The Archive
Writing once featured on the now-defunct Gangrey.com.
Seems like so many exciting new books from friends are hitting the shelves this summer and fall. Here’s my rundown. Correct my oversight. And what are you reading? Juniper: The Gir…
Rebecca Woolington: The obituary ran six days after the death of Madaline Christine Pitkin. It recalled the sunny early October evening she was born. It told stories from her child…
NiemanStoryboard launched an eight-week project showcasing the work of Michael Brick, which is collected in Everybody Leaves Behind a Name: True Stories. Here’s a Q and A about the…
Interesting findings in this new study by Tim Rosenstiel for the Brookings Institute, who says the path toward sustainable journalism is being undermined by terrible data (thanks,…
John Ferro (thanks, Oliver): HIGHLAND – The small, frail man with an Italian passport would arrive unannounced, trundling a small suitcase behind him. Like a wispy Willy Loman, but…
Dan Barry: YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Numbered balls of chance rattle and rise two nights a week down at the cavernous community hall of Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It’s…
Weston Phippen: Yevgeny Safronov and the four tourists landed in Los Angeles on a 70-degree dream of a day last May. They were Czechs, Slovaks, and Russians, here on vacation. It w…
Alex Tizon: They found what was left of him in the spring of 2014. Firefighters battling a huge blaze on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula first spotted a boot in the dirt. Then they notice…
Tommy T (thanks, Oliver): The business I love has put a lot of good people on the street and left behind a lot of empty buildings. I love it anyway, and so do the people who came b…
Randy R. Potts: I waited in my car for 20 minutes. No last name, precise instructions: “Meet me at the truck stop at the corner of 259 and 144 and I’ll take you on from there. You…
Here is the dirty secret of longform: most people, even those who urge its consumption, don’t actually read it. Longform may win awards and it may bring prestige, but it remains at…
Naomi Martin and Dave Tarrant: Had they met under different circumstances, the two 20-year-olds could have easily been friends. Sara Mutschlechner loved Quentin Tarantino films and…
Daniel Engber in WIRED: THE BRAIN SURGERY lasted 11 and a half hours, beginning on the afternoon of June 21, 2014, and stretching into the Caribbean predawn of the next day. In the…
“That word though, if it is a word: Overwritten. In recent years it’s become a sledgehammer in the hands of too many cowardly, unambitious, ladder-climbing, cow-in-a-swivel-chair e…
Jon Caraminico in the New York Times: FRISCO, Tex. — A little more than a month ago, Ben Higgins, the warmly handsome star of the coming season of “The Bachelor,” got down on one k…
Are y’all keeping up with this serial narrative? Here’s Part 1 to get you going. From Gina Barton: Mark Zera and his father made their way down the deserted rural road from their h…
Konrad Marshall: Billy is a mean bastard. He has a lot on his mind. He isn’t getting shifts. His missus is nagging him for petrol money. Didn’t he already give her some? Billy gets…
Casey Parks (thanks, Emily): MYRTLE CREEK — Walter Dickens weaved through his mother’s boxes to answer a knock at the door. It was the fourth one that Sunday afternoon, two days si…
Michael Brick: AUSTIN – The man behind the glass partition was famous. His photograph appeared on statewide news sites and national food blogs, wanted as the architect of a brazen…
Jessica Contrera (thanks, Michael): When 13-year-old Caleb LeBlanc’s death made the news this week, millions of people already knew him. He wasn’t a pop star, an up-and-coming acto…
Patrick Rapa: … About 24 hours before you read this, City Paper will cease operations. Like a lobster, we were purchased to be killed and consumed. For the purposes of this metapho…
Justin George: As massive protest marches continued across Baltimore, the pressure was building inside police headquarters, and Commissioner Anthony W. Batts wanted answers — fast.…
AARON YOST and TROY BRYNELSON in the Roseburg, Ore. News-Review: Hannah Miles sat on a plastic chair inside cavernous Douglas Hall, wrapped in a white Red Cross blanket, shaking. A…
Bradford Pearson: Hello, my name is Brad Pearson. In March 2006, you were one of three people who kidnapped me in West Philadelphia. I’m writing this letter not because I’m angry a…
Mark Warren (thanks, Tim): The forces of Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi had been firing high-explosive ordnance into the city of Misurata for weeks—they’d been shooting tank roun…
Robert Samuels: BUDAPEST — The train ticket would take Josef Majade to a place where he would be safe, but he no longer sought that refuge. Instead, he lay his balding head against…
Earl Swift: It is a quiet, restorative place, this clearing high on a Pennsylvania ridge. Ferns and wildflowers carpet its floor. Sassafras and tulip trees, tall oak and hickory st…
Some serendipity for you. I was searching for something today behind my desk at work and I found an odd envelope. Inside was a funeral program for my father, who died in November 2…
Matt Tullis has introduced a cool new segment on Gangrey, The Podcast, called required reading. But we need your help. Please take a look.
Caleb Hannan on Dr. V’s Magical Putter: “There’s this idea that it’s not going to happen to me. There is a momentum to a story that’s hard to stop. … It would have been a blow to m…
Leah Sottile: RICHLAND, Wash. — The workers inside Hanford’s nuclear reactors in the early 1940s knew their jobs were important, even if many of them didn’t know why. They worked h…
Jill Lepore: For a long time, Joe Gould thought he was going blind. This was before he lost his teeth, and years before he lost the history of the world he’d been writing in hundre…
Jason Cherkis: In 1974, when she was only 14, Jackie Fuchs would wake up way before her parents and catch a ride with friends from her house in the San Fernando Valley across the S…
This is how you profile. Michael Kruse: One morning last month in Burlington, Vermont, at the law office of John Franco, one of Bernie Sanders’ best friends since the 1970s, Franco…
Jeff Sharlet: Open your eyes. Sunday. Another lucky day. Darkness. A luxury afforded the man who owns two tents, one popped right inside the other. No street light filtering in, no…
Robert Samuels: URBANDALE, Iowa — As this state’s most visible culture warriors, Bob Vander Plaats and Donna Red Wing have hurled insults at each other for years. Vander Plaats’s o…
William Browning: On a Saturday morning in May, 2015, a group of law enforcement agents, the FBI among them, knocked on the front door of the Montgomery Homestead Inn in Damascus,…
Jay Cridlin: TAMPA — Minutes after midnight, Uncle John’s Band closes another sprawling set at Skipper’s Smokehouse with the Grateful Dead’s U.S. Blues, drawing cheers from the tie…
Anne Hull: CHARLESTON, S.C. — The glow of their phones lighted up their faces in the night. Terrell White and his friends kept looking down at the updates, trying to separate rumor…
Eugene Patterson, Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 16, 1963: A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, on…
What are your favorite non-print presentations of stories? I’m partial to reading something on paper, but most of the things I most want to read are only available to me digitally.…
Thomas Lake: BB King always slept with the light on, even as an old man, because he’d never shaken his fear of the dark. One summer night when he was a boy, a tornado howled across…
Check out this story Keith Sharon at The Orange County Register. Great lede: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/woodward-657889-beach-huntington.html
I thought this, from the young man who lives in my shed, was very well done for the amount of restraint. Do read Zack Peterson: RIVERVIEW Christopher Marquis is not quite 6. He lov…
Big thanks to Mark Johnson for passing this gem along. Mark Kriegel, New York Daily News, Sept. 10, 1989:
Kate Fagan: ON THE MORNING of Jan. 17, 2014, Madison Holleran awoke in her dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania. She had spent the previous night watching the movie The Pare…
Tony Rehagen: It’s the top of the first inning, and Leo Mazzone is already rocking. Each croak of the springs in Mazzone’s brown leather recliner is punctuated by a knock in the wo…
Wright Thompson: CLAUDIA WILLIAMS FOUND comfort wearing her dad’s favorite red flannel shirt. It smelled like him. Time frayed the threads, pulled apart seams, and years ago the sh…
Mitch Ryals: Chuck Lawrence is breaking Rule No. 1: Don’t get too drunk. “The hell with this,” he tells himself. “I’m goin’ home.” He buys a bottle of Skol vodka at a corner store.…
From George Getschow at UNT: Have you submitted your narrative to Mayborn’s third annual The Best American Newspaper Narrative writing contest? In an effort to foster narrative non…
(Posted by Raja) Ben Montgomery raised some eyebrows and some questions about journalism ethics last week with his story about a mailman who flew a gyrocopter through protected air…
Matt Tullis: “Creech.” The name escaped my lips somewhere in the third mile of a five-mile run. It was a name I had been trying to think of, off-and-on, for the better part of a de…
Kevin Koczwara: A sense of dread has hung over Jason Spare’s life. Spare’s father was 33 years old when he had his first heart attack. It almost killed him. Spare’s mother had brea…
Joe Tone: It was a matter of seconds, closer to six than seven, before what was happening became obvious, the colt masked in pink kicking up clouds of red on its way into the lead.…
Paul Kalanithi: In residency, there’s a saying: The days are long, but the years are short. In neurosurgical training, the day usually began a little before 6 a.m., and lasted unti…
Anna M. Phillips: PLANT CITY — In a strawberry patch thirty minutes outside of Tampa, just past the exit for a dinosaur-themed amusement park, Maria Zuñiga pulls on her mud-covered…
Joe Kovac Jr.: On the evening of July 14, 1915, a couple went into the Southern Railway station in Macon and tried to give away a baby. The blond-haired, blue-eyed girl was almost…
Brendan Meyer: John Reeb plodded down the cracked pavement of Washington Street, his thick white beard and frizzy gray hair glowing orange in the setting sun. His feet ached as he…
Anne Hull: The Hardee’s biscuit slides toward the heat lamp, and the uniforms are waiting. “That one’s mine,” says Brandi Garner, snagging the cinnamon biscuit. A digital clock ove…
Dirk Chatelain: WAYNE, Neb. — Mike Barry bounces back and forth from the gymnasium to the ticket window, running the numbers in his head. Inside, bleachers are filling fast. Outsid…
Michael Patrick Welch: Chris Rose’s Pulitzer crystal sits in his small French Quarter apartment, its glass badly chipped from various accidents. The disfigured accolade for his wor…
Robert Samuels: Robert Barksdale steps in front of the students in an English class at Eastern High School, searching for some semblance of redemption. “For me, school is a treat b…
Chris Jones: Tonight is Wednesday night in Las Vegas, which means Scott Thompson has to become Carrot Top a little earlier than he does most nights. He has Tuesdays off, so yesterd…
Leah Sottile: CALDWELL, Idaho — In the heart of the Northwest, there is Idaho. And in the heart of Idaho, there is God. And God, residents believe, blesses some and takes others aw…
Liam Dillon: On a late Friday afternoon in February 2011, dozens of police officers carrying assault rifles arrived at Sempra Energy’s $1 billion liquefied natural gas plant on the…
Lane DeGregory: LARGO Two afternoons a week, after lunch, before laundry duty, a dozen women at the Pinellas County Jail leave their pods and thread down a long, dark corridor — th…
Dashka Slater: It was close to 5 o’clock on the afternoon of Nov. 4, 2013, and Sasha Fleischman was riding the 57 bus home from school. An 18-year-old senior at a small private hig…
Justin Heckert: Kyle Kinane is everywhere like farty Jesus. He is in the shower with a six-pack of beer. He is drunk at a Wendy’s drive-through ordering chicken nuggets out of the…
Alex Vadukul (thanks, Klink): Joanne O’Connor keeps a three-ring binder as thick as a cinder block to contain the story that echoes through her head. It is stuffed with her researc…
Meant to post this a while back. Michael Kruse: FORT PIERCE — Bud Adams, slim and dressed in blue jeans and a blue button-down shirt and cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, drove his Fo…
There’s a little bit of “of course stories change people… that’s why we tell them” when I read this, but it’s always nice when science says we’re right. Elizabeth Svoboda in Aeon h…
Mike Hixenbough: Wes Van Dorn slipped out of bed around 4 a.m., pulled a green flight suit on over his boxers, then brushed his teeth and kissed his wife before driving to work. Bo…
Jeff Maysh: Colonel Jose Espejo was a man with a problem. As the Colombian army’s communications expert watched the grainy video again, he saw kidnapped soldiers chained up inside…
Leah Sottile: Fear meets Sarah Wolff in the elevator. It’s standing beside her as she rides to her third-floor apartment. Taunting her. Tapping her shoulder and whispering in her e…
Michael Brick: It was our ball when the fight started, game point. Oscar was giving some unsolicited advice to Curtis, who was on his team. Curtis was describing the adequacy of hi…
Lane DeGregory: PAHOKEE — On the day he thought would change everything, Fred left home early while his siblings, nieces and nephews slept. He skipped breakfast, not even a Pop-Tar…
Holly Morris: Outside Hanna Zavorotnya’s cottage in Chernobyl’s dead zone, a hulking, severed sow’s head bleeds into the snow, its gargantuan snout pointing to the sky in strange,…
Jessica Contrera: Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio — The phone call that made him famous came at 4 a.m. on Jan. 24, 2012. He was very much asleep. Ring ring. Ring ring. Actually, it vibrated,…
Ben’s tweet last week about his latest story about the Dozier School for Boys was something I needed to hear. “This story is based on six years of reporting, the review of thousand…
Mark Johnson: Murray Blackmore stood at the lectern and tried to take in the dark conference room, the men and women in wheelchairs waiting for him to wrest a little hope from scie…
My dear friend Michael Kruse let it be known today that he’s leaving the St. Pete Times to work for Politico. We’re sad and happy, which exist on the same end of the emotional spec…
From Mark: Anyone else beaten down by this season of newspaper layoffs? I think I’ve heard enough crap about “right-sizing” and dying industries to last a lifetime. I’ll admit it.…
Dear friends, if you can find it in your hearts, head over to Goodreads and cast a vote for ‘Grandma Gatewood’s Walk’ in the readers’ choice history and biography awards. I’m stoke…
Daniel Miller: It was hot and I was late for lunch. I was feeling mean, like I’d been left out in the sun too long. We were meeting at a joint on La Brea, the kind of place where t…
Brooke Jarvis: On the nights before a dive, Cindy Lee Van Dover likes to stand on the deck of her research ship, looking down into the water the way an astronaut might look up at t…
Michael Kruse: Earlier this fall, someone posted a question on reddit.com: Are there two fake schools operating on the periphery of college football? One was called the College of…
Weston Phippen: TAMPA — Addison Allen was 16, about to start her senior year at Tampa’s Robinson High School, when the police called. They wanted to talk about the rumors. Several…
Stephanie McCrummen: HE WAKES UP, and even before he opens his eyes, he can see his beautiful, delusional son. Gus, Creigh Deeds thinks. He lies in bed a few minutes more, trying t…
From our pal down under, Konrad Marshall: The horizon here is a craggy ridge of open cut coal mine, the blue sky above and the Muswellbrook Race Club below. Magpies arc on the bree…
Maybe I’m missing out on some good ones, but I feel like I don’t see a straight-up narrative news story that often lately? This one’s from yesterday’s shooting in my hometown. Laur…
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I see the stories being shared by contacts in social media circles. It’s rare to see a piece of journalism make the rounds – recent e…
Joshua Hammer: Two years ago, when I began researching a piece for Outside about Moore’s abduction, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which had given Moore a grant to report…
Driving back from our annual Georgia get-together this week, Kruse started talking about interviewing our friend and just-retired TB Times colleague Jeff Klinkenberg for a what-I’v…
Is anyone else listening to this? What do you think? If you haven’t heard of it, it’s by the same crew behind This American Life. In it, Sarah Koenig recounts her reporting on a 19…
Writing fro Oklahoma State’s student newspaper, Kassie McClung: Ashley sits at a wooden table and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear with a sweaty palm. Her eyes shift nervously…
Leah Sottile: Two men in flat-billed hats and baggy t-shirts stand back-to-back on a dimly-lit stage. On cue, they bend at the waist, draw their e-cigarettes to their mouths. Wisps…
Part I, from Cary Aspinwall and Ziva Bransetter: Prosecutor Tim Harris stood before jurors deciding Michelle Murphy’s fate and told them police found someone’s blood near her slain…
Baxter Holmes: ON ALCATRAZ ISLAND, Calif. — John Hernan dug through memories from six decades back when he patrolled this rock as a correctional officer. And his 93-year-old blue e…
Dan Barry: EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A Sunday wedding that was months away, then weeks away, then days away, is now hours away, and there is so much still to do. The bride is panicki…
Joan Garrett McClane: They came from across the city. They came black and white to the towering brick house on Read Street. Bankers, lawyers, judges, government workers, retirees,…
I’m always a sucker for a Wallace Stevens homage, and this one, from SB Nation Longform, is special: a heartbreaking memoir about two best friends and the 1995 World Series. Jeremy…
Charles Anderson in New Zealand: He awakes alone in the black at 12.03am. He does not look at the clock but he knows the time. He cannot see their faces but he knows who they are.…
It’s been 10 years today since Montreal’s beloved baseball team played its last game. Adam Gopnik attended every Expos home opener from the very first, in 1969, until he left for N…
Dinty W. Moore of Brevity Magazine, in The Review Review: I have a standard answer for folks who ask me, “Do you think I should be a writer?” Or “Do you think I can succeed as a wr…
Scott Atkinson: FLINT, MI — Ermina Hagerman could not have known she was sending her children to die. It was November 1885, and it was a desperate time. Her husband, Charles, had d…
Eva Holland has kindly accepted our invitation to guest curate the blog for a spell. I’m excited to brush aside the gangrey cobwebs and see what Eva has been reading. Stay tuned.
The Des Moines Register has a new piece up. It looks like a video game, informs like journalism. They partnered with all kinds of people to put this thing together, combining photo…
Rob Rogers: By the end, they had just eight pieces of bread and a half tank of gas left. It was Sunday night, Nov. 3, and Mark and Kristine Wathke, missing since Oct. 28, were sitt…
Our pal Tim Loh, who left papers in Connecticut for Bloomberg News, graciously passed along three enterprise stories from the outfit better known for its bread-and-butter business…
Lori Kurtzman: Paul F. once gave a gas station a five-star review for its hot dogs. He tore into a breakfast restaurant for charging him a quarter for jelly. He wrote of an enjoyab…
Lane DeGregory: He got the letter in July, at his mom’s house in Seminole. She never would have believed it. Not after everything that had happened. Dakota Rockwell, 20, had applie…
Pamela Colloff: Early one morning in April, Michelle Lyons pulled up outside her daughter’s elementary school in Huntsville, seventy miles north of Houston. Set deep in the Piney W…
Michael Kruse: The Tallahassee medical examiner unzipped the body bag. Here was an 18-year-old, muscular, black male. Here was an 18-year-old, muscular, black male with white sneak…
Bill Marvel’s introduction from the 2014 edition of Ten Spurs. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is mora…
Robert Samuels: Justin Green stands on the Anacostia Metro platform, ready to work. A belt stretches across his chest, holding 33 tiny bottles filled with colorful liquids. On his…
Alexandra Zavis: BOSSEMPTELE, Central African Republic — The militia fighters were hunting for Muslims when they found the father and son at their home in this mud-brick town. They…
Jessica Lipscomb: His first kiss happened long after sunset, illuminated by headlights and perfumed by exhaust fumes on a swath of land in Punta Gorda known as the Redneck Yacht Cl…
Dan Barry: ATALISSA, Iowa — The old schoolhouse on the hill had announced the farm town of Atalissa to the Iowa flatness for more than a century. But a couple of weeks ago, the pre…
Leah Sottile: When the kid backed up to the end of the street, a thousand pairs of eyes looked his way. Straddling his bike — a red, white and blue machine covered in stars and str…
Ashley Luthern: After only four months as a homicide detective, Rose Galindo thought she had the case. Every detective has at least one. The case that eats away at you, haunts you.…
Charlie Scudder: Flies landed on the beast’s back as the cowboy got ready for his ride. He pulled a flank strap around the bull’s backside and a bull rope with a leather handle aro…
Tony Rehagen: On any given workday, the stretch of Georgia 9 that cuts north-south through Roswell is a four-lane wall of cars. Almost as old as the city itself, the thoroughfare w…
Congrats, one and all. From The Mayborn: DENTON (UNT), Texas — For the second year in a row, an article in The Washington Post by reporter Eli Saslow received the first place award…
Joan Garrett McClane: Before the cancer, there was Christmastime. There was convincing her curly-headed 7-year-old son for one more year that Santa Claus existed. There was Amazon…
Marisa Gerber: A red truck pulls into an empty parking lot off Fairfax Avenue just before 6 a.m. René Portillo gets out in a rush and heads to a blue shoe box of a building wearing…
Lori Kurtzman: He remembers the blond hair, the bobbing head, the lifeless body they pulled from the chilly water that evening. Her dad cried from the banks of the Olentangy River:…
William Browning: This woman in ill-fitting, soiled clothes sat beside a shuttered gas station in front of Leigh Mall. I would pass by in the middle of the day and see her. Usually…
Eva Holland: I can still hear the quick crunch of his vertebrae cracking. That’s the meddling of hindsight, of course — he was too far away, out in the middle of the night-dark fie…
Matthew Teague (thanks, Mark): Wildland fire chief Darrell Willis tore along the highway and turned on his truck’s headlights to cut the smoke. Ash and embers rained down around hi…
Louis Hansen (thanks, JHD): NORFOLK Two visitors stretched the security chain on the motel door and peered through the crack. Inside, a man lay motionless on the floor. Stay back,…
Deanna Pan: JUNE 20, 1994 — This is how it all ends: Four gunshots as steady as a heartbeat. Pop, pop, pop, pop. The third hits Dean Mellberg in his left shoulder, just a superfici…
To help identify and train up-and-coming narrative writers under the age of 40, George Getschow and two of the Mayborn’s literary agents, David Patterson and Jim Hornfischer, have…
Chris Jones: Gordy Gronkowski, the patriarch of those very same Gronkowskis, America’s First Family of Smashmouth Football, the man who somehow parlayed five orgasms into 1,258 pou…
Krista Ramsey and Cara Owsley: Malik Nu’qman says the three things he values most in life are his brothers, his mother and his bike. His family, in part because they’re the buffer…
Spirit magazine is on the hunt for hungry young writers (old and middle-aged also welcome) to breathe some life into our feature well. Think you’ve got the chops and ambition to cr…
Mike Hixenbaugh: A 91-year-old man lifts off in a commercial airliner bound for France and for a moment can imagine himself in the cabin of a Douglas C-47, preparing to leap into m…
Brian Mockenhaupt (thanks, Dan Stockman): Near the end of June, the weather patterns over Arizona shift. Wet air from Mexico flows in from the south, replacing the dry air that pus…
We’re pleased as punch to present an excerpt from the first chapter of Earl Swift’s latest, AUTO BIOGRAPHY: A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead and 57 Years of the American Dream. B…
Chris Vogel: In the Northern reaches of China’s Yunnan province, just before the rolling hills and deep, river-carved ravines of the Yungui Plateau give way to cascading sheets of…
Dan England: On an early April morning in 2014, jolts of heavy metal jarred the Spartan Race Gravel Pit north of Las Vegas, a boneyard of rock, grit and wind. As the first few bank…
Matt Sedensky: LOS ANGELES — Jay Westbrook’s cowboy boot is planted firmly on the gas pedal of his shiny black pickup. Everywhere he turns, a memory flashes. In Van Nuys, it is the…
Kevin Koczwara: Jimmy Bonneau was 17 years old when he threw his first punch. It was his first fight and it was with a teammate on the ice. It was the biggest beating he’s ever han…
Police are trying to determine who shot a calf, took the meat and left the carcass behind. The Janesville Gazette reported that the calf, weighing about 400 pounds, was shot with a…
Did you read Roy Peter Clark in The Chronicle of Higher Education? The stories we read live on within us, shaping our psyches. Click.
Brian Haas: CROSSVILLE, Tenn. — Paul Gregory House says “Oh, well” a lot. His mother says it’s a quirk of his damaged brain. A sort of sigh, a mental reset, when his thoughts don’t…
Ben Montgomery, on a little thing that became a big thing. Janet Feldman did not need four dozen rotisserie chickens. Who among us does? But the 57-year-old Davie woman who makes o…
Read this, from Lisa Falkenberg, part of her Pulitzer finalist entry in commentary: Just after 7 a.m., my father is sitting in the dining room, already dressed in his blue-collared…
Not sure how this eluded me so long, but read up. Billy Baker: The first time I saw Robbie Concannon’s penis was in the early ’90s at a party on the top floor of a triple-decker in…
So happy to see so many FOGs winning and being nominated for Pulitzers. Congrats, one and all.
Mailbag: The 2013 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest is accepting entries. The deadline is May 1. The contest, co-sponsored by the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Confer…
The Washington Post April 08, 1996 Toilets, Plumbed By Henry Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Toilets will never be great art, not even the expensive ones that look like art mode…
Check out the first chapter of Running the River: Secrets of the Sabine, from the fine Texas writer Wes Ferguson: A man shot at us our first day on the river. Of course he did. You…
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sunday, October 9, 1966 by John De Groot RAVENNA (AP)–In his world of loneliness and twisted nightmares, Dale Spaur wonders if the nightmare will ever e…
Rebecca Catalanello and Kathleen Flynn: She hobbled down the jetway carrying a suitcase, a pillow, a teddy bear for good luck. At the plane’s entrance she stopped, paralyzed by dre…
Chris Ballard: “You want a story?” my brother said. “You should write about the Streak.” This was last year, over a beer. My brother is 41 now, a successful doctor with two kids. A…
Ethan Brown in Playboy (NSFW, probably): When Lil Reese tells you to get out of the car, you exit the vehicle as fast as you can. The tension began to boil at breakfast when Brando…
Dan Zak: The scent on the breeze is — what? Guava, with a hint of lion’s mane? Or maybe a cocktail of vanilla and cherry menthol and jungle juice. Past the hotel lobby, the haze th…
Fascinating stuff from Paul Coover: Hey Ben, I was recently reading through some old Ernie Pyle stories because A) I graduated from a journalism school that bears his name on its m…
Read. For 1/1/00, I assigned Henry Allen to summarize the millennium in poetry. Here's the brilliant result. http://t.co/rN4etlUwxj — Gene Weingarten (@geneweingarten) March 19, 20…
Life’s Small Moments Loom Large. From the WSJ (thanks TLoh): As night fell last Friday in Kuala Lumpur, businessman Philip Wood hurried to gather his bags for a trip to Beijing. He…
From Mayborn and the Dallas Morning News: In an effort to foster narrative nonfiction storytelling at newspapers across America, The Dallas Morning News is sponsoring the second an…
Justin Heckert: I heard that the clown would never say a word. That he barely ever spoke, even to friends. That he chose to communicate through song, and all of his songs were sad.…
Rod Norland (thanks, Mark): BAMIAN, Afghanistan — She is his Juliet and he is her Romeo, and her family has threatened to kill them both. Zakia is 18 and Mohammad Ali is 21, both t…
Dan Barry: WATERLOO, Iowa — A man stands at a bus stop. He wears bluejeans, cowboy boots, and a name tag pinned like a badge to his red shirt. It says: Clayton Berg, dishwasher, co…
This fun thing – The Tom Waits Map – making the rounds among my friends got me thinking about place. In most of the daily stories I write, I don’t pay much attention to where somet…
Jonah Ogles: The cinder-block school has no windows and no doors, just a string of incandescent lightbulbs hanging down the center of the ceiling like the spine of a great whale. I…
Congrats to Mark Johnson and the I-team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for winning the 2014 Selden Ring Award for investigative journalism. Read the series: Deadly Delays.
Our friend Neil Swidey’s book is out today. The praise has been great. Order yours.
Angelo B. Henderson, a Detroit journalist and radio talk show host, died Saturday. He won a Pulitzer in 1999, when he was at the Wall Street Journal, in the feature writing categor…
Lane DeGregory: TRINITY — In the passenger seat of his mom’s SUV, Austin Erickson sits silently, clutching his wallet, watching as his subdivision slides by. “So Publix?” asks his…
Lewisville (Texas) high-schooler Katelyn Hoagland: The dreams started in eighth grade, the year when I sang in the choir and performed in theater. And the year when Logan, the I’m-…
John H. Tucker (thanks, Barry): Here is the friend. Arms cradling the boy he has known since fifth grade. The boy, 17, is on the ground, foaming at the mouth. Moaning, twitching, t…
A few well-distilled thoughts from our colleague Russ Rymer: It would be encouraging to think, as Jonathan Mahler contends in “When ‘Long-Form’ Is Bad Form” (Op-Ed, Jan. 25), that…
Kevin Hardy: LAFOLLETTE, Tenn. — This place doesn’t look like much. The brick exterior is falling away. The homemade sign standing by the dead-end gravel road is written in crooked…
Todd C. Frankel (Thanks, Mark): CAPE GIRARDEAU, MO. His ex-wife gave him $25 for gas. She didn’t need to. But she did. Somehow he had to get to court tomorrow. His borrowed Jeep wa…
Don’t miss this Bronx Banter interview with the great Pete Dexter: (Thanks to Oliver.) Bronx Banter: What kind of reporter were you when you began? Pete Dexter: I didn’t have a spe…
Zac Crain: It was January 3, 1983, the last day of the NFL’s strike-shortened season, and Tony Dorsett’s Dallas Cowboys were losing to the Minnesota Vikings on Monday Night Footbal…
Michael Kruse: Gated, guarded Wingfield North, outside Orlando in Longwood, is a collection of about a hundred houses with pillars and pools and new BMWs parked out front. Golden e…
Marisa Kwiatkowski: A woman and three children who claimed to be possessed by demons. A 9-year-old boy walking backward up a wall in the presence of a family case manager and hospi…
Sonia Smith: Andy and Patty Grove never planned to settle outside of Texas. Their roots in the state reach back many generations. Patty’s ancestors came to Texas on a wagon train f…
Huh? It wasn’t so many years ago that people assumed the Internet would make long magazine-style stories obsolete. Paradoxically, it now seems to have revived this once threatened…
Charles Bethea: “What’s happenin’, my friend?” Vernon Keenan is saying hello to a large, shy-looking man named John Gibson in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s main elevator, a…
So. Caleb Hannan: Strange stories can find you at strange times. Like when you’re battling insomnia and looking for tips on your short game. It was well past midnight sometime last…
You have to read S.L. Price on Richard Ben Cramer’s unfinished work. It’ll get you fired up. Time now to speak of writers. We are, most of us, a particularly cramped breed, gunning…
Easily worth your $3.99. Barry Yeoman: He stood at the kitchen window waiting. He had memorized everything around him: the pine walls, bare of wallpaper or even paint; the wardrobe…
Robert Samuels: It only took a phone call in 2005 to persuade then-D.C. Council member Vincent C. Gray to push for the inclusion of the Lincoln Heights housing project and the surr…
From Mark Johnson: Last night, I wound up reading this 18-year-old Washington Post Story about the death of George McGovern’s daughter. It’s terrific. It got me trying to think whe…
Thomas Curwen: Frost glistens on the meadow grass. The sun has yet to crest Church Creek Divide, and on his last day in the cabin, Jack English isn’t about to break from routine. H…
Amy Harmon: KONA, Hawaii — From the moment the bill to ban genetically engineered crops on the island of Hawaii was introduced in May 2013, it garnered more vocal support than any…
Some good stuff from the folks over at the Indiana Daily Student: Katie Mettler: HE’D ALREADY BURNED HIS PRISON JUMPSUIT AND SECURED A NEW DRIVER’S LICENSE. He’d put back on his fi…
Michael J. Mooney: When Rafael Cruz walks into the VIP room at the River Plantation Country Club, there’s a spontaneous round of applause. People who were sipping strawberry punch…
Jamie Thompson: On the last night of his life, Kidd Kraddick picked out a stranger on a street corner in the French Quarter. It was a broiling evening last July in New Orleans. Kra…
In case you missed it in the comments, here’s a three-part series from the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Joan Garrett McClane: Her son’s body was left splayed on a road where the s…
Mike Hixenbaugh: VIRGINIA BEACH The man in the grainy surveillance footage strides through the sleepy cul-de-sac with purpose, like someone in command of his own destiny. Freeze th…
I’m making a list of the best newspaper stories this year and could use some help. Don’t be shy. Please and thank you.
For your booklovers, here are a few from our friends from this year. The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese, by Michael Pater…
Christopher Goffard, Joel Rubin and Kurt Streeter: The man emerged from a charcoal-gray pickup and approached the hotel check-in counter. He wanted a room and the Internet pass cod…
Jessica Contrera: In the days before they buried her, no one knew how not to come undone. Her roommate dropped out of school. Her father kept abruptly needing to leave the room. An…
Eva Holland: Alaska’s Teklanika River runs fast and cold. One chilly, drizzly day in early September, I stood on its eastern bank and watched two young hikers strip down to boxer s…
Justin Heckert with a heartbreaking story on a woman who didn’t want to die alone: This is something that happened during a long, dry summer, and if I don’t write it down now I fea…
Jacob Jones: Enclosed in the broken glass and crushed steel of a crumpled 1969 Plymouth Fury, Margaret Nordhagen sits next to the love of her life. Both of them are dying. For more…
Pam Louwagie: Opening the door, he paused to let his eyes adjust from the bright light of the summer day outside before he could see her. The girl was huddled with a friend on a gr…
T Lake: He arrives early, wearing a white T-shirt and red cotton shorts, and during the handshake he reaches out with his free hand, as if to say, I’m open to hugging, but I’ll lea…
Dan Barry: PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The last full-time employee in the tallest building in Rhode Island has grown accustomed to the 26 stories of emptiness. He doesn’t even hear the abse…
Matthew Stanmyer: At 11 o’clock on a Thursday night in August, the thermostat inside George Sullivan’s apartment is cranked to 90 degrees. This might as well be hell. Over the next…
Peter Cooper: On Nov. 10, 1973, Tex Ritter stood on the Ryman Auditorium stage and brought David “Stringbean” Akeman to the “Grand Ole Opry.” “Stringbean, like Grandpa Jones, since…
Jeremy Markovich: Cody Adams takes a drag off his cigarette, and looks over at Andy Smith. “You scared yet?” he asks. “Definitely scared,” Smith tells him. “I’m trying to convince…
And Brandon Sneed tried his best to write it, even though he wasn’t sure he should. This brings up a good question that Brandon wrestled with during the reporting and writing proce…
Scott Farwell: Lauren is alone in the dark. She’s naked, sitting cross-legged in her own filth, eyes focused on a sliver of light. It’s all she has, that light. It glows from under…
Dan Barry: The Protestant minister and the Roman Catholic priest had a $10 bet riding on the 1946 World Series. The minister, a Lutheran from Missouri, went with the St. Louis Card…
Andy McCullough: NEWARK, Del. — The rarity rests behind a stack of papers on a desk inside a first-floor office at the University of Delaware. Kevin Kerrane rises from his chair to…
Michael Kruse: In the dark, in the wet, whirling roar of Hurricane Sandy, on a ship tipping so badly the deck felt like a steep, slick roof, the desperate, damaged sailor searched…
Boston Globe’s new owner, John W. Henry: “Now I see The Boston Globe and all that it represents as another great Boston institution that is worth fighting for. There isn’t a clear…
Jessica Contrera: On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the…
If we define "narrative" in a broader sense than "well-told text story" then this absolutely qualifies http://t.co/6EgfY4Xano @gangrey — Nigel Duara (@nigelduara) October 23, 2013…
Brick: I am a third-generation fan of the professional football team in Washington. When my family sat down for pancakes last weekend, with a big game against Washington’s archriva…
The second paragraph from “People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water,” in the 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories. Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass…
Debbie Nathan When the couple met in 2005, Emily was a methamphetamine addict, living in a suburb near Phoenix. She was in her early 20s and could barely hold a job, but when she w…
Impressive work by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and by J. David McSwane: Wearing only a sports bra and boxers, bruises on her back, the girl surged through the salon’s door. Her fee…
Brendan Bernhard, via Romenesko, by way of Varma: I was going through my files recently and found Brendan Bernhard‘s amusing New York Press story titled, “A Casual Affair: Temporar…
Winner of a Casey Medal this year. Thanks to Alex Zayas for passing this along. Jennifer Gonnerman: Cheryl McCollins got her first hint that something was wrong when she answered h…
If you haven’t seen it by now, Matt Tullis is really running with the podcast. Nine episodes so far: Jason Fagone, Luke Dittrich, Brian Mockenhaupt, Jesse Lichtenstein, Stephen Rod…
Paul Duggan: For 16 minutes, doctors in an emergency room treatment bay called Trauma 1 worked urgently to resuscitate the patient, a gunshot victim with no vital signs and a wound…
Mary Pilon: Scott DiPonio raced to make sure everything was in order — the fighters were ready, the ring girls were on time and the Bud Light was cold. DiPonio was a local promoter…
Kyle Swenson: The grin was a dead giveaway. Bob Sellers spotted the smile on his friend’s face as he pulled up to the end of the tarmac. Bill Warner was still straddling his race b…
Ed’s note: I got my hands on the following email from Lane DeGregory to a journalism student in response to a couple questions: “Is there anything you wish you could tell yourself…
David Finkel: The way it worked was that they joined the Army because they were starry-eyed or heartbroken or maybe just out of work, and then they were assigned to be in the infan…
Leah Sottile: When I was 13, I dreamed of kissing boys in the backseat of a car while Scorpions, a German hard rock outfit, crooned “Winds of Change” from the car stereo. It’s stil…
Recall reading this when it came out. Still holds up. David W. Dunlap: Tania Head’s story, as shared over the years with reporters, students, friends and hundreds of visitors to gr…
Chris Jones: Our new hundred-dollar bill, like every other single piece of American folding money, is born in this rotary boiler. It’s a perfect sphere, an angry kettle fifteen fee…
Konrad Marshall: Christopher Ryan Lane should not be present at this mournful event, on this mercifully mild winter morning. He grew up here but he does not belong in this place. N…
Liz Robbins: The tales of Colin Devlin’s generosity sound like fables. Once, though he was nearly broke and working as a bartender, he pulled $1,000 out of his sock and gave it to…
Don Van Natta Jr.: … All of the vaudevillian hoopla made it easy to forget the enormous stakes and the far-reaching social consequences. King was playing not just for public accept…
Katy Vine: Although the city of West sits just off Interstate 35, on a stretch twenty miles north of Waco that is saturated with harried drivers, the town itself is tranquil. A cou…
Our old friend Raja Abdulrahim: Battoul makes her way around the smashed bus full of sandbags and steps into sniper territory. A man balancing a large box of produce on his left sh…
Dave Tarrant and Sarah Mervosh: He sat alone in the dark, the tip of his Marlboro glowing red with burning ash. After the fire and the explosion and the mushrooming black cloud tha…
Good question from Roy Peter Clark: I’ve been thinking a lot recently of the famous piece — about 1,100 words — that Jimmy Breslin wrote 50 years ago this November for the New York…
Louis Hansen: Manuel Montez walked with a Colorado sheriff’s deputy into a small room. Two Norfolk detectives entered and closed the door. Montez, a weathered man in his mid-50s, s…
Take a look at this four-part series from Meg Kissinger. Part 1: San Francisco — Rob Sweeney sucked on an unlit cigarette while his mother stood at the car rental counter, trying t…
Here’s Dan Barry: FORT WORTH — In a corner of the Shannon Rose Hill Cemetery, close to a chain-link fence that separates the living and the dead, a patch of ground has been worn fr…
A few days ago, Charlie Hurt at the Washington Times wrote with nostalgia about the Washington Post of old, and particularly the “simple stories about mundane life that were so bea…
Brian Haas: In a graveyard filled with those who died with no money and sometimes no family, he died with even less. His gravestone simply read, “John (19) Doe.” He was the 19th un…
Wright being Wright (again): Four days after the tweet, Johnny Manziel did what many boys do when they’re in trouble. He went home. The farm roads and state highways between Colleg…
Amy Harmon: CLEWISTON, Fla. — The call Ricke Kress and every other citrus grower in Florida dreaded came while he was driving. “It’s here” was all his grove manager needed to say t…
I’m a sucker for narrative and science meshed together. Jason Fagone: What’s your full name? Where are you? What month is it? What day of the week is it? Walter Keller tried to spe…
“Imagine it’s your daily coffee. Each time you put down your money the cup gets smaller and the brew gets weaker. That’s essentially what’s happened to American newspapers. We took…
I can’t stop looking at this photo of The King reading a story about himself in the St. Pete Times on August 6, 1956.
