The Washington Post has won the 2023 Innovative Storytelling Award from the National Press Foundation for “The Blast Effect” – an immersive series showing how bullets from an AR-15 eviscerate human tissue and organs.

The series was created by N. Kirkpatrick, Atthar Mirza, Manuel Canales, Ronald Paniagua, Aadit Tambe, Anna Lefkowitz, Rekha Tenjarla, Madison Walls, Ann Gerhart, Peter Wallsten, Chiqui Esteban and Wendy Galietta.

NPF judges noted that for all they’ve read about mass shootings, the visuals of The Blast Effect made it possible to “just look and understand.”

N. Kirkpatrick spoke for the team at NPF’s Annual Awards Dinner Feb. 15, 2024:

The Washington Post reviewed nearly 100 autopsy reports from several AR-15 shootings as well as court testimony and interviews with trauma surgeons, ballistics experts and a medical examiner.

The first part of the reports shows a 3D animation that shows the trajectory of two different hypothetical gunshots to the chest — one from an AR-15 and another from a typical handgun — to explain the greater severity of the damage caused by the AR-15.

The second part depicts the entrance and exit wounds of two actual victims — Noah Pozner, 6, and Peter Wang, 15, who were killed in school shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, respectively, when they were struck by multiple bullets. The Post received consent from victims’ families before proceeding with this account.

The NPF judging panel noted the deliberateness of the user experience, particularly what a viewer finds at the bottom of the page – how many people in a real mass shooting situation were killed in the number of minutes spent scrolling the page.

“That really froze me,” judges said. “It had meaning that you wouldn’t have had” in a traditional format.

The Innovative Storytelling Award was created in 2015 to recognize digital journalism of the highest quality that re-invents the way stories are told. Judges take into consideration originality, how re-imagined delivery vehicles enhanced the audience’s understanding of the underlying journalism and creativity in applying tools or technologies.

Judges notes the high quality of applicants this year and wished to give honorable mentions to The Rolling Stone and Frontline, The Associated Press and SITU Research.

• The Rolling Stone microsite, “The DJ and the War Crimes,” compiled extensive records that point to one man and his role in a notorious paramilitary unit in the Bosnian war. Judges said it “provided a epowerful lesson in how to think about imagery.”
• Judges praised Frontline, The Associated Press and SITU Research’s Crime Scene: Bucha for its complex layering of technologies, including use of CCTV, to provide contextual storytelling about the war in Ukraine that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

Recent Innovative Storytelling Award winners include Aleszu Bajak and Ramon Padilla of USA Today in 2022, a Washington Post team led by Monica Ulmanu in 2021 and Hiroko Tabuchi and Jonah Kessel of The New York Times in 2020.