How do you make peace with stories you wish you’d done differently?

Fielding this one is Esquire legend Tom Junod, who lightly revisited his controversial 2007 Angelina Jolie profile this week after Jolie revealed, in an op-ed piece in Tuesday’s New York Times, news about a preventative double mastectomy. Looking at the hindsight issue more generally, Junod tells Storyboard:

I don’t really go in for self-flagellation. Or, rather: I flagellate myself so enthusiastically while writing my stories that I don’t have the time or the energy to flagellate myself once they’re done. In general, I don’t divide stories into Good and Bad or Perfect and Imperfect—I divide them as Finished and Unfinished.  The Finished stories are just that—stories that seemed to settle into final form before they were shipped to the printer. The Unfinished stories are the stories that were, in some way, taken away from me before they were finalized. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t work hard at them and (Esquire editor) David (Granger) didn’t devote his full attention to them; there’s nothing I’ve published in Esquire that hasn’t been gone over, by everyone, 10 or 20 times.

Unfinished stories are just stories that fall away from some Platonic ideal of what they might have been. In general, however, I’ve written so many more Unfinished stories than Finished ones—which is to say, I’ve written so many more stories that bear the marks of violent struggle, and were delivered by Caesarean rather than naturally. I’m quite aware when stories are coming easily and when they’re not, and when they’re not, I walk around with a rather low opinion of myself. But a writer is like a quarterback or a relief pitcher: You have to be able to put the bad throws behind you, or you can’t do the job.

I don’t flagellate myself because I’m aware that it would be crippling to flagellate myself, and the one thing I know beyond anything else is that I can’t afford to cripple myself. The other thing I know is that an Unfinished story is not necessarily a bad one, and neither is a story that shows itself to be born in struggle (see Leonardo DiCaprio). Hell, even “bad” stories are not necessarily bad ones. I remember walking into a dinner party after Slate called the Angelina profile the Worst Celebrity Profile of All Time. My arrival was greeted with silence; people did not know what to say. So I brought it up, not just to ease the tension but also because I was, like my editor, perversely proud of being so honored, knowing that you can’t hope to write the Best Celebrity Profile of All Time unless you are absolutely prepared to write the Worst. I’m not in this business because I expect to be admired but rather because I want the freedom to say what I want to say and get some kind of reaction for saying it, so if I can’t enjoy the fact that Slate devoted 2,500 words to the Angelina profile then I’ve lost something of myself that I desperately need to preserve in order to write the way I want to write. The great vice of journalism in the age of social media is not its recklessness but rather its headlong rush for respectability—its self-conscious desire to please an audience of peers rather than an audience of readers—and the first step towards respectability is regret.

Several years ago, I interviewed Gong Show host Chuck Barris and he told me that anyone who says they don’t have any regrets is either a liar or a psychopath. And he’s right—but only about life. Not about journalism. As a journalist, I don’t just (metaphorically) sing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” after I write my stories. I make myself sing it, even though it’s a damned hard song to sing.

For “Work the problem” archives, go here. Got a narrative issue you’d like help resolving? Email us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org and we’ll try to get you an expert answer.

Photo by Linda Davidson, courtesy Washington Post

The story: The activists wanted to make their point with fence cutters, graffiti, protest songs, and the thawed blood of a colleague who died in 2008 but hoped to “join” one last mission. Zak tells their story but also that of Oak Ridge, Tenn., built by the federal government as a bomb-making town. “Though you haven’t needed a badge to get into the town since 1949, Oak Ridge’s soul hasn’t changed,” he writes. “It’s still a company town, and the company is the government, and the business is bombs.” The facility housed “enough radioactive material to fuel over 10,000 nuclear bombs, which would end civilization many times over,” material used in warheads renovation programs that could take 25 years and cost $20 billion. The activists, who were convicted last week of injuring the national defense and damaging government property, each took different paths into custody. There’s riveting writing in Zak’s tale—

The lights of the Antichrist flickered through the trees.

The drifter prayed.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. For all the glory is yours, and on the last day Jesus will come like this, like a thief in the night, and the warmongering United States will fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy by beating its swords into plowshares.

He had duct-taped the head of his flashlight to reduce the beam to a sliver. On the downward slope of Pine Ridge, he moved in front of the nun, clearing branches and stones from her path. He was just a frail earthen vessel, he believed, but she was a daughter of God. He was her bodyguard.

On his head was a construction hat painted light blue, with “UN” marked on the front. On his breath was the stink of Top brand tobacco. In their backpacks, he and the nun carried twine, matches, candles, a Bible, three hammers, six cans of spray paint, three protest banners, copies of a letter they wished to deliver to Y-12 employees and two emblems of sustenance — a packet of cucumber seeds and a fresh-baked loaf of bread with a cross molded into the top.

And six baby bottles of human blood.

—and the presentation is beautiful, clean and striking. The Post ran the story on its website magazine style. Illustrations depicted the break-in, and still photos and a slideshow worked as secondary art. The 14 chapter titles alone tell a story: “Mission,” “‘…and the Earth Will Shake’” and “Sabotage.” Have a read, and join us back here on Thursday, to talk about how this project came together.

W.125th to 99 Madison Avenue: 30 minutes on the 1 and N trains according to Google, which was five minutes off. Apparently, Google doesn’t account for 4 inch heels in their walking and transfer time estimations. Seat: Yes. Ambiance: 4. Time in transit: 35 minutes. The OpenData NYC meet-up was hosted at ThoughtWorks, one of the many Manhattan tech start-ups indistinguishable from each other with their fridges full of beers and vague mission statements. ThoughtWorks was unusual only in that its offices were in Midtown rather than the downtown corridor of the original “Silicon Alley.” (from “The Little Blue Book: The Worlds of Commuting Obsessives,” by Madeline K.B. Ross)

Sitting on a plastic bed in the in-patient/out-patient wing of the Weinberg Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins with an IV connected to a catheter that had been implanted in my chest, things were looking up. It was 2008 and I was 28 years old, and due to a recent battery of high-dose chemotherapy that had left me with maybe one white blood cell, which I’d named Melvin, I had to wear one of those surgeon’s masks at all times to keep the world’s germs out of my face. Here I was, if you can imagine, bald and eyebrowless with a paper mask over my mouth, a tube coming out of my chest, the picture of cancer, and things were looking up. Scans showed that the cancer (along with just about every other cell in my body) was disappearing. (from “Healing Me Harshly,” by Keith Collins)

Kathryn Denning spends a lot of time studying scientists who think about aliens. Denning, an anthropologist at York University in Canada, is fascinated by the idea of The Other in relation to humans. Her recent research has focused on how scientists think about the evolution of intelligence in relation to hypothetical extraterrestrials, ethical difficulties and the future of the human colonization of Space. A big reason we’re so drawn to space, she told me, is “its importance in traditional culture.” We all share the experience of looking up at the stars and trying to make sense of it all. “It tends to get intertwined with the heavens and Heaven and we think of it as a place of revelations and knowledge and dreams,” Denning said. (from “Cosmic Postcards: The Adventures of an Armchair Astronaut,” by Kamakshi Ayyar)

In the days and months that followed I replayed the incident in my head over and over again. It seemed so unreal that I often questioned whether what I saw actually happened or if I dreamed it all up. What always made it real again was not the image of a man jumping but the memory of the jolt the train made as it ran over his body. I needed to know who this man was. I looked in the newspapers but found very little. I learned that his name was Dwight Brown and that he was 27 years old. He lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then the trail dried up. It was as if this man’s trace of life vanished. I thought if I could find more about this man, meet his family and friends, I would be able to make sense of that morning. (from “The Witness,” by Mary Ann Georgantopoulos)

Shapiro also gave us a status report on his larger project, The Big Round Table, a Kickstarter-funded web-based publisher of longform narrative that attempts to crowd-curate storytelling by bypassing the “gatekeepers” of publishing and posting what readers say they want to read. Stories get greenlighted by a cooperative of journalists “committed to the future of big narrative ambitious nonfiction” based on the first 1,000 words. Writers earn $1 of every sale. We talked to Shapiro last night by email. Here’s some of the discussion:

Storyboard: You went big with the pitch: “There is a revolution taking place in journalism. With it have come possibilities for writers who despaired of ever finding a way to make a living at their craft. Writers are now freed from the constraints of convention in telling their stories and from the commercial needs of editors and publishers, who determine what tales get told. That, in turn, means a new era of creativity for authors of narrative nonfiction—new writers, new stories, new audiences waiting for a friend to say, Here’s a story you’ll want to read. The Big Roundtable is more than a digital publishing platform; it is a movement, one that we believe can expand the possibilities for writers, and readers.” Where’d this idea come from?

