The best journalism of 2020

For years, since high school, I’ve been ranking my favorite journalism stories of the year. Usually in a textedit document saved to my desktop and shared with no one.

I have this habit of reading stories and then… well I copy them into a Word document, save them and file them away for future use. Used to be I’d re-read my favorites for inspiration before writing big stories when I was a reporter. Now, these stories go under my curriculum folder to be hopefully taught in the future.

Regardless, at the end of all my newsletters this year I’ve added a link to the best story I’d read that week, and many of you seemed to like that. So I thought I’d share my list of the five best stories I read this year and a little bit on why.

For transparency, my taste is likely different than yours. There’s been some powerful, important investigative work by the New York Times, Washington Post and other major outlets this year. But what I like most — and value most — is narrative storytelling. I think introducing us to people, setting the scene, writing detail, telling us the full story, is journalism at its finest. So these stories below may not win Pulitzer’s (though I think No. 1 has a shot), but these five use habits of reporters and news outlets that need to continue.

If I had one main critique of journalism in 2020 (beyond the usuals of focusing far too much on Twitter and self-congratulating just a bit too much) its that the industry did not do a good job of putting a face on tragedy. There’s been a lack of personalization to the 270,000 deaths due to COVID. I’m hoping as we inch closer to the end of the year, there have been projects in place by media outlets to tell those stories. Part of the problem with COVID is so much of the horror goes on behind the scenes, away from public view. What we cannot see, we cannot full understand. Much of the work that’s been done about tragedy this year has been from 30,000 feet, because getting inside those hospital doors is so, so difficult.

However, in a few of the follow examples, reporters were able to get through those doors and show us so we could truly understand. That’s what we need, more than ever, is truly showing showing rather than telling. That is what shapes minds and opinions. That cannot be disputed, either. I think a few of these stories did really did that well.

So, without further ado, here are my five(ish) favorites of the year.

5. It is a terrible irony that Kobe Bryant should fall from the sky, Esquire 

Strongest part:

“Kobe Bryant died on Sunday with one of the young women in his life, and how you will come to measure his life has to be judged by how deeply you believe that he corrected his grievous fault through the life he lived afterwards, and how deeply you believe that he corrected that fault, immediately and beautifully, and in midair.”

This is the piece of writing that I’ll remember years from now when I think about Kobe Bryant. It reminded me that, a few years before Bryant’s death, The Washington Post did a long story on Bryant’s ventures and what he was up to in his life. And there was pushback because very little of the story addressed his sexual assault allegation. This was in the wake of Me Too and Bryant was quiet during the entire era. Had Bryant done what he did in 2015, he might’ve been fired. Might be what we know Ray Rice to be now, or worse. 

So when Bryant died, there was this interesting moment. Bryant was such a large figure in sports for so many reasons, and his death was so sudden and so tragic that it took everyone’s breath away for a moment. I was covering Nebraska basketball at the time, and I remember going to practice the day after Bryant’s death, and it was as if there’d been a death in everyone’s family. The only thing players or coaches wanted to talk about was Bryant. So that was real. But much of the journalism world was trying to figure out how to write about Bryant’s life, which was great in many ways, but would always have this black mark on it. 

And this is why this story was so important. It both addresses the incident, and tries to reconcile the way we feel about Kobe. He was a champion of women’s sports, had died going to coach his daughter’s basketball team, had seemed to change who he was. But still, it felt somewhat incomplete, that feeling of his death. And this masterfully makes us think critically about that, while also honoring one of the greatest basketball players of all time. 

5b. How can Kobe Bryant be gone? His legend wasn’t supposed to end this way, LA Times

You can feel the anger and the emotion in this column. It is voice as best you can write voice. The line about Kobe growing old and becoming a mentor to the next generation is something I’ve thought about often. 

