The Postscript

The Best of 2021, Part II

Cary Littlejohn — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 14:00:47 GMT

Last week, we shared a collection of stories that you might have missed or otherwise forgotten about, especially if you’ve come to rely on The Postscript for weekly recommendations of some of the best stories on myriad topics. The reason you might have missed those stories if you’ve come to rely on us is simple: We didn’t begin publishing until July.

So those stories linked last week would have taken you through the end of June, right before we started publishing. We served them up in a completely different format from our normal Weekend Reading look, preferring to give you not only the high quality you’ve come to expect but also a large quantity in case you were in need of holiday reading.

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This final edition of Weekend Reading for 2021 will also depart from our normal format, but unlike last week, we’ll be recirculating stories from previous editions.

It’s worth taking a by-the-numbers look at 2021 and Weekend Reading. With the publication of this second year-end round-up, there will be 26 editions of Weekend Reading. Within those first 25, there are, by my very unscientific and inexact count, more than 650 discrete links to articles, essays, podcasts, videos, and more.

There were, unsurprisingly, some repeat topics that we returned to because they were massive stories.

COVID-19

COVID-19 tops the list. The editions that had sections that focused on COVID-19 include:

January 6th

Another of the biggest stories of the year happened on January 6th, 2021, so there has been an entire year of diligent reporting on what arguably is one of the biggest stories in recent history. The editions that had sections that focused on the attacks on the Capitol include:

Climate Change

Climate change, and extreme instances of weather that brought the concept to our attention in a more immediate manner, also featured heavily in the news of 2021. The editions that had sections focused on climate change and, relatedly, extreme weather include:

Facebook

Facebook had a bad year, above and beyond the normal pandemic-induced bad year the rest of us suffered through. It was one bombshell after another being broken by reporters and whistleblowers. The editions that had sections focused on Facebook include:

Abortion

The assault on women’s abortion rights was another frequent topic in Weekend Reading. Editions that had sections focused on abortion include:

Those topics are undeniably newsworthy, but that doesn’t mean that all of the Weekend Reading recommendations were hard news. There were numerous celebrations of the arts, like various recently released films, the next must-read novels, sports, and the cult of celebrity through the art of the profile.

Film

July 17th – Anthony Bourdain

October 2nd – The Sopranos

October 30th – The French Dispatch

November 20th – The Academy Awards

And more individual stories, including ones about Siskel and Ebert, neo-noirs from the ’90s, Melvin Van Peebles, and Wes Anderson, to name a few.

Sports

July 10th – Tennis

July 31st – Simone Biles

September 11th – 9/11 Sports Stories

December 18th – Steph Curry

And more individual stories, including ones about Formula 1 racing, Tom Brady, football between New York City’s firemen and cops, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar calling out Lebron James over COVID-19 vaccines, and Matthew Stafford, to name a few.

Celebrities

July 10th – Britney Spears

September 18th – Celebrity Deaths

October 16th – Celebrity Profiles

December 4th – Stephen Sondheim

And more individual stories, including ones about Jason Isbell, Questlove, Regina King, Jeremy Strong, Keanu Reeves, and Hayao Miyazaki, to name a few.

When I think about any year-end list, I naturally think about what, if any, metric is used to judge whether a piece is “worthy” of being included. Some of the lists, like New York’s most-read, uses the simple metric of “total collective minutes of audience engagement.” Other lists take a more subjective approach. One of my favorite trends is a rash of stories from top-notch publications shouting out other publications’ stories under the banner of “Stories We Wish We’d Published.” (Texas Monthly, High Country News, and STAT are examples of publications that recently shared the work of others.)

I, too, decided to go the subjective route. What story did I remember sharing from months ago? Which did I remember, by title or author or topic or publication, to go back and search for? Here are a few that burned themselves in my mind this year.

What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind — Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic

It’s hard to know just how big a story is outside of my media-obsessed bubble, but if ever a story that the media-obsessed bubble fawned over deserved widespread attention, it’s this one. Everything about this story is pitch-perfect. It’s an anniversary piece for September 11th, 2001; it’s been 20 years, so it’s a big one. There will surely be enough pieces on the occasion to make your head spin. But this one will stand the test of time.

Those were the words I wrote back in August, and I stand by them.

His Name Was Emmett Till — Wright Thompson, The Atlantic

This story was included in the “Some of Our Favorites From the Past Week” section back in July, and so it was shared without comment. But it is an incredible piece of storytelling, of reporting, of revision. The story details the truth about where Emmett Till was murdered, and it’s an incredible piece of time travel via engrossing writing.

Our eyes adjusted to the darkness of the barn where Emmett Till was tortured by a group of grown men. Christmas decorations leaned against one wall. Within reach sat a lawn mower and a Johnson 9.9-horsepower outboard motor. Dirt covered the spot where Till was beaten, and where investigators believe he was killed. Andrews thinks he was strung from the ceiling, to make the beating easier. The truth is, nobody knows exactly what happened in the barn, and any evidence is long gone. Andrews pointed to the central rafter. “That right there is where he was hung at.”

A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms — McKay Coppins, The Atlantic

2021 saw a continuation of the evisceration of local newsrooms across the country as COVID-19 exacerbated many of the difficulties that have challenged newspapers that don’t have the heft of The New York Times or the mega-wealthy investors of The Washington Post and L.A. Times. But one hedge fund in particular is doing untold damage by gobbling up newsrooms and slashing staffs, and, in the process, doing irreparable harm to democracy in the process.

A Haunting New Documentary About Anthony Bourdain — Helen Rosner, The New Yorker

“Academy Award-winner Morgan Neville’s new documentary, Roadrunner, has revived interest in the larger-than-life star that was Anthony Bourdain. In the film, he’s portrayed as both the hero and the villain,” [Helen] Rosner says. She writes: “‘When I’m making a film, I often feel like the instructions are in the box,’ [Neville] told me. ‘How I should tell a story is often expressed by the subject: Mr. Rogers should be simple and deep and loving storytelling; Orson Welles should be chaotic and smart storytelling. And this film — Tony — is all about gray.’”

Those are the words I wrote back in the second-ever edition of Weekend Reading in July. I hadn’t seen the film at that point, but I’d go to see it shortly after, and Neville’s quote about the gray is a perfect encapsulation of the film and its subject.

Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year — Zach Baron, GQ

In a wonderfully meta chat with GQ, Jason Sudeikis discusses the depths of his breakout smash-hit of a character, Ted Lasso, and explores how much the character is like the man, how much the man is like the character, and how similarities between their lives, namely the dissolution of their marriages, unites them. The show is a marvel. It, for the most part, makes the viewer feel so much better after watching it. And, I would submit, so does this article. It feels good to learn this man is like this character we’ve all fallen in love with. It’s a small miracle that so many people close to Sudeikis think highly enough of him to say that he is every bit as good as the character, but it’s even more miraculous that a magazine writer could capture that same feeling on the page.

Who Is the Bad Art Friend? — Robert Kolker, The New York Times Magazine

This in no way is required reading, but at the time it was published, it was the hottest story perhaps all year. It was the discussion online, and there was just something so fun about being a part of that conversation. It’s even more fun if you’re a creative type, as underneath all of the pettiness, there are numerous profound and deeply philosophical questions about the nature of art and what’s owed to the artist and the inspiration.

And that’s it for the year. 2021 is a wrap, and from all of us here at The Postscript, we wish you a happy and healthy 2022.

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Searching for the Perfect Title: Madeleine Blais on 'The Heart Is an Instrument' and 'Uphill Walkers'

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Deborah Campbell on 'This Heated Place' and 'A Disappearance in Damascus'

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Madeleine Blais on 'The Heart Is an Instrument' and 'Uphill Walkers'

Madeleine Blais — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 17:00:36 GMT

In writing, everything counts, and even something as inherently short and seemingly inconsequential as a title requires heavy lifting. It is often the final order of business, finding a title that works, ideally on more than one level, functioning as a metaphor and a mini poem. Titles are the first selling tool for a book and, as such, the publisher retains veto power, often just as well because authors are sometimes too close to the material to pick a snappy title on their own. The original title for Anita Shreve’s novel The Weight of Water was the less lilting Silence at Smuttynose.

Examples of titles that work, from fiction and memoir, include A Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, thanks to their sass and their originality. Reading Lolita in Tehran shakes up the gene pool of our expectations. Variations have followed, such as Lipstick Jihad and The Kabul Beauty School. Running With Scissors has brilliant generic quality; it applies to any childhood narrative filled with risk and danger. Mary Karr’s memoir, Lit, works on three levels, describing the author when she was drunk, describing her as she sought spiritual insight, and as shorthand for the business at hand: literature.

Often, one well-chosen word can do the trick. Atonement. Waiting. Prep. Monkeys. Lucky. Saturday.

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How about Jaws? Peter Benchley had been mulling the idea of a shark terrorizing a resort community for years, carrying in his wallet a newspaper clipping about a 4,500-pound shark that had been captured off the coast of Long Island in 1964 to prove to any potential publishers that the story was not so preposterous: It had an antecedent in the world of fact. He kept a running list of possible titles, each more clunky than the next, including The Edge of Gloom, Leviathan Rising, and Tiburon. He also envisioned Jaws of … Despair, Anguish, Terror (take your pick), shortening it at the last minute to the one-word wonder by which the book (and the movie) became world famous.

Among my favorite student-generated titles is that of a memoir written by a young man about the struggle to acknowledge his sexual orientation. For years he struggled to articulate out loud the simple sentence, “Mom, I am gay,” feeling that until he did he could not move forward in his life. His title: Four Words. Another title, about a father who was always on his way out the door: Going, Going, Gone. An older returning student wrote about how as a child in the sixties in an African-American community in Boston, hers was the only family to go on camping trips. Everyone else she knew traveled by train or by car to see relations in the South or in Chicago or Harlem, but her father loved his pop-up camper and all the equipment it entailed and for weeks before they left each summer, he fussed over his lanterns and his mess kits and his two-burner grill stove, much to the amusement of neighbors who took borrowed pleasure in the tableau and saw his enthusiasm as an annual marker in their lives as well as his. Every year when the family set forth, with fewer and fewer black people in sight until finally there were none, the student remembered being befuddled by the road signs as she traveled north to New Hampshire, especially one sign in particular.

Why did her father keep speeding by it? Why didn’t he get in trouble? The title of her memoir: No Passing.

As for my books, the title of my collection of journalism, The Heart Is an Instrument, came from one of my subjects, Tennessee Williams, who said to me during a series of interviews over three days in Key West in February of 1979:

I used to be kind, gentle. Now I hear terrible things, and I don’t care. Oh, objectively, I care, but I can’t feel anything. Here’s a story. I was in California recently and a friend of mine had a stroke. He is paralyzed on the right side and on the left side and he has brain cancer. Someone asked me how he was doing and I explained all this and the person said, “But otherwise is he all right?” I said, “What do you want? A coroner’s report?” I never used to react harshly, but I feel continually assaulted by tragedy. I can’t go past the fact of the tragedy; I cannot comprehend these things emotionally. I cannot understand my friend who is sick in California and who loved life so much he is willing to live it on any terms.
Sometimes I dream about getting away from things, recovering myself from the continual shocks. People are dying all around you and I feel almost anesthetized, feel like a zombie. I fear an induration, and the heart is, after all, part of your instrument as a writer. If your heart fails you, you begin to write cynically, harshly. I would like to get away to some quiet place with some nice person and recover my goodness.

The title In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle was also inspired by a writer, Emily Dickinson, the poet who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, the setting of the high school basketball team whose championship season I covered. Her famous poem claims “hope is the thing with feathers,” though Woody Allen has a joke about that thing with feathers is his nephew in Zurich who thinks he is a bird. I, obviously, had my own definition.

For Uphill Walkers, a family memoir, I had two goals — to avoid body parts (“heart,” “muscle”) and to be less verbose. As children, we walked to school (not very far, definitely wearing shoes). We were designated, on the way home, as part of the uphill patrol. Given my family’s slow trudge upward after receiving a devastating blow (my father died suddenly leaving my mother with five children, eight and under and one on the way), the trajectory seemed to mirror our fate. In our hometown we were the mysterious Other — the frequent target of whispered conjecture, “How do they manage, after all?”

My most recent memoir is about the loss of a beloved summerhouse on Martha’s Vineyard, hardly the stuff of tragedy. And yet when it came time to part with this ramshackle dwelling surrounded by water (“blue gold” in realtor’s parlance) I was filled with that deluge of mixed emotions that signals something worth writing about. The book, published on July 4th, 2017, contains the following passage:

The new owners could of course imagine their own future happiness, but they could not see, and therefore could not appreciate, the human history preceding the purchase, all the lives that grazed ours and the ones that truly intersected, the noisy arrivals and departures, the arguments and the recipes, the ghosts and the guests, crabs caught and birthdays celebrated, clams shucked, towels shaken, lures assembled, bonfires lit, the dogs we indulged, the ticks we cursed, the pies we consumed, and, through it all, both close by and in the distance, the moving waters (as a poet put it) at their priest-like task. They could not see the depth of the life lived here during the summer for all those years.

The title, To the New Owners, comes from that excerpt. I must confess, to my amazement: Everyone connected to publishing who hears the title claims to love it. Why? I don’t know. I do know that my son said if he had written the book it would have been called Not for Sale and the entire text would have consisted of two words, “The end.”

Follow our Continuing Education section for discussions with academics concerning narrative reporting in the classroom and the state of media in colleges and universities; syllabi, reading lists, and coursework to continue your own education; and coverage of other topics in the study of journalism.

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A version of this story was first published in the Fall 2017 issue of LJS, a peer-reviewed journal from the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in literary journalism (or literary reportage).

Meet: About the Author

Madeleine Blais is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where she teaches memoir, journalism literature, and non-fiction writing. Her 1995 book, In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in non-fiction. She is also the author of The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism (1992), and Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a
Family (2001). She holds a bachelor’s degree from the College of New Rochelle (1969) and a master’s from the School of Journalism at Columbia University (1970).

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

Titles are no doubt a great source of stress for writers — a quick Google search will turn up pages and pages of articles offering advice on the subject. Much of the advice is conflicting, and the only general consensus seems to be how important a good title is. Titles have to sell the book by sounding good while also giving the reader an idea of what’s to come; they have to be catchy, short, and informative, all at the same time.

To make matters more complicated, it’s not always possible to know before publication how well a title will work. We can laugh now at the fact that The Great Gatsby was originally titled Trimalchio in West Egg or that Of Mice and Men was originally titled Something That Happened, but we can’t know how F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck felt about those working titles.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a publisher whose Little Blue Books pamphlet series sold hundreds of millions of copies, knew well the power of a good title. He would pull books from his list when their sales weren’t meeting his expectations. Then they’d go to “The Hospital” to be rejuvenated with new titles before rerelease. A few editorial assistants would brainstorm a potential list, and one of those would be tried.

The process could work quite well: Fleece of Gold sold 6,000 copies in 1925 but the following year, rereleased under the title The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, it sold 50,000 copies. Sometimes, even Haldeman-Julius’ young daughter would help; after reading the book Privateersmen, she summarized that it was about seamen and battles, so it was retitled The Battles of a Seaman.

How enticing those titles seem point to something else that can’t be predicted: how well a title will age. Eighteenth-century novel titles were short summaries in themselves, such as the full title of Daniel Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account How He Was at Last as Strangely Deliver’d by Pyrates (1719). The greater detail was necessary at a time when novels were still entering the cultural mainstream, and it would take more than a word or two to pique a reader’s curiosity.

More recent classical works often have titles derived from other works. Popular sources include Shakespeare (Brave New World; Pale Fire), the Bible (The Sun Also Rises; Absalom, Absalom!), and the works of major poets (Of Mice and Men; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). Now, it’s common for works to have single-word titles — but the pressure to summarize, or least capture the essence of, the work within nevertheless remains.

Those articles online do offer a few modern suggestions to creating titles, but take any or all of the advice at your own risk. Methods range from A/B testing to random title generators (which can generate titles as inane as The Missing Twins to as nonsensical as The Teacher in the Alien).

Common title structures make something like a random title generator possible; the titles can sound real, albeit not always. And because there are no copyrights on titles, some small subgenres of fiction do see titles recycled every few years. But picking a title that truly fits takes a bit more work.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Deborah Campbell on 'This Heated Place' and 'A Disappearance in Damascus'

Deborah Campbell — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 17:00:39 GMT

One thing the experience of writing each of my books has in common is this: I remember exactly where I was when I found their titles.

In the first case, I was in the Middle East, conducting fieldwork, and writing at the same time. That day I was at a friend’s apartment, working on the fourth or fifth chapter of a book that very nearly wrote itself. It took me three months to write, a rare state of grace I have never since recaptured. It was early evening, mid-autumn. The sun had set and I was working by lamplight. I had gone to look for a pair of scissors, for what purpose I have no recollection. I had just picked them up and turned back toward whatever task I had in mind when the title appeared, seeming to me to be as much a physical object as the scissors. This Heated Place. That was what I was writing about: the Israel-Palestine conflict, the view from the ground for those who lived it. I had just written a line that included that phrase: “Conflict is the leitmotif of this heated place.” As a title it seemed both literary and quiet, like the book itself. It stuck, as did most of what I wrote in that first draft. The book was published, with that title, one year later, though at the time I had no inkling of its ever finding a publisher.

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Second books are said to be the hardest to write. The next one took five years, not including a year and a half of fieldwork. The book is about the arrest of my fixer in Syria while I was with her, and my search for her. The numerous drafts stacked on the floor of my office attest to the effort it took for this book to coalesce: They reach well above my knees.

For the first several years the book had a title I loved. But as the book evolved, I found that the title required increasingly long explanations, since it no longer made sense to anyone but me. The book had outgrown that working title — but still, I wasn’t prepared to abandon it. It had been with me each day of the journey, like the old gray sweater I wrote in for years despite the elbows wearing through and the sleeves coming unraveled. That I don’t wish to divulge it, despite queries from this journal’s editors, illustrates how attached I remain — part of me maintains that I will use it for another work.

I remember the day the new title came. I was walking home from the university where I teach. It was mid-afternoon, and I was watching the trees signal the change of seasons. I wasn’t thinking about writing, I was simply absorbed by the world around me, which is often when ideas come. As I was about to turn a street corner, four words appeared: A Disappearance in Damascus.

A disappearance is an event that is at once action and mystery. It bespeaks narrative momentum, and a certain edge-of-your-seat suspense. There was a sense of drama to the title that reminded me of Gabriel García Márquez’s non-fiction book, News of a Kidnapping, which a friend had given me when I confessed I was having trouble with my own book. The new title had what the original title lacked, or might have had before the book was written: a quality of inevitability.

Scarcely a single line in the book itself came with such ease. Writing, my second book taught me, is mainly work. But as you do the work, there are sometimes moments of serendipity, moments of grace.

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Meet: About the Author

Deborah Campbell is a writer who has published in 11 countries and six languages. Her literary journalism incorporates extensive fieldwork in places such as the Middle East, Russia, Cuba, and Mexico, and she has won three National Magazine Awards. Her 2016 book, A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War, won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, the largest literary award for non-fiction in Canada, and was
selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches creative non-fiction.

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

The Best of 2021, Part I

Cary Littlejohn — Sat, 25 Dec 2021 14:00:34 GMT

Let it be said first and foremost: Year-end lists are imperfect documents. A year is a long time, and in our current journalism landscape, with the sheer amount of content that’s created daily, a year provides a number of riches. Throw in the surreal, time-warping component of the COVID-19 pandemic that’s approaching its third year, and it’s an impossible task to highlight everything in a single list.

There are numerous formats that could have been used to tackle this task, and many of them would have worked well. A simple one for The Postscript hinges on the fact that it went live in July 2021, and that means there were six months of journalism that we never had a chance to share.

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This format will look different from our usual Weekend Reading posts, but it’s in an effort to cover a lot of ground and give you a quick look back at the year that was and a one-stop shop to populate your year-end reading lists.

Do you remember…

January

The timely reporting and contextualizing from one of America’s darkest days. When The New Yorker unleashed one of its best writers with a simple (but massive) mandate: Tell the story of America during a year of a pandemic. When Representative Jamie Raskin wrote so lovingly about his son. When Anthony Fauci leaped at the opportunity to speak freely as President Donald Trump left office.

When we were reminded, upon his death, that Hank Aaron did so much more for baseball than simply hit home runs. What it took for Mitch McConnell to finally speak out against Trump. How Boeing got a sweetheart settlement deal. Alexi Navalny vs. Vladimir Putin. Stonks and GameStop going to the moon. America’s love affair with guns. America’s deep-seated loathing of scam calls. Tim Cook on Big Tech.

February

The 77 days after the presidential election when Trump tried his damnedest to steal it by saying it had been stolen from him first. How a mother of eight ended up storming the Capitol on January 6th. That time Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon. What it’s like to live upwards of 1,000 feet in the sky. A big league baseball player’s second chance at life. What it took to get votes cast and counted in Fulton County.

When COVID-19 came to Minot, North Dakota, the worst-hit county in the worst-hit state in the worst-hit country at the time. A too-little-discussed lunch counter sit-in in Kansas. How it’s more than jobs that are lost when local newspapers shutter. When Texas froze and utility prices skyrocketed. When Rush Limbaugh died and we reckoned with what hell he’d wrought. That time we got to hear what Mars sounds like. How the Duke and Duchess of Sussex surprised everyone when they said no more.

Climate activists who support the use of nuclear energy. How Facebook could have done more to combat misinformation from right-wing figures. When we realized just how deadly our first winter with COVID-19 actually was. What happened inside the forced labor prisons where China sent ethnic and religious minorities.

March

When the American withdrawal from Afghanistan wasn’t yet a reality. How 2021 was the year we were forced to learn what an NFT is. How COVID-19-related school closures disrupted the lives of students. What it felt like on March 11th, 2020, when the U.S. realized COVID-19 had found us. When we thought Cyrus Vance would be the one who filed criminal charges against Trump.

How polyamorists and polygamists are changing family norms. How Peloton became more than just exercise. How money and economic power didn’t necessarily equal success against COVID-19. When hatred and racism found workers in an Atlanta spa. The pandemic saw U.S. air quality improve and then wildfires erased all of those gains. That time America’s supply of nasopharyngeal swabs depended on feuding cousins.

When Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, organized an epic union fight. How a giant container ship got stuck in and finally escaped from the Suez Canal. An unimaginable travesty of so-called criminal justice that saw a young man spend almost two decades in solitary confinement. How the Kochs tried to block election reform. The history of working out. A witness to George Floyd’s murder refuses to be reduced to the trope of “angry Black man.”

April

How one man with 200,000 Twitter followers became a fount of COVID-19 misinformation. Alexey Navalny’s struggle in Russian prison. When we realized that 55 major corporations had zero federal tax liability in 2020. How the pandemic didn’t erase the opioid epidemic. Amazon beat back the Bessemer unionizing effort. How the longest war in American history not only cost more than 2,200 American lives but more than 100,000 Afghan lives.