Wright Thompson: MANHATTAN, Mont. — Something strange is happening at the house glowing in the distance. Or rather, a web of strange things, magic almost, if you’ll permit what mig…
Earl Swift: NORFOLK He found poetry in tomatoes, corn bread, in old dogs and the scent of magnolia blossoms. He found romance, adventure and inspiration in the past and its stories…
Lane DeGregory: ST. PETERSBURG His alarm beeps at 3:30 a.m., drowning out the talk radio that keeps him company all night. He rolls over slowly and prays: “Please, Lord, give me th…
This is a belated congrats, but a well-deserved one. Several FOGs are on this year’s list of winners for the Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism. The award recognizes the best…
Charles Anderson: The land slipped and crumbled beneath his feet. It had been several hours since Gerry Tonkin began the search and while the topography around him had shifted wild…
Spend $1.99 for this story by Luke Dittrich. If you do, and you read it, and it fails to blow you away, I will personally double your money back. Triple it, even. Go.
Tim Rohan in the New York Times: BOSTON — Jeff Bauman stared straight ahead, his eyes wary and unconvinced, as his doctor told him the next procedure would be easy and painless. He…
Thanks to George Getschow for allowing us to publish these two essays on writing, from George and Michael Mooney, which will be published in Ten Spurs, an anthology of the “best of…
Thanks to KVV for pointing to this cool feature in ESPN The Magazine in which star athletes write letters to their younger selves. I wonder if we can adapt this as a learning exper…
I’m excited to welcome a new voice to the mix here. Our friend Janine Anderson has graciously volunteered to help us in our search for the perfect story. You probably know her alre…
Recently, Brandon Sneed posted a quote from writing guru Robert McKee on his website: “Convert exposition to ammunition.” This is tremendous advice. Here’s what I think it means: E…
Baxter Holmes: Flames licked at the vinyl paneling and the plywood boxed around a stovepipe. They crept skyward, toward scattered clouds hung late in the frigid North Shore night.…
Rick Maese: The secret was already weighing on him as the team bus pulled out of Washington and headed north. Tal Bayer, coach of one of the District’s most unlikely athletic succe…
Port Magazine heralded the “New Golden Age” of print publishing by featuring six male editors on its cover. Lots of folks took issue, including Alyssa Rosenberg, who wrote: “The ch…
We don’t often get to hear Gary Smith talking about the craft. Here’s a rare treat: a conversation with Richard Deitsch about Gary’s Sports Illustrated cover story on a football co…
Has anyone else noticed that people don’t comment on this site as often as they used to? I’m wondering what’s changed. Is it because more people are instead posting their comments…
Joshua Sharpe: This Father’s Day marks the 13th anniversary of the death of a Woodstock teen killed in a car accident. The man accused of causing the crash was believed to be in th…
More Eli Saslow: In NEWTOWN, Conn. — They had promised to try everything, so Mark Barden went down into the basement to begin another project in memory of Daniel. The families of S…
Wright Thompson: VERONA, Italy — Right up until he started quoting Hitler and dropping N-bombs, my new friend was a great dude. I’ll call him The Hooligan. A more generous host wou…
Danielle Paquette: Early morning, on a US Airways flight from Los Angeles to Tampa, Taryn Stone cradles a bonsai tree and chats with a gray-haired man who just bought her two shots…
Ben Montgomery: In February 1961, Vic Prinzi pulled into the visitors’ lot at the Florida School for Boys in Marianna and sat in the car collecting his thoughts. He was apprehensiv…
Eli Saslow on the allegations that ruined a football coach’s career: THE ATHLETIC DIRECTOR walked onto the field unannounced, wearing jeans and sandals, and Todd Hoffner knew in th…
Peter Jamison: CLEARWATER — Ivan “Van” Farber, 68, careens through suburban traffic beneath a Florida sky the color of ash and indigo, squinting against the wind as his convertible…
I’d be very interested to hear your immediate reaction to this Snow Fall-esque multimedia presentation from The Guardian. Take a look. Firestorm: The photograph of the Holmes famil…
Gotta respect his passion: Every Monday at 7 a.m. Andrew Davis sits down and writes a letter to Warren Buffett. His goal is to get a meeting with the billionaire and chat about the…
Tommy Tomlinson on the core elements of storytelling: Thanks for having me here today. I want this to be more of a conversation than a speech. I don’t need much time for a speech,…
Ten years ago I bought a copy of the annual Best American Magazine Writing collection. It contained a story called “Hollywood’s Information Man,” by Amy Wallace, originally publish…
Tom Lake: Jerry Jerome Brown Jr. comes along at a strange time in history: a time when humans willingly enter cages of glass and steel that move in such great numbers at such terri…
Sabrina Rubin Erdely (pdf): She told everyone her boobs were real, which was a laugh: They were immobile and perfectly round, and looked airbrushed, even in person. She credited he…
Steve Friedman (thanks, Don D.): You know what people think. They see jeans too short and winter coat too shiny, too grimy, and think, homeless. They watch a credit card emerge fro…
Danielle Dreilinger: Ka’Nard Allen, 10, does not want to talk about what must be the longest and hardest 10th year of life in all New Orleans. He doesn’t want to talk about Mother’…
Deadline is approaching on the Best American Narrative Newspaper Writing Contest. Don’t forget to submit your best work. In an effort to encourage narrative nonfiction storytelling…
GBSNP Varma at a hospice in India: Rajamma weathers these episodes one dreaded night after another. Time, for him, is measured in breaths. What does he like about his wife? “Goodne…
Roy Peter Clark studies what made Eric Moskowitz’ Boston Globe story work. Look and learn.
Fairly amazing story by Dan Zak on a nun and two male companions who breached security at a nuclear facility in the name of God: The devil was just over Pine Ridge. From the desert…
Konrad Marshall: My week at the wheel begins in darkness, at 3.50am on a Monday on an industrial side street in Richmond, out the front of a small taxi depot opposite a panel shop…
Matthew Teague: TUPELO, Miss. — Federal agents of all sorts invaded northeast Mississippi several days ago, on a mission: Find the man who sent a poison-laced letter to the preside…
Another ebook you should by, from our friend Michael Mooney. So much to read, so little time. Journalist Michael Mooney reveals the life story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the American…
Our pal Michael Brick delivers a Kindle Single. Buy it. When a mysterious military vet lures hundreds of bikers on a ludicrously dangerous transcontinental motorcycle ride, he draw…
Dan Barry: HOPKINTON, Mass. It all starts here, as Hopkinton likes to say. And last week, once again, thousands of marathoners formed a block of Main Street determination that stre…
Is it me, or do these jobs get more interesting the further down the list you go?
Mailbag: Attention longform newspaper writers — Big news from the Mayborn: In an effort to encourage narrative nonfiction storytelling at newspapers across America, the Mayborn Lit…
Congratulations to Mark Johnson, winner of the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics.
By MIKE WILSON St. Petersburg Times 11/29/1995 ST. PETERSBURG — On Tuesday morning, the viewing room at Memorial Park Funeral Home bloomed with the bright colors of sorrow: pink ca…
Last night on Twitter, emboldened by a combination of Pamela Colloff and Woodford Reserve, Ben was moved to declare, “All you sports folks, I love what most of you do, but there ar…
Michael J. Mooney: There’s a story about Chris Kyle: on a cold January morning in 2010, he pulled into a gas station somewhere along Highway 67, south of Dallas. He was driving his…
In which a titan of narrative journalism admits that he spent more than $587,000 on clothes, mostly leather from Gucci, between 2010 and 2012. Pretty sure that’s even more than Wri…
Doug Miller: The sun is hot on top of a hill in San Diego and the house is white, so white that it looks perfect. A late-model 1990s sedan stops in the middle of the quiet street i…
Chris Jones: For as long as anyone can remember, Monday night has been Manly Night at the Playboy Mansion. A little after five o’clock, nine or ten of Hugh Hefner’s best friends —…
Remember the classic Gary Smith story on the boating accident that killed two big-league pitchers? Here’s Anthony Castrovince with the next chapter (thanks, Doug): The cloudless sk…
Evan West (thanks, Tony): I was walking the cracked and crumbling sidewalk along the street where I grew up, on the near-east side of Indianapolis, with my dog, a basset hound name…
Joe Kovac Jr.: BUTTS COUNTY — After hours of waiting, Andrew Allen Cook’s execution moved quickly to conclusion late Thursday once the process began. Cook was guided into the death…
Robert Samuels: The field was barren, all dead grass and half-frozen mud until two weeks ago, when copious amounts of yellow corn mysteriously started to appear on the ground. Fair…
Mike Mooney sent me the link to this story by Michael Graff. Please read it, and then let’s talk about it. I was riveted. *** You think you know them. You’re watching from home. Yo…
Steve Friedman, (thanks, Harry Hall): They are sitting together at a round oak table in a sun-soaked living room on a mountain ridge in Ukiah, California, surrounded by fir trees a…
Dan Zak: LOS ANGELES — The gowns swish up to the gate. Checkpoint Charlize, let’s call it. “Not on the list, sorry,” says a pert Vanity Fair staffer, checking her papers as black t…
Passing this along from our friend: Company: The Pacific Northwest Inlander Position: News Reporter at successful weekly Location: Spokane, Washington St. Job Status: Full-time Sal…
Nigel Duara: On opposite sides of the world, the brother and sister sat transfixed before their computers, reading a stranger’s account of long-ago secrets and deeply buried sins.…
Tim Botos: Still inside his mom’s womb, Austin Gerstenslager began a journey to his birth and medically certain death. A half-dozen nurses and assistants wheeled mom and unborn out…
Kevin Pang: It was the most important night of his career. Curtis Duffy hovered over plates inside the gleaming white kitchen of his new restaurant, Grace. Head down, with the poke…
Andrew Meacham: TAMPA — Tiffany Messingham wanted to get her first-grade students thinking about how the sun works. How does it change things? So in November, the bubbly teacher at…
Wright Thompson: CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Five weeks before his 50th birthday, Michael Jordan sits behind his desk, overlooking a parking garage in downtown Charlotte. The cell phone in f…
Mark Johnson passed along this story, from March 6, 1988. Take a look. By TAD BARTIMUS, Associated Press Writer BUCKNER, Mo. BUCKNER, Mo. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…
Dan Barry: VICCO, Ky. — In a former pool hall that is now the municipal building for a coal smudge of a place in eastern Kentucky called Vicco, population 335, the January meeting…
Zack McMillin: They came floating through her Chicago office, two words transmitted from a news alert on Dec. 14, two words conjoined to form the awful phrase that has become all t…
Paige Williams: Natural history goes to auction five or six times a year in America, and one Sunday last May a big sale took place in Chelsea, at the onetime home of the Dia Center…
Me and Tom and Chris talked to Matt Tullis about all sorts of things. Kruse has the highlights.
Tim Botos: “Did you commit this robbery?” the attorney asked her client. Emil Jaroszyk (pronounced Ja-ross-ik) had answered that question many times over the years. First, as a you…
Two-fer. Read up. Justin Heckert: Behind the empty bleachers he parks his green pickup truck and cuts the engine, spits Copenhagen into an empty plastic water bottle. He opens the…
Michael J. Mooney (thanks to Dixon for the link): As David Pomerantz tells the story, his grandfather was 6 years old at the beginning of World War II, when Pomerantz’s great-grand…
Joe Kovac Jr.: The man who has witnessed more Atlanta Falcons games than anyone on Earth can see them no more. Oh, he can watch them a little when he scooches his leather easy chai…
Dean Starkman takes the temperature of longform at a few papers. It’s not looking good. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, published 256 stories longer than 2,000 words last year…
Up ahead, on your left, Gangrey, The Podcast. Huge thanks to Matt Tullis and Glenn Battishill for pulling this together. Follow @gangreypodcast.
If you’ve ever been part of a big media descent upon a small town, you know that awkward feeling of trying to get the story while also trying to not be an asshole. It’s rare in my…
Jim Dwyer: NEWTOWN, Conn. — A few minutes before 10 Friday morning, Michelle Urbina was speaking with a customer at the small bank branch that she manages in Bethel, Conn., when he…
Susan Taylor Martin, Feb. 11, 2001: He lives alone in the big city. Weekday mornings, between 9 and 9:30, he steps out of Apt. 3A and rides the elevator down to the lobby. Walks ac…
Margalit Fox: It was born on a beach six decades ago, the product of a pressing need, an intellectual spark and the sweep of a young man’s fingers through the sand. The result ador…
Eli Saslow: NEWTOWN, Conn. — The day began, like all days at Sandy Hook Elementary, with the morning ritual of taking attendance. Yellow buses rolled into the parking lot just befo…
An obtituary for James Mattioli, 6 3/4, who died on Friday at Sandy Hook. Thanks to Justin for passing it on.
Susan Carroll (subscription required): PIEDRAS BLANCAS, Guatemala – Leonel Tipaz de León stretched out on the wood-framed bed in his parents’ tiny adobe home, its peeling, aqua shu…
From Daniel Boone to Dirty Harry, America’s Fascination with Firearms Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer April 19, 1989 STYLE, PAGE D1 The Great American Gun Mystique: We lo…
Part 3, from Kelley: The surgeon sewed our baby shut. The neonatologist rose from her prayer rug. Then a nurse returned our tiny daughter to the quiet of her incubator, and we made…
Anne Hull over the weekend in the Washington Post: Week after week, the mailman climbed the steep hill of Shenango Street to the house with the busted porch steps. “Dear Miss Rouzz…
Thanks to Doyle for passing this along. Lauren Smiley: On Feb. 15, Thomas Bruso’s already unpredictable life took an abrupt detour. It was the day he ceased being Thomas Bruso and…
Today I came across a hidden gem of a story, an unbylined piece that ran on page 6A of The Anniston Star in Alabama on October 9, 1972. I present it here, in its entirety, until th…
From the mailbag: I was wondering if you could suggest city hall reporters with strong writing chops. Headed there soon and I love narrative-style writing, and I’m fearful that I’l…
Craig Pittman: North of Gainesville, a church camp once attracted thousands of visitors because it was built around the gushing waters of Hornsby Springs. Then the spring stopped f…
T Lake: 1 A hailstorm in Colorado, summer 1993. A mother and her son were riding bicycles along the edge of Horseshoe Lake, in the town of Loveland. They were three miles from home…
So much good in here. Dan Barry: There was a time; admit it. There was a time when, if given a choice between a warm pastry fresh from a baker’s oven and an ageless package of Ring…
Two Parts. Molly Hennessey-Fiske: After the nightmares started, Davien Graham avoided his bicycle. In his dreams, he pedaled his silver BMX bike through his neighborhood, heard gun…
Dave Tarrant (paywall): PELHAM – The 50-year-old tree growing near Catherine Porter’s front porch sags from the weight of pecans the size of golf balls. The clusters of green husks…
Mailbag: The Winston-Salem Journal laid off its publisher, its multimedia editor and its arts reporter yesterday. The multimedia editor, Michelle Johnson — a talented woman with a…
Ben in today’s Tampa Bay Times: The young man stood at the front of Bus C, his ribs rising and falling with each breath. Before him stood about 20 members of one of the best marchi…
Marjorie Williams, 2004: Every other day of the year, any mother knows that glitter is the work of Satan, but last Sunday it lit her skin with a dew of every color.
Jay Price: Four pagers went off simultaneously early Monday, and the on-duty helicopter crew pulled themselves from their warm bunks at Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City. It w…
I posted Part I below, but go read Part II and Part III of Alex Zayas’ investigation into Florida group homes.
Mike Wilson: TAMPA — A dark-haired woman pushing a double stroller appeared at Airside E security Saturday morning nearly out of breath. Two tiny girls reclined in the stroller. A…
John Jeremiah Sullivan: About a month ago, editors from this magazine, which employs me, and from which I am therefore loath to turn down assignments even when they are horrifying,…
Strong, important investigative work from Alexandra Zayas. Part I: They shaved him bald that first morning in 2008, put him in an orange jumpsuit and made him exercise past dark. T…
Halloween Edition By Henry Allen Washington Post April 3, 1983 Satan? You gotta be kidding. Didn’t science fix that superstitious wagon for good? Didn’t Valium and birth-control pi…
I continue to be surprised and delighted by the upstart This Land Press, and I’m glad they’re getting attention. This project — it’s more than that at this point — gives me great h…
A couple of new ones you might want to check out: The Next Wave, edited by Walt Harrington and Mike Sager. Next Wave is fascinating and beautiful reading for enthusiasts and studen…
Yes, it’s true. Maybe, even as newspapers contract, the people who know what makes a great story will find a way to keep getting paid for their work.
Michael J. Mooney: So much of Bountygate boils down to evidence. This is the biggest scandal in the history of the NFL, and when the initial punishments came down—long suspensions…
Thanks to our buddy Erik Hahmann (@ehahmann) for this Q and A with the lovely and talented Chris Jones. You’ve written a number of profiles in your career, perhaps most famously Ro…
Chris Jones: On or about March 15 of this year, Teller — the smaller, quieter half of the magicians Penn & Teller — says he received an e-mail from a friend in New York. In that e-…
Kruse: Nanci Donnellan, better known as the Fabulous Sports Babe, walked slowly one afternoon this past April to a table at a gelato shop on Beach Drive in St. Petersburg. She wore…
Rukmini Callimachi: HAWKANTAKI, Niger — Each day before the reaping, the 11-year-old girl walked between the stunted stalks of millet with a sense of mounting dread. In a normal ye…
Joe Kovac Jr.: When cockroaches by the dozen started showing up at the front doors of the Fountain Temple AME Church on Sunday mornings, folks in the 35-member congregation weren’t…
Michael Lewis: Even after his parachute opened, Tyler Stark sensed he was coming down too fast. The last thing he’d heard was the pilot saying, “Bailout! Bailout! Bail—” Before th…
Kalani Simpson: When Nicolette Maroulis first came to, she thought she was dead. They were giving her last rites. The priest hadn’t acknowledged that she had woken up, and, so, lyi…
Kruse: JANESVILLE, Wis. — The Labor Day parade here in Paul Ryan’s hometown started with a police siren. It moved slowly down Milwaukee Street, followed by clowns, a green-fatigued…
I’ve been corresponding lately with a talented young Missouri Tiger named Seth Boster (class of 2016). He could use some editing. Well, Tiger Nation — Justin, Tony, Seth, Wright, a…
KVV: On a hot summer evening, when you drive the stretch of highway that snakes its way through water tower towns and the green and golden fields of farmland that make up the lands…
Where’s Ben? In New Orleans, waiting for the storm: About a dozen homeless men hung out under a pavilion as rain sputtered and a firm wind blew.
You’ll want to read this one. Beautiful piece of work from Corpus Christi. Mark Collette: CORPUS CHRISTI — Phil Rosenstein prescribed himself the only medicine he can fathom for a…
Big writing from Michael Browning, 20 years ago: There is simply too much sky. A fortnight after the attack of Hurricane Andrew, the southern arc of Florida lies luminous and shado…
Wright Thompson reports to the marrow: HAARLEM, The Netherlands — Everything that would destroy them had already been set in motion when Gregory and Jason Halman squeezed into the…
Anonymous observation from a “Junior Member” at SportsJournalists.com: “Spending too much time with that Gangrey crowd will give one an ego as fat as theirs.” Govern yourselves acc…
C.J. Chivers: TAL RIFAAT, Syria — Abdul Hakim Yasin, the commander of a Syrian antigovernment fighting group, lurched his pickup truck to a stop inside the captured residential com…
Rukmini Callimachi: SAKABAL, Niger – In a part of the world where the worth of a man is measured by his animals, Tuareg nomad Soumaila Wantala has come to this market to do the unt…
Peter Jamison: LARGO — Arnie is a dour 10-year-old beagle known for his eccentricities, not the least of which is a propensity to eat hundreds of dollars in cash. Seven years ago,…
Our friend, Michael Brick, has a new book out today. It’s a great, important read. Dana Goldstein: Brick has done his homework on the history of American education, and he accurate…
Says Justin Heckert (and confirms Tom Junod): “Required reading for newly hired ATLmag writers. And for ALL writers.” Pat Conroy: Divorce has many witnesses, many victims. It is a…
Julia O’Malley: Bill “Guillermo” Martinez arrived at my door for the first time looking like a person who’d recently disembarked a cruise ship. He had on a denim shirt, sweater ves…
Wow. Wow. Wow. Has anyone else read Mark Singer’s New York piece on Kip Litton, the mystery marathoner? Just finished it today and it’s incredible. Apparently not online except in…
David Simon: To remember him as we met him, twenty years ago, is to know everything that was lost, everything that never happened to a boy who could surprise you with his charm and…
Wright: Before you join Urban Meyer, who is walking toward the exit of the Ohio State football office, there’s a scar you need to see. A few years ago in Gainesville, his middle ch…
What’s the best Olympics-related story you’ve read this year? What’s the best Olympics-related story you’ve ever read? Let’s have a showdown. Post your favorite story (even if you…
Thought this was a little gem buried in the metro section. Jodie Tillman: TAMPA — The call to police Monday came from inside the Ritz Ybor, the scene of a day-long death-metal band…
Alan Feuer: Jake LaMotta was standing in his kitchen on the East Side of Manhattan the other day, wedged in front of his refrigerator, puffing on a Marlboro in the dark. He was blo…
Robert Sanchez: On a cool January night, more than a dozen preteen girls crowded a staircase above a hallway that led to the Olympic-size pool inside the Lee and Joe Jamail Texas S…
David Montero: Aurora, Colo. » Each morning for the past few days, Austin Hogan has carefully pulled out his clarinet, put in a reed and played music in the hospital room. His audi…
Robert Samuels: Usaam Mukwaya realized his American dream at a bar that reeked of sweat and stale beer, where a hunk of a bartender doled out Heinekens and whiskey sours. Men dance…
Ben Montgomery: The sun beat hot and the humidity hung like plastic wrap. The blisters on my heels and toes had grown so fat it felt like I was stepping on cherries. I’d been on th…
The incredible story of why the Toronto Star assigned 15 reporters to write an obit. (thanks, Nigel)
Brady Dennis: AURORA, Colo. — In the darkness of Theater 9, smoke began to rise. Stephen Barton saw flashes and heard loud pops coming from near a front exit. Fireworks, he thought…
Had the privilege of being in the same building as Mark this past weekend at Mayborn. Take a look at this wonderful story: Mark Sundeen: VERN AND DONELLE KERSEY aren’t the type of…
If you want to make someone care about an issue: surprise, surprise. A story works better than statistics. (Via Dan Stockman)
Via Liddy Lake and NPR’s health blog, the funniest pictures you’ll see all week. Reporters literally sprinting with their copies of the Supreme Court’s healthcare decision. Wish I’…
From Mark Johnson: I’ve been rereading Angels & Demons by Tom French. I know many gangreyers are familiar with the story, maybe the finest newspaper narrative ever. I was stopped c…
This is like reading about some forgotten pocket of America. Here’s Doyle Murphy covering a gang trial: WHITE PLAINS — John “Tarzan” Maldonado spent his final hours in what he must…
Mike Mooney: When Bill Fong approaches the lane, 15-pound bowling ball in hand, he tries not to breathe. He tries not to think about not breathing. He wants his body to perform a s…
Dan Stockman: They were such an integral part of our existence that it was hard to imagine life without them. It’s even harder to imagine now how they disappeared.
To follow up on Ben’s excellent post, here’s a picture of my first newsroom, at The Press-Sentinel, in Jesup, Georgia, circa 2001. I’m on the right, covering my face, exhausted. Th…
Caitlin Johnston: MANCHESTER, Tenn. Ukulele and smoke filled the heavy air of the Tennessee hotel room. For $58, the members of the Applebutter Express had themselves two beds with…
Joan Garrett: It’s Sunday morning, and Matt Nevels is at home again. From his front yard, he almost can see the white steeple of Red Bank Baptist Church. Less than a mile down the…
From my inbox: “I’m starting to work on a profile, and when I do that I always love to go back and read great profiles for a little inspiration. I was wondering if youd be willing…
Tony Rehagen: I don’t read manuals. But when my wife was pregnant last year with our first child, she studied every so-you’re-expecting book she could find. I scanned the sections…
An amazing and disturbing and fearless story from Patrick Hruby. Read it before it disappears: I believe in the fix. I believe in the hidden hand, that sports have a secret, redact…
Wright Thompson: TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Something important is being lost. Each rising sun takes a little more from the couple who live in the small brick home southwest of downtown. B…
David Carr: My worry is not about the loss of the earthy smell of freshly rendered pages. A newspaper, even one short on advertising, is a great ad for at least one thing: the pape…
of Writer of the Year for 2012 at the National City and Regional Magazine Awards in Las Vegas, is my old buddy Justin Heckert. This is the second time he’s won, which might possibl…
Jeff Passan: ST. LOUIS – Collin J. Grundstrom, a streaker of considerable skill in the art of persistence and drastically less in that of evasion, was going to get naked Thursday n…
Andy Netzel: Kevin Kiley glares at Chuck Booms overtop his reading glasses. His eyes double in size and his voice is full of annoyance as a small smile creeps across his lips. “Exc…
From Mark Johnson: I’m an avid obituary writer and a big fan of Margalit Fox of The Times. This one is an example of why her obituaries consistently reward the reader. Great quotes…
Mike Mooney: Jeffrey Maxwell told the police officers that his house was a mess. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. He was a big man, 6-foot-5 with nearly 300 pound…
Dan Barry: Another wintry Sunday morning at 7. And in the bifurcated building of a century-old Catholic parish called St. Joseph’s, the faithful gather. On one side of the church w…
Tim Botos: JACKSON TWP. — His beat up Asics running shoes tossed aside, a barefooted Andrew Rihn stretched his leg muscles and swiveled his head back and forth to work the kinks ou…
Check out Paul Hoover: The footsteps begin before dawn Wednesday morning on Tubman Boulevard, runners pounding away down the main artery into the heart of Monrovia. You don’t find…
As @caryaspinwall said, Replace this, machines. When he was 12 years old, the boy did something he only later realized probably hurt his seventh-grade teacher. It was minor — he wa…
They’re coming for us. Last year at a small conference of journalists and technologists, I asked Hammond to predict what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 year…
David Barstow does it again: MEXICO CITY — In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidia…
Our friend Tommy Tomlinson is leaving the Charlotte Observer, where he did wonderful things, for a new sports website, where he will do more wonderful things.
Bill Landauer: Mindy Bennett dreams of the day. She will pack her things. She will pull onto Broadway and turn south on Main Street. She will reach Interstate 83 and head for Balti…
Lee Hill Kavanaugh: She’d read the books last year, twice. But it was “The Hunger Games” movie that sent our 10-year-old daughter climbing our trees, asking for archery lessons and…
Says Heckert: Nonfiction fans/writers/storytellers: A documentary you simply must see.
Chris Jones: I. THE FISK BUILDING On the twenty-second floor of the Fisk Building in New York — an elegant brick giant built in 1921, stretching an entire block of West Fifty-seven…
On Paige Williams‘s nifty new blog, she exchanges notes with Kruse on his missing-woman story: “……dying to know what that receipt was for—lumber? paint? Did you choose to omit that…
Thomas Lake and Melissa Segura: To the many levelheaded conspiracy theorists of Venezuela, at least this part of the story rings true: There was a kidnapping on Nov. 9 in a concret…
NPR’s Noah Adams profiles my colleague Lucy Morgan, a legendary investigative reporter in here in Florida.
A tale of Texas justice and mysterious salt poisoning, from Pamela Colloff: WHAT LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT ANDREW Burd’s early life is contained in a slim Child Protective Services cas…
Harry Crews has died. Here’s a good one, circa 1984: The Violence That Finds Us
Recently, while transcribing some interviews, I realized that I talk too much. It’s a natural human impulse: The other person is sharing, so you want to share too. That’s how good…
Big thanks to Erik Hahmann for pulling together this Q and A with Spencer Hall. Enjoy. Here’s Erik: I’m going to be disappointed if Spencer Hall never writes a novel. That’s not so…
Lane DeGregory: SANFORD These days, Cheryl Brown has to walk the dog. • For a month — ever since her son heard someone screaming for help and her daughter called 911 and everyone h…
The latest classic of straight-faced police reporting from Erin Sullivan: Doyle Hardwick found himself back at the Land O’Lakes jail this week, this time for 60 days, all because h…
She’s a good girl, loves her mama Loves Jesus and America too She’s a good girl, crazy ’bout Elvis Loves horses and her boyfriend too It’s a long day livin’ in Reseda There’s a fre…
A story by Michelle G. Chan in American Journalism Review describes the decision Emily Nipps made to leave the Tampa Bay Times for a PR job at a hospital. (Even though, according t…
The Virginian Pilot’s Corinne Reilly won the Ernie Pyle Award last week for a five-part series called A Chance In Hell. Here’s Part I: KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN The doctors can hear th…
The riveting start of Mike D’Orso’s “The Sniper,” The Virginian-Pilot, March 22, 1987: The sun lay low in the Vietnamese sky. Steam rose from the damp jungle mulch. The only sound…
Thomas Curwen on Paterniti’s masterpiece: “The Long Fall of One Eleven Heavy” was first published in Esquire in July 2000, and 12 years later, I find myself admiring with each read…
Josh Green: In the days after her son vanished four years ago, it seemed to Erika Wilson that everyone wanted to help. There were Justin’s friends, of course, the ones he’d called…
An excellent primer from successful freelancer Jennifer Kahn: Never pitch a story until you know who the characters are going to be and understand the arc of their story: You may n…
David Simon: Seven-baker-twenty-four unit turns at Mosher and rumbles past that stretch of Appleton Street where Gene Cassidy took two in the head for the company, the first one st…
Leah Sottile: It was a Tuesday. In a dusty-orange bedroom — papered in Twilight posters and stacked with stuffed animals — 13-year-old Casey Holliday brushed her dark hair into a s…
The 17 books Ernest Hemingway would rather read again for the first time than have an assured income of $1 million a year.
A classic work from Gary Smith, Esquire, 1990 (thanks, Ed K.): Slowly, so the bed wouldn’t creak, the millionaire who couldn’t sleep rose and walked barefoot to the bookshelves. “T…
From The Paris Review: In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of litera…
Please take a look at the work of Michael Graff, from N.C.’s Our State. (Thanks, Sarah) The Oyster Way: Down in the mud in the North Carolina sounds,the oyster finds a home and sti…
The numbers are in. Female writers are significantly underrepresented in major national magazines, just as they are here on Gangrey. Anyone care to speculate on why that is? Sub-qu…
Eli Saslow: HELEN FORD DRIVES to the house from memory, parks along the curb and idles in her car. This three-story duplex in Cambridge, Mass., had been her home for 40 years, but…
Here, preserved digitally by Joe Kovac Jr., is Tom Junod’s 1994 GQ gem, “Pull The Trigger.” Junod: He shouldn’t laugh, but that first time with the gun – it was funny, you know? Th…
12/26/02 Why did you want to be a journalist? Henry Grade 4 USA Dear Henry, What a great question. Well, I always liked writing. But it was more than that: Being a journalist reall…
The Baron on a new direction for Reuters: During a recent visit to European bureaux Ingrassia contrasted what he termed “adrenaline journalism” – the traditional wire service story…
Diana Moskovitz: After all the torment and torture, Nubia Barahona could still flash a smile. It was radiant and confident, set off by blond bangs and big hazel eyes. She smiled li…
Justin Heckert scores three nominations and competes with Tony Rehagen for Writer of the Year.
Katherine Boo: July 17, 2008—Mumbai Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father. In a slum hut b…
Really glad this was on 1A of the Tampa Bay Times. Will Hobson: LARGO — This was never just about the pig, the neighbors say, but the pig was a problem. Last March a loud, large, s…
Tommy Tomlinson deconstructs “Ode To Billie Joe.”
On Radiolab: Christopher Daniel Gay has broken out of jail more times than anyone else alive. He is the stuff of country songs and film rights. Reporter Ben Montgomery learned abou…
Susan Baer: The dark-oak farmhouse table where Page and Robert Melton spent many a dinner hour is now laden with vases and framed pictures, fragile pieces of their life together th…
On the occasion of the first 2012 presidential primary, Dan Zak unearthed Henry Allen from 1988: New Hampshire is a fraud. Which is to say that behind that idyll of white-steepled,…
Tom Lake: The most infamous roster decision in high school basketball history came down 33 years ago on the edge of tobacco country, between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Oc…
Nick Schmidle: A little after 9 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1990, the owner of a steel-products company pulled up to her office in Vinegar Hill, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and spotted a bl…
Dan Zak: An order has come in from China. Someone in China is looking for an old book. “Oh Edward, did you have energy left to hunt for one?” says Natalie Hughes. “What was it?” he…
Dan Barry: TUCSON January has come again to Tucson. The pleasant days all but demand a hike or a bicycle ride. The cool evenings cast the Santa Catalina Mountains in a mesmerizing…
Manny Fernandez: HUNTSVILLE, Tex. — Kenneth Wayne Davis died at 54 as not so much a man but a number: Inmate No. 327320. Mr. Davis was charged, convicted, sentenced and incarcerate…
My pal Chris Zuppa has quietly been chipping off pieces of a series that looks at the lives of people in South St. Pete. It’s coming together like a smooth and visually appealing o…
Agree? Patrick Hruby: … Turn on ESPN. There are score tickers and headline crawls, slick graphics and constant teases for upcoming stories, everything creating a sense of urgent im…
Eli Saslow: ORLANDO — She was scheduled to deliver a speech across town in 30 minutes, but she did not know where to go, or how to get there, or exactly what she would say if she m…
Paterniti, in a project for Ira Glass, in the NYT Mag (thanks, Dan Stockman): If you’d been born to farmer parents in Battambang province, in the country of Cambodia, and been give…
Wright Thompson: LONDON — After the torture of eight disconnected hours, the plane lands at Heathrow. We’re still rolling when I turn on both phones, hitting refresh on my email, b…
John Keilman: PERU, Ill. —— They buried Anthony Wagner in his hometown two days before Veterans Day. It was cold, with a stinging wind that tore the last few leaves from the trees…
Charlie LeDuff, ladies and gentlemen: Ring of Gunfire: Detroit EMS Unit Stranded on New Year’s Eve : MyFoxDETROIT.com
Two jobs you should consider if you’re looking. You’d be working for an editor who knows story at the Casper Star-Tribune. There are the postings: Crime/Courts and Education. Apply…
Chris Goffard: Reporting from Imbaseni, Tanzania — The fugitive shuffles to his computer and begins typing out his will. He is about to turn 71, and it is time. “My life,” he write…
Fun Q and A with Kerry Burke, a murder and mayhem reporter for the Daily News: … When you arrive at a crime scene, what’s generally happening? How do you go about reporting? Very o…
Tom Junod: The guys were coming over. That’s what Fred and Charlotte Thomas both called them — “the guys,” as though they were Fred’s poker buddies. Fred and Charlotte were both in…
Man, howI love this. I encourage you to find the time to listen to it rather than read it.
Eli Saslow: CONWAY, S.C. — He awoke to his alarm on Monday morning at 6, just like always, even though his handwritten schedule for the day read only: “Find something to do!” Steve…
Chris Rose, circa 2007: As is the fate of most self-styled inventors, pioneers and visionaries — those who toil in decades of anonymity, never realize their dreams and eventually d…
In which he says: I’m sheltered a little at the Times from the woes of the industry, but it’s rare that I’m impressed by out of town newspapers, and I buy them — all of them — ever…
Mooney: Before I met Robert Jeffress, I wanted to hate him. Jeffress is the conservative preacher who made national headlines in October, when he called Mormonism a cult. He’s the…
Amy Harmon: GREENFIELD, Mass. — The first night they slept entwined on his futon, Jack Robison, 19, who had since childhood thought of himself as “not like the other humans,” regar…
Peter Hessler (thanks, Charles B.): In the southwestern corner of Colorado, where the Uncompahgre Plateau descends through spruce forest and scrubland toward the Utah border, there…
Paul Schwartzman: In 1988, a fifth-grade class at Seat Pleasant Elementary received an extraordinary gift: the offer of a college education paid for by two wealthy businessmen. Cou…
Did anyone out there in Gangrey Nation go to Syracuse journalism school? Tell us why it’s Number One. (Saslow, I’m looking in your direction. Your career got off to an awfully fast…
Ed Komenda: His wife standing next to him, Clyde Cressler kissed another woman on the dance floor. Her name was Elaine Seckar, his ballroom dancing instructor at Arthur Murray Danc…
Every day, seven Floridians die of a prescription drug overdose. This is the story of Stacy Nicholson and her struggle to recover from her addiction to oxycodone. Stacy received tr…
Thanks to Raja for pointing out this Foreign Policy piece that tries to identify the stories that “told the story of the Iraq War.” They’re all, of course, amazing stories, written…
First of three parts. Thanks, Mark. John Branch: DEREK BOOGAARD was scared. He did not know whom he would fight, just that he must. Opportunity and obligation had collided, the way…
Tom Bartlett: The son asks the father why he’s not wearing a seat belt. The father says it’s because long ago the father’s sister drowned. She backed her car into a swimming pool a…
Six parts from the Arizona Republic. John Faherty: In the predawn darkness, Gerson Gonzalez wakes without an alarm. He always wakes this way. He lies silently in bed for a moment u…
The NBA lockout wasn’t exactly a diamond mine of writing opportunities. Nevertheless, Brian Phillips found a riveting way to put it all in context: In the past 15 years or so, the…
Speaking of, here’s the amazing Washington Post Style section from Sept. 13, 2001. Go ahead and check out the bylines. (thanks, Dan) (pdfs) 09-13-01-front 09-13-01-p2 09-13-01-p3 0…
The latest “Why’s This So Good?” from Nieman Storyboard, wherein Kruse breaks down Stuever’s 9-ish essay.
photo by Jennifer Morrison He was walking east. She was walking west. The ribbon of sidewalk was only so wide. They’d seen each other a few times before, at the cafe where she work…
Wright Thompson: STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — A light glowed in the long front window of the last house on the left. It cast a soft yellow halo on the drapes. The mood on this chilly Sunda…
Kim Severson (thanks, WWT): OZARK, Ark. — Brenda Farmer and Willie Blanscet have sat across from each other on the Butterball bagging line for 17 years, 102 cold, raw turkeys slidi…
Dan Zak: BAGHDAD — On a bright October day in this city’s Tahrir Square, Muhammed Asaad tried to make some noise. He announced his cellphone number to a group of 50 protesters at t…
Jonathan Franzen: A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the…
I love Hank: The point of living in (or through) a renaissance is to leave behind some really lovely frescoes. Paint your brains out and disregard the cultural upheaval around you.…
Matt Baker: The Hambrick family tree casts a dark and sprawling shadow across the dirt parks and grass fields of the North Suncoast. Pasco County’s only high school football state…
Rebecca Skloot: “I honestly think that structure is one of the most important tools in writing, yet it’s not something that people often pick apart and really get obsessed with.”
Justin George: TAMPA One night this past spring, Kim Bailey was making ice cream in the kitchen of his restaurant when a phone call forced him to put down his tasting spoon. A tele…
Robert Samuels: The proclamation was in the mayor’s hands. The marching band, all warmed up. The firetruck and police cars stood on call. And Pinky and Pepe Rodgers were in their b…
Thanks to Kovac for digging this one up. Francis X. Clines: As he lies healing in a hospital bed, Louis McLendon is a wonder of ballistics: He has nine bulletholes in him from six…
Mark Johnson breaks down Meyer Berger’s 1949 story of a mass shooting. Read it.
