Editor’s Corner
September 7, 2007
A note from the new editor
By
Constance Hale
Hello from Cambridge in the waning days of summer, when the sun catches flecks of gold in the maple leaves, when students slowly drift onto campus, when geese punctuate hot nights with their plaintive calls.
The setting keeps startling me, as I have just arrived from my longtime home near San Francisco. Except for my college years in New Jersey, I have spent most of my life in Hawaii (where I was born and reared) and on the West Coast (where I have worked as a journalist for 25 years).
I have come to Cambridge to oversee the narrative program at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, as well as this Web site.
Building on the fine work of my predecessors, Mark Kramer and Nell Lake, I’ll continue to make this site a home for the best narrative work being done by journalists in various contexts and in many media. The focus will remain on great storytelling, but you may begin to see—in addition to pieces from newspapers and magazines—more tales published online and onscreen, more stories told through podcasts and broadcasts.
These new narrative twists will reflect my longtime interest in the craft of writing, which began when, as a school girl, I listened to the Pidgin English of my Hawaiian playmates. It deepened while I studied English Literature at Princeton University. And it took a subversive turn while I was an editor at Wired magazine, working with other editors to find “the New New Journalism.” Some of my ideas about narrative tradition and linguistic innovation are expressed in my two books, Wired Style and Sin and Syntax. You’ll see these ideas and others reflected both on this site and in the upcoming Nieman Narrative Conference.
Please continue to visit the Narrative Digest for inspiration, and please keep sending your favorite stories. I’m eager to get to know you through your work—and through your comments. This site isn’t intended just as a resource or a one-way publication, but as a place for journalists to come together to query, critique, and congratulate.