When a 17-year-old witnessed the murder of George Floyd and had the awareness to hit record. European soccer had aspirations for a super league that didn’t last more than two days. By daring to go against Trump, stalwart conservative Liz Cheney suddenly wasn’t Republican enough for the base anymore.

Mark Zuckerberg vs. Tim Cook. That time lumber got super expensive, and a beetle didn’t help things. When we learned what it’s like to break out of a maximum security prison like in the movies. The Supreme Court considered whether a school could punish a student for things said off campus and on social media.

May

The pandemic created a showdown between landlords and tenants. Facebook’s Oversight Board upheld a decision to temporarily ban Trump from the social media platform. When the worst of COVID-19 was being seen in India’s massive population. While everyone else in the world wanted to disappear in 2021, the Brood X cicadas were just showing up.

The collapse of the Golden Globes and the corrupt Hollywood Foreign Press Association. How online groups for mothers became a massive vector of COVID-19 misinformation. The pandemic exacerbation of burnout. Behind the scenes of the Republican-led Arizona election audit. The mysterious spy thriller plot line known as Havana Syndrome reached the White House. UFOs. The lasting legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. How the pandemic benefited the fast food industry.

June

Credit card rewards aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. How the wealthiest avoid income taxes. What we gain when we commute to work. Rain refused to fall in the West. The birth of Southwest Airlines. What it was like to spend six months inside one of America’s most dangerous industries: a slaughterhouse.

Amazon proved to be a godsend during the worst days of the pandemic, but it strained an already strained workforce within the company. A prophetic profile of Senator Joe Manchin. The Delta variant vs. the unvaccinated. Retail workers leave the industry in droves. The ongoing search for the origins of the virus behind COVID-19. China remakes Hong Kong with new national security law.

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Stay Close: A Guide to Pushing Journalism Forward

Tips from notable reporters and editors that are pushing back against journalism's unwritten rules to advance the profession by making it more inclusive.

Community-Centered: The Evolution of Journalism

The standards we follow when reporting and writing serve a purpose, but they must evolve with the world we're trying to cover.

Stay Close: A Guide to Pushing Journalism Forward

Jessica Kantor — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 17:00:41 GMT

This is the fourth in a special multi-part series that takes a look at journalists who are covering their own communities, and how their personal ties to the subjects they report on allows them to be stronger confidants and better storytellers.

Journalism has evolved over the centuries; to think that it has stayed the same throughout history would be an injustice to the institution as well as those who have helped it to advance. The past decade has felt like change is being propelled faster than ever before, and the institution responsible for chronicling and sharing humanity’s stories must keep up.

This series, Stay Close, takes a look at specific rules — more often understood than specifically written — surrounding journalism and calls them into question, with the idea that our approach to reporting, especially on previously underrepresented communities, is already evolving through specific people and publications, and must continue to do so. The rules in question include the ideas that you cannot report on your own community, that you cannot become emotionally tied to or interact with a story in any way, or that to be considered a true journalist you have to meet certain predetermined criteria like studying at a university. There are thousands of journalists around the world that are already pushing back on these notions, and proving to their readers that they can bend the rules while still being factual, unbiased, and an asset to journalism.

Meet some of the journalists and editors that are a key part of the Stay Close series:

Marcia Facundo is a Dominican-American reporter who has lived in the United States for several decades. She covers Latino, Hispanic, and immigration beats for Politica Ya, a part of Entravision.
Sanya Mansoor is Muslim reporter for Time. She was a contributor to the BIPOC-led issue, “Visions of Equity,” and has included coverage of the Muslim community in her reporting.
Serena Daniari is a trans reporter for Them, a Condé Nast publication. She has been reporting on the trans and LGBTQ community the majority of her journalism career.
Lucy Feldman is senior editor at Time. She has written first-person narratives as an Asian American and she oversees the work of journalists who actively cover their own communities for the magazine. She was the lead editor on Time’s first BIPOC-led issue covering stories important to the BIPOC community.
Nicole Cardoza is the founder of the Anti-Racism Daily Newsletter, covering issues important to her community and overseeing writers covering their own communities.
Molly Jong-Fast is an author and opinion writer for Vogue, The Daily Beast, and The Atlantic.

This guide combines lessons from their past work to show how reporters can improve their writing, editors can improve their newsrooms, and professors can improve their classrooms. All of these individuals, whether they’re trying to or not, are working to move the institution of journalism forward, especially in regards to how it treats and covers people and communities that have previously been left out of the conversation.

For Journalists

“I never, ever get stuff wrong. I’m really careful about that. You have to work harder to convince people that you’re not just about your opinions. I am continuously asking: ‘Am I misleading my readers in any way? Am I not being honest?’ It’s something that I pay very special attention to because I'm on that side of journalism.” —Molly Jong-Fast, opinion writer at The Atlantic, Vogue, and The Daily Beast

Do use your existing relationships and knowledge of any community of which you are a part to make strong directional choices and get access to people that would be beneficial and appropriate sources for your reporting.
Don’t go to your friends and family as sources; make sure you vet your sources and go above and beyond to make sure that any source you are using is a benefit to your coverage.
Do push yourself out of your specific sub-community bubble. What other people or experiences are within your broader umbrella community? Open yourself up to experiences that are not innate to you but are a part of your community. Don’t be afraid to use your intimate knowledge of any people or place.
Do have multiple conversations with your editor. Whether it’s a conversation before getting started on a piece or a discussion during the writing process if you think that you may be leaning into an area too much. Having an open dialogue with your editor, colleagues, or other journalists in your newsroom can be beneficial and allow you to see potential blind spots. Keeping an open and honest dialogue will help you and your editor determine if a particular story or angle of coverage is inappropriate.
Do continue to fact-check, more so than normal. Leave no room for readers to doubt the accuracy of your reporting.
Do disclose personal ties, interests, or connections. Be very clear — with both your editors and your readers — about any involvement you have with sources or the subject of a story.
Do lean into your gut and personal instinct.
Don’t feel like you have to say yes to covering stories, or every story, about your own community. Individuals should be able to write about what they want; if a story or a request from an editor feels tokenizing, open the dialogue and decline if that’s what feels right.
Do still follow basic ethical guidelines in journalism: do not accept gifts from sources or people you’re covering, do quote your sources correctly, do not distort fact or context, etc.

For Editors

“When I’m editing [a story of a journalist that’s covering their own community] we always have a conversation and I’ll ask, ‘What’s your perspective on this story you’re pitching?’ or often [they] will tell me, ‘Hey — the angle that you think is the most interesting one is not actually the best lead.’ For example, consider the coverage of 9/11 and what stories [Sanya Mansoor] might want to report on Muslims in America over the last 20 years. I had come up with an angle that I thought was really compelling. And she was like: ‘I see why you would think that! But actually, for Muslims in America, this other thing is much more relevant and I think we should do this instead.’ I appreciate that so much. Obviously, we want to be telling the most important story, and if she has a perspective that helps us get there, even if it’s not what my mind immediately goes to, then great. I’m going to listen to her.” —Lucy Feldman, senior editor at Time

Do encourage the journalists you work with if they want to cover their own communities. Be supportive.
Do keep an open dialogue with your journalists. Make sure you’re discussing why they want to cover a particular story and their unique perspective. Be open to discussions about what is integral to the story — as someone from the community, they likely know this better than you.
Do be a guide; help them edit anything that needs to stay but is coming off as bias or opinionated. Help them balance things out.
Do go to other editors and consider having them double-check sources. Keep a general dialogue with other editors about what stories or projects you and the journalists you work most closely with are pursuing.
Do not assume that, because a journalist is from any one particular community, that they will get everything correct or that they do not need you to be a strong editor.
Do look for new and fresh voices to hire and work with.

For Professors

“I have to go against the kind of conventional wisdom that J-school has. They basically told us to stay out of the story; they just said don’t put your opinion in it, but they didn’t go into what that truly meant and of course they never told you that if you’re Muslim not to go to a mosque to find sources, but no one ever actually spoke about or taught the idea of using your ethnicity or your background as an asset when finding sources. The idea [in reporting] of using what you have available to you and using your knowledge to make a story stronger — they just never made me realize how much of an asset it really is. There are ways to avoid tokenization, and not tell every person from a unique community to do this, but there are ways in which J-school can open up this conversation more about reporting on your own community. There’s a more nuanced conversation that can be had about what it means to be a part or not a part of a story.” —Sanya Mansoor, journalist at Time

Do encourage your students to cover their own communities and have open dialogues with them about why it is important and how to do so ethically and effectively. As a professor, your understanding and encouragement is an intricate part in advancing journalism.
Do highlight the strengths that journalists covering their own communities have in their coverage.
Do not assume that, because something has not yet become widespread in journalism schools, it is incorrect or bad. Progress starts with a few key individuals, and can take place in any one classroom.
Do have open and honest discussions about what a journalist is capable of alongside what they cannot do. A great example can be found in Mansoor’s quote above.
Do take time to highlight the journalists, editors, and publications that are covering their own communities in a way you approve. Make sure you note what their roles are in the entire process. Make them a part of your class syllabus, and their work a part of your assigned reading.
Do showcase the work of journalists who have been close to the stories they write or the people they report on. There are examples of journalists and editors in this situation that have done their jobs poorly. Share those too. Show a balance for students to compare and contrast.
Do continue to press the importance of fact-checking, properly vetting sources, and keeping an open dialogue with — or leaning on — an editor when covering these kinds of stories.

The Postscript’s feature stories, profiles and how-to guides, which aim to help those working in and on journalism to better understand the industry and improve their craft, and to make smarter news consumers of the rest of us, come from editorial partnerships or are directly funded by our subscribers.

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Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Read: Stories From the Journalists Included in This Guide

Lucy Feldman’s essay on how the BIPOC-led issue came together: “The Story Behind Time’s First-Ever BIPOC-Led Issue,” May 13, 2021
Sanya Mansoor’s coverage of post-9/11 surveillance on the Muslim community in America: “‘Who Else Is Spying on Me?’ Muslim Americans Bring the Fight Against Surveillance to the Supreme Court.,” September 16, 2021
Marcia Facundo’s coverage of a recent temporary wave from the Agency of Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS): “USCIS Suspende Temporalmente Requisito Para Prueba Médica de la ‘Green Card,’” December 10, 2021
Molly Jong-Fast’s opinion piece on the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade: “The Supreme Court Is Likely to Overturn Roe — What Then?” October 21, 2021
Nicole Cardoza’s coverage of the disparities of how missing people are reported in the media and how you can advocate for the missing: “Advocate for the Missing,” September 21, 2021
Serena Daniari’s coverage of how the start of the pandemic impacted trans surgeries: “Trans Surgeries Postponed Indefinitely Amid Coronavirus Pandemic,” March 25, 2020

Stay Close: A Special Series on Journalists Covering Their Own Communities

Stay Close is a special multi-part series that takes a look at journalists who are covering their own communities, and how their personal ties to the subjects they report on allows them to be stronger confidants and better storytellers.

Meet: About the Author

Jessica Kantor is a freelance journalist that writes about health/mental health, human rights, and issues facing underrepresented communities. She is a living kidney donor. Her work can be found in Fast Company, What’s Next Magazine, Healthcare Quarterly, and others.

Community-Centered: The Evolution of Journalism

Jessica Kantor — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 17:00:31 GMT

This is the third in a special multi-part series that takes a look at journalists who are covering their own communities, and how their personal ties to the subjects they report on allows them to be stronger confidants and better storytellers.

Journalism is a classic institution, and the best of it has long been associated with specific rules and standards that must be kept in order for the work to be deemed credible by its readers. Many of these rules make sense, and The Postscript abides by them, like using reliable sources, fact-checking at multiple levels, and being transparent about mistakes or corrections. These types of standards should never be dismissed, but others can evolve.

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It’s 2021 and more people are now understanding that existing systems have not always had everyone’s best interests in mind. We’re learning that, oftentimes, rules or standards that were put in place — in journalism or other industries — were of benefit to very particular communities. The modern world we live in has a richer blend of cultures and identities than it did when many of those guidelines were created; it also has a more open mind to what’s considered to be newsworthy and how individuals should and should not be represented. More people and publications are approaching stories in new ways, in order to allow the reader to gain a stronger understanding of the issue and perhaps even to have an emotional tie to the situation and the outcome represented. Areas in particular that we’re finding journalists pushing back are that you cannot report on your own community, that you cannot become tied to or interact with a story in any way in order to cover it responsibly, or that to be considered a true journalist you have to meet certain predetermined criteria like studying at university.

This series, Stay Close, looks specifically at these rules and calls them into question. It has showcased meaningful conversations with a variety of journalists that are doing the opposite of what many of us were taught in school and by editors, and proving that their work is intelligent, impactful, consequential, needed — and responsible.

Lack of Coverage and Understanding

Part of the reason there is an evolution in journalism happening right now is because we have seen what happens when the traditional standards of reporting are strictly followed. There is a lack of coverage of specific communities, communities that have voices that should be amplified and stories that should be told. When these communities are covered — like when trans or diaspora communities receive coverage — the reporting is sometimes false or inaccurate, or it’s done by someone who is so far removed and lacking any care or concern for the community that their coverage is biased because of their perception. This is not just harmful to the community, it’s harmful to the audience.

This is one reason why Serena Daniari, a trans reporter at Condé Nast’s Them, is covering the trans community specifically in her reporting. “When the community is being covered there were so many inaccuracies in the ways that these stories were being reported on by CIS reporters,” she says. “This really reflected a general lack of understanding of my community. Oftentimes subjects would be referenced by their dead names or oftentimes they would be misgendered. There would be a fixation on surgeries and medical processes, so many times the narrative was very much focused on just the body and the transitioning. You can tell this coverage comes from a very sensational perspective instead of one that was humanizing and accurate.”

In a conversation, Daniari also pointed out that many of the stories she covers wouldn’t even normally be deemed as newsworthy by other outlets that don’t have LGBTQ or trans reporters on staff. The community is left out of the conversation despite being relevant. “There are fewer and fewer outlets dedicated to covering [LGBTQ and trans] stories,” she says.

Sanya Mansoor, a Muslim reporter at Time, is another journalist who has seen her community inaccurately reported on and oftentimes disparaged, which has inspired her own coverage. She and her senior editor at Time, Lucy Feldman, talked about how they came to cover a specific angle for the magazine’s coverage of 9/11 this year. Feldman had shared what she thought was a compelling idea and Mansoor discussed with her that she understands why someone outside the community would think that angle was the strong choice, but that Time needed to go deeper and report on a story that is much more important to Muslim Americans and how many of them were affected in ways that the mainstream news has yet to cover.

They decided to follow Mansoor’s suggestion and cover how mosques and the Muslim community were surveilled post-9/11 in “‘Who Else Is Spying on Me?’ Muslim Americans Bring the Fight Against Surveillance to the Supreme Court.”

“I appreciate that so much,” Feldman says. “Obviously, we want to be telling the most important story, and if she has a perspective that helps us get there, even if it’s not what my mind immediately goes to, then great. I’m going to listen to her.”

Mansoor and Daniari, in separate discussions, both emphasized that coverage done by reporters from their communities can feel tokenizing right now because newsroom leadership across the country has largely looked the same for decades. A lack of diversity in journalists has spilled over into lack of diversity in coverage. Now, we’ve started having conversations about ensuring that all communities are covered, and it can display as pushing a particular agenda. Eventually, when all types of stories are covered more readily and more often, and a variety of voices are elevated, it will all just be considered news. “Evolving our newsroom starts by asking for space and centering fresh voices within it,” Feldman says.

But this isn’t a one-off project, or something that can be solved by a special issue. No one person from a specific community is representative of all from that community. “There are so many differences in the Latino community. There are as many differences between myself and a Mexican as there are differences between you and I,” says Marcia Facundo, a Dominican-American reporter who has lived in the United States for several decades and covers Latino, Hispanic, and immigration beats for Politica Ya. “In culture, in language, in writing, the way we talk, the accent, the words, everything. As a journalist, I learned to be more aware of our differences when I’m communicating and reporting; that is so important.”

Mansoor agrees. “Muslims are not a monolith,” she says. “I see myself more as a reporter who happens to be Muslim, as opposed to a reporter who speaks for the Muslim community. Part of my job as a reporter is not to report on my worldview; my specific experience as a Muslim. I have a very specific experience. I’m an upper-middle-class Muslim, I don’t wear a hijab, I’m a woman, I’m not Black. All of these things are so specific. I’ve gone to Friday prayers and it’s an important aspect of my life and worldview, but also, within that, I’m very self-aware to know that I have a lived experience of being that kind of Muslim. But I don’t have the lived experience of being a Black Muslim or a Muslim who is incarcerated. And these are all very specific experiences and I feel like as a good reporter that it’s a balance.”

Who Are the Journalists?

Nicole Cardoza, founder of the Anti-Racism Daily Newsletter, still doesn’t know if she would call herself a journalist, despite writing and editing an informative newsletter for thousands of subscribers almost every single day since June of 2020. “I have a lot of freedom writing my own publication, having my own platform, and being able to tell the stories that matter to me and my community,” she says. “In that sense, yes I am a journalist. But I have so much respect for people that have been doing this work for so much longer than I have, and I still have a lot to learn.”

The ARD newsletter started with 80 subscribers and Cardoza launched the first article when she had people in her network reaching out to her specifically and asking how they could take direct action after the events of summer 2020 following George Floyd’s murder and the strong push for social justice that came immediately after. The first installment was about cash bail but took a more active approach in its coverage, including direct information on what the individual and community can do to enact change. “There were so many conversations at that time on how important it is to donate to bail funds, but what was missing was the broader context of how harmful they are and how we need to think about abolishing cash bail altogether,” Cardoza says. Since then, there has been a daily newsletter highlighting systemic oppression, from health to environment to politics. Cardoza initially pulled from her own knowledge and sources online but very quickly started reaching out to community organizers and brought them in as guest writers. Now the newsletter is at 275,000 subscribers and is written by Cardoza, community organizers, journalists, and those that are directly affected by the issues it covers. Cardoza has full-time staff members and works with around 70 writers from all kinds of backgrounds. Though its approach to coverage might not be what we’re used to from a traditional newspaper, the newsletter goes through formal stages of editing and fact-checking.

Cardoza is actively pushing against the standards that society has placed on who can and cannot be considered a journalist. Although she has no formal education in the field, she launched and runs an independent media platform and holds herself and the platform to many noted journalistic standards. Beyond that, she’s also holding space for the voices of those directly affected by the issues she and her team report on, such as incarcerated individuals or people experiencing homelessness. By working with them, many without a formal writing background, Cardoza is pushing even harder.

One way to think of journalists is as storytellers, in which their role is to go out, find stories, particularly those that illuminate some larger truth about the world, and share those with their readers. For many, they do have an agenda, and this is to try to make the world a better place by publishing research, investigations, and other forms of reporting in order to inform people. The notion that one is not a journalist unless they studied it in school or wrote for their school newspaper or practice in a certain way is mistaken.

“We think of journalism as academically sound but we forget the institutions that built academia,” Cardoza says. “We forget that personal experiences are as powerful, if not more powerful, and should be seen and credited. For example, how can we say that an incarcerated writer doesn’t know anything about the incarceration system just because they didn’t study it in school? We consistently, as a society, minimize the voices of the people who have the experiences that we’re speaking about.”

While the word journalist may, for many, bring to mind visuals of a CNN news desk reporter or New York Times writer, both reporting exclusively on politics, the truth is that there are dozens of different types of journalists covering every type of subject that exists. Whether it’s incarcerated individuals reporting on prisons, opinion writers covering legislation, photojournalists in nature, newsletter editors covering racism, or citizen journalists that are helping provide boots on the ground reporting in dangerous or inaccessible areas, the view of who is considered a true journalist should be expanded.

Saving the Child, and Other Aspects of Humanity

Photojournalist Kevin Carter famously won the Pulitzer Prize for a photograph taken during the 1993 Sudan famine; it showed a malnourished child with a vulture hovering behind it. Although the image won awards and was critically acclaimed, it depicted something horrific. Many people questioned Carter as to if he had saved the child from the impending predator after the shot was taken. He had not, because journalists are often taught that they should not involve themselves in the story; they’re there to observe. According to the New York Times, after taking the shot, Carter “sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, and cried.”

The child reportedly made it to a United Nations feeding center shortly after the photo was taken. Carter was villainized for his inaction and ended up dying by suicide the following year at the age of 33. This particular story is unique, and extreme, but journalists are often trained not to interact with their subjects, regardless of the severity of the situation they’re capturing.

When presented with an imagined scenario of actively reporting in a war zone where bullets are flying and asked if they would take a lost child away from the area or leave them, four journalists interviewed for this piece said that they would save the child, and they all provided an explanation as to why they made that choice. “Yes, there are journalistic ideals about maintaining a certain distance from a story, but there’s also just the ethics and morality of being a good person,” Daniari says. “I think it would be wrong; these are real people.”

This particular scenario is dramatic, but every day journalists are faced with situations where they are expected to remain detached, all while being human and interacting with humans. “I think that the journalist has a very tough job to do, which is to get close but at the same time to stay away,” Facundo says. “That’s a balance that you need to find in your professional life, because it’s true that you should be close in order to tell the story properly. It’s just like the balance where you try to be fair in your coverage. I think it’s an exercise that the journalist has to do and find a way to get it done correctly.”

Facundo remembers a time when she first started reporting in the Dominican Republic after college. She attended a press conference, where a family was actively pleading with the new government to let the father, who had been deported for being a part of the guerrilla movement, come back. A child was crying and “I started crying with her,” Facundo says. “I think that was one of the first experiences where I felt like, ‘Oh my God — I am into this.’ I knew I needed to remain objective and they tell you that you have to separate yourself from the news, but yet you feel for people. People have their stories just like you have your own and sometimes you connect with the person you are interviewing.”

“I learned in moments like these that you absolutely can report the story without letting your feelings interfere with the way you report it,” Facundo says. “You’re either a good journalist or a bad one, but connecting with someone doesn’t mean you can’t do your job. I think this helped me see the story more clearly. From then on, I almost want to get emotional because it helps my writing. I am more passionate when I am telling the story because at its core these are human stories, and if you’re able to show the human side of any issue to the readers, I think that’s the main point of it all.”

Many of the other journalists I spoke to as part of this Stay Close series have experienced times where they got close to those they were interviewing or allowed themselves to experience emotions deemed to be unfit for a journalist to experience on the job. Mansoor notes that, if she’s interviewing anyone where there is trauma or a difficult situation involved, she is the first to impress upon them that they don’t have to speak to her, they don’t owe “us” anything. She acknowledges that she may be sacrificing a great quote but believes, even as a reporter, that people are more important to her than stories.

