Archive
Writing once featured on the original Gangrey blog.
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 Ra…
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 g…
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…
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…
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 for…
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…
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.)
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 — narr…
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: ……
Vanessa Gezari shows us the story behind Sami Al-Arian as it spilled out of court.
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…
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. T…
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…
From Vanessa, who has been thinking THIS is some of the "weirdest, prettiest writing I've seen in a while": Of all the scribbled sentences that have converged to create the Valerie…
chronicling the lives of three generations on Delery Street in New Orleans.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Wild week. The power of that hurricane made me feel insignificant, like when you roll out of your tent at 1 a.m. in Seminole Canyon and see the stars for the first time. That's a n…
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…
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…
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…
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 abilit…
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…
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…
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 neighborh…
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 sel…
Following a few backchannel discussions, I'd like to extend an open invite for all of you to let me post your stuff here on Gangrey.com for feedback from other pros. If we can't ge…
"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.
Check out John Doherty's tab-sized tribute to curiosity. Makes me miss the 'burgh.
Don't miss her stuff off Katrina: In Rural Texas, Blessings and Culture Shock and Hitchhiking From Squalor To Anywhere Else.
Makes perfect sense. What else is there to do while you're taking a dump?
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…
Please pardon the delay. Moved into a new house over here in Seminole Heights, and I've been unpacking boxes since I rolled in from the coast. I'll be running stuff shortly. Meanwh…
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…
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 t…
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 lik…
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…
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…
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 sprouti…
Passed on from Goldberg, from Richard Ben Cramer's writings about Ted Williams (second graph in a 1986 excerpt for Esquire): "It was forty-five years ago, when achievements with a…
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…
Don't miss Kevin Cullen's The Redemption of Shane Paul O'Doherty: "He was given his middle name because he was born on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, who was a zealous ki…
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…
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 Minist…
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 pap…
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…
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…
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…
The Plain Dealer's film critic Joanna Connors does Andy's Last Secret in seven parts.
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 man…
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 pe…
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,…
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.…
I'm 17 pages in, and I already need to post from Robert Boynton's The New New Journalism, in an interview with Ted Conover: Do you have any reporting routines you follow when you a…
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."
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
"I love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, s…
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…
"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…
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 [t…
Ever wonder where you can find vintage Jon Franklin?
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?
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…
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'…
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…
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…
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: Writ…
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 com…
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 fi…
By Michael Paterniti Esquire, Nov. 1, 1997 Go with him. Go out into the feed yards with Jack Hooker. His daddy was a cattleman, he was a cattleman, his son today is a cattleman. G…
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 al…