Here at the magazine, you might say we have a thing about marginalia. So perhaps it's not a surprise that I'm mildly infatuated with Niemann Lab's Annotation Tuesday! (That's not an unwarranted exclamation mark.) It's a weekly series in which authors answer questions about their reporting and writing, which is obviously cool. (Who doesn't want to know how a reporter got a witness to talk? Or where that detail about the marigolds came from?) But Annotation Tuesday! serves up the answers in the body of the story itself — kind of like the obsessive highlights and notes I tend to make with my Kindle, but in this case with actual answers.
"The Innocent Man," a 28,000-word article that ran in Texas Monthly's November and December issues, won a National Magazine Award for feature writing last week. In her exchange with Niemann Storyboard, Pamela Colloff, the article's author, admits that she was afraid people were not going to read the (very, very) long piece, and she was surprised, gratified even, that readers wrote angry letters in protest when she ended the first installment with a huge cliffhanger. (In one annotation, she suggests a possible explanation for her skill in structuring a story: "Can you tell I watched a lot of soap operas as a kid?")
There's a lot to unpack from Colloff's reporting of the wrongful conviction of Michael Morton, who served 25 years in prison for his wife's murder. His story will probably always raise more questions for me than can be answered. But I devoured the revelation that a description of Morton's last meal with his wife came from an overlooked note in the case file, or the fact that even Colloff's mammoth word count didn't leave room for every bit of exculpatory evidence ignored by investigators.
Maybe best of all, Colloff's responses show how humbly she approached the material and how concerned she was with the reader's response. For those who spend their days thinking about how to make a reading experience better, it's a good reminder of what an asset vulnerability can be.
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