new yorker

3 GREAT STORIES: Starring sports, maps, and bratwurst

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

When I first started this blog, I felt nervous about this particular segment.

Would I be able to find “3 Great Stories” every week? Stories that would offer me a new perspective on a familiar subject? Stories that would hit me emotionally as well as informationally? Stories that I would want to share even if I did not write a weekly column about them?

(In the first installment of this segment, you may recall, I only found two great stories.)

As this blog rolls into its seventh month, I am no longer nervous.

In fact, writing this segment is now one of my favorite parts of the week.

I have developed a process and rhythm for finding and absorbing great content. I subscribe to various RSS feeds and bookmark stories that pique my interest. I try to read and watch whatever I can during the week, but knowing how busy I often feel, I typically wind up waiting until the weekend to look at the bulk of the stories.

I love that part.

I love sitting down at my computer, clicking on story after story — print, video, audio, and otherwise — and taking them all in.

Between our busy schedules, our dwindling attention spans, and our penchant for the quick and brief over the measured and deep, we often now have to work to find great storytelling. But amidst the flood of information bombarding our minds, I am constantly flooded by powerful stories.

And I appreciate that such storytelling is still out there, in abundance, waiting to be seen.

Man and Superman (9/6/13, The New Yorker): For all the attention Malcolm Gladwell gets for his books, I still tend to prefer him in small doses.

At least, doses smaller than books.

In this case, Gladwell submits another powerful thinker about the blurred lines of athletic doping. He examines our castigation of Alex Rodriguez and Lance Armstrong amidst our reverence for Kenyan runners, who Gladwell finds are genetically predisposed to succeeding at the sport, and Tommy John, who thrived in Major League baseball largely thanks to bionics. At what point does science end and cheating begin?

I, for one, believe cheating begins once somebody breaks a rule. But Gladwell takes on the rules themselves. In doing so, he offers a beautiful example of how to cover a current news story with in-depth, well researched perspective.

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3 GREAT STORIES: Starring Mike Bloomberg, SNL, and Finland

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

Some weeks, I have a hard time finding three great stories to profile in this segment.

Not this week.

Perhaps I just found myself reading a lot more, but I continually found absorbing work on the print side. Beyond that, I also found occasions where traditional media enhanced their content for an online audience.

In a week stacked with memorable content, here were the three pieces that stood out to me:

After Bloomberg (8/20/13, The New Yorker): He is routinely mocked for being bland and boring, but New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg is sneakily candid. He regularly weighs in on national topics and critiques the President, among other leaders, and yet he does not get the notoriety for outspokenness that a Chris Christie might receive.

In his final year of office, one would expect, his candidness will lead to numerous in-depth retrospectives — hopefully as memorable as this one.

Ken Auletta of the New Yorker produces this 8,000-word gem about Bloomberg, and it is special because it blends the mayor’s own words with the appropriate context and commentary. Auletta writes with an obvious point of view, but he generally uses it to color Bloomberg’s words, not overpower them. This paragraph is a perfect example:

I asked Bloomberg if he could imagine joining the President’s Cabinet. In theory, he said, “it would be fascinating to be Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, jobs like that. Secretary of the Treasury, you want someone who’s a real economist”—and someone “who is maybe less opinionated.” Bloomberg thinks of himself as a team player, as long as it’s his team.

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PODCAST EPISODE #7: Erin Brethauer, Asheville Citizen-Times photographer & New Yorker Instagrammer

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The New Yorker is typically known — at least in terms of its visuals — for displaying only the highest-brow material.

(After all, this 17-year-old episode of Seinfeld can’t be wrong …)

But the publication is now making waves because of how it utilizes a much more for-the-masses technology.

Check out the New Yorker‘s Instagram account. The magazine has more than 82,000 followers there, and every week its editors hand the reins to a different photographer — one not affiliated with the publication — to spotlight an important cause.

This is where we find the latest guest on the Telling The Story podcast.

I am joined this week by Erin Brethauer. By day, she is the multimedia editor and a staff photographer for the Asheville Citizen-Times. By night, by weekend, and by numerous other times, she puts her photographic hands in numerous other projects.

