Journalists like to talk about stories and story-telling, but it's rare for someone who actually tells stories for a living to produce a hard-hitting piece of journalism.
Mike Daisey's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is just that - a one-man stage show by an Apple aficionado recounting his trip to China to investigate working conditions in the factories that make Apple products.
If you think that's a well-trodden path, give Daisey a chance - or at least give a chance to the recent episode of This American Life, the US public radio series, devoted to Daisey's project.
The programme begins with a recording of a version of the stage show (featuring more about China and less about Steve Jobs than you'd see off Broadway). In the second half, This American Life examines the claims made in Daisey's show. The results are surprising.
Daisey has been telling stories for years, since leaving the lowly job at Amazon that resulted in his first show and a hilarious book, 21 Dog Years: A Cube Dweller's Tale.
His account of investigating Apple in China is a cross between Michael Moore and Garrison Keillor. Daisey finds he can't get into the massive factory simply by turning up in a cab with his interpreter, but he can talk to workers outside, several of whom say they're 13 years old.
He poses as a US businessman to get access to other factories - seeing, for instance, dormitories, 12 foot square, housing as many workers. And he develops a network of contacts to meet union leaders and union members, who risk their livelihoods to be in a union, or to speak to him.
He hears about how repetitive strain injury (RSI) from production line work leads to hand injuries, and demonstrates an iPad to a man whose hands will never be the same after working on the assembly line for years without ever seeing one work. "It's like magic," he says, when Daisey shows him his iPad.
And he hears about a cleaning chemical that attacks the nervous system but allows the assembly line to speed up because it evaporates a little faster than alcohol.
You can imagine Daisey on stage in front of New York's chattering classes: it must be an amusing night at the theatre with a bit of an edge - wry laughter mixed with guilt as theatre-goers unmute their phones on the way home.
If you want more conventional coverage of the same story, the Financial Times also reported on the Apple supplier Foxconn this week. It too discussed worker suicides, the extraordinary size of the plants (400,000 workers in two factories in Shenzhen), and the resentment of workers at the difference in wages between different plants.
So should we turn to Daisey for the drama and human tales, and the FT for the straight journalism? Apparently not:
When Daisey's claims were rigorously examined in the second part of the radio show, they pretty much all stood up to hard-headed scrutiny. It seems that Daisey didn't use dramatic licence to write his show.
But when the radio producers tried to help listeners to decide how guilty they should feel about using their smartphones and Apple products, some of those you'd expect to champion Daisey's liberal point of view took the chance to put the opposing case.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, for instance, writes about development matters, but says his wife's relatives in a village in China are grateful that their living standards have been raised by 'sweatshop' factories.
And Daisey himself, interviewed in the second part of the show, acknowledges Apple's history of publishing its own audit of its suppliers. Although he complains that, where Apple does admit there are problems, it doesn't name and shame particular suppliers and only gives generic results.
At the very least, you could say that this pioneering example of 'investigative theatre' succeeds in highlighting the kind of uncomfortable facts that a more conventional piece of investigative journalism would be aiming for.
But more than that: in a website update, This American Life now reports that Apple has announced it is going to allow an independent third party to check on working conditions at its factories and publish the results. And for the first time it will publish a list of companies that build its products.
Not wishing to claim too much credit, the producers say:
"We don't know that our show inspired these moves from Apple, but both of the changes are things that Mike Daisey called for in Act Two of our episode."
I think they are being too modest. To me, that looks like a result. Take another curtain call, Mr Daisey.