Is narrative hardwired in all of us? Is it only a matter of tapping into our innate creativity? Dan Kois: … Barry isn’t particularly interested in the writer’s craft. She’s more in…
Dan Barry in Terre Haute: Her Cadillac glides slowly through the rain-glossed streets of this traumatized city, her gat within reach. The ominous evening sky has yet to turn black,…
Michael Paterniti (thanks, Varma): Later, lost far at sea, when you’re trying to forget all you’ve left behind, the memory will bubble up unbidden: a village that once lay by the o…
Joshua Wolfson: She visits him there, beside a lilac bush, framed by Casper Mountain and the city where he died. A pair of vases bookends the headstone they will someday share. She…
Ben: Allie Mae Neal pushed through the screen door and found a shady spot on her porch where the summer sun didn’t bite. Kittens purred at her feet and wasps flitted in and out of…
Brendan McCarthy: Early in Paul Gailiunas’ film, “The Florestine Collection,” there’s a song that plays as a love letter of sorts to New Orleans. It’s an upbeat, joyous ditty on th…
Andy Meacham: ST. PETERSBURG — On their way to Tropicana Field, thousands of Tampa Bay Rays fans have walked past a gaunt man with a graying ponytail playing a violin. His music —…
Dan Zak: AL ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq — The dust storm swallowed the horizon and then the soldiers, who leaned into the windy blur to load rucksacks onto vehicles pointed homeward. At 3:…
We totally missed National Poetry Day yesterday. Make up for it by checking out the 10 Poems Everyone Needs to Read from Flavorwire. (h/t @craigtimes) I’ll add one, which I stumble…
The Town Style Forgot It’s our very own Washington, where women wear “neutral” and men dress like Secret Service agents. By Henry Allen September 14, 1986 The Washington Post This…
Hank Stuever: Remember a few years ago, when your Apple store on any given Saturday afternoon ceased being the clean, technological zendo you once admired — the place you bought yo…
Hemingway once said that Ivan Turgenev’s “The Rattling Of Wheels” was the best short story of all time. I recently read it, and it reached a fine climax despite a slow start, but t…
James Rainey: Want to get under a newspaper person’s skin? Tell them you don’t need their work because you get most of your news from the Internet. Inky survivors can’t stand to he…
Bill Stevens: HOLIDAY — Steve Wrubel fixed a light breakfast Tuesday morning and sat down at the dining room table to pay some bills. He blinked hard to make his eyes water. “I saw…
David Granger’s note in this month’s Esquire welcomes Charlie Pierce back to the magazine and drops this interesting nugget: “In a memo to me a few months ago, Charlie exhorted me…
From our dear friend Janine Anderson: I had no idea this story existed until the 2009 Mike Levine Workshop, when Ben and a few others from the Times Herald-Record brought it up aft…
Tim Botos: JACKSON TWP. — A dripping-wet fist-bump from Frank Gunsett to all you hackers, duffers, shankers and slicers. It’s because of you that he and his wife hatched a 15-year…
Patrick Radden Keefe: One morning earlier this month, just before sunrise, a silent convoy of SUVs streamed into the tiny, troubled city of Newburgh, New York. Over 200 law-enforce…
Dan Barry: SPRINGFIELD, Mass. In the hours after the 2008 election of the country’s first African-American president, three white men crept up to a predominantly African-American c…
Dan Zak: FORWARD OPERATING BASE PROSPERITY, Iraq — “It’s 81 degrees in beautiful downtown Baghdad. Six oh five on your clock on Fun Fact Friday. I’m Prickel.” “And I’m Townsend. Th…
Stuever unearths the above ground pool from way back. So good.
Anne Hull, circa 1999: In the early 1960s, Walter Elias Disney took a plane ride over Florida. When he passed the vast area of scrub land south of Orlando, he pointed and said, “Th…
Dan Barry: KENHORST, Pa. This American summer, the heat is the least of it. A pummeled economy. A credit-rating embarrassment. More tarmac ceremonies for dead war heroes. Tornadoes…
Kruse, from Grantland: There is next to no reason the University of Oregon should have a good football team. Eugene is a small city and is not near a major media market, there’s ve…
Andrew Corsello: My wife is radiant. It comes naturally to her. Yes, she’s very beautiful, and that beauty is the first thing people notice and discuss about her. But hers isn’t th…
Tim Loh: BRIDGEPORT — Slumped on a cot at Bassick High School Sunday evening, Maurice Ballestas offered living proof that emergency shelters have open-door policies. His round-trip…
Eli Saslow (thanks, Mark): German Morales dressed for work in tattered painter’s jeans and a stained white T-shirt, even though he didn’t know when or whether he would paint again.…
I’m a little late on this, but here’s a compilation of Tom Huang’s tweets from Jack Hart’s session at the Society for Features Journalism conference in Tucson last week. Good stuff…
William Yardley (thanks, Nigel): SEATTLE — The sun is not yet up but the baristas are, a blur of busy hands wiping down counters and smoothing black aprons. Chipper and precise, th…
Tony Rehagen: Five miles east of Monument Circle, on the far edge of Irvington, the railroad runs past factories and warehouses and a tiny asphalt racetrack. There is no infield, j…
Seth Wickersham: JANUARY 2008, 17 MONTHS TO GO. Michael Vick arrives at Leavenworth in time for lunch. He’s led by guards to a small cafeteria and left alone, inmate No. 33765-183.…
Dan Barry: BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Down Clown Alley, in the backstage tent for Circus Smirkus, a slight boy of 14 studies his clown self in a jagged piece of mirror. This is Sam Ferlo,…
Great news for Joan Garrett and Roy Wenzl, dear Friends of Gangrey. Here’s to amazing work by good people.
Two for you from the Twittertron: A series by Rich Radford: Two dozen sailors and a handful of officers have come to McClure Field on a Tuesday to play softball. Some have their sh…
Lane: ST. PETERSBURG Rose Woodworth stood in the center of a weedy parking lot off Fifth Street, surveying what was left of her life: A wooden coffee table. A plastic dish drainer.…
In the event your boss tells you to keep it short because nobody reads long stuff online, refer him to this: One last note before the tale of the tape: These monthly memos quite fr…
Big thanks to Tommy for passing along this interview with Mary Bishop, who won a Pulitzer with a Philadelphia Inquirer team for stories about Three Mile Island. Reading this feels…
This strikes me as a good example of how to use records to tell a story. John Barry and Alexandra Zayas: TAMPA — The Schenecker home in Tampa Palms North appeared, in ways, a portr…
Richard Lake: Behold the carcass, once proud. Borders, the national bookstore chain founded in 1971 by two brothers in Ann Arbor, Mich., died a horrible death the other day. It die…
Jason Fagone: Jason Rohrer is known as much for his eccentric lifestyle as for the brilliant, unusual games he designs. He lives mostly off the grid in the desert town of Las Cruce…
Charles P. Pierce: In 2009, in the city of Spokane, Washington, the Public Facilities District bought a bench. It was metal. It was aluminum, its powder coat a bronze that ran towa…
I saw this mentioned in an interview I was reading. Here’s your Friday time capsule. Enjoy. By Harry Crews Playboy April 1, 1984 IN 1958, I was on the Going to the Sun highway in M…
There are quite a few Friends of Gangrey heading to the Mayborn conference in a few weeks. I’m sorry I’ll be missing out. It’s a great list of speakers and George Getschow puts on…
Pat Fenton: Their beat was up in the bars of Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx, it was Beach 116th Street in Rockaway, and places like 9th Avenue down in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, th…
Read it: He said he didn’t really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said, and he’d never celebrated a birthday in his life. But Jerry Jos…
Guess who’s coming to take our jobs. These guys. Special congratulations to Friend of Gangrey Caitlin Johnston. P.S. Two of the three winners are Hoosiers. P.P.S. Tom French is hol…
According to Chris Jones, Chris Jones has never read a story by Gary Smith. He doesn’t want to be influenced by an unattainable standard. Also, in the comments section at the end,…
If you’ve been around the past few years, you’ve probably been witness to plenty of talk about the Editor Wall (see this and this) and how to best deal obstinate bosses or newsroom…
You’ve got to read Christopher Goffard: He kept thinking that there had been a mistake, that he’d be out in no time. That the system, set into motion by some misunderstanding or ac…
Steve Hendrix (h/t Dan): David Sharpe finally hit bottom on the bedroom floor of his apartment in Yorktown, Va. That’s where he sat, legs folded, ready to finish the fight with the…
Michael Brick: NEW ORLEANS — The season is lost. The numbers don’t lie: Defeats to teams from Georgia, Oklahoma, Illinois, Arizona, two places in Pennsylvania and three in Florida,…
Warning: This is disturbing. Sickening even. But let’s talk about this. What do you think of it? Is it too much? How would you have written this story? Eli Sanders: The prosecutor…
Read Lee Hancock: I felt jittery and ridiculous lifting my hands toward the hulking silhouette. I told myself to squeeze. I stared at the paper target 20 feet away. I jerked my ind…
Tim Botos: Kasey (Barton) Proehl has matured from a giggly little girl into a 24-year-old woman. A statuesque 6 feet tall, with gray-blue eyes like her dad’s, she holds a master’s…
Lane: They woke to the sun streaming through the bus windows. He glanced out the glass and grinned. She buried her face in his sweatshirt. “Too bright.” He remembers every detail.…
David Von Drehle: Warm air rises. The earth is an elegant machine, and this is one of its simple and tireless engines, recycling the oceans into life-giving rains, wafting rainbow-…
Frankel: JOPLIN, MO. — They had to find Skyular. They wanted the baby boy home. The 16-month-old disappeared from his mother’s arms and into the massive tornado that two days earli…
Michael Overall: JOPLIN, Mo. – A front-loader goes down the street first, pushing aside tree trunks and rooftops and overturned cars, clearing a path for the firetruck. “Over there…
Kruse: WESLEY CHAPEL — All around the world, all day on Saturday, people mocked perplexed believers who watched and waited for the end that never came. There were supposed to be ro…
Sean Daly: SARASOTA It’s hard to be funny when you look like you’re drowning. Tim Hedley knows this cruel rule of comedy well. Standing under bright stage lights, Tim grasps note c…
Tony Rehagen: THE GEAR IS GATHERED ON THE LANAI—A HALF-DOZEN 7-foot spinning rods, lined and hooked, along with a pair of dusty tackle boxes stocked with lures and weights. Down at…
Alexandra Zayas, Philip Morgan and Justin George: TAMPA Walter “J.J.” Revear walked out of the Hillsborough County jail that day into hugs from relatives and questions from reporte…
Kruse: SARASOTA — Last spring a respected detective for this city’s police department went to the local courthouse and did something stupid. At the time, Tom Laughlin, a twice-marr…
William Browning: LONETREE — In open country, a humble home sits with a couple of trucks and a car parked in the dirt driveway. The local phone book says he lives here. Home, a poe…
Brian Mockenhaupt: KANDAHAR, Afghanistan— By 7 a.m., the first patients of the day were slid off the medevac helicopters and wheeled into the trauma bay at the Kandahar Airfield ho…
Todd Frankel: LAWRENCE, Kan. — The wind whistled innocently through the opening in the sliding glass door. Rushing in from a buttermilk sky, it gave no hint of radioactive traces f…
On William Harrington (thanks, Hank, for the link): I’ve been thinking lately about a writer I can pretty much guarantee none of you have ever heard of — William Harrington. He wro…
Saslow from Sunday: ELKHORN, WIS. — The event had been advertised as a listening session about the federal budget, but nobody could hear much of anything now. Some people booed, ot…
Zadie Smith’s ten rules for writers include the following: 6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is. Smith is a noveli…
This personal essay from Eric Puchner might make you cry: My father, who risked all our do re mi in pursuit of his own California dream, is a case in point. He’d been doing very we…
This is the best thing you’ll read this week. By Henry Allen April 17, 1979 Style, Washington Post ADAMS, Ind. One sullen afternoon in April, a plump little girl walking a dog spot…
Brick: AUSTIN, Texas — Football paid for this house. It is a fine house, nothing ostentatious, set back from the highway in the suburbs northeast of Austin. The front door opens on…
Charlie Pierce, again: The afternoon is fading, and he is standing in the lobby of a salesman’s hotel in Cleveland Circle in Brookline. He looks like any other kid in a gray sweat…
Okay, contest. Who can make a better blog header than the one at the top of the page? Needs to be 940 x 198 pixels. Needs to incorporate all the things I feel about this blog. Winn…
Another harrowing tale from our friend Anonymous. Read it here. (Password is gangrey.)
I’m up in the Panhandle chasing a good one and creeping myself out. I’m staying in this bunkhouse on a private campground where a man went missing seven months ago. Tonight I drove…
Wright: DHAKA, Bangladesh — The guy walking across the parking lot is famous. That’s easy to tell from the reactions. Crowds part for him. Security guards mirror his every step. Ot…
Take a look at this one, by Joe Kovac Jr.: The big-city gal had just spent her Friday night in the Twiggs County jail. Saturday morning found her out on bail, on the phone with the…
Yes. Mooney: Ron Washington is not happy to see me. I wasn’t supposed to come here. Not to New Orleans, the place where he was born, the place he has called home his entire life. N…
Dan Barry: FORT MYERS, Fla. — Our planning went no further than to meet at the ballpark. Simple in theory but madness in practice, given the thousands of others with similar plans.…
Michael Kruse: One wet, raw day last April, at the Broadmoor public golf course in Portland, Ore., Dan McLaughlin stood in the center of one of the greens. He wore running shoes, b…
Stephanie Hayes: Several cases at a St. Petersburg CVS were stocked Wednesday with ridiculous celebrity perfumes. Malibu by Pamela Anderson. Queen by Queen Latifah. Fancy by Jessic…
Roy Wenzl: COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS — Scientists along Buttermilk Creek north of Austin, Texas have found flint knife blades, chisels and other human artifacts lying in a soil layer…
William Browning: Saturday night, moments before halftime, and Scottie Mason wraps what have to be longest fingers in the building around the handles of a dust broom. The buzzer so…
I caught a quick Q and A over at Poynter with Bob Woodward. Quick, like 20 minutes. The audience was made up of a great group of journalists from Denmark and students at Indiana Un…
You saw this? What I didn't say is that the pieces I mentioned, I'm sure, got tons of internet traffic, but that's not what pays the bills, right? (At least at newspapers.) It's st…
Please allow me to introduce you to the work of William Browning, from the Mississippi Delta, covering cops in Casper, Wyoming. Three stories. Lonely Road: It was midday on a bleak…
Steve Rubenstein: They raised their grape juice cups at Lakeshore Elementary School in memory of Jupiter the rat. "He was a great rat," said fourth-grade teacher Rich Mertes. "Poss…
The Gangrey debut of Amanda Heckert: Chris Hall’s eyelids droop behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He crosses his brawny arms and lowers his jowl to his chest, dangerously close to no…
Dan Barry: MADISON, Wis. Here was a tall man wearing a Viking helmet and a look that said, Ask me about my Viking helmet. Here was a shirtless man, wearing a beaded skirt and a deb…
I’m so glad Jones is on our side. We win every time. Here’s his THE YOUNG REPORTER’S GUIDE TO LOCKER ROOM DECORUM, ETIQUETTE, AND NOT COCK PEEKING. Read it. Even if you never step…
Stuever: Anne Hathaway hosted the 83rd Annual Academy Awards on ABC Sunday night, as scheduled. And her co-host, James Franco, did what exactly? (Besides be handsome? Besides a lit…
Storyboard’s latest notable narrative, by Jeanne Marie Laskas: She had no idea, back then, that he was sick. She had no idea he was losing his mind. Something neurological, the doc…
So much good stuff in here. Ben in sunny St. Pete: On the street, the word was fear.
Alex Zayas: TAMPA The four should’ve watched The Office together that Thursday night, teenage girls giggling on webcams, alone at their computers but connected by things only they…
Justin Heckert, circa 2005: It was a small wedding. Bill and Doug arrived together for the ceremony, as for the past 50 years they had arrived together for everything. Each wore a…
Seeing some FoGs as the APSE rolls out its awards this year. Congrats to Reid and Kevin for explanatory reporting and Dirk for feature writing. Am I missing anybody? More to come,…
I drove back from Oklahoma this weekend in the ’98 Cadillac STS my wife’s father gave us. It was a long, (mostly) beautiful drive, made better by a steady cycle of Old Crow’s Big I…
Does A.J. Daulerio represent the future of sportswriting? According this story, Buzz Bissinger seems to think so. If he’s correct, I’m in serious trouble. Jones, maybe you could te…
Roy Wenzl: Jeff Miller of El Dorado crawled exhausted into his airplane seat and had himself a two-finger serving of Scotch in a glass. It was 2004, and he’d been coming to Ghana a…
I know I’m about seven years late to this party, but damn if this isn’t cool. Two songs on the same subject from near opposite perspectives. And, man, the ending on “Uncle Frank” i…
Tom Friend: EDMOND, Okla. — Something keeps calling Zane Fleming to the back bedroom, 10 years later. It’s not a voice he hears; it’s a throb in his temples, an outright ache to wa…
Alex Zayas: TAMPA — Four years ago, John Wade Agan told deputies he was robbed at gunpoint in his taxicab, roughed up and stuffed into the trunk of the car. Three years ago, he dro…
The blog has been ill the past few days thanks to either a terrible boll weevil infestation or an STD from Wickersham’s last comment. My man is working to get her up and running in…
Stephanie Hayes: There are stage lights and a clap board and a Chihuahua named Dane, as in Great Dane, who is very, very calm, considering what’s about to happen. Dane is fitted wi…
Reynolds Price, whose novels and stories about ordinary people in rural North Carolina struggling to find their place in the world established him as one of the most important voic…
Dirk Chatelain: AUBURN, Neb. — On a Thursday in November, at a nursing home just before dawn, a 97-year-old man took his last breath. Elly Ingersoll hunted pheasants and chased gol…
From the great rurritable: At one point in my college career my then girlfriend and I decided to rent a place a little off the beaten path, where she might indulge her fondness for…
Tom Junod: Today, here at Esquire — and only at Esquire, because only Esquire has the guts to tell you this story — we're going to tell you about a man you need to know a little be…
From Mental Floss, via Hank: Ben Franklin turned 305 today! To celebrate, here’s a list of expressions meaning “inebriated” that Franklin first published in the Pennsylvania Gazett…
Peter Maass (thanks, Ramsey): On April 9, 2003, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy, commander of the 3rd Battalion 4th Marines, awoke at a military base captured from the Iraqis a few…
NYT staff, written by Dan Barry: TUCSON — Moments after the swirl of panic, blood, death and shock, the suspect was face down on the pavement and squirming under the hold of two ci…
"One of the deadliest forms of self defense consists of ... a rolled up newspaper." -- Ronald Duncan Holy heavens. The next time somebody trots out one of the old jokes about bird-…
Pauline Arrillaga (thanks, Nigel): TUCSON, Ariz. -- She arrived right on time - smiling, as Gabrielle "Gabby" Giffords so often did, as she made her way through the small crowd tha…
"You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in…
This is the best thing out of there yet, right? David Von Drehle (h/t Tommy T): So much of this story is ugly and twisted that it's best to begin with something beautiful and good.…
"Then the heavens opened, the rain pouring down, the lightning flashing, and they rushed for the cover of the stables, leaving alone on his side near the pile of bricks, the rain r…
I never had a paper route. Not in the get paid sense. But my brother Matt did for the better part of a year, when I was in grade school. And he was bigger than me, and he was a gia…
This may be the strangest crime story I’ve ever read. It’s told in a straight chronology, for the most part, with few visible narrative devices or stylistic flourishes, and I was s…
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They s…
Michael Kruse: Turn on your television on Christmas Eve at 8 and flip to Bay News 9. What you’ll see is four hours of a burning log set to Christmas carols. This log is the local v…
Libby Copeland: We are more naked, as a nation, than we’ve ever been. We are forever baring our souls, revealing the mundane and the sacred. We are naked in our curiosity about the…
Buzz Bissinger: His hair is longer than it was in his former life, the life he left behind like a snake shedding its skin. A yellow bandanna wraps around his forehead, and reflecti…
Lane DeGregory: TAMPA They expect the letters to Santa. So far this season, about 1,000 pleas to St. Nick have arrived in the Suncoast District of the U.S. Postal Service, which se…
Alex Zayas: TAMPA — Vickie Bruce saw so many police officers when she pulled up to her West Shore Boulevard garden shop that February morning, she thought someone must have been mu…
Dan Barry: CARLISLE, La. A daughter of Plaquemines Parish, her camouflage outfit the color of the forest, checks the oil. She checks the steering, the coolant, the gas. She makes s…
Don’t forget. Outshine your punk friends with the coolest j-clothes going. And proceeds go to a good cause: The Mike Levine Journalism Workshop.
Don’t miss this, either. From our friend Reid Forgrave: Early one summer morning in 2006, Eric Jacobs awoke with a start. In bed beside him lay his wife, Heather, three months preg…
Justin George: Kevin Rouse stood before the judge wearing a patchy beard and a rumpled orange jumpsuit. He was accused of following a young boy into a church bathroom, stuffing pap…
Don't miss this. First of three parts ran Sunday. From our friend Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher: On a Saturday morning in June, when his children are at piano lessons and the…
Tim Botos: CANTON — With steely eyes and a scraggly beard visible through layers of shirts, jackets, coats and hats, the man emerged from a soup kitchen. He cast a long shadow bene…
Tommy: They met on eHarmony. They had long romantic talks on Skype. He proposed on Facebook. They have dated a year but they have been together face-to-face for less than two weeks…
Larry King wraps up tonight after 25 years and some 7,000 shows. Here's the best profile of him I've ever read, circa '91, by David Finkel: "THIS IS A TRUE STORY." Larry King says…
Mike Levine workshop alum Pete Iorizzo: When he didn't tweet about Cliff Lee, she knew something was wrong. During the weekend Steven Smith had posted dozens of Twitter messages, a…
Jones: "I just want to talk to you about your role in that journey -- what you did that day, how it affected you. I'll ask you some strange questions because I want to get it right…
Ride to court with the victim. Here's Alex Zayas and Colleen Jenkins: TAMPA — The little girl peered out the window of the car on the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway. She was o…
Joe Mozingo (thanks, Mark): He spent much of his life consumed by what the three men on the screen before him had done. He stared at the glossy, bloodshot eyes of the man in the mi…
Good stuff here. Simple, effective tips from Planet Money's Chana Jaffe-Wolt that can apply across platforms. (thanks, Kelley)
Introducing Gangrey's latest fashion line: GanGear. Click around. Buy shit. Be the coolest kid in the newsroom. Proceeds go to the Mike Levine Journalism Workshop. (h/t Wright.)
SHADY HILLS — Kenny Cole, who will turn 2 in January, nearly died last Friday afternoon after he and his big sister, Arora, who is 3 and tall enough to reach the front door knob, s…
Roy Wenzl: Their brothers began molesting them before the girls reached Kindergarten. When their mother found out, she did little to nothing. When their father found out, he raped…
Ben: LARGO -- Carole Jean Richards moved into Sun Village, a quiet little retirement trailer park here off busy Seminole Boulevard, seven years ago.
We've been asked to pull together a list of our top five favorite longreads from 2010. Rather than a single list, we give you five, with some overlap and a few extras. We each brin…
Dan Barry: HOOPER, Neb. — A few years ago, the Nebraska Department of Roads rolled out a highway bypass to hasten the already-hurried everyday pace. Motorists rushing north to Norf…
Jimmy Breslin, from December, 1980: That summer in Breezy Point, when he was eighteen and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through t…
Sorry, boys, but I love these guys, and this song. Here's to dead brothers and Wednesday afternoons.
The news about Elizabeth Edwards reminded me of this profile. Kelley Benham: SARASOTA - Emma Claire has lost a tooth. That was Monday, her mother thinks. Today it is Wednesday. Twe…
Read this. Michael Mooney: A wiry man with tufts of gray hair hanging over his glasses shuffles into the Pirate Republic Bar late one warm Thursday night carrying a cigar box full…
From the Washington Post: Think of your life as a popsicle. The years are layered, flavor upon flavor. At the center, hidden by time, is the popsicle stick. You can add 50 more fla…
Meg Laughlin: KABUL, Afghanistan On a late afternoon in November, the young men lounging in the park under evergreen trees stare when a mother and her daughter stride past, swingin…
Paul Schwartzman (thanks, Cara): As midnight approaches, the father is where he was when the day began, sitting on the edge of his son's bed, peering into his unfocused eyes and mi…
Wright Thompson: CLEVELAND -- There is a burly, angry man with a Chief Wahoo tattoo on the inside of his left forearm, and he knows I work for ESPN. That makes me the devil. We are…
I'm a fan of literary tattoos. My favorite is pictured here on Harry Crews. (How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death? from E.E. Cummings' Buffalo Bill's.) I'm not sure if i…
We were talking here the other day about how much we enjoy well-done ruminations on ordinary items after Kruse dropped this ditty about Yankee Candles in the Metro section. I tried…
The following is one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever read, fiction or non-. The lede itself, the way we are introduced to the story’s main character, is certainly one of th…
Jones: The day begins for Randy and Evi Quaid inside Hearing Room 1 at the Immigration and Refugee Board. The room is windowless. There is a small clock on one wall. It’s a few min…
Monica Hesse (thanks, Mark): “Sometimes I fear that I dress really strangely,” Laura Hillenbrand says. “Or maybe I don’t speak normally, because language changes while I’m away.” S…
Rob Farley: MIAMI Reina McWilliams woke one recent Wednesday as usual to the sounds of the “Greatest Hits of the ’60s and ’70s” on Magic 102.7 FM. In between songs, an announcer re…
David Wharton (thanks, Raja): There might be blood. At the very least, there will be violence — George Parros can picture it in his mind. The veteran hockey player goes looking for…
I’m thankful for y’all, for the energy and thought you put into helping others get better here at gangrey. If I could hug you, I would. I feel lucky to be a part of a community of…
Ashley Halsey III and Lonnae O’Neal Parker: Dillingham, Alaska — The mountain snapped the five-foot aluminum strut like a hard-bent twig. The metal sliced through the plane’s thin…
Josh Hamilton today was named the American League’s Most Valuable Player. A fine reason to re-read Dave Sheinin’s story from February 2007: The Devil and the Son of God are waging…
Dan Barry: Behind an unmarked door, in a cluttered break room of half-eaten lunches and morale-boosting posters, a dozen Transportation Security Administration officers listened to…
Part One. Amy Ellis Nutt (thanks, Mark): Riotous waves pummel Jose Arias. In the frantic scramble to abandon ship, he zipped his survival suit only to his throat and now the freezi…
Kruse, again: MIAMI — Downstairs was a rented Ford Escape with a used hotel key card on the console. Up in his 23rd-floor apartment were a few pieces of furniture and an unhung sho…
Journalism conferences seem to get rarer and rarer these days, but the Poynter Institute is having a pretty intriguing one December 9-11 at the campus in St. Petersburg. Roy Peter…
We've had this story on here before, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately. Not sure why, exactly, except it has one of my favorite endings of all time. My wife and I both c…
Dan Barry: IN the dozen years I spent working in the newsroom of the historic New York Times building, just off Times Square, I must have contemplated my future a hundred times, a…
Kruse: Berkeley Prep's Robert Klein, fast, tough and committed, took the handoff and raced toward the end zone. Crack! He spun off the first tackle and darted to the left and accel…
Lane DeGregory: In the pre-operating room on the third floor of Tampa General, the two nurses lay in hospital beds, side-by-side. Their husbands had pushed them close enough for th…
Michael Hall (h/t longform.org): On august 20, 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 2 spaceship on a one-way ticket to oblivion. Three weeks later, its sister craft, Voyager 1, blasted…
The company pledges to remove the caffeine, guarana and taurine, but says nothing about the Smurf piss, wolf saliva and moon dust. Steph Hayes: Come to think of it, people were buy…
On a commercial break, cameras still rolling ... Lady: "Oh, the Washington Post hated it. Did you see his review, haw haw haw haw." Other lady: "Yes. It was very good." Watch it he…
What is it about Finkel's writing that gives it such powerful forward momentum? Is it dramatic tension? Pure staccato word choice?
Thomas Curwen: Reporting from the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, — When Gary Ferguson closed his eyes, he could still hear the roar of the river and see the torrent of water as it…
Jim Schoettler in Jacksonville: Carlos Clemons dove to the floor of his friend’s Jacksonville home as 30 blasts from two assault rifles ripped through windows, walls, doors and bod…
Here's the VF tease: After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went co…
More like this, please. Todd Frankel: The trailer sits alone on a hill about 10 miles outside of town, tucked into the rolling farmland, obscured by trees from the gravel road runn…
Charlie LeDuff: IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on the morning of May 16 and the neighbors say the streetlights were out on Lillibridge Street. It is like that all over Detroit, where w…
Rick Moody: THE street addresses of my life, and there have been a great number of them, have often felt less like home to me than the places I’ve written about. The New Canaan, Co…
Lane DeGregory: It was still dark when Robin Goddard pulled into the Lowe's parking lot. Still raining. She cut the engine in front of the garden center. Squinted through her winds…
Eric Wilson (thanks, Hank): On Monday night, at a screening of the movie “Due Date,” Courtney Love told a reporter from Style.com that she was trying to take better care of herself…
Wright: INGLEWOOD, Calif. -- We are driving to Costco to buy beer for a horse. Not just any beer. It has to be Guinness. The horse likes Guinness, likes it room temperature, likes…
Alleged Gangrey lurker Brian Mockenhaupt: Staff Sergeant Christopher Gerhart’s stomach rolled, queasy. He stood alone under a trellis heavy with fat bunches of white grapes, plante…
Stuever: On election night, Sarah Palin served as Fox News Channel's personification of hope - its poetic muse and telegenic Wonder Woman (in no-costume Diana Prince mode), wearing…
Happy Halloween. Here’s a treat. By Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer July 10, 1995 You rent a house at the beach. One night, just back from the ice cream place, you say to…
The only thing that would have made this any better is Four Loko. Oh, wait. Here’s Chris Jones: An ancient oak tree stood behind the main house, and the dozen of us ducked under it…
Stuever: In search of the surest way to reach and encourage his core constituency during the midterm elections, President Obama visited “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” Wednesday…
Barry Hannah was opposed to rules for writing until a persistent and gin-breathed woman badgered him enough. Here are the six handwritten rules he gave her. (Many thanks to S.I. fo…
What you won’t read in the November Esquire is that my friend Luke spent six years reporting this story. He began when we were both working together at Atlanta magazine, when it wa…
Love this idea from Mark Armstrong at Longreads.com: …When I click a headline at NYTimes.com, I can never tell whether I’m going to get a 200-word blog post or a 10,000-word epic.…
Happy birthday to Pat Conroy, born Oct. 26, 1945, in Atlanta. From Beach Music, page 281: In that summer, I would remember my friends and their souls, light and air-streamed as mal…
Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they’d heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dr…
An interesting issue came up at Auburn Chautauqua this weekend that calls for the help of Gangrey nation. If your friend is one of the best magazine writers in America and he doesn…
Lane DeGregory: Outside the prison library, the women were waiting for their teacher, holding a copy of their newspaper, trying to decide what to do. They had named the paper Time…
David Halberstam (h/t longform.org): The desolate neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago where the Bulls play their home games is very quiet these days. Their gleaming new arena,…
Stephanie McCrummen: It is a bright afternoon early in the month, a moment of anxiety at a sun-faded apartment complex in north Phoenix. Down a dusty breezeway, workers are paintin…
St. Pete Times music and arts critics Sean Daly and John Fleming talk baseball: ... The pitching motion is the American form of dance for men. Such are the random thoughts that kep…
Wow. Check this one out. Andy Meacham: ST. PETERSBURG — About 11 p.m. Sept. 12, a car struck Neil Alan Smith and threw him off his bicycle on Fourth Street N. The car didn’t stop.…
Dan Barry: MADISON, Wis. Would it be all right if the Leader of the Free World stopped by your campus for a little while? He wants to surround himself with hordes of enthusiastic y…
Lane DeGregory: ST. PETERSBURG — Four hours before Monday’s first pitch, as the ballplayers were filing into Tropicana Field and bartenders were tapping kegs for the fans and blogg…
Chris Jones: Javier Bardem is listening to a doctor explain proprioception, the cosmic process that allows us to know, among other things, the location of our feet in space. He is…
Lane DeGregory: The call comes about 5:15 p.m. every day. In the tidy cubicle in her Tampa office, Julie Hopson stops typing. She looks up at her co-workers filing past her desk on…
Meg Laughlin: TAMPA Most of the time, Magdala Joseph stays in the bedroom of her South Tampa apartment with the blinds closed, listening to music and reading books in French about…
Go read Wright right now: MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — I went to see Muhammad Ali on Thursday night, and hours later I’m still struggling with the profound sadness of the evening. I’m not s…
William Bradford Huie: YOU never heard of Roosevelt Wilson. I never saw him more than twice. But Roosevelt Wilson continues to disturb me. Whenever I try to feel that I am an hones…
There’s a spat among Brits over the use of present tense in modern novels. From Laura Miller in Salon: What reasons do writers give for opting for the present tense? According to H…
Herbert Bayard Swope, in the preface to Treasury of Great Reporting: Literature Under Pressure, which just arrived in my mailbox: “This work follows the greatest rule of writing (a…
I love these. Thanks to Jim Sheeler for passing them along. THE BOYS ON THE BALCONIES : 40 YARDS OF SILENCE APART Rocky Mountain News (CO) - Sunday, May 22, 1994 Author: GREG LOPEZ…
John Barry and John Pendygraft: GAINESVILLE — Pastor Terry Jones stayed holed up in his Dove World Outreach Center most of Tuesday. His center is a large prefab warehouse on a tree…
I'm preparing for a talk today and I thought of this story, which I love. It's worth re-reading every month or so. Brady Dennis: The few drivers on this dark, lonely stretch of the…
Dan Zak: It gleams like a giant silver bullet lodged in the former site of a used-car lot, between a dumpy little liquor store and a rubbly, vacant property. It's a diner, that Ame…
Sorry for the gangrissues yesterday. Back now and rolling. Here's Thomas Curwen (thanks, Mark): If Elizabeth Uyehara were alive, she would be pleased. Everything was working out as…
Michael Graff (thanks, Elizabeth): Before he started working in genetic sequencing, Randy Crowell dropped out of high school. He went down to the mill in Kannapolis, 16 years old,…
Size does matter: When bathed in his own afterglow, Glenn Beck becomes as soft and gentle as Mister Rogers. In cadence and content, his Washington rally debriefing Monday on Fox Ne…
Anthony Shadid (thanks, Raja): BAGHDAD — In a pastel-colored room at the Baghdad morgue known simply as the Missing, where faces of the thousands of unidentified dead of this war a…
Ben and Edmund spoke at a company forum yesterday about the work that won a Casey Medal and a Dart Award and was a Pulitzer finalist.
From that Time story on Franzen and his latest: Franzen is very conscious that people are freer than ever — that word again — to spend their time and attention being entertained by…
John McPhee (thanks, Richard): I always say to my classes that it’s analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put…
Let’s post the best of the best. This one is worth reading again. Dan Barry: NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 – In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past t…
Blake Hall (thanks, Hank): I met Roy in early 2007. I was the leader of a reconnaissance platoon of scouts and snipers in Iraq and was just back from a two-week leave in the United…
TLake in SI: The New York Yankees’ top prekindergarten prospect lives in Jersey City and plays baseball with his three brothers in the dusty courtyard behind their apartment. They…
That picture! I haven’t had a Schlitz tall boy since the 6th grade. Here’s Dan Zak: The march of Western civilization and the prosperity of the United States have partly hinged on…
(h/t HS) Is the way Tao Lin writes a harbinger of a new no-style (concrete/literal) favored by the all-web generation? Tao Lin profile from The Observer: The Observer was sitting a…
Taught by SPT Enterprise Editor Kelley Benham. Here, with her permission, is the About This Course: In this class, you’ll tell stories. A story is not an article. You’ll learn the…
The conversation here in the enterprise pod this morning was centered on the St. Pete Times’ new branding slogan: One Bay. One Buy. Which makes complete sense in this two-paper reg…
In the last seven years, Atlanta magazine has employed six different writers who did at least one of the following things: 1. Became a finalist for the City and Regional Magazine A…
Liam Dillon from voiceofsandiego.org writes in with a good question: I’m the City Hall reporter here and am working on a profile of the mayor’s chief of staff, a woman who’s rarely…
Interesting subject matter, unlimited access and very smart characters exploring a timely topic. But does the "narrative" drag this down? Matt Richtel: GLEN CANYON NATIONAL RECREAT…
From our friend Dave: Narrative journalism is essentially rejected at my paper. This has not always been the case, but lately no matter how often I try, all my narrative stories ar…
StoryBoard is rehashing the Mayborn Conference this week. Stuff from Tom Huang and Mary Karr up so far. More to come from Gary Smith, Mark Bowden and others. Check it.
Hank: Sometimes a critic can be wrong without even typing a word. Take “Jersey Shore,” for example. When this guido/guidette group-house reality show debuted on MTV last December,…
Check the name in the upper right-hand corner. That’s right. Now read his story, Thumbing His Way Back Home: Before we talk about sacrifice, or phantom blackbirds, or the Chipper J…
Looking forward to seeing how this experiment goes. From the Washington Post’s Story Lab: There’s a truism in journalism that says stories are everywhere, that every person contain…
Step aside, Woodward and Bernstein. Here come Montgomery and Kruse. This is the first byline I can remember seeing them share at the St. Petersburg Times. (I know they had at least…
Stephanie Hayes: PALM HARBOR — Mikey Enfield called his grandpa on a blazing hot Monday. Could he help with the yard sale? He loved spending days with his grandparents. And grandpa…
Gary Smith: ENTER A MAN. EVEN AT 60,in pajamas, his body’s hard and ready, a fist. He lies down on his bed, and soon he’s in it again, the dream in which the football’s in his righ…
Lane DeGregory: PINELLAS PARK Sarah Ludemann couldn't stop crying. All through lunch that Tuesday, while the other seniors at Pinellas Park High chattered in the cafeteria, Sarah s…
Luke Dittrich: He was alone when he discovered she was gone. His son and the other children, along with the other husbands and the other wives, were down the hall, in the large bri…
Wright's in Scotland: My assignment today was to buy $12 worth of newspapers, sit in a pub at 10 in the morning and spend some time reading Tiger "putter" jokes and looking at soft…
Check out Tom French on NPR. As always, you can get Zoo Story: Life In The Garden of Captives and lots of other cool shit at The Shoppes at Gangrey.
Some smart sons of guns there at the Washington Post are republishing old (mostly ’80s) stuff from Henry Allen, thank god. Here are a few. Beware: Reading them all at once is like…
Sorry for so few posts the last few days. Got a lot of good stuff queued. Let’s start with this one, from Wright (and check out the television version on Outside The Lines, Sunday…
S.I. Rosenbaum: (June 27) — On a sweltering January afternoon in 2008, Kelly Keagy — aging rock star, drummer for Night Ranger, the guy who belts MOTORINNN’ on that one power anthe…
Michael Hastings: “How’d I get screwed into going to this dinner?” demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It’s a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO force…
Robert Kirby (thanks, Matt): Shortly before midnight on Jan. 25, 1996, five men gathered at a table in a darkened room at the Utah State Prison and prepared to kill a sixth. They w…
Dan Zak: LEEVILLE, LA. — Their eyes are bloodshot. Their scraggy skin glows reddish-brown. They clutch cans of beer. On the wooden deck of Griffin’s Marina and Ice, they recoil whe…
Roy Wenzl: KANSAS CITY, Kan. — It was my Uncle Jim who told us my Dad was going to die. He stopped my brother and me in the hallway as we arrived outside Dad’s hospital room, and l…
Dan Barry: WASHINGTON — On the 58th day, an outraged nation summoned the man it holds responsible for one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. He walked throug…
Something not covered in this interview is that S is his favorite edition of the encyclopedia, for obvious reasons. Nieman Storyboard with Tom: We spoke by phone this week with Atl…
I love this story because it uses serious reporting techniques to illuminate a subject that's pure fun. Ben Montgomery and Alexa Volland: ST. PETERSBURG — Brett Maddox graduated fr…
Somebody needs to get TV Land a new paper. Check this out. More here. Thanks, Andy.
