St. Petersburg Times: St. Petersburg Times enterprise reporter Ben Montgomery in the room where his reporting team mapped out their Dart Award-winning series, "For Their Own Good."
Investigative journalism is usually about the many: interviews, documents, datasets that have to be assembled and comprehended. Narrative journalism is usually about the one: if not one character or one story, then one moment at a time, propelling the reader forward. Investigative narrative combines the two, and doing that — combining the one and the many — often requires a map. A big map.
That was what the Dart Center discovered when we interviewed two reporting teams that produced Dart Award-winning works of narrative, investigative journalism. Ben Montgomery and Kelley Benham were part of the St. Petersburg Times team that revealed a century of abuse at Florida's oldest reform school. Sheri Fink and Susan White were part of a ProPublica / New York Times team that narrated the decision-making that left 18 patients dead after injections of painkillers and sedatives in a hospital flooded by Hurricane Katrina. As different as their stories were, they reveal an approach to structure that is strikingly similar.
Read the Dart Award-winning series "For Their Own Good."
Read the Dart Award-winning series "The Deadly Choices at Memorial."
Read more about the Dart Awards.
Stan Alcorn
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Stan Alcorn directs multimedia content and special projects for the Dart Center's website. He has written, edited and shot video for venues including the Orange County Register, The Nation Magazine and Marketplace as well as independently for Danger Documentaries.
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