapers, a foray into literary journalism where “the stylishness of fiction [is] paired with the authenticity of news.” Morrison explains how the column functioned as “a leisurely, considered account,” a respite from the “rat-a-tat-tat” of “who-what-when-where” news stories. Howard shepherded Column One for four years, during which she helped expand the portfolio of narrative journalism, including some Pulitzer Prize-winning work.

(Although Column One was suspended in 2017, during contraction and restructuring at the Times, it was relaunched in January 2019. Read the Storyboard interview with editor Steve Padilla.)

Morrison describes the best Column One stories as “yarn[s] that stay… with you,” created from “storyteller prose with substance at its heart.” That’s also a fitting description for what Howard has been nurturing since joining Reuters in early 2018.

Howard is based at Reuters’ headquarters in London, but she has guided projects with datelines including Borneo, Bangladesh, and Bergen. Her team’s reporting has been tackling unwieldy issues such as climate change, immigration, and Brexit. Yet the narratives always make clear how complex and, in many cases, ongoing challenges affect individual humans — people we feel we recognize and understand by the story’s end. To name a few examples:

• “From terror to triumph—a young Rohingya woman’s journey to the impossible” details the extraordinary and often tragic lengths traveled by 19-year-old Formin Akter to secure her identity card as new college student in Bangladesh.
• “Ocean Shock” is an encyclopedic, around-the-world series of deeply reported dispatches combining data analysis of fishing stocks and rising ocean temperatures with vivid testimonies from lobstermen, sardine fishermen and sea cucumber cultivators, among others, spotlighting the “climate crisis beneath the waves.” In August 2019 this series won the Society of Environmental Journalists highest honor — the Nina Mason Pulliam Award for Outstanding Environmental Reporting.
• “Wish You Weren’t Here: Postcards from the Edge of London in the Age of Brexit” reads like a narrated photo album chronicling the experiences of nine distinct citizens in the town of Dagenham; it serves as a primer on issues underlying England’s quest to leave the European Union.

While so much of the news can be scanned or skimmed, Howard’s infusion of Column One narrative journalism into Reuters reporting, which was built on fast-breaking financial news, has produced a slate of stories that keep readers engaged from start to finish. Recently Storyboard reached out to Howard, who guides stories by three principles: “Examine closely. Connect with people. Don’t rush.”

We asked her about the theory and practice behind her role as Reuters’  storytelling editor.

Why was Reuters keen to add storytelling to their news distribution model?
Global enterprise editor Mike Williams took a leap for Reuters in hiring me. In the past several years, he has established this cool new venture focusing on investigations and long-form explanatory reporting —  hard-hitting enterprise that won Reuters several Pulitzers; in the past six years, it has won Pulitzers three times for international reporting. But my kind of storytelling is quite different, and I’m really excited that he took a chance and hired me to work with reporters on developing this skill. It’s been so gratifying to meet journalists who want to find different ways of telling stories at Reuters.

Can you tell us a little bit about how the editing process works for you? I was privy to some of the early ideas of the Brexit story, for example, but did you bounce ideas off of reporters or other editors to get at its ultimate form?
The Dagenham/Brexit story was a great collaborative effort with Andy MacAskill and Andrew Marshall, or “the two Andies,” as I called them. (I’m a big fan of the movie “Hot Fuzz,” which has two drug cops called Andy, their plural a riff on the drug-producing Andes Mountains.) We knew we wanted to do the story, about a longtime white, working-class neighborhood in East London that has seen huge demographic shifts with immigration, to focus on characters like a nonfiction “East Enders” soap opera.

So Andy and Andrew would keep going back to Dagenham and spending time with the people there, earning their trust. We wanted a good cross-section of today’s Dagenham: the longtime white residents, the early immigrants and the newer ones from Africa and Eastern Europe. The trick was to find the connective tissue that would link the portraits into a community, and also establish the community. Andrew found the catalyst by chance when he happened upon these photos of Lego models of buildings being demolished at the giant Ford plant that had once given Dagenham its identity. Turns out they were made by a young autistic man who would go to the demolition site with his grandfather, who once worked at the plant. That anecdote gave the whole story such heart.

Another great collaboration was working with Mari Saito on “A Cloudspotters’ Guide to Climate Change.” It was quite a complex narrative, weaving the story of a group of quirky cloud lovers on a rugged island off the coast of England with the scary science of clouds in the face of climate change. Pulling that off was a tightrope act, and the result, I think, is a magnificent piece of literary journalism that mixes love and loss, regret and hope. Diana Marcum, the winner of the 2015 feature-writing Pulitzer Prize, put it best in a tweet: “This story is everything: endearing people as real as if you chatted with them, fairytale landscapes, climate change and the joy of life itself. Jaw-dropping display of craft in weaving it together.”

Speaking of Diana, working with Mari reminded me of my collaboration with Diana at the Los Angeles Times on her prize-winning drought series. We would obsess over every word, read sentences aloud over and over to get the rhythm right. She’s an amazing young talent who gives me hope for the future of narrative journalism.

From the backstory of “Ocean Shock," included in the series, we know that Reuters journalist Maurice “Mo” Tamman, who lives on a boat in New York City’s Harbor, began noticing different patterns in which fish were and weren’t being caught. But creating a worldwide story, told in really intimate interesting episodes — how did that work? Did you invite Reuters journalists to submit stories ideas and then green-light the best, or did you corral Mo and Matt and Mari in a Skype call and talk it through?

You’re right — the whole series started with Mo on his boat. And then he spent months on the data that unfurled from that one little moment seeing the fish. I hadn’t even been hired yet. In fact, Mo and I first met at my Maine farmhouse as he was heading up to Deer Isle up in Downeast Maine to report on the lobster business and how its boom seems destined to end in a bust because of climate change.

Once we started talking, we realized this could be a bigger series, with global sweep, but told intimately. Mike Williams brought in Matt Green and Mari Saito, and we were a team: Mo and Matt and Mari and Kari. Usually we were scattered around the world, but occasionally we would have the best hours-long jam sessions at my little flat in London, riffing off new ideas for the stories. Those have been some of the happiest, most satisfying moments of my time at Reuters. And I’ve replicated it with other reporters, having them over for tea and baked treats while we talk about storytelling and story ideas.

How many times do the drafts go back and forth?
Numerous times. The first few times are all about the structure: How does the story want to be told? (One reporter at the L.A. Times called me the story whisperer, which I’ve always loved, because it has that sense of trying to tune into the story and find out how it wants to be told.) For instance, the climate-change stories have a lot of science in them. How do we incorporate that without taking us out of the moment of, say, a beautiful moment on an Enid Blyton island off England, like in the Cloudspotters story? It all becomes a matter of tension, playing the beauty off the terror.

