A week of stretching our story muscles

API's Steve Buttry and some seminar members tell the story of the Compelling Storytelling Innovations.

Monday, Jan. 16: Time to re-examine storytelling

The time didn't drag because Dick was tiresome to listen to, but because he slowed it down for effect, concentrating our attention on the effort and drama of a tiny girl's first-ever basket in the last game of the season:

Playing her usual tight defense, Ali saw an opening as her opponent dribbled toward the free throw line. Reaching in, she cleanly swatted the ball away, then recovered it.

Looking up, she saw no one between her and the basket - just the sound of 18 thundering feet behind her. It scared her.

Thumpity-thumpity-thumpity-thumpity ... sprinting and dribbling, Ali closed in on the basket. No one held out much hope that anything would come of this. Not Cassie, who was watching from the stands. Not Coach Decker who, nonetheless, was shouting his support. Not even Ali, who couldn't help remembering that she had gotten her feet tangled up in similar situations.

But in those few moments Ali had increased her lead on the pursuing pack. It gave her just enough time to screech to a halt just a few feet from the basket, gather herself, and deploy The Granny. The squatted, lowered the ball nearly to the floor, then propelled it underhand toward the basket.

Ali heard neither a clunk nor a clang. Just a sweet swish.

"One sentence covers many years," observed a member of the seminar, Todd South, a staff writer at the Red and Black, student newspaper at the University of Georgia. Prohibition whizzed by in this artful line: "And bars close all their doors."

Time, Dick explained, can be a dynamic storytelling device. The writer can use it as a framework for a story as well as to pace the reader.

We're trying to help writers and editors take a different look at storytelling this week. We opened with a discussion led by API President Drew Davis, who told about Newspaper Next, API's project to transform the industry through innovation. For this week, we are concentrating our innovative effort on better storytelling.

Dick led the way by helping the group think differently about how they use their time as storytellers. He showed a PowerPoint presentation that he used to help his editor envision and embrace the possibilities for a story idea that the boss had initially rejected but that eventually won an award. "Did you do that on company time?" a seminar member asked, marveling at the effort that must have gone into the slide show.

Yes, Dick nodded, "Ten minutes at a time."

Victor Merina, senior fellow at the Annenberg Institute for Journalism and Justice at the University of Southern California, concluded our program on Martin Luther King Day with some advice on covering different cultures and covering the parts of our community that too often escape our notice.

Victor showed the group an online account of Hurricane Katrina's victims by Kevin Weston and Cliff Parker of New America Media that includes video clips of youths doing spontaneous rap reflections on the disaster.

He asked seminar members to finish these sentences on a piece of paper: "I hate talking about race because ..." and "I like talking about race, but ..." To keep the answers anonymous, we crumpled our papers up and tossed them at a waste basket in the middle of our circular table (3 of the 18 matched Ali's success). In turn, people opened up the crumpled wads and read the answers:

"... as much as we talk about it not being an issue in America it really is."

"... I'm nervous about saying something offensive."

"... I'm not sure I can translate issues so readers will understand."

Victor exhorted the group to move beyond the code words we often use to refer to race in news stories. "Technically the White House is in an inner-city neighborhood," he noted, shifting into a news-story voice: "George Bush, who lives in the inner-city ..." The group laughed, perhaps a bit uncomfortably, thinking of labels we've used that were really code words.

Later in the week, our group would visit the National Museum of the American Indian and hear some after-dinner stories by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Kiowa storyteller N. Scott Momaday. Victor, who has reported extensively on Native American tribes, noted that an outsider writing about any ethnic group that has had unpleasant experiences with the media faces one pressing question: "Are you with us? Or against us?"

He drove the point home by having us stand up and join him in the "With Us or Against Us" rap. He passed out some rhythm instruments he had brought home from Africa and asked the rest of us to clap this chorus:

Are you with us? (clapclap)---Or against us? (clapclap)

Are you with us? (clapclap)---Or against us? (clapclap)

Are you with us? (clapclap)---Or against us? (clapclap)

Are you with us? (clapclap)---Or against us? (clapclap)

Then Victor would rap the verse:

Hey, reporter superstar, think your act is going far?

Hot-spot, hot-shot, your journalistic sweet talk

Spouting trust, so we must, let you on our sovereign land?

Fat chance, do your dance, get back to your news stand.

