Tony Bartelme: Senior Projects Reporter, Charleston Post & Courier
Bartelme is a longtimer: 35 years at the Post & Courier, in which time he's been a finalist for 4 Pulitzer Prizes and won 80 awards.
Tony is the senior projects reporter for the Charleston Post and Courier, for whom he has worked for 35 years. He's a 4-time Pulitzer Prize finalist with one designation in four different categories (explanatory, breaking, feature, and local reporting).
He's also the author of 4 books, most recently A Surgeon in the Village, an American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa in 2017. And he's done other recent reporting in both Greenland and Africa as well, as relates to the origin of hurricanes that have hit South Carolina.
Tony shared how his reporting on hurricanes came together, how an Elvis impersonator helped him explain what happened as they watched glaciers met, what goes into writing cinematically, and how an angeltree played a pivotal role in his career. He also discussed the evolving mission of local newspapers amid current media dynamics.
Was there a turning point writing-wise for you?
When I got to this Greenville Piedmont afternoon paper, an editor comes over to me. He comes over to me with a press release, which is always a bad sign.
And so, he says, all right, write me up a couple of paragraphs. It was right before Christmas and the press release says there's an angel tree at the Greenville mall. And I'm thinking this is not why I went into journalism, so out of rage more than anything, and also, I was hungry at lunchtime, I go to the Greenville Mall to look at this stupid angel tree. It's just a few days before Christmas and I noticed that there weren't any ornaments on this angel tree.
Angel trees are such that you go, you buy an ornament, and that's a present for a needy child. So, I decided to go back and instead of writing a couple of paragraphs, I crafted a story with a little bit of writing flair about this angel tree without any ornaments. Instead of just a paragraph at the back of the paper like the editor had wanted, it was on the front page of the local section.
And then the next day I heard that that tree was covered with ornaments. And I thought, okay, if you take a little time with your writing, go a little deeper beyond the obvious, you can help somebody.
How do you go about picking your projects?
It's a mix. Most of the time I have a conversation with somebody and that leads to more conversations. And then I'll often try to find something that other people have missed.
A good example might be our project in Greenland. Nobody had ever talked about how in Greenland, the massive amount of ice that just sits up there on land is so much mass that it actually exerts a gravitational pull. Something I'd never heard of. And what I also hadn't ever heard of was that this ice pulls the ocean toward it, kind of like a miniature moon.
And this also pulls the ocean, at the other end of this force, it pulls the ocean away from our coast. We're literally affecting our sea rise, our sea level. I'd read about that in a scientific journal. And then I read it in another place. I think a Harvard professor had done something on it, but it had never made it into the national media, media stream.
And I thought, wow, okay, that's different.
What did you do next?
How do you tell that story? Do you just sit there and just write up a couple of graphs, you make a couple of phone calls. I got a grant from the Pulitzer Center, which is fantastic group, to go to Greenland and went with a photographer and she was kind of like, oh, what are we going to do, what are we going to take pictures of?
I said, we're just going to go watch the ice melt. And we'll take it from there. And that's kind of what we did. Get the kind of details and color that you can get that makes a well-told story.
When you're out there and you're watching the ice melt or whatever it is that you're doing and you're trying to develop characters, what does that look like? Like if I was watching you do that, what would I see?
So that's the fun part of journalism. That's the treasure hunt. So how do you go watch the ice melt? Well, there's no way to get to some of these places where it's really melting dramatically, other than to fly over it. So, we rented a plane. One time we hiked. Oh, we took a boat to another glacier to watch the ice melt. I had spent about a year doing some pre-reporting on this and I had gotten to know a scientist from NASA who was doing experiments by throwing thermometers into the ocean around melting ice sheets. He happened to be there when we were there, and so we got to watch him do his thing.
And, and the cool thing about him was that he was an Elvis impersonator on the side. So, climate Elvis. That was our character. I needed that because telling the climate change story is a total bummer. I'm really into this stuff and I can't read the stories because it's too depressing. So, I, you want to find an interesting character who takes you outside of that misery and yeah, an Elvis impersonator is a nice way to ease people into the story.
Is there any cinematic influence in your work?
Thanks for noting that. When you're writing a narrative, a more complex piece, you're really stringing scenes together and to get a scene, you have to either experience or do an incredible amount of reporting to fill in all those pixels.
And that's what the fun part is, getting in somebody's head so you can write about what they were thinking and what did they see? What did they hear? What did they smell when the tree fell? Scenes are the pearls on a string that you string together for a lot of stories.
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