Articles

Jon Franklin interviewed by Ole Soennichsen

What is your advice on structuring a story while reporting?You report for structure the same way you report for anything else. When you’re reporting for dramatic narrative, you’re reporting for…

One Good Thing On Top of Another

While covering a cookie-stacking contest, Pollak kept asking herself that ever-important question: What and where is the story? So instead of a cutesy, standard piece about a child winning a…

Life’s Ups and Downs

The scale stands at the entrance to the Publix in Hudson, Fla. It catches the attention of passersby; they weigh themselves and react. Through simple reporting—observing people weigh themselves and…

A Queen Arrives, and Even in Jaded New York, Jaws Drop

A harbor pilot steers a great ship through the Verrazano Narrows, the last task of his career. This piece is attentively and elegantly told. What we find most instructive is…

In Her Mother’s Shoes

This is the last line of the first installment of Bock’s series on AIDS in Africa: “For two days and two nights, while the men tend the fire outside, the…

The Boy Behind the Mask

Hallman spent hundreds of hours and more than 10 months reporting for this series, about a disfigured young boy in Oregon. He says he did very little reconstruction, that most…

Three Little Words

In 1989 Jane Morse’s husband, Mick, tells her he has AIDS and, as Clark writes, Jane suddenly suspects that her long marriage has been a lie. A reader may at…

The Weight of a Family’s Hopes

Hull uses detail to full effect but also embeds comments in her narrative that advance her larger point. Notice this phrase in the lead paragraph of this third installment: Amy’s…

The Terrorist Within

This series was written by Hal Bernton, Mike Carter, David Heath and James Neff. It builds plot skillfully, progressing through a classic beginning, middle and end. It also offers what…

Getting In

Gross’s series is an example of using profile to examine larger social contexts or processes, in this case the college-admissions game. The style is airy, the content more weighty, the…