Bill Kirtz / Poynter Online

Details. Details. Details. Top writers and editors last weekend called them the engine that drives every compelling story.

Their comments came at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston. Speakers offered tips on dramatizing investigations, doing narrative on deadline, identifying writing flaws and enhancing stories with multimedia.

Washington Post reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest, who uncovered scandalous conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, said shoe leather reporting, not fine writing, drove their probe.

Hull, a five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, said, “We didn’t think of narrative, voice, sequencing, empathy or storytelling” when they started. “But all these elements” found their way into their series. By immersing themselves in the squalor that wounded veterans endured, she said, they got the specifics that made the story “pop to life in the way traditional investigative reporting doesn’t.”

Because they “lived and breathed the story for four months,” Hull said, they picked up telling details, like the mold and cockroaches limbless soldiers lived with, like the blue ribbon the wife of a brain-damaged soldier tied to his bedroom door so he’d know which room was his.

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