I enjoyed reading the Pulitzer-winning articles for this week’s class. I want to focus on three in particular: An American Education, Fixing Broken Lovelies, and “When can we really rest?”. All three articles used the same structure of a lede comprising a scene. Saslow in particular in his articles, used the formula of an opening moment: the Superintendent at the airport or the psychiatric nurse arriving at the meeting to open his story. Both of these scenes strike me as liminal moments, the moment just before something happens. I think this is a productive type of scene to open with because it immediately creates a sense of expectation and wonder in the reader. In both of his articles, Saslow then has a mini nutgraf that explains a bit more detail, what the underlying problem or need is and then goes back to the scene. After this comes the full nutgraf that contextualizes the issue more holistically and sets up what the rest of the feature to come will deal with. I remember being struck when reading An American Education how far down the article it was that we actually found out the superintendent had hired teachers from the Philippines. I think this careful management of the flow of information was well done because I will still curious to keep reading—if you are going to slightly delay the main point of the article, I think you just have to make sure that what you’re writing is actually interesting enough to get your reader to that point. Nadja Drost’s article about the Darien Gap was interesting to me because it didn’t have a clear nutgraf? The whole first section of the article is describing the groups of Pakistani and Cameroonian migrants arriving at a camp in a clearing. After describing this scene for a while, Drost goes straight into telling the reader the history of the Darien Gap and its significance nowadays. I thought this worked well. It should already be clear to the reader what the article is about, namely, groups of migrants crossing the gap. Drost didn’t want to reveal whether the migrants made it at the start or ask a kitschy question like “will they make it?”.

After their openings, the three articles all seemed to follow a structure of zooming in and out in their presentation of the central characters. A character would experience something and then that would provide an opportunity to talk about a broader issue then the writer would zoom back into the character before moving on from the experience with the character resolving (or not resolving) the experience. However, most of the historical and political context came in the first half of the articles. In the second halves of the articles, all three articles also revealed more information that complicated the way the reader understood what they had read so far. In American Education, it was that the students were experiencing severe social problems; in the Seattle article, it was a recollection of the nurse’s attempted suicide; and in the Darien Gap piece, it was the revelation that the migrants had gotten lucky by not being attacked viciously by bandits. In each case, the revelation kept the article interesting.

I was also interested in the endings: Saslow is clearly a fan of ending with a quote that summarises the dilemma of the article: “Isn’t America supposed to be a model for the world?” and “How am I supposed to fix all of this?”. I did wonder if Drost should have reordered her last sentence so that she could have ended with, “Brother, see you in America!”

 

I have also dug out the questions for Christian from my post from the week he was meant to come:

How are governments responding to OSINT investigations? What counter measures have they employed?

I was also interested in the part of the documentary where Christian shows us how a car bombing in Iraq was staged. He goes on to explain that it took him several days of research to find out what actually happened—time, he explained, that traditional news outlets don’t have. So, what does this mean for journalism? To what extent are we going to rely on citizen journalists being able to prove their claims vs will people continue to trust big news organisations?

My other questions for Christian would be to ask how OSINT is evolving with technology, e.g AI. and I am also interested in how Bellingcat investigators remain transparent whilst also protecting sources / unique investigative practices?