Shapiro: It came from, how best to put it, 35 years of writing for a living—in newspapers, magazines, and books, and seeing how the publishing world felt as it were shrinking, while all around it, the world was expanding. Believe me, I felt the pinch. There was ever more pressure, especially when it came to books, to come up with ideas that were sure to sell. Well, how is anyone supposed to know what will sell, other than genre fiction? At the same time, magazines were feeling ever more predictable, and had been for years. For several years I was a judge at the National Magazine Awards, and found ever more that while the stories I was reading while not bad, seldom lifted off the page. The writing had become so formulaic, so safe—anecdotal lede, nut graf, quote from eminent sociologist. It was ever harder to find a story that you sensed a writer needed to tell. And we all know the difference. We know what it is like writing a story that burns inside of us, and a story that is, well, interesting. The result was a landscape of predictability. Why were journalists, smart and eager journalists, constrained, when writers of creative fiction were freer to experiment and push? What happened to the New Journalism revolution? I cannot believe it peaked a generation ago. Where was the surprise?

You had a $5,000 Kickstarter goal and took in nearly $19,219, from 220 backers. Who gave, and why?

People we know—God bless them. And a lot of people we’d never heard of who contributed generously and who sometimes wrote to say, Hey, cool idea. I have a story. Can I send it along? The answer was, and is, always yes. (Pitches should go to TheBRTable@gmail.com.)

“Now everyone can be a writer and a publisher,” you said in your campaign. Please explain. 

I suspect every writer falls asleep and dreams that come the dawn they will become the next Amanda Hocking, that from the acorn of a few sales via Amazon to friends will spring the mighty oak of best-sellerism. Pretty to think so, no? The problem isn’t one of production or dissemination; no one needs a publisher to print and sell. The problem is audience. How do you find one, and make people feel as if their lives will be lessened if they don’t read your work?

But hold on: There’s still a gatekeeper aspect, because BRT ultimately decides which stories move forward. No?

Shapiro

Yes. But. The gatekeeper is not me. Lord knows if it were me there would be a surfeit of baseball stories. Who is to say that my taste, or any other individual’s tastes, is superior? I may be skilled at seeing where a story slips and can be improved. But I enjoy no monopoly on taste, and nor does anyone else. And so, we’re experimenting, yes experimenting because in a venture like the BRT we are in a permanent state of beta, with the idea that if you ask a small group of readers what they think about a story, you improve the chances of achieving that rarest and most sought after quality in a story: surprise. In an early—call it alpha—version of the experiment, we asked people to read full drafts. Huge mistake. Because presented with a story, writers cannot help but take out their red pens and try to fix things. So, we wondered what would happen if we asked those same people to read, say, the first 1,000 words. Takes five minutes. You can do it on your phone waiting for your tall soy latte. All we asked was: Do you want to read more, or no thanks? Quick response, and much more useful. It told us whether the story had an audience. Why 1,000 words? Because—and here, I am drawing more on experience than data—if you can nail the first 1,000 words of a story, the odds are good that you’re on your way.

Curation is the thing right now—Longreads, Longform.org, etc. You describe the project as a platform “through which writers of nonfiction stories too long for most magazines, and too short for most publishers, can find their readers,” but that also describes, sort of, platforms like Byliner and, to some extent, Kindle Singles, which publishes stories too long for a magazine and too short for a book. How does BRT differ from those?

All our content is original. Byliner does some original work, but mostly curated; they’ve been very kind about curating my stuff. I know David Blum, who edits Kindle Singles, and think he is a very smart editor. But in the end, David, talented as he is, is the gatekeeper. We’re trying something different.

The idea is that a happy reader will (and can) share the story with three friends, which is encouraged through the BRT model. The sharing aspect seems central to this concept. Why the sharing? 

Think about it: When you choose what you read for pleasure is on the basis of a) a review, b) something you heard or read about, or c) because a friend, not a Facebook friend but a living breathing want-to-get-dinner-this-week friend, said, You Have to Read This! I’ve asked this question many times to many different groups of people over the past year and the answer always comes up C. It is all about sharing. The question is, How do you replicate that moment at scale? That, in the end, is what this is all about. Again, it is all about increasing the chances of finding under your nose a story that is surprising.

Writers will make $1 per sale. How will you handle the operational transparency aspect with writers? How will writers know precisely how well their work is doing and whether they’re getting their fair share? 

We will do so contractually—no writer should ever for a moment think, Jeez, these guys aren’t being straight with me. That would be bad on so many levels.

You use the term “nonfiction novella,” the kind of language that makes a lot of people nervous. What does that term mean, from BRT’s perspective?

It means too long for most magazines and too short for a conventional book. Say, 5,000 to 30,000 words. Loosely. There are so many times I wished I had more space—and I have written 17,000-word magazine stories. I also can look at my books and think, you know, I think this would have been perfect at 40,000. If my publisher reads this they will not be pleased. Sorry fellas.

Where does this project live? Looks like you’ve got Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter covered.

It lives on the Internet because we live in a world where it is ever clearer that the Internet—and by this I mean the great amorphous amalgam of feeds and inboxes—decides what shall thrive. There is a terrific book by the sociologist Duncan Watts called Six Degrees—as in, yes, six degrees of separation—that captures as well as anything I’ve read the science of social networks. Watts is a pal of Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed and HuffPost fame, and they take different views of network creation. Peretti, a born optimist, believes that it is possible to tweak a budding network into something larger. Duncan takes a less sunny view. I fall someplace in between but veer toward Jonah. The Internet feels to me like a lava lamp, bubbling around, waiting for someone or something to tip it and get all that action flowing a certain way. Does this analogy make me sound like a Dead Head?

Yes. In a good way. The first story runs in August. What’s in the lineup? Can you give us some idea of the first few pieces?

Some great ones, and I will do so as cryptically as I can, so that people might think, “cool:” Inside the Albanian Mob; My Weekend at Adolf’s; How Disco Never Died; The Mother of Creedmoor; Of Inmates, Fire, and Death; The Miracle on Molokai. And those are but a few.

Generally speaking, are BRT stories those that got rejected elsewhere?

Maybe. We look at the stories as stories. We don’t ask them to come with a CV.

It can be hard enough getting phone calls returned when you’re on staff, but when you’re working without an institution attached to your project, how do you represent yourself? How would you advise a prospective BRT author to identify herself?

I am a writer with a story to tell. Here it is. Our promise is that people will read the first 1,000 words.

Will the authors report/write the whole piece on spec and then hope the thing flies with readers? So much of great storytelling depends on the reporting. You need to report enough to write a great top, since readers will green light the piece (or not) based on the first 1,000 words, but that puts writers working without a net. Say you spend three months reporting enough just to get a great opening, but then nobody bites. That’s three months you just spent, for nothing. Or no?

Out there, as I write, I know, just know, that there are all these wonderful writers with stories burning in their notebooks who are thinking, “There is more to this story than 700 words.” Maybe the New Yorker? The Times magazine? Maybe. But the odds aren’t good. I know this because I have been that writer and I wanted to tell that story and yes, I wanted to be paid for it. But I needed to tell it. And to put my money where my mouth is, I’m working on one now for the BRT. I really need to tell this one. No advance.

Who is your envisioned audience?

Ah, that is the $64,000 question. We have an incredible story in which a woman recounts her banker father slowly drinking himself to death. (Trust me, you cannot put this one down.) Is that only for an audience of children of alcoholics? Or will others, for whom this bears no direct connection to their lives, nonetheless see in the story a quality that speaks to them, that surprises them?

Who will edit the stories? Will there be fact checkers? Copyeditors? How will the actual editorial process work?

We have my all time favorite editor working with us, Mike Hoyt, the longtime editor of Columbia Journalism Review. Best hands, as they say, in the business. If we don’t have terrific stories, and yes fact-checked stories, we are nowhere. But it is not Mike’s job to choose. It is his job to lift those stories, with the author.

You have a stated goal of studying “how people find, read, fall in love with a share stories” and becoming “the research lab of the longform revival” by gathering data that “will at long last illuminate what happens when one friend feels compelled to share a story with another.” There’s a longform revival?

Don’t you think so? Look at all these ventures—Atavist, Longform, Longreads, to say nothing of these heretofore impossible to imagine stories in the Times and elsewhere.

We like “longform” without the hyphen. Looks like you do too.

Cleaner, no?

You’ve said a paid staff will produce BRT. Paid how? Who’s on the masthead?

We have some money from Kickstarter and hope to start getting more—grants, we hope. We have a small staff: Mike, me; our product manager is a journalism school grad, Anna Hiatt. We’re being assisted by Rashmi Raman, who is our engineer, Anna Codrea-Rado, who manages the audiences and our designer, Eleonore Hamelin.

You’ll sell directly from the BRT website rather than through a distributor like Amazon. Why?

Because Amazon does not share all its data. And we want, need, to be able to see and test and iterate.

Whom do you envision as your typical writer?

The writer with a story he or she is burning to tell. Really, it is that simple.

The goal is to understand how readers find, read and fall in love with work, and share it. Assuming you figure that out, what next?

Heaven knows. We’re making this up as we go along. I am learning what it means to be involved in a startup.

(*having had some experience with it ourselves) 

“Yeah, hey bro,” Ramsey told the dispatcher. “I’m at 2207 Seymour. West 25th. Check this out—I just came from McDonald’s, right? So I’m on my porch eating my little food, right? This broad is trying to break out the fucking house next door to me, so there’s a bunch of people on the street right now and shit. So we’re like, ‘What’s wrong? What’s the problem?’ She’s like, ‘This motherfucker done kidnapped me and my daughter…’ She say her name is Linda Berry or some shit. I don’t know who the fuck that is, I just moved over here, bro.”

