Saving Matt: How many people saved a life on the sidelines
This story has great pace, fine detail and got huge reader response.
We admired the sequencing of events in this piece, the driving pace. It focuses on the remarkably coordinated effort it took to save a young football player's life. We asked Kevin Robbins to tell us more about his work on the story and about readers' response. Here's what he e-mailed us:
"The episode itself happened on Friday, Sept. 15, in College Station, about 100 miles from Austin. An editor and I talked about the story the next day. Rick and I began interviewing Tuesday. It took me about four hours to write the draft, from 11 p.m. Wednesday to 3 a.m. Thursday (after the kids went to bed). What was published was essentially what I wrote that night, with the exception of a new ending that I did the next day. The story ran on Friday Sept. 22, a week after the news event.
"All told, we spent two long working days reporting the story and five or six hours writing it.
"This story generated the most intense reader response of any I've written in my six years in Austin. We got e-mails from all over the world. They were 100 percent positive. People seemed to need to read a story like this. Something about the story—the elements of community, heroism and calm cooperation—seemed to touch them.
"On the day the story was published, 'Saving Matt' became the most e-mailed piece of the month from our site. It also remains among the 10 most-printed stories from statesman.com. Days after publication we were still hearing from people; it was still being emailed; it was still being printed.
"One reader wrote that the story was 'the talk of the town.' I'm glad that newspaper stories can still be the talk of any town, especially a big and smart city like Austin.
"A good lesson: Worthwhile narratives don't have to take forever. Not all of them, anyway."