Mark Schleifstein looks at every aspect of his upcoming stories. While
talking about his story on Louisiana fisheries and land erosion
Schleifstein did tons of research on the problem and potential problems
so that he knew what he was talking about in interviews.
Research also helps when people don’t exactly tell you the truth.
Schleifstein mentioned he did some research in Japan. I know you might be
thinking what could Japan possibly have to do with the fisheries in
Louisiana. He went to Japan because of the demand for tuna to be used in
sushi that comes from Louisiana.
Research was also done on how places like Alaska had individual quotas
that helped prevent over harvesting and how people in New England had to
stop fishing because of over harvesting.
Thailand was another stop made to look at how shrimp farms were created in
order to protect the shrimp population and how some of the land had been
polluted to make the farms. Holes were made and had water and shrimp
dumped into them. After time the shrimp would pollute the water with feces
and then the farmers would move on to the next hole leaving the previous
one almost unusable.
On a different story Schleifstein found out that some labs were dumping
toxic chemicals that contained small amounts of uranium and radon into a
river. The next day he called the water treatment plant to see if they
could detect the chemicals and it turned out the treatment plant had no
knowledge of this. While the last example may be more obvious than the
others it is not something you might think of automatically.
He tied all of this seemingly unrelated data into very relevant
information that he was able to use to strengthen the quality of the
story. This is one of the abilities that can make a good reporter great.
It is this ability that I think is a main reason he has won three Pulitzer
Prizes.
--Kyle Evans
No comments:
Post a Comment