I'm curious what sort of magic made her know it was his last day, and move her to document the day like that. Things like this are beautiful but I don't know how to create them in my life. It it down to an inherent personality type?
As a former newspaper reporter who occasionally was assigned to do these kinds of community features (though nothing this well-done), I remember that editors and reporters would frequently get pitches (by email or call) from random folks – because newspapers routinely publish these kinds of stories, and this was well before social media was a viable place for sharing stories.
The irony here is that the author is a newspaper reporter/editor at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and one of the most surprising things about this to me is how the AJC's website apparently didn't have this story in traditional article format. The only thing I see is a followup -- a recap of the original Twitter thread, with the update that Mr. Martin's GoFundMe went viral:
But when I think about it, I wonder if a traditional article (full of images) would have worked as well as the Twitter thread? I'm probably more tolerant of Twitter threads as a format than most people are, but this was one time in which the Twitter format – this includes the way we interact by scrolling through Twitter threads – really seemed to strengthen the material.