“Sir, sir,” said the male dispatcher. “…You have to calm down and slow down. Is she still in the street?”

“Seymour Avenue,” Ramsey said.

“Is she still in the street or where did she go?”

“Yeah I’m looking at her right now. She’s calling y’all! She’s on the other phone.”

They went on for a bit, with Ramsey getting frustrated and the dramatic tension (hello, narrative) rising. A short while later the TV news crews arrived, and Ramsey’s story got longer and more detailed, with discrepancies:

I went to McDonald’s and I’m at home and I hear this, ‘Help, let me out!’ This girl screaming. Now we don’t have that on our street because everybody on this street knows each other, so when you hear something like that you come running to see what’s going on. I thought it was a kid got attacked by a pit bull. And I looked at that girl and I said, ‘You look familiar!’ And I’m prying the door open and she’s trying to get out, and she climbed through the bottom of it and soon as she got out she said, ‘My name is Amanda Berry, call the police.’

You heard screaming? the reporter asked.

I heard screaming. I’m eating my McDonald’s. I come outside and I see this girl going nuts, trying to get out of her house, so I go on the porch and she says, ‘Help me get out, I’ve been in here a long time,’ so I figured it was a domestic violence dispute so I opened the door and we can’t get in that way because…a body can’t fit through, only your hand. So we kicked the bottom and she comes out with a little girl and she says, ‘Call 911. My name is Amanda Berry.’ When she told me, it didn’t register until I got to calling 911… I thought this girl was dead, you know what I mean? And she got on the phone and she said, ‘Yes, this is me…’

And when did you see Gina?

About five minutes after the police got here. See, that girl Amanda told the police, ‘I ain’t just the only one, it’s some more girls up in that house.’ So they went up there 30, 40 deep, and when they came out it was just astonishing because I thought they were gonna come up with nothing.

How long you lived here?

I been here a year! I barbecue with this dude. We eat ribs and whatnot, and listen to salsa music.

And you had no indication?

Not a clue that that girl was in that house, or that anybody else was in there against their will. Because how he is, he just comes out to his back yard, plays with the dogs, tinkering with his cars and motorcycles, goes back in the house. He’s somebody that you look at and look away because he’s not doing nothing but the average stuff. There’s nothing exciting about him. Well, until today.

What was the reaction on the girls’ faces? I can’t imagine…

Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Either she’s homeless or she got problems. That’s the only reason she’s running to a black man.

[The interview over, Ramsey flashed the thumbs-up.]

Why this is great and people love it: First, true originals mesmerize. Unfiltered, unmanaged, Ramsey was authentically who he is. Second, he told a story. His account of the escape is straight up narrative. The elements are there: a compelling character with an original voice (“Yeah, hey, bro…check this out;” “so they went up there 30, 40 deep;” “We eat ribs and whatnot”); there’s a clear structure (chronological), dialogue (which is key), and the aforementioned dramatic tension; it’s got what Tom Wolfe calls status details—food from McDonald’s, assumptions about a pit bull attack and a domestic violence dispute. And then the underdog hero utters a Hemingway’s-iceberg line of dialogue:

“Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms.”

So the story becomes transcendent.

If you’re writing the long-ball narrative you wouldn’t want to omit what happened next, which was that Ramsey, inevitably, went viral. Why? Did the public love him for his storytelling skills? His authenticity? His gutsy instincts? Yep. And was that okay? Absolutely. There was nothing, on Day 1, not to love. This was “a wonderfully vibrant interview with a man who helped kick down a door and rescue three women and a child,” said Neely Tucker, a veteran Washington Post reporter and author of Love in the Driest Season, when we informally polled a few journalists on the topic. “It was precise, exciting, emotional, visually telling, and told with great pacing and narrative detail. All in two minutes, live, on camera. Anybody who’s bothered that the narrator is black and probably not rich is saying more about themselves than him.”

*Things got tricky when the inevitable autotune opportunists and meme-weavers bundled Ramsey with the viral videos of other crime-scene witnesses, all of whom happened to be black. The personal you-go-dude! feelings for Ramsey, conflated with images of expressive stylists like Antoine Dodson, morphed into something else. Not ugly, exactly, but ugly adjacent, if you took the view that the meme-drivers were laughing at, not with. Ramsey moved “from bystander and guy on the scene into ‘Internet object of affection,’” as Justin Ellis, an assistant editor of Nieman Journalism Lab, one of Storyboard’s sister publications, puts it. “I don’t know if that’s just the Internet chugging along or if there’s something else to blame. People want to celebrate him, which is great, but it’s hard to ignore the familiar trappings/scenario of ‘black person achieves Internet fame through local TV,’ which can feel exploitive at times and condescending or even casually racist at others.”

A narrative that already contained those trace elements of race/class (“pretty white girl;” “black man’s arms”) now had an overlay of social media influence, triggering confusion (was it not okay to like this guy’s interview?) and raising coverage questions: How will—or should—this aspect of the story be presented in the long view, or even in the short one? We asked other colleagues and here’s what they said:

Greg Moore

I have not watched a lot of the Internet stuff having fun with Charles Ramsey’s manner and I don’t plan to. I am from Cleveland and I know lots of people like Ramsey. On the street, he is likely being lauded for “keeping it real.” And part of the fascination with him is his originality and lack of self-consciousness. That’s partly why he could do what he did in saving those three women. He was on ABC’s Good Morning America this morning talking about the case, grappling for the right word here and there and sometimes clearly not understanding the question. But there was no mistaking his meaning and his grit when he did. Lamenting that he had shared ribs with the alleged perpetrator and even tried to salsa dance to some of his music, he ruefully noted something like this: If I had known what was going on in that house, don’t you think we’d be having a different interview right now? With Ramsey, you darn tootin’. Sometime people have to laugh to keep from crying. That’s a little bit of what is going on. This stuff is so bad and we are so relieved. But we all need to be listening to what this brave man is saying and not how he says it. I don’t think the reaction is so much racist as it reflects the lack of real familiarity with the strata of America. There are lots of people who talk like Ramsey and are damn funny, too. And there are many I grew up with who don’t play; who do the right thing and are fearless. Simple applause for Ramsey should be enough. He is a genuine hero, quirks and all. McDonald’s needs to put him in a commercial and one of those public-minded dental clinics should give him some new choppers for free. That’s the best way to show gratitude for such courage and community mindedness. And it is okay to chuckle at the unvarnished way he puts things? (Because it is really nervous laughter about how little we know about real people living real lives in communities across America). If we really understood his world, we’d know he is just keeping it real. And we are damn lucky he is. — Greg Moore, editor of the Denver Post, and Pulitzer Prize board member

Callie Crossley

First, of course, so glad he did what he did. Having said that, I wondered why a lot of the response to him has been all about the “funny” delivery. Have to say I’ve seen it before in portrayals of black men who happen into the middle of a breaking story—Antoine Dodson a prime example. For a while he was all the rage in pop culture, even garnering a record contract. But in his case and in Charles’ the serious substance of what they were saying got subsumed by their mannerisms and affect. I’m fascinated—not in a good way—by the fact that Charles’ commentary about race in Cleveland has stopped being reported as part of the story. “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty ran into a black man’s arms”—that’s pretty deep, and I think should have inspired journalists to ask him to explain what he meant. I’ve only heard one report focusing on this piece of the story, and I can’t remember if it was a TV or radio story. The piece picked up on his statement and went on to talk about the deep racial divide in Cleveland. But, that is the ONLY report I’ve seen dealing with it. As I see it, this is another example of journalists who are reluctant to pursue a legitimate racial angle to a story, even if it is a part of the main character’s story. And of course there is a class angle here. Reporters are also not so comfortable dealing with that issue. By the way, in the black blogosphere, a lot of folks are referencing In Living Color‘s satirical sketch: Reporters arrive on the scene of a breaking story and there are two witnesses, one a black professional in a suit and tie and another a black woman in what we used to call a housecoat, with curlers in her hair, and not in great command of the King’s English. Of course all of the reporters rushed past the guy and went to her for a “colorful” recitation of the events that had transpired. This is not exactly the same scenario in Charles Ramsey’s case—he was the only witness—but you get my drift. — Callie Crossley, host of the WGBH Radio show “Under the Radar.” Friday night at 7:30, Crossley will lead a Basic Black discussion called “What Can We Learn from Charles Ramsey?” It airs on WGBH-TV, Channel 2 in the Boston area.

Meanwhile, the Cleveland narrative unfolded. When Anderson Cooper spoke to Ramsey about all this, Ramsey said, “It’s about cojones. It’s about cojones, on this planet.” Cooper then asked whether he hoped to receive the FBI reward for helping free the women. “I tell you what you do,” Ramsey said instantly. “Give it to them.”

