Thanks to the people at the Nieman Storyboard, which highlights outstanding narrative reporting in media, and to USA Today’s Dan Vergano who spotted its latest and told ksjtracker about it, I just read fast through an astounding job of reporting at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. This regional paper, with this story, burnishes even brighter its  reputation in medical writing.

Reporters Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher serve up an exemplary instance of a health reporting tradition: to find an arresting and dramatic instance of disease and follow one patient’s experiences for a good long time. In this case it’s about a disease nobody had ever seen, the patient is a spunky little boy who captures your heart instantly, and the doctors are relentless, plumbing the full depth of medical science and genetic analysis to come up with rays of hope. There is no conclusion yet. Hope yes, but readers are left hanging. The paper calls the three part series, which ran in late December including photos and videos, One in a Billion: A Boy’s Life, a Medical Mystery.

Just read it. Set some time aside to do it at a sitting.

Also see – The NiemanStory board that highlights it.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 6th, 2011 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Health & Medicine Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.