

Aronson was just 22, a young reporter attracted to journalism through economics and politics, watching democracy unfold in Taipei. She couldn't get at the big political stories, though. There was a senior reporter for that. So she found another way. Aronson started spending time with a group of young Taiwanese. They'd vote for the first time, their parents never had that chance. Through them, she told the story of mainland China and Taiwan.


After that, "I just wanted to do narrative storytelling with journalism inside."


'It was in the air'


When he read that a young man was arrested for burglary, he wondered, how did that person feel? He wanted to know about him, "and his brothers and his mother and his school teachers and what happened and those were never in the story."

While the narrative journalism movement started with Tom Wolfe in the '70s, Kramer said, by the '90s it was taking hold as an appropriate voice for institutions that once used "group voice."

"It was in the air, people were telling stories to explain what had previously happened in institutional voices," Kramer said.


"Journalists rushed to the conference," Kramer said, "while other people ambled."




"Hence for a half dozen or so years, the conference was packed and the typical conference-goer was a daily reporter whose way was paid by his or her newspaper," said Adam Hochschild, a journalist and co-founder of Mother Jones now teaching journalism at UC Berkley Graduate School of Journalism, in an e-mail to Poynter. "Mark’s conference was definitely the premier one on this subject, but other conferences and training programs on narrative also thrived..."

"Then, of course, newspaper owners realized that nothing was going to stem the decline of print readership, big layoffs began, and they largely stopped paying reporters expenses to attend conferences like this one," Hochschild wrote. (He's also a keynote speaker this year.)

Kramer's last narrative conference was in 2006, and he left Harvard in 2007. The conference returned to BU, and he got involved again in 2011. Now, it's rebuilding and refocusing, from long-form and print to multiplatform storytelling for print, digital and more.


But at the heart of narrative and the conference "is a concept that informing the public involves telling true stories," he said. "And stories don't only involve a sequence of events, but they involve a storyteller."

'Shakespeare would be great on Twitter'



The conference itself focuses on narrative across platforms. That's necessary now for anyone working as a journalist, Hochschild said, and there are exciting ways to apply storytelling principals to many forms.

"Good stories are good stories," he said, "and we can all learn important lessons in technique from them no matter in what medium they are told."

Aronson's seeing that shift herself at "Frontline," where through partnerships and collaborations they've started exploring different ways to tell stories. Sometimes it's a long documentary. Sometimes short. Journalists now have to be flexible, she said, able to tell strong stories and open to how best those stories work.

"When you're paying attention to what the story is, it will tell you what the right form is," she said.

Roy Peter Clark, Poynter's vice president, a faculty member and a speaker at this year's conference, agrees. Narrative endures, he wrote in an email to Poynter, but how it's delivered has changed.

"Shakespeare remains our greatest writer, but drama delivered in verse is no longer current," he said. "Mark Kramer and his colleagues have done great work in keeping the narrative conference up to date, attuned to all the tumultuous changes we have seen in technology, multi-media, social networks and all the rest. If he were with us now, Shakespeare would be great on Twitter."