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Danielle Batist is an experienced freelance journalist, founder of Journopreneur and co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project. She lived and worked all around the globe and covered global and local stories of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Increasingly, she moved beyond ‘problem-reporting’ to include stories about the solutions she found. She witnessed the birth of the new nation of South Sudan and interviewed the Dalai Lama. She reported for Al Jazeera, BBC and the Guardian and regularly advises independent media organisations on innovation and sustainability. She loves bringing stories to the world and finding the appropriate platforms to do so. The transformation of traditional media fascinates rather than scares her. While both the medium and the message are changing, she believes the need for good storytelling remains.
The Baby In The Plastic Bag
Sometimes you hear a story that refuses to leave you for days after. ‘The Baby in the Plastic Bag’ was one of these stories for me.
On the morning of 8th October 1991, Tor Schou Nilsen was tending the grave of his in-laws at the Vestre Aker churchyard in Oslo, Norway, when he heard something that sounded like a whimper. Following the sound, he found a bloody plastic bag and made a terrible discovery: inside the bag was a newborn baby boy on the brink of death.
The original story by reporter Bernt Jakob Oksnes was published by The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet in 2016, where it drew more than 1 million unique online users: around 20% of the country’s population.
Oksnes spent more than two years reconstructing the story of what happened to the baby, from the moment it was born to what happened next.
It has been credited as a masterpiece of ‘slow journalism’: it takes its time to tell the story, presented in nine chapters. It’s beautifully structured, moving between a minute-by-minute account of the day the baby was found, and the present, where the search for the now 25-year old moves from Norway to the Philippines. Its lay-out is enriched with archive imagery as well as current day photos and video footage, which draw you deeper and deeper into the piece.
For those interested in the ‘making of’ I found this interview with Oksnes insightful too. The Nieman Lab rightly concluded: “It’s a testament to the newspaper’s commitment to the power of the story, and of narrative journalism, that his bosses let him keep working on the project in this time of speeded-up news cycles and short attention spans.”
