Milwaukee paper’s episodic series on Great Lakes is honored
Dan Egan
- In this Tom Lynn photo from jsonline.com with Dan Egan’s honored series, “Great Lakes, Great Peril,” a ship travels through the St. Lawrence Seaway in 2005.
Dan Egan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was a special merit recipient for the Grantham Prize, which honors reporting on the environment. Judges recognized Egan for beat coverage of the Great Lakes in an ongoing series called “Great Lakes, Great Peril,” which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer in explanatory reporting this year.
“The future of this vast ecosystem does not look particularly rosy. But its prospects are better than they were a few years ago, thanks partly to Egan’s sound reporting,” judges said.
The series looked at challenges facing the Great Lakes, offering readers explanatory pieces about the issues and exploring solutions.
Today’s Tip: Take the episodic approach to tackling a project.
Dan was honored for his body of work, not for a multi-part series that ran in December just in time for the Pulitzer deadline. The new model is to build on your beat coverage; once a month, craft a great piece of reporting on the same subject, Alec Klein told participants in recent Reynolds Center workshops on investigative business journalism. “Over the year, you’ll end up with 12 pieces that amount to a worthy in-depth investigation into a single topic,” said Alec, a former Washington Post reporter who teaches journalism at Northwestern University.
Another virtue to this approach, besides not keeping your byline out of the paper for months, is that tips will come in as you start to write stories on the topic. Three recent Pulitzer winners used the episodic approach, Alec noted in his presentation:
- The Las Vegas Sun’s 2009 Pulitzer for Public Service was on construction workers’ death rate on the Strip, by Alexandra Berzon.
- Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post won the Pulitzer for international reporting in 2008 for stories on private security contractors.
- Kevin Helliker and Thomas M. Burton of The Wall Street Journal won the 2004 Pulitzer in explanatory reporting for stories on aneurysms.
Dan points out that the right newsroom is essential, even to do episodic, in-depth stories. “Find a paper that lets you focus on the bigger, project-type stories, not just the little dailies,” Dan says.
As George Snell III notes in his blog, journalism is about getting beneath the news to report extensively on the “why?” Some news outlets focus more on highly competitive breaking news, which Snell refers to as a commodity. You have to redefine the news to not what just happened but to what happened that people might not know yet.