Craig Pittman: ABOARD THE PATROL VESSEL ORION -- Lt. Rama Shuster pulled the boat's throttle back to idle speed as his two crewmen peered at the mess in the water. Ten miles off Pe…
Dan Zak: MOSS POINT, MISS. -- Three dollars'll get you the "gulf oil spill shot." Blue Curacao polluted by black vanilla vodka and Bailey's. The shot goes down sweet, which means i…
Fred Hiers: Before May 13th, Robert Morgan had never had a run-in with the law. The 39-year-old unemployed warehouse worker had lived a mostly quiet life for the past seven years w…
Doyle Murphy: The boy and his friends played on the frozen pond in Newburgh's Downing Park, chipping the ice with a bat and kicking the shards across the surface. He was usually th…
Tom Lake: When Angela thinks about viruses, which is every day now, she sees herself at Costco, pushing a shopping cart. They could have swarmed from the handlebar to her fingers a…
We've been asked to post this: Description: The Virginian-Pilot, a 180,000-circulation daily serving Southeastern Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina, is seeking a reporter to…
Joshua Saul from the Alaska Dispatch shared this fascinating deadline crime story that features one of the most candid jailhouse interviews I've ever seen. Is there room for improv…
C.J. Chivers (thanks, Justin): KHAN NESHIN, Afghanistan — Five-year-old Sadiq was not a casualty of war. He was simply unlucky. The boy had opened a sack of grain at his home early…
This was written around Christmas 2004, but it might as well have been Memorial Day. Dan Barry: THE songs and carols tell us that it is Christmastime in the city, with children lau…
M.I.A. tweeted Lynn Hirschberg’s phone number as payback for Hirschberg’s Times Magazine piece and because of all that I found this cool profile of Courtney Love: Courtney Love is…
Jeb Phillips: A new Lima Company leaves Columbus this morning. It’s the company of Lance Cpl. Brandon Schoen, 25, whose pregnant wife is due June 1. He has never deployed. It’s the…
Winning a Pulitzer prize is allegedly awesome. Being a Pulitzer finalist gets you 18 “almost” emails and, if you’re me, drinks after work on Tuesday with Neil Brown, the very talen…
Hank Stuever: For all the gunk on television, it’s hard to think of a more depressing show these days than the “spillcam,” the live, continuous underwater footage of the broken BP…
When he was a boy, Vernon Lott wanted to be the next great poet. Alas, no dice. Years later, he found a box of his genius and realized that it was horrible. That set him on a quest…
Mike Newall (thanks, Mara): In Courtroom 801, Maurice Ragland began to shake. The drug dealer who shot him twice in the head had just been led in for a May 6 sentencing hearing. Ra…
I found this story today on Longform.org, and I can’t get it out of my mind. Anyone with an ego should give it a careful read. Lisa Belkin: It was fame that killed Robert O’Donnell…
Joan Garrett: For days he lived in the background of the train yard, hiding behind boxcars and lingering near brushy areas within view of the tracks. Nails is a veteran among the t…
Henry Allen: O,the stained souls, the small-hours doubts, the troubled manhood of so many American men who didn't go to Vietnam when they could have -- the strange guilt they seem…
How was Michael Kruse able to slip so far inside the monkey's head? Maybe because he's half rhesus macaque. His monkeybusiness is Storyboard's Notable Narrative.
Mari A. Schaefer, Maria Panaritis, and Joelle Farrell (thanks, Mark): Vanessa Dorwart was out the door in a flash. The Interboro High School sophomore seldom went anywhere without…
S.I. Rosenbaum: (May 15) -- On Thursday, the FBI raided a Mobil station owned by the guy who bought my last car. We watched him on TV, at my mother's house: Elias Audy, a small, ne…
Michael Kruse: He's fast, he's strong, he's smart. He's uncaged and to this point he's uncatchable. The monkey on the loose around the Tampa Bay area for the last year and a half i…
Alright. Wright's idea, so he gets first pick, and it looks like it's going to be Barry Hannah's Pulitzer-nominated short story collection High Lonesome. Mr. Hannah died a few mont…
Who’s down? Wright’s idea. We all read the same book and get on here to take it apart. He’s suggesting new fiction, perhaps a short story collection. Something unfamiliar. Thoughts…
Ten years ago, Justin Heckert emailed Walt Harrington a few clips and asked for some advice. Justin was a sophomore at Missouri and had just finished “Intimate Journalism.” He was…
Kevin Cullen (thanks, Mark): Fifty-nine years ago, Ginny Adams was 20 years old, pregnant, about to become a mother for the first time, but something went dreadfully wrong. She wen…
A few years back, when I was working at the Times Herald-Record up in New York, I had a hot story. A millionaire pizza-chain owner got whacked in his own mansion on the banks of th…
Stuever: Apple pie, apple Betty. The sweetness, the spacey granny thing. The twinkle, the dimples, the cotton-ball coif. It's the simplest sort of television-era algebra: Let Sue A…
Let’s talk about this one. From the archives. Michael Paterniti (h/t Wright): Go with him. Go out into the feed yards with Jack Hooker. His daddy was a cattleman, he was a cattlema…
Dan Barry: ON EAST BAY, La. With the Gulf of Mexico oil spill prompting clients to cancel their plans to get themselves some redfish, the charter captain agreed, for a price, to he…
Wright: PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The man who died is buried in an unmarked grave. The digger worked fast that night. Business was good. He jammed the coffin into the opening at the…
Jeb Phillips: One night in early 2009, Ohio National Guard medic Daniel Hutchison felt that he'd just had enough - enough of the drinking, the nightmares, the memories of Iraq - an…
Dan Barry: VENICE, La. Where the world runs out of road and into bayou, and all that is left beyond is the Gulf of Mexico, dozens of docked shrimp boats bob in place, restless. The…
Eli Saslow: SHELL BEACH, LA. -- Johnny Nunez left for work at 5 a.m. out of habit, even though he feared he might never work again. He put on rubber boots, jeans and a T-shirt and…
From Gawker (h/t Joan): Reporters everywhere are in love with "crowdsourcing," in which sources magically come to them, saving the reporters several backbreaking telephone calls. B…
OK, so Ben and I were just having an e-mail conversation about Gangrey, and we were talking about how many stories go by without comment. The ones that get the most comments are us…
Mark Johnson on the following story from Mike Berger: It’s about 60 years old, but is the best piece of deadline writing I think I’ve ever read. According to the explanation, Meyer…
Thanks to Bill for pointing us to LongForm.org. And the backstory. And to Hank, for showing us where we can check it. (This needs to spread.)
Kaustuv Basu: CANAVERAL GROVES — The last time he came out here, Officer Vann Streety ran from a gunman who shot him six times. The last time, on this dirt road called Satellite Bo…
Dan Zak: BUCKINGHAM COUNTY, VA. — He emerges from the woods, a vision in wool. His walking stick leads and his black boots follow. Underneath a tricorn hat, his white hair flows in…
The 2010 National Magazine Award for feature writing goes to Skip Hollandsworth: Compared with the glistening two-story mansions that surrounded it, the house looked like something…
Jorge Valencia: Stamps the ferret was shipped from a Lynchburg post office in a cardboard box stuffed with food, toy cars and a doll. The destination was a town near San Juan, Puer…
Ralph Blumenthal (thanks, Craig): What, you need a zipper? O.K., Eddie Feibusch is going to sell you a zipper. Brass? Nylon? Swarovski rhinestone crystals? What color? Mystery orch…
James C. McKinley Jr.: The first thing you see when you arrive in this minuscule town is a defunct curio store where people once bought souvenirs of their visit to President George…
Henry Allen: The dream is dying. It was this: a belief that the world has a special love for Americans, for our earnest innocence and gawky immediacy, for our willingness to share…
Doyle Murphy: The girl kept her feet under her as long as she could. A crowd had pushed into the intersection of Dubois and South streets — 40 or 50 teens shoving, flailing and pun…
...this cash prize. (Either that or about a week's worth of the kids' college education.)
Andy Meacham: CLEARWATER — Jimmy Wise, a retired railroad engineer, was out of bed at the first suggestion of sunlight. He threw on an old pair of shorts and hit the beach right ou…
This new Pulitzer winner by Gene Weingarten is worth another look: The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larg…
"Our business now, too many times, is a fat kid in a T-shirt in his mother's basement, eating Cheetos and writing his blogs — and we make it news."
Alexander Wolff (h/t Narrative Digest.): The men running at Joe Gaetjens wanted to grab him and make him theirs. Terrified, Gaetjens and other members of the 1950 U.S. World Cup te…
A conversation between Finkel and Doug Stanton starts at 4 today. Listen in as they discuss the art of narrative nonfiction, the state of writing today and much, much more. Thanks,…
Robert Samuels: ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. -- They lost their child somewhere in South Florida. The last time her mother held her was 44 years ago, as she raced through the doors of a ho…
Ben, Waveney Ann and Edmund, and edited by Kelley: For Their Own Good. "You know what they say about second place," Ben just said over root beer floats in the office. "First loser.…
Michael Kruse: The teens hid their bicycles in the bushes and approached the house in the dark on the dead-end road. The 19-year-old kicked the door in. The 17-year-old followed th…
Talking about mine explosions here today, and I was reminded of this one, from Vanessa Gezari: SAGO, W.Va. - No one could say who started it. All they knew was that someone in the…
Wright Thompson: AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Three dudes with earpieces stand at the bottom of the stairs. They're dressed golf casual, but their square jaws give them away. It's early Monday…
They picked. "The faculty of New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, together with a group of distinguished outside judges, has selected 'The Top Ten Works of…
As I mentioned earlier, I'm mining Blake Snyder's screenwriting book "Save The Cat" for some J tools. Snyder says there are 10 types of movies. Most are self-explanatory: Monster i…
Enjoy this one. I did. Luke Dittrich: The low snap of a single gunshot bursts from eight speakers at once. Each speaker is positioned behind a single man, and each man is positione…
In the next few weeks I'll periodically post the first paragraph or two of a straight news story by a well-known writer. The first person to correctly identify the author gets a po…
Eli Saslow (thanks, Wright): The black binder arrived at the White House residence just before 8 p.m., and President Obama took it upstairs to begin his nightly reading. The briefi…
And that’s how you do that. Stuever: Somewhere between hard science and the Banana Splits, television has this insatiable need to apply human story lines to the lives of animals, a…
Kruse: TAMPA — On Saturday morning, not 24 hours after the state announced a record-high unemployment rate, business students from the University of South Florida stood in the lobb…
We’ve talked about The Editor Wall before (here and here), but I still hear from folks who say they’re not allowed to write STORIES for the paper. Do you have this problem? How do…
Chris Goffard: In late April 2007, Mike Penner published an article unlike any of the thousands he had written for the Los Angeles Times. It was brief, just 823 words, and placed w…
Lane DeGregory: LAKELAND They had just finished lunch, were just crumpling paper napkins into trash bins, when the call came through the school speakers: “Will the following girls…
You’ll want to read this, I think. Frank Deford: There are many roles a man plays in life. Son, Husband, Father, Breadwinner. If he is successful: Star, Boss, Grand Old Man. But no…
William Wan: At 2 o’clock on a Monday morning, the sound of angry pounding sent Army Spec. Zachari Klawonn bolting out of bed. THUD. THUD. THUD. Someone was mule-kicking the door o…
Dan Barry: SAN ANTONIO, Fla. Ten years have passed since the country last tried to meet the essential, constitutional and all-but-impossible mandate to count everybody; the whole l…
David Mamet: THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.
I'm reading a screenwriting book by Blake Snyder called "Save The Cat," hoping to tease out some lessons for journalism. Found one I really like in the introduction: Save the cat.…
Lots of friends and Gangreyers took home National Headliners this year. I'm seeing Roy Wenzl, Zack McMillin, Todd Frankel, Neil Swidey ... who else? Congratulations, one and all.
Stephanie Hayes: ST. PETERSBURG Here is Julian Grimes' fantasy: He lives in New York City, a splattered Bohemia where both street art and rules have gray areas. By day, he and his…
Last year, at the Auburn Chautauqua, we were joined by Stephen Knudsen, a narrative artist and professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He told us his work as an adult…
Rick Bragg: The first one I ate tasted like river mud. It was not that earthy, pungent, essence du monde that well-traveled people like to go on about over their quenelles aux hu&i…
Tall order, right? NYU is narrowing this list of nominations down to ten. What would you pick?
Wow. Dan Barry: Open the door to a small hotel on the Bowery. A small hotel, catering to Asian tourists, that used to be a flophouse that used to be a restaurant. That used to be a…
Drew Harwell: DUNEDIN — Big Bruce Simmons was a deputy at the Pinellas County jail. Little Jean Lea was all of 5-foot-2. They were strangers then, four years back, just watching th…
Michael Brick: CEDAR PARK, Texas – Game night, and the goalie paused in his doorway – 6 feet 4 inches, 212 pounds and a faithless left knee backlit against the amber glow of a town…
Kruse, again: PALMETTO Jeremy Dean had to have the Hummer. He saw the ad on Craigslist for the black '03 H2 a little more than a month ago and raced to the small lot with the big t…
Wow. Kruse: CLEARWATER — The obituary was only the beginning. It read like this: Czernia, Oren, 34, of Clearwater, passed away on Jan. 16, 2010. A University of Miami graduate, he…
Pat Jordan (thanks, Eric): I have been pursuing Jose, like the Holy Grail, for three months now, trying to nail him down for a magazine profile he’d agreed to do in January, partly…
Your assignment for today, students, is to write a narrative lede for this wonderful report about a stunt gone wrong. Assume you have spoken to at least five party guests and are e…
Richard Lake: On a dusty corner in North Las Vegas, there is a Buddhist temple. On that temple’s property, there are cats. Many, many cats. Dozens of cats, in fact, have been known…
Here’s an old one from Justin Heckert that’s unlike just about anything else I’ve ever read. Check it out.
The Guardian asked 29 writers to list their rules for writing, and it’s pretty freaking wonderful. Like … Jonathan Franzen’s No. 4: Write in the third person unless a ­really d…
Remember this bit of genius about tip jars? Fail. The Miami Herald tried for two months but has decided to discontinue the voluntary pay program.
Check this one out. Did it work? Bill Stevens: NEW PORT RICHEY John Maccarelli awoke to a Pasco County sheriff’s detective knocking on his door. What happened to the baby? Maccarel…
Dan Barry: EL PASO At the foot of a bridge that helps bind El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, a United States Border Patrol officer warns two pedestrians not to stray once they reac…
Meg Laughlin: PETIONVILLE, Haiti Jan. 12 was a happy day for the new American chef at the Villa Therese Hotel. Wearing a white chef’s coat with his first name embroidered in black…
Christopher Borrelli: Jenny Sanford came home to Chicago. Specifically to Winnetka, where she grew up as Jenny Sullivan. She came home for the most spectacular of reasons: She left…
I've got it on good info that we should all be parked in front of HBO tonight at 9:30 for "Reporter." Stuever's take: The world feels big and yet way too small in "Reporter," Eric…
Gosh, Wright: OXFORD, England -- Oxford at first light is an ode to potential.
David Barstow: SANDPOINT, Idaho — Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift st…
Tim Botos: His eyeglasses perched just above his nostrils, Fred Askew sipped tea and scanned the morning newspaper. His long legs stuffed beneath a table at the downtown McDonald’s…
Doyle Murphy: Twelve people have been killed in Newburgh since Jan. 1, 2008. Collectively, it's a crisis of violence in a small city. Thousands have packed funeral masses. Friends…
Chris Jones: For the 281st time in the last ten months Roger Ebert is sitting down to watch a movie in the Lake Street Screening Room, on the sixteenth floor of what used to pass f…
Dan Zak: Voices carry. They bounce off buildings. They come from just beyond the plane of visibility, behind the churning haze. No one's around, yet there are sounds now and then -…
Ben Montgomery: DELMAS, Haiti — If it had all gone according to plan, Jared Brown would not be standing here, tennis shoes planted on 5,500 pounds of American rice on a truck in th…
Chivers: The helicopters landed before dawn Saturday in a poppy field beside a row of mud-walled compounds. The Marines ran into the darkness and crouched through the rotor-whipped…
Excerpts from “A Free Shave,” by Ernest Hemingway, from The Toronto Star Weekly, March 6, 1920: If you want to save $5.60 a month on shaves and hair cuts go to the barber college,…
A question regarding long-term reporting projects. With as many interviews as you’re likely to do, you probably can’t (or shouldn’t) quote everyone. So is there a good way to tell…
Charles McGrath: J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adula…
Gary Smith: Maybe, if you were lucky, you had one too. Maybe you had your own patch of earth where your legs and mind might roam and you could make a sport your own. I once had suc…
Best thing out there. Charles Pierce: It’s a wonder he didn’t laugh out loud. Looking out over the frauds and lightweights and bland hunks of man-cheese that make up the assembled…
N.R. Kleinfield (thanks, Scott): At the laundromat, irregular things happen. People square off over washers — mine; no, mine. They sit on the counters where you were planning to fo…
Reid Forgrave: Walk into Donna Toombs’ apartment on the ninth floor of Plymouth Place, a retirement community in Des Moines, and you can almost feel the ghost of Benjamin the Bunny…
Missed this way back when. Here’s Chris Goffard: After the killings, the people on the river slept with their knives closer. They leashed guard dogs outside their tents and cardboa…
Two stories about searching. First, from Theola Labbé-DeBose and Wil Haygood (thanks, Mark): At 5:30 on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 12, William Saint-Hilaire rose from his…
Have you read Jason Fagone's investigation of Marvin Harrison in GQ? It's stunning.
Dan Barry: DAYTON, Ohio Every 15 minutes the chiming bells of the Deeds Carillon mark time’s passage in Dayton. Their ever-repeating song reminds the city of its deep connection to…
Joe Mozingo (thanks, Raja): Port-Au-Prince, Haiti - The night was filled with voices, murmuring then gathering together then rising into hymns and chants that carried far in the ba…
Meg Laughlin: JIMANI, Dominican Republic — At the public hospital in this border town, no one can say how many amputations have been done since the earthquake. One surgeon says he…
Funny Norwegian Newspaper Commercials - Click here for more blooper videos
Erin Sullivan: NEW PORT RICHEY – Eighteen months ago, a 40-something man began a pen pal romance with a woman in prison. Her name is Theresa Jones. She's 49 and this was her fourth…
Tom Lake: Crickets at three in the morning on Chica­mauga Avenue in West Atlanta and the fog had lifted enough so that Ken could see the blue BMW naked in the driveway and he f…
Kruse: LAND O'LAKES — Don Gould clocked in at the Publix here in central Pasco County. The green computer font on the small black screen told him to BEGIN SHIFT. Gould is 46, has b…
Lane DeGregory: ORLANDO — In the dark doorway of the airport hangar, he held her. It was warm inside, with all the other soldiers and their families. But she couldn't stop shiverin…
Stop what you're doing and help us design some 2010 Gangrey paraphernalia. Got an original j-inspired slogan you'd love to see on a snug T? Great. Itching to drink coffee in the ne…
Alex Zayas: TAMPA — The 911 call came in like many do: Nothing to hear but background noise. People bump their speed dials. Little kids don't know who they're calling. Operators mu…
In his new book Eating The Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman talks with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris about interviewing. Morris: If people were entirely reasonable, they would avoid…
Many thanks to Ramsey for this ... People I'm Not Talking to Next Year By Jimmy Breslin New York Herald Tribune All these people today, they run around and put their arms around ea…
Adam Bosch: Mary Taylor starts her Friday night routine by arriving at the bowling alley one hour early, dropping her bag near one of the lanes and heading outside for a smoke. She…
Anthony Shadid: THULUYAH, IRAQ — Recitation of the Koran, mournful but consoling, played from a scratchy cassette as the men gathered in the funeral tent for condolences. They sipp…
Have I missed anything? Cast your vote in the comments …
The Mike Levine Journalism Workshop is April 29 to May 2, in Livingston Manor, N.Y. The MLJW is a bit of a throwback, named after a dear friend, mentor, and one of the best story g…
Mark Bowden in Vanity Fair: Detective Michele Deery works in a cubicle in the basement of the Delaware County courthouse, in Media, Pennsylvania. The only window is high on the wal…
The relentless assault continues: MARIANNA — Boys are buried on the little hilltop. That much is certain.
Alex Zayas: TAMPA — For the first time in history, it allowed a human to tap a backspace key and make a mistake go away. Called “Selectric II,” it was conceived when Richard Nixon…
Dan Barry: SACRAMENTO At 7:56:59 on a Sunday night in November, a citizen known only as Steve called 911 to report a fire in the Curtis Park neighborhood. Flames were rising from t…
Lane DeGregory: BUSHNELL — The two teenagers got to the cemetery first. He wore his dark green dress uniform from the National Guard. She wore a long black dress. They stood on the…
Doctors said Chase Kear’s survival was impossible. After he hit his head on the ground in a pole vaulting accident last year, they sawed off a third of his skull to relieve the pre…
Lane DeGregory: TAMPA The Moscow Mauler couldn’t sleep Sunday. On the night before one of the biggest days of his life, the 37-year-old professional wrestler lay in bed in his Sout…
Eric A. Stern (thanks, Todd): HELENA, Mont. — In Montana, a rabbi is an unusual sight. So when a Hasidic one walked into the State Capitol last December, with his long beard, black…
Giant thanks to Ramsey, who’s typing up old Jimmy Breslin stuff so we all may share. He brings up a good suggestion, btw: “I’d like to see more people doing this. That is, finding…
Peter Baker (thanks, Ramsey): WASHINGTON — On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminati…
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Maira Kalman’s work for NYT.com. Cool stuff. Thanks Ted.
Kevin Robbins: COLLEGE STATION — Long tables draped with maroon linens held the portraits of the dead. Other photographs were displayed Tuesday at G. Rollie White Coliseum, includi…
Wes Ferguson: LINDEN — Whatever happened to Billy Ray Johnson? For years, the middle-aged, mentally challenged black man was a familiar face around town. But on a September night i…
Hey, Gangrey friends, The Wichita Eagle has an unusual story project set to launch Dec. 6. It will include an 8-part serial narrative and our first-ever hour-long narrative news do…
Paul Farhi: Bob Marbourg never wanted to spin records or read the news on the radio. One thing, and maybe only one thing, fascinated him: the mad struggle of a few million people t…
Dan Barry: COLUMBIA, S.C. In the down time before another head count, two prisoners play cards. One inmate shuffles and the other flicks his hand, a mystical cutting of the deck. T…
Tom Junod: On December 7, 2006, a new jail opened in Guantánamo. It was, and is, called Camp 6. Guantánamo is located at the arid eastern end of Cuba, plagued with ig…
It took a minute to recover, but heavens this was fun. Read all about The Auburn Chautauqua here: Atlanta Magazine reporter Thomas Lake recently hosted an unusual narrative confere…
Cormac McCarthy: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in…
Big thanks to Ramsey for spending his Friday night (?!) typing up some classic Jimmy Breslin. Breslin did three columns on the assassination of JFK. We all know the gravedigger, of…
Charlie Pierce: Toward the end of September, a couple in Fredericktown, Ohio, named Richard and Jacqueline Ruhl decided to build a float for the annual Fredericktown Tomato Show Pa…
I'm breathless. From Washintonian.com's Capital Comment blog: Details are sketchy, but numerous witnesses report that veteran feature editor Henry Allen punched out feature writer…
Wright Thompson: ANGOLA, La. –The prison dentist walks slowly down the gravel road past the warden’s house. He is stooped, with a big belly, two white tufts of hair and a bald spot…
First in a continuing series of nuggets from Hank Stuever’s book Tinsel, which you should get, if you know what’s good for you. If there are typos, they’re mine. Page 67: People so…
Andy Meacham: ST. PETE BEACH — Julius Stewart and Angie Lee Burnham were childhood friends who moved away and married other people. Both their spouses died young, and of unusual ca…
Joel Achenbach: Gary Smith writes very long stories for a living. They run 8,000 words. He crafts four of them a year for Sports Illustrated. He is a throwback, a spinner of yarns…
Paul Grondahl with Poppy’s Story in seven chapters (thanks, Brendan). Here’s the first: ALBANY — “I ain’t nobody, boss. I ain’t nobody.” The man was wrapped in three layers of ther…
… over at Nieman Storyboard. Good stuff. Like this: Is there anything narrative journalism does that can’t be done by some other type of print or online story? Narrative journalism…
Check out Wes Ferguson: There will be tears tonight. There will be voices in the cemetery — a child’s laughter, a whispered threat. On a cool, damp night in Longview, paranormal in…
Wright Thompson: NEW YORK — I am a man of the people, which is why I generously tipped the guy who shined my shoes in a suite near the home plate of Yankee Stadium. Actually, that’…
Congrats to the folks at the York Daily Record, which posted the highest circulation gains this go-’round. I don’t know much about the paper, but I know they have an intense focus…
Lane DeGregory: Tom Sawyer is in jail. Again. He’s well known at the Hillsborough County lockup: trespassing, drinking in public, resisting arrest. Alkie crimes. It’s petty stuff,…
Sean Daly: LARGO — Jim Priebe will never forget how he found out: Nine years ago, he called home to check on his mother, a routine how-ya-doin’ in the middle of the day. Margaret P…
Lane DeGregory and John Pendygraft: Much of the debate about health care reform has centered on the nation’s 47 million uninsured. But those pushing the nearly $1 trillion plan are…
Gary Smith: She’s the water boy on the football team. She’s president of the National Honor Society, a year from graduating as valedictorian. She can bench-press 180. She hunts dee…
From Soul of Athens: For 63 years, Tom Rose and his wife, Mary, built a life together on his family farm on Canaanville Road. Then last year Mary passed away, leaving Rose to face…
Artist Tracey Falcon: “As the roots and the rings on teh trees offer information on the land over time, the pages of the newspaper are steeped in human history. Information, truth,…
Stephanie Hayes: ST. PETERSBURG — Alexandra Kensler had been working weird hours, not sleeping well. The imposing teen with the blond ponytail and iron grip was awake at 6 a.m., al…
Dan Barry: MONTGOMERY, Ala. The State of Alabama has just dedicated $6 million in federal stimulus money to combat a certain invasive weed, and the two men chosen to lead this grou…
P.J. Huffstutter: The latest edition of the Budget had just hit newsstands and Amish family mailboxes, and already fresh updates were pouring in. “Canning is coming to a close,” on…
Ever watch football? Then read “Game Brain,” from GQ, by Jeanne Marie Laskas. It’s got me fired up to do better work. Here it is: On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002,…
David Von Drehle: A story told around Arlington National Cemetery holds that John F. Kennedy paid a visit around Veteran’s Day in 1963. As he stood near the mansion that once was h…
Kruse said the blog is looking a little outdated, a little behind the times. So I’ve tinkered with it a bit and I sort of like the changes. Take a look.
I’m awake. What the hell. 1. Today’s Drink on the 1A rail. 2. Every non-major league local sports story must contain at least 30 names of athletes. 3. We bring back delivery boys o…
My wife said the other day that she is cake’s No. 1 fan. I am the No. 1 fan of front page editorials. I wish there were more of these.
Chris Erskine: Santa Monica Pier juts out into the Pacific like Jay Leno’s jaw, a defiant, whimsical and improbable landing pad. Just 100 feet below, sharks are at play, scarfing t…
Sheri Fink: The smell of death was overpowering the moment a relief worker cracked open one of the hospital chapel’s wooden doors. Inside, more than a dozen bodies lay motionless o…
I needed this. Hank Stuever: Wawa in the morning, Sheetz at night. Sheetz in the morning, Wawa at night. They’re just convenience stores, you shouldn’t think too hard about them. (…
Richard Lake: It’s hard to pinpoint when the trouble began, but that doesn’t matter now. On Monday, my hands were shaking, and they wouldn’t stop. This made note-taking difficult.…
Josh Tyrangiel, managing editor of TIME.com, says that long form journalism is not working on the web. But NYT Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati, says “contrary to conventional wisd…
Andy Netzel: The lunchroom is half-full, but the din sounds like it’s packed past capacity. Two Lincoln-West High School staffers hang at the edges to keep an eye on things, callin…
Dan Barry: PROVIDENCE, R.I. The chief emerges from his tent to face the leaden morning light. It had been a rare, rough night in his homeless Brigadoon: a boozy brawl, the wielding…
Giant thanks to Lena Price for taking notes at The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference last weekend, then structuring them in this nifty top ten tips list, just for you: 1. Get…
Jennifer Fermino (thanks, B): The latest candidate to throw his 10-gallon hat into the race for mayor is a Nietzsche-spouting semi-nudist who lives in New Jersey, twice posed for P…
David Barstow: WICHITA, Kan. — It did not take long for anti-abortion leaders to realize that George R. Tiller was more formidable than other doctors they had tried to shut down.
Vanity Fair gives the cold gov’s resignation speech a hard read.
Great to see so many familiar faces on the list of AASFE winners. Congrats, one and all.
I loved this behind-the-curtain look at a robbery investigation from John Barry: TAMPA — In blurry videos of three convenience store robberies last week, one detail got everyone’s…
So the over-65 crowd has long been the most dedicated newspaper readership demographic. It’s high time we forgive them for calling to complain about the word “suck” appearing in pr…
Dan Barry: ... But a request to talk to people who had recently joined the cause was met with resistance by James Fitzgerald, the national director of field activities, who began t…
Steve Persall: She wanted to be a dancer or an actor and was lovely enough to be either. Instead, she became a newspaper reporter and a damn fine one. But she looked nothing like t…
Shari Roan (thanks, Raja): It’s been a rough week. A few days ago, at UCLA’s Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, 6-year-old Jani toppled a food cart and was confined to her room. Sh…
Eli Saslow (thanks, Mara): He heard the familiar whine of a Metro train approaching the platform, and Tom Baker decided to run for it. The next train was scheduled to arrive at Tak…
On his life and death: Geoff Boucher and Elaine Woo: Michael Jackson was fascinated by celebrity tragedy. He had a statue of Marilyn Monroe in his home and studied the sad Hollywoo…
William McKeen on the impact of information overload on a new generation: Novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe is among those who arch eyebrows over the time and labor-saving devic…
Ian Shapira: YaVonne and Erwin DuBose stepped outside the D.C. medical examiner’s office yesterday to take in the fresh heat. They needed a reprieve. They had just seen a photograp…
Mike Anton: An hour before dawn in the camp of last resort. Dozens of men and a few women are asleep in the beds of pickup trucks, in the back seats of cars or on flattened cardboa…
Wow. Wow. Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin: Part ONE of THREE The leader of the Church of Scientology strode into the room with a boom box and an announcement: Time for a game of mus…
Lawrence Weschler: I want to get rid of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The class I teach at NYU is called “The Fiction of Nonfiction,” and it is less a class about…
Wright Thompson: WASHINGTON -- Baron Hill is in training, working on his jumper, pumping iron, doing rep after tedious rep on the weight machines to strengthen his bum knee. He swo…
Kruse: The people in the trucks were mechanics, roofers, wrecker drivers, current and former military men. Inside, they parked RVs, pitched tents, hammered in horseshoe pits and pu…
As Roy Peter Clark says, most nonfiction writing falls into one of two categories: the story and the report. Many articles are hybrids. They use elements of both. They have narrati…
From the New Yorker's Book Bench: Yesterday, Ha’aretz — Israel’s oldest newspaper — sent home all of its regular reporters and contributors, and replaced them with famous literary…
Sarah Kershaw: There is so much hugging at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, N.J., that students have broken down the hugs by type: There is the basic friend hug, probably the…
Dan Le Batard (thanks, Nigel): The grass has browned around this haunted house in Davie. The lower half of the front door is covered in smudges that let you know the hands and feet…
Farhad Manjoo: When I signed up for Mine a couple of months ago, I was mainly looking for a laugh. The new magazine from Time Inc. seemed like a gimmicky, goofy effort to save a be…
Lee Hill Kavanaugh: Her phone rings at 10 p.m. The voice on the other end is quiet, uncertain. I just got picked up by the police. … Do you hate me? Donnette Siems takes a deep bre…
Denise Gamino: ABOARD A TROOP PLANE — Flight attendant John Bechtold keys the public address mike just moments after this wide-body jet swooshes into the humid Texas sky. His messa…
Bruce DeSilva: My father’s ankle-length, black-and-white tweed Mayfield, the first fine piece of clothing he bought for himself when he returned from the war, hangs still in my cro…
Ron Matus: … One day, the band meekly begins what should be a raging funk jam, Jungle Boogie. Mr. T tells the baritone sax player, “You got to be angry.” He scrunches his face in m…
Ashley Clark and Karla Ward: At 336 Hollyhill Drive, he was Leslie J. Burns Jr., the man who lived in a modest 1 1/2-story brick house before he died. At a dimly lit bar and restau…
We should have a conversation about beat sweeteners. I hear so many people ripping them and, frankly, this is one of the most interesting stories I’ve read out of the WH. Has anyon…
John Barry: TAMPA — The Chair is one of those ugly gray Office Depot things. It faces the long messy desk of Cantor Moshe Friedler at Rodeph Sholom. All the kids in religious schoo…
Stephanie Hayes: ST. PETERSBURG — Ted Dahlem settled into bed every night. He talked to his wife. She died in 2005. He talked to his children. Three of his four died, one by one, i…
Chris Goffard: Before dawn that morning, they clambered onto an empty boxcar at the Union Pacific yard and rode it out of Bakersfield into the Tehachapi Mountains. There were six o…
Cool idea from Paper Magazine. They invited a band of visual communicators to rebrand America. Take a look: Right now America is like a company teetering on bankruptcy -- we have l…
Hank Stuever: We live in the age of extreme niche fandom. Even more extreme is the quibbling. I was commanded by Paramount's publicists -- the Legion of Women With Clipboards -- to…
From the newspaper hearings, David Simon: It requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them kn…
P.J. Huffstutter: As the morning Wall Street crowd rushed past Minas Shoe Repair, a group of women in dark business suits stepped inside, sorry-looking pumps in hand. The shoe-shin…
Anna Quindlen: ... But my second response to reading over the stories was delight. They were so thoroughly reported, so well written. Whether local, national or international news,…
If you want to get better … George Getschow, writer in residence of the nationally renowned Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, is inviting journalists and other nonfiction wri…
David Gonzales (thanks, Raja): For the father, the choice was obvious: An engineer with several jobs yet little money, he saw no future for his daughter and son in their struggling…
Justin George: In his black SUV, he rolled through the darkness before dawn. He drove past shuttered buildings and fried fish shacks, toward the housing projects of West Tampa and…
Here: ALIABAD, Afghanistan — The two Army lieutenants crouched against boulders beside the Korangal River. Taliban gunfire poured down from villages and cliffs above, hitting tree…
Hank Stuever: WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. — The country’s best-selling cookbook right now is for people who don’t really cook, written by a hyperkinetic 43-year-old former TV producer n…
Konrad Marshall: Brian Duff sat in the corner of the homeless shelter courtyard, scribbling in a spiral notebook. He drew faces in black pen but averted his eyes from those around…
Meghan Murphy: In the hallway of his apartment building, Solomon Davis is trying on postures like new clothes. He stares into the mirror. He squints through black-framed glasses. F…
Go, now, and find a copy of Atlanta Magazine for T. Lake’s latest. Well worth the hunt, friends.
Breaking: St. Pete Times wins two Pulitzers. Lane DeGregory, and PoltiFact. More to come. … And John Barry, finalist, for Winter’s Tale! Check it here.
Leonora LaPeter Anton: ST. PETERSBURG — Walk into Starbucks. Look around. The coffee grinder is grinding, the milk is frothing, and the barista is announcing a pair of half-caf lat…
Dan Barry: COBURG, Ore. — The winding steps of granite lead to a dark hardwood floor as polished as the mirrored ceiling above. Together they reflect only luxury, from the dining a…
Lane DeGregory: JACKSONVILLE — On his way to the airport, pulling his suitcase across the dark parking lot, he gives himself the speech: Everything is fine. Nothing’s going to happ…
I missed this earlier, but here’s a memo: David Finkel, one of The Post’s most creative writers and thinkers, is returning to the newsroom after a successful book leave to take on…
Buy this new compilation, reviewed by Jamie James (thanks, Bill): … Hearn had a rare gift for bringing a place to bustling, scented, gorgeously tinted life. Anyone who has spent ti…
Michael Wilson: Subway heroes, as they are inevitably tagged even before the grease from the tracks is rubbed off, come along every now and then — indeed, as the story of Chad Lind…
I’m sure this isn’t new, but let me float something here: Why not add something like a tip jar to every story that runs on a newspaper website? Something like this (upper right). W…
Big ups to Jones for finalisting at the NMAs. If you haven’t read his story, do it.
Sorry about the blog, but it’s back, so shut up and read this: HARRIMAN, Tenn. — After watching and reading about the legend of Ken Mink again and again, and after getting inside o…
John Barry: ST. PETERSBURG The container looks like a bacon-bits shaker. It contains Ray Fennessy's Magic Bullet formula. It's the stuff he says will keep him alive until he's 120.…
Neil Swidey: Adele steps on her scooter and glides down her flat dead-end street of neat single-family homes. Kids emerge from their backyards and through their front doors, follow…
Daniel Zalewski recently wrote a profile (not available online for non-subscribers) for The New Yorker about the great novelist Ian McEwan. I found some of the thoughts on writing…
Lane DeGregory: CLEARWATER They were anchored about 38 miles offshore Saturday afternoon when high waves flipped their small boat. The four football players, who had been fishing f…
Robert D. McFadden: ... Like Walter Winchell and Gabriel Heatter before him, he personalized the radio news with his right-wing opinions, but laced them with his own trademarks: a…
Seriously. Wow. I don’t know what to say about this.
Go, now, and read Wright Thompson: I came upon a box containing two small notebooks used by the soldier tasked with guarding James Meredith, the first African-American student at O…
Dugan Arnett (thanks, Nigel): Wichita — Not long ago, it came to light that Baby Mangino — the rotund infant who recently earned a great deal of national attention for his Hallowee…
Richard Lake: Several weeks ago, a story written by a free-lancer ran on page 11 of the main section in the New York Times. It was not groundbreaking, nor particularly revelatory.…
Stephanie Hayes: The week before I started the job, I sat at the kitchen table with my grandpa. I explained what I’d be doing, the best I could. Truthfully, I wasn’t totally sure.…
Kruse: The “25 Random Things About Me” phenomenon on the social networking site Facebook.com seemed to come out of nowhere, peaked in late January and then began to fade away. Peop…
Hank Stuever: HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 22 — Jai ho, you Oscar slumdogs, which we think translates loosely as: Shout hallelujah, c’mon get happy! But how happy? After all, the movie that won…
This story limps a little coming out of the gate, but stick with it and you’ll get a tremendous reward. It’s packed with true, deep, surprising insight on a topic that tends to ins…
David Filkins and Paul Grondahl: BECKET, Mass. Bodies hurtled through the air as windows smashed. "Guys were flying around like ping-pong balls," Albany River Rats left wing Joe Je…
Tom Treweek is looking for feedback on a story he wrote about a town's volunteerism after a January ice story : The lunch line backed out far into the gym at the activities center.…
Rebecca Green: The woman at the heart of the recent incest case wants people to know what happened to her. And, more than anything else, the 30-year-old wants them to know she is a…
From the book Art & Fear via Kevin Kelly: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he…
Jeff Wiehe: Rhonda Berger won’t talk about the phone call, other than to say, “I was on the phone with her the whole time.” The call came early Friday from her daughter, who was tr…
I enjoyed this little snippet from Wikipedia’s entry on narrative journalism: Also, Narrative journalism has not yet found a definite home in the newsroom due to the nature of news…
Erik Wemple: Everyone knows big changes are afoot in Style and its thematic cousins at the Post. A new co-managing editor, Raju Narisetti, was recently hired to oversee these fiefd…
Lane DeGregory: INVERNESS He found it four years ago when he was cleaning out closets. His sheet music: Chopin, Beethoven, Debussy, all buried inside a dusty box. He hadn’t seen th…
Mailbag: I’m looking for great sports features/narratives/stories about a father and son or a coach and player in a similar relationship. Anyone know of any?
Anne Hull: BRINKLEY, Ark. — Wayne Loewer’s truck reveals a lot about his life. A 12-gauge shotgun for duck hunting rests on the floorboard. A blue thermal lunch bag containing elk…
David Maraniss: In taking the oath of office as the first African American president in the nation’s nearly 233 years, one man reached a singular achievement. But at four minutes a…
Looks like Inara Verzemnieks cracked the Atlantic: Time was running out for Fizzle the rooster. Four weeks ago, he had announced his sex to the world, or at least to his Portland,…
This story, by David Samuels, really picks up speed as it goes: With two minutes left in his workout, Rampage mounts a final assault on the heavy bag. An invisible string seems to…
Washington Post photographer Andrea Bruce (thanks, Ramsey). This is beautiful.
