Articles

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…

Katrina’s Nameless Dead

Bruce DeSilva wrote us this about the piece: “Rukmini Callimachi is an AP bureau writer with less than 5 years in the business. She set out to do a situationer…

The Four Noble Truths of Religion Writing

“Life means suffering.” According to the Buddha, that is the first of four “noble truths” that together define human existence. I’m not much of a Buddhist (I’m a lapsed Catholic…

Equal Treatment

This piece uses narrative elements in shedding light on an irony of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it gets worked out at one locus, one institution. The piece is narrative in…

Father, Son and Holy Rift

“One by one they fell away, the doctrinal pillars of the house his father built.” This is the story of Chuck Smith, Jr., and his movement away from the stern…