Fresh Voices and Other Benefits

Many of the journalists and publications that are broadening their view of who should be allowed to report on what are seeing benefits to their coverage. Regarding journalists that cover their own communities, this can include understanding who would be a great source to interview and having contacts that can connect reporters to sources more easily. They also have a higher level of understanding of the subject matter than someone without ties to a community. This can come from understanding unique parts of a religion or tradition, or even knowing terminology that isn’t used in a general lexicon. While research will always be needed for a story, having this knowledge going into a piece helps to strengthen the reporting. Being a part of the community adds a level of depth and understanding, but it also opens up doors.

“Additionally, I feel like there’s a trust element,” Mansoor says. “Particularly if you’re a community that has not always been represented favorably by the media and you have a skepticism. I think that’s a reasonable skepticism. Obviously you still have to earn people’s trust, but it’s in the active small things. For example, if I call someone up and say ‘As-Salaam-Alaikum’ because that’s the way that I greet someone who is Muslim, instantly there’s a comfort level.”

Daniari has had a similar experience when working with the trans community, a community that generally has an intense distrust of the media because it’s been covered poorly. Being a trans journalist working within the community provides a level of trust. This may not be enough to break through barriers entirely, but reporting subjects often trust that Daniari is not going to make the same kinds of mistakes a cis reporter with no understanding of trans issues might. Additionally, understanding a community means that you’re clued in to what may be worth covering — stories that don’t get picked up by mainstream news.

“I think there is just a level of insight that I and other trans writers have into the big issues that cisgender people may not have, to be honest,” Daniari says. “A lot of the stories that we cover don’t even make a blip on the radar of what most journalists would like to cover. There are very real and extremely urgent issues for our community, like joblessness, lack of health care, the string of trans bills. But maybe a fraction of them may be covered by mainstream media outlets.”

For many journalists working to push the boundaries of traditional journalism standards there is a built in distrust from colleagues or readers they need to overcome. Additional time may be dedicated to fact-checking and interviewing, an asset to any story. Molly Jong-Fast, an opinion writer for Vogue and The Daily Beast, understands that she’s different from most journalists, because she’s writing from her perspective about issues that are important to her. She notes that, because there is already a spotlight on her coverage, she goes the extra mile to make sure she is factual and ethical. “I never, ever get stuff wrong. I’m really careful about that. You have to work harder to convince people that you’re not just about your opinions,” she says. “I am continuously asking: ‘Am I misleading my readers in any way? Am I not being honest?’ It’s something that I pay very special attention to because I’m on that side of journalism.”

This type of special attention is something that often gets missed in mainstream coverage. There’s a race to be the first person to report rather than considering who is best positioned to cover a story. Coverage can be sensationalized — or read as sensational — which leads to its own set of issues. Reporters who know their communities, who go out of their way to advocate for the coverage of stories that are important but often overlooked, who spend the time to ensure their coverage is not only factually accurate but address a community’s needs — these are the reporters pushing journalism forward.

For decades, mainstream news has seen the same types of journalists in the newsroom covering the same types of stories. By expanding to include diverse journalists and allowing them to cover what they deem to be important, we’re opening up the world to a greater level of understanding. For those who receive push back for their role in the evolution of journalism, Facundo notes that it doesn’t matter. “Let’s start a movement. I don’t think there’s more that you can do other than be a good journalist,” she says. “Do what you have to do and do it better than the others. Don’t give people room to say that you’re a bad journalist. Tell the story in a better way, make it more attractive. Make it impactful in a way that people read you or watch you or listen to you more than they do the people who are spreading misinformation or ignorance.”

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Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Stay Close: A Special Series on Journalists Covering Their Own Communities

Meet: About the Author

Weekend Reading: The Terror of Tornadoes, bell hooks, Steph Curry's Record, and More

Cary Littlejohn — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 14:00:37 GMT

There’s a lot of great journalism out there. Every week, in a format short enough that it won’t be clipped by your inbox, we aim to share some of the best, with additional context for understanding the biggest news of the day. This is a weekly digest of stories you can savor and reporting you can rely on.

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Rare December Tornado Outbreak Was a ‘Worst-Case Scenario’ — Thomas Frank, E&E News/Scientific American

The storms that ravaged the South didn’t reach my hometown in the western part of the state, just above the Mississippi state line, with the same force they had about two hours north, where my sister lives and works. Across the northern state line into Kentucky saw the worst of the damage.

The tornado outbreak that likely killed more than 100 people over the weekend was an anomaly in every way possible. The deaths were concentrated in a state — Kentucky — that has been relatively unscathed by tornadoes and tornado fatalities. The outbreak hit during a month when tornadoes are least likely to occur. And it struck at night, when tornadoes are unusual — and particularly deadly because people are asleep and unlikely to hear warnings. … The outbreak is certainly the deadliest to have occurred in the United States during a winter month, according to an E&E News analysis of NOAA tornado records dating to 1950. The deadliest recorded December tornado occurred in 1953 in Mississippi and killed 38 people, NOAA records show.

🖥️ Here’s How Rare That Massive Tornado in Kentucky Actually Was — Philip Bump, The Washington Post: “In the 70 years from 1950 and 2019, there were nearly 64,000 tornadoes recorded in the United States, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data. Of that total, there was precisely one, a tornado that hit in 1952, that generally shared an unusual set of circumstances with the one that touched down over the weekend: It hit Kentucky in December and was measured at at least an F3 in intensity. It’s an unusual combination and, this time, a deadly one.” I love the maps in this story that show the prevalence of tornadoes by month, and, as the months move throughout the year, you can see the tornadoes working their way north on the map, until the winter months roll around again.
📖 They Said the Tornado Would Hit at 9:30. It Hit at 9:30. — Thomas Fuller & Tariro Mzezewa, The New York Times: This story resonated with me from the jump, for one very specific reason: the 1995 movie Twister. When I was a kid, this was a VHS that I nearly wore out from watching and rewinding so many times. For a time, I thought that’s what I wanted to do with my life, to chase storms. If you haven’t thought about the movie in many years, you’d be forgiven if you’d forgotten that it wasn’t just an addiction to the adrenaline of the chase. Helen Hunt’s character was chasing a ghost; as a child, she’d lost her father to a tornado because the warning didn’t come in time. Now, all those years later, the technology has caught up.

The huge strides in tornado prediction rates have been made possible by a cascade of scientific advances. The introduction of Doppler radar in the 1990s and subsequent upgrades allowed forecasters to measure the wind inside of a storm, to distinguish between rain, snow or hail and to see and predict the formation of tornadoes. The proliferation of weather satellites allows scientists even more visibility into the formation of storms — and, crucially, the conditions that might create a tornado. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates 16 satellites.

🗄️ From 2011: “Heavenly Father!" “I Love You All!" “I Love Everyone!" “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!" “I Love All of You!" — Luke Dittrich, Esquire: There was a line in that Scientific American story that caught my attention: “Although the exact death toll remains unknown, the outbreak is almost certain to be the deadliest since the devastating Joplin, Missouri, tornadoes killed 158 people in May of 2011. It’s likely to be one of the deadliest tornado events in U.S. history.” I remember that storm well. I was in my first year of law school, and that year I’d made a dear friend who was from Joplin. That’s the only reason I had ever heard of the town when the tornado struck. Out of that storm came this remarkable piece of journalism, and if that evocative headline didn’t get your attention, maybe this deck will: “On May 22nd, a three-quarter-mile-wide tornado carved a six-mile-long path through Joplin, Missouri, killing 160. Unable to escape, two dozen strangers sought shelter in a gas station's walk-in cooler while the funnel ripped apart every building, car, and living thing around. This is their story.”

‘The World Is a Lesser Place Today Without Her.’ Acclaimed Author bell hooks Dies at 69. — Linda Blackford, Lexington Herald Leader

bell hooks, a Hopkinsville native who went on to an international career as a hugely influential author, critic, feminist and public intellectual, died on December 15th at her home in Berea. She was 69. … Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25th, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to Veodis and Rosa Bell Watkins, the fourth of seven siblings. She attended segregated schools in Christian County, then went on to Stanford University in California, then earned a master’s in English at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in literature at the University of California–Santa Cruz.

🗄️ From 1999: What bell hooks Had to Say About the State of Feminism in 1999 — Jacqueline Trescott, The Washington Post: This article from 1999 captured bell hooks while she was at an event for one of her books. She was a prolific author, and the book, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, was “her reflections on famous writers, her own work and ‘women who write too much.’” I love this quote in particular: “No one said to John Coltrane, Why do you play the saxophone so much?’ … They accepted he had a passion for this,” hooks says. She is wrapped in black and red wool, as dramatic in person as she is on the page. Writing is as easy for her as breathing, and as necessary for life, she says. “There is a lushness to how my mind works. And sometimes I feel guilty because I have this abundance of ideas but I have my life mapped out in writing for the next 20 years.”
🎧 bell hooks on How We Raise Men — David Remnick, The New Yorker Radio Hour: In the aftermath of the revelation of the details of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes, and in the midst of the #MeToo movement, bell hooks talked with David Remnick about patriarchy and masculinity.
🗄️ From 1995: Cool Cynicism: Pulp Fiction — bell hooks, Artforum: I first read this review of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in American Film Critics: An Anthology From The Silents Until Now, a collection of critical writings on film. While it was likely low on the ladder of her writing in terms of its importance, it was one of the first that I thought of when I heard about her death. It shows off a particular style as she both lauds and criticizes the film.

Tarantino has the real nihilism of our times down. He represents the ultimate ‘white cool’: a hard-core cynical vision that would have everyone see racism, sexism, homophobia, but behave as though none of that shit really matters, or if it does it means nothing cause none of it’s gonna change, cause the real deal is that domination is here to stay — going nowhere and everybody is in on the act. Mind you, domination is always and only patriarchal — a dick thing.

🗄️ From 2019: In Praise of bell hooks — Min Jin Lee, The New York Times: Min Jin Lee tells the story of how she, as a sophomore at Yale University, came to find herself in a class taught by bell hooks. She described hooks as one of those lecturers who can captivate a class, where everyone in the room recognizes that something special is happening. hooks opened Lee’s mind through her writings.

For me, reading ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ was as if someone had opened the door, the windows, and raised the roof in my mind. I am neither white nor black, but through her theories, I was able to understand that my body contained historical multitudes and any analysis without such a measured consideration was limited and deeply flawed.

Steph Curry Redrew Basketball’s Map of Possibilities — Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker

What strikes me about Steph Curry breaking Ray Allen’s three-point record isn’t that he did it; that much seemed like a foregone conclusion. It was that I actually got to watch it happen in real time, which by no means was a sure thing. But I saw it, and whenever it comes to discussing that record, I’ll never forget that I saw it live.

Curry’s three, by contrast, isn’t an interesting novelty or the final recourse for a lengthening career. It is the culmination of a process that began when the three-pointer was invented. Techniques exist to be perfected; Curry has pushed the three toward its telos. He runs with his torso slightly bent over, with his feet set at a noticeably wide stance — the better to spring into the holistic motion, big toe to the tip of his pointer finger, that makes the net shiver, no matter how far away. Unlike Allen or Miller or his teammate Klay Thompson, another great shooter, he doesn’t have just one form. He placidly fans the shot upward on standard catch-and-shoots but throws his arms out like a tipsy dart player when he’s off balance and covered well.

📖 Stephen Curry’s Scientific Quest for the Perfect Shot — Ben Cohen, The Wall Street Journal:

Curry decided before this NBA season that he wasn’t satisfied with simply making shots anymore. He wouldn’t even settle for swishing those shots. “Too easy,” said Brandon Payne, his longtime personal coach. “We're doing swishes within swishes.” The only way to do that was to shrink the basket. This is where the shot-tracking technology described in Pyke’s research became useful to Curry. It allowed him to monitor the exact location of his shots and instantly learn whether they were good enough for him. A shot that strays nearly five inches away from the center of the hoop in either direction can still be a swish. But that margin of error in his left-right positioning was much too high for Curry. So last summer, as he shot threes in the NBA offseason, he gave himself only three inches of wiggle room. He was even more demanding when shooting from closer: Curry’s leeway for his free throws was two inches.

📖 His Job Is Counting Stephen Curry’s 3-Pointers. You’d Retire, Too. — Scott Cacciola, The New York Times: This is such a clever use of Steph Curry’s fame and spotlight to highlight a man who toils away behind the scenes and, in many ways, is one of the least likely to get such recognition.

[Fred] Kast, who will turn 82 this month, has recorded every field goal, every free throw, every foul and every timeout in nearly every Warriors home game since 1963-64. He jots the stats into an NBA-issue, spiral-bound notebook that goes to the league office at the conclusion of each season. In a league that has seen its share of technological advances, the official scorer — the person who logs each game’s most vital elements — is a throwback, and every team has one. Somewhere in the NBA archives, there is a small library of Kast’s handiwork.

🖥️ The NBA’s Revolution in Pull-Up Threes Isn’t Going Away. But Does the Shot Actually Help? — Louis Zatzman, FiveThirtyEight: Steph Curry is credited with breaking the game of basketball, with changing the entire way the game is played. This is said in reference to his three-point shooting prowess. “Such shots are now routine, emblematic of a revolution of the pull-up three. Steph Curry, James Harden and Damian Lillard each pushed the usage of the shot beyond what had been its logical boundaries in previous eras, and those three remain some of the best pull-up shooters in the NBA. But as often takes place in revolutions, the action has spread beyond the originators; the pull-up three has become the norm throughout the league. Year after year, teams are pushing the envelope in how many pull-up threes are attempted.” FiveThirtyEight takes its statistical look at whether that revolution is a good thing for the NBA.
📖 He Thought He Made N.B.A. History. All He Got Was 3 Points. — Tania Ganguli, The New York Times: For those of us of a certain age, the three-pointer has always been a part of basketball. It’s hard for us to conceive of the game without it. But it bears remembering that it was an addition to the game, long after the fact. And one man thought he’d recorded the first three ever. Until he learned he didn’t.

For more than a decade, Kevin Grevey thought he was the first player in N.B.A. history to make a 3-pointer. “It’s pretty amazing that I didn’t make the first one,” Grevey, 68, said recently. “Because I think the first time I touched the ball I caught it in the corner and toed behind the line, shot it and made it.”

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

How Netflix Made Americans Care About the Most European of Sports — Amanda Mull, The Atlantic

What We Lost When Vaping Got Political — Vanessa Grigoriadis, Vanity Fair

4 Dead Infants, a Convicted Mother, and a Genetic Mystery — Oscar Schwartz, Wired

Jason Isbell Is Tired of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia — Elamin Abdelmahmoud, BuzzFeed News

John Roberts Has Lost Control — Dahlia Lithwick, Slate

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The Atlantic’s Reporting on January 6th

📖 Beware Prophecies of Civil War — Fintan O’Toole, The Atlantic

Chris Cuomo’s Exit

📖 CNN Faces Prime-Time Uncertainty After Firing Chris Cuomo — Benjamin Mullin, The Wall Street Journal

Notable Trials

📖 Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Chose Fraud Instead of Admitting She’d Failed, Prosecutors Said in Closing Arguments at Her Trial — Stephanie K. Baer, BuzzFeed News

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Pamela Newkirk on ‘Spectacle’ and ‘Within the Veil’

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

The Orgy Next Door: Ethical Relationships in Gay Talese’s ‘Thy Neighbor’s Wife’ and ‘The Voyeur’s Motel’

On the balance between loyalty to the reader and to the investigated subject or community, and the need for self-awareness in literary journalism.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Pamela Newkirk on 'Spectacle' and 'Within the Veil'

Pamela Newkirk — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 17:00:34 GMT

The title for my 2015 book, Spectacle, came to mind early in the process of researching the story of a young African who in 1906 was exhibited in the Bronx Zoo monkey house. The title, I believed, not only captured the shocking exhibition in a world-class zoo of Ota Benga, the caged African boy, but also the ravenous public response. During the month of September 1906 nearly a quarter-million people flocked to the zoo to see Ota Benga, who was taunted and at times attacked by raucous crowds. The exhibition provoked sensationalized headlines across the country, including at the New York Times, where editors defended zoo officials against the handful of outraged critics. The spectacle set in stark relief the prevailing bigotry of the era and of the city’s leading men of science and public affairs.

However, as we neared publication my editor was unhappy with the title. She argued that it was too vague and instead proposed one that indicated that the book was about a man who was exhibited in the zoo. Among the suggestions were: Man in the Monkey House, Scandal in the Monkey House, An Unnatural Event in the Monkey House, and A Man Amongst Monkeys.

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I countered that the book was not merely about the weeks Ota Benga spent at the zoo. The book explores his life and the racial attitudes embedded in science, history, and popular culture that culminated in his exploitation. I believed that the shameful episode was merely a microcosm of race during the era. For weeks we tossed around other titles and subtitles but none, to my mind, were as fitting as Spectacle. She finally relented and we agreed that a subtitle was needed to give readers a better sense of the contents. After weeks of brainstorming we agreed on “The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga,” which evoked the stranger-than-fiction story of Ota Benga’s remarkable life that went beyond his captivity at the zoo.

The working title for my first book was The Color of News, which examined how race overtly and covertly influences news coverage. The book more specifically explored the uphill battle of black journalists to integrate mainstream newsrooms and present more balanced portraits of black people. The book, based both on archival documents and interviews with more than 100 journalists, took readers behind the scenes to uncover some of the contentious newsroom debates around race and news coverage.

I opened the first chapter with a quote by W.E.B. Du Bois that read: “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.” I thought the quote conveyed my aim to lift the veil on newsroom operations to tell the untold story of the battles waged by black journalists to more fairly depict black life.

My agent at the time honed in on the words “within the Veil” which she said could signal that the book was a behind-the-scenes look at race in the newsroom. The full title became Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media.

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Meet: About the Author

Pamela Newkirk is a professor of journalism and director of undergraduate studies at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (2015), her latest book, won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Nonfiction and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award. Her 2000 book, Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, won the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Media Criticism. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from New York University and graduate degrees from Columbia University.

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

The Orgy Next Door: Ethical Relationships in Gay Talese's 'Thy Neighbor's Wife' and 'The Voyeur's Motel'

Julie Wheelwright — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 17:00:35 GMT

(AnemoneProjectors/Wikimedia Commons)

In the summer of 2016, Gay Talese, who has been credited by Tom Wolfe as the founder of the New Journalism, appeared at the center of a controversy. The author of 14 books, including such literary journalism classics as The Kingdom and the Power (1969), Honor Thy Father (1971), Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1980), and the magazine article some consider to be the best ever, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (Esquire, April 1966), Talese’s reputation had a long way to fall. Novelist Mario Puzo declared him “the best nonfiction writer in America,” Barbara Lounsberry called him “a reporter’s reporter who is revered by fellow writers,” and Robert Boynton declared him the “poet of the commonplace” who has demonstrated “that one could write great literary nonfiction about the ‘ordinary.’” Lad Tobin has praised Talese’s approach to his deeply investigated subjects, which involve “an industriousness and integrity too often missing in the work of the new generation of writers of creative nonfiction.” In particular, Talese has been cited as an exemplar of the long-haul investigation, “the Art of Hanging Around,” where the writer immerses him- or herself into the lives of subjects.

All of Talese’s lauded journalistic accomplishments, however, were called into question over his latest investigative work, The Voyeur’s Motel, published in 2016. Based on the journals of the self-confessed voyeur of the title, the book claimed to chronicle Gerald Foos’ observations of copulating couples from a viewing platform in the Aurora, Colorado, motel that he purported to own from 1965 to 1995. Foos also recorded witnessing criminal behavior: domestic abuse, drug dealing, an episode of incest, and even a murder. A long extract appeared in The New Yorker in April of 2016, attracting widespread media attention, with producer-director Steven Spielberg purchasing the film rights, and a planned national book tour.

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However, a Washington Post investigation, conducted shortly after the New Yorker article appeared, revealed major discrepancies between events in The Voyeur’s Motel and information found in public records. Foos had, in fact, sold the Colorado motel in 1980 and only reacquired it eight years later. The Post also uncovered that the murder Foos recorded in his journal bore a striking resemblance to the unsolved case of Irene Cruz, who was murdered in November of 1977, not in Foos’ motel but in a Denver hotel. These inconsistencies cast doubt on Foos as a narrator even though Talese had, in part, verified his claims by joining him on the viewing platform during a research trip to the motel in January of 1980. Confronted with these discrepancies, Talese told the Post, “I should not have believed a word he said,” adding that he would not promote the book because its “credibility was down the toilet.” However, Talese quickly retracted his public regret in a statement from his publisher: “I am not disavowing the book, and neither is my publisher,” it read. “If, down the line, there are details to correct in later editions, we’ll do that.”

Aside from the factual inaccuracies in the book, criticism also focused on concerns about the ethics of including Foos’ observations of the couples without their consent. If Talese, this exemplar of the form — whose books belong to the canon of literary journalism — admits to the fallibility of his methods, questions may then arise about what we can learn from his mistakes. Inevitably, further questions arise about the enduring value of his previous works. Even the method, the “fine art of hanging out,” might be called into question. Or perhaps Talese, for once, had merely let down his guard and provided valuable insight into his approach.

Reviewers had raised similar questions in 1981 about the narrative reliability and lack of ethical boundaries in Talese’s research and writing of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, a social history of America’s sexual revolution. In an epilogue to this 512-page volume, Talese admitted both to having sexual relationships with female subjects interviewed during his investigation and to managing a Manhattan massage parlor. Fellow journalists, authors, and feminists were excoriating in their comments. Talese said of the experience: “I was made to feel like I was an essentially wicked, perverted person…. It was my version of a scarlet letter.” However, despite this critical lambasting of his process and its final product, Talese returned to the subject of sexual practice in The Voyeur’s Motel. Here he included the journals in which Foos recorded his own voyeuristic experiences, some of which Talese had originally considered including in Thy Neighbor’s Wife. While Talese questions his reactions to the material throughout the 2016 book, even pondering his own voyeurism in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, he proceeded to publish descriptions of the couples, without their knowledge, and whose consent could have been sought because Foos possessed their real names and addresses. Another concern was whether Talese had been complicit in Foos’ crimes, not only by failing to report them but by providing the voyeur with a media platform and thereby escalating his compulsive behavior. While Thy Neighbor’s Wife was a much longer, more considered — albeit problematic — book, The Voyeur’s Motel, while a complement in subject, fails the test of being in the public interest. Moreover, both may have caused harm to the investigated subjects.

There are lessons here for literary journalists and scholars of literary journalism interested in the practices and ethics of immersion. Broadly, they are issues related to the necessity for a journalist to consider the impact that a journalist’s status and behavior may have on the subjects of investigation. If the journalist is not transparent about how his or her very presence frames the relationship to the group or individuals studied, the result may be an unreliable text. If the motives are falsified, the testimony may become manipulative and the resulting narrative may fail that of public interest. Both Thy Neighbor’s Wife and The Voyeur’s Motel faced fierce criticism that, I will argue, was rooted in a perception that these problems were inadequately addressed. Before turning to the details of these two volumes, however, it is instructive to examine how journalists describe their practice and how immersion reporting relates to the field of classical or traditional ethnography, a form of social science research that explicitly draws upon journalistic practice but with its own shared, ethical consensus.

