In writing a story, every journalist has to answer the following questions: what happened and/or what’s going to happen. Some articles are straightforward to write, however in my experience it has often been the opposite, where constant digging for more information and analysis is required. Now once all of that is completed, what do you do with it? This is where the role of structure comes into play as discussed in John McPhee’s New Yorker piece and Rob Rosenthal’s article. I found McPhee’s description of structure somewhat difficult to understand. The man is so experienced that I felt that I was reading a chapter of his memoir rather than a ‘hey everyone here are tips to help you lay out a story.’

 I felt the opposite way about Rosenthal’s use of napkin to represent the various ways you can structure a story. As I was reading it, his use of “the e” in which you begin with the present, leave the present, and then return back to it closer to the end made me recall the process in writing the profile last week. Especially when Deb told the class that many of us had our best quotes and analysis at the bottom of our stories and to move it up. Or when Raphi told me to share more on the background of the person who I profiled.

Similar to Miriam, I believe that reporting should come first, and the structure should be taken into account once the piece is initially composed. I think if these priorities are swapped then what happens is you focus more on aesthetics of the content, rather than the content itself, something Fred Abrahams warned against in the War and Truth conversation. 

Rosenthal comes from a more radio background whereas McPhee is more narrative nonfiction and print based. Given their different mediums of journalism, I would be curious to hear what structure of the 5 Rosenthal presents McPhee would think is the most helpful in writing for print. So much about telling a story is about the little things, not just getting the main and/or supporting characters, context, and then what to do next. Which quote is the strongest? Where should it go? These are the questions I have had to ask myself many times, and I felt validated reading about how McPhee has often had similar experiences.

Structure is critical because it represents how much time and dedication a journalist puts into taking “mess” and shaping it into something beautiful. However, arguably it has greater implications for the person, place, or thing being written about. It can either provide control, approval, comfortability, etc. Or it can take that away.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Berlin has become home to a fragmented but resilient community of exiled Russian journalists. Scattered across the city, they are trying to rebuild a profession in conditions that blur work and survival.

Among them is Anastasia Korotkova, who left after her outlet TV Rain was labeled a “foreign agent.” She now works in Berlin alongside other displaced media professionals, trying to maintain a connection to an audience back home that can barely access their work. Ekaterina Fomina, once an investigative correspondent for Important Stories, fled after releasing an interview in which a Russian soldier confessed to war crimes: she continues reporting from abroad despite an 8-year sentence awaiting for her in Russia, and the distance forces her to rely on a web of anonymous sources and encrypted messages. Danila Bedyaev, formerly a local radio host in Yaroslavl, now helps coordinate practical support for others through the MiCT Exile Media Hub, where displaced journalists share workspace, training, and grants.

The piece explores how exile reshapes not only their journalism but also their sense of self. Based in Berlin, they work to preserve networks inside Russia that remain irreplaceable sources of information, all while navigating Germany’s slow bureaucracy and the constant awareness that someone could be watching. Putin’s regime has reached deep into Europe before, and nowhere feels entirely safe.

Rather than portraying exile as a single political statement, the story approaches the unique case of journalists as a daily practice of endurance, mutual help, and stubborn professionalism. These reporters no longer define themselves by access to Russia, but by the act of continuing to publish despite it. In Berlin, they start their days with headlines from a country that no longer wants them, and end them hoping someone back home is still reading.

My article will be focused around how Germany’s AfD party is recruiting young white men. The article will start from the beginnings of the AfD party, their rise to power, political factors that influence demographic support, and finally the youth movement. A majority of the information for the context of this article has come from various interviews prior to the Berlin trip. Most importantly, I will include interviews from AfD politicians and those who have seen this rise affect their lives. The people I met in Berlin will become characters in my story, including the young AfD social media activist who I wrote my profile about. Additionally, I hope to talk more with a Freie student about her experiences with the AfD party and how it is affecting her younger brother who has been leaning more and more to the right. Since he has not yet agreed to an interview, I can’t say for sure this will be my main story line.