5c. Remembering Gigi Bryant, The Athletic

While the world wrote about Kobe Bryant, one reporter took a moment to give Gigi Bryant an obituary that tore my heart to shreds. There wasn’t a lot to go off of, as she was just a little girl. But it was important to acknowledge there were more people in that helicopter, and one of them had a bright future ahead. A terrible story that was so important and I think was very appreciated. 

4. The president is sick but his followers feel great, Washington Post

Strongest part: 

On Sunday there were camping chairs, takeout from Panera, coffee from 7-Eleven. There were bouquets of roses and sunflowers heaped on the Walter Reed sign, next to burning candles scented like fresh linen. It was a perfect day: a gentle sun, a cool breeze, a reason to congregate outside and feel a part of something as everything falls apart.

John and Carri drove separately from Pennsylvania, he from Scranton starting at 10:30 Saturday night, she from outside of Philadelphia starting at 3:30 Sunday morning. John slept in his car. Neither would give their last names, out of a combination of bashfulness and distrust in the media.

“My heart pulled me here,” Carri said.

“I wanted to see the emotion,” John said.

Two things to acknowledge really quickly here. Try, for a moment, to erase whatever partisan opinion you have about Trump or COVID. As a reporting venture, this is near perfect deadline writing. It’s man on the street interviews, it’s setting the scene, and it’s writing about absurdity in a direct and revealing way. 2020 was absurd, and the President of the United States contracting a deadly disease just 30 days before the election was just a footnote of it. And this really makes readers reconcile with just how incredible the President being in the hospital really is. 

It’s also a wonderful, wonderful allegory for America in 2020: divided. This reporter captures that, with arguments back and forth between an actual divide, the road, all while Trump watches from far away and literally in this case looms overhead from the hospital room. The hardest part about a story like this is keeping it focused. This story is about so many things: race, religion, truth, trust, the election, Joe Biden, Trump, COVID. But in that way, it is about one central thing: 2020 being 2020.

3. A desperate rescue: a father’s heartbreaking attempt to save his family from a raging fire, Statesman Journal

Strongest part:

Back in the Jeep, struggling to navigate a road once so familiar but now shrouded by smoke-filled darkness, Chris almost ran over what looked like a bikini-clad woman on the road. Once he was closer, he realized she was wearing underwear. Her hair was singed, her mouth looked almost black, and her bare feet were severely burned.

He impatiently tried to help her into his car, explaining how he needed to find his wife and son, feeling like she was resisting.

Finally, she spoke. "I am your wife.”

This is an all-time lead. This is a lead you’ll read a journalism workshops for years to come. It checks off all the boxes. 

Boom, we’re dropped in a moment and the stakes are set. A man is driving in his car, fire surrounding him, with a mission: he needs to find his family. We have a very quick, very revealing moment where the man turns away someone because the Jeep is headed further into the forest, showing us that this guy is willing to go into the belly of the beast to find his family. We don’t say he’s noble, but we show it, and we’re now full-on cheering for our hero behind the wheel. Then we get this incredible moment where he saves his wife, who he can’t even recognize, showing the destruction of this fire. And then the lede ends with the rest of the task: finding their son. 

The story grabs you and doesn’t let go, and makes you stick around because you have to know what happens. 

It is a lede that epitomizes what needs to be done more often in reporting: show us faces, show us moments, so we can care. It is difficult to connect to a wildfire. Most of us haven’t seen one. But put a man in a Jeep finding his family, and we can connect that to any number of books, movies, TV shows, or even personal experiences. We know the trope of trying to save family. We recognize it. And immediately, we’re locked in. We’re engaged. And now we care about the wildfires. We care about the man in the Jeep, and therefore the wildfires. 

This story is short, and loses momentum at times. But this story went viral and cut through the noise and put a face on this tragedy. A local outlet, too. There’s power there. 

2. Death without ritual: inside a funeral home in the nation’s hardest-hit city, the struggle to deal with surging deaths in the coronavirus pandemic, Washington Post

Strongest part:

They stood there a moment saying nothing, and then the phone rang, and the front doorbell rang, and now Omar was sitting with a man in a mask and a windbreaker, explaining the documents he had to sign.