Immersive Journalism

Walt Harrington describes journalists as the “junkyard dogs of ethnography,” and while the suspicion may be mutual, these respective practices share many characteristics, and a history. Robert Parks, the former journalist turned sociologist, employed journalistic techniques to develop his pioneering center for participant/observer-based fieldwork at the University of Chicago. The traditional approach to ethnography that grew out of this hybrid tradition is defined as “a practice in which researchers spend long periods living within a culture in order to study it.” Journalists who employ immersive techniques also involve themselves in the on-location lives and events of their subjects. Wolfe identified this emerging trend in 1973, of which Talese was the exemplar, where writers provided their readers with a “full objective description” but added details about “the subjective or emotional life of the characters.” According to Norman Sims, writing a decade later, the immersive process “begins with emotional connection” and “in its simplest form, [it] means time spent on the job,” “trying to learn all [you can] about a subject,” and is “the journalism of everyday life.” The method includes the writer living with his or her subjects, letting the action unfold naturally, collecting material through the observation of sensory details, recording overheard dialogue and watching for small events and details that evoke their stories’ themes. However, despite the intimacy of the experience, according to Anne Hull, the journalist must “minimize your presence,” remembering that “you are not one of them,” “you are ever the infidel” who must preserve the need to “check people out.”

In acknowledging these shared principles, new hybrid terms were developed, such as ethnographic journalism, anthro-journalism, literary documentary journalism, and cultural journalism. Anne Kirstine Hermann argues for the seemingly inherent relationship between long-form literary reportage and public ethnography, with journalists employing social-scientific immersion strategies and, in the process, remodelling journalism’s epistemic norms. Dominic Boyer, however, notes that, while journalists and ethnographers share many characteristics, they operate under different institutional and temporal conditions that influence their working practice.

Although literary journalists’ reflections on their approach are insightful, the development of an agreed set of ethics to accompany this practice is more elusive. As Sims has argued, writers in this genre “follow their own set of rules” to produce long-form narratives that focus on their specific experiences and encounters with subjects. Meanwhile, Robin Hemley and others, while acknowledging the individual aspect of this practice, argue that the immersive writer must still pass the test of public interest in making decisions about his or her process and in gauging its potential consequences for subjects upon publication. Underpinning the public interest justification is an understanding that the journalist’s primary responsibility is to the reader and to the author’s employer, rather than to the investigated subject. This is a crucial distinction, as ethnographers (who normally remain anonymous in their research reports) employ similar practices but define their responsibility as primarily to their subjects, which, in turn, justifies the intimacy of their access. This creates a complex set of decisions, as journalists may regard their loyalties as split, especially where subjects make themselves vulnerable through disclosure, through actions witnessed by the journalist, or through their interactions with them.

Another critical difference arises from the role of the narrator, or narrative voice. The journalist searches for meaning on the reader’s behalf, through what is experienced, and therefore operates as a “stand-in for the countless souls whose everyday existence she is investigating.” The writer’s access to the subject is usually contingent, temporary, and circumscribed by being insulated from the consequences of publication. The journalist relies on scenic description rather than the “thick description” of the ethnographer, leaving the readers to draw their own conclusions rather than continuously probing for meaning. Instead of representing the views of a given group or community, journalists aim to accurately report on what they have heard and seen.

Throughout an immersive journalistic investigation, a writer will attempt to preserve a formal distance (Hull’s notion of remaining “ever the infidel”) in order to construct the narrative. In this scenario the writer must become separate from the subject in order to view the experience for the consumption of the imagined reader. Hermann challenges this assumption of distance, however, arguing that the journalist in the field “cannot remain a detached observer and narrator, but must become an immersed partaker.” The hybrid of “ethnographic reporters” inevitably transcends “not only professional conventions and reporting habits but also their own demographic profiles” by “exchanging the traditional skeptical attitude with an empathetic one.” This may feed the sense of divided loyalties for journalists left to patrol their own ethical boundaries. According to Harrington:

When you add the word literary to journalism or documentary or ethnography, you cross a line. You are no longer attempting only to describe other people’s experiences. You are now taking responsibility for describing them through your own sense of those other people’s experiences. The egoist in us emerges because we now take pride in the way we tell a story, in the cleverness of our inquiry, the uniqueness of our insight.

Harrington articulates perfectly the tensions inherent in a participatory investigation where journalists must balance a respect for their subjects’ vulnerabilities while retaining control over the final copy: the journalists’ version of what they witnessed, how they have understood it, and what it means. As writers grapple with these questions, they must also ask whether their presence, like that of an ethnographer, has changed the story itself.

Talese reflects on his process of immersion in his essay, “Origins of a Nonfiction Writer.” Here he describes how a childhood spent observing his mother’s exchanges with her female customers at her dress boutique in Ocean City, New Jersey, provided the impetus for his journalistic career. The shop was “a kind of talk show,” he writes, where his mother’s “engaging manner and well-timed questions” drew out intimate confessions from her clients. Talese “used to pause and eavesdrop ... to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt,” techniques which he later parlayed into interviews. His mother also exemplified the “trustworthy individual” in whom her customers could confide. Taking this exchange as his model, Talese writes that he is motivated by his curiosity about “‘ordinary’ people” and analyzes their behavior through the lens of “a small-town American outsider whose exploratory view of the world is accompanied by the essence of the people and place I left behind.” Immersion, for Talese, involves both a considerable amount of time and the writer’s physical presence. “I also believe people will reveal more of themselves to you if you are physically present; and the more sincere you are in your interest, the better will be your chances of obtaining that person’s cooperation.” Once consent is obtained and subjects agree to have their real names used, Talese is free to describe a group or individual’s behavior through his own idiosyncratic perspective rather than as a representative of the subject or group.

Turning to the two books in question, there are several examples where Talese’s description of his immersive process seems to contradict his subjects’ experience of it. Their critical responses reveal challenges inherent to the immersive process for a journalist with Talese’s high public profile, and to his apparent lack of transparency about his approach to research and reporting. As a celebrity journalist, Talese was an asset to the Sandstone community, a “growth centre” in Topanga Canyon, California, which he visited in 1973 while researching Thy Neighbor’s Wife and whose managers were hoping to boost their membership. In the case of Gerald Foos, the voyeur’s desire to access the vast readership that a writing collaboration with Talese would offer may have driven him to falsify his journal entries. In these cases, the ambiguous nature of the relationships Talese fostered with his subjects raises questions about what he actually observed and his motives for observing it. Criticism, expressed in the form of contemporary reviews and critical articles, also suggests that the lack of self-reflection and transparency about his methods may have led readers to question his reliability as a narrator and to cast the process of immersive journalism into doubt.

Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1981)

At the time Thy Neighbor’s Wife was published, Talese enjoyed an enviable public profile among Manhattan’s literary elite, both as a writer and as the husband of Nan Talese, one of New York’s most powerful publishers. A trawl through issues of the New York Times of 1980 shows him mentioned in gossip columns, quoted in articles, and endorsing books in publishers’ ads, and by 1981 even reported as appearing as the aptly named “sexual adventurer” in Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip. His financial ranking was also newsworthy. Following The Kingdom and the Power (1969), his “human history” of the New York Times; and his expose of a New York mafia family in Honor Thy Father (1971); Talese’s publisher Doubleday paid him a $1.2 million advance for a two-book deal, of which Thy Neighbor’s Wife was the first. In October of 1979, United Artists offered Talese the then-record sum of $2.5 million for film rights to the book.

Expected to be what Clarence Petersen of the Chicago Tribune called “the most controversial book of the year, and one of the most provocative books about sex since the first Kinsey report,” it was also, Peterson reported Talese as saying, “the most important story I’ve ever written.” The author, however, seemed unprepared for an onslaught of negative reviews, including Peterson’s reports of John Yardley’s description of it in the Washington Star as “a genuinely dreadful book” and “a slimy exercise,” and, in The New Republic, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s dismissing it as “boring … pious and self-righteous.” Harrison’s sentiment was echoed by novelist Mordecai Richler: “Thy Neighbor’s Wife is an impoverished book; it succeeds like no other I know of in making of sex a mechanical bore.” It was as deep as a “skin-flick,” according to Joan Beck in the Chicago Tribune. And in the Washington Post, Robert Sherrill decried it as “constructed mostly from the sort of intellectual plywood you find in most neighborhood bars: part voyeurism, part amateur psychoanalysis, part six-pack philosophy.” Aside from their misgivings about the book’s literary qualities, some critics thought the subject, borne of the counterculture, by 1980 had arrived too late for serious consideration. The party was over. The critics’ objections to the book’s potted social history, however, were mild in comparison to their comments about Talese’s revelation that he had enjoyed sexual encounters at the nudist Sandstone Retreat in Topanga Canyon. For several chapters in Thy Neighbor’s Wife he describes a nirvana where ordinary middle-class couples experimented with unconventional (and largely heterosexual) relationships.1 There are graphic descriptions in Thy Neighbor’s Wife of orgies, and of couplings, that reveal the subjects at their most publicly uninhibited. This theme of “freedom” runs throughout the book with many characters described as having escaped from puritanical parents and restricted childhoods, from poverty and from oppressive ideologies. Sex operates as a form of rebellion against orthodoxy, against restrictions and religious control, while the Sandstone residents seek enlightenment through new philosophies, such as Abraham Maslow’s concept of self-actualization.

Given the sensitivity of the investigation, Talese explains his approach in an author’s note at the end of Thy Neighbor’s Wife. He describes how he conducted hundreds of interviews, with some subjects more than 50 times, and established “such trusting relationships with the interviewees that they would allow the use of their names in connection with the intimate stories they told me about themselves.” Talese assured his subjects that their stories would be relayed accurately and in “the same non-judgemental tone that characterized my previous work.” Despite this neutral tone, Talese discloses only in a final chapter, in which he writes about himself in the third person, that he engaged in a sexual relationship with Sandstone’s cofounder Barbara Williamson. By concluding, rather than opening the book with this admission, Talese obfuscates the reality of his role in the story and his methods for obtaining information about his subjects. The book is, quite simply, read differently without this knowledge.

The descriptions of the residents’ sexual libertinism are written in a tone of detached interest that enables Talese to maintain his “small-town American outsider perspective.” In this passage, he gives an eye-witness account of the basement “ball-room,” the regular Saturday night party where residents, and guests, were granted entry to a pleasure-seeker’s parlor”:

There were triads, foursomes, a few bisexuals: bodies that could belong to high-fashion models, linebackers, Wagnerian sopranos, speed swimmers, flabby academicians; tattooed arms, peace beads, ankle bracelets, ankhs, thin gold chains around waists, hefty penises, noodles, curly female pubes, fine, bushy, trimmed, dark, blond, red valentines…. Everything that Puritan America had ever tried to outlaw, to censor, to conceal behind locked bedroom doors, was on display in this adult playroom, where men often saw for the first time another man’s erection, and where many couples became alternately stimulated, shocked, gladdened, or saddened by the sight of their spouse interlocked with a new lover.

On the floor above the “ball-room,” prominent literary and counterculture guests gathered, ranging from psychologists Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, to New York Post columnist Max Lerner, actor Bernie Casey and the former Rand Corporation employees responsible for the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo. Cofounder John Williamson’s vision for the community’s eventual membership was a “cross-section of upper-income California businessmen, artists, actors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and people with a creative drive.” According to Barbara Williamson’s records, only 5 percent of Sandstone’s membership was “blue-collar” and 90 percent “upper-middle class.” This suggests, along with Talese’s list of prominent guests, that far from offering an outlet for “ordinary” people — the neighbors of the book’s title — Sandstone’s real aim was to attract those with high status and money.

Talese arrived at the community as a “big-shot very prominent journalist” Williamson hoped would publicize their cause and continue to attract an elite membership. After Talese’s initial visit in 1974, he provided Sandstone with national television coverage by promoting its lifestyle on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. He later appeared at a public event for Sandstone, along with the author of The Joy of Sex (1972), Dr. Alex Comfort, Playboy magazine’s managing editor Nat Lehrman, and Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein. Talese gave numerous radio and print interviews about Sandstone, most notably to Aaron Latham for New York magazine:

Sandstone had institutionalized the orgy so that it was always there when you needed it. Sandstone stood as a monument to prostate power. Many of the openly copulating residents practiced the reverse of fidelity: they were strict about not making love to anyone to whom they had made love to before … Gay told a reporter for Coast magazine: “I’m not that young anymore, and lately the most I’ve been doing is about once a day. But I’ve been engaged at least four times a day since I’ve been here. After a hundred times, it gets a little wearing.”

Although Talese indulged his sexual fantasies on his first visit, when he returned for a longer research period he was committed to becoming “part of the family.”2 But his refusal to share domestic tasks such as cooking and cleaning set him apart from the group and reinforced his celebrity status. Tom Hatfield claims the writer spent his days playing tennis, interested only in interviewing the Williamsons and participating in the Saturday night parties where “he took women into his own bedroom,” violating the community’s rules.

Williamson realized that Talese was struggling to establish a rapport with the other residents and describes him as someone “used to getting his own way” and sulking because the other residents refused to speak with him. To remedy the situation, Williamson describes in her memoir how she visited his cabin one afternoon. In Talese’s version, Williamson was “a sexually aggressive woman” who demanded his sexual favors in return for an interview. “After she had finished, and only after she had finished [italics in original], Barbara Williamson began to talk freely, confiding in him for the first time since he had arrived at Sandstone….” Thus he appears to justify his sexual experience as an extension of his journalistic method, an argument he continued to make in 2009 following the re-publication of Thy Neighbor’s Wife. As he explained to Katie Roiphe (who wrote the preface for the new edition) in an interview for the Paris Review:

I also wanted to emphasize [in the final chapter of Thy Neighbor’s Wife] my distance from the events surrounding me, even when I was within them. I might be in a sauna, but I’m also apart from that sauna. I’m always thinking what it looks like from across the street, or I’m eavesdropping on other conversations. As a reporter I disassociate. It seemed the most obvious way to put myself into the book. I am an observer at all times.

Williamson, however, contradicts Talese’s account, claiming she initiated sex to soothe Talese’s “crushed ego” and that her seduction was calculated to salvage his pride. She led him to the bedroom saying, “Come on, let’s get you better.” Their physical exchange also casts doubt on Talese’s insistence that he remained an ever-vigilant observer, an idea that ignores what Ken Plummer describes as “the complex social processes” involved in the telling of sexual stories.

In the Roiphe interview, Talese, reflecting on Sandstone, justified shedding his clothes and engaging in sex as a means to establish trust with his subjects. “The point is that they had to trust me and I had to trust them. I couldn’t have done it any other way.” But Talese struggled to establish a rapport with John Williamson, partly by insisting on interviewing him at a Malibu Beach restaurant rather than at Sandstone, a demand the Williamsons perceived as a “power play.” Since John Williamson was such a key figure, Talese asked Cynthia Sears, “a well-respected female writer,” to conduct the interview. Barbara Williamson noticed a marked difference in their styles. “[Sears’] whole approach was a radical departure from Gay’s journalistic sense of propriety, his macho pushiness, and John’s response was instantly positive…. Throughout the entire interview, Gay wore an expression of disbelief.” Sears is credited in Talese’s book only as his “research associate” who “tape recorded my conversations” with the Williamsons and “carefully transcribed these dialogues that gave me an additional record so that I could play back and hear again what was said about events and emotions involved.” Barbara recalls that other members found Talese’s interviewing style “overly aggressive, pushy,” which suggests that, despite the months living in the community, Talese had failed to establish the trust vital to an immersive investigation.

Another contrast between Talese’s articulation of his method and his subject’s experience of it arises in considering his attitude toward the female residents. In Thy Neighbor’s Wife, he claims that the Saturday night parties provided women with a safe space in which they could experiment sexually. As he describes the scene:

There was no need for coquetry or traditional feminine coyness at Sandstone, no thoughts about one’s “reputation” nor the legitimate concerns that most women had about their physical safety whenever conversing with male strangers in bars or other public places … women were protected by those around them from being victim of one man’s hostility.

However, while Williamson shared Talese’s conviction that the orgies were liberating for women, she resented the way he rejected any lover who became emotionally attached and his tendency “to treat women as objects, denying them their full expression as individuals.” One woman commented, “he treats women like paper towels: tear one off, use it and throw it away.” Hatfield even remembers a female guest making a rape allegation against “an honorary member,” with Talese as the prime suspect and who, when confronted, “became very angry and accused me [Hatfield] of “power tripping.”

Talese’s lack of clarity about the extent to which he engaged in sexual relationships seems an important oversight in the construction of this narrative. Had he used the first person throughout the Sandstone chapters, the reader would have been alerted to the highly subjective mode in which he was writing and this in itself would have offered greater insight into his stated objectives. By including only a highly edited version of his experience and leaving this crucial information to a final chapter, he obscures and distorts the story. The narrator’s reliability is cast even further into doubt when the Sandstone residents’ memoirs are considered. Talese’s high-profile status and volatile temper also appear to complicate his role as a “part of the family,” raising doubts about his acceptance by and his ability to understand, meaningfully, the community and its individual members.

The Voyeur’s Motel (2016)

Despite the opprobrium heaped upon Talese for Thy Neighbor’s Wife, it became a bestseller and was the topic of television and radio talk shows across the country. Talese’s experiment with inserting himself into the text prompted him to employ this technique in a memoir about his Italian heritage, Unto the Sons, published in 1992. In his essay, “Origins of a Nonfiction Writer,” he writes that the memoir enabled him “to expose … myself and my past influences, without changing the names of the people or the place that shaped my character.” His turn to a deeply personal story anticipated the memoir boom, which, by the early 21st century, saw “more than 150,000 new titles [released] every year.” In keeping with the trend toward a first-person narrative, where the writer provides greater transparency about his or her methods, Talese, in his most recent book, offers more detail about his practice, writes in the first person, and is reflective throughout. Because Foos originally contracted Talese as a possible subject for Thy Neighbor’s Wife, it might be regarded as a companion volume that deals with the same intimate subject matter. If these rhetorical devices address the concerns voiced by past critics of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, they fail, however, to satisfy fully a fresh set of ethical concerns.

Meeting the Voyeur

Voyeurism was not a novel theme for Talese. He made reference to it in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, summing up his observations of how the different genders consume sex, in Europe and in the United States: “Men were natural voyeurs; women were exhibitors. Women sold sexual pleasure; men bought it.” In The Voyeur’s Motel he compares his journalistic motives and methods in Thy Neighbor’s Wife to those of the voyeur, making the distinction that “the people I observed and reported on had given me their consent.” He makes a comparison, perhaps unconscious, in “Origins of a Nonfiction Writer,” where he describes himself as “overhear[ing] many people discussing candidly with my mother what they had earlier avoided” in the dress shop, another form of observant watching that is central to his evolving identity as a journalist.

With the link between voyeurism and journalistic investigation firmly established at the outset of the book, Talese describes how, after receiving a letter from Foos, he agrees to meet him in Denver on January 23rd, 1980, as a possible subject for Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Here Talese describes how he translates his curiosity about — and reactions to — a subject into prose. After their first meeting, Talese writes up his daily impressions about his encounters, a long-established practice. He provides a detailed physical description of Foos, his mannerisms, and his character, even though Talese wonders, “What could I see in his attic that I had not already seen as the researching writer of Thy Neighbor’s Wife and a frequenter of Sandstone’s swinging couples’ ballroom?” Just as Talese is present as a first-person narrator, describing his investigation techniques in detail, he is also self-reflective about his process and his relationship with Foos. There are several examples where he contemplates the ethics of publishing Foos’ observations of his guests from the platform in his motel, justified by Talese as his subject “indulging his curiosity within the boundaries of his own property, and since his guests were unaware of his voyeurism, they were not affected by it … there’s no violation of privacy if no one complains.” As if emboldened by this justification, Talese joins Foos on the viewing platform (and returns “a number of additional times”), where he observes couples engaged in sex. Talese here admits that this activity is “very illegal” and wonders about his own complicity “in this strange and distasteful project.” He eventually decides that because Foos would have to remain anonymous, he cannot use this material and returns to New York to begin his promotional tour for Thy Neighbor’s Wife.

Between 1980 and 1995, when the motel was sold, Foos sent Talese his journals that documented, in great detail, years of his surreptitious recordings from his attic platform. Over that period, Foos became increasingly frustrated with his inability to share his findings — he compared himself to professional sexologists such as Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson — while his fantasies, and behavior, became more florid. For example, he performed an “experiment” where he planted sexual paraphernalia and pornography in a motel room and recorded whether his “subjects” used them. He also describes occasions when he followed female “subjects” back to their homes, even making inquiries about one from a neighbor. Reading this material, in New York, at a geographical and psychological distance, Talese wonders if “voyeurs sometimes need escape from prolonged solitude by exposing themselves to other people (as Foos had done first with his wife, and later me), and then seek a larger audience as an anonymous scrivener of what they’ve witnessed?” This statement seems to raise the question of Talese’s role in aiding Foos’ criminal behavior. The possibility exists that a celebrated writer who considered publishing his accounts — which would satisfy the voyeur’s stated desire for “a larger audience” — may have driven Foos to take greater risks with his “subjects.”3

Critics of The Voyeur’s Motel argued that the author had, indeed, violated journalistic ethics in his treatment of Foos. Dick Lehr, writing in the Huffington Post, in response to the Foos controversy, suggests that, while Talese was correct in his refusal to notify the authorities about violations of privacy, the book fails the test of public interest. “Promises reporters make to sources are a very big deal,” Lehr writes “It’s a matter of trust, a promise so sacrosanct that many reporters would only consider breaking it in the rarest of exceptions.” But, he continues, concerns for the violation of the couples’ privacy should have taken precedence over Talese’s loyalty to his informant. For Lehr, the more troubling aspect of the book is why Talese, who makes repeated references to Foos’ unreliability, chose to believe him.

The second ethical issue arises over whether Talese, as the voyeur’s constant reader and who holds the promise of an international readership for his “research,” encouraged his criminal behavior. Kim Walsh-Childers argues that, by respecting their confidentiality agreement, Talese allows Foos to subject hundreds, even thousands more guests to his voyeurism, judgment, and scorn. Their years of correspondence affirmed Foos’ behavior, “helping him maintain the myth that his actions served some higher purpose, some noble societal goal, rather than simply satisfying his own sexual desire.” More disturbing is the possibility that, through Foos’ reference to his increasing frustrations and references to experiments with his guests in which their privacy is further violated — the sexual paraphernalia planted in their rooms, the stalking of female guests — that his activities escalate. Voyeurism, according to psychologists, is rarely a discrete clinical entity: many studies have found that perpetrators of voyeurism also engage in other forms of sexual deviance, including rape, paedophilia, exhibitionism, and sadism. Earl Ballard, who purchased the Manor House Motel from Foos in 1980, raised this possibility. He told the National Post that, during the 1970s, Foos invited him and another man to join him “multiple times” in the annex to look in on guests. This seems consistent with psychologists’ descriptions of voyeurs as suffering “a general deficit of control over deviant sexual behavior” and contradicts Talese’s image of Foos as suffering from periods of “prolonged solitude.”

