This piece explores a judge’s difficult position in a difficult case. Siegel traces parallel themes in the lives of the judge and defendant: responsibility, redemption, compassion. The piece won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. A man leaves his … Read more
A Buddhist monk from Thailand is visiting New York. Someone steals his bag. There’s no punch line, but it’s a nice narrative complication; and out of it Barry crafts a touching, even beautiful, tale about the intersection of different worlds … Read more
This is a story about an enormous collection of pictures. A man started the collection and marketed it as a service to graphic artists and others who needed visual inspiration. When the man died, one of his clients bought the … Read more
We found the level of action detail in this gruesome series remarkable: Bowden traces what happened when—who got shot where, shrieked, said what, shot whom, with what—with striking clarity. We imagine that spelling out each thread in the bloody narrative … Read more
This piece uses narrative to turn what could have been a distanced roster of wrongs into a more compelling, close story about individuals’ suffering. Vivid narrative makes good investigative work all the more compelling, the wrongs more outrageous, because the … Read more
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 character, meaning and structure at the same time. What … Read more
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 competition, we get a more quirky and enduring one, in … Read more
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 talking with them about their reactions—DeGregory achieves a surprising richness … Read more
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 how Barron chose to approach the story. He looked for … Read more
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 women inside will clap and leap and cry, their … Read more
