In a Five-Part Series, The Times Movingly Explores Another America

In a volatile election season, with candidates going for blood and the volume turned up full blast, Dan Barry's five-part series makes its appearance in The Times like a visitor from a distant planet.

The “Donna's Diner” articles, which have been featured on the front page since Sunday, are quiet, clear-eyed and thoughtful. They make no violent assertions. They merely offer a window into the way many Americans live today in parts of the country that get little attention, except as places where swing-state voters remain undecided.

The stories offer that window through skillful storytelling about good people who are struggling to get by.

The series is, indisputably, very long. Its opening piece last Sunday was 4,000 words - beginning on the front page under an inviting headline, “At the Corner of Hope and Worry,” and continuing to two full pages inside.

I wondered, for a moment, if I had misunderstood. Five parts about a diner in Ohio? A total of almost 14,000 words?

Then I began to read about 57-year-old Donna Dove of Elyria, Ohio, who “maxed out her credit cards, cashed in her 401(k) and opened a business to call her own.”

You know this place: It is Elyria's equivalent to that diner, that coffee shop, that McDonald's. From the vantage point of these booths and Formica countertops, the past improves with distance, the present keeps piling on, and a promising future is practically willed by the resilient patrons.

And I will admit to being hooked. The two inside pages read like a short story.

Perhaps the most haunting piece is Wednesday's, in which the difficult subject of race is treated through a focus on Ike Maxwell. He is a one-time high school football star who now wanders the streets of Elyria shouting, and whose brother's fatal shooting by the police caused race riots decades ago.

Mr. Barry handles the subject matter, and writes about the people, with respect and sensitivity.

“This was not going to be ‘here's another dying Rust Belt city,' ” he told me this week, as he described how he came to decide on this particular diner in this particular city. (The photographer Nicole Bengiveno, whose fine work accompanies the stories, came across it while on another assignment and suggested it to Mr. Barry and his editor, Chuck Strum, a deputy national editor. Also important to the project were the deputy photo editor Meaghan Looram, the videographer Kassie Bracken and the multimedia journalist Jacqueline Myint.)

“The spirit of the people, their great pride â€" I was just enchanted,” Mr. Barry said. He and Ms. Bengiveno both spent a great deal of time in the small city over the past several months. Mr. Barry said he drove there “maybe 10 times,” staying for three or four days each time.

“The idea wasn't to find a sad place and tell you a sad story,” Mr. Strum said. In The Times, “we write a lot about people who have money to burn,” but the idea with “Donna's Diner” was to show a different America, one where difficult circumstances are balanced by enduring hope and optimism, against the odds.

The idea for the project began last year when the executive editor, Jill Abramson, told staff members that, in the coming election year, she wanted The Times to find new ways to look at the American economy and its effect on people.

“Dan took this almost as a personal assignment,” Mr. Strum said. He described Mr. Barry as someone with “an enormous heart and a lot of feeling for these folks.”

Ms. Abramson is justifiably pleased with the result.

“Elections turn on the balance between the hopes and struggles of the American people. Dan Barry's vivid reporting on Elyria, Ohio, brilliantly explores this balance at precisely the moment that so much political coverage focuses on candidates rather than the characte r of the country,” she told me.  Top editors felt its quality justified the generous amount of space in print.

She called the series “a majestic narrative, in words, pictures and multimedia, about Donna, her family and the people she feeds at the diner.”

The last part appears in Thursday's Times. It's well worth spending the time to read all five parts of this remarkable series and see the multimedia effort, too.