About the project

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Narrative Journalist, a reader-interactive magazine showcasing student work from the UW Journalism Program's COM 460 Narrative Journalism course.

Narrative journalism is a genre of feature writing that combines rigorous reporting with fiction-writing techniques and eschews dramatic, news-making events to focus on everyday life and ordinary people. The genre is not new -- some scholars trace its beginnings to Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year -- and it flourished spectacularly in the '60s when the so-called new journalists Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin and Hunter S. Thompson deployed literary techniques to counter the staid reporting of the establishment press.

The genre is re-emerging now as a way to go beyond the routines of daily journalism with depth reporting that explores the timeless in the timely, the extraordinary in the ordinary. Many colleges offer courses and even majors in narrative journalism, which is also called literary journalism, intimate journalism, creative nonfiction and the new, new journalism. Harvard's Nieman Foundation hosts an annual conference on the subject that draws some 900 journalists from across the country. Narrative articles are regularly published in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic Monthly and in alternative newspapers like the Village Voice.

This magazine features the work of student journalists who are making their first contributions to the genre. For their first assignment, "A day in . . . ," the students profiled places in greater Seattle that capture something of the character and culture of the area. For their second assignment, "Tagging along with . . . ," they profiled the people in greater Seattle who are behind breaking news stories, public issues or trends, or whose personal worlds are rarely featured in the mainstream news. For their third assignment, "Writing Seattle," they enterprised stories about underreported aspects of everyday life in greater Seattle. The articles include sections for readers' responses; we encourage you to write us and let us know what you think.

Visit the Communication 460 Web site...

Download an MS Word version of the Communication 460 Syllabus...