Articles

Second-day disaster stories, or eighth-day disaster stories, often merely tote up possessions damaged and lives lost. Not so with “The Answers in the Wind,” in which Washington Post reporter Tamara…

Occasionally a story strikes our fancy because of the sheer surprise of the subject. And so we were smitten by “Grandmasters in Guayaberas,” Josh Schonwald’s piece in the Miami New…

There’s a subgenre in first-person works of journalism in which the “I” is the reporter on the trail of a story. This sort of story offers readers a look at…

The scene-writing is compelling in this tick-tock reconstruction of the experiences of the Virginia Tech class that lost the greatest number of people in the shooting. We found keeping track…

A woman working at a Chinese restaurant refuses a man’s pennies when he tries to pay his bill. The man is indignant; a circus act of politicians and community leaders…

Like “Thembi’s Diary”, this story takes us into its characters’ world without the use of a narrator. It’s an approach that can provide exceptional immediacy. In this piece, a soldier…

Finkel shows his knack, once again, for crafting newspaper stories with a writerly, particularly human point of view. He doesn’t just write technically compelling scenes; he lets his readers in…

This story reconstructs the experience of Johan Otter, who was attacked by a grizzly while hiking in Glacier National Park with his daughter. The first section tells the story of…

Thembi Ngubane is one of the most compelling characters we’ve encountered in a nonfiction narrative. She is an exceptionally likable narrator, both open in her feelings and poised in her…

We admired the cinematic quality of this piece. Raghavan moves his lens from image to image, providing vivid concrete detail, at times moving in close, at other times stepping back…