@GlobeMoskowitz

With Tamerlan driving now, Danny in the passenger seat, and Dzhokhar behind Danny, they stopped in Watertown Center so Dzhokhar could withdraw money from the Bank of America ATM using Danny’s card. Danny, shivering from fear but claiming to be cold, asked for his jacket. Guarded by just one brother, Danny wondered if this was his chance, but he saw around him only locked storefronts. A police car drove by, lights off.

Tamerlan agreed to retrieve Danny’s jacket from the back seat. Danny unbuckled, put on the jacket, then tried to buckle the seat belt behind him to make an escape easier. “Don’t do that,” Tamerlan said, studying him. “Don’t be stupid.”

Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark broke down the story’s strengths beautifully in a recent post. Three highlights:

It begins, like the ancient epics, in medias res—in the middle of things.

“The 26-year-old Chinese entrepreneur had just pulled his new Mercedes to the curb on Brighton Avenue to answer a text when an old sedan swerved behind him, slamming on the brakes. A man in dark clothes got out and approached the passenger window. It was nearly 11 p.m. last Thursday.” (I can’t help feel a digital-age irony here, that Danny drives into mortal danger by doing the right thing — pulling over to text.)

Clark, speaking at a Nieman Narrative Journalism conference

The construction of narrative journalism depends upon certain strategies associated traditionally with fiction, and we get all of them here: scene, dialogue, character details, point of view. The fact that the events tick-tock in a block of time (about 90 minutes) and inside the confines of an automobile, create what classical critics might call a unity of time, place and action that intensifies the experience of the reader.

This story should remind us of how rarely dialogue appears in breaking news, with reporters depending more often on quotes gathered after the fact. Even though he is using a single source (the bombers being unavailable, one dead, one arrested), the writer chooses to re-create the dialogue in the car based on Danny’s recollection. I count at least 12 paragraphs containing dialogue such as: “Don’t look at me!” Tamerlan shouted at one point. “Do you remember my face?” / “No, no, I don’t remember anything,” [Danny] said.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” go here.

Left to right: Swartz, Colloff and fact checker David Moorman at last night’s festivities, courtesy the @TexasMonthly Twitter feed.

Colloff recently annotated “The Innocent Man” for Storyboard, as part of our growing Annotation Tuesday! series. Here’s a snippet from Part 1, with Storyboard’s comments in green and Colloff’s in blue:

A running gag between them involved Michael calling out, “Bitch, get me a beer!”<Interesting details, because this moment (and their history of squabbling) was turned against Morton in court. What was your perception of Michael Morton before you began your reporting, and how and why did your opinion change, if it changed at all?/pw I’m using a detail that later is cast in a very dark light by the prosecution, but I’m presenting it here as Michael and Christine saw it, which was as just a joke. A lot of the media coverage following Michael’s 2011 exoneration made him appear almost saintly, because he did not want revenge and he handled his wrongful incarceration with such grace. But that’s not who he was back in 1986. I wanted people to see his rough edges and his imperfections so that he would be a real person. Also, I wanted to provide some context for the way that investigators in the case saw him. His crudeness was, I think, part of what led investigators to think he was capable of violence. As for where this detail came from, the marigolds came from the trial transcript, and I asked Michael about it in more detail, which is when he explained their placement in the yard./pc —something they had once overheard a friend of a friend shout at his girlfriend. Christine would respond by telling Michael to go screw himself. “He teased her a lot, and he would go right up to the line of what was acceptable, and sometimes he went over it,” Gersky said. Referring to an attractive friend of theirs who stopped by the house one day wearing shorts, he told Christine, “Now, that’s the way you should look.”<Great detail; source?/pw A friend of Christine’s told me this and our tireless fact-checker, David Moorman, ran it past Michael before publication./pc

And from Part 2:

“When I got here, they used to put all new arrivals in the field force,” Michael<One thing I meant to ask in Part 1: How did you decide to refer to him as “Michael” and not Morton?/pw Excellent question. I always wrestle with whether or not to refer to a protagonist by his/her first or last name. In this case, there were practical reasons to go with his first name. Christine had the same last name, so it ended up being an easy decision. (Calling him “Morton” and her “Christine” seemed awfully weird.) But generally speaking I like the immediacy of using someone’s first name, when it’s appropriate./pc wrote, referring to inmates who were assigned to work on the prison farm. That had been three years earlier. Now 47, he was too old to be doing hard physical labor all day long, he told Garcia. His face had settled into the softer contours of middle age, and his sandy blond hair was going gray. “Try to imagine twenty to forty men,” he continued, “shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, swinging their [hoes] in unison and chopping weeds that are, I swear to God, six to ten feet high. Or, on the bad days, working in a huge irrigation ditch, skinning the banks down to bare earth<Hey, not bad, the writing./pw I know! I get a lot of letters from prison, and I can assure you that none of them sound like this./pc and then dragging the chopped-up vegetation back up the banks. It’s long, hard, backbreaking work.

A few other Colloff favorites from the Storyboard files:

-Her piece “‘Why’s this so good?’ No. 65: David Grann and the death row prisoner.” In our ongoing series, Colloff wrote about Grann’s treatment of the questionable case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas for killing his children.

-Her chat with Storyboard about her story on a mother convicted of killing her son with salt.

-Her piece about the innocence of death row inmate Anthony Graves, which we included in a “What we’re reading” post.

Congratulations, Pam, and thank you for your work!

Stillman

Filipinos launder soldiers’ uniforms, Kenyans truck frozen steaks and inflatable tents, Bosnians repair electrical grids, and Indians provide iced mocha lattes. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is behind most of the commercial “tastes of home” that can be found on major U.S. bases, which include jewelry stores, souvenir shops filled with carved camels and Taliban chess sets, beauty salons where soldiers can receive massages and pedicures, and fast-food courts featuring Taco Bell, Subway, Pizza Hut, and Cinnabon. (AAFES’s motto: “We go where you go.”)

The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at meagre chow halls, and host dance parties featuring Nepalese romance ballads and Ugandan church songs. A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.

The wars’ foreign workers are known, in military parlance, as “third-country nationals,” or T.C.N.s. Many of them recount having been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by their subcontractor bosses. Previously unreleased contractor memos, hundreds of interviews, and government documents I obtained during a yearlong investigation confirm many of these claims and reveal other grounds for concern. Widespread mistreatment even led to a series of food riots in Pentagon subcontractor camps, some involving more than a thousand workers.

Stillman’s piece won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Public Interest and the Sidney Hillman Foundation prize, for excellence in reporting for the public good. (And her recent story “The Throwaways,” about young informants being used to a deadly degree in the nation’s criminal justice system, is up, tonight, for a National Magazine Award. Our Annotation Tuesday! series will carry a line by line on the piece soon, so check back for that.)

When accepting the Hillman prize, Stillman recounted how she found the “invisible army.” Her acceptance speech comes in at the three-minute mark, but here’s the first of it:

“It began when I was at an Indian restaurant in Oxford, England, a few years ago, oddly enough, and I had a waiter—a young man, Tony, came up to me. He was giving me dinner and he heard my American accent and he said, ‘Oh, you’re an American! I used to work on a U.S. military base, feeding soldiers.’ And he whipped out his cellphone and started showing me these pictures of Jessica Simpson on her U.S.O. tour, like in a tank top. He had these funny, interesting stories but then he began to tell me about some of his friends, also from Goa, India, who had been promised great jobs in Dubai and Jordan and instead were taken to a war zone, to a U.S. military base. Other workers had been hit by rockets and lost eyes or limbs and had been sent home to their countries with no insurance. So this was on my radar when I first went to to Iraq in 2008. I thought I was going to have to work hard to dig up these stories and just find these people. And I arrived on the base and lo and behold one of the first things I saw was a Burger King staffed by Indian workers. One of the second things I saw was a Pizza Hut staffed by Bangladeshis, and a Cinnabon. And then a beauty salon where you could actually get $7 manicures and pedicures from a group of Fiji women who ultimately became the subjects of my story. … I learned that they had been promised lavish jobs and a nice hotel in Dubai, and instead were taken to Iraq. I got to know them over a period of years and was there on the day that one was sexually assaulted by her supervisor. When I called the emergency sexual assault hotline on her behalf I found only a phone that rang and rang, and no answer.”

You can find Stillman’s full talk here:

And for more installments of “How’d you find that story?” go here.

Storyboard: How did you come upon this story and why did you want to tell it?

Saslow: This idea actually came from a very good editor who I work with at the magazine, Paul Kix. When he started explaining the story to me, I knew right away that I wanted to write it. It is surprising and tragic, with loads of tension. So all of that was appealing. Also, it was a chance to write a little bit more of a reconstructed narrative, which I hadn’t done in a while.

You’ve been writing about politics and the economy a good bit lately. What is it like to switch over to sports? Is a narrative a narrative?

I started as a sports writer at The Washington Post, and then I switched to politics/economy/etc., so it is fun to occasionally write about sports again. The truth is, I think it is all pretty much the same. Good narratives are mostly about people, and what they do is pretty secondary. Athletes, politicians, anonymous people—if you can get to a level of intimacy, they are all equally good, worthy topics. I was terrified when I first switched from writing about sports to politics in 2007, but about a year in, I realized the two topics were much of the same: people who were hard to access, and who cared a lot about winning.