Not all of the commentators on the controversy surrounding The Voyeur’s Motel, however, agreed that it cast doubt on the genre and practice of New Journalism. David L. Ullin, writing in the Los Angeles Times, argues that Talese probably relied too heavily on Foos as a narrator simply because of the author’s “desire to believe” this “too good not to tell” story. Ladd Tobin, writing more broadly about Talese’s methods in his Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” also concludes that, however conscious, the author’s fascination and identification with his subject is a primary framing device. I would argue that Talese’s references to his own voyeurism — as a boy in his mother’s shop, as a journalist at Sandstone, with Foos in the motel — “[seep] into almost everything he sees and says” in the book. Ullin’s view that Talese is motivated by a desire to relay Foos’ “too good not to tell” story ignores what Tobin uncovers: that the author’s unconscious, over-identification with his subject causes him to suspend his critical judgment. Moreover, Talese’s unresolved and conflicted feelings about his own sexual desires are played out in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, another case where his ability to maintain distance — and judgment — collapses.

Conclusion

Tobin’s observations are especially helpful in considering the broader lessons to be learned from Talese’s immersive techniques in writing about his own, and others’, sexual experiences. Thy Neighbor’s Wife and The Voyeur’s Motel appeared to be vehicles for the writer to work out his own obsessions, thereby “telling us as much about himself as he does about his subjects.” However, if immersive journalism is a practice in which the writer may strip him- or herself bare, then this must be done with brutal honesty; otherwise, the text becomes manipulative and the truth claim with the reader is broken. Talese, I have argued, disappoints by failing to appropriately frame his Sandstone chapters in Thy Neighbor’s Wife as the experience of a celebrity whose presence colors his intimate relationships with his subjects. The confessional author note, left to the final chapter and written in a distancing third person, seems self-serving and casts doubt on the book’s message.

Talese’s self-reflective mode in The Voyeur’s Motel, however, fails to fully address these concerns. Here the ethical questions are even more sharply focused because of Talese’s complicity in the crimes perpetuated by the subject and by the possibility that his attention may have prompted the voyeur’s sexually deviant behavior to escalate. The unconscious over-identification with the subject, which goes unacknowledged, seems paradoxical given Talese’s stated ability to “disassociate” and to remain ever “an observer.” Perhaps the most vital message in this exploration of these journalistic investigations into the fraught territory of sexual intimacy is the need for psychological insight and an ability to face up to the brutal honesty of our motivating psyches. As Phillip Lopate has written about the essential requirement for good personal writing, “Remorse is often the starting point … whose working out brings the necessary self-forgiveness (not to mention self-amusement) that is necessary to help us outgrow shame.” Whatever Talese’s motivations that lay behind the years he has devoted to writing about sex, perhaps this self-understanding might have been a better, and more ethical starting place.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

Meet: About the Author

Julie Wheelwright is a senior lecturer in narrative non-fiction writing at City, University of London. She is the author of Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Crossed Dressed in Pursuit of Life Liberty and Happiness; The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage; and, most recently, Esther: The Remarkable True Story of Esther Wheelwright. A former journalist and broadcaster, her research interests include the transmission of history in popular media, gendered readings of women at war, and memoir as a historical source text.

Read: Footnotes

John and Judith Bullaro feature as the typical middle-class couple whose lives are deeply affected by the sexual liberation movement through their involvement with the Sandstone Retreat. In “My Sandstone Experience,” Tom Hatfield noted that, rather than your next-door neighbor, as Gay Talese described it, the sexual revolutionaries who made up the community at Sandstone were regarded by their founders as an elite. The community was “a cross-section of upper-income California businessmen, artists, actors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and people with a creative drive.”

In “My Sandstone Experience,” Robert Rimmer paraphrases Talese from a radio talk show interview with Marty Zitter, describing his reaction to Sandstone as “like being a kid in a candy store.”

There is also the question of how Gerald Foos benefited financially from this arrangement. Foos, at the time of publication of The Voyeur’s Motel, was selling off his collection of baseball cards and antique dolls. Talese, also a high profile and well-known sports writer, appears in a YouTube video with Foos, overlooking the collection.

Weekend Reading: The Atlantic's Reporting on January 6th, Chris Cuomo's Exit, Notable Trials, and More

Cary Littlejohn — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 14:00:31 GMT

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Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun — Barton Gellman, The Atlantic

I rarely lift entire sections of a single publication for inclusion on a topic, but I’m making an exception for The Atlantic’s upcoming January/February print issue on the fallout from the January 6th attacks on the Capitol. The first must be Barton Gellman’s cover story. Gellman’s thesis is fairly simple: “There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.” That restatement of the thesis comes near the end of a monster piece. What makes it so notable, so worth your time and consideration, is what came before it: Gellman’s prescient reporting and writing from November of 2020, entitled “The Election That Could Break America,” came months before the terrible acts of January 6th.

📖 Are We Doomed? — George Packer, The Atlantic: It’s wild that January 6th isn’t bigger news, right? It’s disconcerting that it’s faded into the background so easily. Granted, there’s a pandemic ravaging the globe still and myriad other travesties and traumas to go around, but this was a huge deal with possibly republic-shattering implications. That’s why I appreciate The Atlantic’s upcoming issue, harnessing the power of a print publication to put out a collection of stories one year since that fateful day. Magazines are great at anniversaries. George Packer, as they say, understood the assignment; he begins his piece thusly: “A year after the insurrection, I’m trying to imagine the death of American democracy. It’s somehow easier to picture the Earth blasted and bleached by global warming, or the human brain overtaken by the tyranny of artificial intelligence, than to foresee the end of our 250-year experiment in self-government.” After dispensing what he thinks are non-issues, Packer concedes this point: “Before January 6th, no one — including intelligence professionals — could have conceived of a president provoking his followers to smash up the Capitol. Even the rioters livestreaming in National Statuary Hall seemed stunned by what they were doing. The siege felt like a wild shot that could have been fatal. For a nanosecond, shocked politicians of both parties sang together from the hymnal of democracy. But the unity didn’t last. The past months have made it clear that the near miss was a warning shot.”

📖 A Party, and Nation, in Crisis — Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic: I love a good editor’s note in a magazine, and Jeffrey Goldberg delivers in this one, summarizing the theme of the issue, which has as much to do with January 6th as it does with the decline of the Republican Party. He does not mince words; he does not miss.

There is insufficient space in any one issue of this magazine to trace the Republican Party’s decomposition from Lincoln’s day to ours. It is enough to say that its most recent, and most catastrophic, turn — toward authoritarianism, nativism, and conspiracism — threatens the republic that it was founded to save.

CNN Fires Chris Cuomo Amid Inquiry Into His Efforts to Aid His Brother — Michael M. Grynbaum, John Koblin & Jodi Kantor, The New York Times

Last Saturday saw what many media-watchers would tell you was long overdue: CNN fired anchor Chris Cuomo for his efforts to help his brother survive, politically speaking, sexual harassment accusations. A journalistic slippery slope that raised concerns in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, back when New York was the hardest-hit place in the world, saw the brothers Cuomo trading back-slapping banter on air and it was a ratings bonanza for CNN. Critics said perhaps the governor of New York didn’t deserve such softball interviews, but they continued. When the sexual harrassment allegations broke, Chris again seemed to suggest that slippery slopes were not serious concerns. But last week, CNN said it had discovered that Chris’ collaboration went deeper than initially suspected. Who’da thunk it?

📖 The Code of Chris and Andrew Cuomo — Eric Lach, The New Yorker: Eric Lach explores CNN’s half-measure of simply suspending Chris Cuomo before finally cutting all ties with him a few days later.

Chris Cuomo’s business is media. Andrew Cuomo’s business is politics. The line between them is clear, except when it isn’t. “I’m trying to help my brother,” Cuomo told investigators working for the New York attorney general’s office during a six-hour deposition in July, a transcript of which was made public on Monday. “But I’m not part of his team.”

📖 Inside CNN’s Decision to Fire Chris Cuomo: ‘He Gave Me His Word’ — Jeremy Barr & Sarah Ellison, The Washington Post: Blatant disregard of journalistic ethics may not have been the only factor at play when it came time to fire Chris Cuomo.

The network’s decision was almost certainly accelerated by the emergence last week of a sexual misconduct claim against the host, made by a lawyer who described her client as a former junior colleague who encountered Cuomo before he joined CNN in 2013. Yet the cable news giant took pains over the weekend to assert that Cuomo had already done enough to merit dismissal earlier this year, when he helped his brother, former New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, combat an unrelated sexual harassment scandal.

📖 Time to Pull the Plug on Cable News — Jack Shafer, Politico: Just how powerful are the cable news networks? Jack Shafer wonders if we might not be better off without the whole lot of them.

Why all this attention when cable news barely matters to most Americans? The average audience commanded by [Rachael] Maddow and [Anderson] Cooper and [Sean] Hannity and all the others slithering down your cable cord is so tiny you can almost get away with calling cable news a niche media. According to October numbers from TV Newser, the three major cable networks attract an average audience of only 4.2 million viewers during primetime, which is when viewing peaks. In a nation of 330 million, that’s just a little over 1 percent of the population.

Drawing Ghislaine Maxwell — Choire Sicha, New York

Now, does this Q&A with a courtroom sketch artist at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial rise to the level of Jimmy Breslin columns in the aftermath of the JFK assissination? No. But few things do. It is an interesting look at a widely covered trial that evokes the spirit of Breslin by looking ever-so-slightly off the center of axis of an issue of the day to find stories that matter. The artist has been drawing defendants in trials for more than 40 years. (For context: The Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell — Sabrina Tavernise, The Daily/The New York Times)

📖 Jussie Smollett’s Conviction for Orchestrating and Reporting a Phony Hate Crime Punctuates Actor’s Sudden Downfall — Megan Crepeau & Jason Meisner, The Chicago Tribune: First, it was news because it seemed like the terrible, ugly culmination of so many things America had been building toward under the Trump administration. It was, at first blush, a hate crime. But then the story unraveled, and it became news for a whole new reason: The cops and prosecutors alleged that Jussie Smollett had staged the whole thing. On Thursday, a jury agreed and found him guilty of five of six felony charges. (For context: What the Jussie Smollett Story Reveals — John McWhorter, The Atlantic)

🎧 Accusations and Evasions — The Dropout: Elizabeth Holmes on Trial/ABC Radio: The incredibly propulsive original formulation of The Dropout summarized the captivating story of Elizabeth Holmes and the rise and fall of Theranos. Once Holmes went on trial, The Dropout came back to life, and used its built-in audience to update listeners on the machinations of her trial itself (which has been recommended in Weekend Reading on an earlier occasion). Whereas the original series produced only six episodes, the trial coverage has produced more than double that number. (For context: The Theranos Trial: What to Know After Elizabeth Holmes’ Lawyers Rest Their Case & The Trial of Elizabeth Holmes: Who’s Who in the Theranos Case, The Wall Street Journal)

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

The House Always Wins … Unless — John Gonzalez, The Ringer

Birds Aren’t Real, or Are They? Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory. — Taylor Lorenz, The New York Times

Jimmy Chin Enters Uncharted Territory — Jacob Baynham, GQ

We’re Not Going Back to “Before Roe” — Dahlia Lithwick, Slate

Utah Makes Welfare So Hard to Get, Some Feel They Must Join the LDS Church to Get Aid — Eli Hager, ProPublica

On “Succession,” Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke — Michael Schulman, The New Yorker

Low-Profile Heiress Who ‘Played a Strong Role’ in Financing Jan. 6 Rally Is Thrust Into Spotlight — Beth Reinhard, Jacqueline Alemany & Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Ted Conover on 'Rolling Nowhere,' 'Coyotes,' and 'Newjack'

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

Stories That Matter: How Time Released a BIPOC-Led Issue With Journalists Covering Their Own Communities

A conversation with Lucy Feldman, the lead editor of a first-of-its-kind magazine issue, and Sanya Mansoor.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Ted Conover on 'Rolling Nowhere,' 'Coyotes,' and 'Newjack'

Ted Conover — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 17:00:37 GMT

The search for a perfect title is, of course, collaborative. It’s you and your editor, but it’s also your best friends and the publisher’s sales team. The search for the title of my first book, about riding freight trains with hoboes, lasted for months — for the entire time I wrote it. And the night I mailed it in — the typewritten manuscript, pre-computer — my mother had me to dinner in Denver. The good news: I was finished! The bad: except for the title.

Over dessert we brainstormed. I knew my ideas weren’t working and soon she could see that I didn’t like hers, either. “So tell me some titles of actual books that you do like,” she said. (Dialogue here is reconstituted to the best of my ability.) I told her I liked the title of Jack London’s story collection about hoboes, The Road. I liked Hard Travelin’, a biography of Woody Guthrie, and I liked a book of photos and interviews called Riding the Rails. Of all the books about hoboes I’d read, I said, getting distracted, the best was a collection of semi-autobiographical stories from the Great Depression by a man who had been homeless named Tom Kromer. I told mom how the book was dedicated “to Jolene, who turned off the gas.”

“What was the book called?” she asked.

“Waiting for Nothing,” I answered. “Doesn’t that say it all?”

The wheels were turning in mom’s head. “How about Rolling Nowhere?” she suggested. It struck me as perfect — the railroad-specific version of Waiting for Nothing. I added the subtitle, Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes. Coffee was poured; such was my relief that it might have been champagne.

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By the time the book came out, I was in graduate school in England. The Viking Press airmailed me two early copies. Holding that first book of mine in my hands was one of the highlights of my life, except … for the subtitle. The publisher had changed it from “Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes” to “A Young Man’s Adventures Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes.” I got on the phone to New York.“What’s with ‘A Young Man’s Adventures’?” I demanded. “That’s not what we agreed on.”

My editor, who otherwise had done a great job, sounded defensive. “We just thought that described it better,” she said. “You were young then.”

The book came out a year later as a Penguin Travel Library paperback. A few years after that it went out of print. But with the success of Newjack, Vintage Books, my new publisher, agreed to bring Rolling Nowhere back. That’s when I learned that you can sometimes change a subtitle. So for many years, the complete title has been what it was meant to be all along: Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes.

Coyotes wasn’t my first choice for my second book, which recounts a year of travels with Mexican migrants; my first choice was Mojado, which means “wet” in Spanish. It was slang used jokingly by Mexicans themselves, which is why I liked it. But my editor put the kibosh on that. “How do you pronounce it? Mo-JAY-do?”

“Mo-HA-do,” I corrected him.

“Well, forget it. Books with foreign titles don’t sell.”

I don’t remember how we came up with Coyote, except that it had the benefit of being a word in English as well as Spanish. That it didn’t refer to the migrants but instead to the smugglers didn’t bother my editor, who thought it conveyed an atmosphere — and finally I agreed.

A few months before publication, he sent me the Vintage Books catalogue. There was my book, with an evocative photograph by Sebastião Salgado on the cover, and the word coyotes, plural, emblazoned across the top. Again I called New York. “What’s with Coyotes, plural?” I asked.

“Oh,” said my new editor. “It turns out that a novel is coming out at the same time from another house called Coyote. We added the ‘s’ so there wouldn’t be confusion.”

“Why didn’t they add an ‘s,’?” I demanded.

“Don’t worry, Ted — it’s basically the same,” he assured me.

My next book, about Aspen, was with the same editor. We agreed on that title, Whiteout, with its connotations of loss of perspective, of wintertime, and of cocaine. There were no surprises except for the first cover art he showed me: a photo of two women in bikinis and fur coats standing near the Little Nell gondola. After my flat rejection, he sent another one, of a photo of a snow globe they had commissioned just for the occasion. Inside the globe was the title of my book, chiseled out of a snowy mountain. I was very happy.

Newjack, about my 10 months as a New York State corrections officer, got its title from inmate slang for a rookie officer. That’s an idea I like: a title derived from the argot of a subculture. My new editor and I agreed upon it immediately. The only problem it has ever caused: Occasionally a reader confuses it with the movie Newjack City.

I had a new editor again for my next book, about roads. We struggled and struggled until one day I blurted out the idea I’d been husbanding for a while but was afraid to say out loud. “How about The Routes of Man?” I said.

There was silence. “Did you just pull that out of your hat?” he asked.

No, I said — I’d had the idea for a while. But I was afraid it might sound sexist. He didn’t think it did. And like me, he appreciated the echo of the classic photo book by Edward Steichen, The Family of Man, and the double-entendre with “roots of man.” The only hitch with it has been that some people pronounce routes as “routs,” and miss the double meaning. Ah well.

For my most recent book, which is about how to research and write the immersive non-fiction that I’m best known for, we considered the titles In Deep, Inside, The Art of Immersion Writing, and The Deep End. But after a long discussion over the phone, my editor and I agreed on Going Deep. As I hung up, I thought it might be a good idea to check online for books with that title. Already there was a memoir about football called Going Deep, as well as romance novels, gay and straight. So we moved the phrase to the subtitle, settling on a simple label for the title: Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep.

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Meet: About the Author

Ted Conover is an author who combines anthropological and journalistic methods to research social groups. His research has led him to experiences such as riding freight railroads across the western United States and working as a corrections officer. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000), based on his time as a corrections officer, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general non-fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

Stories That Matter: How Time Released a BIPOC-Led Issue With Journalists Covering Their Own Communities

Jessica Kantor — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 17:00:33 GMT

The second in a special multi-part series that takes a look at journalists who are covering their own communities, and how their personal ties to the subjects they report on allows them to be stronger confidants and better storytellers.

Following the events of summer 2020, employees at Time decided it was important to highlight key issues and amplify strong voices. In May of 2021 the magazine put out a special BIPOC-led issue on the fight for racial justice and building a better world. “Visions of Equity” was the first of its kind as it was written largely by BIPOC employees at the magazine and solely about issues relating to BIPOC communities globally. The initiative was led by Senior Editor Lucy Feldman.

Shortly before the issue came to be, Feldman started a resource group organized by staffers for BIPOC employees and then spearheaded the creation of the issue, supporting her writers along the way. Reporter Sanya Mansoor was one such writer who joined the issue and shared a bit about what it’s like being a Muslim journalist and writing about Muslim issues for Time. This personal essay was included with seven others in a special piece that had Time journalists reflecting on covering their communities over the past year — a year that was extremely hard for a multitude of reasons. The essays from the staff were real, at times uncomfortable, and at times critical of their workplace, but as Feldman shared in our conversation, Time leadership is working hard to make sure that they oversee a safe and supportive place to work for their BIPOC staff.

Read the Original Time Story

“Longstanding journalistic maxims would have a reporter remain disengaged while gathering the facts,” read the opening statement from Time’s issue. “But pursuing the whole truth means considering the humanity of one’s subjects — and of oneself. Lived experience can help a reporter empathize and deepen their work in the service of telling stories that accurately reflect the world. After an intense year of reporting on stories about the struggles endured by people who share their identities, Time journalists reflect on the lessons they will carry forward in their work.”

Both Feldman and Mansoor share their stories of how the special issue came to be and how they felt working on it. The conversation also dives into how they feel covering their own communities and where their personal experience within these communities is a strength — not only for this special issue but for the publication as a whole. Feldman’s perspective as a senior editor is particularly insightful as she works closely with a handful of writers that are covering their own communities. The interviews have been edited for concision and clarity.

Lucy, You were really instrumental in bringing the entire BIPOC-led issue to fruition. Do you want to share a bit about how you got there? What made you want to do a BIPOC-led issue and what made you think Time would be open to it?

Feldman: Basically, I had been at Time since January of 2017 and always found it to be a great workplace. But, like most workplaces, as we’ve heard across the country, there are always little things. As an Asian-American editor, I feel it’s interesting that we treat stories about race the way that we do. I didn’t necessarily feel like that was something I would set out to change, but the summer of 2020 rolled around and so many of my colleagues were in such deep pain. With the pandemic, we were also isolated and I just had the impulse to create this ad hoc community that included anybody who identified as a person of color from across the organization, which included editorial and members of the business team as well.

We started getting together and chatting, sharing stories and perspectives, and encouraging each other; listening and being there for each other. What everybody was bringing to these really informal conversations was so interesting and smart. Everybody had these points of view that were different from what I was hearing in my own little family group or my own little editorial group. It seemed like a huge untapped resource really, for us as a media organization but also for anyone who just wanted to gain a little perspective of how other people were feeling during a really intense terrible time.

At the time, Time was planning an equity-focused large-scale project and I asked if we could get involved somehow, I was really grateful for how our editor-in-chief responded; it was always a very open, very welcoming situation, which I know is not the case everywhere. As we talked more, I realized I didn’t want to set this group up to not be able to deliver the fullest version of what we were able to do together. So we decided to wait and spend more time brainstorming and coming up with a project that could be fully our own. Then May of 2021 rolled around and we were ready to publish our full issue.

Sanya, you shared your perspective in this piece and have covered topics surrounding Islam and the Muslim community since then. How did you get involved? Were you asked to take part in that or was that something you asked to be involved in?

Mansoor: Yeah, that’s a good question. So that project actually came out of our BIPOC group and the leaders of that had been really pushing for a BIPOC-led issue where we would take ownership of a lot of that issue, either writing the articles ourselves or coming up with ideas ourselves ... but having kind of specific personal topics that speak to us in a way that we might not have access to in every single issue. And so as part of this BIPOC issue, one of the things we landed upon as a group was having these personal reflections about being a journalist. And they left it pretty open-ended, right? So they were like, “what is it like being a journalist from your community?” And initially, to be honest, I think because I always saw myself as a reporter first, I almost didn’t see myself writing a piece. I’m a reporter, I’m not an op-ed writer. So my initial instinct was I didn’t jump on it. And then I did have an internal dialogue asking, “Is there something unique I have to contribute to this?” I just didn’t know that I could make my experiences coherent in that way before I had really done it.

Then [Lucy] approached me and was like: “Hey, I think you’d be a great person to hear from in this essay. No pressure, but is this something you’re interested in?” And with that prodding, I decided to kind of reflect on my own experience. So I told her off the cuff, you know, these are the ways in which I thought about being a Muslim reporter, the way that it’s informed how I work, and the way that it has sometimes been a challenge, but also an asset. So, she gravitated toward that idea and was like, “give it a shot.” So that’s really how it came together. So it wasn’t that I came up with this idea out of the blue and it wasn’t just my standalone essay, but we did it together and all these essays were kind of like a kaleidoscope of, you know, where we’re at.