Once we get a structure worked out, it’s all about the rhythm and the flow, down to the tiniest word. I read stories aloud, but another trick is to look at the story in newspaper column width, which makes you look at it differently, and see things you hadn’t noticed before, from flaws to stoppages in the flow.

You are working with gifted reporters—but how do you help them on find the structure and form of the story?
I’ve been so lucky to work with amazingly talented writers, both established ones like Mo and Andrew Marshall (who has won an astounding three Pulitzers), and younger ones like Mari and Zeba Siddiqui, who wrote a really moving piece about two Rohingya sisters who always dreamed of getting an education. That bittersweet piece, about a dream attained and a dream lost, and two sisters’ love enduring despite it all, ended up being part of last year’s Pulitzer-winning entry because of Zeba’s enormous heart and determination.

One reason I wanted to work at Reuters at this point in my career was to be a mentor to young writers who want to try something different from the breaking news the agency is known for. It’s been extremely gratifying to work with them on longer stories, yes, but also on short-form storytelling.

Speaking of longer stories, I’m quite jazzed about a story that Andrew is going to do later this year that I hope will be a true climate narrative, combining a historical tragedy with today’s climate change. Another high-wire act of storytelling.

The post Three core story principles, along with tea, baked goods and endless enthusiasm appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

“The Loneliest Polar Bear” wasn’t just a heart-tugging news story. It was a suspenseful, multi-thousand word saga about an abandoned newborn polar bear. It was rationed into five chapters that were published in the print paper and online. It was graced with the kind of cute-animal photos and video that are guaranteed to go viral.

But there’s more.

“Project Nora,” as The Oregonian/Oregon Live called it, also featured a 30-minute documentary, “Thin Ice: A Polar Bear’s Plight.” A children’s book, “Hope for Nora,” debuted alongside coloring pages, a drawing contest, puzzles and a board game. In response to readers’ concerns for Nora, the newspaper ran several follow-up stories.

In other words: “The Loneliest Polar Bear” was a news tsunami.

“Project Nora,” published in October 2017 after a year of reporting, also took industry experts by storm: The print article won the Best Newspaper Narrative Writing contest hosted by the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas; the online package won the top prize in the Online News Association Awards; a documentary film called "Thin Ice" by Dave Killen won two regional Emmys; and reporter Kale Williams won the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award and Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Reporting from by the Scripps Howard Foundation.

But this epic — which takes place across four states, in three zoos, and includes an injured Alaskan hunter, a weeping zoo keeper and a nutritionist who whips up batches of polar bear milk — illuminates issues of global warming and the somewhat discomfiting merits of zoos.

It all began with a seemingly simple story about a polar bear in Ohio moving to a zoo in Oregon.

The Oregonian’s package included a summary of its reporting approach in a “How We Did The Story” page. But that doesn’t go behind the scenes to explain the origins, decisions, collaborations and emotions involved in producing a package of this scope and intensity.

Storyboard reached out to some key members of the team of “Project Nora:” reporter Kale Williams, the Oregonians’ then-executive editor Mark Katches, Trending News editor Karly Imus, and narrative specialist, Kelley Benham French, who (via phone and email) addressed the process of writing this unforgettable story.

Kale Williams had been at the Oregonian for a little more than a year. As part of the Oregonian’s Trending team, part of his job was to scan the internet for popular topics, then develop them into stories for local readers. As part of that, he had a mini-beat focused on science and environment, and had written about wolves and polar bears.

So when he saw a press release from the Oregon zoo announcing that a polar bear cub had just arrived from a zoo in Ohio, he took note. The cub had been abandoned by its mother, which, Williams knew, diminished its chances of survival. Williams met with Katches to discuss the idea of a larger narrative. But as Williams acknowledge in a recent phone interview, “I didn’t have the gumption to propose a 15,000-word story.”

Katches encouraged him to take the next step: “Why don’t you chase this a little bit more?”

So Williams phoned the Columbus Zoo in Ohio. He was connected with Devon Sabo, the keeper who had tended Nora’s mother, Aurora. As the cub’s backstory was filled in, Katches sensed more potential. He sent Williams to Ohio to interview Sabo in person.

About a decade earlier, Katches was in charge of projects at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. While there, he edited a three-part series about Mahal, an orangutan abandoned at birth. That story, written by Jan Uebelherr, won a 2009 National Headliner Award. “It was a lovely series, full of nice engagement touches — like a children’s book and coloring contest,” Katches wrote in an email.

Now along comes “this gorgeous bear.” Nora was 10 months old at this point, with an origin story that reminded Katches of the ill-fated baby orangutan. He saw an opportunity to “delve deeper into the cub’s life and to really understand the motivations of the people who saved her.” He also saw a compelling doorway into reporting on climate change, wildlife extinction and “the philosophical discussion about animals in captivity.”

As the story was in its early stages, Katches enlisted award-winning journalist Kelley Benham French, who now teaches at Indiana University and has worked as a consulting editor on other Oregonian projects. Benham French was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Never Let Go,” an intimate story about her own infant, who was born just shy of 24 weeks. She also lives with a menagerie of animals, and often fosters puppies.

Benham French helped shape the reporting and writing from afar as “Project Nora” grew. In-house, Oregonian editor Karly Imus pulled together the myriad multimedia elements that made up the full creative package. Together, Katches said, the four of them “ran the Milwaukee playbook — on steroids.”

Williams’ reporting from Ohio helped establish a timeline of what that zoo did on behalf of Nora’s survival — a timeline that plays out in pulse-quickening opening graphs of his story, describing how, when Nora was six days old, her mother “rose and stretched and ambled” out of the den, and failed to return. Nora, “unmoored from her mother’s gravity and heat,” began screeching “like a baby dragon.”

In the past, most of Williams’ work involved filing short pieces on deadline: “I write a thing, get a quote, write a clever transition, then end with a quote.” But as this story grew beyond manageable bounds — “there’s a new creature at the Portland Zoo” — Williams felt his anxiety rise.

Williams was already familiar with Benham French, who had done a workshop and some other contract editing at The Oregonian. When Katches invited her to help with Project Nora, she instantly recognized the potential for “a riveting action-packed, nail-biter about the fight to save this baby bear.” Benham French told me by email that Nora was “the cutest, most engaging, most sympathetic character I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Benham French had intimate knowledge of high-stakes moments with infants because of her own daughter, who was born so prematurely — at 23 weeks — that her chances of survival were little more than a question mark for several months. Benham French chronicled her daughter’s story in a newspaper series for the Tampa Bay Times: “Never Let Go,” which was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer in feature writing. She then collaborated with her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Tom French, on a book, “Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon.”

To add to the connections, Tom French had written a seven-part series for the Tampa Bay Times — then the St. Petersburg Times — taking readers behind the scenes of the Lowry Park Zoo. That was expanded into a book, “Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives.” When the story of Nora came her way, Benham French said, it was as if “‘Never Let Go’ and ‘Zoo Story’ had a baby.”