What are you reading these days? And what, if anything, do you read to get you in the zone to write?

I’ve been trying to read a lot more fiction lately—a New Year’s resolution, since I’m usually bad at it. My wife reads a ton, so mostly I’m reading whatever she passes my way when she’s done. Lately that’s been The Burgess Boys, the new book by Elizabeth Strout (great characters, so sad); Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (vivid and awesome); Prep (I’m about five years late); and Gone Girl (yes, again, from my wife—and also super entertaining). To get into the mood to write, I go back to some of the same people whose narrative work I admire, and many of whom work or worked at the Washington Post: David Finkel, Anne Hull, Kate Boo, etc. So many great writers to choose from.

What’s the best narrative advice anyone ever gave you?

Stay until you have the story. Good narratives are all about reporting—about observation and detail, and reporting long enough to watch a story play out.

What, if anything, did you learn from doing this story?

I knew this in some ways before, but the court records were a narrative treasure trove for this story. I called down to the court in Iowa, and a few weeks later I had boxes and boxes of transcripts. All of the primary characters in the story had testified, and the details and the dialogue in that box did more to help tell this story than any other method of reporting.

“Bringing Down the House”
August 13, 2012
ESPN The Magazine
By Eli Saslow 

HELEN FORD DRIVES to the house from memory, parks along the curb and idles in her car.<Past or present tense are always a choice for the narrative writer, as are first, second (risky!) and third person. How did you decide to tell this in the present tense?/pw It is weird, and probably stereotypical, but I tend to default to past tense for newspaper stories at the Post and present tense in magazine stories for ESPN. Not sure why, really. A good friend told me recently, though, that present tense can make a story feel a little more alive. I think that’s right. Also, in this story, starting in present tense helped distinguish reporting done in the present moment, versus all the reconstruction to come./es This three-story duplex in Cambridge, Mass., had been her home for 40 years, but now she wonders whether she has the courage to enter. She turns on the radio and takes out a crossword puzzle. “I don’t know if I’m ready to do this,” she says.<You’re with Ford, in the car, right? Her return is key to the whole piece, so it’s huge that you were present. How did you make sure that happened?/pw Yes, I was in the car. I timed my trip around her return to the house. She knew she was going to go see it with the lawyer in a few weeks, so I waited until she was going on her own and went with her then. If she hadn’t been going on her own, I would not have taken her there. I feel pretty strongly that you can’t manufacture scene in a narrative story and pass it off as genuine observation. That’s a lie. It’s a little like narrative plagiarism. So, I waited until she was going on her own, and I planned my trip around that./es

It has been more than two years since she was last here – two years since her famous son betrayed her and the foreclosure specialists arrived with moving trucks. She fixates on the house during the long nights alone in her one-bedroom apartment, dreaming about all the good memories and waking every few hours because of the bad.

“I have to see it,” she says now. Helen turns off the radio and walks to the house. “The only way I’ll ever move on is by getting back in there.” A blue padlock is on the front door that she had once been too trusting to lock.<This sentence says much with little./pw A sign that reads “Danger: No Playing” is planted in the front yard, where she had hosted graduation parties for her children — four of her own, four adopted and at least 30 foster kids. Cigarette butts and half-empty beer cans litter the makeshift basketball court, where one of those children had turned into a star.<You delay identifying the son gone bad. Why? Talk, if you would, about how withholding information can serve narrative./pw I think sometimes holding back on information for a few beats can help build tension, especially by foreshadowing that “one of those children turned into a star.” Now, I hope, a reader is wondering: Who? Why? What happened? And they are making an investment in reading the next paragraph, and then the next./es

Helen’s lawyer, Dennis Benzan, stands on the front steps, waiting to greet her. The house belongs to the bank now, and Helen doesn’t have the authority to enter alone. Benzan punches numbers into the padlock, then turns toward his client.

“Technically, I should tell you that we are going to be trespassing,” he says.<Interesting! What qualms did you have about this?/pw I didn’t, really. We were with the lawyer. It had been her house. It felt like a minor offense, but it was interesting to me because it reinforced how much Helen had lost, and how infuriating that must be for her./es He asks Helen if she’d wear a mask to protect herself from dust and mold, but she waves him off.

“This is my house,” she says. “I can handle it.”

Helen steps through the door. A blast of cold, stale air stops her at the entryway. “Dear god,” she says. The house is dark. The objects take form slowly, and at first they don’t make sense: clothes, furniture and garbage strewn about the living room floor. Tattered mattresses. Broken champagne bottles. A Fisher-Price basketball hoop flipped on its side. Tiles have been stripped from the kitchen. Graffiti covers the walls. Basketball trophies that were once part of her children’s Wall of Fame are piled in a trash can near the door.

“The squatters got to everything,” Benzan says.

“Yes, I see,” Helen responds.

Only one item remains untouched, high on the living room wall: A poster of Rumeal Robinson in his University of Michigan uniform, dribbling. His lips are pursed. His eyes look downcourt confidently. A message scrawled near the top of the picture says, “Our Rumeal.”<Flawless detail. Observation/detail are so important in narrative. Did you know this would be a linchpin when you saw it?/pw I knew right away in the house that the poster would be important, and I knew that this scene would be where I started the story. That inscription on the poster says so much without ME having to say it. My stories tend to work so much better when the reported details tell the story for me, instead of when I’m left to make grand pronouncements or assumptions. I don’t do that too well./es

Our Rumeal: Helen’s greatest pride, the boy she took in off the street at age 10, who later earned a college scholarship, hit the winning free throws in the 1989 NCAA championship game, joked with a president at the White House and bought his mother a Mercedes and a mink coat.<Lovely collapsing of time—a life in a graf./pw His success persuaded Helen to devote her life to helping more children. She once petitioned the city to rename her street in his honor, calling it Rumeal Robinson Way.

Our Rumeal: Helen’s greatest disappointment, the child who burned through his millions, broke the law and executed a series of scams that resulted in his mother’s eviction and homelessness at age 65. His failure has left her riddled with self-doubt. She later petitioned the city to rename the street again, to anything else, so long as “they get his name off of it.”<This bright side/dark side repetition is so effective and does so much work in such a tight space—how did you arrive at it?/pw I knew the story would be about this contrast, so I knew I had to tease both in this first section. Sometimes parallel structure is a way to do that pretty easily. It also allowed me to play on the poster inscription./es

Helen turns away from the living room now and walks out of the house.

“I’ve seen enough,” she says.<Did you automatically know that you had to open the piece with this scene of ruin? Play around with any other openings?/pw I knew this was the opening. It was also probably the easiest part of the story to write, because it was present moment, and I had observed it all. I knew I wanted the piece to start in the present moment and then go backward, and having Helen visit the house allowed me to tease out a lot of the big themes in the first 500 words./es

HE HAD COME to see them as a sign from God.<Interesting. We sense that we’re about to slip into Rumeal’s point of view, but we stay with Helen, and add Lou./pw

It was the fall of 1977. Helen and Lou Ford had recently lost their 2-month-old son to spina bifida when an employee at the local grammar school called to tell them about Rumeal Robinson, a homeless Jamaican boy on the school basketball team. Who better to ask for help than the couple everyone referred to as Ma Ford and Uncle Lou? Lou was a Cambridge letter carrier who also owned a bar, and he knew every adult in town. Helen was a cheerleading coach and a school security guard, and she knew all of the kids. They lived with two sons, ages 11 and 6, and they hosted so many parties at their duplex near Central Square that neighbors referred to the place as the Ford Hotel.

“Maybe you can do something for this boy,” the school employee said.

The next day, Helen drove to the elementary school and met with Robinson after basketball practice. He seemed unusually serious for a 10-year-old, she thought, and he spoke dispassionately about his problems. He told Helen that his mother had moved to the United States when he was a toddler, leaving him in Jamaica with impoverished grandparents who often let him roam unsupervised and sleep on the beach. They had recently put him on a plane for Boston to be reunited with his mother. When he arrived, she had yelled at Rumeal for being in her way; he had chafed at her strictness. “I can get by on my own,” he told Helen. “She doesn’t want me.”<Narrative journalists often talk about how to handle recreated dialogue. What’s your working philosophy? Do you take the interviewee’s word for what was said or use quotation marks only if you’ve double-sourced the content, or does it vary from story to story? Or something else?/pw I only use quotation marks if I have double-sourced the content. Usually, I’m lucky, and I’m writing observed narratives where I am only quoting things that I heard. But in this story I had to use some recruited dialogue. In this case, the dialogue from Rumeal was double-sourced with newspaper stories from earlier in his life, and with Helen./es

He had been sleeping in the halls of the Peabody Terrace apartment complex for the past two weeks, wearing the same sweater and subsisting on leftover school lunches and dry cereal. Winter was approaching, and the hallway was drafty at night. He missed the warm evenings on the beach in Jamaica. “It gets a little cold, but I’m fine,” he told her.

