Jennifer Crandall of the Washington Post has been assembling a sum of many parts, the highly-regarded onBeing series that runs weekly on washingtonpost.com. (It’s been on hiatus for a while and is supposed to relaunch sometime soon.)

The series, which features interesting people saying interesting things in a spare white environment that strips away context and puts full attention on the words, is reminiscent of Studs Terkel’s oral histories — sharing the notion that ordinary people have extraordinary points of view. Crandall conducts the interviews in a small studio, shooting with a single Sony HDV camera then editing with many jump cuts and focal lengths. But what matters is the people she finds, and she spoke at the recent Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference about the work that goes into finding the
right people to interview.

Between sessions, we also got a chance to ask her for some advice on creating and working on sustained and innovative projects such as onBeing.