The parallels were stunning to Benham French. “Nora, the baby polar bear, and Juniper, the baby human, were the exact same size at birth (one pound),” she told me. “And both required groundbreaking interventions to survive.”

That knowledge helped Benham French guide Williams through a story that was emotional and descriptive as well as factual. Readers meet Nora when she’s just six days old, “the size of a squirrel, deaf and blind” with “translucent fur (that) barely covered her pink skin” and picture her “soft paws paddle(-ing) against the straw” as her nose leads her “in one direction: toward her mother.” A mother who, readers learn, will never return.

With Benham French’s encouragement, Williams began to explore a greater context for the story and track down Nora’s ancestors. He traced Nora’s father back to zoos in Buffalo, New York, and Wisconsin, learning that the bear had been orphaned in Alaska in 1988. He requested U.S. Fish and Wildlife press releases from that year, and found a mention of Gene Rex Agnaboogok who, 27 years before Nora’s birth, literally stumbled upon the bear that eventually became Nora’s father.

The press release listed Agnaboogok’s village, a tiny town called Wales. Williams reached out to see if he still lived there. Yes, he did. And he was happy to talk.

That’s the moment the story turned, according to Benham French. Beyond a compelling piece about the consequences of rearing wild animals in captivity, it now revealed connections to climate change and its effects on culture and traditions. The project team had been trying to find a climate scientist who studied the impact on Arctic bears, assuming that person would be in Canada. But when Williams found a native Alaskan who had fallen through the ice directly into a den and killed the angry polar bear and taken her cubs, a door opened directly to Nora’s story. And Nora’s story was a doorway to environmental changes in the Arctic.

“When we started, we did not know about Nora’s connection to the Alaskan wilderness, about the Eskimo who killed her grandmother, about the researcher working with her wild relatives,” said Benham French.

Katches, the top editor, jumped back in: “Let’s make it happen!” Williams was soon on his way to Alaska.

Initially the team thought the story could be told in one strong narrative.  Then it became three chapters. Then five. The more they reported, the more they learned about the core risk posed by the cub’s abandonment, and about her physical and mental health issues.

Benham French says, “All of that is a credit to Kale’s tireless, clear-eyed reporting. He could have just been gobsmacked by Nora’s cuteness or the already-amazing story in hand, but he didn’t stop. He got critically important zoo records that unveiled a much more complex story.”

Williams said drafting the first two chapters was intense. He would write; Benham French would shape. By the third chapter, Williams felt like he had absorbed some of techniques for this kind of writing. He applied Benham French’s oft-repeated advice:  “Get out of your notebook.” Understanding that readers need a reason to care about the reporter’s cache of facts and quotes, he strove to put the facts of Nora’s story into a larger context.

Meanwhile, Benham French hounded him for specifics:

“I pushed Kale for details that existed initially only in my imagination. Like, what does a polar bear’s breath smell like? (While we don’t learn about bear breath in the published story, we know the den where Nora was born smelled of “cool concrete” and “captive musk.”) What gauge needle did veternarian Priya Bapodra use? (Answer: 22, the second smallest needle on hand.) I was fixated on a few things he probably thought were stupid.”

Williams learned to anticipate the directives: “More detail! More dialogue! More meaning!” He gathered minute details, like the fact that the newborn’s birth plan ran 23 pages, that the rifle that killed her grandmother was a .270 Remington, and that the device used to mix baby bear milk replacer was a “Magic Bullet.”

Williams and Benham French poured the information into shared Google docs. They chopped three long sections into five shorter ones. They moved sections from one chapter to another.

Mark Katches was also hands-on. And Williams’ regular editor, Karly Imus, was closely involved, not only with the story but with the many other elements of the multimedia package.

In September 2017, Katches called Benham French to say he was moving the publication date up, from December to October. At that point, only two parts were written. Benham French had just started a new teaching semester at Indiana. She took the call while standing on her front porch in Bloomington: “I had to sit down. I told (Katches), ‘I’m going to need a lot of chocolate.’ A few days later, two pounds of See’s Candy arrived in the mail.

In addition to unspooling an extraordinary narrative, “The Loneliest Polar Bear” works throughout to serve larger themes and issues. Every sentence either builds to or supplies an answer to an essential question: Why does this matter? Benham French said that was a running push from her husband as they worked together on “Juniper,” and from Mike Wilson, her longtime editor in St. Petersburg, and now editor of the Dallas Morning News. It now infuses her writing, editing and teaching.

“As is true in nearly every story I work on, with college students and with Pulitzer winners, I take responsibility for the big ideas,” she said. “The reporter is buried in logistics and details and facts, so the editor is a little more free to see the story from a higher altitude and riff on What It All Means. Many of the sections where you see a lot of synthesis and voice are my influence.”

She means passages like:

Nora was the first newborn polar bear to live more than a few days at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium since it opened in 1927. Her birth in a concrete den in central Ohio represented all the ways humans and polar bears were inextricably tangled—from the day nearly three decades before when an orphaned cub was pulled from an icy den in the Alaskan wilderness, to the political battle that appointed her species the sad-eyed symbol of climate change. She represented the damage humans had done to the Earth, and she offered the thinnest hope of setting things right.

And:

Nora had a role to play. She could grow up and contribute to the biodiversity of the species. She could help scientists understand her distant cousins who still walked the shrinking Arctic ice where her father was born. She could endear herself to millions of visitors who might think of her when they filled their gas tanks or tuned into the latest political debate.

And:

Nora could lead a generation of children to consider their role in preserving the planet.

When “The Loneliest Polar Bear” debuted it was published in chapters over a period of five days — with the first installment hitting the stands on a Sunday, then running in print and online through the week.

During the first six weeks it received nearly 200,000 unique visitors and more than 1.2 million video views. According to Oregonian metrics, viewers spent an average of 20 minutes online with the story, which Williams said is “an eternity.”

During the weeks leading up to publication, as the Project Nora team struggled to contain the sprawling narrative, The Oregon Zoo announced Nora would be leaving Portland for Utah’s Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City and be in quarantine at her new home in when the series ran. The story had no neat ending. Katches advised writing an ending that was unresolved, which would also make the story feel current, so Williams reported and wrote Part Five almost live.

And there wasn’t just the written narrative to get right. Karly Imus was charged with pulling everything together inside The Oregonian newsroom, coordinating the work of a dozen staffers and freelancers. With so many moving parts, including filming documentary and illustrating a children’s book, Project Nora had become all-consuming, she said.

As publication deadline loomed, Imus handed off most of her other duties to another editor so she could give it 100 percent focus. She brought her kids to the office on weekends. She edited by reading drafts aloud to her son. All told, the story went through more than 30 drafts. Benham French flew to Oregon so the four primary team members — Williams, Benham French, Imus and Katches — could read all five parts aloud, which they did over the course of two days.