Helen had been a victim of an unstable childhood herself.<Lovely handling of the exposition of Helen’s past, which gives us a deeper sense of her motivation./pw Her mother died during the birth of one of Helen’s younger siblings, and Helen was rotated from one relative to the next. She had embarked on motherhood with the motto “Children need stability.” So on that day, without a moment’s hesitation, she took Rumeal back to her house, made him fried chicken and called the police to explain the situation. She told Rumeal he would share a room with her eldest son, Donald, and that he would stay with them for a little while.

Rumeal was polite and grateful but at first kept mostly to himself. Within a few weeks, though, in his bedroom he began to create whimsical drawings of his new family; the pictures would then appear on the family fridge, where everyone could see and praise them. Soon enough, Rumeal went from calling Helen “ma’am” to “Mrs. Ford” to “Ms. Helen” and finally, just before the holidays, “Mom.”<Another great time collapse—and oddly visual./pw For Christmas, she bought him an entire wardrobe: 6 sweaters, 13 pairs of pants and 3 pairs of basketball shorts. “I’ve never gotten this much before,” he said. A short time later, Helen and Lou decided to adopt Rumeal.

The Fords liked the laughter and energy created by a crowd of children. Soon, they wanted more. Helen registered to become an emergency-placement foster parent. For most of the next decade, she and Lou cared for a dozen foster kids at a time, toddlers and teenagers, some who stayed for a few days and others who never left. Lou bought the other side of the duplex and knocked down the center wall to double their space. He tore out the carpet in the living room so the kids could ride their bikes and skateboards inside the house during the winter. He attached a basketball rim to the old oak tree in the front yard, where dribbling was optional during pickup games because of the uneven dirt. They bought other hoops for inside the house; scuff marks covered the walls. “It’s a house for kids,” Helen would say. “Let them have their fun.”<How did you report this story? You spent how much time with Helen Ford—and what else?/pw I spent a lot of time with Helen, but I also visited with lawyers, many of Rumeal’s friends and several of Helen’s other children—the people who lived in the house during this time. And then, for the second half of the story, the court records were a massive help./es

Lou filled one bedroom with four refrigerators — one for milk, one for juice, one for meat and one for produce — so the kids could always help themselves.<Great detail—did that come naturally in her telling?/pw I don’t remember exactly, but I am sure it came from asking pretty pressing details about that time in their lives. Sometimes, during an interview like this, a subject can be confused as to why you want so much detail, so I tell them: I’m trying to do justice to your story by writing it exactly as it was, and it is the details that make it real to people. Explaining why you want to know something gives you a little more latitude to press again and again for specifics. It can also make a subject feel like a collaborator in a small way in the reporting, and they work hard to remember and recall details. Also, Helen and I spent a lot of time looking at old pictures of that time, which was useful mainly because it jogged her memory, and got her talking about certain stories or moments she would not have recalled otherwise./es Helen cooked for 15 every night, adding water to her soups<Great acute detail./pw and preparing five pounds<Ditto./pw of meat at a time. Guests were given two instructions: Announce yourself when you come in, then make yourself at home.

“If we had a castle and unlimited money,” Helen says, “we probably would have had 100 kids living in there.”

There was Randy, Helen’s son from an earlier marriage, who became a record-setting track star. There was his high school rival, Lazar, who had a falling-out with his parents and needed a place to stay. There was Dawn, a white girl from the neighborhood who showed up at school with bruises on her arm. There was Louis Jr., the state’s player of the year in basketball. There were Tyrone and Ernie, the rambunctious twins from New York.<You may have covered this in the how-reported answer but were you able to use foster care records or other documents?/pw Yes. I was able to get those, and they were a big help. I don’t think I’ve ever written a story that relied this much on records./es

Then there was Rumeal, the budding athlete, the center of the Fords’ orbit, the emergency-placement case that led to all the rest.

EVERYONE NOTICED HIS WORK ETHIC before anything else. On weekday mornings during high school, Robinson would strap on a 40-pound vest and run five miles along the Charles River. His coach at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, Mike Jarvis, challenged him to do 100 pushups and sit-ups each day; he did 500 of each instead. He went to Michigan on a recruiting trip and spent most of his time working out with the track coach, quizzing him about ways to improve a vertical jump.

“He worked as hard as any player I’ve known,” says Jarvis, who went on to become a head coach at four colleges. “I can think of two other guys I coached, Patrick Ewing and Michael Jordan, who were in Robinson’s class as far as work ethic.”

Rumeal already looked like a professional athlete by his sophomore year of high school in 1984, with his broad shoulders and barrel chest. He played with a different style from most other point guards: less calculation and finesse, more brute strength and aggressiveness.<Did you watch tapes?/pw I did watch tapes. I also talked to several of his old coaches—and people who coached against him./es Helen sometimes gave him coaching advice at the dinner table: “Go hard to the hoop and stop shooting from so far away.”

Helen and Lou saved money to send their son to five-star basketball camps. Helen rearranged her schedule to attend his games. Rumeal’s birth mother came to one of them during his senior year. She made such a scene in the stands — Helen remembers her repeatedly yelling, “That’s my son!” — that a security guard removed her from the game. Rumeal sought out Helen at halftime, scoreless and distraught, desperate for counsel. “Don’t worry about her,” Helen told him. “Focus on what you have now, on your family and basketball.”

And so he did. He averaged 18 points as a senior and led Rindge & Latin to a high school state championship. In the spring of 1986, he accepted a basketball scholarship to Michigan.

During the 1988-89 season, with Robinson a top scorer and team leader, the Wolverines made it to the Final Four in Seattle. Lou and Helen couldn’t both afford to go, so Helen traveled to the West Coast alone. The next day, friends started up a collection for Lou, picked him up in the middle of his mail route, took him to the airport in a limo and paid for his ticket to Seattle.<*sniffle*/pw He arrived in time to see Helen onstage at the pep rally before the championship game against Seton Hall, leading 2,500 Michigan fans in a cheer.<*sniffle*/pw

Helen and Lou watched Robinson score 14 of his 21 points in the first half. Then with three seconds left in overtime and his team trailing by one, Robinson drove hard to the basket, just as Helen had always instructed. Seton Hall’s Gerald Greene bumped the point guard’s shoulder, resulting in a two-shot foul. One shot to tie. One more to win.

Seton Hall called a timeout to try to force Robinson to consider the stakes. Robinson had been in a similar situation earlier in the season against Wisconsin and missed both free throws, so he had taken at least 100 foul shots during every practice since. Now he blew the sweat off his fingers<Great detail—how’d you get?/pw CBS showed this in the “One Shining Moment” video that year, so I watched that a bunch, which didn’t really feel like work. Who doesn’t love watching One Shining Moment?/es and stepped to the line. Helen and Lou held hands.<Also great—how’d you get?/pw Helen’s recollection, and news articles from the time of the game./es

Swish. Robinson raised his right fist in triumph. A referee threw him the ball again. The arena was silent now. Robinson lofted his second shot. Swish again.

Seton Hall’s last-second attempt hit the backboard and nothing else, and Helen and Lou jumped from their seats as confetti fell from the ceiling.<Gorgeous sentence./pw They fought through the crowd to hug their son. They listened to his postgame news conference; when a reporter asked what he had been thinking about on the free throw line, he said simply, “I was thinking of my parents a lot.”

A few months later, Cambridge organized a city parade in Robinson’s honor. The mayor declared it Rumeal Robinson Day. The high school hung his jersey from the rafters. Hundreds of people lined the streets, and Robinson and his parents rode the parade route in the mayor’s convertible. They drove to City Hall for a brief ceremony, and the three of them stood next to each other on the steps.

In the year to come, Robinson would re-create his winning free throws in the White House Rose Garden, then toss the ball to President George H.W. Bush and say, “C’mon man, you can take a shot.” He would grace the cover of Sports Illustrated, become the 10th pick in the NBA draft, move to a mansion in Atlanta and buy each of his parents a Rolex and a new Mercedes-Benz.<You’ve got some mojo going on here because at this point we’re thinking back to that opening scene and wondering how this could’ve gone so wrong. Structurally, this is pretty much straight chronology with a present-day opening and a lingering mystery about what’s become of Robinson. Did you play with structures at all?/pw This seemed like the natural structure from the beginning—start in the present moment, and then go with straight chronology. It is definitely simple, but I also think that structure is usually pretty effective./es

But first, on the steps of Cambridge City Hall, Rumeal handed Lou his NCAA championship ring and wrapped his parents in an embrace.

“You guys didn’t give me my second chance,” he told them. “You gave me my only chance.”

ROBINSON LEFT FOR ATLANTA in the summer of 1990, after signing a four-year contract worth $4.3 million, and some friends from Cambridge came along. He agreed to launch a record label with them, just because he had always loved music. He invited a new girlfriend in Georgia to move into his spacious home, then extended the offer to his hairdresser too. He had the same craving as his parents: He wanted a crowded house, bustling with activity.