Tom Chiarella (thanks, Casey): The sink is full of tongues. Beef tongues, each as big as a man’s shoe, frozen into one icy clump the size of a propane canister, defrosting for an a…
David A. Fahrenthold (thanks, Kevin): The Chesapeake Bay is not tar-black and dead. It is not bright-green and toxic. It looks just as beautiful as ever, come a sunrise in Annapoli…
Almost missed this: Finally, I thought, a story about a print organization that has found a way to tame the Web and come up with a digital business approach that could serve as a m…
Michael Kruse: We’ve never been more safe. We’ve never been more afraid. That’s the paradox we’re left with now that police have finally named a killer in the murder of Adam Walsh.…
Lee Hancock, part one of five: Min Patel huddled in a fourth-floor hallway with Dr. Edward Taylor near an intensive care unit, where the trauma surgeon’s patient lay tethered to a…
Dan Barry: EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. They came for the gravely ill racketeer last month, appearing at his North Providence home around dawn. His time was near, but not as near as the p…
Ben Montgomery wonders why so many stories he reads use a common newspaper cliche to suggest plurality. He's not alone. A Gangrey request: Let's (... is not alone) all (... is not…
William Langewiesche: What were the odds? There were so many chances for the accident not to occur—so many ways to break the chain that led to it—that a crash investigator later to…
Snow fell in Vegas. And it's almost Christmas. Poetry time! See what you think: 'Twas the week before Christmas, when all up the Strip Not a sunbeam was shining, not even a bit. Th…
GQ’s Sean Flynn has a gripping narrative on the Alaska Ranger sinking on Easter Sunday. This is a long story, but beautifully told. The detail is cinematic. Flynn makes readers fee…
Rick Reilly (tx, Justin): With apologies to Harper’s Index … Amount jailed star quarterback Michael Vick spent from July ’06 to July ’08, according to recent bankruptcy papers: $17…
Top 10 Thanksgiving Stories? I’ll start. Dan Barry: THEY deserved New York. Those who have willingly donned the maroon-and-gold uniforms of the Pinson Valley High School marching b…
One of our friends is meeting today to talk about launching a crime blog at his paper. He’s looking for some good ones out there and any advice on making it successful. Seems like…
Paul Salopek (tx, Nigel): IN THE AFAR TRIANGLE, Djibouti – The desert is a war. U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Cynthia Ramirez roared through it in an unmarked Land Cruiser, projecting the a…
It’s uncanny the number of things Hanna-Barbera Production’s The Jetsons correctly predicted. Flying cars. Carwash-like showers. That a black man would be elected president of the…
When I was a boy, I used pull the covers over my head and read the sex scenes in my granny’s romance novels. I just typed granny and sex in the same sentence. I did it again. Anywa…
Emily Nipps: When the Tampa Police Department needs a touch of compassion, someone who can roll into any situation and defuse it with a calm, tolerant demeanor, they know just the…
Tonight I read a story that reminded me why, despite all its surplus commas, The New Yorker is still indispensable: Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when th…
Susan Dominus: Everyone’s a critic, and apparently it’s never too soon to start. That’s why David Fishman, an Upper West Sider who turned 12 last month, decided to take himself out…
November 11, 1992, Wednesday, Final Edition Vietnam: Hazy Images And Searing Memories; The Drama of The Absolutely Ordinary Soldier BYLINE: Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Write…
Neely Tucker: It was a short ceremony, and not that many people came. Maybe 25, and one small white dog. People gathered around the grave. There was the American flag and the rainb…
From the Washington Post: Hundreds of uninsured and underinsured Americans flock to Wise County, Va., every year to seek treatment at a makeshift field hospital operated by the Rem…
Wil Haygood: TEIGEN, Mont. Cattle ranchers in the high plains of central Montana sometimes come across square rock formations just beneath the ground’s surface. They have no doubt…
If there’s any question about why things are what they are, and why that’s scary, read this: The difference between print dollars and digital dimes — or sometimes pennies — is bein…
I used to think boring your audience was the greatest sin a storyteller could commit. Maybe I still do. But here’s another one that may be just as bad: confusing your audience. Loo…
Bill Reiter: CHARLOTTE, N.C. | Before hitting the links, Marty Schottenheimer offers a warning. “The coach in me always comes out,” he says, his big blue-grey eyes bearing down wit…
Some stories cry out for narrative. Others don’t. Like this story from Doyle Murphy about … ah … read it your damn self: A Newburgh firefighter became an ad hoc surgeon Friday, cal…
Check out Scott Anderson’s series on first-time voters. From Part I: It was September 1975, and Luis Granados entered the United States under a cover of darkness. He was 26 years o…
Sean Daly: On a Party Block, a neighbor is always outside, drink in hand. On a Party Block, this neighbor might be you. But more than likely it’s Chuck, a great guy — two tween kid…
Blaine Harden: TOKYO, Oct. 24 — Due to a shrinking population and an expanding Internet, the decline and fall of newspapers in Japan is all but guaranteed. “I am in a dying industr…
Leonora LaPeter Anton: She’s walking up the sun-streaked sidewalk in front of her doctor’s office, trying to be positive. I have a baby inside me, Carolyn Zinn tells herself. Ten d…
Libby Copeland: Jill Biden still teaches Monday through Thursday back in Delaware in the frantic last days of the presidential campaign. Her students may know who she is, or they m…
Rick Reilly: I have the absolute worst fantasy league football partner. Just try to get the guy to return a call. Or a text. You need a damn court order. He's Barack Obama. And, ye…
Konrad Marshall: The weathered man stares through the screen door from his third-floor concrete block apartment, out onto the old industrial core of Jacksonville. But his eyes are…
David Filkins: Mike and Lindy Slingerland made their way around the dark barroom, shaking hands, embracing old friends, holding it together when they could and breaking down when t…
Tom Lake: TAMPA — Michael Rodeman, a growing boy who has not eaten breakfast, would very much like to harvest the wind. He might build a water-powered car, if he knew anything abou…
Claire Hoffman: It’s close to midnight, and Dov Charney, the 39-year-old founder of American Apparel, lies in his bed staring at a massive flat-screen TV. A pair of boat shoes and…
Fascinating take here, from the Times-Picayune's Chris Rose: (I wonder, should we all follow?) Q and A: ... SD: Did the voice of other reporters at the paper change as well? CR: Th…
Anne Hull: SUN CITY CENTER, Fla. -- The sign over the woodworking shop says "Sawdust Engineers," and there was a time when the men now bent over the tools used to put on ties or ma…
Alex Zayas: TAMPA — In the dark of night, the masked man soars across the Howard Frankland Bridge, his cape streaming behind his Batcycle. "Batman!" people yell when he enters the…
Erin Sullivan: BAYONET POINT — Andy Law was eating breakfast with his girlfriend, Mary Dinan, at their Hudson home Saturday morning when she pushed the newspaper at him. "Read this…
Michael Kruse: BOSTON Max Dougherty, an otherwise sane 28-year-old American male, has a tattoo of the Red Sox logo on his left chest and two cats named after members of the Red Sox…
Dan Barry: SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. — In another charming suburban house, with another old Subaru Outback in the driveway and another pair of squirrel-nibbled pumpkins on the steps, anot…
Hank Stuever: It’s gold parties now, here in the de-gilded age. The women who used to invite all their girlfriends over to their fantastic homes for good wine and catered nosh on t…
At Salon: You’re pretty accomplished as a long-form magazine writer. You’re kind of “the guy.” Do you ever think, “Maybe I’m complacent here. Maybe I should be writing books or mov…
Michael Brick: SACRAMENTO — He was known as the king of the Yosemite lifers, that proud band of rock climbers, tightrope walkers and seekers who made camp on the margins of the law…
Check out his commencement address in 2005 at Kenyon College: There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods a…
I made it back to Tampa last night. When I rented the Chevy Aveo, it had 193 miles on the odometer. I turned it in with 4,412. It’s a big country. Some good stuff for your Thursday…
From The Forever War: The green hoods appeared busy, and one of them stood up. He held the man’s severed right hand in the air, displaying it for the crowd. He was holding it up by…
The first time I went to work at Yankee Stadium, not the first time I went to Yankee Stadium, but the first time I went to work there, with a pen and a pad and a press pass, was Op…
Heckert, for Esquire: Steak when you were four years old, cut up into strips on a paper plate in the kitchen of your parents’ first house, steak bound by tribunals of carrots and p…
I’m told the guy was a great American novelist, although I admit I’ve yet to read Infinite Jest. He was also a world-class reporter. This is one of my favorite Wallace stories: Mr.…
Hank Stuever: In a world of people who all coyly say "In a world . . ." and everyone gets the joke . . . In a world where the trailers are almost always better than the movies . .…
The NYT is guiding a discussion about the Bissinger book here with a series of essays on the book's 20th. Pretty cool idea. Check out Dan Barry: Could the Odessa, Tex., of 1988 be…
I love it when I have a passing thought, then wake up in the morning and read about it. Eli Saslow and Robert Barnes: ST. PAUL, Minn., Sept. 3 -- Organizers conceived of this conve…
Libby Copeland: John McCain is a man with many friends, and many more on the way. "My friends," he says frequently in public appearances, to emphasize a point or buy time or forge…
Never read an ending like this one before. Not sure I could have written it, myself. Pow.
Jeremy Hsu: When Brad Pitt tells Eric Bana in the 2004 film Troy that “there are no pacts between lions and men,” he is not reciting a clever line from the pen of a Hollywood scree…
I'll read anything Michael Lewis writes: NEW ORLEANS — When the storm finally passes and the wind ceases to blow, the only evidence of property damage for many blocks around us is…
I actually caught myself smacking my fist into my palm while reading this story: BARTOW — In the dead of night six years ago, a Volkswagen Passat ran off a dark country road, hit a…
Here’s Justin Heckert: 7:25 a.m. He takes the long way to work. Straight down Peachtree Street, into the heart of the city where he was born. It’s the first morning of July, and fr…
Anybody see any stellar DNC coverage in the papers? Stuff you wouldn’t expect? Stuff like this?
Political narrative series by Roger Simon: … The campaign would improve as time went by, becoming more coherent, better planned and much less arrogant. But by the time it improved,…
Dan Barry: PHILADELPHIA Her guests began arriving around 8:30 Thursday night, in anticipation of the moment. They told the doorman they were here to visit Doris Smith in 21-Q, and…
Meghan Murphy: MONTGOMERY ­— There was a strange quiet in Clinton Street Cafe Wednesday. At the Walden Bank. And Eddie’s Deli. Richie Reynolds wasn’t there. For decades, the ma…
Libby Copeland: WILMINGTON, Del., Aug. 26 — The strangest thing happened Monday morning at the train station here. “Joe came in here with a motorcade,” says Daniel Thorpe, 44, a ca…
Hank Stuever: The end of the world is here: Lizardbreath has married Blandthony. Grandpa Jim is on his deathbed, with pitiable second wife Iris at his side. Our protagonist, Elly P…
Michael Brick: Her tennis dress was red and her shoes were red and the space in between was all bulging muscle. Li Na used it to power serves conjured solely from forward motion. H…
Dan Barry from New Orleans: On the seventh-floor parking garage of a Holiday Inn that calls itself the “jazziest hotel in New Orleans,” soldiers dressed for combat wait for the eve…
Help us cobble together the best songs about/referring to newspapers. Here's a start. The Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece Tracy Chapman, Across the Lines Beatles, A Day In The Li…
Dan Southerland: In July last year, a butterfly landed on my shoulder while I was taking a break from my office for a few minutes one afternoon to talk business with a colleague. I…
Tom Lake, Elizabeth Dyer, Saundra Amrhein: Three men went on a rampage. It involved guns, money and sexual violence. It lasted at least seven weeks, stretching from downtown St. Pe…
Our friend Kevin Pang eats some penis with Bill Plaschke. Seriously. In the name of journalism. Watch this now.
Andy Newman: At the end of the line, the subway creaks to a stop a few yards short of the yellow crash bumper. A few stragglers, or a lurch of homebound commuters, head for the str…
Leah Friedman: David Hayes has been fishing since he could walk, and his weapon of choice is an open-face spinning reel with a 6-foot rod. But Hayes, 56, is a doting grandfather. A…
Don't wait until Sunday: And so with the fighting over, it seemed as if finding that body was the thing to do. I was a reporter, and I needed a corpse for the newspaper. Ashley ask…
Brendan McCarthy: “We need to chat with the people inside that house,” he tells Wischan. As Pardo approaches, a young woman in the door’s threshold curses him. “Fat bitch,” she cal…
I’m late on this, but say a prayer if you’re inclined for our friend Tommy Tomlinson, who is recovering from a surgery to remove a tumor from his heart. He writes: You’re not going…
We talk a lot on here about good writers, but we’ve spent not a lot of time talking about good editors. I found myself the other day trying to list the best editors I’ve had, and I…
Hank Stuever: Symbolic to our era like a sledgehammer to drywall, the biggest house that ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” ever made over — a sprawling, four-bedroom starter c…
Charlie LeDuff looks like he’s having fun. Check out these Detroit News videos. Part I and Part II. I love his expression when the camera first flashes to him in Part II. And this…
Jeff Klinkenberg: Tad Staples savors summer, especially afternoons when the cumulus clouds pile up like dumplings before turning gray and ugly. He likes when the atmosphere above F…
Somebody buy the government a beer. Those guys work their asses off, toiling for years to get us important information: If anyone is still wondering about the safety of a circus th…
Andrew Adam Newman (Anybody know if this Andrew Adam Newman is really Andy Newman?): There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mo…
Nigel Duara: Ten weeks after the largest workplace immigration raid in U.S. history, this is the new Postville: Drunken brawls. A food pantry that is almost bare. Women afraid to w…
Candice Millard last weekend at The Mayborn narrative nonfiction writers conference in Texas: You want your characters to be so good that readers miss them when the story is over.
This has nothing to do with writing (well, maybe). A guy in New York buys vending machines off the Web, fills the capsules with ideas and plants them around the city. Fifty cents b…
James Meadow in Part I: She is half-naked and friendly. Probably clean, too, since she is merrily soaking in the Seal Pond - where, by the way, there are no real seals. Just two st…
It would look like this: Twelve hours ago: Called wife on way home. Wondered if I should pick something up for dinner. Eleven hours, 59 and a half minutes ago: Listened to wife's c…
Libby Copeland: Cindy McCain might yearn to be invisible sometimes, or at the very least, not surrounded by the Secret Service and photographers and gawking people. The scrutiny se…
AP: The many and deepening cuts at newspapers across the country are starting to take a toll on their content, according to a study being released Monday. The challenge newspapers…
John Barry: GULFPORT — She looks young and petite, waiflike in T-shirt and shorts. The only clue to who she really is, or was, is a slight toughness in her voice, a commanding dire…
Irene Jay Liu: Joseph L. Bruno had wandered off again. Walking through the Albany International Airport, with a crush of staffers, media and well-wishers in tow, Bruno was supposed…
Paul Kix (thanks, Dan): This is the machine. It is a gray square of hard plastic, looks like a garage door opener but is perhaps double the size of one. Inside this square is the c…
Lane DeGregory: LITHIA She slept late last Sunday. After her daughter and grandbaby had moved back to town, after her sister had flown in — surprise! — from Italy, her husband figu…
From Roy Peter Clark: Chip Scanlan and I have been asked to do a third edition of the Bedford book: “America’s Best Newspaper Writing.” The first edition was a historical anthology…
So look at this. Derek Zumsteg, who writes for a baseball site called Ussmariner.com, recently became the first blogger to have his work included the annual Best American Sportswri…
Wright Thompson: ELDORET, Kenya -- He slips into the backseat of a parked taxi and hides behind its darkly tinted windows. What he is about to say could get him killed. Two of Luca…
Our friend Tim Logan is all over the In-Bev takeover. Here, here, here and here.
DeNeen Brown (thanks, Richard): A woman sits alone on a gray chair in a psychiatric ward in a Brooklyn hospital. When we first see her, we do not know how long she has been sitting…
Colleen Jenkins and Tom French: TAMPA — In front of the jury, the case played like a cross between Peyton Place and Bleak House. There were whispers of extramarital affairs, accusa…
Leonora LaPeter Anton: It's fight night at the A La Carte Event Pavilion and Jenna Shiver is pulling a satin skirt on over her shorts. On the other side of the dressing room curtai…
Dan Barry: Lately, in the maintenance garage at the Danbury rest stop just off Interstate 84, the topic of conversation can shift suddenly from grass-cutting and litter pickup to d…
The Washington Post's Sylvia Moreno, Sari Horwitz and Scott Higham: It was above 80 degrees, the start of another steamy summer day in Washington. At 8:58 on the morning of July 25…
Richard Lake: Live Action Sex! Delivered Right to You! Available Any Time! At the Library! Huh? Turns out, anyone with a library card, a shuddering lack of shame and an IQ just hig…
Leah Friedman: RALEIGH - A News & Observer subscriber is suing the newspaper for cutting staff and the size of the paper. Keith Hempstead, a Durham lawyer, filed the suit last mont…
Dan Barry: SAG HARBOR, N.Y. SOMEONE must sing a proper song of farewell for Shea Stadium, the nice try of a coliseum in Queens, as its dismantling draws near and a new ballpark ris…
Oliver Mackson: GOSHEN — Mabel Waingrow outlived her husband, her only son, all five of her brothers and her sister. She closed up her coffee shop out on Route 94 in Blooming Grove…
T Lake: On the 84th night of the revival, the air was charged with collective energy and the floor shook from pounding feet. A spine-tingling roar rose from the crowd. They were ca…
Hank Stuever: TEMPLE, Pa. The only satisfying thing left to do on television is clean up people’s houses. In a half-baked, slovenly era of sub-accomplishment, organizing closets ca…
Lon Wagner: Man, Greg Sipe can’t just start off with his best guitar story. Stories are like rock songs, man, every layer’s important. You need the drums and bass to push that baby…
Ben Montgomery: Melissa Parrot drains her Coors Light, slips out of her T-shirt and hops off the tailgate of her Texas Edition Ford F-150. The pickup gets 20 miles per gallon of ga…
Tom Lake: LUTZ — In the church on the stage by a tall white cross stood a man with a red guitar. He flexed his facial muscles as he played, the way guitarists do when they reach a…
Someone asked a while back about new looks at the lame gas prices story. Here’s Tom Hallman (thanks, Audrie): From his perch behind the gas station’s cramped counter, Austin Egland…
Konrad Marshall of the Indy Star recently scored a pretty cool Q&A with Tom Chiarella of Esquire.
Michael Weinreb (thanks, Nigel): It’s true, what she says about the graves. I went to see them not long after I heard Lonise Bias tell an incredible story to a group of South Carol…
Claire Hoffman: It’s dawn on a hot sunday morning in June, and Amy Winehouse is inside her North London home, staring at her reflection in a dark tinted mirror, looking the tiny li…
Ken Fuson (thanks to newsgems): Cedar Falls, Ia. - It was the raging river vs. a sea of volunteers. Winner take all. The frantic battle to save this city's downtown began early Tue…
I pulled out a copy of the Jan. 15, 2007 Times Herald-Record the other day. I do this from time to time. The Record is a tab up in New York, and it used to be run by a fine man nam…
Check out the Washington Post's three-part series on the housing crisis: The black-tie party at Washington's swank Mayflower Hotel seemed a fitting celebration of the biggest Ameri…
Here's one from Michael Graff (thanks, Laura): He wouldn’t run. All those thoughts racing through his mind, and never once did he consider running. Lew McDonald stood in the front…
Tom French: TAMPA — Inside the slightly dusty Mazda 626, carpooling it across Tampa Bay, the conversation kept turning to Hillary's motives and Hillary's flaws and the eclipse of t…
Paige Williams, deputy editor of Atlanta magazine, recently beat finalists from GQ, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker to win the 2008 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. She…
Hank Stuever: The single set of footprints in the sand — as millions of inspired souls now know — was that time when the Lord picked you up and carried you. It’s a metaphor, people…
How it all came to pass: On September 10, 1993, a major motion Picture—penned by future hotshot Quentin Tarantino, directed by action pro Tony Scott, and starring Christian Slater…
Dan Barry: HOLLIDAYSBURG, Pa. Down halls where cigarette smoke perfumes the air and shuffling slippers give the floors an extra buff, there resounds an intercom announcement: Head…
This is so ridiculous, yet so watchable. ESPN.com (thanks, Justin): Could an NFL kick returner score a touchdown against a bear?
T.M. Shine: The exodus began with the word “Bob.” “Bob, can I see you for a minute?” the boss had asked. Within minutes, Bob was exiting the office with a wave and a “Nice working…
Stuever: It’s never too soon to regret the summer we didn’t have. Those pangs start now, on Memorial Day, as summer already slips away, like losing your favorite sunglasses again,…
Adam Bosch and Alexa James: Brandy Williams knew that one day, “Daddy’s in heaven” wouldn’t be enough. They were sitting in the grocery store parking lot when she heard the questio…
John Barry: The little girl who walked through fire wants to show her pictures. She opens a binder with her stiff, taped hands. One photo shows her posing in her cheerleader unifor…
Dugan Arnett: PORT CHARLOTTE — At any given moment, the dugout of the Murdock Little League Yankees smells like a mixture of sweat, bubble gum and farts. It is a cramped space — yo…
From Dan Stockman: You think the folks on Gangrey could offer a critique? I faced a lot of challenges - the story was six years old, parts of it had been previously reported elsewh…
This is rad. Jeff Solochek: LAND O'LAKES — Marge Whaley has been called her share of names during her 16 years on the Pasco County School Board. But nothing compares to the vitriol…
Pete Iorizzo: Austin, Texas -- Hours before he broke the four-minute mile, Darren Brown thumbed through a novel, keeping his bookmark, a worn color photograph of his father, visibl…
Andy Meacham: TAMPA — Robert Patrick, who collected roadkill with priestly benevolence, died on Friday of pancreatic cancer. He was 38. People who Mr. Patrick and his wife met soci…
Published on: Wednesday, 4/21/1982, Style section, edition, zone, B07 The 'Chariots' Are Driving Me Crazy! By Henry Allen Da deedle-ee dum dum. It's the song of the year, the anthe…
Gas is over $4 in some places which means editors are trolling newsrooms looking for reporters to send out on a gas story we've all written dozens of times. Here's a clip from The…
So there's a post on Creative Loafing about the newspapers on Tampa Bay, how the Times and Trib are making cuts to continue to breathe in a two-paper market. And most of the discus…
Check out Inara Verzemnieks: Perhaps the clearest view of who we are as a people can be found through the double doors of a warehouse at the edge of North Interstate Avenue. Inside…
Congratulations to Raja Abdulrahim, a fine reporter at the Times Herald-Record and a consistent Gangrey voice, for earning a gig at the LA Times. She says she's headed to a newsroo…
Remember this? Here's the rest of the story: ST. PETERSBURG — Under the harsh hospital lights in Room No. 9, a make-up artist wearing a paper mask brushed mascara onto Stacey Karav…
Joseph Lelyveld: "How do we know exactly what the reader wants? I think you should give the reader a fresh and original paper that's very well-written and covers all sorts of thing…
Kevin Cullen (Thanks, Tim): When I was a cub reporter at the late and much-lamented Transcript-Telegram, I got sent to cover a homicide in one of the less salubrious sections of Ho…
Tom Treweek: BENTONVILLE - The flag changed direction. One moment, it was waving toward the south, southeast, maybe east. Then, it snapped the other direction. That was Chanci Osbo…
Craig Kapitan's incredible series on a sniper with PTSD: In this case, the suspect was a teenager - 14, 15, 16 ... who knows - who had ridden his motorcycle day after day down a ro…
Stephanie Hayes: LARGO — He couldn't drive a block without gawks. He couldn't walk five steps without posing for a photo. He couldn't eat lunch in peace. Then again, neither could…
Read this. Charles P. Pierce on Barack Obama: The cynic knows he’ll never make Oshkosh. He took the wrong exit and went too far north, and now he has to double back. He gives up, f…
Doyle Murphy: CITY OF NEWBURGH — A tall, slim 15-year-old died with a bullet in his body late Tuesday night, three years after the same thing happened to his brother. Jeffrey Zacha…
Lane DeGregory: The dress should be long, to the floor. All the girls at Tarpon Springs High are getting long dresses this year, Stacey Karavokiros told the designer. It should hav…
Libby Copeland: MUNCIE, Ind. In the 1920s, two amateur sociologists went searching for a city that was singularly unexceptional. They wound up here. They made a study of Muncie, as…
Richard Lake: HOUSTON — Tuesday evening, it is warm. The old man mows the lawn in the twilight. Darkness has not yet arrived, but it is coming. The old man is out of gas now, almos…
Stephen Deere and Doug Moore: Kirkwood — In his hands were a bank ledger, an envelope of money and a photo album. He knocked on the door of Chuck Runnels' home and flashed that wid…
I'm sure you've read this by now. I just got caught up. Thoughts on this? David Simon: ... At the very edge of being rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Internet -- at the pr…
Lon Wagner: Ruth Silberholz pointed at the can of Diet 7UP on her kitchen counter Friday morning, and the one detail she hadn’t noticed until then. “It seems like every time I come…
David Ferrara: FAIRHOPE They were here for the film festival. Everyone knows someone who saw them. The story goes like this: Brad worked with an actor who lives in Fairhope. The ac…
Dan Barry: Another special request came in the other day to the old brick factory on Gallagher Avenue, where pride — if not much profit — is taken in being the country’s last maker…
We've added a new feature here at Gangrey: The Shoppes At Gangrey, via Amazon. We'll add all the books we're reading and talking about to the list. Check it often. Support your fri…
Joanna Connors: On Oct. 27, 1984, a headline on Page 14A in The Plain Dealer read: "Disgusted judge gives repeat offender 30 years for rape." The story followed standard newspaper…
DEATH of the SALESMAN; We’re Not Talking Loaded With Options Here. We’re Talking Bottom Line on Wheeler-Dealers. Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer Everybody hates car sales…
Congrats to the finalists for the Livingston Awards. Some gangreyers on here. Reid. Konrad. Wright. Peter. (Am I missing anybody?) Well done, folks. Here's to $10,000.
Go, now, and check out our friend Jim Sheeler getting grilled by Terry Gross. And buy his book, which went on sale today.
A tornado hit Virginia, if you didn't hear. Check out some good stuff from the Pilot. Kristin Davis: SUFFOLK Jennifer Schmack is wearing her only pair of shoes. They are brown and…
William Glaberson:GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — The first indication that the afternoon’s hearing in the case of Salim Hamdan was going to be different came when he showed up in war crime…
Obit: Charles Hillinger, the Los Angeles Times’ retired roving feature writer and columnist who traversed the highways and byways of California, America and beyond in pursuit of co…
Michael Brick: NEW ORLEANS — At 26, Danny Wimprine lives with his parents, not far from his old high school, in a room full of timeworn football posters and state championship ring…
That narrative songlist we collected back in the day is evergreen. At least a few people a day land on Gangrey via a “narrative songs” search on Google. So, here’s the list, thanks…
If you can write, you can write. Bruce Springsteen on Danny Federici: Let me start with the stories. Back in the days of miracles, the frontier days when “Mad Dog” Lopez and his te…
Tim Botos: In death, Agnes “Aggie” Meyer got the last word. She had plenty to show for her 85 years on this earth, most of it enjoyed before she entered Manor Care nursing home. An…
We owe a great deal of thanks to the authors and illustrators of children’s books for trying desperately to reinforce the notion that the newspaper is a source of enjoyment and int…
Ben Montgomery: Johnny Foens paid $548,200 to get into heaven. He rode an elevator into the sky, unlocked a door and stepped onto the balcony of his new three-bedroom, three-bathro…
Tom French: ST. PETERSBURG— The temple of forgotten songs — secret mecca of joy and mystery and Elvis 45s — waits at the end of the earth, which happens to be just a few blocks nor…
That’s right. Every Friday (if I remember, and you bet I will). Right here on Gangrey. All ages. No cover. Retro Henry Allen. April 14, 1995 Nobody understands the white shoe thing…
David Barstow: In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag…
Libby Copeland: It's a tiny thing, but you notice it anyway, walking around the city. On a brisk, sunny day in Georgetown, there it is again: a coat bearing a worn, wrinkled Obama…
John Barry: Some of Steven Gey's students have asked his permission to pray for him, to beg God to spare him, to pray for the only thing that may save him — an Old Testament, open-…
Jeb Phillips: The wounded soldiers arrived during the relay race yesterday morning. Three of them rolled on wheelchairs. The fourth walked with a cane and wore shorts, his prosthet…
I watched the movie There Will Be Blood for the first time last night, and it made me think hard about storytelling. I had recently seen No Country For Old Men as well. These films…
From Celina Ottaway: We are having a discussion here (Albany T-U)about using dialogue in narrative reconstructions. Would love to hear thoughts on standards, use, etc... For exampl…
Stuever: Catholics don't argue about abortion or the death penalty nearly as much as they argue about what music is sung (or not sung, or used to be sung) at their local Sunday Mas…
Check out the Roanoke Times work on the VT shootings, one year later. And take a peek at this smart Facebook page.
In 1988, Tom French broke new ground with a 10-part serial narrative he later turned into a book. The serial is finally online thanks to a recent update in the case. Take a look.
I hate to start the week like this, but, whatever. Grab a hanky. Click play. Keep reading. (If you're in the newsroom, it might be cool to unplug your headphones and let everybody…
Mark Leibovich (thanks, Raja): Whenever Chris Matthews says something he likes, which happens a lot, he repeats it often and at volumes suggesting a speaker who feels insufficientl…
Frank Ahrens: After our big Pulitzer win on Monday, there was some melancholy around the newsroom along the lines of, "Oh, this will be the last year this kind of thing will happen…
This is cool (Thanks, Sean): People have long wondered what goes on in Bob Dylan’s mind. But if you pay attention to what the recent Pulitzer Prize-winner says and plays on his XM…
John Barry: The mistress of this trailer home is music. The blue and white trailer has no living room or dining room, really. It has music studios. Shelves of music scores and fram…
I'm so glad Charlie LeDuff is back (thanks, Russell): DETROIT -- Blowing through the grand foyer of the decrepit Michigan Central Depot was a memento from a grander time. It was a…
Brilliant structure on a story that most of us think we've seen before, and several of us have written, but not like this. Chris Jones: Don Collins stood in the sun and mapped out…
Dan Barry: BROWNSVILLE, Tex. At the very bottom of this country, where the Rio Grande loops up and down as if determined to thwart territorial imperatives, there sits a natural won…
Get it all here. Links to winning stories here. 2008 Pulitzer Prize winners in journalism and the arts JOURNALISM: Public Service: The Washington Post Breaking News Reporting: The…
Michael Kruse: Lauren Ortiz died alone on a concrete porch behind the home of a man she barely knew. Last Sept. 1, on a dark street sometime between 10 and 10:30 p.m., Ortiz, 24, g…
Roy Wenzl: SAN ANTONIO - Ill will toward Roy Williams isn't universal In a better world, Jayhawk fans would feel sweeter. Oh, they feel sweet already. But it's sweet with sour. The…
Dan Barry: CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. The members of the 2:20 tour follow their guide up the front steps of Monticello, past those iconic white pillars and into the domed building’s aura…
Tomas Alex Tizon: Harrington, Wash. "That door," he says with dramatic pause. "That door weighs 4,000 pounds. It's been reinforced to withstand a nuclear blast." Peter Davenport ha…
Inara Verzemnieks: There's no way to get scientific about it, to quantify the minutes of lost sleep, the number of Buffalo wings gobbled during an all-you-can eat bracket-party fre…
Here’s Russell Nichols, a freelance writer and poet who used to pound a city beat at the Boston Globe: with a kiss, i interviewed your soul your smile was an inverted pyramid telli…
Kevin Cullen: BURLINGTON – They were brothers, and they grew up in a small, white house, on a small side street, in a section of town the locals call The Flats. more stories like t…
WSJ Review: A Reporter at the Ramparts By PAUL E. STEIGER March 28, 2008; Page W5 Taking on the Trust By Steve Weinberg (Norton, 304 pages, $29.95) In 1901, John D. Rockefeller had…
Ben Montgomery: If the old man is to be believed, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise, then when Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese bullet on the Pacific island of Ie Shima…
Our apologies, and congratulations, to Konrad Marshall, whose stories, In Full View and Looking Back, should also have been mentioned as finalists in the Long category of the 2008…
Tom Lake: TAMPA — They arrested Audie Grogg one night in January, for no good reason, and one bad thing led to another. Jail is expensive. He was in his motor home, out of gas by t…
Hank Stuever: Half the history of Converse is about basketball, and the rest is about something far more complicated, about the ways a plain sneaker is consistently adored by antic…
S.I. Rosenbaum: You’re living in the Vermont woods in a four-story dome you built yourself. Well, the third floor is really a trampoline. You’re not sure if that counts as a floor.…
If we could clone this youngster like 14 million times, we could all sleep easier. Johnny … Son — can I call you son? — please let your light shine.
Wowzers. Memo to the Mercury News: That means we need to provide a wide assortment, in terms of subject matter, tone, emotional appeal, length and appearance. Yes, it means we will…
SHORT Caryn Bush Baird, Here's 8 Years of Change. Other finalists in this category were Brazen Meets Kind in a Courtroom, by Colleen Jenkins; and Scharf's Last Act: A Call to 911,…
Brady McCollough, who turns this story in a day. Shawn Windsor, who gets unheard of access and shows us an inside look at the life of a college basketball coach. And Dirk Chatelain…
For money: "By offering a chance at instant money and athletic glory, the Ultimate Game had created dozens of awkward unions between poor golfers who wanted to be rich and rich bus…
Calvin Trillin: What happened at the foot of the driveway at 40 Independence Way that hot August night in 2006 took less than three minutes. The police later managed to time it pre…
William Yardley: TACOMA, Wash. — Annamarie Ausnes is known for holding up the line at her favorite Starbucks here, carefully counting out her coins to pay for her “short drip, doub…
Roy Clark: I learned that Deford likes to work on paper of different colors. All writers struggle with imagining and constructing the big parts of the story, an architecture often…
From Reid Forgrave at the Des Moines Register: In our newsroom, we’re having discussions about what are the best ways to do storytelling online. Some have argued that there’s no pl…
Tomas Alex Tizon: CORDOVA, ALASKA — By way of telling his story, and the story of this fishing village, Mike Maxwell — born, raised and hoping to die here — wants to talk about wha…
Professor Sheeler. I’d take his class. Congrats, Jim. Too bad for newspapers. At the same time, Sheeler believes that the art of storytelling will be as important tomorrow as it is…
BENNINGTON, Vt. (AP) — W.C. “Bill” Heinz, a sportswriter and author who witnessed the Normandy invasion on D-Day, covered some of the greatest sports events of the 1940s and helped…
Just wanted to let everyone know: Bill Reiter of the KC Star has four top tens in the APSE contest currently being judged in Florida, which is a truly astounding number of awards,…
David Segal (thanks, Raja): NEW YORK — Nobody had seen one in decades. Then, five years ago, they started showing up in homes and hotels across the country, prompting a flood of ca…
Here: If nature abhors a vacuum (not that anyone in this town knows what a vacuum is), does Hollywood abhor the absence of a Vanity Fair Oscars party? Oh, stop the whining. So what…
Elizabeth Rubin: WE TUMBLED OUT of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through…
Libby Copeland: The king of doggedness, who excels at biting his lip and biding his time, waits out the last hours guardedly. Onstage, he projects victory. Offstage, he knocks on w…
Michael Brick: Before an assembly of his high school classmates last week, with all the fervor and high dudgeon only a pep rally can conjure, a football player from Nevada announce…
Dan Barry: A longing for reform, for fresh faces and new ideas, has overtaken Knox County, so much so that many people here cannot wait to vote in the Super Tuesday primary. And it…
Here's a column with a sharp lede and a strong voice. Kevin Cullen has the makings of a great metro columnist. See what you think.
Wright Thompson: PHOENIX -- You don't notice Ernie Adams at first, but he's always there in his own peculiar way. Walking the halls in the Patriots' complex, lost in his own though…
...to enter The Goats, which to my knowledge gives you a deal never before seen in the history of newspaper awards: ten bucks and a minimum of paperwork gets your work read by a ju…
Read Michael Kruse: On the evening of Aug. 22, 2005, a camcorder clicked on in a gated community called Pristine Place. Natalie Shelton, bleached blond and 25 at the time, sat on a…
Jim Sheeler: When the intelligent man in the thrift-store clothes parked his rickety bicycle outside a restaurant or bar, the customers heard him before they saw him, and everyone…
Andy Newman: “It’s not a joke,” said the tall man in the F.D.N.Y. hat as he left the funeral home. “I mean, it’s somebody’s life, that just happened to pass away. Same thing’s goin…
As if you didn’t have enough reason already to submit your stories to The Goats, here are some of the people who have agreed to help judge the contest. Christopher Goffard, Pulitze…
Henry Allen: There’s something about the word “disembowel.” Or “depravity,” or “disfigurement” — about so many words that begin with the letter “d.” Divorce, destitution, doubt, dr…
Jake Adam York: Until I had moved to New York, the phrase “good barbecue” meant nothing to me. In Alabama, there was only barbecue — and a food either was or was not barbecue. Barb…
Andy Meacham: The first time the manager of Clock Family Restaurant in Zephyrhills offered Wilfred “Spook” Wyman a refill on his coffee, he was soundly rejected. “He said, ‘G– d— i…
Chris Goffard: Like the other old men at this Costa Mesa boatyard, where the hulls of peeling sloops and half-made cutters rot on their wooden posts, Karl Markvart can’t be certain…
This story is very, very long. I suggest you print out and read it before bed. Satisfaction is guaranteed. But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a “…
Libby Copeland with the snow birds: BOCA RATON, Fla. — The best place to meet the Floridians who could save Rudy Giuliani’s hide is here at the Flakowitz Bagel Inn, where just abou…
It was only a matter of time: On Jan. 9, Wall Street Journal bureau chiefs from around the world gathered for a night of cocktails and dinner at the Marriott Hotel on West Street i…
Scene I: Foggy, mid-town Manhattan street. Woman #1 (wild, bloodshot eyes) is running down the blacktop, zigging, zaggin, checking over her shoulder, shouting with fear. She runs i…
Check out this investigative multimedia package from Christine Young at the Times Herald-Record.
Holding the bombshell. Saving the last bite of cake. Whatever you call it, read this one to the end. Here's Andy Netzel's take: My first reaction was: I love it. Wow! I can't belie…
This is it, folks. The time has come. Gangrey.com is sponsoring a new kind of writing contest. We're calling it The Goats. For each winner, we will donate a goat to feed a hungry c…
Donna St. George: The sun had not yet risen in Taji. A young Army soldier lay alone in the dirt. She was alive, but barely. Her ribs had been crushed; her spleen, ruptured. Her rig…
Lane Degregory: SARASOTA — Every morning, Susan Stanton wakes early and takes three pills. They help her suppress who she was and become the person she believes she should be. At 9…
Erin Sullivan: SAN ANTONIO — David Roth had a simple Christmas; at home with his mom and dad andhis older brother who flew in from New Jersey, sharing good food, playing outside wi…
Thanks to Baird for passing on the following essay by James Lee Burke, whose recent book, The Tin Roof Blowdown, is supposed to be pretty good. Check it out: I have never thought o…
Lee Hill Kavanaugh introduces us to a woman who escaped a death sentence in Iraq. Shawn Windsor profiles the new man at Michigan. Reid Forgrave goes for a narrative on deadline. Ma…
Back in my Jacksonville days, I used to play poker with a rookie reporter named Brad Schmidt. He was the smartest player in our group, although, for some reason, that rarely transl…
Somehow, this story manages to be touching and hilarious all at once. In fact, on balance, I think I like it better than the one about taquitos.
