Great storytelling, dogged reporting net award for Bloomberg Markets
David Evans, a senior writer for Bloomberg Markets magazine, noticed that drug companies were repeatedly paying large fines for illegally marketing some of their best-selling drugs “off-label,” or not for the uses for which they had been approved.
Using court records, earnings reports and interviews with former prosecutors, he found that Big Pharma was putting profits before penalties. For example, the $2.3 billion in fines and penalties that Pfizer paid for marketing Bextra and three other drugs off-label amounted to just 14 percent of its $16.8 billion in revenue from selling those medicines from 2001 to 2008.
“Big Pharma’s Crime Spree” recently won one of 13 Best of the Best in Business Awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. The judges commented that Evans did a good job of compiling the history of the drug companies’ fines and criminal activity and commended his “great storytelling, as well as dogged reporting.”
“It captivated me from top to bottom,” one judge said. Here’s the original magazine story, broken into parts one, two and three.
Today’s Tip: Historical reporting requires strong storytelling skills.
“Readers can be nearly paralyzed by compelling stories confidently told,” writes Jill Lepore on the Nieman Foundation’s Web site. “In the hands of a good narrator, readers can be lulled into alternating states of wonder and agreement.”
Writing a cohesive piece like this requires organization and a clear road map. In my classes, I encourage students to use maps for writing to help visually outline the points they want to make and to see the holes in their research. Maps require less effort than an outline. This site has examples of maps you can create to get started.
Jacqui Banaszynski, Missouri’s Knight Chair in Editing, introduced a similar organizational tool in the Webinar she did for the Reynolds Center recently on writing business news for the Web. It’s called the “stakeholder wheel.” In it, news is the hub of the wheel, and the spokes are the primary stakeholders in a story, with secondary stakeholders as the rim.
