One drawer of my desk – the largest – contains a mound of stories, the best I’ve found in newspapers and magazines over the last 20 years. In addition, three or four “great writing” folders float around the top of my work space; faux-wood fragments of the desktop are seldom visible.
Then there are a handful of individual stories [...]
Tag Archives: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Why’s this so good?” No. 27: Christopher Goffard tracks love in flight
January 10, 2012 – 11:52 am
“Why’s this so good?” No. 17: Meyer Berger delivers on deadline
October 25, 2011 – 11:32 am
The Pulitzer Prize for breaking news tends to go to a massive team effort, often one in which a dozen or more reporters feed material to one, two or even three writers, who pull together the main story. Papers like The New York Times and L.A. Times used to call this the “swarm” approach to [...]
Kathleen Gallagher and Mark Johnson on medical reporting, the future of genetics, and how to keep your story going in the event you get hit by a beer truck
January 7, 2011 – 11:50 am
We talked this week with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters Kathleen Gallagher and Mark Johnson about their recent project “One in a Billion,” our latest Notable Narrative. The three-day serial tells the story of Nicholas Volker, a 4-year-old boy whose baffling illness and life-threatening symptoms defied diagnosis month after month. The role of technology in trying [...]
“One in a Billion”: a narrative window into the future of medicine
January 5, 2011 – 12:49 pm
Our latest Notable Narrative, “One in a Billion: A boy’s life, a medical mystery,” tells the story of Nicholas Volker, a 4-year-old boy who has made more than 100 trips into the operating room to treat a disease doctors are unable to diagnose. In an effort to find the cause and stop what seems like [...]
Targeting the Good Cell
December 18, 2009 – 12:00 am
Here’s a narrative challenge: recount a quarter-century of lab experiments conducted by several investigative teams working separately from Kyoto to California. Now make the story urgent and give it a sense of Olympic-level competition that might change the face of medicine.
Mark Johnson delivers, with “Targeting the Good Cell,” a three-part narrative from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. [...]
In a Child’s Best Interest
March 15, 2007 – 4:37 pm
We see this story about a severely disabled boy and his fraught past as in part a demonstration that being truly “impartial” can require shedding that civic, “just-the-facts-ma’am” journalistic stance. Stephenson manages to be fair to all parties while approaching the story with a human, down-to-earth voice and stance. He also manages to impart the [...]
An American Hero’s Fall From Grace
September 17, 2006 – 12:00 am
We particularly liked the lead in this piece. It swept us in with its pace, strong voice, establishment of theme and strong detail. The story as a whole is an engaging portrait of a complex man.
We asked Johnson to give us some background. Here’s what he wrote us:
"I read a short [...]