Please consider making a donation to this fundraiser to help get the Mike Levine Journalism Workshop off the ground. And spread the word. (The site accepts donations via PayPal). B…
Andy described writing this gem of an obit thusly: “Like trying to put a playing card between two wood blocks. The one wood block is easy praise of the dead, the other is being unn…
David Ferrara: This is a collection of stories from the sometimes cyclical world of consumerism. Stories about getting what you paid for, about what it means to have something othe…
Clark Kauffman (thanks, Nigel): Unbridled lust! Unspoken passion! Unemployment! A Sioux Center woman has been fired from her job at an industrial equipment manufacturer for working…
From the Chicago Trib's Rex Huppke comes Jamie's Story. From the Plain Dealer comes Holiday letters dissected. Cindy Lange-Kubick in Lincoln on Gary Scharf's last act: He was antsy…
Dave Tarrant at the Dallas Morning News with a story: In Sallie's dream, Chuck stands behind a chain-link fence. He tells her that he will be gone a long time, but ultimately they…
Ben Montgomery, now in Floridian: The man who brought us Gatorade, that kick, that burst of something in the fourth quarter, died of kidney failure last week at 80. His name was Dr…
Doyle Murphy: Those in the karaoke crowd still stretching last call in the lounge don't see Joe leave, and they didn't see what brought him here, either. They didn't see him five y…
Libby Copeland: HART'S LOCATION, N.H. -- One day last spring, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Democrat and long-shot presidential candidate, and his young British wife, Elizabeth, w…
Michael Brick: On trial for three killings connected to a strip parlor in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a bouncer told jurors yesterday that he was being framed by a squad of police assas…
Joe Posnanski: They bow to Trey Hillman. And they bow. And they bow. He walks through the winding tunnels of the Sapporo Dome, and it is a concrete maze — it took him two years as…
Tom Lake: On a warm fall night two years ago, as the moon rose over Lake Tarpon, a silver Nissan Pathfinder rolled down a boat ramp and plunged into water the color of dark chocola…
Be sure to read Tom French's series, Zoo Story: Eleven elephants. One plane. Hurtling together across the sky. The scene sounds like a dream conjured by Dali. And yet here it is, p…
Chivers: The ruined Afghan police truck smoldered on the highway in the village bazaar, flames rising from its cargo bed. The village was silent. Its residents had hidden themselve…
Robert Smith: As the children swarmed toward the glowing windows of the school, the van drivers, mostly fathers just off third shift, stepped out to admonish them to zip up coats a…
David Segal(thanks, Celina): Looking for a perfect little weekend vacation this fall? Here's a travel tip you don't hear very often: Head to Pittsburgh. Right away. Seriously, get…
Dan Barry: A boy named Isaiah Polk went off one day to see what he could see. He scaled a chain-link fence at the back of his tired FEMA trailer park, where fetid water gathers, an…
Watch this (thanks, MEM): On June 23, News & Observer photojournalists Travis Long, Takaaki Iwabu, Ethan Hyman, and Juli Leonard visited the Eno Quarry in Durham to shoot video and…
John Barry: YBOR CITY – Long ago at the Columbia Restaurant, a waiter made his way through the tables, flaming cocktail teetering aboard his tray. The drink was called “Spanish Fla…
Tom Lake: TAMPA — The arena was cold and quiet and full of children. Nearly 400 of them, heads down, pencils in hand, deep in thought. It was nothing less than a thinking contest.…
Jon Lee Anderson: Joint Security Station Thrasher, in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, is housed in a Saddam-era mansion with twenty-foot columns and a fountain, now dry, t…
Jose Antonio Vargas: NEW YORK — Aboard the crowded D train, rumbling into Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, the inevitable rant explodes. A rant courtesy of Faye Anderson, whom we’…
Dorsey Kindler with William Langewiesche: Back in Davis, Langewiesche was about to finish his second Heineken when he mentioned one of his pet peeves – the mini-industry that had c…
Chivers: First Lt. Aaron W. Childers stood before a doorway inside a mud-walled compound while an Afghan and American patrol searched behind him. Paratroopers swept metal detectors…
Here’s to getting better, and to helping each other along the way. Happy Thanksgiving. Dar Williams: Amber called her uncle, said “We’re up here for the holiday, Jane and I were ha…
Gettleman: The people here are hungry, exposed, sick and dying. And the few aid organizations willing to brave a lawless, notoriously dangerous environment cannot keep up with thei…
Eric Neel: “At some point — maybe after your parents have died and you’re not trying to please them anymore — at some point you have to decide what truly matters to you and what yo…
Stuever: Even now -- in the era of erectile-dysfunction television commercials, or teenage girls extolling the latest in cardboard-applicator tampons -- we still don't quite know h…
Would you name her? From Rex Smith, editor of the Albany Times Union: I'm doing something here that's not very nice: I'm letting you know that I know something you don't know. And…
In the department of Books That Have Been Out A Long Time But That I Just Discovered How Awesome They Are, I would submit a Richard Preston title called The Hot Zone. It was not a…
From the Post and Courier in South Carolina, Glenn Smith, Tenisha Waldo and Schuyler Kropf: A chorus of flushing toilets fills the silence as inmates wake for breakfast. At 6:31 a.…
Libby Copeland: Politics and Judi Giuliani have not always gone well together. In recent months, as her husband's presidential campaign heated up, Giuliani was pilloried in the New…
Michael Brick: The definitive history of New York night life may one day make note of Stephen Sakai in a short chapter called Downtown Bouncer Violence.
Dwight Garner channels Richard Ford on Springsteen: It is a uniquely American celebrity, rewarding excellence that’s unquestionably native, prizing an apparently natural phenomenon…
Yesterday was the Great American Teach-In. Roll-your-eyes assignment, right? Check out Leticia Stein's story: TAMPA - Betty Boudreaux admits she panicked a little when she saw the…
Paul Salopek: MOGADISHU, Somalia — Abdulrahman Habeb was a man with problems, the most pressing of which involved a barrel of tranquilizer pills. The barrel — containing 50,000 cap…
"Of course, in the first half of the 20th century, we added some important inventions so that the burdens of information scarcity were removed once and for all. But in doing so, we…
If you haven't yet, grab a copy of Earl Swift's The Tangierman's Lament. Put it in your own stocking. It's a great collection of Earl's tales. Like this one: THE CLUB IS PACKED. Tw…
With the recent discussion about wild comments on our news sites, I thought this was apropos. Teresa Wiltz: "I don't know what it is about this particular moment in human history w…
Catherine Shoichet: Squirrels are scampering in the ceiling. The sewing machine won't stitch straight. Nine naked mannequin torsos stand in the display windows, beside sale signs t…
David Filkins wrote a story about a man who likes to speed: It's 3 p.m. on a recent Friday and Robinson climbs behind the wheel. He sticks his key in the ignition and fastens his s…
Dan Barry: The Moocher introduced them years ago down by the ferry terminal, near that “No Loitering” sign scratched up to read “Know Loitering.” It was Ed, meet Daryl, Daryl, Ed,…
Read this, watch this, like right now: "I have to ask you something, Blake," I said. "If I'd gone down in Fallouja, would you have carried me out?" "Damn straight," he said, withou…
Erin Sullivan: A sea gull of no known age, gender or name died Wednesday afternoon as it warmed itself on the asphalt at Pine Island.
Here: Some whispers went up from the press pen. Just then, a Books-A-Million employee approached another, who approached another, who walked to a shelf near the podium and quietly…
Hank Stuever: Back to our scandal in progress: The affidavit was written by a total man, who doesn't go into exact detail about what Walters actually purchased at Neiman's. He's al…
Michael Brick: With his long legs stretched out to cross at the ankles, his gaze like a vacant lot, Allan Cameron was sentenced yesterday to life in prison with no chance of parole…
Kaj Larsen, a journalist and former military officer, paid $800 to endure being "waterboarded" for a video on Current TV. (Watch the video). Raja wonders: How far is too far for a…
P.J. Huffstutter: MOORESVILLE, IND. -- When it comes to protecting the memory of his great-uncle, Jeffrey Scalf sees himself as a lone sentinel. Admittedly, it's not easy to defend…
He's back, kinda. Charlie LeDuff (thanks, Richard): It was never a dream of mine to raise a baby. Sometimes, when Claudette is asleep, I find myself staring into the rearview mirro…
Hank Stuever: America, Facebook has sent you a confirmation request, and it's from France: How do you "know" Nicolas Sarkozy? Well, we don't know him know him, and anyhow, the Fren…
Ben Montgomery showed us another side of Black Reign today. The story was the most-read on Tampabay.com, the Web site of the St. Petersburg Times. I'm not sure how many of the read…
Justin George: For 25 years, Art and Pat Fuxan took Communion to Catholics in nursing homes. They slipped broken bits of wafers onto the tongues of the infirm. Strangers barged in…
Erin Sullivan: Saturday morning, inmate 147760 waxed the floors of the county jail in Land O'Lakes and overhead some deputies talking. They needed an inmate to walk behind the Pasc…
Lon Wagner: VIRGINIA BEACH --Whew, their clothes are on. But maybe not for long. "We're going into the back room," says Marion Keeler, "to take 'em off." Now, now, ladies. Marion,…
Per this conversation, here's Gene Weingarten: When I was 12 years old my classmate Kenneth told me that if your urine smelled funny after you ate asparagus it meant you had cancer…
C.J. Chivers (thanks, Nigel): Sergei Babayan was trapped. Minutes before, wisps of smoke had begun flowing through cracks in his classroom door at the private Moscow Institute of G…
This narrative grabbed hold of me and compelled me to read to the end. Stories like this force me to put the rest of life on hold for a few minutes.
Cristina Silva with the story behind the suicide of a politican. Lane Degregory with one family's choice to let a kid go. One team was 0-8. The other team was 0-8. Someone had to w…
Libby Copeland: Comes now the newbie, the freshman senator, the bean counter with a nose for following the money. And at the moment she's following it -- not big money, not earmark…
Hank Stuever on Robert Goulet: In the shower, any man is Robert Goulet. On a clear day, rise and look around youuuu, and you'll see who you arrre. . . . Somewhere, my love, there w…
This can't be a good thing, but if you Google "examples of fancy writing," guess what the first hit is? That's right. Try it.
Josh Levin (thanks, Jamal): In August 1994, on the occasion of the magazine's 40th anniversary, Sports Illustrated ran a 22,000-word story called "How We Got Here." Steve Rushin's…
Cindy Lange-Kubick: Her neighbors filled the courtroom, the air heavy with hate and dread. The alleged witch sat before them on the witness stand, shrunken as an old apple. Tillie…
We all read the AP briefs. Here’s the rest. Wright Thompson: POWDER SPRINGS, Ga. — Genarlow Wilson is lounging on his bed, watching a college football game. An old high school budd…
Hey, remember that haunting piece from a few months back about the guy who publicly soiled a building in downtown Jacksonville? Well, as several of us requested, Konrad Marshall of…
Go, now, and pre-order Dan Barry’s City Lights. From the sousaphone playing tourist from Alabama to the monk whose bag was stolen in New York to the story of Anne Nelson’s lapton,…
Richard Lake is scheduled to watch a man face death tomorrow. Naturally, he’s apprehensive. He’s looking for advice. Anyone ever do this? Any tips? Any examples of when it was done…
This story by The Chicago Trib’s Louise Kiernan got my attention Sunday. It’s the first of a four-part series. The quality of the writing in Part 1 had me looking for Part 2 today.…
A couple years back, my sister Liddy and I were driving up I-95 in a rented Chevy Cavalier on our way back from a Seven Mary Three concert in the Florida Keys when we got to talkin…
Dan Barry at the tryouts for the Mormom Tabernacle Choir. Reid Forgrave in Des Moines starts a three-part series on meth. Peter Slevin on brothers shipping out. Andy Meacham watchi…
Adam Bosch is working on an essay for grad school and he’s looking for some help. He’s taking George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write” and comparing it to the persuasions of current-day…
Neil Swidey (thanks, Mackson): Just after 4 o’clock, when John Ferreira was looking the other way, a prankster pushed him into his pool. It’s a gorgeous pool, rimmed by smooth boul…
Erik Hedegaard in Rolling Stone: As a child, Mario Lavandeira spent most of his time in bed, watching TV. He watched Friends, Melrose Place, She-Ra, He-Man, G.I. Joe, The Wuzzles,…
Vince Bzdek: "I believe in the Church of Baseball," Annie Savoy says at the beginning of the great epistemological movie "Bull Durham." "I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the…
Bill Dwyer (thanks, Doyle): A death often brings talk of the person's era. Shav Glick's triggers the plural. Eras. The career of the veteran Times sportswriter, who died early Satu…
Stacey Stowe: THE rat took a nose dive on Third Avenue, pooling on the sidewalk like a downed parachute. Chaz Rynkiewicz swung into action. “Uh-oh,” said Mr. Rynkiewicz, assistant…
Diane Tennant's new series. Part I: VIRGINIA BEACH On the luckiest day of the year, a turtle crawled out of the ocean at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. On 7-7-07, a spotter on…
There are delayed ledes and then there are ledes that slam the reader head-on. Check out The Chicago Tribune's Salopek on Mogadishu Here are the first few paragraphs: There are so…
A Narrative Map of the World: "The parking lot gate was open, and we ran in with the skateboard. As I whipped around while holding my husband’s hand and he showed me how to ollie,…
J.A. Montalbano (thanks, Hank): One of the first things Don Schrader points out the first time he welcomes me into his apartment is that it measures 12 feet by 14 feet and that whe…
Nancy Franklin in the "On Television" column on "Friday Night Lights" in this week's New Yorker: Berg, who wrote and directed the first episode and is also one of the series’ execu…
VH1's Michael Hirschorn in Rolling Stone's 2007 Hot Issue: "There's been all this apologizing for TV, people saying that it has to be more like the Web. But one of the overall tren…
I'm so glad no one rushed this with a lame third-graph nut. "The sense of dread in this story is amazing," a colleague just said. Read Rebecca Catalanello's story: RIVERVIEW - Blac…
Check out Lena Price, one of Corey's students in Lewisville, Texas, writing about Mom: The price for a 16-ounce cup of French vanilla coffee at 7-Eleven is no longer $1.29. Maybe i…
San Fransisco Chronicle: Journalist Chauncey Bailey infused black pride into his work for more than three decades, writing hundreds of stories about Oakland's African American comm…
Ira Glass in his introduction to the new anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction: I don't see anything wrong with a piece of reporting turning into a fable. In fact, when I'm researc…
Diane Carman (thanks, Bill M.): Twenty-year-old J. David McSwane is the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious. Opinionated. Brief. Very brief. He writes tight. Short se…
John Barry: A hospital call awakened Sue Schramek at 2:15 a.m. Eighty-year-old Hildy Werner had passed away. Sue got up, padded through the dark house, made coffee. She couldn't st…
Katie in Kathmandu: When you imagine the future, there are certain things you picture: places, people, types of work, etc. Yet, lately I have had several moments when I stop, pause…
Toño Angulo Daneri (thanks, M): Every so often someone shows up in Aicuña asking about “the mysterious albino town.” The curious or nosy make a twenty-hour bus ride f…
Dwyer: More than most sports arenas, Madison Square Garden is the palace of a feudal-state, and its lords fly the flag of entitlement. They pay no property taxes on most of a squar…
Jesse McKinley: ON SADDLEBACK MOUNTAIN, Calif. — Walk into Mike Gates’s summer home here and the first thing you notice — the only thing you could possibly notice — is the view. Wi…
Read to the end of this little gem from Ben. It won’t take you long.
The New York Times takes a look at SPT’s model: DURING the next year or so, The St. Petersburg Times plans to continue pursuing deeply reported, long-term features about such topic…
C.J. Chivers: GROZNY, Russia — In the evenings, unexpected sights appear in this city, which less than two years ago seemed beyond saving and repair. Women stroll on sidewalks that…
Gangrey.com has become a consummate inventory of off-beat articles about fairs. We all gotta cover them at some point, right? Keeping with that tradition, here’s Richard Lake: It i…
Alex Zayas: The flier taped to the door of a small Italian deli on Florida Avenue says it all: Mixing it Up At Merino’s. Come join your neighbors and business owners at a FREE!! FR…
Tyler Kepner is one of the very best on the baseball beat, and this is from yesterday’s NYT — just a really, really fine example, I thought, of deadline work on a game story that w…
Andy Newman: On June 12, 2007, at 4:17 p.m., on a concrete floor behind the Sea Cliffs exhibit at the New York Aquarium, a strapping, 115-pound male Pacific walrus calf entered the…
Read this now. David W. Dunlap: Tania Head’s story, as shared over the years with reporters, students, friends and hundreds of visitors to ground zero, was a remarkable account of…
The Rays play their last home game tonight. Reminded me of this classic by Dan Barry, which Kruse and I have relived many, many times: MR. MET does not have the ability to speak. T…
I've always found mime a chuckle, but when I heard that Marcel Marceau had died I wondered how someone would find words to describe what he did without them. I thought this AP obit…
I'd like to direct your attention to a report by Jeff Testerman of the St. Petersburg Times: PALM HARBOR -- With hundreds of loan closings a month, business boomed at Gulf Coast Ti…
In the book Telling True Stories, which you ought to buy if you haven't yet, Susan Orlean asks five questions of the would-be nonfiction writer: "Why do you want to be a writer? It…
Andrea Ball (thanks, Richard): Adrienne Nash writhes on a gurney in a speeding ambulance, gasping her way through another contraction. Take deep breaths, the emergency medical tech…
Remember this discussion about unicorns? Well Andy Netzel asked Matt Tullis to turn his comment into an essay for Cleveland Magazine. It's fun to read. Check it out: In 1985, I tru…
Check this out (thanks, Doug): On the day they posed for the team photo in their black and silver football uniforms, the boys were still champions. That autumn of 1992, the south S…
Somehow this got deleted earlier. Here's Dan Barry: DARYL Holton shaved his head clean a couple of months ago. He thought he could retain some control in this small way. But he als…
Pete Dybdahl: Bluetooth cellphone headsets -- small devices perched on the ear -- may be convenient for the heavy mobile phone user, but they have created a modern conundrum.
Lane DeGregory: Baby died Sunday, April 29, at home. She was 42. Purchased March 29, 1965, at Walker Ford on Treasure Island, the Mustang Fastback was well loved, but not well trav…
This looks great. (Thanks, Andy.) Rachel Dissel: Johanna Orozco's grandmother clasped a bath towel to the darkening pit where the 18-year-old's jaw was supposed to be. Blood seeped…
Libby Copeland: STRATHAM, N.H. -- If New Hampshire can offer Fred Thompson some advice, it's that he'd better start spending some time with New Hampshire. New Hampshire has a lot o…
Read this: The dead disappear into the muddled minds of old caretakers, in a graveyard where roses rust. The funeral flowers are made from tin so they can be used again and again.…
If you've never read Dirty Red, do it now: The neighborhood has low rent and no trees, a leaky bucket of a place where dreams seem to run right on through. Dirty Red's mother pries…
So maybe I'm a little late to this book, but I'm glad to be here nonetheless. Here's an excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I think it applies to us: The migrant pe…
Read Tommy Tomlinson (thanks, Ted): Look at this picture. What do you see? Maybe it depends on who you are. This picture was taken the morning of Sept. 4, 1957 -- almost exactly 50…
Final from Celina Ottaway's series: LOVE, PRIDE AND SHAME FROM SHIRLEY TEMPLE TO AFROS AND CORNROWS -- A HISTORY TOLD BY HAIR May 9, 1999 Miss Madeline Seel stepped off the bus, wa…
Doyle Murphy goes beyond a brief: Warwick — Maureen Segota, her husband and three children picked their way along the path toward the water. A group of teenagers already had a spot…
Check out this passage from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, a book even nonfiction writers ought to read: Sanity in a writer is merely this: However stupid he may be in his priv…
I was reading an AP story this morning about President Bush's comments on the status of U.S. operations in Iraq, and the same piece contained the predictable counters and debate, a…
Check out Earl Swift's series on who shot the Norfolk mayor: IT CAME IN AS A 10-39. A body found. Sounded routine, so Ralph Mears rolled west on Little Creek at the speed limit, no…
Happy Labor Day, everyone. The Front Porch Song (Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett) This old porch is a big ol' red and white Herford bull Standin' under a mesquite tree in Agua Dul…
Tom Lake: VERNON - Nothing binds a town together like a powerful story: the Giants win the pennant, for example, or a mother wolf rescues twin boys from the riverbank, or a silvers…
Wright Thompson: I love air conditioning, and I love cocktails in the gloaming on the City Grocery balcony, and I love a plate of shrimp and grits when the sun finally goes down. I…
Tom Lake: PORT RICHEY – First they stole his license plate. Then they burned his flag. Fred Slaven is convinced this makes him the victim of a hate crime. And after six years in Fl…
Read Kruse’s story: PORT RICHEY – At 3:49, in the driver’s seat, Laurene Warner opened her eyes and wiped her face. She yawned. She lit a cigarette. The glowing tip was a brief bit…
Read this. Seriously. Elizabeth Gilbert profiled Hank Williams III in GQ in 2000, and that was a special story, but Esquire, GQ, the NYT mag, one of her books, whatever — when her…
Seen this? UPDATE: Cartoon me, courtesy S.I. Rosenbaum.
Lon Wagner: In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. By 1905, the bulbs were being sold in stores, and a family in Norfolk bought one. What they did with it at first is not…
Matt Tullis: The words tumbled out of a speaker above Patty Keller: Georgia, Georgia The whole day through Just an old sweet song Keeps Georgia on my mind. The voice was sweet — a…
Lane DeGregory: Ten boxes of stuff. That’s all Brooklyn Carr figured she’d have room for in her dorm room. She bought the biggest plastic tubs she could find, deep rectangular bins…
Reid Forgrave: By 9:30 a.m., the streets and cul-de-sacs and perfectly manicured lawns in the Bartlett Farms subdivision were – finally, mercifully, eerily – quiet. American flags…
William Booth: A most unusual case, this Bob Saget. We were just reviewing the file, a very thick file. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it a…
Don’t miss Wil Haygood’s beautiful story from last Sunday’s Post Magazine on Ralph Ellison and the second novel he never completed. It’s a fascinating story and Haygood tells it we…
This is Mitchell Gaff. Mitch lives in a special place. A facility the state of Washington created for sexual predators. Mitch’s therapists think there’s a chance that Mitch won’t g…
From Bill Marvel: I’m about to teach feature writing at a local university. I wonder: Looking back at similar courses they took in college, what things did Gangreyers find most use…
Five short stories: The spotters were too late. … “Sir?” Etherton yelled. “Sir, are you okay?” … “Who knows how long people will want to look at me?” … The girl in the purple dress…
Ben this morning on 1A: Michael Allen Phillips lived in trouble. He strutted through the suburbs shirtless, a tattoo of a skull on his arm and a pistol on his belly. The man whose…
I posted an invite the other day for folks looking for criticism, and the first brave soul has stepped up. Let's hear it for Joe Eaton at the City Paper in Washington. Here's Joe's…
C.J. Chivers in Finland: Jack Chivers spotted the lightning first. We stood on a pier on a bright summer Finnish night, looking down an archipelago extending into the Baltic Sea.
From the post from Roy Peter Clark at the bottom of the frog and the cheese thread: "I'm wondering if there might be a test we could apply to these kinds of stories, a kind of 'mas…
We talk a lot about what we should be giving people when they pick up the paper. What do they want? What do they need? How do we strike a balance between "news" and everything else…
This time it's allegations against Scott Thomas Beauchamp in the New Republic. The Weekly Standard has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Tho…
Howard Kurtz reports that David Bradley had been trying to lure Jeffrey Goldberg to the Atlantic for more than two years and finally succeeded. The guy, evidently, is genius at spo…
Wright Thompson in Atlanta: An empty chair sits in a ranch-style home in a city long divided. It's a comfortable chair, positioned in front of a large high-def television, and it b…
I don't pretend to know the best way to make a newspaper function, but I think it's a bright thing that the Chicago Tribune, what with all the financial stresses, has hired Louise…
Sean Daly in Memphis: It's 3 a.m. in the birthplace of rock 'n' roll, and I'm walking out of a former brothel with two tipsy 21-year-old women. I just met them inside. Well, met th…
Another from Justin George’s series, Deciding: RIVERVIEW – She came home from work and asked her husband about his day, holding back the question pressing on her mind. Nicki Bradle…
Manuel Roig-Franzia (thanks, Brady): SAN PEDRO GARZA GARCIA, Mexico — Tinny salsa downbeats jangled out of the flashing cellphone. Mario Salas pressed hard on the clutch, jammed th…
Bill Reiter: Eddie Johnson walked through the door of the Cadillac dealership in crisp white clothes and dark tinted sunglasses. A small fortune in diamonds hung from his wrists an…
S.L. Price (thanks, Tim): ONCE YOU DISCOVER THE SALVATION OF TRAVEL, the way it allows you to escape the old, escape yourself, it’s a habit as tough to kick as any narcotic. But it…
Stephen Farrell and Peter Gelling (thanks, Alex): The bare statistics will record that in the 71st minute of a soccer tournament 5,000 miles from Iraq, a Kurd from Mosul kicked a b…
John Doherty: This is what Newburgh is like without crack. Laressa Knight and her friend, Yahaira Fernandez, are walking down Lander Street on their way to the city pool, pushing a…
Miami Herald’s David Ovalle with Who killed Joaquin March? (thanks, Nigel): On a dark May morning, Joaquin March threw on a red T-shirt backward, slipped out of his house and pedal…
Read Ben Montgomery on the fall of Lindsay Lohan: She looks up and smiles in the video clip taken after her accident, and we’re all there, co-conspirators, watching through the gla…
Read Catherine Shoichet’s story, then watch the sweet video: On the back of the shopping cart, a bright light flashes with each hip-hop beat. Nelson Sanchez glides past piles of pl…
Wow. Thanks. Thanks for the input. What a cool thing. A few folks I know on there, a few I've never heard of. I couldn't come by stuff for everyone, but it will be up soon. Here, t…
Tomas Alex Tizon (thanks, rlake): Clyde Friend’s life changed the moment his bulldozer hit the first tree on a hot summer afternoon in 2002 as he leveled a hill behind his workshop…
Victoria Burnett: Ramón Sánchez is not a great believer in the powers of Cupid. But when Mr. Sánchez, a wiry 54-year-old bachelor, heard that dozens of women w…
Vincent M. Mallozzi: If seeing is believing, Michael Sayre will see today that he has no better friend than Aiden McGuire. Mr. Sayre, 25, and Mr. McGuire, 26, grew up in Syracuse a…
Monica Hesse: Think for a moment about your cellphone. How many phone numbers does it have? How many photos? If it were lost, how long would it take you to reconstruct your life? I…
Pete Hamill called into Fred Dicker’s Albany-area radio talk show this morning to promote his new novel “North River.” Thought all you Gangreeks out there might enjoy what two of t…
It’s an ancient newspaper quagmire: An event comes to town once a year, and everyone expects the paper to cover it, but how do you give people something they’d want to read. Doyle…
A sentencing comes alive: The end brought no mercy for Paul Siminovsky. It came more than four years after he was arrested in cinematic fashion: pulled over in his car, driven to a…
Sometimes you just want to read about a dude gone nuts. Here’s John Doherty: There are two parts of Eddie Houston’s story police think they believe. Number one: Police think Housto…
Barton Gellman and Jo Becker: Shortly after the first accused terrorists reached the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Jan. 11, 2002, a delegation from CIA headquarters…
Stephanie Hayes: Breasts. Boobs. Hooters. Half the population has a pair. In America, they're celebrated. Obsessed over. Regarded with a sexy sense of humor. But sometimes, breasts…
Amber Mobley on love bugs: They’re the couple next door in desperate need of drapery, the eternal newlyweds, the definitive PDAers. Kind of sweet. Extremely gratuitous. Perpetually…
Check out this unusual narrative: One day a baby sparrow plummeted 25 feet from a nest tucked in the eaves of a Southeast Portland home and landed in a clump of dying irises.
Konrad Marshall, who sort of took my old job at The Florida Times-Union, comes out of nowhere with a beautiful, haunting character study disguised as a story about a man crapping i…
This is great, and I don’t have all the details, so correct my mistakes somebody: An editor somewhere in the northern portion of TimesLand put some money down for a contest to spic…
Remember this two-parter from Thomas Curwen at the LA Times? He shares a bit about his experience and some of the feedback with Nell Lake: He wrote us that the online story package…
Cindy Lange-Kubick’s mom was so not cool. Andy Newman takes us beneath the Cyclone. Lane Degregory with another Encounters. Stephanie Earls on The Force in Albany. Kruse and Erin S…
Real men sweat and wrestle: Arthur Breur pressed down on the other man’s back, cradling him in his arms. “Wrestle!” the coach barked, and then Breur’s only thought was domination,…
Another Encounters: Susan Zaffater has been to enough garage sales to know when something is junk. The trunk was special. She didn’t even need to search inside it to know that. The…
No, these aren’t newspaper stories. But I submit the following two passages as standards toward which to strive as we try to explain the world. They both appeared in The New Yorker…
Advice via email from Roy Wenzl: Here’s my take on how to get past the editor wall. First, just print out what “MIKE” said, and keep it with you. It’s the best adivce possible, bec…
Okay. This is a good one coming off the writers workshop. Got an email from a guy at a mid-sized paper who wants to do good stuff and he’s challenged because the bosses don’t get i…
Tamara Jones: Matt Deighton grabs a broom and starts sweeping the living-room floor, a chore clearly more cathartic than practical in the ruins of his childhood home. The cozy litt…
From Bill Marvel: Several people who regularly post to Gangrey have attended the Mayborn Conference here in North Texas. It's aimed at exactly the kind of writing Gangrey promotes…
Here I am, officially my first day back in the Memphis cubicle, and the news comes through my email — Gangrey friend and contributor Colleen Kenney is among the 13 U.S. journalists…
Sometimes we see things that are hard to stand. And this story is hard to read. But Ben made something beautiful and powerful out of it. Angel T. Jimenez bought a length of nylon r…
Greg Bruno’s report: On the evening of April 8, 2000, midway through her second semester at the U.S. Military Academy, Cadet Kristina Thompson passed out drunk in a Washington, D.C…
LAT’s Thomas Curwen with part 1: JOHAN looked up. Jenna was running toward him. She had yelled something, he wasn’t sure what. Then he saw it. The open mouth, the tongue, the teeth…
His magazine piece (thanks, Kevin): This story begins on an August afternoon in 2002 when the baby needed a nap. Or possibly in a different year with a different baby taking a diff…
Kruse with an Encounter: BROOKSVILLE – Dan Weaver was telling stories outside his food trailer called The Olde Smokehouse the other day at the Hernando County Fair. He’s 55. Someti…
Google News failed me. My friend John-Henry Doucette has brought light and understanding to the Virginia Tech massacre in a spirit that would have made our mentor proud. Here he is…
Read Corey Kilgannon’s story: There have been higher points in Rohan Davey’s career — starring in big-time college bowl victories, dominating the N.F.L.’s European league and colle…
From Cory Golden, via email: If you were a feature writer assigned to this, and you had your choice what you went after, where would you be drawn? How would you make your story dif…
His story: They told the police that they thought it would be easy to rob the gay man. It was not easy. The gay man ran away when they punched him, they said on videotaped statemen…
If you didn't look before, swing by Pat Walters' blog citing 48 tips from the Harford National Writers Workshop. Lots of useful stuff (you can nearly feel Pat sweating), including…
Carlo Rotella on Shannon Briggs: The eclipse of the American heavyweight echoes the recent string of American failures in international basketball and baseball competitions and the…
Andrew Wolfe of the Nashua Telegraph goes wild on a car crash (thanks, Matt): Dude, you are SO grounded! Taking your mom’s ’95 Maxima after she went to bed, that was brazen. It’s c…
The Post's Sudarsan Raghavan was there (thanks, Tim): The bomber blew himself up no more than a few yards away. First, a brilliant flash of orange light like a starburst, then a gi…
He's got a running list of tips from the folks speaking there. Keep up with it here.
Remember the racket a few weeks ago about the old man who died in his house and was found 13 months later, still in front of the turned-on TV? LAT’s Erika Hayasaki brings us the ba…
Our friend (and Gangreyer) brings us this story (via, Nieman Narrative Digest): Just before suppertime on Feb. 7, 2006, a little boy named Zach Kroeker, who lived on a farm in Jeff…
Jack Shafer on the embellishment trap (thanks, Cory): If you’ve never embellished an anecdote to get a bigger laugh from your drinking companions, please stand up. If you’ve never…
If you’ve ever covered something spontaneous near deadline, you know it’s easy to ditch style and story for the sake of getting all the stardard information in short order. That’s…
Libby Copeland in the sunshine: The sand is white, the water is blue-green, and the nation’s college students are celebrating the proud rites of spring as they always have, with Ke…
Kruse with a study of sweet tea geography trends: McDonald’s has been selling its so-labeled and specifically pitched product called Mickey D’s Sweet Tea for a while now in select…
Here at Gangrey we generally focus on craft, but this one wins on content. The narrative is a litle convoluted and hard to follow. But it may be the best news story of the year. To…
I seem to recall a conversation late one night not all that long ago in a so-so hotel room just off an I-4 exit ramp in Orlando in which Ben asked that someone please write … THIS.
A smidge of Hank Stuever on a Sunday morning: As the details of Anna Nicole Smith’s death (you may have heard about it already) were being orgiastically reported in print and on TV…
(Thanks, Ollie) PETE DEXTER blew into town from Florida some 30 years ago with a cowboy limp and a car that smelled like wet dog. His hips were messed up from an old football injur…
The egg comes first: Let us now praise an unsung hero of tourist season: the short-order cook slinging hash, right this minute, in the crowded kitchen at Skyway Jack’s Restaurant.…
ASNE was kind enough to give him the award. Read it again. —— By C.J. Chivers New York Times KARMA, Iraq, Oct. 30 — Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby clutched the injured m…
Even before I knew her, Lane Degregory was my hero. So I think it’s pretty cool that she is the winner of this year’s Ernie Pyle memorial award for human interest writing. Here’s w…
From the AP’s Kristen Gelineau (Thanks, Andy): “You got a letter,” Mike Seccuro said, tossing an envelope onto his wife Liz’s lap as he climbed behind the wheel of their minivan. W…
On the heels of some great discussion about what’s right and wrong in narrative today, consider this story about the Largo, Fla. city manager who is undergoing a sex change: As the…
It all happens here: “Florida is a dream state,” Mormino says. “And the dream comes in many versions. You can reinvent yourself here. You could be bankrupted twice in Illinois and…
Read Michael’s story: The big chair is still gone. The giant-sized deck chair was 11 feet tall, 6 feet wide and weighed 400 pounds, and it sat in front of the Bare-Lee Used Furnitu…
Check out Gangrey-lurker Jennifer P. Brown's feature column, Street Stories, from the Kentucky New Era. She's catching all sorts of quiet stories, like a prayer meeting in a rough…
If you haven't kept up with their series on Walter Reed and the results of their investigation, here's your chance, along with a transcript from their online chat today.
Ray Rivera's story: Balding, with just a fringe of unwieldy gray hair, Mr. Melnitzky was once a recognized art expert. He was the principal art conservator at Sotheby’s for nearly…
Read her story: "They seem to think I'm some evil, horrible soldier down here trying to sacrifice our kids to Iraq," Harrington said in describing the increasing tensions on the Ea…
And that makes a fun read. Here's Colleen Kenney's story: “Say I’m at a bar with friends,” Mike Terpstra says. “If I go, ‘I’ll get that round!’ my friends just look at me. '‘Think…
Jenifer Warren in today's LAT: It's a warm, cloudless day and Patty O'Reilly is about to meet the man who killed her husband. A million thoughts compete for attention in her head.…
Nora Ephron in Telling True Stories: I have also learned things through screenwriting that would have been good to know when I worked as a journalist. As a young journalist I thoug…
Jimmy Breslin in the New York Herald Tribune March 1965 Selma, Alabama � United States Highway 80, between Montgomery and Selma, is fifty miles of asphalt with a yellow dividing li…
Ben swings and connects: LITHIA - There once was a turtle named Pepper who lived in a small pond in a neighborhood called FishHawk Trails.
Ken Speake: We hit 'em upside the head with inhumanity, then we go to commercial and come back and hit 'em up the other side with fear. Folks tell me they appreciate my stuff becau…
From Thursday's THR: The rings arrive. The party crowds into the mayor's office. The phone keeps ringing. A police scanner chatters in the corner. "Friends," starts the mayor, Marl…
* Cindy Wolff with some zoo lovin'. * T. Lake on a gator attack (read the ending). * David Montgomery with the man behind The Man.
Read Jacob Fries' story: The fake survey. It’s an old ploy private eyes use to trick people into telling the truth. “We’re in the neighborhood,” they say, “and have a few questions…
Read Earl Swift's classic story: The hall outside Judge M. Randolph Carlson II's courtroom is crowded with old lovers this Valentine's morning. Most are wearing their coats, speaki…
Gregory E. Favre on Mike Levine: Mike was an editor who never stopped being a reporter and a writer. He was an editor who never stopped being a teacher. He was an editor who unders…
Roy Peter Clark wonders about Lisa Nowak's diaper: What makes the diaper a great detail? I'm struggling to understand. Perhaps it's the diaper's gritty specificity. Or the way it d…
Read Michelle York's story: The odds of someone Mr. Schenk’s age developing lung cancer are roughly one in 5,000; the odds of winning the jackpot in the $5 game of High Stakes Blac…
Read John Barry's story: The old Gibbs was a dump, a 1928 asbestos-ridden relic. The principal and janitor shared a room. Biology students shared a frog. Everyone remembers old Gib…
Read his story: His shoes and jeans are splattered with star paint. His fingernails are lined with the dirt of creation. John Wilder, a senior in the arts program at Gibbs High, ju…
Jim Dwyer's story (Thanks, Craig): "Orlando." In a dim, nearly deserted Everglades farm stand, nothing moved. Orlando Boquete, hybrid of youth and age — his body springy and athlet…
Lance Griffin came to Tom French's seminar at Poynter a few months ago on doing narrative on deadline. He got the chance to try it out last week when an armed man shot up a medical…
Kruse on Jessica Lunsford: She was frilly and girly. She was curious and conscientious. She was warm and bouncy and kind and caring and empathetic and mature for her age and had go…
Helen Anne Travis watches a cow make a cow and Tom Lake brings us the note found in a middle-schooler's pocket: "lay low for a while. Don't bring s--- to school cant get Busted or…
Funny is hard to do. This is funny: Joyce Newman misses her vulture. She adopted it seven years ago, agreeing to pay $300 a year for its care. Usually she sent more, up to $1,000.…
This is a fine example of good narrative. Read Dave Tarrant's story from Sunday's Dallas Morning News: Grief has a way of finding you. Even after 35 years. Shonda Palmer Hardy was…
There's a fine line between poetry and hokey horseshit, right? So howabout Michael Wilson's observations about a fire in the NYT today? * Bang: The wind makes waves of the dust and…
Earl Swift and Tris Wykes write a story about a story: So this Harvard kid writes a book – a book of funny stories, all of them made up – and Random House makes plans to sell the b…
Sorry for not posting the past few days. We were up covering the tornados. We'll be running full steam soon. Ben
Read his story: "What's it like to be homeless?" he is asked. "It sucks. It's so boring, just sitting here." "It's not that bad," says his mother, Maria Diamond. "And you got an A…
Jimbo in the New York Daily News, December 1980. That summer in Breezy Point, when he was eighteen and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the be…
I got a new computer a few months back, after my old laptop finally expired, and then I spent many hours ripping all my CDs to the hard drive. It was a real pain, but now I can bur…
Read Kruse’s story: The lights were off, the music was stopped, the doors were locked. There was a U-Haul truck backed up to the side of the main building at the Rogers’ Christmas…
Read Marc Kaufman’s story: As Neil Armstrong prepared to take his “one small step” onto the moon in July 1969, a specially hardened video camera tucked into the lander’s door click…
Michael Brick on mercy or death, Dan Barry from Sunday, and some daily inspiration from Hank Stuever back in February of 2003: A good five inches of snow falls, and the cubicle lan…
David Simon, former Baltimore Sun cops reporter and force behind the brilliant television shows Homicide and The Wire, visited the St. Petersburg Times on Friday to talk about the…
Damien Cave in Baghdad: Staff Sgt. Hector Leija scanned the kitchen, searching for illegal weapons. One wall away, in an apartment next door, a scared Shiite family huddled around…
Read Tom Lake’s story: In the end they identified just one tooth. It belonged to the old woman’s son. Now she sits on a brown wraparound couch in her living room, telling stories t…
Justin George on Gene’s: Someone sneaks out the side door, and a breeze blows in. The DJ interjects with another message: “Shut the door, baby.” It’s an order meant to keep the pou…
New York Herald Tribune. November 1963. Washington – Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment…
From the NYT's Molly O'Neill, a food story that's really a story about ecology, culture, morality, mortality: Like most sons of sons of Maine fishermen, Mr. Bridges, 61, grew up ea…
To report with everything you have – how did it look, how did it sound, how did it smell – and with FEELING. Let stuff hit you. Flat-faced and hard-hearted “objectivity” misses wha…
Garrison Keillor on why the newspaper ads Style: Whether you're sitting or standing, indoors or out, leaning against a hitching post or with your brogans on a desk, a newspaper giv…
In his 2006 book Letters To A Young Journalist, Samuel G. Freedman said this: If you can't be a person, then you'll ultimately be less of a journalist. The story of two prize-winni…
Ramsey noticed this spare, driving narrative by Marc Santora: Saddam Hussein never bowed his head, until his neck snapped. His last words were equally defiant. “Down with the trait…
Read John Doherty’s story: The problem with the driver of the SUV seemed obvious enough. He was making crazy-wide turns around corners and drifting over the center of line of city…
Read his story: A quiz for aspiring burglars: You’ve just stolen $25,000 or so from a church safe during Christmas morning Mass. There is a witness, a man who asked you what you we…
Just the other day, I was scanning through a book of poems by Billy Collins when I noticed one called The Death of Allegory. Here’s how it begins: I am wondering what became of all…
From Sara Rosenbaum: Mike Zorr stopped in at Einstein’s Bagels last week for coffee. He had been visiting family in Virginia and was on his way back home to the Keys, where he live…
I’ve never done anything for radio but I stumbled onto a story with radio potential, so I wandered over to This American Life to see how to pitch them a story. The section on their…
Read Corey Kilgannon’s story: It bears no plaque, nor mention in any local guidebook as a cultural landmark, but local residents recognize the two-story cape as the historic home t…
Richard Harrington’s appreciation for James Brown: This time James Brown is gone. No more faux faints to the floor, no more hasty cape-covering or furious cool-down fanning by conc…
Erin Sullivan covers a tornado: Paul Lilley was dialing a neighbor Monday to tell him bad weather was coming their way when he heard a terrible rumble, looked out his window and sa…
Here’s to making some stories of our own this Christmas. Turn off the computer. Go be with your friends and family. We’ll return to business on Tuesday.