My essay wasn’t necessarily critical of Time, but what I did appreciate about this is that there were other essays in there that were critical of our workspace or some interactions that have been going on and it shows that no workplace is perfect. But there was something about this project and this honesty that I appreciated because I didn’t feel like I had to hold back. I wrote pretty honestly about my experience and, from reading the other essays, I feel like people were pretty candid in how they felt navigating some of the weighty decisions. Especially, you know, when you’re one of a few people from your racial or religious community in the newsroom. There’s almost that added weight of like: “Am I speaking for my community? Or am I just a reporter who happens to be something?”

Lucy, you were the head editor on the entire issue?

Feldman: Yes, I was.

Amazing. So what were your thoughts and feelings when you were looking at all of the pieces? Were you ever worried because of the classic Western audience that there would be push back? And did you care?

Feldman: That’s a great question. I did not care. I can’t even tell you if I really worried about it, I think that I didn’t because I felt such strong conviction about what we were setting out to do. When it came to the personal pieces, and also when it came to a piece by Janell Ross, one of our senior correspondents in the package, where she had spoken about something in her personal life that was really painful — of course, we all had conversations about the realities of putting things out there in the world about yourself and what might come back to individuals. I had published a personal essay after the Atlanta shooting and had gotten back some incredibly racist, misogynistic stuff that was really just disgusting and I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me. So I wanted to make sure that anyone who was including personal material was fully aware of what could happen with that and that everyone was set up with protection.

We’re really lucky to have a great security officer who helps us with the nitty-gritty of what to do if you’re going to publish something sensitive. And it’s really unfortunate that these things are of concern at all, but myself personally working on this issue, I didn’t think about it much. And actually, when I got back to the office recently — we aren’t working there yet but I went back to clear out my desk and go through my mail — I did have some pretty extreme hate mail. It was so freaky. There was a picture of the editing team that ran in the print edition. They cut out the picture and pointed to my face, they were like, “you — go back to where you came from.” Just really vile ... but for every response like that there are so many more people just being so excited and moved by seeing an institution like Time going in this different direction.

It’s true. That issue, the work Time has been doing, the work you and your team have been doing, it’s changing the perception of what is accepted in journalism and the institution. I’m interested in hearing your perspective as an editor who is working with several journalists who are actively covering their own communities. Are you doing anything different or do you have any red flags to make sure that no one is getting too personal or venturing into a “bias” area?

Feldman: For this project, in particular, it was so personal to all of us and I think that we made that really clear to the reader. So, it wasn’t as much an issue. When you’re writing or editing personal material, those rules apply in different ways. But when I’m editing, for example, like Sanya’s pieces, we always have a conversation and I’ll ask her, “what’s your perspective on this story you’re pitching?” or often she will tell me, “Hey — the angle that you think is the most interesting one....” For example, the coverage of 9/11 and what stories she might want to report on Muslims in America over the last 20 years. I had come up with an angle that I thought was really compelling. And she was like: “I see why you would think that! But actually, for Muslims in America, this other thing is much more relevant and I think we should do this instead.” I appreciate that so much. Obviously, we want to be telling the most important story, and if she has a perspective that helps us get there, even if it’s not what my mind immediately goes to, then great. I’m going to listen to her.

Definitely. Do you think. in newsrooms around America, that those open conversations are happening? And are editors being open to a reporter from that community sharing their perspective and not just shutting them down as being personal?

Feldman: I don’t know what’s happening in newsrooms around the country. I hope that people are listening. I’ve always considered editing to be a job about listening more than anything else.

Has that been your experience prior, working with your own editors?

Feldman: Yes and no. I think that the best editors are the ones who recognize how much their behavior has an impact on other people. I think everyone had an editor who was like, really there, or I guess I hope everyone had an editor who was really there to support them as a human and a journalist at the same time. I don’t know if everyone has. I’ve had both.

In regards to the “8 Time Journalists Reflect on a Year of Covering Stories About Their Communities” piece, were all of the people that shared their stories immediately open and excited — well, excited is a hard word to use because that was such a hard time. Let me rephrase. Were people looking forward to sharing their perspective about such a tough issue or was there hesitancy to participate?

Feldman: There was a mix, for sure. Some people were like “this is already my favorite part of the project, I can’t wait to take part, I know what I’m going to write about.” Some people, I knew from being their colleague and peer that they had a very specific experience that I thought would add something unique and poignant to this mix of stories and I approached them individually and asked if they were interested. I tried not to apply pressure because it’s such a personal thing. But I found in a lot of cases there were writers who absolutely know what they would say, if they felt free to do so. And I felt like my job was to make sure they knew that this was a safe space to do so and to work with them along the way. Actually, a fun fact about this project is that I didn’t turn anyone down. We ran all of the pieces that people wanted to write.

Was there anyone that, after the issue came out, they regretted participating? Or on the opposite end, are the writers who participated feeling more empowered now because of their involvement?

Feldman: No one backtracked; no one expressed any kind of regret. During the process, I had a lot of conversations with people about how different, but exciting, but nerve-wracking ... it was an intense thing for someone to opt into because in many ways it was us calling out our own employer. But the response on the other side from the readers, the writers’ family and friends, and even our own leadership at Time was just so positive. I certainly hope no one regrets it.

Do you think that Time is forever changed because of this project and will continue with this type of coverage and to be open? Or do you think that, as long as you, or people like you, are at Time and continue to fight for this type of coverage that it will continue?

Feldman: I think that Time editors at all levels are really aware and committed. Obviously, individual people are passionate about different things to different degrees. But I don’t think anyone could have gone through this past year without having their perspective shifted at least a little bit. And our top editorial leaders are so committed to hearing feedback and trying to make adjustments. I don’t think that any one person or piece is necessary to keep the whole machine running.

Sanya, I want to go back to your last question: “Am I a representative of my community? Or am I just a reporter that is a part of the community?” Do you feel like you can answer that question? Do you feel like there is an answer to that question?

Mansoor: I feel like, you know, Muslims are not a monolith. So in a lot of ways, I feel like I kind of see myself more as a reporter who happens to be Muslim, as opposed to a reporter who speaks for the Muslim community. Part of my job as a reporter, right, is not to report on my worldview, my specific experience as a Muslim. I have a very specific experience, right? I’m an upper-middle-class Muslim, I don’t wear a hijab, I’m a woman, I’m not black. All of these things are so specific. I’ve gone to Friday prayers, I pray and, personally, it’s an important aspect of my life and worldview, but also within that, I’m very self-aware to know that I have a lived experience of being that kind of Muslim. But I don’t have the lived experience of being a black Muslim or a Muslim who is incarcerated.

These are all very specific experiences and I feel like, as a good reporter, that it’s a balance. I’m drawing on my personal knowledge and experience. For example, and I mentioned this in the essay about the story for COVID-Ramadan. I reached out to the Imam at New York University who I knew from going to Friday prayers there. That was a very easy personal reach out for me to do because I knew everyone knows him and loves him. He put a message out on my behalf and my inbox was flooded with people wanting to talk to me. On the other hand, sometimes I do need to go the extra mile a bit. Like, for the last Ramadan, I did a story on Muslims in prison and the challenges of being Muslim in prison. That one was more tricky, right? Because it’s not like I had colleagues to call up and be like, “hey, can you put me in touch with these people?” I had to do more digging around and talking to people I wasn’t already talking to. But I wanted to tell that story, even though I had no personal experience in that area. I felt like, as a reporter who is Muslim, I wanted to unpack those issues. On one hand, I don’t know what it’s like to be a prisoner during Ramadan, but on the other hand, I do know what Ramadan is like. So in my mind, I’m asking questions like: “Does someone wake them up to eat their pre-dawn meal? Are they getting enough food between those two meals?” So in many ways, I know more than the average person but I don’t know everything.

Well, and that’s the thing: Many people think that, if you’re reporting on a story that you’re close to or a community you’re a part of, that you’re putting your opinion or your experience into the story, but that’s not necessarily true. It can help with contacts, understanding issues, knowing what questions to ask….

Mansoor: It definitely helps, but there are two aspects to it, I think. There’s a practical aspect, which is, for example, contacts and knowing who would be a great person to contact. Also knowing the basics and not having to Wikipedia basic stuff about the religion because it’s stuff I already know. But additionally, I feel like there’s a trust element. Particularly if you’re a community that has not always been represented favorably by the media and you have a skepticism. And I think that is a reasonable skepticism. I feel like this is actually the biggest asset — the trust side, which is not necessarily something that I’m doing. But obviously, you still have to earn people’s trust as well, but it’s in the active small things. For example, if I call someone up and say “As-Salaam-Alaikum” because that’s the way that I greet someone who is Muslim. Instantly, there’s a comfort level.

Beyond that, for example, I’m doing a story right now for the anniversary of 9/11 but it’s actually about the post-9/11 surveillance of Muslims. One of the sources said they were so glad that it’s me writing the story because they really trust me. Just hearing that kind of stuff, I feel like people are less worried about you and they feel like you get it a little bit more. So they feel a little bit less of a need to overexplain or defend. But again, with the caveat that I don’t have every type of Muslim experience — but I do have enough to kind of get at the heart of what people care about. And it’s interesting, because we were kind of debating what direction to go in with our 9/11 coverage and, based on my conversations with some of these sources, I really did actually push back on some ideas the higher editors have raised about the approach we should go in. I mentioned that, based on my conversations with people, that a story about the surveillance would be much more powerful than going with another route. So, yes, there’s practical stuff but then there’s trust, connection, being a part of the community. This is someone that opens up doors and stories and adds a level of depth and understanding.

You are covering a community that has not been fairly represented in Western media, hasn’t been fairly represented in legislation, even in criminal justice issues like experiencing Ramadan in prison. So, can you speak to that? Do you feel like you need to help amplify voices? Do you feel empowered when you’re reporting on the Muslim community because you’re at least portraying a slightly clearer or stronger story than maybe your colleagues would have done?

Mansoor: Yea, so I feel like that’s a really personal question that varies from person to person. I personally feel a sense of agency, and I do want to amplify people’s voices, particularly Muslims who are not, like, the boilerplate spokespeople for the community and kind of just, you know, getting at the heart of some of these issues. But at the same time, I’ll balance that by saying that I don’t think a Muslim reporter who doesn’t want to touch this topic at all is in some way doing something wrong. For example, I was really drawn to doing something for this anniversary and I pitched it and really pushed hard on a particular idea. But I felt like a lot of Muslim-American reporters were like, “I don’t want to be the person who does an anniversary piece.” And I feel like that really falls to the individual reporter to decide if it’s empowering or feels like a chore or deciding if it feels like they’re being tokenized. So it is such a nuanced distinction that only each reporter can make for themselves. For me, I really feel empowered in a sense.

One thing I do sometimes struggle with is that I feel like I’m so immersed in a story while I’m reporting it. I’m 100 percent present and when you finish a story it’s like, you kind of move on from it a little bit and you have to jump to the next thing because there’s only so much you can do as a reporter. Like, I’m not a lawyer. I can’t instantly change policies. Like, for example, after the prison story, I was like: “OK — I wrote this. I had these really personal conversations with these people...” and sometimes there is a little bit of a feeling of helplessness, but you’re happy that you got to amplify that issue and those voices….

Stories That Matter is a series of interviews with the people behind some of the best and most influential journalism being done today, focused on reporting, writing, and lessons we can learn from the process of creating great work.

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The Postscript

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Predict: What Happens Next

Time magazine is an institution in journalism. Editors and writers like Lucy Feldman, Sanya Mansoor, and all of the other participants in the BIPOC-led issue, represent the shift in thinking that is occurring in the industry.

As a senior editor, Feldman is working to continue to encourage and support all of her writers to write about what they want and what they know — especially the writers who come from communities that have not always been encouraged to do so. Mansoor hopes to continue to be a strong journalist that gets to amplify stories from the Muslim community, working carefully to not speak for the entire nation and not allowing it to define her as a journalist.

Stay Close: A Special Series on Journalists Covering Their Own Communities

Read: More Articles and Essays From Mansoor and Feldman at Time

Feldman’s personal essay after the horrific attack on Asian Americans in Atlanta: “‘We Are Always Waiting Our Turn to Be Important.’ A Love Letter to Asian Americans.,” March 18, 2021
Mansoor’s coverage of incarcerated Muslims observing Ramadan: “‘I Don’t Think You’re Going to Be Eating Tonight.’ Muslims Describe Ramadan in U.S. Prisons.,” May 12, 2021
Mansoor’s coverage of post-9/11 surveillance on the Muslim community in America: “‘Who Else Is Spying on Me?’ Muslim Americans Bring the Fight Against Surveillance to the Supreme Court.,” September 16, 2021
Feldman’s essay on how the BIPOC-led issue came together: “The Story Behind Time’s First-Ever BIPOC-Led Issue,” May 13, 2021

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Weekend Reading: Jack Dorsey's Run at Twitter, the Omicron Variant, Stephen Sondheim's Legacy, and More

Cary Littlejohn — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 14:00:38 GMT

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Jack Steps Back — Casey Newton, Platformer

Jack Dorsey’s reign at Twitter ended this week. Casey Newton looks back at a solid year for the company, even though it never met expectations set out by one of its hedge fund investors, to answer the question: Why resign as CEO now? He also considers the notion that maybe Dorsey didn’t really want to be CEO of Twitter, and he looks ahead to the man who’ll fill Dorsey’s shoes.

From his earliest days at the company, Dorsey was an enigma: on one hand, a visionary leader with an uncanny grasp of what the future holds; on the other, a distant and often inscrutable manager whose slowness in making decisions would hobble the company for almost half a decade.

📖 Jack Dorsey Was the Soul of Twitter — Steven Levy, Wired:

You could argue endlessly about whether someone else could have done better. But you can never dispute that, for the past six years, Twitter was run by someone who was its very soul. He exulted in its timeliness and verve, and embraced its messiness. He playfully taunted his critics, who kept pestering him for an edit function. There is no way — no way — that Jack Dorsey would rename his company after some dream of a metasphere.

🗄️ From 2013: Two-Hit Wonder — D.T. Max, The New Yorker: Steven Levy’s musing in Wired about whether someone else could have run Twitter better is predicated on one huge point: Jack Dorsey was, before his resignation, the CEO of two multi-billion-dollar companies, the second of which was Square. He’ll continue as Square’s CEO, overseeing the device and related technology that made it possible to swipe a credit card on one’s cell phone.

Some of the designers protested, but soon gave way: Square is Dorsey’s company. It is his do-over, after a messy experience with Twitter.

✉️ Twitter Has a New CEO; What About a New Business Model? — Ben Thompson, Stratchery: This article thinks more about the business side of Twitter and what’s in store as it moves forward. I like the business-minded approach to a question that I probably couldn’t answer in my personal capacity: Why do I like (and prefer) Twitter as a social media platform?

What makes Twitter such a baffling company to analyze is that the company’s cultural impact so dramatically outweighs its financial results; last quarter Twitter’s $1.3 billion in revenue amounted to 4.4% of Facebook’s $29.0 billion, and yet you can make the case — and I believe it — that Twitter’s overall impact on the world is just as big, if not larger than its drastically larger peer. Facebook hollowed out the gatekeeper position of the media, but that void was filled by Twitter, both in terms of news being made, and just as critically, elite opinion and narrative being shaped.

The Uncertainties of the Omicron Variant — Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker

The first case of the new coronavirus variant, Omicron, also known as B.1.1.529, was detected in southern Africa this month. Just a few weeks ago, South Africa, where the most Omicron infections have been detected, was recording around 300 coronavirus cases a day — one of its lowest averages of the pandemic. Since then, cases have soared. Nearly 5,000 South Africans now test positive for the virus on average each day, the country’s test-positivity rate has increased nearly fivefold, and the number of COVID hospitalizations in Gauteng province, where the variant was first identified, has almost quadrupled. It’s not yet clear how much of the surge is due to Omicron, but preliminary evidence suggests that it has played a role. Last week, just a day after South African officials reported its emergence, the World Health Organization declared Omicron its fifth ‘variant of concern.’ So far in the pandemic, that’s the fastest the W.H.O. has moved from detection to classification.

A day after this was published, the first case was detected in the U.S.

📖 Omicron’s Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios — Rachel Gutman, The Atlantic: Despite being declared a variant of concern, here’s a potential upside from the emergence of Omicron. Emphasis on the word “potential.”

If Omicron continues to show signs of being milder than Delta, that’s good news, of course. But if it also turns out to spread more quickly than Delta, that could be great news. When two variants are circulating, the one that infects more people more quickly will tend to dominate, said Samuel Scarpino, of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. That variant could win out either because it replicates more quickly in its human hosts and spreads more efficiently between them — that is, it’s more transmissible — or because it more deftly evades the immunity we already have.

✉️ The Omicron Information Vacuum — Charlie Warzel, Galaxy Brain/The Atlantic: I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s a new variant of COVID-19. Sarcasm aside, the news has been wall to wall with coverage of the new Omicron variant, but it’s so early in the game that all of the breathless coverage doesn’t really amount to much yet. Not to say it’s useless, for there certainly is some useful information being shared. This is more of a media critique of the Internet Age, where the speed of information (and partial information and misinformation too) is lightning fast and expected to be even faster.

And so here we are: Stuck in a super-weird moment where we know a thing is happening, but we don’t know exactly what that thing is. We’re living in an information vacuum.... It’s a bit like hearing news of a tropical depression out on the ocean that has all the makings of turning into a vicious, land-bound hurricane. The conditions are right for that eventuality, but even advanced modeling can only tell us so much in the early days. Ultimately, we have to wait for nature.

✉️ On Omicron, Uncertainty, Vaccine Equity, and the Media — Jon Allsop, The Media Today/Columbia Journalism Review: More media criticism from CJR, and this entry has a great round-up of the types of things news outlets are publishing.

It’s not hard to imagine what media critics will say about the early Omicron coverage in a few weeks if the variant turns out not to be as bad as some experts fear. Equally, however, it’s not hard to imagine what media critics would have said if major outlets had initially ignored or downplayed Omicron and it turns out to be really bad. There is no good way out of this bind without knowing what’s going to happen next — and the story here is that we don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91 — Bruce Weber, The New York Times

The Friday after Thanksgiving was awash in remembrances for Stephen Sondheim, one of, if not the, most famous names from Broadway’s rich history, after news of his death broke. An unparalleled career was recounted skillfully in this New York Times obituary.

🎧 'Fresh Air' Remembers Broadway Legend Stephen Sondheim (Part 1) — Terry Gross, Fresh Air/NPR: In the first of Fresh Air’s three-day tribute to Stephen Sondheim, he makes one of my favorite statements about art:

Order out of chaos. Order out of chaos. That’s why I like crossword puzzles. Order out of chaos. I think that’s what art’s about anyway. I think that’s why people make art. … The world has always been chaotic. Life is unpredictable. It is - there is no form. And making forms gives you solidity. I think that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories and — that have beginning, middles and ends, even when the middle is at the beginning and the beginning is at the end.

📖 The Measureless, Omnipresent Influence of Stephen Sondheim — Mark Harris, Vulture/New York:

What if Stephen Sondheim had never written a word, or a note of music, after his 30th birthday? What if, grief-stricken at the death of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II in 1960, the young composer had simply decided that he had done his part for musical theater and was ready to try something new? Had that happened we would still, today, more than six decades later, be memorializing a man who had, via his lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story, made an indelible contribution to the history of American musical theater — specifically to modernizing it, to darkening it, to helping it burst what were then thought to be the boundaries of its form.

This touching remembrance only gets better from these already masterful opening words.

📖 Tony Kushner, Oracle of the Upper West Side — A.O. Scott, The New York Times Style Magazine: Stephen Sondheim’s death occurred in what seemed like a revival of the man’s art (though one can hardly say he’s gone anywhere). He’s portrayed by Bradley Whitford in Lin Manuel-Miranda’s directorial debut, Tick, Tick ... Boom, about the life of Jonathan Larson, the writer of the Broadway smash-hit Rent. The film just recently arrived on Netflix. Whitford nails the look of Sondheim, down to his tiniest mannerisms, but when Sondheim saw that his character was to leave a message on an answering machine, he told Manuel-Miranda that he’d never say that and asked if he could rewrite it. He ended up voicing the message himself. Another big screen adaptation is Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, for which Sondheim wrote the original lyrics. Spielberg teamed up with Tony Kushner, the celebrated playwright of Angels in America (and husband of Mark Harris of the stunning Sondheim remembrance above). A.O. Scott from the New York Times interviews Kushner ahead of the film, which premiered this week.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

Who’s Killing the Grizzlies of Fremont County? — Natalle Schachar, The Washington Post Magazine

The Teenagers Getting Six Figures to Leave Their High Schools for Basketball — Bruce Schoenfeld, The New York Times Magazine

A Posthumous Shock — Will Self, Harper’s

How the FBI Discovered a Real-Life Indiana Jones in, of All Places, Rural Indiana — Josh Sanburn, Vanity Fair

A Year in Gay Bars — Bryan Washington, The New Yorker

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

Ahmaud Arbery

🎧 A Prosecutor’s Winning Strategy in the Ahmaud Arbery Cause — Michael Barbaro, The Daily/The New York Times

Kyle Rittenhouse’s Acquittal

📖 Universities Try to Force a Consensus About Kyle Rittenhouse — Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic

Terror in Charlottesville

📖 The Mantra of White Supremacy — Ibram X. Kendi, The Atlantic

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Stories That Matter: How ProPublica’s Cezary Podkul Shed Light on Massive Unemployment Claims Fraud Nationwide

While out-of-work Americans battled outdated unemployment insurance systems to file legitimate claims during the pandemic, scammers aided by automated tech tools were cashing in.

Stories That Matter: How Journalists Teamed Up to Investigate a Mega-Dairy Affecting Communities 1,500 Miles Apart

Agricultural consolidation is shrinking margins and pushing small farmers out of business all while creating new environmental concerns.

Stories That Matter: How ProPublica's Cezary Podkul Shed Light on Massive Unemployment Claims Fraud Nationwide

Bobbi Dempsey — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 17:00:37 GMT

Almost immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic began, labor department officials in states nationwide noticed an alarming increase in fraudulent unemployment claims involving identity theft — a trend that really skyrocketed once federal and state programs for enhanced unemployment benefits started going into effect.

In June, Maryland officials said they had identified more than 500,000 potentially fraudulent claims in just the previous six-week period alone, and roughly 1.3 million since the pandemic began. Each of these phony claims represents a potential victim of identity theft, whose Social Security number and other private information was used by a scammer to attempt to commit fraud — often successfully. Even top government officials and lawmakers aren’t immune — fraudulent claims were opened by scammers in the name of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Read the Original ProPublica Story

In “How Unemployment Insurance Fraud Exploded During the Pandemic,” ProPublica reporter Cezary Podkul reveals the conditions that allowed scammers to commit fraud by filing huge volumes of bogus unemployment insurance claims and delves into the marketplaces operating online in plain site where criminals would buy and sell victims’ personal information. It was, Podkul says, possibly one of the biggest fraud waves in U.S. history: “Depending on who you ask, it was tens of billions and perhaps hundreds of billions, paid out in improper payments, including due to fraud.”

