📰The Greats

After a mob lynched her friend Thomas Moss and two other Memphis grocers in March 1892, Wells investigated dozens of lynchings across the South and concluded in print that the usual rape charge was mostly pretext. While she was away in New York that May, a mob destroyed her newspaper's office and promised to kill her if she returned. She never lived in the South again — and kept publishing the evidence, case by named case, from New York and Chicago.

In 1887 Bly practiced deranged expressions in a boarding-house mirror, got herself committed, and spent ten days inside the Blackwell's Island asylum, where doctors pronounced her hopelessly insane while she quietly took notes on ice-cold baths, spoiled food and sane immigrant women trapped by their poor English. Ten Days in a Mad-House prompted a grand jury investigation that invited her testimony, and New York's asylum funding rose in its wake.

On 9 March 1954, See It Now built its case against McCarthy almost entirely from the senator's own filmed words, Murrow closing: 'We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.' CBS declined to promote the broadcast, so Murrow and producer Fred Friendly paid for a newspaper advertisement out of their own pockets. McCarthy's filmed rebuttal in April fell flat, and the Senate voted to censure him that December.

While more than six hundred correspondents covered the surrender ceremony aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, Burchett rode trains for roughly twenty hours to Hiroshima carrying rations, a pistol and a Baby Hermes typewriter. Sitting in the rubble, he typed a dispatch describing survivors dying of an unexplained sickness — radiation poisoning that occupation authorities dismissed as propaganda. The Daily Express ran it on 5 September 1945 under the words 'I write this as a warning to the world.'

In 1975 Kapuściński stayed in Luanda as Portuguese settlers crated the city into shipping containers and fled Angola's independence war, remaining for three months as one of the only foreign correspondents in the capital and filing by telex whenever the line held. The book that grew from it, Another Day of Life, opens with the city emptying around him — the sustained, solitary witness that made his reputation, and that his critics would later scrutinize line by line.

In November 2009, after Caijing's owners moved to rein in both its investigations and its business operations, Hu resigned — and most of her newsroom, reported at the time as roughly 140 of about 180 editorial staff, walked out with her. Within weeks she had launched Caixin Media and rebuilt the operation. A newsroom following its editor out the door en masse is nearly unheard of anywhere; under a press system where such jobs were scarce, it was an extraordinary vote of trust.

When Chechen fighters seized a Moscow theater with about 850 hostages in October 2002, they asked for Politkovskaya by name as someone both sides could trust; she walked in, carried water and juice to the hostages, and relayed the gunmen's demands. Four years later, on 7 October 2006, she was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building. Five men were eventually convicted of the killing; whoever ordered it has never been identified.