On Sunday, the Press-Register started his package about a man trying to prove he's a little girl's father. (You've seen Andy on Gangrey in the past few months) Read his series: Thi…
From the Post's anniversary edition. Read this now: "We were having a vicious argument -- about ice cream," King says. "I loved Borden's. Herbie loved Breyers. Sandy loved Carvel .…
The TH-Record's Steve Israel and Ashley Kelly tell a story: In Livingston Manor, the raging brown water roared and rose like some prehistoric monster: 7, 8, 9 feet high. Edie McArt…
Read his story: Three little blond boys stood in a line in a strip-center dojo in Hernando County's rural east end. Gambatte Karate is in the Sunrise Plaza with a Quiznos sub shop…
Could this be the future of newspapering? Darkness falls on a chilly Winn-Dixie parking lot in a dodgy part of North Fort Myers just before Thanksgiving. Chuck Myron sits in his li…
During an invitation-only visit to the Times Herald-Record's most exclusive Writers Workshop this week, Dan Barry - indeed, he of "About New York" fame - charmed the staff with tal…
Erin Sullivan in the ICU: This is not their Eva. This can't be happening. She's their doll, shiny dark hair, warm eyes, full, rosy lips. She's tiny, 4 feet 81/2 inches and weighs j…
Read John Barry's story: A gloomy cloud of homelessness looms over 30,000 clowns. A massive orange, yellow and red clown diaspora could be choking on dust on U.S. 27 by New Year's…
I'd say it was a good day for the Gangrey kids at the St. Pete Times. Ben: The girl was young, slim, pretty in a strange way, and shy. She spent most of her time alone in her bedro…
This led to a conversation earlier this week with Meghan, which led to a conversation last night with Ben, which leads now to this question: If you got to blow up your newspaper, e…
Michael Brick in court: By his own description, the contract Jessie Jacobus signed with prosecutors offers a warm letter to his sentencing judge in return for his pledge to “be tru…
Corey Kilgannon in this morning’s NYT: In a wooded patch between a schoolyard and a row of backyards, Danny Azzato perched himself 20 feet up a tree and nocked a razor-sharp, carbo…
This comes from Jessie Bonner via Poynter: She blinked and wondered how long she had been asleep. She saw the Chanel ads and Vogue magazine pages taped to her white walls. She blin…
Read Jennifer 8. Lee’s story: Paul Iversen had not seen his aging parents in three years, even though their homes are but a mile apart in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. They had a falling ou…
(Via Romenesko) A reader asked Howard Kurtz to list the top ten newspapers in the country. His reply: “It’s an entirely subjective exercise, of course. I think that the NYT, LAT, W…
Check this out from Shauna Stephenson at the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle: The idea was if I can do it, anyone can. But I don’t believe that anymore. There were 300 grueling miles ahead,…
Some interesting stuff in the Post’s review of the new Eggers book: And he’s talking about one thing readers of “What Is the What” can’t say for sure: How much is fact and how much…
Read Sara Rosenbaum’s story: The boy is wired into the computer. He is 8 years old and has gray cat-eyes. A little blond mohawk sticks up on his head like a strip of uncut grass. H…
Sent along by David Finkel and very much worth discussing: Reader Mario Possamai of Toronto raised a good question last week that can come up with longer stories written from an in…
Read Corey Kilgannon’s story: But on the field Saturday, the trappings of their current lives fell away, from the opening kickoff until the game was called when another group of Tu…
From Tuesday’s Washington Post: Katherine Harris, who is trying to become a U.S. senator, says she is writing a tell-all about the many people who have wronged her. This includes,…
Calvin Trillin, who, by the way, is a keynote speaker at this year’s Nieman, in American Stories: I sometimes described what I was looking for as a story that had a beginning and a…
The challenges of writing an intimate story on Kirby Puckett’s last years were many. Says Laurie Hertzel: how do you profile someone who is already dead? how do you profile someone…
For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries: to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style. — Ben Johnson There is no wa…
John Barry at a truck stop. Wil Haygood on Deval Patrick. Michael Lewis on what keeps Bill Parcells up. Dan Barry is good. Steve Lopez helps reunite classmates: a homeless guy and…
Roy Peter Clark in Writing Tools: Reports convey information. Stories create experience. Reports transfer knowledge. Stories transport the reader, crossing boundaries of time, spac…
From Saturday’s NYT: It’s not every day that a great big rock shows up on your block. But it happened on Vanderbilt Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The rock is jagged, seven feet…
Tom Mulvoy in Writing For Your Readers: The best writing in the Globe comes from those who are disciplined, who take a theme or situation and develop it along narrative lines that…
Ramsey Al-Rikabi in court: Early on the morning of Oct. 20 of last year, Marie Jedraszak, during a fight with her husband, walked outside to the garage, plugged an electric chain s…
Tom Wolfe on Jimmy Breslin in The New Journalism: Breslin's work stirred up a certain vague resentment among both journalists and literati during the first year or two of his colum…
Jon Franklin in Writing For Story: The technique is foreshadowing, and it's one of the most powerful pieces of magic in the storyteller's bag of tricks. Foreshadowing is the techni…
Read Michael Brick's story: That night, he said, yogurt vanished and computer gear was broken and again Nixzmary lied and he threatened her with a belt. He said he asked her to exp…
Anybody read the piece by Malcolm Gladwell a couple weeks back in the New Yorker in the media issue? It was called The Formula and it was about these people who have developed a sy…
Susan Orlean in her introduction to The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: What I wanted to write about were the people and the places around me. I didn't want to write about famous pe…
The idea has been floated: If we're all going to get together at Nieman, should we try to reserve a room at the hotel or a restaurant? The thought is we'll take contributions from…
Rick Bragg to Kelley Benham in Orange Journalism: "While it's true people read less, while it's true that it is difficult to marry up with technology, I think the main reason that…
Check out Brady Dennis' story: An hour passed, and then another, and finally Jerrick Blue went searching for her. He slipped out of the small concrete block house on Osborne Avenue…
From Fast Company: Curley--"just a nerd from Kansas," as he puts it--hasn't won a Pulitzer or worked at a major daily. But since teaching himself to build Web sites 10 years ago, h…
From Ben: She didn't seem to notice the odd juxtaposition of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial replica next to the Westfield Brandon mall, the names of 58,000 dead soldiers situated be…
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc in New New Journalism: Q: What is the first thing you do when you begin reporting a story? A: I drive around and observe. Then I work up the courage to walk o…
Joseph Mitchell in Joe Gould's Secret: Joe Gould is a blithe and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for…
Hank Stuever in the preface in Off Ramp: I am unassigned, mostly. I was a child born and raised and now living in a permanent Elsewhere, and because I didn't have a beat, I gave my…
Read Andy Newman's story: The boat is called the Empty Vessel. The name was meant to conjure infinite possibility, a floating tabula rasa on the Gowanus Canal in the form of a 63-f…
Gary Provost in Make Your Words Work: This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what i…
Samuel G. Freedman in Letters to a Young Journalist: "It takes time to acquire expertise. It takes time to hear out the innermost truths of individuals. It takes pateince and wisdo…
Ira Berkow with a heavy lifter: Phil Pfister, who owns a Ford Crown Victoria, is an unusual kind of motorist. Not only can he drive the car, he can lift it, too. “One day we were d…
Here's his story: When Casey was done talking, the next sounds included scribbling pens and checks being torn out of checkbooks because of what Democrats say this race means: A Cas…
NYT's Alan Feuer, who wrote this one on the recent plane crash, takes his lumps: T.R. looked at his screen. What was there? A crash. A fire. A dead man. A dead body. Two dead bodie…
Philip Gourevitch in We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: In the province of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, in the swamp- and pastureland near the…
Walter J. Ong in Orality and Literacy: Narrative is everywhere a major genre of verbal art, occurring all the way from primary oral cultures into high literacy and electronic infor…
Charlie Pierce in the preface to Sports Guy: They are throwaways, these celebrity stories, and they teach lessons as simple and as tedious as flat blacktop. Oh, there is occasional…
The success of the Mets this season brings to mind one of my favorite Dan Barry columns, from days when things were a bit darker: Mr. Met does not have the ability to speak. This c…
The NPR reporter at the pulpit: A major problem with these new technologies is that they allow reporters to stay in the newsroom rather than hitting the streets to find the real st…
Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men: What's the problem, officer? he asked. Sir would you mind stepping out of the vehicle? The man opened the door and stepped out. What's th…
Stephen King in On Writing: "Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent."
Read his column: Cory Lidle wasn't just another Yankee to me, wasn't just another pro athlete I covered. He was closer than that, and getting closer by the day. In the last couple…
Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 1844-81: We are the music makers And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lonely sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams; World losers and world…
This was fun: Then, from behind a thicket of acacia trees directly off our front left bumper, a huge female emerged — ‘‘the matriarch,’’ Okello said softly. There was a small calf…
I must've missed this one: With all the spectacular ways to die in this dying city, the fate of a man named Allan was almost pathetic. There he lay, in a weedy lot on the notorious…
Carlton Stowers, a true crime author and writer at the Abilene Reporter-News, launched a serial narrative on the murder of Abilene television reporter Jennifer Servo. Looks interes…
Michael Lewis in The New New Journalism: “Characters are always so much more interesting when they are moving through space than they are when they are at rest (especially when the…
Jon Franklin the other day on WriterL: The idea of a green zone and a red zone comes, of course, from Iraq. The green zone is where it's safe, and the red zone is the real world ou…
From Origins of a Nonfiction Writer in The Gay Talese Reader: “The shop was a kind of talk show that flowed around the engaging manner and well-timed questions of my mother; and as…
Probe of anthrax casts shadow on brothers For recruiter, saying 'Go Army' is hard Review of Cormac McCarthy's new The Road In Brooklyn, unusual show of sympathy for arson defendant…
Buy this book. Yoder was Rick Bragg's intern back in the day. He put his book out a while back and it's some damn book.
John-Henry Doucette is theVirginian-Pilot's newest columnist (bottom of the story). Congrats to John. We worked together at the Times Herald-Record a few years ago. John does some…
I'm sure this could have been lost among the daily doings of Pinellas criminal court. Chris worked it for all its potential. Read his story: This is a story about a guy who didn’t…
From Lon Wagner from the Virginian-Pilot: "Dear Gangrey: "The Virginian-Pilot narrative team hosted our annual (it was the second one, so I think I can call it “annual” now) conver…
** Update: His last story. Obit here: R. W. Apple Jr., who in more than 40 years as a correspondent and editor at The New York Times wrote about war and revolution, politics and go…
Michael Brick has it down. Read his story: The case, Justice Albert Tomei of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn reminded the jury, was entirely circumstantial. So instructed, 12 citiz…
At these “writers’” conferences it’s almost always all about the reporting. This is important. Today at the National Writers’ Workshop here in hot, breezy South Florida, it came up…
From USA Today: Newspapers grappling with declining circulation and profit margins can turn themselves around if they quickly develop publications and affiliated websites packed wi…
Jeffrey Gettleman in Mogadishu: They call her the “Black Hawk Down” lady. And in the corner of her dirt yard, beneath rags drying in the sun and next to a bowl of filthy wash water…
Read his story: The old man still dreams about the bottom of the sea. He dreams about sponges, about tiger sharks, about big-hearted men he figured would live forever but are now g…
Gangrey exclusive from Alex Zesch: It wasn’t a congratulations on your new baby visit. The woman said something about her van and her dog was inside and her insurance company. I ga…
Michael Weisskopf loses a hand in Iraq. Tamara Jones talks to the First Lady about steamy books. Janine Anderson on the closing of an old theater. Sudarsan Raghavan on the price of…
Read his story: If you believe their confessions — and the accused say the signed statements cannot be believed — the $2,500 Taco Bell heist was staged, a piece of criminal theater…
I defy you to find more good stuff inside the Monday edition of a regional newspaper anywhere in the country. Sports columnist Gary Shelton makes eloquence seem effortless. Read hi…
Michael Lewis with The Ballad Of Big Mike: As he drove into Memphis in March 2004, Tom Lemming thought that everything about Michael Oher, including his surname, was odd. He played…
Read his story: The friendless death of Nixzmary Brown in Brooklyn last January demanded a reckoning. She was broken and starved, 7 years old, left in a den her brothers and sister…
Read her story: The voices had been bad that morning, angry and insistent, screaming through Justin's head. He sat behind the reception desk at Vincent House, swiveling in the chai…
I came across this piece of physical description in Stephen Hunter’s review of the movie, “All The King’s Men.” I’ve always had trouble with physical description of people. This on…
Ramsey Al-Rikabi says this made his day: The Q train announcement was, actually, decipherable. That’s not to say it was easy to comprehend. “This train is being delayed. There is a…
A friend up north pointed out an ongoing series by Bob Shaw at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Shaw is documenting -- in narrative fashion -- the changing of a century-old farm into a…
Lincoln's Colleen Kenney writes for Gangrey: After a martini, two margaritas and half a beer last Friday night in Texas, I said this to some Florida journalists I met at a conferen…
Read Corey Kilgannon's story: Juliet the carriage horse held forth for about two decades on the south end of Central Park taking tourists on slow romantic rides through the park. S…
Save my wife: Prudence Lemokouno was lying motionless on a bed in the bleak hospital here, her stomach swelled with a fetus that had just died, her eyes occasionally flickering wit…
Read her story: He stood holding his lip. Blood was pouring out, but he kept his voice calm, level. "Good girl," he said to Rula. "Easy. Easy." The tiger listened to his voice, set…
Mike Wilson is the AME for newsfeatures here at the SPT. He did a brown bag session Thursday called What I Learned About Writing By Editing. The best thing he talked about: "closin…
Northern Colorado backup punter arrested: The University of Northern Colorado's reserve punter was arrested Tuesday, accused of stabbing his rival in his kicking leg. Mitch Cozad,…
Here's the story: The place is a hole in the wall, one of those newsstands where a blind guy peddles newspapers, coffee and pastries. The man behind the counter is "Big Jack," not…
I'm going to keep a running list of the good stuff to come from this anniversary. Please drop your links if you see something we should read. UPDATES: Wow. Wow. Wow. Read Gary Smit…
Michael Brick's story: Five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center. Downtown smelled like Coke cans and hair on fire. It was tel…
Read Brady Dennis' story: The stares begin each time he approaches the stage, his hand searching for the familiar touch of the keyboard. He never knows how many pairs of eyes are f…
Michael's brother Bjorn Kruse with a rant (it began as a brother-to-brother email) about the changing Frosty: Last week, out on an aimless drive, I stopped at a Wendy's franchise f…
Damon Hack with Tiger Woods: A game marked by chance has become something else over the past two months, a treatise by Tiger Woods on what is possible with a crooked stick and a di…
* Wright Thompson following a prep star. * Dan Barry. * Chris Goffard with Father, son and holy rift (read this). * And the first thing I thought when I read of 'Crocodile Hunter'…
Now that he’s been arrested in Sudan and charged with espionage and “writing false news,” one of the best reporters in the country is finally on the national radar screen. He shoul…
Mark Johnson writes: “The L.A. Times had a haunting narrative this week on a preacher’s wife who killed her husband with a turkey gun. The writer, Peter H. King, makes it more than…
Read his story: Every community that doesn’t have a Mark Opsasnick needs to get one. He is a tall and obsessed man from Greenbelt who quietly rages against forgetting. What he resc…
Bruce Nolan recreates the storm: Two hours before dawn, at the threshold of the darkest week in the history of New Orleans, a hand shook Cyril Crutchfield awake in lower Plaquemine…
I call it: Fun With Archives. It’s something I do while waiting for someone to call and say, Go home. And why not share. Here are a few from Rick Bragg in the late 80s and early 90…
Sunday, Sept. 3. 6 p.m. My place in Tampa. One requirement: bring something to read aloud. Email me for directions.
Read John Barry’s story: O mighty is man’s lust for Mount Everest that a team of climbers recently pronounced a frozen companion dead and left him behind in their quest for the sum…
Read her profile: Matt Farrell, a video producer, needed an attorney after he had been charged with growing marijuana. He hired Allison Margolin, “L.A.’s dopest attorney,” on a fri…
As he collected his things this afternoon after his brown-bag talk, Ken Fuson grabbed my hand. "No fat jokes on the blog," he said. Damn. In that case, I want to point out somethin…
Read his essay: With a man in custody claiming to have killed JonBenet Ramsey -- in just the plausibly improbable way her parents and certain forensic experts had all along claimed…
Read it: The doe's face smashed against the driver's side window and its body sheared off the mirror. There was no blood. Pam Fix knelt by the doe, which at about 140 pounds weighe…
The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid talks with Terry Gross of "Fresh Air" about his response to pleas for help while covering the Israeli bombing of southern Lebanon. Here's the l…
Read his story: See the green Corvette blazing east toward the dawn, miles beneath the moon, seconds beyond the law. Pasco County, nine winters back. A pursuit call crackles into S…
DeNeen Brown on the smell of memories: The smell of summer and dying marigolds, and mosquito spray and cut grass. The smell of melting tar and telephone poles and Chinese kitchens…
Swing by the Nieman Narrative Digest for a few on the theme of "deadline narratives."
Read it: Though it is murder on the soul, celebrity gossip does keep us young, if only in the sense that it renders us childish and reliably gullible, the way some children can sti…
Brick: Fred Wheezy, an orphan with half a working lung who recovered to win fame as a detective, to star on Broadway and to contemplate a teaching career, was killed on Wednesday b…
Mark Johnson pointed out that Jill Carroll's story in the CSM "is written in a very unusual way. Jill writes large sections directly from her experience then a colleague, Peter Gri…
Time to start thinking about Nieman. Registration is now open. The conference (in a yet another new place this year) starts Nov. 17 with a keynote by Calvin Trillin. Early-bird reg…
Read Wright Thompson's story: A great love story ends today. For 73 years, Elden and Mildred Auker were married, inseparable. Their romance was the stuff of paperback novels and Me…
Read T. Lake's story: Cecil and Denise Allred's Sunday night began without incident. They ate dinner at KFC. They returned home to Randee Road. He stepped outside to feed chicken s…
When he splits for his thinking stint, that town's not going to wake up with stuff like this or this in its paper: Barbers tend to be generalists -- they remember heads of hair and…
Mark Johnson writes: "AP narrative ace Todd Lewan has an interesting two-years-in-the-making tale that a number of papers have been running this week. He’s a superb writer. There a…
Read "Baby, Give Me A Kiss": Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard beh…
Forgive the no-post yesterday. I was a little busy. Here's the NYT's metro kids on the heat wave ("it was a morning and night of a million little miseries"); and check out B. Scott…
I must have missed Mark's series from a few weeks ago. I'm seeing this for the first time this morning. You know Mark from his Pulitzer-finalist series last year, and, of course, f…
Read Hank Stuever's story: MTV turns 25 today, which is still a few months younger than Justin Timberlake. The typical way to go from that sentence would be to bemoan -- in snarkab…
Whatever you do today, don't miss Dan Barry from Saturday: A MONTHLY calendar, courtesy of a gas station on Jerome Avenue, hangs in the kitchen of a spare apartment in the Bronx. T…
Read Kelley Benham’s story: It got dark. Out came flashlights. They still hadn’t gathered all the dogs. They didn’t know what to do with them all, and they didn’t know how many the…
A buddy asked the other day for advice on cover letters for job applications. I haven’t written cover letters for my last three moves, so I’m not the best person to comment. Beside…
One good thing about strife over there? Anthony Shadid comes to play. Read his stuff here, here and here.
It does my heart good to see so much good long work in the newspapers today. I’m sure I’ve missed a hundred others, but it’s because I’ve been wrapped up in these. Michael Levensoh…
Mark Johnson spotted this story on Thursday: Inside the chill of the county coroner’s office, the detective and the forensic anthropologist stood over soot-covered bones arrayed on…
How do you make a feature about a car shop come alive with drama and tension? Take a lesson from John Barry’s story: Let’s say that back in the day, you were hell on wheels. But yo…
We talked a while back about Doyle Murphy’s idea for the Greeley Stampeed, the annual rodeo that draws the same boring coverage year after year. Doyle wanted to try something diffe…
I started at the San Angelo Standard-Times at 21K in 2000, and Jenny and I lived in the best apartments in town. So I don’t know what this kid is bitching about. But it’s an intere…
Read her story: "I need one egg," says the manager at Johnny D's Diner in Newburgh. "A raw one." A baffled cook rolls a medium grade A onto the stainless steel counter. Johnny K (f…
From Mark Johnson: "AP just ran a well-written Everest narrative. I especially liked the places the writers chose to end each section. The parallels with the fatal Mallory expediti…
Robert Thompson of the Times of London says, "An important concept for newspapers to contemplate is that of "complementary content," as each medium has its strength and weaknesses.…
Read his story: The lawyers in a triple-murder case filed some paperwork, the judge named some dates and then the court officers called the next case: a skinny 17-year-old with a g…
Check out Gary Smith's profile of Andre Agassi in this week's SI. What else is good out there this weekend?
Read her story: Republican Ron Paul missed out on the 19th century, but he admires it from afar. He speaks lovingly of the good old days before things like Social Security and Medi…
Read Among The Ghosts: Heroes and Grand Plans: AT the end of a long week, I went searching for her tomb. I spoke first to the priest at the Armenian Orthodox Church, who pointed me…
For the first day of jury selection in the John Evander Couey trial, Kruse brings us this: Jessica Marie Lunsford, 9½ years old and not quite 5 feet tall, in the early morni…
Read his story: New Yorkers, it has been said, like to complain. Finally, there's proof. It comes from the bowels of the municipal archives on Chambers Street, where thousands of c…
Sorry about the troubles with the site. Completely out of my control. Keith Goldberg stumbled onto this one: Anna Fiorello has been at Ray and Alice Allen's barn at Historic Track…
Here's Tamara El-Khoury on Vanessa de la Torre's story about a closed Krispy Kreme: "I liked it because I knew exactly what she was talking about. "That smell. Remember?" Talking a…
I think Hank's best when he's going off on under-appreciated America. Check out this piece from last week, if you haven't already: What if the government had left Route 66 intact a…
Read his story: RAMADI, Iraq, July 4 — The Government Center in the middle of this devastated town resembles a fortress on the wild edge of some frontier: it is sandbagged, barrica…
Happy Independence Day everyone. I'm heading out of town for the weekend, so here are a few to keep you busy. Dan Barry from Cameron, La, Lane DeGregory on the reality of a develop…
Mark Johnson writes: You’ve probably come across Dexter Filkins’ story in today’s Times. It’s a good example of storytelling in a war zone in the tradition of Ernie Pyle and others…
Brick’s tell-it-like-it-is quickie in court today read like something from the old days, didn’t it?
So David Barstow suggests that standard investigative journalism — which tends to include the “a (fill in the blank) investigation shows … bullet, bullet, bullet” nutgraph and thre…
I liked this, this, this and this. (And I’m loving these World Cup photos.) What are we reading today?
Stuever on the building beat; Barry on squeegee men; Goffard on an old pedophile.
I got this email from Doyle Murphy: “I’ve pitched a project idea, and I hoping Gangrey readers can offer some advice. We have a giant rodeo called the Greeley Stampede that lasts f…
I have a friend and colleague who often comments on my stories. Usually he says nice things. But today he had criticism. It started with a question. “When is a news story to be wri…
My man Charles Fishman passed this along (and even if you don’t much cotton to business journalism, his bestseller The Wal-Mart Effect is a virtuoso example of explanatory narrativ…
Read her story: There are a lot of really crummy ways we could all die, including nuclear annihilation or a flu pandemic. And then, of course, there’s the possibility that we’ll be…
Read his column: Smiling and hugging and screaming and dancing and blowing kisses and raising index fingers and pounding on their hearts and high-fiving and laughing and raising th…
Read his story: Pardon me while I go off now on the beauty in blank asphalt, and office buildings, and sky. A reverie about what's not there, a newspoem, a secret: I am having an a…
Read his story: OCALA - He's a 33-year-old Democrat with no political experience, a Republican wife and a college sophomore running his campaign. And on this Thursday afternoon, he…
Read his story: All trees and farmland, the tribal chief said. With hard acres of green where cattle grazed, adults trapped game, and boys and girls of the Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe…
Read his story: It’s the morning after his 78th birthday, and T. Boone Pickens is staring at a monitor, watching the energy futures market. He’s already been to the gym, done his d…
Read her story: There are girls out there in ponytails and basketball uniforms who dream their own hoop dreams, bouncing balls on blacktops, stepping on the night's black air for l…
Today's piece from Lakeshore, Miss.: If you were to fly over rural Hancock County here, you would see more than 9,000 of them, white rectangles clumped in sun-bleached parks and sc…
Read his story: "The typical listener is probably a male (but might be a female), most likely under 30 (but might be over), and is almost certainly listening in a house (but might…
Congratulations to Janine Anderson and Colleen Kenney for their recent Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism. Kenney won for her series on problems at the Pine Ridge reservation,…
A secret source suggested this series called Juice Vs. Justice, a hard look at the Vegas court system. (The other stories link off this page.) Anyone read this?
Read Jeff Klinkenberg's story: Gators are falling for each other all over Florida right now. Raging hormones have them on edge. Males are bellowing. Females are grunting. Boy gator…
Ramsey passed on Dan Barry (start of a series, yay!) from Biloxi, and then Bayou La Batre: "To understand a little about this small crustacean of a city nine months after Hurricane…
Sorry for the slow posting this week. Finishing this story was keeping me busy. I'd love some criticism, if anyone gets around to reading it.
Read her story: In 1995, Sam Brownback sacrificed part of his body and wound up closer to God. He discovered a melanoma and had to have two surgeries, during which a "big hunk of f…
Read Mike Dawson's story: In our two-lane region, there is much we suffer trudging along our side of the yellow line. The slow turners. The school bus stops. The cell-phone gabbing…
Read Corey Kilgannon's story: Pepe's Tire Shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, fixes flats for $6 apiece and is usually swarming with people trying to get patched up and back on the road.…
Read Dave Sheinin's story: This is a story about fate, a story about a curse -- if you care to believe in such things. It is a story about coming to grips with them, and maybe, jus…
So I lost Ramsey's cell number when my phone broke a month back, and I started missing the booger, so I called the 800 number for the Times Herald-Record, where my boy handles nigh…
Mark Johnson writes: This is one of the strangest features you’re likely to read. It’s one of the finalists for an alternative weekly newspaper contest. It’s not narrative there ar…
Read Richard Serrano's story: Richard Lee McNair's job in the prison factory was mending U.S. mailbags. Thousands of the leather pouches were routinely delivered to the shop at the…
Check out Kalani Simpson at the Star-Bulletin: here, here, here and here.
If you expect to write about a flood or hurricane or snow storm in the future -- most likely everybody not on a sports staff -- please give this piece in Slate a read: "The earth p…
Here he is with the pacifist and the warrior: One minute Stacy Bannerman is stuffing envelopes to promote an upcoming peace workshop. The next her husband, Lorin, unexpectedly appe…
Meg Martin from Poynter writes: Just chatted with 25ish fourth to eighth graders and their teachers at Writers Camp. Teachers came up to me later to ask about Irish oral storytelli…
You remember that cowboy from West Virginia who won $314 million in the lottery a few years back? If you do anything this weekend, read the rest of the story. I know it's old; read…
Good catch and good access. Read Tamara El-Khoury's story: Tiffany punches something special on the jukebox. She and Peggy take the stage. They start off slow. Late on a Friday aft…
Read his story: When the metal door bangs shut, the daylight is gone. Distorted guitars climb a mountainous drumbeat and a voice snarls Spanish. Thin strands of neon shine dim pink…
Sorry for the problems with the site today. What do you expect? Should be worked out by now. Peace, Ben
Ramsey Al-Rikabi tells a tale without wasting words: The Sunday midnight shift for Deerpark police Officers Mike Conklin and Ed Josefovitz began quietly. No calls. Routine patrol.…
Sorry for the malfunction this morning. Not sure what happened, but we’re back. Don’t miss Tomas Alex Tizon from Hawaii, Lydia Polgreen in Darfur, and Andy Newman following some an…
Keith Goldberg passed along this piece from AJR about the frequency of long narratives devoted to harsh disease afflicting young people, and the author explores a few good question…
There are gold nuggest throughout SI’s Q and A: SI: (On his DiMaggio profile) Your friend David Halberstam called the piece the best of sportswriting of the 20th century. Did you t…
Read Corey Kilgannon’s story about the Samurais: “You’re looking for the samurais?” said the girl sitting in the hallway. “They’re up there.” She pointed up a staircase to a small…
Read John M. Glionna’s story: For 16 years, Dane Johnsten has been a pain-in-the-neck panhandler in this city’s Castro district. On some days, the gangly 39-year-old in the filthy…
Read Stuever’s story: We are 50 floors above Central Park on a recent afternoon, and wouldn’t it be great if this serene, impossibly gorgeous actress jumped up, kicked out the wind…
William Booth: CANNES, France — Richard Kelly looks not good. His face is the color of a mollusk. He is as clammy as a gym towel. His eyes are these little itchy, red-hot BBs. He c…
Could’ve been one of those quick and ridiculous ride-alongs, but this one is much more. Turns out not many people know what happens after they take the gators away. Read Tom’s stor…
Theresa Vargas on a stamp’s story: In the stamp collecting world, often the tiny square on the outside of an envelope is all that matters. It is the commodity that is coveted and t…
She showed up about 9:32 p.m., and her momma was smiling into the pain and blood, eyes closed, just smiling, smiling. God, she had said over and over before the pushing was finishe…
Jon Franklin in a recent post on WriterL: "It has been my observation, over the years, that journalists for some reason are impervious to outside critique of their craft. As long a…
He asked for some Gangrey feedback on his chilling story of a girl named CoriAnn McDevitt: The party started at 7 p.m. It's already 7:10, and 13-year-old CoriAnn McDevitt's jeans a…
Big stuff these days for our guy Wright Thompson, Gangrey poster, sports writer for the last four years at the Kansas City Star -- and now the latest newspaper talent to be plucked…
All this Hallman talk seems to stem at least partly from the assumption that the kind of reporting "the Tom Hallmans" do is somehow different than any other kind of reporting. It g…
This time from the Boston Globe: Q: As a writer, you show a great deal of interest in the working methods of your subjects. What is your own working method? A: I do a lot of readin…
Corey Kilgannon goes upstate: It took a brass band to make it happen, but peace broke out last week in the Ulster County Legislature. It was a brief but harmonious disarmament, las…
He can write. Mark Johnson passed on this MediaBistro Q and A from '05: Q: You started out as a police reporter at The Times. Did you like that beat and what were the plusses and m…
Ever notice that? Somebody does some digging, checks some records, and suddenly the story needs a line that says "a [Your Newspaper's Name] investigation shows ..." and about 17 bu…
On June 1, Gangrey.com will be a year old. Ahhh. I remember the days when HTML was just a bunch of letters. The site has grown in popularity thanks to metions from a few people out…
Read John Doherty's story: On William Street, far from the Renaissance city of the riverfront festivals, the news travelled fast: Hargrove heard before Rivera's family did. If Newb…
From the current Esquire: On Sept. 1, 2004, The New York Times reported a new form of terror unfolding at School No. 1 in Beslan, Russia: "Heavily armed insurgents, some with explo…
Simple wreck, in an area where they happen every day. Simple story, in a business where we refer to them as "fatals" and holler "brief it" across the newsroom. Tom Lake shows us wh…
David Finkel said once that narrative writers 10 years ago had the benefit of the readers' doubt, but it's different now. We must be honest and transparent with our work. I thought…
Read his story: For a long time, Ann Nelson's laptop computer remained dark. It had been returned to her family in North Dakota, along with the other belongings she left behind in…
Read his story: Out of ideas and low on cash one cold morning, the man with the biggest badge in town put his meaty fingers on a keyboard and tapped out a letter to the leader of M…
And Michael Brick is there to document it: And then, despite complaints of arthritis and gout, Mr. Gargiulo re-enacted the fight, his voice rising and accelerating, hands waving, f…
Jeb Phillips on Mother's Day: All of it, every second, has been a gift. Lisa Norman knows this because she and her husband, Jack, prayed for a year and a half for a baby and then,…
The Atlanta Journal Constitution is half way through a 22-part serial narrative by Jane O. Hansen called Through Hell And High Water. Chip Scanlan has some background, and there's…
One of our veteran reporters here at The Commercial Appeal is the insatiably curious and always energetic Cindy Wolff. She attended Nieman for the first time in 2004 and it has bee…
Jeb Phillips passed along this piece from the Baltimore Sun: Paul had been shot in the side of his face, but the freckles of gunpowder on his cheeks were covered with makeup now, a…
Read his story: In court yesterday, he wore a matching blue sweatsuit and handcuffs. His dreadlocks were disarranged. Mr. Rothstein told the judge that doctors at Bellevue Hospital…
In this morning's editorial in the Times: "Newspapering is not a philosophy, it is a way of spending a lifetime," Abe Rosenthal concluded when his time running this newspaper ended…
This ran a few days ago, but check out Thomas Lake's piece on a man who was arrested while trying to tend to his daughter: After the car crash, after the paramedics came, after the…
Read Mike Dawson's A Legend At The Lake: On Windermere Avenue, where the CVS and post office now stand, there was a long expanse of open pasture. There, the boys would play sandlot…
Read Alan Cowell's story: He had been shot at in Zambia, stung by bees in Gambia. There had been volcanoes, arrests and accidents. But when the round-the-world cyclist Heinz St&uum…
Samuel Freedman's Letters to a Young Journalist led me to Alan Dershowitz's Letters to a Young Lawyer -- doing the courts beat makes you buy funny things off Amazon -- and this pas…
Sometimes, if I have reason, or even if I don't, I end up pulling up some of Finkel's stuff from long, long ago here at the "SPT, and it never doesn't make me say ... GAWWLLLY. Ser…
Mark Johnson passed along this must-read from Esquire: Humanity has paused on Jones Street near the summit of Russian Hill in San Francisco. Tourists, businessmen, café work…
She asks: "What happens when semi-famous-people-from-Hollywood meet people-who-might-be-slightly-famous-for-Washington? "Is one more powerful than the other? Or is it like matter m…
From the NY Times in-house self study on its own writing: "First, I think the Times should be striving for kinetic energy at every opportunity. It should be thinking about topspin…
So we've got these cool weekly "brown bag" shop talk lunch sessions here at the SPT with people who either work at the paper or come in from somewhere else -- Anne Hull did one, an…
Ramsey writes: For Gangrey, or, as is it sometimes known, the Unofficial Michael Brick Fan Club. I think this first-person piece has about as much info as I've ever known about the…
Talking about his new book on NPR today: David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine, says he often finds himself in the "loser's locker room." There, he tells Robert Siegel,…
Let's congratulate Gangrey contributor Zack McMillin. He learned a few days ago that he was awarded a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. Huge honor. If you know Zack, you know he's a hell…
Read his story: Two succulent, naturally raised chickens with good farm references are in the oven, snuggled up in a roasting pan like doomed lovers. Fat, perfect carrots are peele…
Was Corey Kilgannon's shot at sports perfect? "Everything seemed perfect for Anthony Velazquez going into yesterday's game. "Anthony, 17, made history by throwing perfect games in…
Doyle Murphy was kind enough to pass along his notes from this weekend's National Writers Workshop: Leonard Pitts, new Pulitzer-winner Stan Tiner, Hank Stuever, Jack Hart and Gangr…
This story feels familiar, like maybe we've talked about it before, but as I sought some inspiration tonight for a tough-to-assemble crime piece, I came across Matt James' Inside T…
Since every person I’ve interviewed has led a life unique to them, they have something to say about the world that I couldn’t get from anyone else. That gives them a value that tra…
In case you missed the former LA Times editor’s speech: It is important for us to explain to the public why journalism — real journalism, practiced in good faith — is absolutely es…
Read Michael Kruse’s story: Stuart Harvey killed a dog. He shot it dead and has never said he didn’t. Is he necessarily guilty of animal cruelty?
Sorry. I slipped out on business for a few days. Hope all is well out there in NewspaperLand. Mark Johnson asked Dan Barry for his Pulitzer entries, and here they are. Forgive the…
Here’s Mike Dawson: The man just wanted to start his lawnmower. But things this afternoon got complicated and dangerous. Fast.
Read Lane Degregory’s story: Find him if you can. Stake out the sidewalks. The poet is as elusive as his verses. He signs his work in script: Jacob Christiano. A lyrical name. It’s…
Read Wright Thompson’s story: Zack Greinke is alone, something that seems to both comfort and frighten him. The normally busy baseball facility has gone silent. Just green grass an…
Read Michael Brick’s story: In the days after the disappearance, the Randall family had a backyard party. Neighbors later told the police of a foul odor; Ms. Randall said that a fa…
Check out Chip Scanlan with Samuel G. Freedman: There’s a temptation, once you’ve mastered a certain skill or form, to endlessly repeat it, especially if you’re praised for doing i…
Meg Martin wrote the other day about Alex Wolfe's tips on doing the historical feature. Fantastic opportunities exist for that, although we don't do many in the news pages. We've t…
I asked Mark Johnson for a link to his fantastic Pulitzer finalist piece, and he sent this: "Feel free to let us know what worked and what didn't and what we could have done to mak…
Read Thomas Lake's story: One week ago today on a boulevard in Jacksonville, an uncommon woman punched her accelerator and rolled west toward the skyline. She drove a dark SUV full…
David Finkel won the Pulitzer for explanatory reporting for his piece on exporting democracy to Yemen. And check out who was a finalist for explanatory: "Mark Johnson and Kawanza N…
We've talked about Andy Newman's story a few times (here and here) but if there's ever been one worth revisiting, it's that piece. Kruse hit him up for some more info. Read it agai…
Read Corey Kilgannon's story: He lives in a small room he rents for $400 a month in Woodside with a bathroom in the hall he shares with three other men, all Colombian and in a simi…
Read Chris Goffard's story: He said the Brotherhood killed one gang member for engaging in openly homosexual activity, and killed another inmate for informing to authorities. He sa…
Read David Finkel's story: In the angry life of Maryscott O'Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun h…
Read Finkel and N.C. Aizenman from a few days ago: On most days, Mohammed Butt and his older brother, Imran, can be found in an office decorated with photographs of their family ba…
Read S.I. Rosenbaum's profile: In Clancy Huffman's life there have been 825 moments of pure happiness. They haven't been his. But he was there. He was close enough to see the bride…
SI's Tom Verducci, in a handout, from a breakout session called "Bringing a magazine sensibility to the daily paper": "The bottom line is I think newspapers think in terms of snaps…
John Doherty on a rally in Newburgh: It took 10 minutes for them all to pass. They sang in Spanish, carried signs in English and chanted seamlessly in two languages. They carried f…
Read Hank Stuever's latest: Tony from Gardena, Calif., is calling: "My question is I'm in a band now and we're starting off and we came up with a name and want to know if any other…
Check out Colleen Kenney's piece from Huron, S.D.: This is the first thing he remembers: It’s dark. Maybe 3 a.m. He’s in his hospital bed in Rapid City about a month after the seiz…
The story of Mike Russell: Out on the corner, some people drive by and shout FREAK, others tell him to ROCK ON, MAN, and then there are some who sit at red lights and put up their…
Mark said it, and I agree. Anne Hull's latest is a lesson in journalism: Blake Johnson is almost 18. Tan and muscular, he plays third base for the Clarkdale High School Bulldogs. H…
Doyle Murphy passed along this piece by Mike Peters from the Greeley Tribune, on a schizophrenic who killed his folks a few years ago: Just above his bed in Ward F-7 at the Colorad…
Check out S.I. Rosenbaum's story of trapeze artist Simone Dykes (click the link under Brandon Times), told in a comic. We ran this in the section, and they added the cool online co…
I'm posting this again because I didn't realize it was a more than a single part. Man, I enjoyed this. Here's Alexa James' series on a high school play.
