Читать книгу Feature Writing and Reporting - Jennifer Brannock Cox - Страница 55

Washington Post Executive Editor Philip L. Graham once called news “the first rough draft of history.” Journalists are responsible for documenting news events, preserving them for generations who will use lessons learned to make decisions about the future. But the value of news is not just its documentation; journalists’ ability to add context and meaning to those news events helps readers put the past, present and future in perspective.

Historical features can be used to help our readers learn about or reflect on important pieces of the community’s past. When conflicts flared in 2017 surrounding monuments honoring Civil War Confederate fighters, many journalists wrote articles explaining the history of protested statues, plaques and memorials in their community to help readers more fully understand the issues.

The controversial statue “Silent Sam” stands guard on-campus at UNC- Chapel Hill before it was toppled by protesters in 2018.

Yellowspacehopper at English Wikipedia via Wikimedia

Reporters Jane Stancill and Andrew Carter of The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, produced a detailed historical feature to help readers put the removal of Confederate monuments in perspective. Protestors pulled one such monument—a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier known as “Silent Sam”—from its platform near the entrance to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus in 2018. The event fueled shouts of excitement from people on one side of the argument and shouts of anger from those on the other. But most of all, the debate on what to do with the statue prompted confusion. Who was “Silent Sam”? Where had he come from? What had his significance been then, and what was it now? Stancill and Carter addressed these questions and more in their five-chapter article, which walks readers from the present to the past and then into the future, using a mix of archival documents and contemporary quotes to give readers a sense of how emotions have varied over the years and why conflicts over the statue rage on today.