We talked to Podkul, who specializes in data-driven stories, about his process for compiling and analyzing large volumes of information — and got his tips for other reporters who may be contemplating similar projects.

The interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Seems like I’m seeing reports in my local media about fraudulent unemployment claims several times a week at this point. Is that how this got on your radar?

Podkul: It’s one of those issues where everyone seems to know someone who either had their identity stolen and had a fake unemployment insurance claim in their name or knows someone who has a friend who did.

I had just finished another project for ProPublica in April and then my editor mentioned this as a possibility and asked if I’d be interested in looking into this further. It just seemed really interesting because I’ve been seeing all of these reports of pandemic-related fraud, like with the Paycheck Protection Program. There had already been local stories written about it, but it seemed like the time was right to do a bigger piece that would dig deeper and give people the big picture of everything that has happened with this issue over the past year.

How long did the research and reporting process take?

Podkul: That conversation happened in spring, probably around May, and then all in, it took about two months to do this story — which was pretty quick. The way it all came together is, I like to follow a multi-thread process. So at the same time I was filing records requests I was interviewing and looking for potential victims to profile and trying to gather as much data as possible and collect it all at the same time while doing analysis and setting up additional interviews. My general approach is to try and have everything progressing simultaneously.

One thing that helps is the strength of ProPublica’s pitching, vetting, and editing process, which is very efficient, and helps because you get feedback all along every step of the way so you can see what may be missing, and that enables you to be very efficient in your work.

I imagine you had a lot of public records requests.

Podkul: For this story, there actually weren’t that many because I realized early on in my reporting that unemployment insurance claims are not public records. They are considered private information because they involve things like Social Security numbers, so public records acts don’t apply. So I knew right away that it would be a waste of time to try and fight that fight. I did file some public records requests, but I was very strategic about it, so instead of making broad blanket requests, I focused on asking specific questions. For example, with the Office of the Inspector General in Washington, D.C., I had learned from my reporting that the number of full-time investigators they had on staff had been decreasing for many years and I wanted data that would show that timeline. And that data was covered under public records.

One of the things you have to be mindful of is the workload for staff at these agencies. Given the national emergency in which they were operating, where they’ve got backlogs of claims and all these people still waiting to be paid, and then they’re dealing with this huge wave of fraud, this didn’t feel like the time to be going on a big FOIA fishing expedition.

Outside of that, it was just a lot of — I hesitate to use the term “shoe leather reporting” because I can’t remember the last time I actually did shoe leather reporting — but it was a lot of working the phones and interviewing. And then once I learned where the action was, jumping on Telegram.

Did you find that state officials were hesitant to talk to you, afraid that shedding light on this issue might reveal, in some cases, how easy it seemed to be to commit fraud?

Podkul: That was certainly a concern, but to their credit, for most of the states that I contacted, they engaged and provided responses in a timely manner. All of them made an effort to answer as much as they could. Whenever I deal with a situation like this where you’ve got 50 states each running their own unemployment systems and the territories as well, you’re talking about 53 systems to implement one national unemployment program. In a situation like that, my first stop was the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, and I was a little surprised that I never got a response from them. But instead it was actually the states that engaged, which was a little unexpected. I’m glad the states did engage, though, because I think it’s very important in a story like this to hear what they have to say and how they’re dealing with it.

Once you gathered all of this data, how did you go about analyzing it and focusing on the parts you wanted to include?

Podkul: I’m very fortunate at ProPublica to get to work with [editor at large] Allan Sloan on a bunch of projects. Allan and I just have a really good working relationship. We developed this process a while back where, as we pick up interesting things that we think are part of the story, we just start writing a memo. I used that for this story, writing a very lengthy memo to myself — I think it ended up being like 100 pages — with all of my notes and the interesting tidbits from these reports. A lot of the reporting involved reading government reports from the Inspectors General, reports from other sources like the Century Foundation, the Government Accountability Office, and putting all of that into on document and organizing it into sections — listing data under the points it supports — and going bullet point by bullet point, and takeaway by takeaway.

Once you’re done with that, you have this long document, so you go for a walk and clear your head, and then you start to really read it until you start to see the big picture. Once you put everything in one place, it enables you to see the big picture more clearly.

A cruel ironic twist to this is that we were hearing so many reports of people who were trying to file legitimate claims and were having trouble — particularly in states like Florida with notoriously outdated or inefficient unemployment claims systems — and yet it seemed to be so easy for scammers to file all of these fraudulent claims. Were you surprised at how easy it seemed to be for them?

Podkul: That surprised me at the outset, just how easy it was. And just to be clear, as time went on and states caught on to the fraud, they did try to lock things down and implement tougher safeguards, but certainly at the outset it seemed like the door was wide open and billions of dollars in these fake claims got paid out. Estimates vary as to how much was actually paid out but no matter who you ask, the answer is too much. Especially in a situation like this where so many people are still suffering and waiting to get paid on legitimate claims. So yeah, it was absolutely too easy for criminals to get through and have their fake unemployment claims paid out. On the flip side, the question is, is it too hard for legitimate claims to go through the process? If people with legitimate claims are waiting and waiting while criminals are getting through, something in the process is broken.

Did your reporting identify anything people can do to protect themselves from being the victim of a fraudulent claim filed using their identity?

Podkul: There are practical things people can do. The raw fuel behind this wave of cyber-crime was stolen identities and they have to come from somewhere. There are various ways that criminals steal people’s information, which they then sell and resell in various forums. One of the big ways is phishing, so it goes back to the old advice of not clicking on an email that looks suspicious and not opening random attachments. I just did another story on fake job ad scams and that’s another way that criminals are getting people’s identities, which is particularly nefarious right now because so many people are out there looking for jobs.

Be smart about what you share online. Use a password protector, don’t use the same passwords everywhere, and be careful about providing too much information online, because so many of these websites end up getting hit with a breach of some sort and getting their data stolen.

What do you think it is about Telegram that seemed to make it such an attractive platform for these scammers?

Podkul: It’s probably no different than with a lot of messaging apps, in that people want anonymity and the ability to securely exchange these types of messages. It’s anonymous, encrypted, and gives people this ability to host channels where they can attract lots of users, gain a following, and blast messages out to lots of people. And then you can also automate things. You can create bots to send automatic responses to inquiries. So there’s a lot of functionality, but I think part of it is also that it’s fun for them. There are stickers and emojis and all kinds of ways to attract attention.

All of those Telegram conversations that we mention in the story, we did bring to Telegram’s attention and we never heard back. We asked for a comment and got no response. But I did notice that, after we started asking those questions, a bunch of the channels where people were exchanging those kinds of messages were taken down, so it does look like the company took some action. But there are still lots of them out there.

Any tips for other reporters working on similar types of stories?

Podkul: One piece of advice I have for journalists is, don’t be afraid to cover a subject or go deep on a story just because it’s been covered elsewhere to some degree. With unemployment insurance fraud, there had been stories written about the issue. It was popping up in local media, warning people to be on the lookout. There’s a lot of good work still being done by local TV stations and newspapers, even with diminished staff. So if I see good work being done on a topic, I don’t see that as a reason we shouldn’t do a story. If anything, that’s all the more reason to devote some resources and try to elevate the issue.

One of the first things I do when I’m thinking about doing a story is do a clip search and see what’s already been done. And if I see a string of local stories but don’t see the big, broad national story, that’s a great sign that there’s room to do that.

On the data side, whenever you’re dealing with 50 states, it’s helpful to try and find a central repository where you can find all the data. In this case, the Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration is where all the states report their data on unemployment claims, so that was a great repository, and the Century Foundation had put together a data dashboard with a lot of that data as well. Try to find centralized sources of data that you can use instead of having to go state by state. That really helped us speed up the analysis.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

“At some point whenever the pandemic is over and there’s a postmortem analysis of how this process went, some of the questions will go toward what went wrong and how not to repeat those mistakes in the future,” Cezary Podkul says. “And those are conversations already happening at the Department of Labor as they think through all of this stuff.”

Read: More of ProPublica’s Pandemic Investigations

Internal Revenue Service records show that dozens of super-rich Americans received aid intended to help the poor and middle-class: “These Billionaires Received Taxpayer-Funded Stimulus Checks During the Pandemic,” November 3, 2021
Cheap COVID tests that people could take at home for quick results are in high demand, but many Americans are finding them tough to afford — if they can find any: “Here’s Why Rapid COVID Tests Are So Expensive and Hard to Find,” November 4, 2021
During the first year of the pandemic, teenagers across the U.S. struggled to complete schoolwork and cope with the stress of a pandemic — but their experience varied widely depending on where they lived: “The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers,” March 8, 2021

Meet: About the Author

Bobbi Dempsey is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, and other outlets. She can be found on Twitter at @bobbidempsey.

Stories That Matter: How Journalists Teamed Up to Investigate a Mega-Dairy Affecting Communities 1,500 Miles Apart

Bobbi Dempsey — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 17:00:43 GMT

When journalists Debbie Weingarten and Tony Davis met for casual shop talk over drinks in the fall of 2019, they didn’t realize they were taking the first step in an investigative reporting journey that would consume a significant amount of their time and energy for almost the next two years.

Davis is an environmental reporter for the Arizona Daily Star and Weingarten is a freelance writer who specializes in agriculture and rural issues. While chatting during that casual get-together, they realized they were both intrigued — and alarmed — by the massive impact that mega-dairy company Riverview LLP was having on the environment and surrounding communities in both Arizona and Minnesota.

Read the Original HCN Story

What would have been an ambitious and challenging assignment even under ideal circumstances became much more difficult once a pandemic was added to the mix, but the pair produced an expansive and exhaustively researched 8,000-word feature for High Country News (shorter variations of the story were also published by the Guardian and the Arizona Daily Star).

We talked with Weingarten and Davis about the daunting amount of reporting and research that went into this story — made possible in large part by support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project — and the logistics of finding and interviewing sources in rural areas of two states during a global pandemic.

How long did this process take, from the time you first started working on it until it was published?

Weingarten: It took almost two years for the High Country News version. But part of that was because the pandemic hit and I got COVID, so we kind of put the story down for a while.

Davis: We started pitching it in November or December of 2019. The HCN story was published online in August of this year, and the print version came out in late July. I’ve never spent that much time on any story in my life. And have never done anything as consuming as this story was.

Weingarten: There was a while there where the story was just kind of on hold. We weren’t actively working on it as much when I was sick with COVID. And we weren’t sure what was going to happen with it. There was a period of time when it was like, “Does anybody really care about stories that aren’t COVID?” But thankfully we got back into it.

I wondered how this got on your radar, and it sounds like it fit on the beats you were already tuned into.

Weingarten: We met up for a beer one day to talk about work, and each of us mentioned that we were curious about this dairy. Ultimately, we decided the story would be stronger if we collaborated because we each brought a different piece of it to the table.

Davis: We didn’t have an actual story in mind when we agreed to get together. It was just to meet and talk shop. It grew organically from there.

What was the writing and reporting partnership like? How did you sort out who would do what and how it would blend together?

Davis: Debbie told me about the stuff in Minnesota that she had heard from her contacts and we agreed early on that I should focus mostly on Arizona and she would focus mostly on Minnesota, although she did end up doing some work in Arizona also.

Weingarten: Our interests intersected here. Tony has been reporting on water in the southwest for decades and my background is agriculture. I was initially interested in the story because of its ties to what’s happening in the dairy industry right now, and Tony was interested in the impact of this company on the groundwater.

A lot of people really don’t want to know or think too much about where their food and milk comes from. Was that your first hurdle — educating people are what mega-dairies are and why they should care?

Weingarten: I don’t know if it was so much of a hurdle as just part of the story. I do a lot of reporting on rural issues and areas that often aren’t written about, so there’s often that aspect of the “Why should we care?’ question from editors. I do think Americans are super out of touch with where our food comes from, and corporations take advantage of that ignorance. The dairy crisis that’s sweeping across the country that’s been happening for several years has been pretty overlooked. Most Americans probably don’t know that dairy farms have gone out of business at an alarming rate. So that was part of the story that was important to do, explaining that trend toward factory farms and away from picturesque family farms that we all think of.

Davis: These dairies are all collapsing across the country, but this one is expanding like mad. And causing all these huge environmental impacts.

For this kind of story, it’s critical to find those “real people” sources that put a face to the issue and help readers feel a connection. How did you go about finding sources in rural areas where people are spread out and not necessarily easy to reach?

Davis: It was very difficult for me. A number of people had already moved away and nobody knew how to reach them. People would tell me they knew somebody who had lost their well but they didn’t want to talk about it. The woman that we led the story with, Lauralynn, I just stumbled across her. I went to stay at a Days Inn and she was working at the front desk and we just got to talking.

Weingarten: I traveled to Minnesota right before the pandemic in January of 2020. On my first day in Minnesota, I attended a dairy crisis meeting sponsored by a few farmers’ organizations and it was packed. I think there were 130 dairy farmers, all concerned about the state of the dairy industry. A hot topic of conversation at that meeting was the impact of mega-dairies on small- and medium-sized dairies. So I met a lot of people that way. And then the question of, “Who else should I talk to?” was really valuable when I was doing interviews. I got pointed in a lot of interesting directions. Because this took a long time, and because we were tracking land purchases for so long, we noticed when Riverview started expanding [in Arizona] to a completely different part of the valley. That’s a side of the story we wouldn’t have gotten had we stayed on track with the original publishing timeline.

Davis: We spent a huge amount of time going through records, particularly here in Arizona, because the dairy had bought so much land and we were having trouble sorting all of that out because we were getting contradictory information and inaccurate information from the local assessors, treasurers, and recorders offices in Cochise County, Arizona. That was an ordeal. It sometimes seemed like that was what the story was about. Plus, I had to get well records and go through them to prove what their impact had been. It’s the most records work I’ve ever done. But there was no getting around it; it had to be done. Every fact in there had to be backed up 10 times because we wanted to be absolutely certain.

Weingarten: We also worked with Alex Devoid, the data journalist at the Daily Star, to map where the dried-up wells were in comparison to where Riverview’s land was. There were just so many layers of records. We have this master database of land purchases that we would then have to dissect and figure out how much acreage are we talking about and how much money did they pay and whether it was in cash. Tony is the king of the well records at this point. The story went through fact-checking with flying colors because of his attention to detail to the massive amount of facts in that story.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

“The main thing that’s happened since our story ran is that a group of activists in Cochise County, Arizona, have started gathering petition signatures to get an initiative on the November 2022 ballot in that county to create a state-run active management area in the Sulphur Springs Valley and in the Douglas area that would require stricter groundwater management in those areas than now exists,” says Tony Davis.

He adds: “Next year, it’s likely that yet another effort will be made in the Arizona legislature to allow for some local regulation of groundwater pumping in rural areas of the state, including Cochise County. Given that Republicans are in control of both houses of the legislature, such legislation continues to have little chance of passing, but you never know.”

Read: More on the Water Crisis and the Role of Mega-Dairies

The Arizona Republic shared stories of families struggling to get water when activities by large area farms cause groundwater levels to keep dropping: “In Southeastern Arizona, Farms Drill a Half-Mile Deep While Families Pay the Price,” December 5, 2019
BuzzFeed News reported that federally mandated water cuts mean Arizona will lose 20 percent of its supply from the Colorado River in 2022: “People in Arizona Are About to Face the West’s First Major Water Crisis,” October 27, 2021
In this piece for the Arizona Daily Star, Tony Davis reports on road closures due to fissures caused by groundwater pumping of agricultural operations: “Fissures From Groundwater Pumping Close Two More Cochise County Roads,” August 23, 2021

Meet: About the Author

Bobbi Dempsey is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, and other outlets. She can be found on Twitter at @bobbidempsey.

Weekend Reading: Ahmaud Arbery, Kyle Rittenhouse's Acquittal, Terror in Charlottesville, and More

Cary Littlejohn — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 14:00:41 GMT

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Guilty Verdict for Ahmaud Arbery’s Killers Is a Welcome Sign of Progress, Jesse Washington, The Undefeated

Equal parts a haunting reminder of the contextual reality of blackness in America and a hopeful eye toward the future after a positive day in the Black Lives Matter movement, Jesse Washington’s essay was a fitting summary of a saga that was bigger than simply Ahmaud Aubrey’s story.

🗄️ From 2020: Twelve Minutes and a Life — Mitchell S. Jackson, Runner’s World: No excuse is needed to reshare this Pulitzer Prize-winning (and National Magazine Award-winning) piece on running, as a pastime, for black Americans.

Peoples, I invite you to ask yourself, just what is a runner’s world? Ask yourself who deserves to run? Who has the right? Ask who’s a runner? What’s their so-called race? Their gender? Their class? Ask yourself where do they live, where do they run? Where can’t they live and run? Ask what are the sanctions for asserting their right to live and run — shit — to exist in the world. Ask why? Ask why? Ask why?

🗄️ From 2020: Ahmaud Arbery Will Not Be Erased — David Dennis Jr., Atlanta Magazine: David Dennis Jr. begins his story about Ahmaud Arbery with an ugly truth: “Black people disappear in America.” He goes on to highlight the state of Georgia’s ugly past in that respect.

In 1982, James Baldwin flew from Paris to Atlanta to write about the trial of Wayne Williams, the man believed to have been responsible for [the Atlanta Child Murders, where at least 29 black children and young adults went missing]. His reporting eventually became the 1985 book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen’ about America, race, and how a country allowed Black bodies to continue to disappear. “Black death has never before elicited so much attention,” Baldwin wrote, noting that “this is not the first time such a devastation has occurred: It is the first time that Authority has been forced to recognize the devastation as crucial.”

📖 The System Only Worked Because It Was Pushed — Adam Serwer, The Atlantic: Much like Jesse Washington’s piece in The Undefeated allowed for room to celebrate the administration of justice while tempering a potential desire to see the guilty verdict as a huge step forward, Adam Serwer points out an uncomfortable truth: The trial very nearly didn’t happen at all.

Of Course Kyle Rittenhouse Was Acquitted — Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

There is a paradox of fragility here, in which a moment of fear — perhaps one imbuing the deceased with supernatural strength — is invoked to justify homicide, and the dead who would be alive but for this moment of terror subsequently become a symbol of the frightened man’s valor. At a certain point the logic of this sort of “self-defense” becomes indistinguishable from a custom that simply allows certain people to get away with murder. This is the legal regime that a powerful minority of gun-rights advocates have built — one in which Americans are encouraged to settle their differences with lethal force, preferably leaving as few witnesses capable of testimony as possible.

📖 Kyle Rittenhouse and the Scary Future of the American Right — Zack Beauchamp, Vox: In Adam Serwer’s piece, he writes: “It is one thing to argue that the jury reached a reasonable verdict based on this law, and another entirely to celebrate [Kyle] Rittenhouse’s actions. Much of the conservative media and the Republican Party, however, don’t see the killings as ‘wrongful’ in any sense, instead elevating Rittenhouse as the manifestation of retributive violence against their political enemies.” Zack Beauchamp’s piece for Vox looks into reactions on the right, from citizens to politicians, and uncovers ugliness.

Immediately after Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal on Friday, the fringe right’s online forums lit up with celebration — and among some, a belief that they too can kill without legal consequence. On Telegram, a secure messaging app popular with extremists, the leader of a neo-Nazi group wrote that the verdict gives “good Americans legal precedent and license to kill violent commies without worrying about doing life in prison if we defend ourselves in a riot.”

🎧 The Acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse — Michael Barbaro, The Daily/The New York Times: If you were unable (or unwilling) to watch the entirety of the trial, perhaps you could use a refresher on what exactly happened in the courtroom.

📖 Kyle Rittenhouse, American Vigilante — Paige Williams, The New Yorker: Paige Williams wrote the definitive account of the aftermath of the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that led to Kyle Rittenhouse being on trial. But it’s so much more than just that.

Jury Finds Rally Organizers Liable for the Violence That Broke Out in Charlottesville — James Doubek & Vanessa Romo, NPR

More despicable behavior on trial and more decisions reached by jurors. White supremacists responsible for 2017’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, were found liable for conspiracy to the tune of $25 million.

Lawyers with the plaintiffs have acknowledged that one of the goals of the lawsuit was to diminish the ability of white supremacists to spread their message and influence by draining them financially.

📖 A 19th-Century Law Dismantled the KKK. Now It Could Bring Down a New Generation of Extremists. — Lyz Lenz, HuffPost: Although the plaintiffs won a $25 million verdict, the jury was unable to reach a consensus on federal charges that stemmed from alleged violations of the KKK Act of 1871.

After lying dormant for several years, the KKK Act is currently being used to sue conspirators in the January 6th Capitol riot, and in December of 2020, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump and the Republican Party under the act, alleging that they conspired to interfere with the voting rights of Black Americans in Michigan.

📖 White Supremacists Used Racist Slurs and Cursed in Bizarre Opening Statements for the Charlottesville Trial — Christopher Miller, BuzzFeed News: Christopher Miller did some great reporting from the trial, posting numerous updates throughout, but perhaps none captured what a sideshow the white supremacist/neo-Nazi defendants wanted the trial to be like his coverage of their opening statements.

“Check. Check. Check,” neo-Nazi shock jock Christopher Cantwell spoke into the courtroom microphone. Wearing a blue shirt without a tie or jacket, he proceeded to name-check Mein Kampf, drop the n-word, plug his far-right radio program, call himself “good-looking” and a “professional artist,” and blast antifascist activists all in a matter of minutes. Surprising nobody in the courtroom, Cantwell, who prepared for this moment with help from two other neo-Nazis in prison and spending evenings watching Tucker Carlson, said “I’m not a lawyer … [but] I'm the best attorney I could afford.” He added, “and I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”

📖 Charlottesville Extremists Lose in Court, but Replacement Theory Lives On — Alan Feuer, The New York Times: Just in case you didn’t get enough outlandish political commentary from some relative around the Thanksgiving dinner table, here’s a doozy for you.

