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The audacious claim by the government of Bangladesh that hackers spoofed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York into giving them tens of millions of Bangladesh’s dollars has us salivating at the prospect of reading the inside story. It also got Storyboard to looking back through the money stories we’ve featured over the years. Here are some of our favorites:
Globalization and its discontents are high on our list. Beth Macy wrote about how she put together the book “Factory Man,” part memoir, part expose of the displacement of the once-powerful U.S. manufacturing sector. A roundtable of editors dissected Michael Lewis’ “California and Bust,” which ran in Vanity Fair in November 2011, and admired among other things his ability to put powerful people into unusual and productive positions for journalism to take place. Scott Carney’s “Cutthroat Capitalism” put the economics of Somali piracy into a narrative told primarily in charts and other graphics.
We’ve also had an eye for grandiose projects. We examined the power of what the novelist Harry Crews wrote for Playboy about the town of Valdez, Alaska as it awaited a fateful oil pipeline in 1975, a story that sparked his journalistic hobby. And we looked at the world’s tallest slum in a piece written for reading on cell phones.
We’ve looked at the very rich, examining the power of Matt Taibbi’s unforgettable sentence anthropomorphizing Goldman Sachs into a vampire squid. And conversely, the very poor, as when we highlighted these two short videos on the economy of Haitian tent cities and the tap-tap bus economy. We included interviews with Adam Davidson and Travis Fox, the two journalists who spearheaded the Haiti stories.
In the early days of Storyboard, we featured two stories that used everyday consumer goods to examine the connections of the global economy. The French Fry Connection followed a load of potatoes to examine the global impact of the Asian financial crisis. Paul Salopek’s “A Tank of Gas, a World of Trouble” went backwards in time to retrace a shipment of gasoline.
All in all, a collection of stories a journalist can profit from.