What the judges said...

IN AN era of ‘alternative facts,’ the responsibilities of journalists are always increasing. But it is also important to recognise that the real skill of the journalist does not reside just in the facts, but the narrative in which he or she embeds them.

It is not a coincidence that most journalists describe what they produce not as an ‘article’ but as a ‘story’. Journalists present their facts in narrative form because that is the way our brains have been conditioned, over millennia, to make sense of facts and to remember them.

In doing this, journalists take certain liberties with the facts — not by changing them, but by organising them. They are allowed to decide, for instance, which are the most important facts in their narrative, where to put them and how to best engage the reader’s interest. Most of all, they recognise that no narrative can be long enough to contain all the facts, so their tools are, among others, juxtaposition, humour and — above all — the identification and description of details which, although they are only a small part of any story, are significant enough to engage the reader’s imagination and can illuminate the whole narrative, like a spotlight on a crowded stage.

Our overall winner, I feel, knows this in his bones. From a deceptively low-key introduction, he engages us and our imaginations in a fascinating story, through short paragraphs which keep the reader racing ahead, to a conclusion which ties up the events of the narrative in a way many professional journalists would salute.