The Dispatches of 2024
In a year marked by wars, extreme weather and general wickedness, many dispatches defaulted to a distinctly dark tone. But as our correspondents traversed the globe, they found pockets of light, too.
Bryant Rousseau has been editing dispatches since the series launched in 2017.
With major conflicts raging in multiple regions of the world, it is no surprise that many of 2024’s best dispatches — articles focused on a sense of place and people’s lives — were filed from battle zones. Our correspondents showed both the toll of the violence and how everyday citizens are responding to it — from the streets of Kyiv to the hills above Beirut to the jungles of Myanmar.
War’s devastation and deprivation was hardly the only dark theme explored in dispatches this year. Natural disasters, too, demanded up-close coverage, and our reporters, surmounting daunting obstacles, arrived on scene soon after the destruction to document rescue and recovery efforts, from the muddy streets of the flooded Spanish town of Paiporta to the East African island of Mayotte, where a cyclone leveled whole neighborhoods.
And as hard as it could be to look, acts of sheer depravity were exposed as well, whether in Syria’s notorious prisons or the town in France where 50 men and her husband raped Gisèle Pelicot.
Sometimes, the darkness was a lingering memory, whether from a massacre decades ago in My Lai, Vietnam, or from a 17th-century genocide on an island in Indonesia, with the slaughter driven by a lust for nutmeg.
Thankfully, the news in 2024 wasn’t all grim: Sports (and the Olympics) led to some of the year’s best writing, from Christian surfers in Costa Rica to hurlers in Ireland to an English city angry that it doesn’t get enough credit as soccer’s birthplace (and a Canadian provincial capital longing for its lost hockey team).
Animals are often the stars of dispatches, and this year, they were a source for dispatches of both delight and damage: We embedded with snake catchers in Australia and ventured into the wilds of Scotland to witness the havoc boars are wreaking.
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