And the winner for the Best Pulitzer Prize lead is …

And the winner for the Best Pulitzer Prize lead is …

The collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles from this year is all you would need to show that we have lost the art of the great news lead.

Do not misunderstand me. Respect is the only thing I have for the 2019 victors. The reports and stories by the winners represent the best of the best at a time of dwindling resources, including everything from inquiries into the presidency to coverage of school shootings and institutional sexual abuse scandals, corrupt judicial systems, and more.

Without a strong protagonist, excellent work can still be written. Average is sufficient if the material is persuasive.

Some gold coins were in the cash drawer, that's for sure. As the winners of the lead competition for the fifth annual Best Pulitzer Prize, let me give you a brief overview of them. As I've already stated, the only thing you really earn from this is bragging rights. The victors get to buy me lunch at the Banyan coffee shop, assuming they ever make it to St. Pete. I will leave the recommendation.

Unless a tale immediately catches my attention, I will typically simply take into account the lead of the first entry.

Why is a lead a good lead?I appreciate the image used by John McPhees, where he compares a lead to a flashlight that you beam into the story's well.You only need to look far enough ahead to understand what you are getting into—you don't need to see all the way to the bottom.

Yesterday afternoon in Washington Square Park, a 17-year-old kid chased his pet squirrel up a tree, setting off a chain of events that resulted in 22 arrests and eight injuries, including five police officers.

You can decide which of these you prefer above that diamond. Please start the drum roll.

CAIRO (AP) The 15 policemen' accents were obviously foreign from the United Arab Emirates, even though they covered their faces with headdresses when they arrived at the prison in southern Yemen.

The captives were lined up and told to lie down and undress. The cops then claimed to be searching for illegal telephones as they probed each prisoner's anal cavity.

The males cried out and screamed. Dogs with barks intimidated anyone who refused, and they were beaten until they bled.

Seven witnesses who spoke with The Associated Press said that hundreds of prisoners at Beir Ahmed jail in the southern city of Aden experienced similar sexual abuse on March 10. Accounts of the widespread maltreatment provide insight into a world of widespread sexual abuse and impunity in Yemeni jails under UAE administration.

Analysis: A lead including the term "anal cavity" will be more noticeable. Its use here, along with its specificity, provides readers with the proof they need to comprehend the extent of this horrifying prisoner torture. It made me think of the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib by American guards. Anecdote followed by nut paragraph was once thought to be an unusual pattern. After the inverted pyramid was overturned in the final decades of the 20th century, attempts were made to dramatize the news by adopting a new standard. It still has usefulness and vigor.

First place finalist:

Authorities were pretty tired with Bobby Byrd by the time they pulled him out of the Red River in 2011.

After leading authorities on a chase through Shreveport's downtown and into Bossier City, he abandoned his car and dove into the water.

He got bit by a police dog that paddled out. Subsequently, the officers used "distraction strikes" to batter him on the riverside, claiming he persisted in resisting. Byrd had handcuffs on his wrists, a fractured nose, an injured kidney, and broken eye sockets when he arrived at the hospital.

Byrd's car matched the description of the tan minivan that the police had been searching for a serial burglar in. However, it was his unwillingness to put an end to any theft that put him in the hands of a Caddo Parish jury.

Analysis: It's generally accepted that going back into a story is harmful. However, it's beneficial to introduce a story slowly. This is particularly valid if you're going to run across technical problems with the criminal justice system. Setting a leisurely pace for a story includes using short and medium-length phrases. Periods are like stop signs.

Second place finalist:

Hannah Dreier, co-published with New York magazine in ProPublica: A Betrayal The youth gave cops detailed information about his gang, MS-13. He was targeted for death and deportation in exchange for feature writing.

If Henry is slain, his death can be linked to a silent moment in his 11th grade English class in the fall of 2016, when he was slouching in his normal seat by the door. A scrawny young man with a messy hairstyle, he had been reflecting a lot on his life and its possible conclusion. His notepad was open, with blank pages. With his sweatshirt pulled over his earbuds, he put on a Spanish ballad and began to compose.

He started out by describing his feelings of anxiety, pressure, and inadequacy. It could have been any 17-year-old's journal post, but this one described machete-assisted killings in Long Island suburbs. Five Brentwood High School students had already died at the hands of Henry's gang, MS-13. His companions were the murderers. And now they were expecting him to go on the rampage with them.

Students strained to see what he was so intensely working on. But Henry was engrossed on what was turning out to be an autobiography, his notebook shielded by an arm. He was taken back in time to a vast coconut grove next to his grandfather's El Salvadorian home. Standing before him was a man wearing a blindfold, draped between two trees with his arms and legs arranged in an X pattern. There were MS-13 members all around him, supporting him. El Destroyer, the gang's commander, then moved forward. He was in his sixties and had tattoos of the letters MS on his back, chest, and face. In his hand, a double-edged machete gleamed. He desired for Henry to murder the man wearing a blindfold.

Hannah Dreier is the winner of the Feature Writing Prize, so we know that she will write well and convey compelling stories. Take note of how deftly she transitions between the terrifying memory to El Salvador and the present day in that classroom; the transition is so seamless that you hardly realize it. This story of a single teenage boy will come to represent the most difficult moral issues related to America's unsolvable immigration situation, therefore anyone who believes that feature writing is weaker than news writing should read it.

Third place finalist:

Simon Lewis and Antoni Slodkowski, Massacre in Myanmar: How Myanmar forces torched, robbed, and slaughtered in a secluded community, International Reporting, with noteworthy contributions from Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo (journalists from Reuters recently released from prison in Myanmar).

Myanmar's INN DIN The ten Rohingya Muslim hostages, bound together, observed their Buddhist neighbors excavate a shallow grave. All ten of them lay dead early on September 2nd. Buddhist people killed at least two of them with knives. Two gravediggers said that the remaining individuals were shot by troops from Myanmar.

Soe Chay, 55, a retired soldier from the Buddhist community in Inn Dins, Rakhine, claimed to have helped dig the hole and seen the killings. "One grave for ten people," he stated. He claimed that the soldiers had shot each victim two or three times. Some were still making noises as they were being buried. Some had already passed away.

The murders in the seaside village of Inn Din signaled the start of yet another horrific round of ethnic conflict in northern Rakhine state, which lies on the western edge of Myanmar. Since August, around 690,000 Muslims from the Rohingya ethnic group have left their communities and walked into Bangladesh. As of October, not one of Inn Dins 6,000 Rohingya was still living in the village.

This is the only lead where a source is actually quoted, turning into a narrator himself and disclosing the horrifying possibility that some victims were buried alive. Once more, we reach a now-familiar maneuver in this type of reporting: A paragraph or two introduces the story to us. A direct quotation from a significant source is used in the second paragraph to bolster the first. In the third paragraph, the nut, so to speak, rips back the curtain and uses figures to show the larger, numbing truth.

It was rightfully hailed when the two imprisoned journalists who worked on this story were released.

I'm still not very fond of the brief, powerful lead. Maybe, Pulitzer fans, next year. Congratulation to all of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winners in the interim.

An edited image appeared in a Facebook post that appeared to be a screengrab from a popular TMZ video.

A wide range of free news from various sources is now available to readers. Instead, news organizations are emphasizing upscale local news.

Although deepfake detection technology is advancing, researchers claim that solutions for audio deepfake identification are still lagging behind.

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