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May 2008 - Posts

Friday, May 30, 2008 6:06 AM

Sights and Sounds

I love the way Andrew Lee Butters starts his "Welcome to Hizballahstan" in the May 26 issue of Time with a sharp mix of sight and sound accented with a strong quotation: Surrounded by a ring of mountains like a concert band shell, Beirut
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Thursday, May 29, 2008 6:16 AM

Bringing the Troops Home

Bryan Bender and Kevin Baron of the Boston Globe have done some outstanding reporting on military affairs. In December we highlighted "Army Knew of Cheating on Tests for Eight Years." Now they have produced an excellent Memorial Weekend series, "Finding
posted by BrianSummers | 0 Comments
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Wednesday, May 28, 2008 6:21 AM

Smugglers and Guards

As investigative reporting budgets shrink while multimedia storytelling expands, I wonder if we'll see more joint efforts like the one between PBS' Frontline World and The New York Times that ran yesterday. "Mexico: Crimes at the Border" by Lowell
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Tuesday, May 27, 2008 6:43 AM

Weaving a Story on the Web

"A Clearwater Girl Is Burned, Not Broken," by John Barry of the St. Petersburg Times, is a fine example of a Web package that combines pictures, text and audio to tell a moving story. When you open the story, your eyes are drawn to a photo of a scarred,
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Friday, May 23, 2008 5:51 AM

Food and Water

Two recent magazine stories have done an impressive job of exploring what's happening to our food and water supplies. In the May Vanity Fair, the incomparable investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele explain in "Monsanto's
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Thursday, May 22, 2008 6:59 AM

Vision Quest

In September 2006, Marquette University engineering professor Mark Polczynski challenged a team of five students as they began their senior project: Can you design a biodiesel reactor that's high tech, yet so ingeniously simple that you could imagine
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Wednesday, May 21, 2008 6:20 AM

Two Tales Become One

"In Rubble, Couple Clung to Each Other, and to Life," by Edward Wong in The New York Times, is one of the finest stories to emerge from the Chinese earthquake. In his lede, Wong quickly draws us into the predicament a husband and wife face as they lie
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008 6:34 AM

How Lucy Got Through College

Barbara Mahany of the Chicago Tribune does a fine job on human interest stories. Her latest, "Lucy's Mom Was There," is the inspiring story of Rosa Trevino and her 24-year-old daughter, Lucy, who is confined to a wheelchair and has limited use of her
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Monday, May 19, 2008 6:07 AM

Hidden Cameras

The use of hidden cameras for investigative reporting fell after ABC got smacked with a $2.47 billion lawsuit because it ran an undercover story in 1992 about the Food Lion grocery chain (an appeals court later reduced the award for damages to $2).
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Friday, May 16, 2008 8:18 AM

Dying of Neglect

Award-winning Washington Post reporters Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest just concluded a stunning series, "Careless Detention: Medical Care in Immigrant Prisons." Some 33,000 immigrants are crammed into these facilities, often for minor offenses, and many
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Thursday, May 15, 2008 8:25 AM

Trash Talk

The cologne-scented pages of the May GQ feature a wonderful story about, of all things, garbage. In "This is Paradise," Jeanne Marie Laskas describes with pungent detail the Puente Hills Landfill near Los Angeles and the philosophical men and massive
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Wednesday, May 14, 2008 8:31 AM

Medical Bills

When Tom McGrath's daughter Sarah had her appendix removed, the doctors and nurses did everything right. But when McGrath got the bill for her hospital stay, none of it made sense to him. "My Daughter's $29,000 Appendectomy" in Philadelphia Magazine
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Monday, May 12, 2008 9:53 PM

Filling In the Blanks

The National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University, collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. Peter Carlson of The Washington
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Sunday, May 11, 2008 10:55 PM

A Soldier Comes Home

The magnificent and moving "The Things That Carried Him" by Chris Jones in the May issue of Esquire narrates the nine-day journey that Sgt. Joe Montgomery's body took between his death in Iraq and his burial in an Indiana cemetery. Moving backward through
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Thursday, May 08, 2008 10:31 PM

Storm Damage

It's a reporter's nightmare: trying to cover a devastating natural disaster in a country controlled by a paranoid military junta. The news out of Burma this week has been spotty after a cyclone killed tens of thousands of people or perhaps more than 100,000 --
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Wednesday, May 07, 2008 11:22 PM

Paths of Evil

"A Trail of Deception," by Justin Fenton of The Baltimore Sun, is an nicely written 3-chapter series on the multistate criminal career of Cindy McKay. Near the beginning of chapter 1, Fenton introduces McKay: The mother of six, McKay was far closer to
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Tuesday, May 06, 2008 10:02 PM

Throwing Their Dreams Away

To protect pitchers' arms, major-league managers usually restrict the number of pitches they can throw in a single game. But, as Tom Wyrwich of the Seattle Times shows in "Former High School Pitcher Hopes Rules Are Changed to Protect Young Arms," high
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Monday, May 05, 2008 10:45 PM

Primary Politics

For depth of political coverage, it's hard to beat The Politico and politico.com. Since editors John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei launched the upstart Web site last year, it has quickly ramped up the quality and thoroughness of its coverage. For an
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Sunday, May 04, 2008 6:34 PM

Flames on Planes

Reporter Phil Williams of WTVF Channel 5 in Nashville used the Freedom of Information Act to do an investigative story of national significance. Williams obtain Federal Aviation Administration videos and reports indicating that two kinds of wiring commonly
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Friday, May 02, 2008 8:30 AM

Explosive Deals

The greatest threat of nuclear proliferation may not come from rogue terrorists but from white-collar businessmen trying to get rich, according to a joint investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting and American RadioWorks. Their "Business
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Thursday, May 01, 2008 8:00 AM

Hard to Swallow

Nationwide sales of bottled water have increased nearly 50 percent in the past five years. Behind the growth are some disturbing practices. First the water must be bottled. Here, in a special report called "Water's Edge," Ivan Penn of the St. Petersburg
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