I’ve been hearing good things for a while now about Retro Report, a journalism project that produces 10-to-20-minute-long videos about what happened to big headline stories from decades ago. I’m now gobbling up my Monday morning watching their backlist. It’s excellent stuff, and I’ve been trying to figure out why I like it. I think it’s because the programs get beyond the simple “Where Are They Now?” format. The journalists who make the pieces really report the stories–they go back and find people who were in the midst of the news to interview them, and then they discover the surprising course of the story after it fell away from the world’s attention.

What really surprised me about Retro Report is