“Trial by Fire,” from the September 7 issue of The New Yorker, recounts the story of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in Texas for setting fire to his house and killing his three children. Reporter David Grann uses disturbing details to reinforce the doubt expressed in the article’s subhead (“Did Texas execute an innocent man?”) , and the drama continues to unfold as more evidence comes to light suggesting a mistake was made.
The facts of Willingham’s story are compelling enough, but Grann’s structure maximizes their impact. He opens the piece with the fire itself, giving readers just the information that was available for investigators to examine.
Those fire investigators are the next characters we meet—the people we count on to interpret the facts and explain what happened. Grann gives us a list of their credentials; one is a former firefighter and recipient of multiple Purple Hearts with decades of on-the-job experience. We follow as Grann recreates their visit to the ruins of the house, which leads them to classify what they find as a clear case of arson. Read more
At last weekend’s American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors conference, keynote speaker Shawn Levy spoke about "getting the story" and the connections between writing books and journalism. The film critic at The Oregonian, Levy has written five books, including King of Comedy, about comedian Jerry Lewis, and his most recent biography—Paul Newman: A Life. In addition to his work at The Oregonian, he blogs about film and professional soccer, and tweets compusively, suffering from what he calls “monkey brain.”
Levy suggested reporters should “look high, look low, and look sideways” when researching, and he praised the investigative reporters who taught him how to dig for a story. He talked about the “high”—academic institutions and libraries that offer arcane documents and details. He connected the “low” with tabloid accounts and stories on a subject, and the concept of looking “sideways” with looking for what else was happening in the life and community of a subject at any given point in his life.
Read more from his talk. Read more
Today at the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors (AASFE) conference, St. Petersburg Times reporter Lane DeGregory talked about how her Pulitzer-winning feature “The Girl in the Window” came together. The multimedia project … Read more
The first Notable Narrative for September takes a police procedural as its template. The article begins with the loss of a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter in March 2009 off … Read more
Excerpts from a July 2009 interview with Tom Friend on his story “The Disposable Superstar”: How long did you take on the Chauncey Billups story? I spent a week in Denver and I interviewed Chauncey and his parents. I … Read more
From a March 2009 email interview with Thomas Curwen: Q: How did you first meet Edwin Shneidman, and what made him interesting to you? A: I met Edwin Shneidman in 1999 when I was working on a story about … Read more