They went out as a group for $500 dinners at steak houses. He attended a boxing match as the special guest of promoter Don King. He sent gaudy bouquets of roses to Helen on her birthday and fancy chocolates to the house on Easter, but his calls home became increasingly infrequent. “He was never a big talker, and I thought he was just a grown man living his life,” Helen says. “But we heard rumors about him blowing his money.”

Early in Rumeal’s second season with the Hawks, Helen asked her son Randy, the track star, to move in with his brother and bring order to his life. Randy went to Atlanta and discovered a mansion with a guesthouse and a garage filled with two Porsches, two Mercedes and a few motorcycles. Then he opened Robinson’s mail and noticed nobody had been paying the electric bill. The power company wanted $2,400 or it would turn off his lights. Randy ordered his brother to pay it.

Still, there was no slowing Robinson’s spending.<How were you able to source all the financial details?/pw Court records detailed this stuff for hundreds of pages, so in the end it was a matter of choosing which details to include./es He invited people to the house for what he called “business meetings” a few times each week, and he made deals for Atlanta real estate, music equipment and designer dogs. He hired a fashion consultant to build his wardrobe as well as an interior designer to work on his house. Sometimes, Randy says, Robinson handed his employees blank checks, trusting them to pay themselves. One contractor stole his dogs and relocated her business to another state using Robinson’s money.

He had never been a drinker, but he threw parties to show off his house and cars. He paid for friends to fly in and visit for a night. Late one morning during the off-season, three of his guests woke up in Robinson’s house expecting to have breakfast with him. They couldn’t find him anywhere, so Randy called his cellphone.

“Where are you?” he asked Robinson.

“I’m out in Brazil,” he said, explaining that he had bought the ticket on a whim the night before.<As you do. What surprised you most about this story? What was the biggest challenge in reporting/writing it?/pw The biggest challenge was trying to address why Rumeal did this, because nobody really seemed to know. The simple answer was that he got in over his head and became financially desperate. But trying to understand the reason behind the betrayal was the hardest and least satisfying part of reporting./es

Meanwhile, Robinson’s play suffered. He occasionally slept through his morning workouts and started to gain weight. He averaged just 5.6 points and 2.8 assists as a rookie in 1990-91. He improved those numbers to 13 points and 5.5 assists during his second season, but his maddening inconsistency made coaches eager to trade him. Robinson drifted to five teams during four more NBA seasons. He almost never started. He played in the CBA and Europe. In 1997, when he was making nearly $1 million as a benchwarmer for the Lakers, American Express sued him for unpaid debts. In 1998, he filed for bankruptcy, and a court forgave his liabilities to three creditors.

He moved to Miami after his retirement in 2002 and lived in a condo on Williams Island, near the opulent homes of Sammy Sosa, Missy Elliott and Whitney Houston.<Okay this may sound naïve but how on earth, if he’d declared bankruptcy?/pw Good question. Bankruptcy usually limits what you own—your assests, and since he rented the place on Williams Island it wouldn’t have counted against him in a bankruptcy hearing. Still, he is a very different type of bankruptcy case. I spent a few days once in Michigan listening to bankruptcy hearings for a story for The Post, and those people were in tattered shirts and mismatched shoes. Not Rumeal./es He started a real-estate development company with plans to attract investors and build a resort called Harmony Cove on 25,000 acres in his Jamaican hometown. He met a stripper named Stephanie Hodge, who had recently dated former Miami Heat forward Chris Gatling; Robinson hired her as his office manager. She was compensated with a company Mercedes and a salary of $150,000.<We’re in the wrong business, dude./pw Pretty good job. But, then again, she did have to live with Rumeal, who was in the process of fleecing his mom./es Point./pw

Robinson’s real estate business never made any money, he would testify, and he never filed tax returns. But he was accomplished at attracting investors. It was something of an obsession — “Rumeal talks about deals all the time, left and right, all day long,” Hodge would later say — and he borrowed money from anyone he could: businessmen from Michigan who remembered his free throws, relatives in Cambridge, loan sharks, a WNBA player.<Great details—how’d you get?/pw Court records. Many of these people testified./es

Although Robinson and his partners traveled to Jamaica and regularly stayed at five-star hotels, they never made any progress building their own. He focused more on what he bought, turning his life into a constant spending spree. Three family members flew to Florida on separate occasions, witnessed his extravagance and asked him to stop. Each time he turned sullen and defensive, they say. “I have billions coming to me in business deals,” he told them.

Randy blamed stubbornness and stupidity for his brother’s money troubles: “He thought he was like an international deal maker.” Perhaps, but money had also become his identity.<Great insight—how did you decide to make this almost psychological declaration and the one that follows? Is this Helen’s POV or yours, or both?/pw This is Helen’s, but it is more mine than anything else in the story. I tend to prefer subtlety in my writing, sometimes to a fault, and at a few points in this story the ESPN editors pushed me to be a little more forceful in describing what we were seeing./es Money distanced him from the memories of the 10-year-old boy who had wandered the halls of an apartment complex with nothing to eat and nowhere to go. “He had come from nothing, and now he couldn’t get enough,” Helen says.

His monthly credit card bills, according to court records, testified to his wanton excess:

Rodeo of New York: $2,050. Coco Cigar: $794. Bodega: $1,491. Louis Vuitton: $1,990. Biltmore Golf Course: $1,592. Circuit City: $14,257. “Laptops,” Robinson later testified.

Bed Bath & Beyond: $1,449. “That might have been a gift,” he said.

Pottery Barn: $2,920. “Just spent some money,” he said. “I don’t know what Pottery Barn is.”<Love how you did this, the repetition of following the line item with an explainer quote. How’d that come to you?/pw I love short, punchy sentences and paragraphs. Every once in a while, they can be so good for the pacing of the story. And his quotes are just so silly and hilarious. In the trail transcript, this exchange—prosecutor reads charge, Rumeal responds—went on for pages and pages, and I guess I wanted a few beats in the story, to mimic that./es

Robinson developed a habit of spending himself into debt every few months, then seeking a major loan to cover his expenses. He borrowed several thousand dollars as many as 10 times from a Florida foreclosure specialist named Rick Preston, who charged him 14 percent to 18 percent interest.

Sometime in 2002 or 2003, Robinson approached Preston about another deal. Would the foreclosure specialist, he asked, have any interest in acquiring an old house near the heart of Cambridge, at 2 Rumeal Robinson Way?

ROBINSON FLEW HOME and showed his mother a series of drawings that he described as architectural plans for Harmony Cove in Jamaica. Lou had handled the couple’s money, but he had died of dementia the previous year. Helen listened as Rumeal said he needed her help to develop Harmony Cove.

“I’m not a rich woman,” Helen told him.

“But you have this house,” Rumeal said.<Chills. Turning point, subtle but alarming./pw

She owned it outright, but Robinson asked her to take out a new loan against the home’s equity. Robinson said he would take that money and use it to fund the project in Jamaica. He said he’d pay her new mortgage. In return, he promised to make Helen an investor in the project. “This could make you a rich woman,” he said. If all went well, he said, she would make $5 million within a few years.

Helen thought the Harmony Cove design looked nice, with its imaginary trees, hotels and casinos. But she didn’t understand the finances; Lou had bought their house in 1951 for less than $8,000 and made the payments himself. She had never dealt with any of it.

“Okay, sure; I trust you,” she told Rumeal. “You’re my son. I’m your mother. Okay.”

On June 16, 2003, Robinson sent Preston to Cambridge to take care of the paperwork. Helen had never met him, but she insisted that he stay at her home. He took her to the city courthouse, where Helen thought she was agreeing to a loan for her son. Instead, she later testified, she unwittingly sold her home. She signed a deed that gave ownership of the house to Preston. Then she went with Preston to the bank, where she thought that the roughly $250,000 she received was a loan. It was, in fact, her proceeds from the sale.

She unknowingly signed over the money to Preston, she says, thinking it would go to the construction of Harmony Cove. “I really just signed here, do this, that, and I was just going through the motions,” she says now. (In court testimony, Preston said that Ford knew she was selling her home.)

During the next few years, Robinson and his friends flipped the house twice in a scheme that grew to involve bankers and housing appraisers throughout the country. Each time, Robinson and his friends made thousands in profits from the sale — money allegedly intended for Harmony Cove but instead wasted on motorcycles and spent paying off other debts.

Preston first sold the house for more than $600,000 to Jorge Rodriguez, a business associate of Robinson’s, who had also obtained $150,000 for the Jamaican development from his mother-in-law. Rodriguez then sold the house to Stephen Hodge, 19, the brother of Robinson’s girlfriend in Miami. Hodge was an unemployed Iraq veteran who lived in Hawaii, but according to court records he managed to secure a loan to buy the house for $1 million.<In your reporting, did you get into the intricacies of how these deals worked? This seems emblematic of what’s going on in the country right now w/r/t predatory lending and underwater mortgages—or no?/pw Yes, very emblematic, which is one of the reasons the story appealed to me in the first place. And this stuff is SUPER confusing. It is easy to see how Helen could have been hoodwinked. It took me a lot of research and several conversations with lawyers to understand the intricacies of this stuff, and much of it was too in the weeds to include in the story. But, like always in reporting, I had to understand it fully to know which parts to include and leave out./es

Robinson had kept up with the loan payments on the house for a time by borrowing from other investors, still convinced that he could eventually make back the cash in Harmony Cove, but the project never earned him a dollar. “I don’t think Rumeal ever believed Helen would actually lose the house, but he was operating in denial,” says Benzan, Helen’s lawyer. “He couldn’t keep up with those debts. Nobody could. He was running in quicksand.” As the years passed and the house’s ownership changed, nobody took care of the mortgage.

