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 social issues and moral context. In the Hollywood version of … Read more
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 case. Pablo Garza mopped floors at St. Joseph Hospital and … Read more
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. We admired her portrayal of the son Mark Foster’s filial … 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 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 good structural and thematic device. Overall it’s an affecting window … Read more
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 pieces so well written that they stand on their own. Read more
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 … Read more
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 affection to her institutionalization during the 1950s for tuberculosis. Latimer … Read more
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 on the 30 Katrina victims still unidentified and unburied. The … Read more
