This spring, North Atlantic right whales started rapidly dying. In fact, they were dying so quickly that when Ed Yong, a staff writer at The Atlantic, reported the alarming trend in a news story, he needed to revise the text within hours of publishing. It can be difficult to pull off doom-and-gloom conservation stories, especially those involving charismatic megafauna. Here, Nadia Drake, a contributing writer at National Geographic, takes a look at what makes Yong’s piece excellent.