In 2007, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door at 2 Rumeal Robinson Way and served Helen with foreclosure papers. “This must be a mistake,” she said. She went to court to bargain for more time and called Robinson. “What in God’s name happened?” she asked him. Robinson promised to take care of it, made a handful of payments, then stopped answering her calls. A sheriff’s deputy came knocking again in March 2009. This time he brought moving trucks.

The next two days were among the worst of Helen’s life. She was living in the house with three of her children and five grandkids, and the relatives scrambled to find new housing. Her youngest son, Louis Jr., then 22, came from Washington to help her pack. They had a lifetime of belongings to organize in two days. Helen, meanwhile, called Robinson and prayed for him to answer. A part of her still believed in her son, because questioning his actions and motives also meant asking tough questions of herself. Much of her image had been built on his story, on the fact that she ushered him from homelessness to stardom. He was her greatest success. So if Robinson was a failure, what would that make her?<I like that you went there—the story isn’t just the litany of what happened but also what it means. This, to me, is a transcendent quality of the piece. How did you decide to deepen it in this way? Do you look for a transcendent quality in all of your stories?/pw I certainly think you hope for a transcendent quality in every story, and I think this turn was important since it is a story as much about Helen as it is about Rumeal. And really, this is the biggest thing he took from her: not the house, or her money, but a sense that she had accomplished something incredible in her life by raising this great, successful kid. That’s more devastating than any of the rest of it, and it is also more human./es

“My mom had such blind faith and love in Rumeal that she was thinking he was going to do something until the last hour,” Louis Jr. says. “I was sitting there bad-mouthing the hell out of this dude, and she was calling him thinking he might pick up. She thought he was going to save the day.”

Instead, the bank changed the locks on the house, and Louis Jr. loaded a U-Haul truck and moved his mother into a one-bedroom apartment in nearby Somerville. Only then, torn from her home, did Helen’s confusion turn to anger. And her anger build to rage. “He betrayed us,” she would say whenever anyone asked about her sudden move. She hired a lawyer who explained the steps behind Robinson’s deception during half a dozen meetings, and each time she grieved again. She discarded most of his basketball memorabilia, and she asked friends not to mention his name.

In September 2009, Robinson was indicted on charges that went far beyond deceiving his mother: federal wire fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and issuing false statements to financial institutions. All of his scheming had finally caught up with him. Federal prosecutors held Robinson’s trial in Iowa because a bank he defrauded was based there. Helen flew to his trial to testify as a witness for the prosecution. She had not seen Robinson for several years when she entered the courtroom. He was sitting at the defense table, dressed in one of his sharp suits. He looked handsome, she thought. She tried to make eye contact, but he looked away. She swore under oath and looked at him again.

“Are you related to Rumeal Robinson?” the lawyer asked.

“Yes sir,” she said.

“What’s your relationship to him?”

“I’m his mother.”

She answered questions for about 30 minutes, briefly recounting her son’s successes and his scams. “He wasn’t raised this way,” she said. The judge dismissed her, and after she left the courtroom she began to cry in an elevator. Then she fainted. A courthouse employee helped her to the staff break room, where she lay on the couch, drank water and sobbed. “It was my breaking point,” she says.

A few days later, after Robinson was found guilty on 11 criminal counts and Helen had traveled back to Massachusetts, the judge issued his sentence. He told Robinson he would spend six and a half years in federal prison.

“You could not handle the money once it got in your hands,” the judge said. “It was like a drug to you.”<It’s interesting that you keep the camera wholly on Helen, and that this story works despite Rumeal’s absence—we never really hear his voice. Was that a function of his inaccessibility? Even though the story is really Helen’s, can you talk a bit about writing about a story subject who declines to participate? Did he testify, by the way?/pw It was mostly a function of his inaccessibility. I tried to get Rumeal—wrote him a few letters in prison, and, after my third attempt, he finally wrote back. He sent a letter in legal jargon that said his name was copyrighted, and we were not allowed to print it. It was a very strange letter. He did testify, so that was helpful, and a lot of those details helped me bring his perspective and his voice into the story./es

TWO YEARS LATER, on a gorgeous fall day, Helen leaves her one-bedroom apartment and drives to work. Her eviction defines every hour of her daily routine: She wakes each night at 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. because she still feels uncomfortable in her apartment. She leaves home at 5 to spend an hour walking on the treadmill at a Gold’s Gym in Cambridge because everything in Cambridge feels more familiar. At night she tries to modify her old recipes to make them for one. She watches sports because she’d rather listen to the announcers than deal with the silence. She prefers football because basketball reminds her of Robinson.

At 67, she still works as a security and safety specialist for the Cambridge elementary schools, devoted to helping troubled kids. On this day, she monitors the lunch rush at a local elementary school, doling out meatball subs and chocolate milk while watching the students come and go.

“I used to feel like I knew them all, trusted them, understood them, could tell where they were headed in life,” she says, eyeing the children, shaking her head. “But people change. They disappoint you. Now I’m not so sure.”

She has not talked to Robinson or tried to contact him since the trial. He is incarcerated in South Carolina. He refused to comment for this story unless he was paid, sending a letter from prison filled with legalese, threatening ESPN The Magazine with copyright infringement and going to the trouble of having it notarized. In that letter, he also wrote that he has appealed his sentence, blaming “inadequate” defense attorneys for the guilty verdict.<Was a mental health assessment ever part of the court proceedings? Just curious./pw Surprisingly, no. I think Rumeal was too vain to go in that direction./es

Helen has been working with a lawyer, Benzan, to try to win back the house, even though she has no money for a down payment. Benzan has known her family for ages and has offered to volunteer his time, spending the past two years untangling a real estate mess that involved a series of fraudulent buyers and victimized banks across the country. He has finally reached a tentative agreement about the house, and on this fall day he wants to explain it to Helen in person. She drives to meet him after the children clear out of the cafeteria at school.

“I’m due for some good news,” she tells him.

Benzan explains that a third party has agreed to buy the house, clean it, repair it and divide it into rental condos. Units will go for about $2,000 a month. One will be reserved for Helen, as long as she pays the landlord.

The new buyers have plans to restore the center wall that Lou had taken down so long ago, when his family needed more space.<Whoa, nice metaphor, rebuilding that wall./pw They hope to carpet the living room where the boys had ridden their bikes. They will paint over the basketball scuffs in the halls.

They’ll clean the house of its history, the good and bad.

“I’m sorry,” the lawyer says. “I know it’s quite a change.”

“I’ll be okay,” Helen says, nodding. “What hasn’t changed?”<What’s Helen’s status now? Update?/pw She is getting back into her house, but the house is all rental units, and she rents one of them. It isn’t a happy ending, exactly, but I think it at least puts her in a place where she is comfortable. Her lawyer, who helped her pro bono, is gearing up to run for Congress. Rumeal is still in jail, and will be for another few years. I saw him written about a few times last month, when Michigan made a run to the Final Four. I didn’t see any of those stories mention his mom, or the house. At least in late March, he is still remembered mostly for those free throws./es

Eli Saslow is a staff writer for the Washington Post and a contributor to ESPN The Magazine. His first book, Ten Letters, was published by Doubleday in 2011. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and daughter.

To read more installments of Annotation Tuesday!, go here.

Saugstad was mummified. She was on her back, her head pointed downhill. Her goggles were off. Her nose ring had been ripped away. She felt the crushing weight of snow on her chest. She could not move her legs. One boot still had a ski attached to it. She could not lift her head because it was locked into the ice.

But she could see the sky. Her face was covered only with loose snow. Her hands, too, stuck out of the snow, one still covered by a pink mitten. Using her hands like windshield wipers, she tried to flick snow away from her mouth. When she clawed at her chest and neck, the crumbs maddeningly slid back onto her face. She grew claustrophobic.

Breathe easy, she told herself. Do not panic. Help will come. She stared at the low, gray clouds. She had not noticed the noise as she hurtled down the mountain. Now, she was suddenly struck by the silence.

The two finalists were Kelley Benham, of the Tampa Bay Times, for “Never Let Go,” an elegant narrative series about her “micro-preemie” daughter, and the Washington Post’s Eli Saslow, author of “Life of a salesman,” a beautifully done piece about a swimming pool salesman struggling in a debilitating economy. For the stories behind the stories: Branch walked a University of Georgia and Twitter audience through “Snow Fall” recently; Benham’s colleague Ben Montgomery talked to her about “Never Let Go” for Storyboard; and Storyboard spoke with Saslow in detail about his salesman piece and more.

For the full list of Pulitzer winners and finalists, go here. Warm congrats to all, and thank you for your work.