CNN’s Nima Elbagir may not be a household name for most British television viewers, but the Sudanese journalist is making such an impact internationally with her fearless reports from Africa and the Middle East that she is being compared with the network’s veteran Christiane Amanpour, who shot to fame with her Balkans coverage in the 1980s.

Elbagir won an award for specialist reporting from the Royal Television Society and only narrowly missed television journalist of the year.

Her winning coverage was headed by a six-month investigation into people-smuggling from the Nile delta in fishing boats to Rome; undercover reporting of children for sale in Nigeria – she was offered two for $500; and an encounter with a mother and daughter who practise female genital mutilation.

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The two uniformed jail guards argued angrily, cursed each other, then erupted into a nasty brawl with punches and furniture and bodies flying. As the fight ended and the guards skulked away to lick their wounds, a breathless audience of about 100 people looked on.

The violent eruption wasn’t in a jail. It was on the stage of The Living Room theater in Kansas City, and it was the latest example of an innovative new approach to investigative journalism: put a controversial story on stage and dramatize it for audiences who might not otherwise be aware of the issues at stake and the discoveries made by traditional news media.

The Kansas City production, “Justice in the Embers,” is the latest example of the collaboration called “StoryWorks,” launched by the California-based Center for Investigative Reporting, a non-profit journalistic organization, and the Bay Area’s Tides Theater group. The ways of investigative journalism have changed little since the days of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell — a reporter works and digs and writes a story for months or years, then publishes or broadcasts it and…hopes for the best. Hopes that the public, or the government, is moved or outraged enough to take action. And if not, the story settles quietly into the archives. Though multi-media techniques have improved the presentation of investigative stories, they still reach mostly an audience of dedicated news consumers, and rarely much more.

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