Because I haven’t finalized a main character for this story, I have been brainstorming more ideas to find the through line. One of my interviewees mentioned that she was an intern at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which focuses on extremism in social media. In addition to this organization, I will be including some evidence from videos posted by social media influencers to serve as direct evidence. Another method for contacting sources will be to directly message people who liked or commented on these types of post. 

I also would be interested in comparing the movement in Germany to the rightward shift more broadly across Europe and in the US. The main AfD politician who I will be including in the story has posted on his Instagram a selfie wearing a MAGA hat. Another aspect that I also want to include, but am not yet sure where it should go, is opinion that many hold that the democrats did not do a good job in their messaging in the past few decades, and are partially at fault for this movement.

This week’s focus on structure reminded me of Joshua Yaffa’s comments on the difference between top-down and bottom-up reporting. The pieces this week show us that we might think about the two styles of reporting as applicable to styles of structure in the resulting piece. Colloff’s piece on Skalnik follows a structure that makes it seem like it is a bottom-up story: through Skalnik’s exploits, we can get a glimpse of the broader problem of snitches in court trials. We spend virtually the entire story with Skalnik, the victims he prays upon, and the way that judges respond to his statements in court. I’m a little astounded at the sheer number of twists and turns in his life, and he seems like the perfect character for the story. Only in a couple of paragraphs and one or two sections do we read about how Skalnik is emblematic of a broader problem in the criminal legal system. In this sense, I would argue that it is a bottom-up story: the story stays close to him, and only occasionally zooms out. Whether or not the reporting process turned out to be bottom-up or top-down could go either way (to Colloff’s credit, I think, because it makes her storytelling feel more organic): the fact that Skalnik was mainly active in the 20th century, and the piece was written in 2019, suggests that Colloff may have been looking for a story to narrate the issue of snitching in courts, but on the other hand, the Dailey case’s recent developments may have prompted her to look into the longer backstory. In the end, I posit that the former seems more likely, as the moments where Colloff zooms out are backed up by relatively less extensive reporting.

By contrast, Schulz’s piece on The Really Big One is structured in a very top-down way: the piece is about an earthquake, and characters slot in every now and then between hand-based demonstrations of how subduction zones work or extremely vivid descriptions of the catastrophe that would ensue if an earthquake emerged from the Cascadia zone. They are merely one way of dramatizing the geologic story Schulz wants to tell. I suppose this makes sense: if your main “character” is an earthquake, it’s a little hard to ask it about its life.

The McPhee and Stewart pieces on structure seemed suited for the formats they were written for. McPhee jumps in and out of chronology, weaving in flashbacks and fast-forwards at every opportunity, though following a generally chronological pathway. By contrast, Stewart cautions against too many shifts in point of view or time period, presumably because the type of audio journalism he was writing for had less time to tell a story (in, say, a “This American Life” duration). A documentary like In the Dark shows you can get away with a lot more temporal flexibility with longform reporting, similar to McPhee’s work. I generally side with a more McPhee-style approach given my preference for longform reporting, but I see how Stewart’s piece may be useful when writing shorter-from content. Though when comparing the two styles of piece I much preferred Stewart’s, due to his mostly direct, informative approach. In this case, the information within McPhee’s showing and telling—his somewhat sprawling, narrative account—didn’t seem to warrant the length of the piece as a whole. Although perhaps that’s because I’m a Zoomer with no attention span.

The key theme that I took away from the readings this week is that there is no “one size fits all” for journalism. This was especially communicated in the Rosenthal article with different napkin drawings, and how varied the designs were. It also demonstrates the more abstract thought that goes into a piece, with dips and gradients representing how a reader could be feeling, not necessarily the specific words that they are receiving. 

I found the New Yorker piece by John McPhee especially impactful for my own reporting right now. It is hard to believe that an author, after having published many successful works, still feels so unsure about their own abilities when starting a new assignment. It almost gives me a little more confidence, knowing that even the best of the best can struggle with issues like writer’s block and an overall confusion with the amount of information that must go into a piece. I liked the quote that “you’re last one is not going to write your next one,” because it speaks to the shifting nature of journalism. Every story is unique to the characters, and just as your content is varied, so must be the structure. 

