Editor’s Corner
November 30, 2007
Marching toward March
By
Constance Hale
In my first note in this space, I mentioned the early signs of fall that greeted my arrival in Cambridge. Now, exactly two months later, the maple leaves are gone, their abandoned branches silhouetted against milky gray skies. Winter presses in.
But the plunging temperatures have hardly sent us into hibernation.
The Digest team has been combing through submissions, selecting a Tamara Jones story from the Washington Post as our monthly example of a notable narrative. Jones’s lyrical sentences, suggestive images, and evocative characters make “The Answers in the Wind” an inspired day-after-disaster story.
Also inspiring are the multimedia narratives readers have begun to send. While we wait for structural changes that will enable us to feature new narrative forms on our site, we wanted to call attention to “Tackling Life,” a package that appeared recently in the Sacramento Bee. In it, a reporter and photographer track down members of a 1992 Pee Wee football team whose experiences belie the term childhood. This nonlinear story animates dire statistics on young African American males and shows how newspapers are beginning to combine images, sound, video, and words in the service of narrative journalism.
Multimedia will be a large part of the next Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, which will be held from March 14 to March 16 at the Boston Sheraton. Please visit our Web site for updates. The theme is “storytelling in many media, many voices,” and the journalists giving keynote addresses include Emmy- and Peabody-award winner John Hockenberry, Washington Post reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest, MIT professor Sherry Turkle, and documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard.
But for now, we join the coated masses trudging through the Massachusetts chill, cheered by the thoughts of future submissions, which we look forward to sharing with you.