Writing short wins awards

Poynter has an interview up with Brady Dennis, night cops reporter at the St. Petersburg Times. Dennis won this year's Ernie Pyle award for human interest writing. You're probably wondering now why I'm posting this on a design blog, but this wasn't just any old human interest story. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a typical human interest story. Now imagine yourself designing it. Ugh, right? Requesting space, aruging about trimming two inches of the 80-inch narritive. Assuring the photo department you will do thier work justice despite the monstrosity in front of you. Well, here's what Dennis did. His feature, or series of them rather, was titled 300 Words. Yup. That's about it. Each piece highlighted a "regular" person and came in under nine inches. About once a month Dennis and photographer Chris Zuppa get together to tell their stories on the SPT's local front.

Dennis says in his interview:

I learned it doesn't take 3,000 words to put together a beginning, middle and end. A good story is a good story, no matter the length. And sometimes the shorter ones turn out [to be] more powerful than the windy ones.

That said, there's a risk of sounding like I'm advocating super-short stories with no traditional nut graph. Not so. I believe no matter how long or short the story, people should know why it is important and worth their time. It's not enough just to paint a pretty picture. We must strive to tell them something about the world that matters, to be journalists and not simply storytellers. Hopefully, in a non-traditional way, "300 Words" does that.

Refreshing and award winning! Read the Poynter story here. Read Dennis' work here and here, and if anyone from the SPT would like to send along some examples of how this was handled on your local fronts please pass 'em on to nicole.bogdas@gmail.com.