The feeling McPhee described, not knowing how to structure a story after having collected interviews and research, feels somewhat like my current position, though on a very different scale. Now that we have returned from Germany and I have enough content to fill more than enough pages, I am struggling to find the through-line for my piece. McPhee wrote the perfect metaphor for this moment, it is like returning from the grocery store, and setting all the materials out on the table. The biggest challenge and asset is the main character. As McPhee described, once he figured out who was going to tell the story, the rest came to him much more easily. Notecards of information fell into place, almost like a giant puzzle knowing which cards needed to be touching, close, or sequential, fitting them all together for the final structure of the article.

 The last piece by Stewart gave strong general tips for using chronological order in any article. Oftentimes when I am writing my own stories, it makes the most sense to lay every detail on a timeline just to get a better sense of the story before I begin writing. I liked how this article discussed elements that never really need to be in chronological order, like background info or small events outside the script. This is because a story that is scene driven has specific elements that are the most important and other details can be worked in where relevant. There was also a strong emphasis on how a writer is shifting to be inside different characters’ minds, and to be intentional in how this tool is being used.

How the AfD Plans to Win Berlin

“At the moment, almost every German is saying that Berlin is a shithole: There are too many crimes, there is too much trash on the street, drug addicts at the train stations, and so on,” Martin Kohler told me as he sipped a cappuccino in the basement café of Berlin’s state assembly building. Kohler, a tall, white man with round glasses and a cheerful demeanor that contrasts with his alarmist words, is an up-and-comer in Germany’s far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Currently the chair of a local AfD faction in Berlin, Kohler also used to head the state’s Young AfD group before it was labeled a right-wing extremist group by the German government and subsequently dissolved.

To Kohler, Berlin is the clearest example of what happens when the left is allowed to govern: it is a city dominated by the left wing, full of immigrants, and restrictive of the free market. But where far-right politicians in other countries may consider their capital cities a lost cause electorally and symbolically, Kohler takes a different view. “As a patriot,” he said. “If you give up the capital city, you can give up the whole project of getting in power and conquering your country back.”

The AfD has been gathering momentum across Germany. During the 2025 federal elections, it won second place nationwide, receiving 20.8% of the vote. The party is gaining in the east, with polls finding that if an election were held today in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, AfD would earn a record 40% of the vote. 

But the party has struggled to bring its success to the nation’s capital, where a center-right SPD/CDU coalition is in power, a large left-wing bloc wields influence, and people are skeptical of the AfD’s restrictive approach to migration. Because of these factors, the party is a marginal force in Berlin’s state politics. It only holds 10 percent of seats in the Berlin House of Representatives. The regional government has set up a “firewall” to block it from performing basic functions, from serving in committees to relegating its federal offices to the farthest office building from the Bundestag. It has been plagued by a history of infighting and incompetence that one former member characterized as “unambitious mediocrity and opportunistic indifference.” 

If AfD plans to earn the right to call itself a national movement, it needs to make ground in Berlin. For my final project, I intend to write about how they plan to adapt to Berlin’s local particularities as they prepare for the 2026 Berlin State elections. Will people like Kohler try to court voters on the left that are concerned with the AfD’s hardline policies and connections with extremist groups, or will they stick to a more sympathetic right-wing base? How will they adapt their anti-immigration agenda to a voter base in which nearly 40% of citizens have a migrant background? Answering these questions will shed light on AfD’s capacity to “detoxify” its image, as well as its chances of successfully carrying out its anti-migrant policies. 

To write this story, I hope to build on the interviews I conducted with AfD state politicians and party representatives, especially those who represent or come from districts with large communities of people with migrant backgrounds. I plan to talk with political scientists who are analyzing AfD’s strategies and ask them about their thoughts on the chances of AfD gaining ground in Berlin. I also seek to learn from social media influencers who have boosted AfD’s popularity among youth voters. Finally, I hope to contact representatives from other parties in Berlin to learn about how they are responding to AfD’s success (or lack thereof) in the district.

At a cafe in Frankfurt on October 12th, 2025, Nazira Khairzad, former goalkeeper for Afghanistan’s national women’s team, put her provisional ID on the table and flipped to the portrait page. A red line ran diagonal through her biometric data. Across the top, “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung)” was written in German, and under that, “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!” Since joining her sister in Germany in 2023, Nazira has been searching for a way to stay. Under “duldung” or “toleration,” a status unique to Germany, her deportation order is on hold–but only for as long as the German government deems it necessary. 