Imus testified to the pride she felt about the collaborative process and project’s success: “We’re a talented, scrappy newsroom and we aren’t afraid to throw resources at good journalism. I think a project of this scope, where we had so many staffers working on aspects of it, shows what can happen when you believe in a story and commit to it.”

Benham-French echoes the sentiment: “I’ve never worked on a project that involved so many people and so few meltdowns. It was all just a joy, beginning to end. I'm still sad that it’s over.”

And yet: the narrative continues.  The Oregonian ran a follow-up story in late 2017 on how Nora was adjusting to the Utah zoo. Then in February of 2019, Nora broke her leg. An article in March chronicled Nora's new friend, Hope. Meanwhile, Kale Williams is working on a book about Nora due out sometime in 2021.

The success of the Project Nora has inspired The Oregonian to mount other ambitious multimedia news projects. Applying the lessons from the Loneliest Polar Bear, the newspaper used insights--from timelines to design to social media roll-out of related content —to guide the launch of “Guns: An American Conversation,” which aired in the spring of 2018 and was the focus of a Storyboard feature; “The Ghosts of Highway 20,” which debuted in December 2018; and “Polluted by Money.” which launched in March 2019.

The post About a bear: The story behind the story of “The Loneliest Polar Bear” appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

“The Trials of Whiteboy Rick,” the Atavist Magazine story, by Evan Hughes, of a baby-faced young white man who rose to the top of Detroit’s mostly black cocaine world. “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” about journalist Michelle McNamara’s obsessive search for Golden State Killer. “Conversations with a Killer: the Ted Bundy Tapes,” the 2019 Netflix documentary on one of America’s most notorious serial killers, who still haunts the nation’s pscyche 30 years after his execution.

Nonfiction about evil and crime is thriving.

The theme of this year’s Power of Narrative Conference at Boston University was “telling true stories in turbulent times.” Whether intended or not, that "turbulence" included a strong of thread of presentations, resources and cautions about reporting and writing dark stories: criminals as main characters, gun violence as a recurring event, the rise of racism, slavery on the high seas.

But through that thread wove another: the incongruous idea of empathy for those we would disdain. Rather than being clear-cut stories of good and bad, such stories present an inherent conundrum for the journalist, one that conference keynoter speaker and Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow wrestled with in his recent book, “Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist.” Saslow spent months exploring the case of Derek Black, who was raised as the heir apparent of America’s white supremacy movement. As Black journeys from certitude to confusion to transformation, Saslow also chronicles the moral conflict of those confounded by the proper response to Black. As Saslow notes in his book: “What was the appropriate response to the most intolerant kinds of free speech? Exclusion or inclusion? Was it better to shame and demonize…? Or was it more effective to somehow reach out…?”

These same questions confront journalists who try to write about subjects with empathy and open-mindedness, while giving their hateful actions and views a platform. That dilemma was addressed directly at conference breakout sessions by three reporters who repeatedly reach out to society’s villains: Beth Schwartzapfel of The Marshall Project, whose reporting on injustices in the criminal justice system wins awards year after year; Evan Ratliff, co-founder of the Atavist, co-host of the Longform Podcast, and author of “The Mastermind” about the quest to take down drug lord Paul Le Roux; and Jeff Sharlet, the Dartmouth professor and National Magazine Award winner who has written about the influence of Christian fundamentalism in American politics. (Sharlet’s forthcoming book, “This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers,” is an exploration of vulnerability and suffering, which he at first reported through Instagram snapshots that he took during a two year period of insomnia and late-night driving.)

All of the reporters offered nuts-and-bolts tips (more on that below) for doing this kind of work. But they also weighed in on the sticky issues that come with “platforming bad guys.” They discussed how they navigate a line between portraying the authentic, non-stereotyped lives of pedophiles, hitmen and hate-mongers without “over-humanizing” them. That challenge starts from the moment the reporting begins.

For example, Schwartzapfel said she spends considerable reporting time just trying to find appropriate terminology to describe her subjects. She hunts for a middle ground between using charged terms such as “teen murderers” on one end of the spectrum and, on the other, being overly careful with phrases such as “persons experiencing a sex offender conviction.” In “Banished,” a Marshall Project story about paroled sex offenders who are left homeless by restrictive housing laws, Schwartzapfel worked with her editor to find a balance in writing about people who have “done the worst thing you can do to a person,” while simultaneously shedding light on the factors that force them to live as nomads.

The journalists also discussed the physical and psychological risks inherent in pursuing such stories and the precautions necessary to protect themselves and their families. Sharlet began his talk by acknowledging that he is being doxed by organizations critical of his work; his home address, pictures of his children’s school and more have been circulated on the internet as part of an intimidation campaign. He has had many standard links to his professional bios shut down, and asked conference attendees at his talk not to tweet about him. (He granted Storyboard permission to write about his talk here.) Ratliff also said he takes some precautions: He is careful not to write about criminals who live or work in his city, and puts no information about his children on the internet.

Another consistent theme the presenters touched on was the inherent danger in gaining enough proximity to struggle with emotional boundaries. Schwartzapfel found herself sympathizing with a convicted pedophile who was terrified of the world around him. Sharlet had his picture taken with a person who advocates executing homosexuals and their allies. (Sharlet, who has reported on intolerant views on four continents, said he has amassed a file of such photos on his computer.) An additional and chronic challenge in such reporting is deciding when and how to negotiate anonymity for story sources and subjects, especially when those sources are also criminals.

For those navigating the minefields to reporting on society’s darker corners, Ratliff had one piece of overarching realistic advice: “The struggle is the answer.” Sharlet echoed that: “If any of you have a really good 1,2,3 for how to do this work — I would love to hear it.”

Meanwhile, here were some of the actionable tips offered in the workshops:

Beth Schwartzapfel: Data-driving stories at The Marshall Project need characters — human beings — to function in the same way as fans cheering from the sidelines of a marathon. Those characters make the data relatable, keep the reader reading, and remind us why a story matters. To find characters that illuminate stories:

• Talk to public defenders to help understand the criminals and accused, and prosecutors to provide perspective about victims. Ask them to tell you their most outrageous stories.
• Search public records data-bases and scour court documents. Try using PACER, the public access site to court records.
• Communicate with people in jail. JPay and CorrLinks can provide and pay for email access; she suggests pre-paying the cost of an inmate’s replies. Remember that all communication is monitored, so know the rules.
• Talk to the relatives and friends of the incarcerated.
• Work through advocacy groups to gain access and cooperation.
• Show up where your story subjects live their lives. Do shoe-leather reporting.

