The Long-form Journalist’s Task

Gretel Ehrlich is an award-winning author of essays, novels, and poetry. 

Neal Conan and Gretel Ehrlich were together from 2010 until 2021 when Neal passed away.

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The Long Form-Journalist's Task
An essay by Gretel Ehrlich, November 2025

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Neal had always wanted to be a writer. He wrote one book and was working on another before he died. But it was radio and the fast-paced, noisy newsroom that beguiled him. It quenched his thirst to see, to know, to delve into that unseen whole and bring it forward in vivid detail whether on the page or on the radio. His voice was resonant, sure-footed, and open-hearted. He talked to anyone, everyone: tenant farmers in the American southeast, heads of state, and those who had just landed on these shores.  He was born in Beirut—his father was a doctor who helped start the American hospital there and later, in Saudi Arabia---and when Neal was torn away from the Middle East, from its languages, smells, tastes, sights, and sounds, and relocated with his parents to New York, perhaps the move disrupted something. He said Arabic was in his mind but that he had lost it.  He said to me: “You are my only home.” We are all lost much of the time: that’s what drives us outward, pen in hand, camera clicking, or microphone on.  

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The chaotic newsroom became Neal’s preferred habitat. At age 17, he took a lowly job in a New York radio station, and eventually, became one of the founders of NPR’s “All Things Considered” along with Susan Stamberg and Bob Seigel. Enrolled at Columbia University, he said he forgot to go to college. Self-educated, he had an encyclopedic memory, and into that large brain he poured the histories of many countries, the geopolitics of each, their unique cultural signatures, and the complex puzzles of poverty, power, and politics, the continual breaking and betrayals, the violence and corruption. Not only did he cover headlines news and instant drama, but in his reportage and interviews, he penetrated the lives and events to see beneath and inside the propulsive elements that fueled them. 

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Because I’m a writer too, Neal and I often talked about the tools necessary for long-form journalism—the long interview, the long essay. 

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He listened ardently. He took dazzlingly detailed notes while working on some geo-political conundrum, as well as on our personal travels to Zimbabwe, Greenland, Palau, and Gates of the Arctic, Alaska. Every detail mattered. Nothing was lost on him.

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I think about the word, “journalist,” and the reality of the “journey” you make, how your jottings are transformed into a portrait of each encounter. 

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Our duty as writers is to enter the otherness around us: others’ lives, wars, sorrows, and joys. You sharpen your vision to find the story within the story and tell both. A journalist’s work is to quietly uncover the truths and lies, the delusions and insights, and to savvy points of view other than their own.  To open oneself and sponge in the experience of what is happening. 

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A journalist’s toolbox is the same as a novelist’s: it involves developing character which means knowing and caring for each person you write about. It means setting the scene, creating context, knowing the history of a place. It means becoming fluent in others’ dialect and lingo. And it necessitates having a sense of humor. If nothing else, a writer is often the comic relief among a group of strangers. 

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Journalists must unwrap each moment, each person, skirmish, disaster, weather event, or coup to see what’s inside, what makes the organism wriggle, then tell what they’ve seen and how and why it happened. 

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Long-form journalism is a space-time continuum in which a story can accrue flavor, voice, and shape. The box of words that opens must be used judiciously, modestly, and with the highest standards. 

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Gertrud Stein said, “Action is devotion.”  Or was it “Devotion is action?” Devotion means an intimate interaction has taken place. Intimacy takes time. Time means surrender and empathy. You give yourself over to what comes on the road, then pull back to observe. Being a witness is tricky, and requires bravery, selflessness, and discipline.

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We walk around in the world: and the world walks around in us. We can get lost, injured, afraid, and if we are able, we find ourselves again, still alive.  Our words are weapons and magic. They have the power to transform.

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Everything is always unfolding. The journalist’s path is a wayfinding journey: we note down how we got there, what we found on arrival, how it shaped us, how we escaped or returned, then disgorge the words to tell it. 

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Neal covered the foreign desk for NPR in London for four years. Sent to Kuwait, he was captured in Basra in the First Gulf War. When we met, he asked if I’d ever had “a dark night of the soul.” I had. Live or die? That’s always the question. He had a taste of what other correspondents have gone through for much longer, for weeks and months and years, and for the trauma that stays long after they’d reached safety.

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A lengthy interview or essay has the capacity to search for justice and truth within stories of destruction and horror, and the reasons those perpetrators are incapable of acting from love. Dignity, respect, devotion, surrender, empathy: a journalist sees how easily these can be erased.  But to untangle that mess—that’s our job; to find the through-line from flickering points in ancient history to drone warfare, from immigration nightmares to joyful homecomings, from climate chaos to the possibility of survival.  

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Neal was just one of the many of you who go out to see the world, to comprehend its complexities, to untangle its mysteries and report them on video, on the page, in a photograph, or on radio.  Always humble, his discipline was rigorous. He expected the same of those who worked with him. As the news platforms collapse, the prize being awarded tonight in his name is meant to function as a walking staff: to keep going out, keep opening our eyes to the world, keep telling us the important stories of what is happening, what it looks like, why the geo-political twists have made it what it is, and how to endure, escape, and despite all, to find our way. 

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After Neal’s show, Talk of the Nation, was unceremoniously cancelled, and his six million listeners with it, we bought a macadamia farm on the island of Hawaii. He was crushed---his life’s work had been taken from him--but he kept reaching out. He became a certified scuba diver, he rose early every morning and worked the farm with our two 80 year-old local men who kindly taught him all they knew. He was brought on by Hawaii Public Radio to do a daily news roundup called “the Pacific News Minute,” which was much-loved across the islands. And finally, he formulated a completely new project: to cover the geo-politics, culture, and climate problems of the entire Pacific Basin including China, the Philippines, Japan, Australia, NZ, and all the island nations. The first grant for the project arrived the week he was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer.    

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The great Polish journalist and novelist, Ryszard Kapuscinski who spent most of his years in Africa said: “We who went through wars know how difficult it is for those unfamiliar with that experience. Language fails us. We often feel helpless. The experience is, finally, uncommunicable.” And yet he did write about it all. 

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The Neal Conan prize is a reminder to continue against all odds, to work with vigor and humility, with nimble feet and mind, with a hunger for finding stories that express the truth of these very difficult times, of the unspeakable, and feed our need to know and understand.    

Going forward, how exactly correspondents will be able to get the news out will require reinvention and determination. We hope this prize will help. At no time in our lives has it been more urgent or important.    

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And so, for those of you who tell us how it was, and how it is right now, and who ask, “Who are we?  Why do we do what we do to each other, and, (nightmares notwithstanding) were you able to sleep last night?” I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
 

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For Neal:

I stack mountains and

Unwind rivers.

The trail of the one leads to the other.

That’s all we’ve got, 

this singularity, 

Everything that is nothing 

going around and around.

–Gretel Ehrlich 

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