Half a career, one story, four lives saved
Brian Patrick O’Donoghue spent half his career covering one news story, about four young Alaska …
The skill and ethics of a great investigative journalist
Recently I used a computer shortcut Rich Mauer taught me 35 years ago. A little later, I got news he …
How to detect exaggerations and lies
A journalist pulled out a notebook in a bar in a tiny town in Alaska and started to write down the …
Hopeful shoots grow amid the stumps of dead newspapers
Michael Armstrong dedicated 22 years to the small-town weekly Homer News before he retired. When it …
Throw away your list of questions
Here are some of the rules I’ve learned from doing thousands of interviews. Real people are more …
One Jersey Shore weatherman’s fight for integrity
The cheerful weather forecaster in front of a green screen—if you can’t trust that guy, who can you …
Can democracy survive the cacophony of the internet?
The chaos and fakery of social media are stress-testing democracy and its most important component, …
Why AI is faking fan mail, and everything else
A reader reached out with a perceptive appreciation of one of my books, the kind of message any …
How to manage the tricks of memory
Working with Senator Lisa Murkowski for years on her recent book, I came to know her two ways: …
Alaska’s new heroes for press freedom
The resignations last week of four small-town journalists in Alaska made me proud and sad. Proud …
More than half of adult Americans cannot read this
America’s Founders recognized a problem for representative democracy: average voters might not …
Hungry polar bears and a 50-year story
Polar bears came into George Divoky’s camp on a barren Arctic Island last summer and devoured a …
How to write clicky headlines (and how I learned)
Newsrooms had changed when I went back, in some ways for the worse. But for all I disliked about …
He taught me the most important writing lesson
I never had a better boss than Tom Gibboney, the publisher at a weekly in an Alaskan fishing village …
Now is the time for moral courage
My last piece attracted a lot of attention because it was about physical courage and worthy …
What I learned from a man who was eaten by a bear
What is a good man? That question always makes me think of a story I wrote as a newspaper reporter …
Here’s the path out of editing hell
Bad editing is torment. Office workers know what I am saying. After unclear initial direction, a …
Back in the trenches of local science reporting
Writing projects sometimes start at odd places. I met John Upton in a coffee shop near the Port …
How permission can lead to more authentic truth
Winning permission to enter whaling camp and the promise of honesty
Lying in a memoir is just plain lying
My rule is extreme and increasingly unpopular. I say everything in non-fiction should be true. You …
How tiny details spawned a TV doppelganger
It was a weird feeling to have my former boss and old friend portrayed on television in an eerily …
Paywalls are necessary, and they’re killing democracy
For all the attention paid to keeping traditional media alive, not much has been said about how to …
Everyone has a story. Lou Grant said so
During our second conversation, over coffee, it came out that what Dan wanted most at 36 was to grow …
If you must write, you can write
I was ready to go home at the end of my work day when I got a call about a possible mutiny at sea. …