Evan Ratliff: He finds crime reporting inherently interesting because it has a strong clear beginning, middle and end. But he offered these cautions:

• Be careful of The Fascinating: don’t forget that these are people who may have done terrible things and, possibly, to whom something terrible has happened.
• Report your way to empathy. Try to put yourself in the place of the person you are writing about.
• Make sure you are doing your work for a good reason.
• As a reporter who’s had his work optioned for Hollywood (a goal built into the business model of the Atavist) he advises against buying the life rights to someone’s story. Going into business with your subjects can encourage you to tell a crazier story and to overlook deception.
• Be comfortable with criticism and be ready with answers about why you did what you did in your reporting.

Jeff Sharlet:  His journalism often centers on people who elicit fear, anger, hatred, contempt and revulsion. Or, as he said, “Pedophiles. Genociders. Killers.” The most revolting are those he most wants to understand. His counsel:

• We don’t know enough about monsters.
• There are risks to approaching the deplorable. Be wary of amplifying and platforming evil.
• “If a monster invites you to lunch, you should go. Carefully.”

The post Probing dark corners and dark souls appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The first sentence is treacherous: This is how I die.

It stands alone, in italics – first person, no quote marks. It reads like an epitaph beneath a photograph of six people huddled close – some wearing breathing masks, one a hardhat – so what stands out are the eyes and, where visible, smiles. Smiles – even though they are posing for what could be their last photo.

At the outset of this pell-mell narrative, we don’t know who is living it. We don’t know the name of the “she” who turns to face her death. We only know she is standing “…in the drive way of a sand colored house ... and the air is choked with smoke.” We know that “the sky is nuclear orange” and the “wind is hurling embers against her body and into her blond wavy hair.” And if that’s not enough to secure your full attention, we are told this: “She has just seen an ambulance melt.”

That’s how Los Angeles Times reporter Corina Knoll takes readers to the heart of the notorious Camp fire that overwhelmed Paradise, California, in November, destroying more than 18,000 buildings and leaving 86 dead before it burned itself out. There is nothing traditional about how she tells the story. No official sources.  No direct quotes. No context beyond the moment she puts us in. Not even the hint of a nut graf. It was written, as Knoll later told us, on tight deadline, in a rush of emotion and images.

But those images – that intensity and intimacy – were enough to land it on Page 1 on Nov. 22, 2018, amid a torrent of coverage of the deadliest wildfire in California history.

Knoll tells the story of Tamara Ferguson, “a 42-year-old woman who does not surrender." The headline read: As deadly flames approached, a mother called her daughters to say goodbye. But the story became known, simply, as “the final call,” built as it was around what Ferguson believed were her last-ever phone calls to her children.

With a just three lightning-strike sentences high in the story, Knoll illuminates Ferguson’s character:

She graduated high school with a 4-month old and a 4.0 grade point average. She put herself through nursing school while pregnant and with four children. She coaches panicked women through difficult labors.

“These were words a mother of five should never have to say,” Knoll tweeted after this story began flickering across the internet, uniting thousands of people in shared emotion. Presidential advisor KellyAnne Conway tweeted it.  So did CNN’s Jake Tapper. So did filmmaker Ava DuVernay. The story hit my inbox on Thanksgiving, the day it ran, accompanied by “OMG!” I could not stop thinking about it – through small talk, through dinner, through dessert. It burned in the back of my mind and clung to my thoughts, like smoke on clothes.

As the story unfolds we learn that Tamara Ferguson is front-and-center among those in that haunting photo – a selfie that she took. She was one of two nurses who, with a pediatrician, two EMTs, two paramedics and two volunteer firefighters, were trapped inside a ring of fire that had erupted Nov. 9 and cremated everything that got in its way.

But while much of the wildfire coverage delivered necessary news about fire paths, visible damage, rising fatality counts and desperate rescue efforts, this story tunnels into a personal reckoning. We are inside Ferguson's thoughts as she confronts mortality, staring down the very moment she knows how and (roughly) when she will die. Knoll captures most of the experience by writing in close third person:

...(she) wonders whether she should stay still when the flames come or get inside the ambulance, which has oxygen tanks and could explode.

Again, nothing is in direct quotes. When Knoll wants Ferguson’s thoughts to be stated directly, she shifts to first person and italics:

What is the best way to be taken by fire?

For the remainder of this lean story, the reader is taken along on a wild ride as Ferguson and her colleagues make what they think is a futile dash to safety, and as Ferguson finally pulls out her pink cell phone and phones her eldest daughter to start her goodbyes.

I spoke with Storyboard’s editor Jacqui Banaszynski about the challenges and risks of writing from inside a story subject’s head. We talked a bit about the work of Gary Smith for Sports Illustrated, Tom Junod for Esquire, Tom Hallman Jr. of The Oregonian and a select few others. That level of intimacy – in reporting and writing – usually takes time for reporter and subject to develop trust, and careful consideration of story structure –  even design and type – to convey credibility and transparency.

Knoll dared all that in a few pressured, helter-skelter hours, as she filed feeds for other stories. She took the approach not as some trick of narrative but because, as she said, that's "how I felt it should be told.”

Knoll, who writes for the Times’ metro section, was on the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer for breaking news for coverage of the San Bernardino shootings and subsequent terror investigation. She also contributed to work that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in public service for exposing corruption in Bell, California.

In an email conversation with Storyboard, Knoll discussed the pressures and advantages of working on deadline, gives credit to an encouraging colleague and acknowledges leaning on instinct to produce this haunting narrative. Our Q&A has been edited lightly for brevity and clarity.

Where you got your instinct and skill – what seems an uncanny ability to get inside this woman’s head on the day she believes is her last and how, as the flames push closer, her great loves and painful regrets are magnified and dealt with in brief phone calls?

I wish I could sound really deep and tell you how I mapped out this story, but it was written mostly under a very tight daily deadline, and I just did it how I felt it should be told.

I do tend to be driven by a subject's emotion, so it felt pretty natural to write it that way. I didn't use quotes because it felt stronger without them. I think the reporting drives the writing so it helped to have a lot of details to work with.

When did you have the idea for writing about the Camp fire through Tamara Ferguson? And how did your editors get involved or react?

The night before I left for Paradise, I read a bunch of the news coverage. I had heard about a woman who gave birth right before evacuating. I looked for stories about her and there were several that talked about how she survived with a group of first-responders and medical staff, including Tamara Ferguson. There was a mention of last phone calls, and that just seemed like the most heartbreaking thing to ever have to do. I didn't have a clear plan, but I knew I wanted to ask specifically about that. I didn't know what to expect traveling up there so it felt good to have somewhere to begin. I thought maybe I would do a larger story about what people said in final phone calls.

How were you able to meet Tamara, and establish trust and rapport, and then portray her innermost issues – the wonders and baggage of a lifetime – as it's both compressed and amplified by a life-or-death afternoon?