“The crematory will probably take some time, probably until next Monday,” he said, writing down a date that was one week away because the crematoriums were getting booked.

It was near 2 p.m. There were nine bodies downstairs and still more to pick up. The phone rang.

It is so hard to write about chaos. Because often, when trying to really show chaos, your story can sound disjointed. It can sound like rambling thoughts, random anecdotes. It’s hard to capture a full, complete story like that, but this does, and does it so, so well. With all these short, choppy sentences, you almost feel out of breath after reading it, which is the point. It truly does feel like you’re sitting in this funeral home, that you are sitting there with a mask, sweating, stuffy, hearing the phone ring, hearing the doorbell ring, driving around in the car, doing a job that simply can’t be done. 

This story could’ve easily been a short 600 word news story about how funeral homes were becoming overwhelmed. But that gets lost on B2 and at the bottom of the webpage. That doesn’t do much to move the heart. When dealing with tragedy on the scale we have in this country, you gotta show people for them to understand. And this does that. It places you immediately in the lives of those who are dealing with the impact of COVID, and makes you consider what it really must be like. 

A general rule of journalism is the larger the story, the smaller your story. This large, global story is boiled down to a few people in an office and a phone ringing off the hook. It is difficult for readers to relate to a pandemic. But they can relate to a phone ringing, and being busy at a job. And connecting those two thoughts is important, and done so well here. 

This story was one of the first I saw that placed a reporter in the middle of the tragedy and what the reporter does so well is just observing and taking notes, then emptying that notebook to set the tone of the entire story. Tone is something often overlooked, and rarely taken seriously. But tone here is important. The tone is anxious. The tone is fear. The story is about death without a ritual, and the story itself shows why there is no ritual: because there is no time. And because there’s no time for the ritual, it’s rarely showed, because it hardly exists. It’s a meta-reporting tactic that works brilliantly. 

April was an anxious, horrible time in this country. This story shares a slice of why.  

1. 24 hours at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, New Yorker

Strongest part:

“If you got close enough to the buildings, you could hear various things attached to them humming. Hundreds of yards away, the waves were coming in quietly. As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room.”

This 24-hour capture of New York City at the height of the pandemic is extraordinary work and should be considered for the Pulitzer prize in feature reporting. But it’s not just good because it’s “good.” It’s the best of the year because this story is important for many reasons. 

First off, if you’ve clicked on that link, you can see this thing is a monster. Wouldn’t shock me if this was more than 20,000 words or so. And it’s important to note that stories that are long are not inherently good. There’s a line you have to toe when writing an exhaustive story: is it “exhaustive” or is it exhausting? And this story does dance on that line. Anecdote after anecdote pile up, from stories about weed deals, rappers, Seth Meyers working on his monologue, a bus driver and on and on and on. There’s a small part that makes you wonder if this could be split up into 50 small stories to pepper the magazine. 

But the best journalism stops time and captures it for a reason, and this reason is essential: to make sure future generations understand what 2020 looked like. The trop of a “day in the life” is easy, yes. We did it at the Omaha World-Herald when I was a reporter. But to put 50 writers and dozens of photographers to work, the planning it takes and the common voice of the entire piece makes this truly a masterclass. The thing reads like a novel or a movie. You could shoot this as a movie. You can see it, can’t you?

Yes, this is exhausting. But if anyone ever asks you what 2020 was like, and you want to explain the anxiety, the stress, the pain, suffering and small joys, this is the story you show them. And that’s why this is the best. Because in a year that was so unbelievable, we need something to prove it. This, exhaustively, does. 

Honorable mentions: 

The worst-case scenario, Washington Post 

Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat are in a barista battle, ESPN

The hero of Goodall Park: inside a true-crime drama 50 years in the making, ESPN