Deconstructing MoJo’s Haiti Reconstruction Story

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Last week, Andrea Pitzer, the editor of Nieman Storyboard, a project of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, sent me an email. “Each month, we pick one outstanding narrative that is then poked and prodded by a group of top editors from around the US to see how it ticks,” she wrote. This month, they picked my feature “Aftershocks: Welcome to Haiti’s Reconstruction Hell.” 

Pitzer promised that being dissected by the editors would be “a little like getting an ice cream sundae while being beaten with a stick.” Indeed, some of their comments are flattering, some of them harsh, some bitingly true and then some, in my opinion, a little off the mark. If you’ve read the piece and want to see if you agree with the experts, check out the roundtable here.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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