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How much time did you spend with Casey Jones for the story?
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I talked to him on the phone for about an hour initially. We emailed back and forth after that. The photographer and I went to a talk he gave at a church on Sunday morning and shot pictures. We went to Mass with him and his family. Then were at his house from maybe noon till 7:00 that night.
Then I rode on the plane with him the next morning. He had been upgraded to first class for life, and whoever travels with him also upgrades. But the difference between the fares was [hundreds of dollars]. It seemed like an ethical problem for me to take the upgrade, and the paper didn’t have the money to pay for it. So he swapped seats with some lucky guy, and he came back to sit with me.
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What other reporting did you do for this piece?
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I also read all the stories I could find about the plane crash itself. And [Jones] had done a television program where they had had asked him to keep a video diary the first week after the crash. Some clips from it were on YouTube, but he sent me the whole thing.
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Your narrative arc seems simple at first, but you sneak in a lot of chronological shifts and backstory. Can you talk about how you decided to structure Casey Jones' story?
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I wanted to frame the piece around the trip. I knew I wanted to see him boarding the plane in the first section. The next section was the closest thing I write to a nut graf; my editor Mike wanted to bring everybody in. That’s why the second person voice is in there. Melding the background and the present in the third section was a little tough.
Then it got easy—I got to narrate the crash. Jones was a very introspective and religious man. He’d thought about these things a lot, which made it great to interview him. His narration of that flight took almost an hour during the interview process. We just really slowed it down. It had really only been about 23 minutes.
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Did you consider trying to insert more context on post-traumatic stress disorder into the piece?
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No. My editor is usually the one to tell me, “Let’s broaden this,” or “let’s tighten the focus.” He said there would be so many pieces done about the survivors that we should just keep the lens focused on Casey. So I was able to focus on what the effects on him were specifically, rather than interviewing some expert and writing about what post traumatic stress disorder is and does.
At first, when I heard that he’d already been back in the air, I thought, “Oh, shoot. He’s already flown a few times.” But then I realized it was a gift that he’d already flown, because even after he had done it, the crash was still affecting him.
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In this piece and others you’ve written, you propel the reader quickly and effectively into intimacy with your subjects. What are your strategies for creating this intimacy?
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My goal is usually to take the readers with me wherever I go. One of the stupidest stories I ever did got the biggest response. It was an “up all night” piece about what happens between midnight and 6:00 am. I had all these old ladies calling me up and saying, “I’m never up that late, and I didn’t know about any of this.” It was so gratifying to take them someplace they would never go.
I try really hard not to be in my stories. On some of the chat boards, some of the negative comments [on the Jones piece] were about the end of the story, where Casey holds the hand of a “woman.” That was me, but I didn’t want to put in that it was a reporter.
We do talk about those kind of things. When I did the last big profile of Evel Knievel, I called myself a visitor. I ask my editor to make the call—I defer to him on things like that.
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We’ve highlighted a lot of your narratives on our site, and one of them just won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Do you have any tips to offer?
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One lesson from this story is to go back. I covered news for 10 years before I ever did features. It seemed then like the stories would always be better if you could wait a couple weeks. And it’s true. For this story, I had Casey all to myself—I didn’t have to compete with anyone. And his story was still interesting six weeks later.
The other lesson is to ask. Some people wouldn’t ask, “Can I ride with you on the plane?” But he said, “Sure.” When you’re willing to ask for access, most people will give it to you. I’m so lucky to get the access I do. If I hadn’t been able to fly with Casey, it would have been just another story with an interview and a microphone.
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