I reached out to Tamara on Facebook the night before I left for Paradise. By then she had actually been interviewed a lot, I think, but she was gracious enough to respond and we set up a time to meet the next day. I told her I wanted to zero in on her phone call, what she said and why. Tamara was forthright with details and emotions and willing to answer all types of questions, which really helped. Still, it was my first day in Paradise and I wasn't sure if I had a story or what kind of story, so after that I did interviews for other possible articles.

Two days later, my colleague Ron Lin came to the area to report. We met up and talked through story ideas. I mentioned the idea I had about the last phone call one makes and telling it through Tamara, and he immediately encouraged me to write it. I was supposed to send in feeds for a different story, but Ron inspired me so much that I ran to a coffee shop and quickly wrote up the first few paragraphs and sent it to two editors to give them a sense of what I was thinking. Then I went out and got feeds for the other story.

The following morning, I was told they wanted Tamara's story for A1, which meant a 3 p.m. deadline. So from then on it became a daily. The interview with Tamara was the only one that I recorded, because we talked for about one-and-a-half hours and there were so many details. I hadn't yet finished transcribing the entire tape, so I was frantically doing that while writing. I also had to call and text Tamara several times throughout with follow-up questions.

I turned it in, a few words were tweaked, and that was it. In some ways the pressure of a deadline helped. If I had been told to hand it in later, I might have approached it differently or maybe an editor would have suggested reshaping it. Who knows? I definitely wish there had been more time to polish it though.

How many different interviews were conducted and then distilled to tell Tamara’s story?

I did two separate interviews, one with Tamara and one with her daughter, Savannah. I wasn't on deadline at the time of the interviews – I didn't even know if it would become a story.

Was your interviewing technique different than it would have been for more ordinary reporting? Can you share some of the questions you asked?

I don't know that it was any different than reporting for a feature. I repeatedly asked her about what she said in the phone call and why. I realized that we probably all would say similar things in that situation, but the why is what differentiates us. And I asked a lot of specific questions about the scene, because in order to understand why someone makes that kind of phone call, you have to know exactly what they were facing.

Did you tell Tamara how you wanted to take readers along inside her head/heart/journey?

I told her initially that I wanted to hear her story even though I wasn't sure what would come of it. When I was actually writing it on deadline, I explained to her my approach so she wouldn't be caught by surprise.

Iknow you’ve had a tremendous response from readers, but what specifically are they responding to?

The response was unexpected and a tad overwhelming, but in a good way. I appreciated anybody who took the time to say something about it. And so grateful that Tamara was open to me writing about her in such a personal way.

I think maybe the pacing and length of the story was helpful – we all want to do those long narratives, but sometimes a quick read is more digestible. It probably helped that it ran on Thanksgiving when people are feeling particularly emotional and generous.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A special thanks to Tamara Ferguson. Despite everything she's dealing with, she was fast and gracious in responding to our request to use her photos for this post. We send all wishes for hope and home to her and everyone displaced by the California fires, or by disasters – natural and manmade – anywhere.

The post A “final” phone call from the wildfires inspires an unusual, intimate story written under the fire of deadline appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

There are known news conventions: something happens and someone writes about it and somebody publishes it and then maybe people talk about it. There are known narrative conventions: a relatable protagonist confronts a complication and, through time and rising tension, reaches resolution.

And then there is "Guns: An American Conversation,” which defies all of those conventions to tell a story that is, in terms of news and narrative, not much of a story at all.

Some quick backstory to that non-story: There had been yet one more horrific school shooting – this one in Parkland, Florida. That was followed by yet more protests and yet more political proclamations and yet no more resolution. In that static wake, publishers from Advance Local, which owns news outlets in nine states, invited people to talk about guns and gun culture, through a broad invitation via social media and in a smaller in-person group over a weekend in Washington, D.C. Advance worked in concert with SpaceshipMedia, which hosts and guides conversations with the goal of using “journalism to bridge divides.”

The resulting project was, according to its introduction, “… an audacious experiment in a new kind of journalism and a new kind of public discourse.” That claim risks ignoring the civic or public journalism movement of the 1990s, when newspapers sought to engage more directly with citizens by hosting discussions on matters of shared public interest.

But if the core event behind the gun conversation wasn’t groundbreaking, the approach to reporting it may have been: Advance contracted with three of the top narrative journalists in the country – Kelley Benham French, Tom French and Ben Montgomery – and assigned them to do what they do: report and write a compelling story, rich with character, detail and tension, and structured around a beginning, middle and end. Here’s how, in the intro, they framed the personal intimacy of a national political story:

A gun, by its nature, is a polarizing thing. A gun forces us to envision ourselves on either one end of it or the other. A gun is an equalizer, a tool, a symbol of liberty and power and slaughter and loss.

Some of the 21 gathered here saw a gun as an instrument of protection. One kept an AR-15 atop the armoire. A few kept guns strapped to their bodies, under their clothes.

Others had been threatened with guns. They feared that guns empowered people who would marginalize or silence them. They had been intimidated, mugged, raped. They'd lost mothers and cousins and uncles and friends.

No spoiler alert here, because there is no resolution to this, one of society's most troubling complications. It's just a story about an extended and intense conversation. So how do three writers (described by Kelley French as “nut-graph girl,” “structure guy” and “drop-everything-for-adventure guy”) plus one editor (“who can make lint sound fun”) turn that conversation into a riveting 5,000-word narrative? We asked, and they answered. The Q&As are edited lightly for length and clarity, and offered one by one.

KELLEY BENHAM FRENCH, lead writer and “nut-graph girl,” was a reporter and editor for the St. Petersburg (now Tampa Bay) Times before joining the faculty of Indian University. She was a 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Never Let Go,” a three-part serial narrative about the birth of her premature daughter. She and her husband, Tom French, later co-wrote the book “Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon.” (@KelleyBFrench)

STORYBOARD: What was the context (a phone call, a coffee date, an email?) of the invitation to write this story and what was your initial reaction?

Kelley French: Mark Katches (then the editor of The Oregonian) called and said he knew I probably didn’t have time to do this, but he hoped I did. When he described the story — some people talking in a room about guns — I thought, well, that’s not going to be any good. But Mark can make lint sound fun if he’s excited about it, and he had worked up some excitement for this. It was a story at the center of our most urgent national conversation. Advance had been doing groundbreaking work with these facilitated conversations, but without a cohesive narrative to tell the story of the story, who was noticing?

I’m a gun owner and a former high school teacher and a mom, so I really did feel like I could fairly represent all sides. I knew the traps of reporting on guns — how inflammatory the wrong language can be, and how important it was to be careful with the details. I was insanely busy with other projects, but Mark said I could hire help.

The day before the first weekend of major reporting I had some crazy stuff go down in my personal life and had to bail. Mark was calm. He always puts family first. He asked if I had a backup plan. I called Ben Montgomery, who was on a plane in less than 12 hours. So Mark had to convince a bunch of other editors that Ben was going to be great, and then he called me and said, 'This guy had better be good because I just put my reputation on the line for him and I’ve never f**king met him.'