We'd join in on the chorus, then Victor would rap another verse, and again and again, asking tough questions of people who think we're the ones who ask the tough questions:

You want the inside, in-depth, Indian stories on the rez,

Talking to the tribal folk, peering through the holy smoke - What a joke!

That's your goal? Bare our soul, promise us a better role?

Get real, no deal, you never say what we feel.

It was a thought-provoking start to a week that we hope will transform the storytelling for 17 journalists, and perhaps another 17 that they share the experience with, then another 17 ...

Tuesday, Jan. 17: Time to master new storytelling skills

I'll do an audio blog. Maybe I'll have some video of one of the clinic groups where our writers and editors brainstorm the digital storytelling possibilities of their stories. But I have about an hour or so now, so I'll claim the deadline excuse. That makes it OK, doesn't it? We can tell less than our best stories when we have a good excuse, can't we?

You want excuses? How about the rising waters knocked out power to your press? Or the inmates are rioting in the nearby jail? Or your phones are out? Cell phones, too? How about that you're rationing water in the newsroom? How about that your distribution routes are under water and the truck drivers are all evacuating their families anyway?

I guess my deadline excuse doesn't stack up against the conditions facing the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Nola.com last Aug. 30. Jon Donley, Nola.com's editor, told the Compelling Storytelling Innovations seminar how digital storytelling was the only solution for covering the biggest story in the lives of those journalists.

"You're sitting on the biggest story of your career, and you've lost almost every normal tool and process you could use to cover and distribute it," Jon explained.

Our New Orleans colleagues turned to the web to tell the story from their makeshift newsroom in Baton Rouge. Fortunately, they had lots of practice. With the exception of the missing-persons database, all the tools that Nola.com used to tell the story of Catastrophe Katrina were tools the web site was using regularly. The staff had developed a disaster plan following Hurricane George in 1998 and updated it after some 2004 close calls that hit Florida harder than Louisiana.

Some Times-Picayune journalists used digital storytelling tools regularly. The web site used blogs from the Sugar Bowl and Saints training camp and from the war in Iraq. Coverage of the fiery Kenner City Council used audio blogs. The newspaper staff blogged briefs to the web site in a "Midday Update," with RSS feeds automatically featuring the headlines on the home page.

Still, like in any newsroom, some journalists were slow to adopt the new storytelling tools. But, as Jon noted in his dry, understated tone, "There's nothing like having your world collapse around you to give you a push in the new media direction."

We heard an audio blog that Jon phoned in from the back of an evacuation truck. Then we watched a video blog of circulation trucks packed with journalists pushing through water up to their headlights.

At one point, Jon recounted, the truck driver got close to his own home and bailed out to evacuate his family. None of the journalists on board knew how to drive a big truck with air brakes. The human cargo in back took a beating as one colleague learned on the fly how to operate air brakes.

The catastrophe forced some different storytelling techniques onto the staff. Instead of periodic deadlines, they faced a rush to get news online as soon as they could verify it. "You couldn't wait when your competition was getting the story out and in some cases getting it wrong," Jon explained.

Updates would rush online in blog form, with polished complete stories following periodically. The staff and community found some psychological value in producing something that looked like a newspaper, so Nola.com posted pdf pages of a Times-Picayune that didn't use a single drop of ink or a single soggy roll of paper.

But the online edition went way beyond electronic newspaper pages. An editor who went to check on his own home found it had been swept away when the flood wall of the 17th Street canal gave way. He filed an audio blog by walkie-talkie.

Jon listed what he called the "new media toolkit" that is crucial in a disaster but also opens new storytelling possibilities every day: blogs, audio blogs, video blogs, RSS feeds, photo galleries, forums, citizen reporting, databases and mailing lists for news alerts.

The missing-persons database was the only tool Nola.com wasn't already using. They "created that on the fly," using software they were planning for an advertising database similar to craigslist. Soon people could use the web site to search for and connect with missing people and pets or to find emergency housing.

The scattering people of New Orleans became citizen storytellers, writing their personal disaster stories and contributing to extensive photo galleries that were favorites among site visitors.

I think it made each of the 17 editors and writers in the seminar think about how we would tell stories if we didn't have our familiar tools. It made the seminar's moderator quite uncomfortable with the familiar excuses.

Nora Paul, director of the Center for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, followed Jon. She showed the group how digital opportunities are transforming storytelling. Instead of explaining, she said, we can help readers experience stories. She illustrated with an MSNBC "Baggage Screening" story that gives the reader a screening simulation in which you look at X-ray images, trying to guess which is a security threat, with impatient passenger voices rising if you slow the luggage down.