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PODCAST PREVIEW: Erin Brethauer: “Instagram really refreshed the way I was shooting”

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True story: Erin Brethauer squeezed in our podcast between a vacation on the beach and an interview with the BBC.

I was surprised when she told me this, but I should not have been.

In the eight months I have known Brethauer, she has always impressed me with her willingness and enthusiasm to take on any challenge. The multimedia editor and staff photographer for the Asheville Citizen-Times, she hit the road with our Gannett Turbovideo squad despite having less than a week’s notice. Through her young career, she has excelled at photography with a variety of cameras, from the traditional to the phone-based.

And her latest achievement?

For one week this month, Brethauer ran the Instagram account for the New Yorker, the prestigious magazine with more than 82,000 Instagram followers.

This week, Brethauer joins me for Episode #7 of the Telling The Story podcast. We discuss the future of photography, her work with the New Yorker, and which cameras are best for which situations.

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3 GREAT STORIES: Starring frivolity, whimsy, and nostalgia

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Every week, I will shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

I’m back.

After two weeks of vacation and four fill–in–the–gap blog posts, I return with fresh Telling The Story content, starting with three great stories from this past week.

And in the spirit of vacation, I have chosen stories on the opposite side of serious.

Perhaps I am speaking too broadly. After all, the stories in question deal with millions of dollars, ancient traditions, and behind-the-scenes heartache. But mostly, these are not front-page matters. They are in-depth looks at lighter fare.

How Bobby Bonilla landed the luckiest baseball contract ever (7/1/13, Celebrity Net Worth): This is one of those stories that actually ran a full month ago — but that I saw last week for the first time.

Bobby Bonilla is a former Major League Baseball star who these days, despite having long ago ended his career, receives a million-dollar check every July from the New York Mets. Sports aficionados know all about the famous contract, but few people know about how it came to be.

Enter Brian Warner of Celebrity Net Worth.

Warner details the behind-the-scenes details of Bonilla’s deal, including the unlikely role of notorious Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. This is not the best-written article you will ever see, but it is informative and thorough. Sometimes, for matters like this, “informative” and “thorough” are what make the difference.

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3 GREAT STORIES: Best of 2013 (so far), written edition

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Every week, I will shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

I am on vacation — and out of commission — for the next two weeks, so I figured I would use those weeks to post “Best Of” editions of my 3 Great Stories segment.

I will post my three favorite audio/video stories of the year so far next week. This week, without further ado, my three favorite written pieces from January through June (although, it seems, they were all written in April), along with what I wrote about them back then, with minor edits for clarity:

Yearning for the Golden Age in Crisis Coverage … That Never Existed (4/25/13, Sabato’s Crystal Ball): Larry Sabato is the director for the center of politics at the University of Virginia.

The man can also craft a good Tweet.

He got my attention in April when he Tweeted this one-liner: “Think coverage of Boston bombing was bad? JFK assassination coverage was worse.”

That line provides the premise, and Sabato’s article delivers.

The doctor, most known for predicting election results, goes into detail about the CBS broadcast after President Kennedy’s assassination; he documents the misinformation CBS and Walter Cronkite reported as well as the general behind-the-scenes madness. It’s an educational read for those who long for the good ol’ days of news coverage.

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3 GREAT STORIES: The printed, foreign affairs edition

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Every week, I will shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

After submitting three local TV news features for your approval last week, I wondered, “What would be the complete opposite of such stories in the media realm?”

My decision: print stories about international affairs.

(Granted, I did not spend too much time on this question. And that means one of you readers may correct me on whether these are indeed the “complete opposite”, a la George’s salmon-tuna situation on Seinfeld.)

As George would say, “Good for the tuna.”

In the meantime, check out the masterful storytelling — and, in one case, story-obtaining — in these three pieces from last week.

Bin Laden raid reveals ‘state failure’ (7/9/13, Al-Jazeera.com): Here is that example of story-obtaining, and it is a biggie.