Thomas Lake's St. Pete Times debut: Yvonne Holcombe stood firm as night fell on her husband's mind. She busied his hands with household tasks. She watched as he wandered the back y…
Guess who Nell Lake just threw up at the Narrative Digest. (Hint: We talked about it.) Nell has a fantastic critique of the piece. "We like the spareness of this story's telling, t…
Read Hank Stuever's Ballpark Blues: No amount of Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton and Mariah Carey songs could mask the pain. One by one, until the wee hours Monday morning, the re…
Check out Alexa James' piece in today's Times Herald-Record: On a December night, in the high school auditorium, junior Noah Meyer finds himself steaming across the Atlantic on a l…
Let's hope Zack stays safe out there covering the tornados in Tennessee. His stories are stellar. Read them here and here: The saddest hillside in Gibson County was clogged with th…
Saundra came in a few weeks ago talking about a wacky obit she ran across. Turned into a damn fine story: Magdalena and Andres married and had six children together; she worked in…
From Donald Murray, Pulitzer Prize winner and writing teacher: "The more pofessional we become, the greater the danger that we will see what we expect to see. Experience, of course…
Read his story: The old musician died on a southbound Q train. It was after midnight on a Sunday and the body of the old musician rode to Stillwell Avenue where the subway tracks e…
The morning of a big sports night, especially when it involves a team from L.A., Plaschke, of course, is a must-hit on the Web run. Read up heading into tonight's game: "The player…
Dan Barry with A Safe Haven, but Not Safe From All; T.O. does Dallas, so the Morning News finally makes it to Alexander City, Ala.; Robert L. Smith in Cleveland with Ohio new 'bord…
I can't say enough how important it is that you read W.C. Heinz's Death of a Racehorse: They were going to the post for the sixth race at Jamaica, two year olds, some making their…
Feinstein is known best for his sometimes long, padded, sappy books, but he does know a thing or two about access — and, like in this story, how to use small details to show bigger…
I go back to this piece once in a while for a reminder of the power of brevity. I remember watching Steve work on this story. He listened again and again to a tape of Charlie speak…
First this, then this this one yesterday. Makes me think Andy Newman is just a read-to-the-end kind of guy.
I could give flip about Mizzou basketball, but this is why people know Wright Thompson’s name: Truman the Tiger sat in a darkened hallway, mascot head by his side. A small crowd ha…
Read John Mangels’ seven-part series, Plagued By Fear: Dr. Thomas Butler was the government’s go-to guy if you were worried about a plague attack – and in the hair-trigger months a…
I meant to post this a few days ago. Please read Jeff Klinkenberg’s story about a man who won’t give up: Through the open door Freddie spots the Cadillac, looking for parking space…
Read Doherty’s story on commuting gangsters: “Mobsters are just like everyone else – it’s simple demographics. The money is moving to the suburbs and the Mafia follows the money,”…
Michael Brick's continuing coverage: Most murder defendants do not testify in court; the strategy is too risky. But then, most murder defendants do not take on a SWAT team with a k…
Read Kelley Benham's piece on an unhappy swamp rat: It is, by almost any standard, a nice house. There's a Beware of Dog sign in the bay window and some junk cars around back, but…
Found the StoryCorps site last night and spent an hour being blown away. This is good good stuff. You guys think there is a way to do this sort of thing in print? "Sweetie, your re…
Jeffrey Gettleman, good guy and proud alum of the Hernando County bureau of the St. Petersburg Times, is back in Iraq for the NYT. Check out the ending on this bad boy (and the beg…
Please read Andy Newman's story about a guy who bought a table and got a New York story: Funny how a piece of furniture can bring strangers together. Beau Willimon and his girlfrie…
Read John Jeremiah Sullivan's Upon This Rock: But as my breakfast-time mantra says, I am a professional. And they don't give out awards for that sort of toe-tap, J-school foolishne…
More Hank Stuever: For woe unto the manly. So scorned, so sublimated. When was the last time you could throw a punch? Not in the professional world, with its PowerPoint, no-I-in-te…
My former wiffle teammate, Cory Branan, is releasing his second album, and anyone lucky enough to pick up his first effort, The Hell You Say, knows why it's much anticipated. Anyon…
Read Malcolm Garcia's story: He walks the aisles of the supermarket, scrutinizes prices against his coupons. It was here by the meat counter one afternoon a woman stood and stared…
The lesson here is always read the classifieds. Damn. Read Jim Walsh's story from City Pages in Minneapolis/St. Paul (Thanks, Sara): He placed his first ad in the "I Saw You" secti…
Check out this innovative series by Janine Anderson, from the Journal Times of Racine, Wisconsin (You may have bumped into her on Grangrey). Here's the tease: If a reporter called…
This Fresh Air interview with David Mamet and Shawn Ryan is instructive for storytellers in any medium. ******** Mamet ... The trick is to leave everything out. That's the whole tr…
Read Hank Stuever's story: Even though the courthouse is right next to Santa Maria's lone shopping mall, many people in this town of 83,000, three hours north of Los Angeles, were…
Read Wright's story: They climb higher and higher, the ride a gift from a friend, just one of a thousand little acts of kindness that have gotten the Holleys through. It climbs up…
If you haven't noticed, posts this week have come from a few different people and have hit a variety of subjects. Three reasons for that: I'm pressed for time, Kruse and I don't ha…
Read Vanessa Gezari's story from Houston: On the way to Wal-Mart, they passed a mosque and a truck selling tacos. Inside, Jauney wondered at the food on the shelves: the giant taro…
Ramsey Al-Rikabi went to a fire then told people about it; Chris Goffard on a small tape with a huge impact; and Tomas Alex Tizon with a Katrina evacuee a long way from home: She d…
Got in the mail the other day a dog-eared copy of The Literature of Reality. The introduction is by Gay Talese. It's called "Origins of a Nonfiction Writer." Some bits of wisdom: "…
He was a photographer, but he was much more, and we could all learn from Gordon Parks' example of hard work and showing people things they wouldn't otherwise see. Wil Haygood with…
Dan Barry on life going on at ground zero, Rebecca Catalanello on a rescue gone wrong and Andy Grundberg with Gordon Parks' obit.
So long as we're talking about origins and keeping it real, welcome to the controversy here in Memphis (where we lay claim to Ralph Wiley, too): To be proud or ashamed of Memphis r…
I mean, come on, how FUN is this? I want this in MY local newspaper. Some highlights: This one was reeeeeeeeeal. Understand that we are mostly blase about famous people, see 'em al…
Read on a break from prepping for next week's Allains trial: "We are storytellers, an amalgam of journalists, entertainers, poets, jugglers and dodge artists. We sling ink and bina…
Just watching the red carpet. And taking notes. And writing it up all fun: "They're all predictably thrilled, prepped, dressed, posed. They're all tiny but somehow huge. They toss…
Read his letter, then his story below. Did Jimmy B. succeed? Inside the church, the heavy air-conditioner in the wall kept the narrow hallway cool. Carroll Tyler and Sandra Hopkins…
I'm due to hand my Tampa Tribune-issued computer and various chords over to Darrin, the tech guy here, in a few moments, so I'll rapid-post one last time as Friday nears Saturday.…
This is a letter Jimmy Breslin sent to his editor at the New York Herald Tribune in, I believe, May 1964. He's pitching a series about Harlem. The language is dated, for sure, but…
How does Garrison Keillor write with such a distinct voice? You hear him speaking as you read his stuff.
For those of you nearing the deadline for another daily on yet another day, here's some last-minute inspiration from Jimmy Cannon via a guy who isn't. (From the New York Post) "THE…
Dan Barry with New York's nicest pool player; Damon Hack spins one from Palm Harbor; John Doherty with a narrative state of the city; Colleen Kenney at the famous U-Stop.
Read Emily Wax's story: Under a rotating disco ball and steps from a clay pot sitting on fake flames, Congolese crooner Prince Fisecoze slams down a couple of shots of sambuca bar-…
I stumbled across this short profile of Jimmy Cannon. It's full of lessons, including this: "Jimmy led the classic reporter's life," said Izenberg, who wrote alongside Smith for th…
I love it when a reporter becomes a character. It adds tension to Michelle O’Donnell’s A Haunted House, Clinging To Secrets: Every winter, when the trees drop their leaves, a certa…
This is off topic, and I fear it reveals something about me I’m not sure I wish to make known, but what? How could Travis not pick Moana?
Why my man Geoff Calkins is so well-loved here in Memphis. “I love you more than you love me,” Kimberly would say.
Corey Kilgannon on a gadfly in a Queens co-op; Kelley Benham on measuring memories; Hank Stuever on The Blue Tarp.
There’s an energy and sense of wonder in Libby Copeland’s writing that makes me jealous. Here’s another one from Turin: The Americans just attack the snow with their fierce wills,…
Ralph Blumenthal with the story of a big small town: What it does have is the Boot Track Café (open mornings), a post office, a gas station and the yellow Deco two-story cou…
Lauren Collins in Talk of the Town: Some breaches of decorum are easier to rectify than others. Perhaps you have been invited to attend a memorial ceremony at Auschwitz and you arr…
Kruse pointed it out, and I’m in agreement: Libby Copeland’s stuff from Turin is fresh, energetic and, unlike a lot of stuff from the Olympics, readable. Here are a few of them. Ci…
Read Kelley’s story: They cruise the bus station, Campbell Park, Lake Maggiore. These aren’t places homeless people cluster. They were the kinds of places Tom hid. He was a loner.…
Brick's Suspect In Murder-Attempt Case Has Something To Say, Dan Barry's Away From Mardi Gras, Glints Of Life As The Hopeful Trickle Home, Corey Kilgannon's At $2 A Dance, A Remedy…
Michael Brick in court: "From a juror's vantage, much of the strange courtroom imagery goes unexplained. The disembodied faces on trial are represented by a row of four men seeming…
Read his story: "Trumpets sounded, drums pounded and the feet of a city marched in place, tapping an anticipatory beat on asphalt. Someone gave the noontime signal for a parade to…
Read Erin Sullivan's story from Daytona: The man they call Wild Bill Owen sat at the bar, looking through photo albums of his hero. "There's the man." "And there he is." "There he…
A threatening voice mail from a thug name of Monty has me frantically finishing off the first-ever Gangrey.com two-CD Narrative Song extravaganza. Also, we're trying to cajole Mich…
Goldberg passed along this story from the AP's Desmond Butler: O'Pharrow, known to friends as "Jimmy O'," has been a mentor to Salita since he taught the young boxer to jab at the…
For those of you who remember Sonia Nazario's Pulitzer-winning piece, Enrique's Journey, here's the latest chapter.
Read Kruse's story: SPRING HILL - Lori Burns and John Gorman had come Thursday morning to be wed at Winn-Dixie in the frozen foods aisle in between the pizza and the ice cream. Thi…
Read Hank's story: "These are all things Weir's mother, the equally outspoken Patti, did. "She raised a kid who would grow up to nickname himself "J. We" and "Tinkerbelle" and tell…
I'm sure everyone has seen this, but this is the first time I'm reading Steve Coll's two-parter on the death of Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinal free safety who, after 9-11…
Dan Barry and Adam Nossiter advance a parade: The first Mardi Gras parade of 2006 will strut and shout up Napoleon Avenue and then along St. Charles on Saturday, trumpeting a plain…
Read his debut: The snowmen melteth. In the front yards of homes all over Greater Memphis, the last vestiges of Friday's 3 to 5 inches of snowfall were thawing to death. Wind and s…
Brady Dennis' The Long Road To Recovery: Lee has bad days, too. He worries, as injured soldiers often do, whether his wife will have the patience to stay by his side. Just last wee…
He writes: "Cusack, who turns 40 in June, was only 22 when he played the part (and, arguably, played it over and over -- the sensitive, mix-tape-making, imperfectly perfect boyfrie…
Robert Redford. Dave Eggers. Sarah Vowell. Elvis Mitchell. Jonathan Caouette. Bonz Malone. Ira Glass. Catherine Hardwicke. Xeni Jardin. Orville Schell. Go here and listen to all of…
An email came in backchannel asking for the names of folks out there who are pushing the envelope without recognition. Gangrey tracks a lot of good writers, but there are no doubt…
The New Yorker editor -- deep breath -- isn't really worried about what readers want and he isn't dumbing down his product to attract the young'uns. Please forward this to your edi…
Lane DeGregory's A Matchmaker Named Katrina; Tom Hallman Jr.'s Bill Porter: Life Of A Salesman; Rick Meyers' 14 Tips For Building Character; a slew of stuff that won American Assoc…
G. Paschal Zachary, a Time and Wall Street Journal vet, says it's about time to stop lying to readers: "Trying to be fair and balanced, journalists have failed their subjects and t…
Michael Brick as Joe Friday: "The place was New York City. Crime was the dish of the day, and the main course was injury to an animal with a side of petty larceny. The victim was B…
From a conversation between Robert Krulwich and Ira Glass, on the occassion of This American Life's 10-year anniversary. Go read the whole thing. It's chock full of inspirations an…
Over at WriterL, a chat about personal essays has turned into a detailed discussion on the nomenclature of literary journalism, which Mr. Franklin says is very important. If we're…
Corey Kilgannon takes a look at the setting of a crazy crime in the Bronx: "White Castles open 24 hours a day have long been a siren for off-kilter customers looking to cap off the…
Read Erin Sullivan's story: "His room is a boy's room, mostly frozen in time from when his mom decorated it seven years ago. It is covered with sports things he can't really see. H…
Read Lane DeGregory's story: In Briny, you never have to worry about anything. You don't have to think about dressing up or trying to impress anyone. You are never lonely or bored.…
A lot of new folks are swinging through the ol' bloggy-blog since Chip Scanlan gave us a mention (Thanks, Meg), so I figured it might be useful to highlight some of the stuff the f…
Asher was up early -- like, nose-bleed early -- so we strollered down to the Henry Avenue honor boxes in the dark. I could find just two dimes and a nickel, so I played the who-get…
She has a piece in this week's New Yorker, but only in the mag. They did link online to her piece out of Oklahoma City from 2003 -- The Marriage Cure. (Print it before it's gone, o…
Tom Hallman Jr.'s latest: Nearly all the great ones start out this way. Anonymous. The public has no idea because it's nearly impossible to truly see heart, passion and dedication.…
From CJR's Cultivating Lonliness: "With so many low-budget Web logs that do little more than emotionally react to the headlines" -- not Gangrey! -- "rare is the commentator who doe…
All the cool kids read Gangrey. Please welcome Chip Scanlan into the fold. I should start charging for this wisdom.
Finding something readable on media day is possible. Wright Thompson does it twice. Here he is on Jurevicius and turducken.
We want more stuff like this: To get to the place where they like George W. Bush more than any other place in America, you fly west for a long time from Washington, then you drive…
Make that five: “Hall has red hair and pearly skin. She was born in Kankakee, Ill. Chili pepper lights hang in her kitchen; Southern folk art and pink flamingos abound. In the midd…
In advance of her coming story on “young, poor mothers in the swamps of Louisiana, their children, and a nurse who is trying to change their lives.”
Former Times Herald-Record publisher Jim Moss: “And there’s a question for us at the newspaper. Do we simply hold up a mirror and report dispassionately about what we see, or is th…
Sometimes, when I really, really like something I read online, I click the print button twice with a kind of subliminal string – Maybe this will disappear from the WWW, and then ma…
Four in a month? I’m not complaining. Anne Hull’s latest on a post-Katrina Dickensian encampment in a place called Arabi.
Stumbled across The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. Looks pretty good. From the pitch: Ian McEwan: “The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful par…
Kruse passed on two pieces from the West Coast, back to back: “Both used I (not only that, but “I” was a major character, and HAD to be), and both made me read to the end. Definite…
Check out Mike Dawson’s subtle use of scene in his short story on some neighbors. It makes this story, and is not something you get on the phone.
“After passing the Bar exam on his fourth try, Charley Demosthenous wasn’t exactly a hot property. Even his father thought he should go sell screwdrivers. Representing the poor and…
So Susan Orlean has a pretty fancy summer home in the Hudson Valley, and she told the NY Times all about it. She even did voice-over for the slideshow, talking about how her home i…
And when you were finished reading, he'd roundhouse kick you in the face.
Kurt Vonnegut says we're smart only four hours a day, and that what we do after the age of 45 is crap.
Gregory E. Favre: We are going through a period in our industry, at this moment, in which we seem to be searching for our souls; in which the feeding frenzy over the future of news…
Zack passed on this nugget from Slate's conversation with 24 writer Michael Loceff on why complex narrative works: Slate: In the last five years or so, television has experienced s…
The Salem Oregon Statesman Journal talks to Bragg: "Writers are crazy anyway, we're just looney, and I don't mean that in any romantic sense. We're just generally a restless and un…
When Mom Is Over There: I am driving a hulking Expedition with a yellow ribbon on the bumper that says "Support Our Troops." In the grocery store parking lot, a man nods at me. I'm…
It's not every day you get Dan Barry, Michael Brick, Corey Kilgannon, and Tamar Lewin in the same metro section. (And don't miss Lewin's piece on growing up from Sunday.)
The folks at Nieman have added a program to Public Radio Exchange on rehabbing our business. Here's the description: "Rehabbing the Fourth Estate" is a broadcast special from the N…
Anyone else want to see the Times' Vanessa Gezari, who carried her narrative voice to Sago, W. Va., pursue the karma-kissed Mouse Burns House story? What do you say, Vanessa?
Warm day. Cool water. Sand and all. And two buckets. Maybe we should build a castle! Collect broken shells, then throw them back and start again. Perhaps we should put seaweed on o…
The way Erin Sullivan asks questions and listens, it's no wonder she was able to get the sensitive details of Jessica's Story. Give it a read when you get a chance.
Jim Shutze in the Dallas Observer: "I have waited patiently for the holiday season to expire. Now I'm afraid I must bring up the guy who got caught sprinkling his own dried feces o…
Jay Allison deserves an award for This I Believe. It makes me want to work in radio. Check out Be Cool To The Pizza Dude: "Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in humi…
Kruse passed along this Bill Plaschke column: History died cruelly, unusually, extinguished by a killer who didn't even lose his breath. Shortly after 9 p.m. Wednesday, Vince Young…
Fred Grimm: Stop reading for a moment. Flip this over. Notice that the backside of your morning newspaper is utterly unencumbered by cords, plugs, telephone jacks or USB connection…
Tom French's One life, a treasury of moments: "Sometimes, you can live an entire lifetime in a single morning. Just take a walk with Bill Futch."
David Ignatius writes: "Maybe the lesson of 2005 was the same for the media as for the politicians: Hang on tight to your values, and don't be afraid to let that passion animate yo…
Anne Hull and Julia Cass with Auld Lang Syne in the Big Easy: "The waitresses at Cafe du Monde hustled out trays with warm beignets and thick chicory coffee, and Maspero's was pres…
Corey Kilgannon’s Beer by the Barrel, Stories by the Scoop: “At the crime scene, reporters compete ruthlessly for exclusive information, hunting and hoarding the juiciest quotation…
James Rainey writes that Times-Pic reporters “have made their front porch the world’s. They have become the definitive news outlet for myriad journalists trying to understand this…
From the CJR Daily: “Each day and every week, a great mass of print journalism is produced in this country — something all too easy to forget when reading a mere sliver of that out…
Hank Stuever overcried. Deneen Brown had Christmas in the basement. Tanya Ballard’s mother got an iron and left. And I’m thinking we should do more of these; Easter, St. Patrick’s…
…for Christmas is to write like these people. May your holiday reading be plentiful and your underwear warm.
Zack McMillin with a Gangrey.com exclusive: According to Forbes, it has been “the year the newspaper industry began to self-destruct.” According to Editor & Publisher, “Fitch Ratin…
I was reminded how good John Prine is when I heard “Christmas In Prison” today and cried. We’ve talked about him before. I’m obliged to post the lyrics below, but if you can, give…
Read his series on a U.S.-funded program to encourage democracy from its inception to its conclusion.
You’ve used this before? Microsoft Paint is far more difficult than it looks, but I gave it a go and have plans to release a full Gangrey.com clothing line. Hats, decorative swords…
I’m gone a week and the world goes to hell. What ever happened to wholesome holiday stories? Pumpkin pies and snowflaked skies and rasmuffins and tidy greetings? Kelley has a PR gu…
John Scalzi's Being Poor: Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs. Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV. Being poor i…
Zack says: Take your blood pressure medicine and then read ... THIS: Staff cuts are a disgrace to journalism Profit-driven media companies trimming muscle, not fat, are bad news fo…
It's cold in Oklahoma City today, so cold I've been stuck inside my in-laws' for hours. I'm holed up in this little computer room reading and cleaning out email. I came across the…
From Keith Goldberg: Just read this story in Sunday's New York Post, from 1956 on the trade of Jackie Robinson. You never see a news story written like this in a sports section any…
I stumbled across this test a few days ago and finally had a chance to give it a whirl. Fun stuff, it is. A sample from the Trib's 1A, using first graphs only: * Hillsborough Count…
Bill Kirtz tells us why narrative matters most now: ... "when outmoded notions of "he said/she said" fairness, avaricious owners and new media all threaten newspapers' primacy -- n…
I admit it's been a while since I've bought a Rolling Stone, but I really want to read this guy. (Thanks, Kelley.) (I also like reading this guy.)
Vanessa Gezari shows us the story behind Sami Al-Arian as it spilled out of court.
Ramsey passed along this story from Jason Burke of The Observer, which Adam Hochschild mentioned at Nieman. He was making a point about observation. This is especially brilliant: .…
Sitting there stunned, listening to the Diana K. Sugg preaching a virtuouso Sunday sermon about finding journalistic salvation, that's what I kept asking my good buddy Erin Sulliva…
Read Lane Degregory's series: Michelle Dowdy had auditioned on a lark. In January she had gone to New York with her mom, Karla Harris, to visit colleges. A friend had phoned to tel…
Michael Brick gives us something not even Court TV can do: a short daily on hours of court proceedings, with graceful narrative elements and important details that put readers ther…
While waiting at Logan with Ben and a beer for a snow-delayed flight back to what will be the most welcome warmth of Greater Tampa Bay … Nieman every year ends up being about amazi…
Tom Wolfe: "It's great to see this many people involved in journalism. I just wish there were more readers." "It's the emotional part of crimes that we do not report in our newspap…
Why is it that some people, for some reason, are compelled to do this blogging thing? Ben insists. I wake up. I feel a little groggy. I'm not sure what I can possibly learn about w…
The seminar was called Community Journalism and Narrative. At the table up at the front of the room were Charlotte Observer editor Cheryl Carpenter, Boston Globe columnist Derrick…
Pet peeve question No. 1 asked by some people at Nieman who don’t get it: Um, he there, yeah, I was wondering, how can you weave facts into narrative? OK. NARRATIVE IS FACTS. IT’S…
Mark Singer, the longtime writer for The New Yorker, admitted he comes from a different world than the daily newsperson. "I didn't work in newspapers. I don't think I would've last…
"Novelists come out of these great standing pools of water called Masters of Fine Arts programs," Tom Wolfe declared on Friday, his left arm in a sling but the rest of his white be…
His Doctors Wage A Frantic Fight To Save A Wounded Officer: The guarded entrance to Building C of the Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn is designed for ambulance traffic, bu…
Read Kelley’s story: They eat cold fried snapper for breakfast. Taso shaves with saltwater and enjoys the sting. He says “buenos dias” to Louie the sun and plays with his dog, but…
Is it that time of year again? Time to string the cliches from the rafters and hang the unoriginality from the mantle and tuck the ridiculous quotes snug into bed for a long winter…
Remember this? Well, now there’s this. And that’s the way miracles unfold sometimes.
Hank Stuever: Quick! Stir this while we take a sec to give thanks for dear Ruth Siems, who is credited with inventing Stove Top Stuffing in 1972, of which tens of millions of boxes…
The OC Weekly’s R. Scott Moxley on one of California’s most awful hate crimes: We joke, in Orange County, about beige and white, about beige carpets in beige homes behind beige wal…
Michael Kruse’s story: Bam Bam Bigelow skidded off the motorcycle and onto the hard wet asphalt on State Road 50 one Sunday in early October on the west side of Hernando County. Th…
Michael Brick’s Tracing Steps Of The Man Who Walked Away: He walked these avenues and then he was gone, as the inhabitants of one city give way to the next, as some are hurried alo…
WriterL member Lynda Ward has started a Yahoo group for studying and analyzing narrative themes in movies like Million Dollar Baby, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The St…
Kate Boo on lying low: “The darnedest thing about real people is that they don’t conform to our little preconceived narrative of life,” Boo said. “So they are going to surprise you…
chronicling the lives of three generations on Delery Street in New Orleans.
NYT's Warren St. John talks shop: "But I don't think storytelling is ever going to go away. I don't think trying to understand what's really happening in the world is ever really g…
In case you were wondering, THIS appears to have been up since August, but I must've missed it. There's a nugget of inspiration in the second graph below. And make sure you read A…
Kruse found this: "Let's be all the things we love to read. Let's astonish our audience. Let's stop asking our readers what they want. Let's remember, as Frank Capra, the great dir…
Writing that spurred a revolution. Talese: "I'd always read short stories," he said, "and the short story writers?and the playwrights and the novelists?were just writing about peop…
Anybody making plans yet? What are we longing to hear? 2005 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism Draft Schedule Friday, December 2, 2005 11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Registration 1:…
So the new circulation numbers are out for six-month period ending Sept. 30, compared to the same period last year. In the spirit of the New York Tab War, I'd like to shoot one acr…
For those without a staff, and without the time or the patience to muddle through more than one paper, there is Carlos, a young man of indeterminate origin and background (“I’m fro…
Read Michael Brick's Halloweens Pass: The old-timers watched Halloween from the stoops, and laughter rose above the other noises. Batman came with a Superman bag. A tiny cheerleade…
Kruse says this is the best thing Ramsey Al-Rikabi has ever done: Jose "Tito" Torres fired only two shots. The first went through the belly of a 16-year-old girl. The second he sho…
Gangrey will be down for a few days. Miami lost power and phones so I’m stuck for now using the cell to file, which is as slow as Doherty on deadline. Please keep making each other…
Am I not looking hard enough, or have all the waiting-on-the-big-one stories been done? Seems like every idea that feels fresh has been done by someone better and brighter than me.…
Check out this piece by Josh Peter, who should have won the Pulitzer for feature writing a few years back. Here’s to this year. “Across the street from the Astrodome, in the alcove…
He’s living on the street. And it looks real. (Thanks, Tim.) Steve Lopez: The call comes in at 11:18 in the morning. Possible overdose on skid row, just half a block from one of th…
Dan Barry: Umbrella. Say it fast, as one peddler did in Times Square – umbrella-umbrella-umbrella – and there’s music playing. Say it soft, as another peddler did at Herald Square…
The last (and only?) interview Cormac McCarthy did was this one, for the New York Times Magazine, in 1992. But someone has been thinking lately about how cool it would be to talk t…
Alex sent this: “If Michelle Kosinski’s canoe had sprung a leak on NBC’s “Today” show Friday, she didn’t have much to worry about. “In one of television’s inadvertently funny momen…
Sheryl McCarthy thinks so: “Relationships between journalists and their subjects are complicated and often conflicted. Even when they evolve into a kind of friendship, they are fue…
Kruse passed along the story behind Josh Paul, the now famous third-string catcher for the Angels.
( Thanks, Baird. ) It was supposed to be a simple story about a mysterious senior-softball phenom whose legend was growing in America's heartland. Of course, nothing is simple.
NEW ORLEANS - Inside, it smells like mold. Outside, the entire French Quarter smells like a dead cat. But the lights came on this week and so, here and there along the street, men…
Brooklyn, 1955, and raw ( Thanks Keith ): There is no way to understand Oct. 4, 1955 and the great explosive release of giddy, tearful, fist-pumping emotion at 3:45 that Tuesday af…
NYTimes.com: A third man has been detained in a suspected plot to detonate explosives on the city's subway system, a government official said today, as police officers searched pas…
Kurtz: The Washington Post is a bloated newspaper that should cut its voluminous and often dull output by a third to attract more readers, some say. The Washington Post's rich offe…
From Romanesko letters: There are any number of ideas for coping with this problem, some of which will be successful -- examples include a Web news presence that reflects the abili…
Here's John Henry Doucette, sweet and tight, on a family making copies of a dead kid's picture: Billie A. Spruill sifted through photos to pick out the best one of her dead son. Sh…
Vanessa Gezari on the police beat: At 7:31 a.m. Tuesday, on a quiet street in St. Petersburg, a man who had done terrible things to a woman and dodged justice for almost two years…
From Zack: Went to see John Prine Friday night, and found myself inspired for two solid hours, listening to THE MAN. Was wondering if anyone had particular favorite singers/bands w…
As someone else said, there has been so much good writing out of New Orleans, but this is the first poetry. I can't stop reading it. ...In Bywater and the surrounding neighborhoods…
I dig this, but I don’t get it. “GOD couldn’t decide where to meet for a cup of coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts? “No place to sit.” Howard Johnson’s? “Gone, my child, gone.” Starbucks? “Too…
A few nuggets from Newspapers In Turmoil in The Rake: ( Thanks, Zack. ) …But almost everywhere else, newsrooms have been stripped of adequate resources, imagination, and editorial…
Please check out the Times Herald-Record’s Tuesday coverage of a triple homicide Monday. Comprehensive, readable, good stuff. The main bar: Fired sex offender shoots 3, kills self.…
“The good years were sweet – he sang on big radio shows in New York, was offered a movie contract by MGM, got to hear his songs covered by pop stars – and then he fell and fell har…
So I got Direct TV a few weeks ago and I finally got a chance to flip channels this morning. Somewhere in the 300s, I stumbled across Charlie LeDuff getting his ass kicked by a bik…
Taped under receptionist Gloria Williams’s desk were “urgent” instructions to recite in case of a hurricane: “Our Father who art in heaven, through the powerful intercession of Lad…
Early on, after I had written my fifth robbery roundup in five days, the metro editor at that time, a great guy named Bill Gerdes, came to me and said, “Stop! No more robbery round…
If you haven’t done it already, sign up for a free 14 days of Times Select at nytimes.com, and check out the multimedia video feature with Dan Barry. Classic stuff. He reads the pa…
Zack McMillin ran across a helluva bargain: 80 years of the New Yorker for $63.
Makes perfect sense. What else is there to do while you're taking a dump?
Don't miss her stuff off Katrina: In Rural Texas, Blessings and Culture Shock and Hitchhiking From Squalor To Anywhere Else.
Just thinking, after a long hard trip and staring down the muzzle of another: If a good writer only puts out a story or two a year, is the writer really all that good? (I like that…
Given the extreme physical conditions, the obvious logistical difficulties and the challenges of just being a human being and seeing what there is to see all along the Gulf Coast,…
I’ll be away for the next week, so forgive me for not updating Gangrey. But make sure you check on how Kruse and I are doing as the water recedes from Mississippi at www.tampatrib.…
They were going to the post for the sixth race at Jamaica, two year olds, some making their first starts, to go five and a half furlongs for the purse of four thousand dollars. The…
This started on Sunday: Portland attorney Darian Stanford must choose: He can keep his paycheck at a prestigious law firm. Or he can pursue principles at the DA’s office. Does he m…
And Dave Richardson lets him have it: “This week’s contender for the title of World’s Dumbest Criminal: the genius who allegedly broke into the same house for possibly the third ti…
So, Dwight Gooden ran from the cops Monday, and folks here and in New York (and lot of other places, I guess) are nuts about it. It’s a nice chance to compare how different folks h…
Zack McMillin let’s Roy Peter Clark have it (from a WriterL discussion on narrative length): During one of those unavoidable by-committee meetings that accompany a large narrative,…
Kruse asks if Corey Kilgannon’s The Endless Night works: “One night, hanging out with teenagers, apropos of nothing much. Does it work?” Elizabeth Gilbert on the worst wedding toas…
NEW: Here’s the end. Figured I’d throw this on for your thoughts and advice. On Tuesday, I pitched a short serial out of the 2005 National Truck Driving Championships this week in…
David Finkel on overstatement: "Do not overstate, no matter how big of a rush you're in. Be a fearless editor of yourself. See if things stand up, or if you're overstepping your bo…
New New Journalism excerpt, from an interview with Lawrence Weschler: Are there any activities that help at this point? Two things. One is that I read a lot of novels. Writers like…
Sunday hymnal: Please check out my boy's boy Marc Broussard, with his new video, for his song "Home." This kid is bad. Sounds like a 67-year-old black man. (Click on VIDEO beside H…
Kruse passed along this piece from Connie Schultz. And check out Christian Wade's Trib debut: The Deep Lagoon clubhouse, a faded yellow building with clumps of long grass sprouting…
Writer's Almanac, in my view, is par to my Slick granny's buscuits and gravy. On behalf of the education of future generations of Kentuckians(ites?), shame on the gutless tricks th…
Man. Read Mike Dawson: "Pat Campbell is giddy Wednesday as she emerges from her dank trailer, which has no electricity, and stands in her yard of squalor – a sagging heap of busted…
I told you. Fanclub. "California v. Michael Jackson is a criminal trial, but if you sit on a metal folding chair in an oversize trailer behind the county courthouse watching it on…
Zack McMillin writes: The Hank Stuever riff sent me to the bookshelf for Nick Hornby's "The PolySyllabic Spree." I love it so much I'm going to retype it for Gangrey readers everyw…
He left the swamp country of southeastern North Carolina in 1929 and headed to New York City. He was 21 years old. He got gigs at The World, then The Herald Tribune, then The World…
Zack McMillin passed this along: If present readership trends continue indefinitely, says University of North Carolina professor Philip Meyer, the last daily newspaper reader will…
I will soon be creating a Hank Stuever fan club. Read his critique of the Washington Post's critiques. Highlights: I think we've overlistened to people who never read the paper, an…
John Doherty nearly made me cry with his sad goodbye to a scruffy chunk of a scrippy-scrap city: It's always been a park by default. It's an empty lot next to the Newburgh Ministry…
Like this, by Jay Allison: A young boy molts. Tender skin falls off, or gets scraped off, and is replaced by a tougher, more permanent crust. The transition happens in moments, in…
I don't know how I haven't run across this yet, but here's your girl, doing her thing, for free. From Nice Doggy: The other day, my Welsh springer spaniel, Cooper, gave me a manicu…
The Plain Dealer's film critic Joanna Connors does Andy's Last Secret in seven parts.
Almost missed Brick’s Longing For A Cuss-Free Zone: And all that art, if you want to call it that, reflects life, if you want to call it that. In the schoolyards kids bomb the penc…
Read Barry: Irish shipwrights built St. Brigid’s in 1848 as spiritual shelter for those brothers and sisters who survived steerage on famine ships. Its twin steeples rose over Tomp…
Ben’s last post inspired me to go back and do some re-reading. Lawrence Weschler: “I’m obsessed with a narrow range of huge issues: Passion. Grace. Exile. Blockage. “In the case of…
This stuff from Richard Ben Cramer is so good I don’t even want to share it: How do you know when a story is right for you? I’ll mention an idea to my wife, and she’ll say, “Ah, th…
This is a story I wrote, yes, and it was done on deadline, and I’m not even sure I dig it, but I’ll throw it out there as a way to start a discussion I think is worth having here.…
Today’s Dan Barry: POLICE officers stopped a sightseeing bus in Times Square on Sunday morning, and not because they suddenly desired to see the South Street Seaport. Urgent word h…
Ben Yagoda tells Poynter’s Chip Scanlan why style is important: “Think of Michael Jordan and Jerry West each making a twenty-foot jump shot, of Charlie Parker and Ben Webster each…
I love retyping this piece by Bob Considine, via The International News Service, 1938. Listen to this, buddy, for it comes from a guy whose palms are still wet, whose throat is sti…
Got in the mail in a package from Amazon.com a big fat book called The Seven Basic Plots. In it a dorky British guy named Christopher Booker says that’s how many stories there are.…
And when reporters just starting out asked her for advice about journalism, she replied sagely: "Get on the front page a lot and use the word 'allegedly' a lot."
Up Highway 96, sometimes called the State Fair Freeway, past the cliche of wheat fields, the thicket of signs proclaiming a right to life, take a left on 23rd Avenue and you will f…
He keeps cranking out stuff like this: This time there were no all-night happy hours in front of the bodegas, no battery-powered boom boxes blasting news updates between "In Da Clu…
Ran across a good question: How do we use our senses to report without slipping into cliche? Lynn Franklin points out that taste and smell are aspects of reality best shown in prin…
Newspaper writing was better then than now, Jimmy Breslin tells Corey Kilgannon, because "the language has been hurt by the computer." "It was a product of nervous energy back then…
How does Hank Stuever pull it off in every graph without looking stupid? And don't miss his ending: Doohan was Scotty; Scotty was Doohan, and an archetypal employee/colleague/frien…
The New York Times has seen tomorrow, and it is Medicaid fraud and man dates! On July 6, Times managing editor Jill Abramson and associate managing editor Rick Berke convened a lun…
"I love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, s…
From a Wall Street Journal interview with John Irving on his latest book: "Novels are exaggerations of life -- we exaggerate the worst and the best of our experiences. . . . It [th…
"The novelist's eye for detail and attention to moral complexity is not just a bag of techniques. It is a way of seeing, a kind of theory of human behavior. When we inquire with wh…
Thanks to Keith Goldberg for noticing this serial narrative from Kurt Streeter.
"There's a sky-is-falling quality to the media's conversation about their own troubles." But is it really all that bad?
From Transom.org Ira is a radio hero because of the way he listens, and the way his listening summons stories you remember. He is a champion for the Many Voices that public radio's…
Ira Glass suggests we imitate others. "Painters do it," he says. "Why don't we?" Michael Kruse, sounding a lot like Mikey from The Goonies when he's standing in the waterfall and t…
Some writers are simply better at finding meaning. Their habits of mind find connections that other writers miss. They discover patterns in what others see as chaotic thickets of i…
Not even a half-hour before show time, Hernando County's Elvis Presley is upstairs, in Room 615 of the Sheraton, wearing a tight white suit circa 1972, changing his daughter's diap…
Saw these at The Neiman Narrative Digest, from a Laurie Hertzel speech early this year. She's the enterprise editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and she's good. Tip one: Write w…
The folks on WriterL are recalling tips passed on by Jon Franklin. A few are worth noting. From Adina Gewirtz: Jon called it the “black box” school of deduction. That’s to look at…
“We aren’t trying only to tell a good story. We’re trying to chronicle and illuminate the world, take readers into the lives of people they would never meet, write stories that are…
Check this out, from Ramsey Al-Rikabi of the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record.
From Brave Men: “I’ve written many times that war isn’t romantic to the people in it. But there in that plane, all of a sudden, things did seem romantic. A heavy darkness had come…
The Little Girl in Grave 1565 Life November, 1991 For 47 years after she died in a tragic circus fire, no one knew her name. This is the story of two people: one obsessed with find…
Thinking: We should use more proper nouns. Doesn't it sound better to say Longhorn Steakhouse rather than local eatery?
So I’m speaking in a participation in government class in a high school in Newburgh, N.Y., and a kid at the back of the class raises his hand. “Yep,” I point. “How do you know all…
Back in Howard Beach, the pot and the kettle are both black Dan Barry David Finkel Anne Hull Michael Kruse Dan Barry The Lost Youth of Leech Lake