The Wall Street Journal nails the story “Huge Pipeline Delivers Bonanza to Towns on Route.”

What makes it compelling?

Let’s start with timing.

After slaving on this 1,679-mile wonder, the last leg is now being laid and welded. The end is literally in sight.

With a helping hand from REX’s PR department, Journal writer Ann Davis offers ample quantification:

• Last leg of the pipeline cost $6.7B

• Used 1.4M tons of steal

• Welded 110,814 sections of 42-inch pipe

• Negotiated with 6,530 landowners for rights of way

Side note: Can you imagine? I can’t even get my neighbors to trim their avocado tree hanging over our front yard.

• Worked 27 million man-hours

• Created 10,000 jobs

• Reduced the premium the East pays over the West to 17 cents per million British thermal units from $2.77

I’ve evangelized the power of the anecdote, which Ms. Davis showcases throughout the piece starting with misplaced varmints:

“To avoid disturbing the endangered Indiana bat, crews in Ohio had to clear trees in the dark and in warm weather when bats wouldn’t roost. Biologists monitored their every move.”

Nice touch bringing in the binocular brigade for a little tension.

But the best anecdote comes from the periphery:

Dry cleaners are starching uniforms for welders so sparks will bounce off their clothes and not burn holes.

Good imagery. I’m guessing the heavy starch box gets the checkmark.

And rather than shackle the pipeline with esoteric nomenclature, the good folks from Kinder Morgan Energy Partners dubbed the pipeline REX. Even I get the double entendre to the land of oil and gas, TEX.

Aside from a few pesky analysts questioning Kinder’s financial return, this is a feel-good story that delivers.

Kinder’s president of natural-gas pipelines and COO Steven Kean sums up the undertaking with the Zen-ish reflection:

“Everybody really needed the pipe. The question was: Who was going to build it?”

Technology Review claims to be the oldest technology magazine in the world, going back to 1899.

Coming out of MIT, there’s a certain cachet to the publication as it strives to educate us mortals on emerging technologies.

Not exactly considered the magazine for hammock reading during a lemonade summer day.

And certainly not a magazine known for its entertainment value.

Not so fast.

There’s bona fide storytelling in the publication’s July/August issue as it strives to reveal the real Wolfram Alpha in the article “Search Me.” (BTW, great double entendre for the over-50 crowd who, when asked a question in their youth they didn’t know, would respond “search me.”)

Check out the lead sentence in the story:

On the evening of April 27 a ferocious rain raked the windows beside Jamie Williams’s cubicle as the physicist sat, exhausted, immersed in the minutia of food science.

Nice twist on the “dark and stormy night” opener; the stage setting continues with:

Williams wasn’t toiling in a redoubt of Silicon Valley Web entrepreneurs but in a Midwestern citadel of science geeks: Wolfram Research, in Champaign, IL, housed in an office block overlooking a Walgreens and a McDonald’s. This was the corporate lair of Stephen Wolfram …

Great word “lair,” last prominently used in Batman.

I also liked the explanation of the technology through a jargon-free example:

Say you wanted to know how much cholesterol and saturated fat lurked in a slab of your grandmother’s cornbread. You’d transcribe its ingredients from her yellowed index card to an online query bar, and Alpha would run computations and produce a USDA-style nutrition label.

Now this isn’t to say the piece doesn’t periodically delve into the esoteric — etymology tables, crystallographic patterns, animal morphologies, and the like — but again, a genuine story threads the content with a couple decent subplots.

It turns out “grasshopper,” none other than Google Founder Sergey Brin, interned for Mr. Wolfram in 1993 before surpassing the master. And while Technology Review doesn’t play the conspiracy card, it chronicles a series of Google actions that allow the reader to draw his/her own conclusions.

Also, we learn there are people who dislike Wolfram and view him as a “techwomizer,” a bit of a showoff when it comes to technology. So when Wolfram postulates on his search engine’s place in history in the same breath as the invention of mathematics and this thing called the Internet, it rubs some in the scientific community the wrong way.

While the ending is somewhat predictable, we see a softer and dare I say humble side of Wolfram in the closing line:

“It’s here as a useful service, and the test is, do people find it useful or not?”

From a communications perspective, there’s no question that Stephen Wolfram is good copy. He seems like a cross between Stephen Hawking and P.T. Barnum.

Still, the person or people behind building the public profile for Wolfram Alpha deserve credit for delivering access to Technology Review which, in turn, allowed for the storytelling. Striving to control this type of article suffocates the narrative.

As a side note, Wolfram Alpha has possibilities for PR professionals. Just one quick example: Dropping “BusinessWeek versus Technology Review” into the search engine results in the following:

Certain storylines never go out of style.

People love to see bullies get punched in the nose (like when Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly clocked Biff in “Back to the Future”).

Perseverance overcoming all obstacles is another can’t-miss theme.

But there’s no story quite like coming back from the dead to spike the ratings. Such was the case last week when Bloomberg inadvertently published its latest version of Steve Jobs’ obituary, available in its entirety at Gawker.com.

The search volume on Google Trends is just one indicator of substantial traction for the story.

As you would expect, the blogosphere had a field day with the gaffe. There were a few headlines that I thought were particularly good: “Bloomberg: Steve Jobs is dead! Wait, no he’s not” on Ars Technica and “Steve Jobs: Still Not Dead. Film at 11″ on The Unofficial Apple Weblog. 

Even the blog serving the society of professional obituary writers — I suppose if you’re not a “professional” obit writer, venture in at your own peril — got in on the fun with the double entendre: “Whoops a daisies!”

Humor is a great tool to snag the audience’s attention from the get go and a powerful element for storytelling in general.

The fact that humor is underutilized in business communications makes it all the more effective.