Nora showed how you can invite opinions, instead of merely informing, taking us to a Seattle Times "Ax and Tax" package that invited readers to come up with their plans to balance the state budget (offering warnings of the possible consequences of some decisions).

She showed how sound and image can enhance stories, as in "Against Their Will," the Winston-Salem Journal's package about involuntary sterilizations of black women, or "Dying Tongues," the Fargo Forum's package on Native American languages in North Dakota.

Nora showed how instead of inviting people to learn by reading, we can invite them to learn by playing, as in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's "Hurricane Maker."

She showed how databases can let learners (Nora encouraged us to think of our consumers as learners, not readers or browsers) customize the information we gather for them, rather than just reading our reports. Adrian Holovaty's "Chicago Crime" package gives a reader countless ways to learn specific, detailed information about crime in any location or along any route in Chicago, based on official police reports.

Text is so 20th Century. I really need to learn better ways to tell stories.

Wednesday, Jan. 18: This account of the visit to the Freedom Forum was provided by Elizabeth Birge, assistant professor of journalism at William Paterson University:

Big deal.

As participants in Compelling Story Innovations and Design for Contemporary Newspapers seminars, the only thing we need to know is that the First Amendment applies to us, not anyone else. It's all about the press. Those four other freedoms mentioned? Someone else can worry about them. Right?

But John Seigenthaler, the legendary journalist and founder of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, urged the 34 members of the seminars to expand their understanding of one of the linchpins of this democracy. And he urged them not to make the same mistake he did.

"I took the First Amendment for granted and thought it applied only to me," he told the group. "It's after all an amendment that applies to everybody. It's a precious gift to be protected."

Seigenthaler and his colleague Ken Paulson, editor of USA Today and former director of the Freedom Forum, are engaging teachers with a gift for making their students laugh even as they talk about important matters. In two hours of mixing fun and games with serious business the pair covered a wide range of history and contemporary thought on the First Amendment.

"Be confident," teased Paulson, as members of the six teams competing against each other tentatively raised their hands in answer to a question. "Get your hands up there no matter how wrong you are!"

In a tag-team performance, the two posed questions about all the freedoms protected by the amendment (religion, speech, press, assembly and petition, thank you very much) and discussed much of its history, some of which is frequently glossed over in text books or left out all together.

The journalists watched in amazement as Paulson showed them three textbooks from a period of 40 years and marveled at how each one managed in its opening pages to either change or omit one of the five freedoms from the First Amendment or, in the case of the textbook published after Sept. 11, 2001, leave out the First Amendment all together.

And the ratification of the Constitution, the one that went so smoothly? It didn't go smoothly at all, Paulson said. Asked to sign off on a new central government, the 13 states said "thanks, but no thanks. We had a strong central government and it was called a king." They were afraid, and with good reason.

So a deal was cut, after the Massachusetts legislature added a bill of rights to its ratification vote, an idea that caught on with the citizens of New York as well as a few other places. Add a bill of rights to the Constitution, one that says people can worship the god of their choice, and that their state militia can carry guns to protect its citizens, and oh yeah, we demand a free press, one that can keep an eye on those in power - do all those things, and a few more, and we'll ratify the Constitution.

And so it was.

The First Amendment is the absolute core of who we are as a nation, said Seigenthaler.

And it's the absence of those freedoms that leads other governments to topple, said Paulson.

Wednesday, Jan. 18: Learning the timeless power storytelling

Traditional because N. Scott Momaday was telling stories that his Kiowa forebears have passed along for generations. Innovative because each time a storyteller tells an ancient tale, he explained "the storyteller will put a different part of himself into the story."

We are spending the week exploring Compelling Storytelling Innovations. After Monday's consideration of time as a storytelling element and Tuesday's dive into digital storytelling, this bear reminded us Wednesday of the timeless power of story.

We had spent Wednesday morning learning about Native American cultures as we wandered the galleries of the National Museum of the American Indian, working on a visual storytelling exercise that will continue Thursday with the Design for Contemporary Newspapers seminar. I made a point to linger in the Kiowa display, noting the photograph of Rainy Mountain School, where Momaday's grandmother had been a student.

Though this Kiowa sage was telling us stories that predate the Internet by generations, maybe centuries, he underscored some of the lessons we had learned the day before about online story possibilities. As I listened to this rich, engaging voice tell spellbinding tales, I wished I had a digital audio recorder, so I could share his voice with you rather than passing along his stories in plain text.