Ben, Tom and I are quite literally family. Tom is my husband and Ben is the ex-husband of the woman who donated an egg to make my daughter. We’ve worked together so closely for so long that we can actually finish each other’s sentences. I can mimic either of their writing voices. We were all really busy, but between the three of us we probably added up to one whole reporter.

How did you write such a cogent interesting piece? Describe the meeting where the three of you strategized a plan for how best to report this story.

We didn’t meet until mid-way through the reporting, when Ben came to Bloomington on a previously-scheduled trip to talk to my reporting classes (at the University of Indiana). Ben and I worked together by phone while Tom finished his semester at IU. Our job initially was just to monitor the conversation on Facebook, which was sprawling and churning and alternately fascinating and super boring. The rest of the team at Advance was unbelievable about keeping track of the conversation, feeding facts into it, working with the participants to keep it productive, and reporting every day about what had taken place, what deserved follow-up, and what hinted of change or anything that might lend itself to a larger narrative. They did so much of the scouting work for us as we looked for characters.

We had to choose characters very, very early in the process, before we really knew who would learn or grow or change or interact. And we had 150 or so people from which to choose. We were going for diversity of all kinds — geography, politics, gender, age. And of course each of the publications that belong to the Advance umbrella would appreciate having a character from their readership, though no one pushed us about whom to include.

Ben put the likely candidates on a Google map, and we started calling people. The first person I called was Alexis Intilli, and right away, as she breathlessly and profanely described how this project had changed her life, I thought, wow, maybe this experiment is working. Maybe this is a narrative after all.

Tom jumped in after about a month and sketched an outline, looking for ways that one character might tie to another. Ben was off and reporting early, taking a big swath of the Deep South. He got all the fun gigs – a ride-along with a cop, shooting with a gun enthusiast. Tom and I would grumble about this later. Tom had to tag along on a trip to the orthodontist, and I pretty much reported by phone. 

Was it messy?

Not alarmingly so. No one cried. At one point I fell a few days behind and Mark told me I needed to pull it together, and I appreciated so much how he conveyed both the urgency and importance of the situation and his total confidence in me to not screw it up.

Why three writers?

Simply because none of us had time to do it alone. Mark gave me free rein – I could have hired 12 writers. I looked at a map and thought about where I had friends who could report and whether any of those reporters were within shouting distance of a good character, but in the end it ended up being the three of us.

So how about this graph? If I had to guess, it’s Tom:

"A gun by it’s nature is a polarizing thing. A gun forces us to envision ourselves on either one end of it or other. A gun is an equalizer, a tool, a symbol of liberty and power and slaughter and loss."

Hell, no. That was me. Tom is structure guy. I’m nut-graph girl. Ben is go-have-an-adventure-on-company-dime guy. I also did all cleanup/polish at the end, while Ben disappeared to hike the Appalachian Trail.

What was harder than you expected and what was easier?

This magnified the classic narrative problem of intimacy vs. breadth. Because for each character – and each reader – the issue was absolutely personal, and you have to lay some background and do some digging to represent that in a way that people on the other end of the political spectrum will see it. What does it really feel like to have a gun pressed to your temple, or to live alone at the end of a long, rural road? Guns tie into our identity, our sense of self and of liberty and of power and of control. We needed deeply intimate reporting, expansive nut sections, and smart, efficient structure and synthesis. And we also had to explain the project and how it came together. The word count (3,000 words) felt really tight from the start.

What was easy was how the three of us handed off the pieces. We all trust each other so much that it felt like this high-wire act where you can’t always see the other person but you know when you reach your arms out you’re going to lock wrists and no one is going to crash.

As a seasoned journalist trying something new, what was your takeaway?

I learned so much about interviewing from the story partners and just being there for these exercises in active listening. At the end, I was in awe of this process as a tool for change and a tool for journalism. It forced me to consider not just how we do this work but why we do it, what it’s for.

BEN MONTGOMERY, primary field reporter and “adventure guy,” is the author of three books, including “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk,” which won the 2014 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography. As a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, he was on a team that was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist in local reporting for exposing decades of abuse at a Florida reform school. He is founder of the narrative journalism website Gangrey. (@gangrey)

Storyboard: What was the context of the invitation to write this story and what was your initial reaction?

Ben Montgomery: I didn't fully understand the pitch at first. My friend Kelley Benham French, who had worked with Mark Katches before, tried to describe by phone what it was they were trying to do, and that they wanted to hire independent journalists to tell the story, but she and I both were pretty confused about the whole thing early on. Because Kelley had a family emergency, I was thrown into the mix a day or two before the gathering in D.C. I booked airplane tickets with no real understanding of what it was I was going to cover. I spoke by phone with (Advance VP) Michelle Holmes in Alabama the night before the event and, honestly, was still pretty confused about the mission. I remember asking: 'What's the goal here? What do you all hope to get out of this?' And Michelle was essentially like, 'There is no goal. We want people to talk.'

I told Kelley it's going to be incredibly difficult to write a narrative – and that's the word they were using – about people having a conversation. I went to D.C. to basically try to select a handful of people who seemed interesting to me. Then we wanted to visit those folks in their hometowns and write about how their lives and experiences influenced their feelings about guns, and whether the conversations had changed their beliefs. To me, that amounted to more of a psychological narrative – following a handful of people with strong opinions through the process of psychological or ideological change. Tall order!

Describe the meeting where the three of your strategized a plan for how to report this story.

I came back from D.C. with mini-profiles. They were just simple character sketches, like: young black man, thinks gun control is racist, armed to protect himself from white supremacists ... that sort of thing. I had those for everyone involved. We began selecting the participants we thought were most interesting, articulate and honest about their feelings, and those we could reasonably go visit (i.e., did they live within a few hours of a major airport, etc). When we felt comfortable with our selected group, we set up time with each of them, to see life like they see it, to accumulate scenes and to get the texture and detail to help make their stories interesting.

When that reporting was finished, and our deadline was coming, we all got in the same Google doc and mapped out our scenes in the style of a thorough outline (or an annotated table of contents, for those familiar with book proposals). Kelley and Tom played with the structure of the scenes, so the story had a rhythm and the right complications at the right moments.

Was it messy?

Not for me. As confused as we were going in, we all gelled on the back end. I wrote my scenes and a sketch of the opening meeting in D.C. Kelley and Tom did the hard work of crafting transitions and arranging sections.

What was harder than you expected and what was easier?

There were a hundred moving pieces in this thing. We had to pay attention to the fast-paced Facebook conversations and track our characters’ arcs, and we didn't want to miss anything. We were getting daily updates from Advance folks on every little bend and turn, every news story that local reporters were writing, every controversy in the groups. Keeping up with all that wasn't super easy.

