“Rigorous thinking, innovative ideas, clear-eyed reporting, smart analysis, and truth-telling. Those are the tools Chip shared with me, and when I teach storytelling to this latest generation of young journalists, those are the habits and skills I try to pass on.”
STEPHEN BUCKLEY 
-Director of Professional Development Programs
The Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications
Nairobi, Kenya

Over the last 25 years, Chip Scanlan quietly revolutionized journalistic storytelling. Both as a writer and a teacher, he showed reporters how to thread narrative elements into their deadline work so that ordinary articles sparkled with details and action and drama. We take storytelling on deadline for granted these days, but the fact is that Chip was largely responsible for that shift. And millions of journalists—and their audiences—are grateful.
Chip has always been ahead of the crowd. He was one of the early advocates of the power of the personal essay. He was teaching writing for the web long before many editors began to grasp digital storytelling. He was using data for storytelling years before it became fashionable.
Chip has always been about rigorous thinking, innovative ideas, clear-eyed reporting, smart analysis, and truth-telling. Those are the tools Chip shared with me, and when I teach storytelling to this latest generation of young journalists, those are the habits and skills I try to pass on. That’s the impact of a master craftsman, and we can only hope his legacy endures.
Stephen Buckley
Director of Professional Development Programs
The Aga Khan University
Graduate School of Media and Communications
Nairobi, Kenya
Former Dean, The Poynter Institue
Former Managing Editor, Tampa Bay (Fl) Times
Former foreign correspondent, The Washington Post
@sbuckley310