These stories endured without digital archives, "always just one generation removed from extinction."

His Kiowa name, he explained, was Tsoai-talee, Rock Tree Boy. He took his name from the stunning geologic formation that we know as Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Hundreds of years ago, the Kiowa moved from the mountains of western Montana near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River onto the plains, migrating eventually to Oklahoma, where young Scott Momaday grew up into a 6-foot-3 man, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, House Made of Dawn.

As the Kiowa migrated south, they were awed by the Wyoming rock that looks like a gigantic tree stump, reaching a thousand feet up from its roots. A storyteller whose name has been lost to the ages told this story: A boy and his seven sisters were playing in the woods. He began pretending he was a bear and started chasing the sisters, who ran and pretended to be scared. Eventually as they chased and played, the boy turned into a real bear and the sisters became terrified and fled in earnest. As they passed a tree stump, it told the sisters, "If you will climb upon me, I will save you." They climbed on the stump and it began rising up into the sky. The bear scored the bark all around with its claws, but was unable to reach the girls. "The seven sisters were borne into the sky and they became the stars of the Big Dipper."

As a boy in Oklahoma, young Scott traveled to Devil's Tower with his parents. When he returned, an old arrowmaker named Pohd-lohk visited the family. "He took me up in his hands and began to talk and all the other voices fell away." The old man told him some stories of the Kiowa, concluding, "And now you are Tsoai-talee."

Now it was our turn to hear wisdom from a Kiowa elder: "You will never be able to look at the Big Dipper the same way. I have changed it for you."

And whatever became of the bear? Tsoai-talee smiled: "Sometimes I turn into a bear, just as the boy did."

Thursday, Jan. 19: Creativity multiplied by collaboration

Deborah Withey, deputy managing editor/presentation at the Pilot, passed along the man's wisdom (alas, without dropping his name, and I forgot to ask) in a discussion of the newspaper's use of a spadia, a narrow wrap the newspaper used to promote special events during the tourist season. They wanted to do the spadia in color and keep color on their section fronts as well. That was a challenge for the press configuration but the manager answered:

"Let me see if we can do it in a way we've never done it before."

That's what we are doing this week, trying to spur members of our seminar to tell stories in a way they've never done it before. Wednesday and Thursday we did this by bringing our seminar together with the Design for Contemporary Newspapers seminar for a visual storytelling exercise. Collaborative teams from each seminar worked on telling stories of our experience the day before, visiting the National Museum of the American Indian and listening to Kiowa storyteller N. Scott Momaday. Our only rules: Be creative and collaborate.

First we received instruction and inspiration in collaboration from Withey and Maria Carrillo, managing editor of the Pilot. They showed and told about various collaborative efforts among visual journalists, writers and editors. Some didn't work so well, but that was OK. They encourage and allow risk.

"There are 365 days and we can blow it," Maria explained. "We can blow it in a big way."

They also can nail it, as they did with "The Fever," a gripping series about the 1855 yellow fever epidemic that swept their community.

Deb's enthusiasm for creativity and collaboration was evident in her gestures. "When we get it right, it looks like this," she said, swinging her arm vigorously and sending a bracelet flying, to laughter from people who understood.

After a morning listening to Deb and Maria, our teams went to work, putting the final touches on storytelling projects they'd begun the day before. By afternoon, it was time for show and tell.

Each project had excellent examples of creativity and collaboration. One team planned a new niche publication targeted to young Native adults in the readership area. To show us about plans for the "Artifacts" feature, Mike Smith of USA Today passed around arrowheads and other artifacts found in his home region of South Carolina, remnants of the Yamasee tribe.

Another group told the museum's story in a slide show, "Shaped by Wind and Water." In perhaps the most moving passage, one quote from the museum said, "My daughter's got a moccasin on one foot and a tennis shoe on another." The next slide showed a Converse sneaker covered in tiny, shiny red beads, with an intricately beaded Native American girl on the ankle. The words underneath were the theme of the slide show: "We are still here."

One group developed a culture section for a daily paper, telling of the oral story traditions of Native people, their creation myths and their vanishing languages. One project, "Ancient Cultures, Modern Lives," focused on the transition of young Native people, moving from youth to adulthood and facing the challenge of preserving their culture while moving ahead in a rapidly changing world. Another project presented a magazine and web site for middle-school teachers, providing help in teaching about Native cultures. That package included the story below by Josh Nichols of the Grand Junction (Colo.) Free Press.

