If you’ve ever struggled to wrestle a complicated and emotionally charged story to the ground, you should watch this SFJ webinar.

Katie Engelhart, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, talked about her winning piece, “The Mother Who Changed: A Story of Dementia,” at a virtual Society for Features Journalism event on Oct. 15, 2024.

Engelhart’s New York Times Magazine story sets out to explore a difficult philosophical question: “When cognitive decline changes people, should we respect their new desires?”

Engelhart was interviewed by Maria Carrillo, a veteran editor who has served as a Pulitzer juror six times. Their conversation is helpful for any journalist who embarks on telling a deep story that requires sifting through hours of recorded interviews and reams of documents. You can watch a recording of it here.

“When I first set out to do this, I thought this was going to be a story about elder abuse, and hopefully I’d get to the alleged abuser and figure it all out,” Engelhart told Carrillo. “It was only in the course of reporting that I realized that the story was a lot more complicated, and that this abuser character had a story of his own.”

Engelhart and Carrillo discussed a wide range of skills and techniques that can help journalists hone their craft, including how to:

• build trust with story sources;

• mine court documents — ideally after the discovery phase of a lawsuit is over;

• embrace a messy story rather than retreat from it;

• make sense of hours and hours of recorded interviews;

• create detailed timelines to keep track of important details and moments;

• use word processing programs like Scrivener to organize materials and build an outline;

• edit with patience, clarity and humor, and

• make a living as a writer.

Huge thanks to Katie Engelhart and Maria Carrillo for taking time out of their schedules to share such great insights with us! Here’s more information about them:

Katie Engelhart is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. She writes about medicine and ethics. In 2024, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her story “The Mother Who Changed: A Story of Dementia.” She is also the recipient of the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting and the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism for her 2020 story “What Happened in Room 10?” Engelhart is the author of the 2021 book “The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die,” published by St. Martin’s Press. Previously, she was a correspondent for VICE News and a documentary film producer at NBC News. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons.

Maria Carrillo is a consultant and coach after spending 36 years in seven newsrooms. She was enterprise editor at the Tampa Bay Times and Houston Chronicle and, before that, managing editor at The Virginian-Pilot. She has edited dozens of award-winning projects, often lectures on narrative journalism and co-hosts a podcast (WriteLane) about craft. She is a board member of the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism, a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute and a juror for the Hillman Prizes. She has been a Pulitzer Prize juror six times. Carrillo was born in Washington, D.C., two years after her parents left Cuba in exile. She now lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Laura T. Coffey is president of the Society for Features Journalism and a longtime editor and feature writer. She’s also the author of the bestselling nonfiction book “My Old Dog: Rescued Pets with Remarkable Second Acts.”  Connect with Laura here.