At last month’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, in Boston, hundreds of reporters attended dozens of sessions on everything from analyzing unstructured data to working with the coolest web tools and building a digital newsroom. The conference, which started in the 1970s, … Read more
Our second Roundtable of September examines “The Good Short Life,” by Dudley Clendinen. Diagnosed with ALS, Clendinen reflects on the past suffering of those closest to him and decides that he would prefer to approach death on his … Read more
This tour de force pursues two basic lines of narrative: a more intimate story in an Illinois gas station, where its workers struggle and customers complain as gas prices climb. A larger narrative is international. Salopek managed to get access … Read more
This piece was a finalist for a 2006 Pulitzer Prize. U.S.District Judge Joan Lefkow became famous after a man whose case she oversaw murdered her husband and mother in the basement of their home. Schmich follows Lefkow as she struggles … Read more
This is a narrative measured out in minutes. It is precisely and, as the Pulitzer board wrote in their commendation, meticulously reconstructed. Keller traces the minutes leading up to the tornado’s destruction of parts of a town, and also the … Read more
Kiernan neither romanticizes nor demonizes her characters in this story. Her approach to the story is complex and intelligent. We like the lead, which imparts so much information in an innovative and intriguing way. We also like that this is … Read more
This is a powerful work of reporting, a devastating account of exploitation. The two-part series tells the story of a group of young Nepalese men who were recruited to work in the Middle East, sent to Iraq against the expectations … Read more
Ana Flores was walking with her three-year-old daughter in downtown Chicago when a piece of window glass got loose from a building, fell and killed Ana. Kiernan writes about the incident with clean and active sentences. We admired her reconstruction … Read more
How many leads can you think of that focus on smell? We admire the first seven paragraphs of this piece. They’re evocative, authoritative and efficient. Kiernan told an audience at the 2003 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism that she did … Read more