Several presentations included spectacular photographs from the museum, including the photos presented here (click on the image for a larger version) by Vanessa McVay of the Wenatchee (Wash.) World.

We presented awards for two projects. One group from the Toronto Star, the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., and the Daily Journal in Kankakee, Ill., developed a special section called Passages. The theme of this edition was "Circle of Voices," pulling together elements from the museum and from Momaday's storytelling session.


Designer Spencer Wynn of the Star describes himself as "a champion and friend of many Inuit peoples and culture. Once one meets and lives among them, it changes one's life." In the cover photo (at left; click on the image for a larger version) of the Kiowa storyteller, Spencer explained, "Of special note is the shadow, to me, reflective of the passing of stories from present to future and brought from the past."

Inside, a story by Robyn Monaghan of the Journal explained the theme of the section: "In American Indian culture, the circle is the story. And the story is the circle." See the rest of the story below.

The circle theme carried on through a web site designed for children, with information on Native food, music, animals and a "myself" section for children to personalize the experience.

We declared the best project to be "A Taste of Time," which focused on the Mitsitam Native Foods Café. This was a thoroughly collaborative effort by Eddie Wooten and Mel Umbarger of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., Eyder Peralta and Jason Middleton of the Houston Chronicle and David Fredette of the Daily Star in Oneonta, N.Y.

Rather than wandering the galleries of the museum, this team spent its visit Wednesday in the café and delighted peers Thursday with a multimedia story about the Native foods served. The special newspaper section and web site included recipes and an interview in Spanish between Eyder and a cook making tamales. The project also included a slide show from the museum.

The group talked to children who ate the Native foods rather than taking the familiar chicken fingers and fries. One boy explained that "buffalo burgers are better because they have more cheese." A fifth-grader said she chose tamales because "my mother is really about organic things."

Mel, with some help from Eddie, wrote about the cafe for the News & Record, including some photos by Mel that will make you hungry.

By Robyn Monaghan

In American Indian culture, the circle is the story.

And the story is the circle.

Above the rotunda of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C., a dozen shrinking circles rise to a ring of sunlit sky.

Upstairs in the gallery of the Universe, specks of stars and globes of moon twinkle on an arc of cobalt night sky.

In the Lakota tradition, all things, common life and spiritual, exist inside the circle, the Hockoa. In the sun dance, they gather in a circle and pray to the four directions, starting with the west. Each direction stands for a life cycle, a season, an animal, a nation, a human value.

Weaving the yarns of heritage through the generations is the job of the elder. The storyteller's mission is to pass the word -- all things dwell inside the circle. Black, yellow, red and white represent the four directions. Blue is sky; green, Grandmother Earth.

It is the circle too, that frames the cycle of tale told upon tale, that primordial pass-the-secret play of words passing from grandfather tongues to son to baby girl and boy. In Tinglit lore, The Raven spits orbs of moon and sun into the heavens to spawn day and night. Concentric rings of the Mayan calendar shape the story of rolling days and years.

Yet, ask a twenty-something working here in the nation¹s newly-opened Museum of the American Indian about his tribe's storytelling tradition. A blank look comes across his face.

Losing track of the oral tradition may be as fierce a foe to Native Americans today as the Anglos were in centuries past. The flow of words that at one time was waterfall may now be dwindling to a trickle.

It worries Kiowa storyteller Scott Momaday, also a poet, novelist, playwright and English professor. Momaday has spent a lifetime keeping the American Indian spoken word from fading to a whisper. In a slow cadence and a deep, melodic tone, Momaday not only breathes voice into his heritage. He tells the story of the story.

"The Native American story is one generation away from extinction," he says.

The spoken word is more powerful than print, Momaday says. But it's also far more fragile. "The fact that it's frozen on the page gives us a false sense of security," he said. "The spoken word demands you must take a long serious look, you listen responsibly and remember what you hear."

Moses Joyce, a middle-aged Seminole father, tells his people's story, the saga of a tribe that faced the white man's wrath when they refused to leave their reservation in Central Florida.

"Telling our story is how we keep in touch with where our people come from and how we can see where we're going as we look toward the future," Joyce said, "as well as a reminder of the traditions of the past." Once tapered down to a tribe of just 200, the Seminoles today have bounced back to about 2,400.

