This is the wrong approach. You don't train someone to produce such works. These types of proses are more like a personal distillation of experiences. You can

This is the wrong approach. You don't train someone to produce such works. These types of proses are more like a personal distillation of experiences. You can take a handful of olympic athletes, pair them up with a great editor and writer team, and come up with a great story about what happened at the london olympics. That would be a cover worthy story. It's not about training writers who can churn out articles. It's about understanding that writing itself is an art, not something that can be trained, but something that needs to be invented. Put it in terms that people on hacker news would probably understand - Writing a major New Yorker cover story is like finding the topic, writing, and then defending a PhD thesis. You have to come up with an original thought, support it with research and original experimentation, distill it down, test your hypothesis, and see if your thesis is still solid. After rounds and rounds of editing, repositioning, rewriting, and PIVOTING, you come out with a kernel of an article - the amount of words written would be approx 10 - 20 times the amount of text that would actually be published. The rest would be research material and stuff "left on the editing table". You can't train that. Successful authors understand this - all of their advice to young writers would include something like - "only you know what kind of story you want to write" - "keep practicing" "keep writing every day". There is no handbook to learn, no school to go to. Journalism school gives you a template of what other people have done, but at the same time, I consider it a waste of time for writers. Just go out there experience the world, talk to as many people as you can, and write seriously every single day. You'll come out the other side with a comparable set of skills as someone who went to school for journalism. --- So what is the right approach? For me, it would be encouragement - start young - get education right. Bring up childhood and adult literacy, give people the ability to think and reason. Increase funding to schools and give teachers a better deal. You'll find more and more kids wanting to write, keep practicing it, and thus we get better writers when they grow up. For the immediate situation, the same thing applies - give people who want to write the chance to tell their story. Increase funding commitments to schools and higher education. Get people talking about writing as an actual practice instead of as an advertising technique (ie writing copy) or as a purely legalistic/procedural language (ie taxes, lawsuits, and manuals). People will become more interested in writing and the skills required in literacy. Who knows, the best story might be hiding there in the heart of that guy you pass by every day living on the streets.