“It was not my choice to come to Germany,” Nazira had told me a week earlier, calling from her home in Neuberg, where she lives with her parents and two brothers. When the Taliban took over her country in August of 2021, she fled to Italy, risking persecution as a female athlete. When her sister, Nazima Khairzad, who made a name for herself summiting mountains and dominating ski challenges, was hospitalized with a brain tumor in Frankfurt, Nazira packed up her life again. Today, Nazira is the only one in her family without asylum in Germany. “They can send police and they can send me back to Italy,” she told me. “It happened for some people I know.” 

I plan to write a 2500-word feature story following Nazira’s relentless efforts to play sports professionally, learn German, and adjust to a new culture, despite her precarious legal status. Nazira’s path fits into a broader narrative about the German government’s recent attempts to block the arrival and integration of Afghans. After the German government set up a program to admit vulnerable Afghans in late 2022, Chancellor Merz has reversed his country’s course, putting Afghan men convicted of crimes on flights back to Afghanistan and announcing plans to deport many others. Meanwhile, Merz has offered Taliban officials consular positions, threatening to legitimize the very regime that forced Nazira to flee. 

This piece, which I am still reporting, will foreground Nazira’s search for stability in Germany against the broader context of the country’s mounting rejection of Afghans. I will speak to asylum lawyers in Germany, scholars familiar with the specifics of duldung, and people relevant to Nazira’s story, including her lawyer, sister, parents, and teammates on FC Mittelbuchen. 

I’ve been thinking about how the unique trait of longform stories is that they don’t simply tell you what happened, but make you understand why people acted the way they did, or how something big feels up close. It’s a much more introspective form than news that gives you the facts in motion. Longform slows them down, rewinds them, and asks what they reveal about people and systems once the noise dies down. It’s journalism that doesn’t rush to close the file, because the editorial function is so inherently different.

Pamela Colloff’s story is about corruption, but what really sticks is the slow pace of it, and how small compromises pile up until a man might die because of someone’s performance in court. The piece doesn’t rush to outrage, and instead it lets you sit in the absurd normality of the system. It’s almost boring at first, and that’s the point. By the time the story opens up, you realise the horror isn’t just the lie, but how routine the lie became.

Jennifer Senior’s essay on Bobby McIlvaine does something similar but with grief instead of injustice. There’s no clean shape to it. No beginning, middle, and end. It’s full of detours: family arguments, memories, other people’s versions of the same story. But that’s how grief actually works. You read it and think that’s what loss sounds like when everyone’s trying to make sense of the same silence in different ways.

Kathryn Schulz’s earthquake piece works on the opposite end. She’s talking about a disaster that hasn’t happened yet. Still, she writes it like it already has, tracing the science and history until the “when, not if” feels personal. Paradoxically, I did not find it particularly sensational. It’s just steady, calm, and terrifying because of it.

The Ukraine piece is all about how governments try to get ahead of a story, and how information becomes part of the battlefield. It’s fast, reactive, almost like a news feed, but still grounded in people making impossible choices in real time.

Reading all these together, what struck me most was how they’re all wrestling with control: who has it, who loses it, and how stories themselves are a form of it. Each writer builds structure out of something messy and uncertain.

John McPhee said structure in nonfiction “causes people to want to keep turning pages,” but it also feels like a way to hold chaos still just long enough to look at it. These pieces don’t pretend to solve anything. They just give the mess a shape so we can stand it for a little while, and maybe understand it better before it starts moving again.

In 2016, the German Consulate in New York City received 350 applications from Jewish individuals reclaiming their citizenship. In 2024, however, that same consulate received 1,500 applications, resulting in 700 naturalizations. Many attribute this increase of over 300% to the reelection of President Donald Trump and his increasingly authoritarian governance. 