"What makes us Seminoles is our customs and tradition," he said, "I think if our younger folks don't know our language and traditions, that's a big threat to our existence." The oral tradition is a continuum over time, master storyteller Momaday says about his craft.

"We don't know where it first began, but we know it goes on," he said.

The circle is the story.

And the story is the circle.

By Josh Nichols

N. Scott Momaday would take a live theater performance over a good book any day.

"I have a deep love for the spoken word, and I think it has a greater power than writing," said the Sante Fe-based college professor. "Oral tradition and spoken word has a much greater vitality than the written word."

Funny, considering Momaday, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, is one heck of a writer.

But listen to him at the front of the room full of strangers -- almost whispering a passage from a story he's been telling nearly his entire life, then exploding with his deep bellowing voice to drive home a point at a climatic moment -- and you begin to understand what Momaday's talking about.

Words on a piece of paper can't begin to compete with his live performance.

Momaday knows it, his dad knew it, his grandfather knew it and his great-grandfather knew it.

When Momaday sits in front of a group of folks and tells a story, he's carrying on a tradition passed to him by generations of Kiowa Indians -- a tradition of explaining the world around them through storytelling.

The Kiowas aren't the only American Indians with such traditions.

"Native spiritual values live in stories," writes Emil Her Many Horses of the National Museum of the American Indian. "Passed verbally from generation to generation, the stories preserve native culture, languages and ways of explaining the Universe."

That's how Momaday sees it, too.

But he didn't always see it that way.

It took age accompanied by maturity for him to appreciate the stories ingrained in his memory. "At a certain time in my life, I realized how important these stories were," he said. "You realize they're one generation from extinction and then you take them seriously."

It seems every generation thus far has done just that.

"It's a continuum that is ancient," he said. "We don't know where it first began -- but it goes on."

Friday, Jan. 20: A call for victim-centered journalism

One participant wept openly while telling about her interview with the mother of a high school student who had been sexually tortured and strangled.

Another was too choked up to talk about an enduring image from a tough story.

Another told in an emotional voice how difficult it was to interview a woman who had survived having her throat slashed by her boyfriend, covering her 4-year-old daughter with so much blood the photographer initially thought the child had been stabbed. The reporter described the rasping sound as the woman spoke through a tracheotomy, explaining that the boyfriend "put the sword in their daughter's hand and said, 'OK, you finish her off.'"

Bruce Shapiro, field director of the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, closed our week-long seminar by calling on the journalists to be "storytelling innovators on a subject that matters deeply in the lives of your readers."

By understanding trauma - what it does to us and to the people we write about - we can write better stories, Bruce said. He called for a more "victim-centered journalism."

"It is easier to write about the perps," he said, encouraging us to ask whether we are considering victims in our news choices, whether we are respecting their words and experiences.

The hard-hearted, exploitive journalism of stereotype doesn't get the best stories from traumatic events anyway, he said. As examples of powerful, sensitive storytelling, he cited the obituaries that the Daily Oklahoman published following the 1995 bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City or the New York Times's "Portraits of Grief" following the 9/11 attack or the more recent obituaries in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and other Gulf Coast papers that wrote about victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Traumatic stories, Bruce said are difficult to tell "in ways that live up to the dignity of the material." As a veteran journalist and a victim in a sensational 1994 stabbing attack, he understands both sides of the traumatic news story.

Since that attack, he has studied trauma and how journalists cover it. He explained what happens physically and in the brain as a response to trauma.

To tell these stories effectively and compassionately, we need to build trust by sharing power in the interview. "People who have been traumatized have been disempowered in a radical way," he explained. "The only thing they have to control maybe is the story."

So a reporter who wants to tell that story needs to ask sometimes for "multiple levels of permission." Ask if the person minds asking a few questions. Ask permission again as you move into the most troubling part of the story. Tell the person you will go over the quotes you plan to use. Sometimes the victim will trust you more and tell you more if you share more control of the interview.

Don't ask about feelings, Bruce advised. Ask what happened. Ask what the person saw and heard. Avoid neat endings. Trying to tie the story up with a bow may be tidy, but it's not accurate, he said. "Be honest about conflict and confusion that follows in the wake of violence."

The thought-provoking session brought an end to our week-long exploration of innovative ways to engage readers in storytelling. If you couldn't join us for this seminar, I hope you can join us in Pomona, Calif., for the next edition of Compelling Storytelling Innovations.