Update — April 19, 2012
Videos of the keynote presentations are available on BUniverse:
The NarrativeArc: storytelling journalism goes digital
March 23-25, 2012 | Boston University College of Communication
The NarrativeArc Conference celebrates and explores narrative journalism, a powerful, unfettered, public but individually voiced genre, as it expands into many digital media. Established practitioners—Pulitzer and RFK and Murrow and National Book Award winners, fine, humane docmentarists, masters of the craft— share their know-how as do many of the founders and best vanguard practitioners of narrative journalism in many digital media, even as these forms continue to evolve.
Welcome aboard the NarrativeArc.
What's this conference about?
New literary genres come along rarely. But in the final quarter of the last century, one has. It has many, audience-specific names: literary journalism, creative nonfiction, narrative journalism, new journalism. We've developed it in books, articles in newspapers and magazines, public radio pieces and documentaries--strong work by insightful, outspoken reporters, writers and visual artists, the best of it, stylish, revealing, absorbing, ethical and publically concerned. Now it is morphing into recombinant digital forms of sound, print and image, still and moving.
In this conference we recognize the civic, ethical, political and literary achievements of the finest storytelling journalism—and celebrate the digital work emerging in the same young genre. Great storytelling, whether chanted by a griot or produced for an iPad, is ultimately about making tasty, substantial soup, not about which bowl it's served in.
This conference is about our new genre, still in progress, about understanding its heritage, integrity, power, and the craft skills that make it work.
Lineage
This conference started at Boston University in 1998, where it was called Aboard the Narrative Train. In 2001 it moved to Harvard and was called the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. After a break of a few years it resumed at Boston University as The Power of Narrative. As it now is expanding and encompassing not just print, but narrative in many media, it has become, for this 2012 conference, NarrativeArc: Storytelling Journalism Goes Digital. The conference is once more directed by its founder, Mark Kramer.