Ira Glass challenges young journalists to tear up old models and find new ways to fight the “massive machine churning out non-factual stories” and come up with “new ideas about how to reach people and what to reach them with.”
mikedang
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Great High School Imposter
Artur Samarin was a 19-year-old Ukrainian college student when he visited the U.S. via a summer exchange program and met an American couple willing to adopt him so he could stay indefinitely. There was a catch: Samarin would need to change his name to Asher Potts and enroll in school as a 14-year-old high school […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Killing at Donkey Creek
Jimmy Smith-Kramer, a former high school basketball star and a member of the Quinault Indian Nation in Taholah, Washington, was only 20 years old when James Walker mowed him down with his pickup truck. Was it a hate crime? Investigators aren’t sure.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Moon Is Beautiful Tonight: On East Asian Narratives
Using Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Key, Jianan Qian examines the differences between how stories are structured and celebrated in Western and East Asian cultures.
Posted inEditor's Pick
This Is What It Was Like Learning To Report Before Fake News Was The Biggest Problem In The World
BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith recalls what it was like working as a young reporter in Belarus in 2001. One of his first major stories resulted in his source being beaten and thrown in jail — or so he thought, until he discovered the truth more than 15 years later.
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A Betrayal
Henry, a high school student in Long Island, wanted to get away from MS-13, a Central American gang that trafficked in violence, so he became an informant, helping the police to identify and arrest gang members. Rather than protect Henry, authorities turned him over to ICE — endangering his life by detaining him with MS-13 […]
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How Joan Didion Became Joan Didion
Joan Didion didn’t shy away from criticizing everything and everyone from The Sound of Music and J.D. Salinger, and she did it with flair and a voice all her own.
Posted inArts & Culture, Discussions, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
The Writers’ Roundtable: Fiction vs. Nonfiction
A conversation between writers Eva Holland, Benjamin Percy, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Mary H.K. Choi, and Adam Sternbergh about writing on both sides of the fiction-nonfiction divide.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Bottom Line
Diaper companies have poured billions of dollars into research and development to make their products better, but not cheaper, which can be hard on low-income families living on a tight budget.
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Why I’m Suing Over My Dream Internship
Illgner was paid £30 a day for working nine-hour shifts as an intern at Monocle, a magazine based in London — well below the minimum wage. She’s suing for unpaid wages and asking her former employer to start paying its current and future interns the statutory national minimum wage.