Navigation the Unknown: Reconstructing Detail

Fortellingens kraft 2025 (The Power of Storytelling 2025) gathers some of the best forces in the field of journalistic storytelling to give you inspiration, tools and sharpened skills.

RECONSTRUCTING DETAILS

Jessica DuLong shares strategies for gathering essential details to create engaging narratives, even when information is limited. Drawing upon examples from a diversity of texts, DuLong highlights techniques like reconstruction, re-envisioning, wide-ranging research, and “reporting around” to create vivid, true stories despite a scarcity of details. This talk covers maintaining factual accuracy despite gaps in the archives, a dearth of eyewitness accounts, or other research challenges. Exploration of these topics prompts questions like: How do we maintain factual integrity while reckoning with notions of “reality” that prioritize certain people’s experiences? How do we represent, in more balanced ways, the multiple frames through which events and issues can be seen? How do we open our reporter-minds to different ways of knowing without violating the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction—truth and imagination? Ultimately, the key to successfully using these narrative strategies lies in earning readers’ trust through transparency in the reporting process, which also, helpfully, enhances reader engagement.