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Foreign Correspondent

Real-Life Activities

Real-Life Communication

A journalist's first duty is to pick out the facts of any event. After he or she has the facts in order, the story can be written.

The following excerpt is an example of the kinds of facts a foreign correspondent might have to use to craft a story. Written by journalist Shawn Hartsock during an assignment in Russia, the article covers the discovery of deserted labor camps -- called gulags -- in Siberia.

Read over the excerpt and see if you can pick out the main facts of the story. Ask yourself what information Hartsock had to tell the reader, and then write those points down.

By most accounts, the Krasnoyarsk region was saturated with labor camps. It is a vast area in central Siberia, reaching almost from the Mongolian border to the Arctic Sea and drained by the Yenisei.

Off-limits to westerners until last year, the region's inaccessibility made it ideal for labor camps in both czarist and Communist times.

"We don't know how many people were deported to Siberia under the reign of Josef Stalin," Surotin said. "We can't give a full report of the size of the gulags because the archives of the KGB are still closed."

But anecdotal evidence alone is telling. The northern mining city of Norilsk has been called "the city built on bones" because it was one vast labor camp.

It earned the name five years ago when the bones of Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian military officers who had been arrested in 1940 and sent to Norilsk as slave laborers began to surface in the tundra, pushed up by the permafrost.