News commentary

My favorite short newspaper story of 2024, appreciated and analyzed

Poynter · Roy Peter Clark · last updated

July 13 marked the first anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, an attack that bloodied the president and killed one of his supporters.

It brought to mind a newspaper story, a short piece in The New York Times written by Shawn McCreesh, who was covering the Trump campaign. It was a finalist in Poynter’s recently established short writing competition, part of the Poynter Journalism Prizes

This story is so good that it deserves special critical attention, what I call X-ray reading, a form of interpretation designed to reveal the hidden architecture of the piece.

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