The investigative unit at Al-Jazeera received a copy of a report, commissioned by the Pakistani government, to determine how Osama bin Laden could live in Pakistan for nearly nine years undetected.

Like any modern-day journalistic outfit, they take the correct first step and make the entire report available for viewing online. But beyond that, this piece by writer Asad Hashim — one of nearly a dozen that accompanied the release of the report — details the report’s blunt words about the government’s incompetence throughout bin Laden’s time in the country. The commission even coined a phrase for it: “Governance Implosion Syndrome.”

The commission’s report is scathing; give credit to Hashim and the Al-Jazeera crew for distilling it into manageable, yet quite shocking, terms.

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3 GREAT STORIES OF THE WEEK: Covering the Moore, Oklahoma tornado

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Every week, I will shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

This seems to be way too familiar an occurrence.

Tornadoes take hold mainly during the springtime, and this year they have struck numerous states across the South and Southeast. The latest one, an EF5 tornado that leveled buildings and homes across Moore, Okla., left at least 24 dead and hundreds injured.

The hardest part in dealing with these tragedies, I think, is trying to make sense of them. The same applies to covering them as journalists.

This week, I picked out three examples from the coverage of the Moore tornado in which the journalists and storytellers did not try to impose their own beliefs or wills on the situation. They simply conveyed it and let the horror — and the emotions that followed, both positive and negative — speak for itself.

A tornado hits Moore, Oklahoma (5/20/13, The New Yorker): A month ago, I praised Amy Davidson of the New Yorker for her coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings. In that case, I appreciated her ability to take a stand about a difficult issue.

In this case, I appreciate her abilities to simply capture the details and atmosphere of a scene.

Davidson wrote this story as the specific information about the tornado was still developing; the twister’s death count and EF rating had yet to be officially determined. She doesn’t run for her lack of answers; she embraces them. Davidson aggregates the most piercing details from the first day of the tornado and presents them in a clear and sympathetic way, acknowledging both the potential big-picture ramifications and the immediate, visceral reactions.

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3 GREAT STORIES OF THE WEEK: Covering the tragedy in Boston

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Every week, I will shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

By the end of last week, several people I know who had been following the week’s tragic events in Boston told me the same thing:

“I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

That sentiment came to these people — and many others, it would seem, judging by Twitter and the blogs — after a week of being burned by speculation and incorrect reporting by the news media. From my vantage point, this week seemed like a tipping point for major story coverage; more often than not, by week’s end people would only believe what authorities and officials told them. FBI press conferences became the first official reports to be accepted and widely spread, as opposed to leaks of those press conferences.

For the most part, those who discuss journalism marked the week’s reporting as a low point for journalism. I will offer, in this space, three examples of strong reporting during the chaotic week:

The Saudi marathon man (4/17/13, The New Yorker): Amy Davidson chronicles the story of a Saudi Arabian who was incorrectly targeted as a person of interest in the bombing of the Boston Marathon. In doing so, she offers a poignant look at how one life was affected by the targeting of police and the massive coverage of media. Davidson leaves us with more questions than answers, such as this one at the article’s end:

And yet, when there was so much to fear that we were so brave about, there was panic about a wounded man barely out of his teens who needed help. We get so close to all that Obama described. What’s missing? Is it humility?

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3 GREAT STORIES OF THE WEEK: Starring memorials, the NCAA, & Marv Albert

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Every week, I will shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

This was a tough week to choose three great stories.

I read, watched, and listened to a lot of wonderful pieces this week. Perhaps I now spend more time seeking out terrific work because I write this entry every week, but more and more I find myself impressed and encouraged by the journalism — and simple storytelling — I see on a regular basis.

Here are this week’s 3 Great Stories, but I may soon need to increase the number:

Former sailor writes out Afghan casualties’ names from memory (3/27/13, Military Times): Everything about this story is beautiful: the camerawork, the audio, the opening music, the subject matter, and the person being profiled. The thing I like most? Photojournalist Colin Kelly lets this story breathe; he lets you soak in every minute of his subject’s quest. I don’t want to reveal too much about this story … just that if you watch it, you will be touched.

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