All of the pieces have interesting structures with important lessons for us to think about as we work on our feature story. I paid particularly close attention to chronology and choices pertaining to the order of presenting information. For Engelhart’s dementia story, the piece started in October 2017, first describing when the mother stopped answering the phone and the daughters first showed up at their mother’s doorstep asking to be let in. Then, Engelhart moves to the past, sharing descriptions of what the daughters thought their mother was like, then moves back to 2017 to the dementia diagnosis, then moves to the present mostly in chronological order. This order of past – further back – past – present effectively provided context while maintaining reader interest in the story. Although my final story is more focused on the present moment and future anticipation, one potential thing to think about for my remaining interviews is how to ask questions about past events such as the last Trump presidency to set the context for how migrants feel about what lies ahead.

Saslow’s piece on education in the pandemic is an example of several good practices we discussed in class. The first is using a scene as the lede, and I liked that it opened at an airport with the superintendent trying to find the newly recruited teacher. The piece also had several other scenes including conversations from the classroom with students and Obreque’s attempt at maintaining order in the classroom as students asked to use the bathroom. The story also heavily relies on quotes and classroom scenes to deliver the message, which is a great way of following the rule of “show don’t tell”.

Drost’s piece on the Darien gap also starts with a scene of people arriving at the campsite. In terms of chronology, this piece seemed to start with the “present moment” of the scene, then goes back to the past to explain the historical and political context of the Darien gap, then goes back to the group that arrived at camp and explains their journey. A common theme across several of these stories is starting with a scene, moving back to an earlier point in time, then going forward to meet the point on the timeline that opened the story, then continuing from there. Many of them also ended with a scene, and the last sentence was a quote of the main character in the story.