[We recently met Benjamin Chesterton at the Frontline/ICP symposium, where he participated in a discussion on the future of visual narrative. He had some strong opinions about photojournalists and storytelling, and we thought our readers would be interested in hearing his ideas. Read more
This series was written and reported by Thomas Farragher and Patricia Wen. It recounts the experiences of a couple and their two sons. One son is straight, the other gay. Both marry during the same summer. Farragher and Wen follow … Read more
This story about the construction of Boston’s new Institute of Contemporary Art building is a good example of involving readers in an overarching narrative, covering a lot of ground in relatively short space. It’s the kind of topic a paper … Read more
This piece was part of a package that won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting. Cook uses narrative in this piece to show the “real people” who could be helped by advances in stem cell technology. It’s a sad … Read more
A model of clear explication of complex ideas, this piece shows how a sense of arc and suspense can be achieved in the form of amiable-narrator-in-pursuit-of-ideas. Swidey begins the piece with a scene in which identical twins show marked differences. Read more
According to this series, 29 percent of elderly people who break a hip die within a year. This is higher than the one-year rate of death following a stroke. The series is very effective in highlighting this surprising problem in … Read more
We asked Swidey to tell us about his work on this story. Here’s what he e-mailed us: “I knew what I didn’t want to write: the birth-to-current-day profile of Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful. That had been … Read more
This narrative succeeds because of the clarity with which it sequences events and because of its evocative detail. Its wrenching emotional content springs from such detail: the mother’s instructions for caring for her children, the pilot’s farm, the cell phone … Read more
This essay appeared in Best American Travel Writing 2004. In much of his writing, Haines is a cross-cultural guide, seeking to take his readers into foreign worlds, to help them experience another culture’s deep difference—and also its humanity. In this … Read more
Viser writes about a young man, Zack Weinstein, who has “started an unusual process: healing by blog.” Weinstein writes about his experiences on his blog following a spinal injury that paralyzed him from the chest down. Viser alternates excerpts from … Read more