But what I feared early on – making a narrative out of something that by design was sort of physically stagnate – that part was easier that I thought. That's likely because of Kelley's genius in editing.

What was your personal takeaway from trying this?

I remain unsure of the usefulness of this type of experiment, but I have great respect for the ambition behind it. I was, at times, in awe of that ambition.

THOMAS FRENCH, the “structure guy” who outlined the narrative thread, holds the Riley Endowed Chair at his alma mater, Indiana University. In 1998, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for “Angels and Demons,” a series about the murder of a woman and her two teenage daughters that he reported for the St. Petersburg Times. Two of his other newspaper projects were turned into books, and he co-authored “Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon,” with his wife Kelley Benham French.

Storyboard: How did you build the emotional though-line of this story?

Tom French: Kelley and Mark were the brains behind the story, and Ben reported and wrote with his usual vivid detail and energy. I tried to pitch in as best I could.

Kelley did ask me to work on the structure, and it was an interesting challenge, sequencing all those people’s stories and the back-and-forth of their conversation and the juxtaposing of their perspectives and the way those experiences collided and wove together, all of it unfolding as our country tried to come to terms with Parkland and so many other tragic gun deaths.

That’s a heckuva burden to place on one little outline.

So I tried to keep it simple and find a structure that got out of the way as much as possible. I asked myself what were the elements that the story absolutely had to contain for it to make sense, and then built the thing based on those essentials. Once you assign a section to each of those essentials, you can start moving those chunks around and looking for the most organic sequence. In the past I have used sugar packets to imagine an order for sections, and in the classroom I’ve used different colored markers, and in conferences with my students I will use virtually anything on my desk – a stapler, a tape dispenser, a phone charger, whatever’s at hand. In this case I didn’t use those types of physical objects because I was trying to construct a map that could be seen and evaluated by Mark  (Katches) and Kelley and many other smart people from around the country. So I just started trying out combos of basic section outlines in Google docs, then got feedback and shifted accordingly.

The emotional through-line was crucial and fairly clear: The depth of heartbreaking feeling that our country brings to this tangled question of guns flowed like a river through the conversation that we were chronicling. And it flowed through the lives and experiences of the participants. So my goal was to let that river run straight through the story, paying attention to the currents and crosscurrents, trying to make room for both the personal memories the participants were carrying as well as some revealing moments in their extended conversation together.

The question driving the story – it was important for us to keep this in mind – was not what is the solution to gun violence but can people from radically different perspectives have a civil conversation that might conceivably lead this country toward common ground. That’s why the connection between Jennifer Brush and La'Daniel Boykin jumped out at me. Both were passionate and articulate about their opposing views, and both carried searing experiences that formed those views. I doubt they’re ever going to agree with each other, but they respected each other, and they listened to each other, and when they talked about Jennifer’s teenage son, it felt to me like something new opened up between them. That new space, to me, was the promised land that this whole experiment was searching for.

You excel at creating suspense, building cliffs for readers to dangle off. But how do you employ human curiosity as a structural tool so readers follow something so nebulous as the emotional arc of a conversation rather than plot points based on what happens to a protagonist? 

I am drawn to suspense and I feel confident at identifying it in almost any kind of story I tackle, whether it’s a murder case or a story about a 13-year-old boy hoping for his first kiss. But this project was different, and I didn’t see a way to rely on that traditional kind of plot-driven suspense. Mark and Kelley’s belief – and I think all of us on the team felt this way – was that the conversation itself was a matter of life and death.

A common piece of structural advice, in journalism and other forms of storytelling, is that you need to raise the stakes, to make it clear to the audience what matters and how much can be gained or lost. There are hardly any stakes higher than those roiling inside our national conversation on gun violence. The future of our country is on the line. So many people’s lives are on the line. Our children’s future is on the line. My children’s future. Your children’s. The suspense, in other words, was built in.

We needed a structure that allowed our readers to see how those stakes are unfolding in the lives of our subjects. We needed to zoom in on little details that grounded the massive themes of the story. Like Jennifer and her son at the orthodontist, seizing a quiet moment when the tech walks away to talk about the violence in video games. That’s about as far from Hollywood-style action as you can get. But that tiny unglamorous moment was alive with Jennifer’s yearning for peace and her well-founded fears for her son, with all the huge questions that drove this whole project. How are we going to stanch this ocean of bloodshed? Is there room inside the American idea to do that while respecting the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights? Can we create those possibilities together? Can we even hear one another?

MARK KATCHES was the “can make lint fun” editor of The Oregonian and OregonLive.com when he oversaw “Guns: An American Conversation.” He previously ran the non-profit Center for Investigative Reporting, and now is executive editor of The Tampa Bay Times. (@MarkKatches)

Storyboard: What it was like to edit this story?

Mark Katches: The editing was the easy part. Thankfully, we had enlisted an incredible team of narrative writers in Kelley Benham French, Tom French and Ben Montgomery. When it comes down to it, this story was about a process: the process of bringing people together for a conversation and then the process of conducting the group chats. And much of it happened via Facebook at all hours of the day involving people posting in their pajamas at home or during their lunch breaks.

Although the topic was timely and the project unique, the ingredients made this really challenging from a storytelling standpoint. We basically assigned Kelley, Ben and Tom to write about a bunch of strangers posting on Facebook. Nothing terribly dramatic actually ended up happening. We saw some heated exchanges along the way and a couple of people got kicked out for bad behavior. But there wasn't any big resolution or climactic ending.

So the great challenge fell to Kelley, Tom and Ben to identify a handful of compelling characters through which they could tell this story about people talking about guns in America. And I think they absolutely nailed that. The backstories of the characters they selected made all the difference.

How much direction did you give Kelley French about what you wanted her to produce?

The credit for conceiving the idea of a group conversation belongs to Michelle Holmes, who was at the time the vice president of content at the Alabama News Group. This was her baby. She wanted to bring people from diverse backgrounds around the country to the table after Parkland. Get people in a room and then expand the group for a month-long moderated conversation on Facebook. The goal wasn't to solve all of our issues but to see if people could learn to listen or talk in a civil manner.

I got involved when we decided that we should chronicle the experience. John Hassell, who is the vice president of content for all of Advance Local, was the first to suggest that we capture this somehow with our own story. John asked me if I could enlist Kelley, who I had worked with on a big project about a captive-born polar bear.

We kept it simple. We approached this in a less-is-more sort of way. About 150 people from around the country participated in the group discussion. We wanted to find just a few compelling characters who had volunteered to be part of the conversation and we wanted to tell this story through their eyes as they experienced it, while also weaving in their backstories and their personal experiences with firearms. We originally talked about a 3,000-word story. But Kelley, Ben and Tom had gathered so much great stuff. It was not a hard decision to give them more space (5,000-plus words) and to build this into a special section that we published in every Advance market.

The post Finding a narrative in “our most urgent national conversation”: the one about guns appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.