The Reported Essay

Last year, rather than starting with exploring a topic, as journalists tend to do, Ruby Cramer set out on a reporting journey thinking instead about an emotion: anger. Ruby is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post, who finds feature ideas off the news. She began talking to her editors about exploring a “coarsening” she noticed happening within communities and between people.

I teach in a lovely little undergraduate degree program at the University of California, Irvine, where students spend their academic quarters reading, reporting, and writing features and narrative nonfiction. The Literary Journalism Program was launched over two decades ago by Barry Siegel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Los Angeles Times writer, who steadily built the curriculum into a unique and truly special major, unrivaled when it comes to other undergraduate degrees.

The beginning of freelance journalist Camille Bromley’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?” invites readers to consider this very question in a reported essay-style opening, as Bromley brings home Ellie, a “black-eyed, bat-eared German shepherd puppy,” which she and her partner hope can develop more self-confidence.

Last week, in a post on story structures, I mentioned “the reported essay.” Here is how I described the form: A first-person story grounded in reflection and reporting. These pieces weave facts, scenes, interviews and research with personal observations and narrative storytelling.

It has been nearly two decades since I wrote about Binna. But her story stays with me. I wonder if she’s doing okay. I question if I did everything right. It was 2006, on a weekend shift at the Los Angeles Times, when I first learned about a murder-suicide. Another reporter had written up details based on police reports: A father had shot his entire family in Koreatown before killing himself. Only his teenage daughter survived, a bullet to her head. In the news story, she had not been named.