Articles

Dark Books See Light

The writing is snappy and the voice human in this slice-of-life piece about a couple and their fateful courtship. We liked the efficient movement from event to event, the sparing…

Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field

This story seems to have followed a recipe for compelling narrative: Take a heroic figure, add a group of “endangered children, let them struggle against great odds. Fold in current…

Heart Surgery’s Invisible Man

Writing an admiring piece about a likable character is sometimes challenging; the story can end up cloying, empty. In this piece Berg uses narrative and concrete evidence to build his…

The High Price of Keeping Dad Alive

There’s a lot of engaging subtext in this piece; it’s a deft character study. Meckler writes in plain language but tells a complicated story, of family dynamics and psychological struggles.…
The Crossing

The Crossing

Here’s what Carol Hanner, this series’ editor, wrote us as an introduction to the piece:“The Crossing is the longest series the Denver newspaper has ever done. Reporter Kevin Vaughan, photographer…

After the Fall

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…

Coping When All is Hopeless

We liked the focus in this piece on one patient, the very clear narrative and progression from scene to scene. We thought the use of the doctor’s internal soundtrack a…

Two Brothers Make a Family

Usually we want newspaper narratives with highly emotional content to connect with some larger public issue; otherwise they’re so often mawkish, sentimental. But there are also, of course, plenty of…

Drugnet

Shiffman and his editor, Avery Rome, made a very complicated story readable and highly engaging by sticking closely to narrative technique. Read “Drugnet,” by John Shiffman…

Quarantined

This is a great example of linking a deeply personal experience to a larger social issue, or in this case to social history. Latimer traces her mother’s fear of showing…