Eva-Lynn Podietz, a retired social worker in New York City, told NPR in July, “I just thought, well, it really would be good to have this passport…Jews are almost always in exile. So maybe that’s just part of being Jewish.” Laura Moser, Jewish author and former politician who moved to Germany in 2020, told me something very similar when I met her in a Berlin cafe in October, “I do think there’s something very Jewish about having an exit plan.”

However, for many Jews returning to Germany two generations after their ancestors fled Nazi persecution, the reality reveals that the nation has not moved as far from its past as they once imagined.

When I asked Moser how she explains her repatriation to native Germans, she told me, “I don’t volunteer that I’m Jewish anymore…I did in the beginning, but they fetishize us… They’re like, oh, wow, it’s so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much…They feel exonerated.”

She also offers me another interesting piece of information: “Almost all the congregations here are led by Germans who converted…I find it really distasteful to sort of adopt this victim’s mentality when their grandparents were literally Nazis.” 

Deborah Feldman, who moved from New York City to Germany in 2014, recently released a book called Judenfetisch (Jew Fetish), exploring this phenomenon – and, more specifically, those she describes as “fake” Jews who convert and “lie about their ancestry and their upbringing in order to position themselves politically in ways that are personally profitable to them.”

In this story, I want to report on Jewish Americans who have reclaimed their German citizenship and either already relocated or are considering relocating to Germany. I want to use these first-hand accounts to depict the potential differences between their expected reception in Germany and the realities they face upon arrival. 

To report this story, I want to contact Deborah Feldman, whom I quoted above, Tanya Gold, a Jewish journalist who has worked on similar projects previously, and, through talking to these sources, hopefully get in contact with more Jewish-Americans in Germany. 

In conclusion, I hope this story illuminates how U.S. domestic politics and Germany’s conception of “memory culture” shape the experiences of Jewish Americans both in Germany and at home, while also touching upon questions of return from exile and the limitations of historical redemption.

This week’s readings on structure and long-form pieces of journalism were quite interesting to read in conjunction. In his book and New Yorker article, John McPhee outlines different ways to structure long-form articles and books alike, centering chronology and main characters that remain consistent throughout pieces. Transitions, too, he writes, are important to ensure that readers can keep track of the line of the article and remain engaged. However, I found McPhee’s description of structure types to be extremely formulaic. Unlike academic writing, which often follows a rigid essay or study structure, I typically do not think about structure in journalistic writing as something so prescriptive – likely due to the more creative, storytelling aspect of it. My process of writing articles normally starts with a draft that is written intuitively, which I then revise and restructure afterwards. Some of the long-form articles we read this week also shed this rigid structure. 

Kathryn Schulz’s “The Really Big One” in the New Yorker starts with a gripping lede – the first-hand account of the 2011 earthquake that struck Japan. However, it takes her a while to actually get to the topic at hand, not the great earthquake mythologized to occur in California along the San Andreas fault line that is referred to as “The Big One,” but rather a more disastrous potential earthquake stemming from the Cascadia subduction zone. She then goes through a series of historical examples of earthquakes as well as a way to physically imagine the intensity and mechanics of this potential earthquake. While she has one notable character included in the lede, that character is not really followed throughout the story. Despite not following a structure that may not be typical within long-form articles, I found Schulz’s story to be fascinating – especially considering the amount of technical information she needs to convey to readers. 

Jennifer Senior’s “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind,” conversely, centers one family grappling with the death of their young son, brother, and soon-to-be fiancé, Bobby, on September 11th, 2001. The tension driving the reader to keep reading the article in this case takes the form of a physical artifact: the final diary that Bobby wrote before his death, the possession of which sparked tension between his mother and girlfriend. The story is for the most part structured around these characters, who each describe their grief and how the twenty years since 9/11 have shaped them. However, structure itself plays a role in this story. Senior describes how a 22-year-old Bobby critiqued the fact that she concluded her first five pieces in the New Yorker with a quote from others. She writes, “I credit Bobby with teaching me a valuable lesson: If you’re going to cede the power of the last word to someone else, you’d better be damn sure that person deserves it.” Thus, of course, she leaves the last words of this piece to Bobby – a snippet from his final diary in which he reflects on his perception of his role in life. This piece exemplifies the way that structure can itself play a role in a story and not just act as an apparatus for storytelling.