Four years after the event, the same ideas that made “Unite the Right” a lightning rod for hate groups are increasingly being echoed, albeit in modulated tones, by prominent figures in conservative media and politics. Chief among them is the great replacement theory, which holds that Democrats and others on the left are trying to supplant white Americans with immigrants and others for their own political gain.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

No Chips, No Problem: Why Old Video Games Are Better Than New Ones — Justin Heckert, 1843 Magazine/The Economist

The Tomb Raiders of the Upper East Side — Ariel Sabar, The Atlantic

Keanu Reeves Knows the Secrets of the Universe — Ryan D’Agostino, Esquire

Hayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last Spell — Ligaya Mishan, The New York Times Style Magazine

The Dave Portnoy Playbook — Reeves Wiedeman, New York

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

The Effects of the Pandemic

📖 A Crisis of Childhood Grief — Anna North, Vox

Peak Newsletter

📖 Substack Is Now a Playground for the Deplatformed — Chris Stokel-Walker, Wired

The Next Academy Awards

📖 ‘Procession’ Isn’t a Documentary on Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church — It’s a Portrait of Survivors Reclaiming Their Lives — David Fear, Rolling Stone

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Michael Norman on 'These Good Men' and 'Tears in the Darkness'

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Amy Wilentz on 'The Rainy Season' and 'Martyrs' Crossing'

A series from award-winning authors and teachers of writing literary journalism on what they learned from the experience of titling their books.

Searching for the Perfect Title: Michael Norman on 'These Good Men' and 'Tears in the Darkness'

Michael Norman — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 17:00:38 GMT

Working a manuscript, I try to keep an eye out for a good working title, a word or phrase I can hang on the wall of my mind, reminding me that my job is to capture the essence and nature of the topic or the collection of characters I’m writing about.

You don’t find such a title; it finds you. As I’m writing or sifting notes or reading for background, I’m subliminally asking myself, “What is this book about?” Then, when I have hundreds of answers to that question, most of them unsatisfactory, I narrow the question and ask: “What is this book really about?” And the answer to that should be the working title. Simple, right?

Of course not. A title should also be much more than a description of the book’s contents or a statement of its theme. It should be a suggestion, a powerful prompt to readers that the well-crafted work of narrative non-fiction they have in front of them is also about the universe just beyond the book. It urges readers to look for more and think about more than what’s in the pages.

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All of this takes place in that private space where writers struggle through the process of creating a book. It’s a wonderful place, that space. Quiet, insulated against the rest of the world. Plenty of room for grand ideas, room to let the narrative mind wander until it happens upon on the perfect title.

Then you finish the final polish and hand the manuscript to the publisher, and the wonderful place where you created the book is gone. The “book” becomes a “product.” From the writing room to the factory floor. For me, the title has always represented a kind of tipping point between those two states of mind, or to put it in more scholarly terms, the two phenomena.

Every professional writer wants sales. Writers know that to help achieve those sales, their books should carry an intriguing, powerful, elliptical, punchy, shocking, salacious, clever, or otherwise engaging title. Sometimes that title is the working title, or a refinement thereof, and sometimes it’s an editorial directive. Often it’s a conflation of both.

Here are two examples of the effort to find a perfect title.

My first book was a memoir, a look at my time serving as a young man in a Marine Corps combat unit in Vietnam. The title: These Good Men. I was wary of the title at first because, at the time, the Corps was using the advertising slogan, “We’re looking for a few good men.” But the phrase “good men” interested me. What did it mean? “Good,” how? At killing people? There was no goodness on the battlefield. I was thinking of “good” in other, more philosophical terms. So I started reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Lo and behold, there was my “good”: The feeling of comradeship that is as powerful as love. That’s what the book was about. I simply added a demonstrative plural pronoun — short for “these particular men” — and These Good Men: Friendships Forged From War became the title. The subtitle, as I recall, was the publisher’s. And I wasn’t thrilled with it.

My aim is to avoid clichés and threadbare idiomatic expressions, easy titles I call them, and the subtitle Friendships Forged From War struck me as clichéd, wrong-headed, and melodramatic. Friendship does not, in any sense, arise from a blast furnace. And war is not a caldron. It’s a funeral pyre. A broken metaphor all around. The only thing the subtitle had going for it was the alliteration. When all else fails, call for the cavalry of assonance and consonance.

I was an English poetry major in college, so I also thought about the poetics of the three words — the phonemes, the meter, the images. To me the substrata of music produced by the words in a title (or in any phrase or sentence, for that matter) can be as important as the meaning. The title is the reader’s first encounter with the book, and it should have the power of a siren song, one that suggests the essence of the book and acts as a powerful invitation to engage it — which is to say, buy it.

A title can be a summary or coda or an elegant suggestion of what is to come. For me it was also a way to introduce the idea of many characters as well as a characterization of them as a group. I think a writer has to consider the conflation of purposes a title represents and explore the implications of the title for each of those purposes. Again, my first consideration was literary.

I came to my title early, which is to say as I was about to sit down and begin the manuscript. If the title reflects all or most of the themes in the book (conflation without confusion), it helps to keep me on track. It’s like standing on a precipice for a moment, surveying the full landscape of the book just before you sit down to write.

I work hard to come up with a title early, rather than let the publisher begin the process of the title search. On my second book, a co-writer and I spent months wrangling with our editor, going through hundreds of titles; yes, hundreds. And here’s the kicker: The title we ended up with (Tears in the Darkness) was the very first title we had proposed.

The book is a cross-cultural look at America’s first land battle in World War II, a battle that turned out to be the largest defeat in American military history. The book took on the myths of war and tried to unmask them. (Tears in the Darkness, by the way, came from one of the hundreds of interviews we did for the book, a war book with a shifting point of view.) One Japanese character, describing his commander’s reaction to mass casualties, used the word anrui. Japanese expressions often have literal and figurative meanings that serve as complements. In this case, the idiom of anrui was “a broken heart,” but the literal translation was hidden or unseen tears, hence Tears in the Darkness.

Not perfect, but it works.

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Meet: About the Author

Michael Norman is an associate professor emeritus of journalism at the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. His co-authored book Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (2009) was picked by several reviewers as one of the top 10 books of the year. He has also published These Good Men: Friendships Forged From War (1990). Previously, he was a reporter and columnist for the New York Times.

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

Searching for the Perfect Title: Amy Wilentz on 'The Rainy Season' and 'Martyrs' Crossing'

Amy Wilentz — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 17:00:39 GMT

It’s worth thinking about other writers’ really good titles when you start brooding about naming your own book. Why do they work?

Here’s a title for all time: The Way We Live Now. A novel by Anthony Trollope, true. But it can be repurposed for narrative non-fiction, anthropology, political science … and it has been. It’s endlessly useful, because it’s empty, yet urgent (that Now), and we all want to have our lives explained to us.

Here’s another: War and Peace. Again empty and waiting to be filled with the meaning of the book, yet gigantic and important. We care right away. Some writers, feeling self-important and at the top of their game, choose titles with just one abstract word, as in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. And at the end of the book one is left wondering why, other than the drumbeat repetition of the word within the text.

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But other times, a one-word title happens to be just right, such as William Shawcross’ brilliant Sideshow, about the desolation and killings associated with the war in Vietnam that did not take place in Vietnam. To be fair, Sideshow has an explanatory subtitle — Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia — but non-fiction often does.

My favorite title for a novel (other than the idiosyncratic and inimitable Moby-Dick — which has a much ignored explanatory subtitle, or, the Whale) is Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. In Bleak House, you barely notice Bleak House itself, and when you do see what Bleak House is, you realize the house isn’t bleak at all, it is bright and beautiful and reflects the lovely soul of its proprietor. It is the site of happiness, and a reconstituted family, and an unbreakable but profoundly assaulted love. Bleak House is where the main protagonists of the book gather and we see them there in their best light. Dickens could have called the house and the book Sunnyvale, but Sunnyvale wouldn’t have interested us, and more important would not have conveyed the darkness and power of the novel. It wouldn’t have made you feel, on putting the book down, finally, that all England, and especially London, is in the grips of an oppressive system that grinds humanity down. Bleak House does that.

And plus: the title sounds good. Real estate almost always provides good title. Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia comes to mind, or Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.

Depends on the place, though. Mississippi is evocative, Patagonia is mystical. But not all places work. Try In Rhode Island. No. Life in Staten Island. I don’t think so. D.J. Waldie, who wrote a great book about suburban anomie, had the sense not to call it In Lakewood, but rather Holy Land. With the explanatory and seemingly contradictory subtitle, A Suburban Memoir.

When I am writing a book, I’m always trying on titles as if they were eveningwear for my workmanlike piece of writing. One is too elegant, another too transparent, another too old-fashioned, another, somehow, boxy or too contemporary.

When I was writing my first book, I was living in Haiti and reporting on Haiti and writing about Haiti. I had this little apartment in a small complex for foreigners that was expanding daily. I was alone when I wasn’t out reporting, and I had a Hermes Rocket typewriter, white plastic, very small, that clacked and binged a lot. I’d put it on the “dining room” table, facing a big window that opened on the canyon at the bottom of which I lived, amid garbage and birds and rats. I was working my way through reporting and note taking. Every day then in Haiti (and every day now) was filled with event. I was pushed and pulled from one thing to another, always exhausted, always underfed. For years, I couldn’t figure out how to feed myself in Haiti.

And all the time, like a little gnawing anxiety, I was wondering what I should call this thing that, as I grew thinner and thinner, was growing fatter and fatter, into a sizable pile at the side of my Rocket. Whenever I looked up from my work, I could see the house gecko eating trails of ants. He wasn’t hungry. The “kitchen” was behind me, old coffee sitting on the “counter” in a silver Italian espresso maker. There was nothing in the “fridge,” a machine that must have dated from the 1960s and suffered frequent lapses for lack of electricity.

On Friday afternoons, drums outside my window announced dances or get-togethers or religious services. I’d be writing up my notes from the day, and the drums would get going, evening settling in, the smell of cooking charcoal burning, and then a rainstorm would come pounding down on us, whipping the palms and the banana trees. I loved that moment because I was inside. The ceiling was tin and thunderous. I’d get up from my chair of labor and go stand at the window, watching the rain and wind make everything dance, including the garbage, as the waters turned the dribble of the canyon into a broad river carrying mango leaf and banana refuse and plastic and glass and bones.

One evening, standing there, watching another flood go by, I said to myself, ah: the rainy season. And then I said to myself, ah: The Rainy Season. And the title was born, and thus the feeling of the entire book.

Of course, the book wasn’t about the rainy season or any particular rainy season. Its subtitle was Haiti Since Duvalier, and it was about a time of doubt and struggle in the country, during which it rained in a way that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It rained dramatically, unabashedly, violently, brilliantly, passionately. And the title seemed to express something I’d felt about Haiti: how the rains disoriented me the way the place did; because they and it were foreign to me, and not yet arranged in my mind to be known and navigable.

It always takes me time to come to a title. Martyrs’ Crossing is my novel about an emergency faced by a Palestinian toddler and his mother at a checkpoint between Jerusalem and the occupied territories. I finished it before I had a title.

The working title (there’s always a working title, or three…) was Checkpoint, but I felt that that made it sound like a thriller by Michael Crichton. Although it did have elements of a thriller, that title was too limiting and — worst sin of all for a title — promised something other than what the book delivered.

I offered my editor many possible titles for this book, titles I culled from the Old Testament (hey, I figured, it’s a book about the actual holy land). But my editor was having none of it. I said to her, “Hemingway did it.” She replied, in her tart way: “Are you Hemingway?”

I wasn’t.

Then one night my husband, who had been a reporter in the Middle East while I was writing the book, said, “How about Martyrs’ Crossing?” And I had that moment one can have, with a good title, where everything seemed to come to a stop, and it was clear that this was the title the book had been waiting for.

I tried to ignore the fact that it sounded, to my American ear, just a bit like a highway warning sign. Also: Martyr is hard to spell. Also, I hate having any punctuation in my titles. But it seemed to me to sum up the problems raised and the story told in the book.

This was in the spring of 2001. It was in the early days of Amazon ratings for books, and I used to go on to Amazon to see what the book’s number was and what people were saying about it. Then I thought, “Let’s see if it appears anywhere else on the Internet,” and I Googled the title. (Maybe I Internet Explorered it … it was early days.)

After a few references to the book, another listing appeared. I clicked on that: It was a story about the infamous Israeli Army shooting, captured by French television, of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura while in his father’s arms at a checkpoint in Gaza the Israelis called Netzarim junction — and the Palestinians called Martyrs’ Crossing. I remembered being so sad about this kid when he was killed, and feeling his connection to the boy in my novel; but I had no idea that he’d died at a crossing point that shared its name with my book. History made the title deeper, more political, and just plain better. Not that anyone knew the connection but me. Still, I knew it.

I can’t give pointers for titles of books. It doesn’t really work that way; it’s all about inspiration and a feeling for the totality and broad meaning of the book. My most recent title, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, came to me as an inspiration. At the Monnin art gallery in Pétion-Ville, just outside Port-au-Prince, I had seen a very moving and beautiful flag of the kind used in Vodou ceremonies, a huge green sequined thing with a forest god depicted on it, waving. As I stood before this sweet, friendly little god of Vodou, I was still in the middle of reporting my book, and writing it (I tend to do both simultaneously) and standing there in front of the flag, I thought of the early reference in my book to “Fred Voodoo,” which was what British journalists used to call the Haitian man in the street, affectionately, but disparagingly too. Outsiders should stop seeing Haitians as Fred Voodoos, was one of the points in the book. The book also, I’d started to notice, had begun to take on a kind of valedictory flavor, as I wandered the rubble-strewn streets of a city I had once known so well, notebook in hand, and contemplated what my life would be, would have been, could ever be, without Haiti.

Hello, the little Haitian god seemed to be saying with his wave. And bye-bye. Farewell, Fred Voodoo. So there was the title, in a flash. He welcomed me in and pushed me away; that was Haiti for me. If you ever see the book you’ll notice that that little god is on the cover, waving to you too.

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The Postscript

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Meet: About the Author

Amy Wilentz is the author of four books and teaches literary journalism at the University of California–Irvine. She has won the Whiting Award in non-fiction, the PEN/ Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Award. Her 2013 memoir Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1990) was nominated for the award in non-fiction.

Read: David Abrahamson and Alison Pelczar on Titles

Weekend Reading: The Effects of the Pandemic, Peak Newsletter, the Next Academy Awards, and More

Cary Littlejohn — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 14:00:37 GMT

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Why Health-Care Workers Are Quitting in Droves — Ed Yong, The Atlantic

Ed Yong doesn’t miss. His latest is unsurprisingly great but oh-so bleak when you consider what he’s saying. COVID-19, the disease itself, but also the broader sense of the term that includes public opinion, science skepticism, lackluster governmental responses, and so much more — they’re all taking away our nation’s medical professionals. This story opens with a gripping story of extreme care given by a longtime ICU nurse, and you feel for her. It ends with an ER doctor who recently left the profession, and while it is cumulatively our loss, you can’t help but feel for her too.

📖 What Happened at Carmine’s — Bridget Read, The Cut/New York: If Ed Yong’s piece showed on effect of COVID-19 to be a loss of our medical professionals, this story from New York shows the loss of civility. Now, is the COVID-19 pandemic to blame for all of that? Of course not. But this story shows have vaccine mandates — and requirements around those mandates — fueled an ugly narrative that mixed with faulty reporting, innuendo, and other hot-button topics in our national political discourse in 2021.

📖 Will Real Estate Ever Be Normal Again? — Francesca Mari, The New York Times Magazine: In a story that could initially feel like it represents the collective loss of sanity on the part of homebuyers, this New York Times Magazine feature gives some interesting explanations for why this possible run on the housing market may not be over any time soon, including my fellow Millennials arriving belatedly to home-buying party after the Great Recession did them no favors.

📖 The Home Is the Future of Travel — Derek Thompson, The Atlantic: The CEO of Airbnb considers a reality that was always coming but was accelerated by the pandemic: the revolution made possible by remote work. “And remote work — the ability to do a job not only from home but from anywhere — mashes up our work time and leisure time, erasing the spatial differences between many of our weekdays and weekends.” He and his company are betting that the future of vacations is tied up in those homes people are so desperate to buy right now.

📖 What Happened to Eric Clapton? — Geoff Edgers, The Washington Post: Eric Clapton is representative of that which we’ve all had to deal with on some level, and that’s how to assess a person with whom you might disagree. This story tells about a friendship lost, and that’s a reality that many recognize during this highly charged time through which we’re now living. But Clapton is also Clapton, the same famous guitarist who saw his name equated with God in London graffiti decades ago. HIs lofty perch and popularity make him a vector for some troubling thoughts when it comes to COVID-19. What does that do to the artist and fans’ relationships to him? The same questions could be asked of other famous people, like Aaron Rodgers after his willful lies about his vaccination status and his recitation of tired tropes, weak “science” and conspiracy theories. Some will care; others won’t. But his story encapsulates a lot from the past two years.

A Good Newsletter Exit Strategy Is Hard to Find — Delia Cai, Vanity Fair

I’m going to get a bit meta for a minute, thinking about the concept of the very magic that will put these words in front of you: the humble newsletter. Before she was Vanity Fair’s Delia Cai, she was the Cai of Deez Links, a popular media-focused newsletter on Substack. After taking her talents to VF and (for the most part) retiring from the newsletter game, she assessed the state of the great newsletter boom of 2021, prompted, in part, by the aftermath of the Atlantic’s rollout of a new suite of newsletters. While most who start a newsletter are dreaming of growth and longevity, some who’ve already seen both are looking for a way out.

Inevitably, a writer freed from the constraints of pesky editors and SEO dictates must become a writer and a one-person P.R./circulation/audience-development strategist all at once. (Turns out, media companies had those things for a reason?)

📖 The Internet’s Unkillable App — Dave Pell, The Atlantic: Dave Pell, the reigning “managing editor of the Internet,” wrote approximately 1.3 bazillion words in his email newsletter, “Next Draft,” before The Atlantic asked him to write an essay on a simple question: Why have newsletters persisted? I liked so much of what he wrote, but especially this paragraph:

Newsletters are patient. I send something to you, and you can read it when you want to and respond (or not) when you want to. You get to absorb and consider the contents of a newsletter without the rest of the internet chiming in, telling you what to think while puking out tweets, replies, posts, comments, photos, videos, news, and memes at a pace that pulverizes human attentional capacity. (The second you catch up, you’re already behind.) Newsletters are always right where you left them. Sure, people complain about having too much email. But compared with everything else online, your inbox is the Walden Pond of the internet.

📖 We Haven’t Reached ‘Peak Newsletter.’ Not by a Long Shot. —Jack Shafer, Politico: Jack Shafer weighs in:

The lunatics haven’t taken over the asylum, the writers have. Together they’ve produced something of a shift in the journalism business as a growing number of readers have expressed a taste for unhomogenized, point-of-view journalism from “name” writers that hasn’t felt the iron fist of an editor, doesn’t necessarily conform to the AP Stylebook, and hasn’t been compressed into the inverted pyramid form. Alone, newsletters won’t save journalism from extinction, but as an arrow in the quiver they are doing their part to buttress the shattered business model.

How Kristen Stewart Became Her Generation’s Most Interesting Movie Star — Emily Witt, The New Yorker

The end of the year means a whole host of Oscar-baity movies are on the way, and with the movies come big profiles. This one from the New Yorker catalogs the life and career of Kristen Stewart in the magazine’s typically meticulous way, and it uses some of my favorite tropes of these pieces, namely using the upcoming film to reveal truths about the actor (and vice versa) and the inclusion of the random outing the reporter’s been allowed to share with the star (in this case, it’s a trip to the golf course).

📖 Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Licorice Pizza’ and Moviemaking: ‘Anyone Who’s Done This Knows That Confidence Is an Illusion’ — Brent Lang, Variety: Spend even a short amount of time skimming through Film Twitter these days and you’re sure to see a tweet of rapturous praise for Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest film, Licorice Pizza. This longform Q&A is fun for PTA’s everyman quality — “He’s up by 5, in bed by 9 or 9:30...” — and for a peek into an auteur’s viewing habits — “Shang-Chi was good fun. There’s a terrific energy about it, but I also live in a Marvel-obsessed household, so continuing the journey of these Marvel stories is exciting to us. I liked Venom 2. Titane is worth seeing.”

📖 Introducing the Real Will Smith — Wesley Lowery, GQ: Another of Paul Thomas Anderson’s most-anticipated films of the year comes out this week. “I watched the trailer for King Richard, and when it comes out, I will be first in line. When Will Smith decides to turn it on, it’s so magical,” PTA told Brent Lang in Variety. Wesley Lowery profiled Smith ahead of the release of the film, in which he will play the father of Venus and Serena Williams.

For decades, Will Smith was driven by the desire to be the biggest movie star on Earth — early in his career, he even came up with a formula based on the top 10 box office successes of all time. He achieved that goal so effortlessly, ruling the July Fourth weekend from 1996 (Independence Day) to 2008 (Hancock), that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was for a rapper turned actor. But over the last 10 years, as Smith has become increasingly focused on evolving as a human being, a gulf has emerged between Will Smith the movie star and Will Smith the man.

📖 Inside Jane Campion’s Cinema of Tenderness and Brutality — Jordan Kisner, The New York Times Magazine: Sometimes a beautifully complex subject meets a beautiful writer. One of my favorite paragraphs in the whole piece:

Campion tends to seek eye contact, and she is quick to ask fourth-date questions. (During our walk, she asked whether I liked being married, really wanting to know. She is divorced and a bit skeptical of the institution.) She laughs raucously and frequently, and she inserts impish comments into every conversation in her clipped New Zealand accent. She has the drape of fine, silver hair you might associate with a mystic, but everything else about her — the square, chunky black glasses and understated, monochromatic outfits — indicates, aesthetically speaking, what she is: the most decorated female filmmaker alive, an auteur in the lineage of Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, and Pedro Almodóvar.

More of Our Favorites From the Past Week

To Catch a Turtle Thief: Blowing the Lid Off an International Smuggling Operation — Clare Fieseler, The Walrus

Amazon's Dark Secret: It Has Failed to Protect Your Data — Will Evans, Wired

Seven Forgotten Stories From 1995 — Josh Levin, Slate

The Notorious Mrs. Mossler — Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly

Untimely Futures — Brandi T. Summers, Places

The Follow-Up

The news doesn’t stop. If you checked out last week’s edition and found the topics interesting, here’s a collection of stories published since.

Supreme Court News

📖 What Rhymes With Breyer? — Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic

January Insurrection

📖 The January 6th Investigation Gets Closer to Donald Trump — David Rohde, The New Yorker

The National Rifle Association

📖 Sons of Guns — Elena Saavedra Buckley, Epic Magazine

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The Postscript

This week, elsewhere on The Postscript.

Going Solo: How Journalists Recreated the Production Studio in Their Own Homes

COVID-19 saw journalists adapt to new conditions. With only skeleton crews allowed inside most studios, what did broadcast journalists who had to work from home do? We spoke to three to find out.

Stories That Matter: How a Local Writer Built a Resource for Parents of Color Navigating Seattle's Gifted Program

Jasmine M. Pulido and the South Seattle Emerald, a non-profit digital news outlet, navigate educational equity on a human scale.

Going Solo: How Journalists Recreated the Production Studio in Their Own Homes

Frankie Lister-Fell — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 17:00:56 GMT

Behind the scenes: Ali Rae created a floating dolly by attaching a gimbal to a skateboard to keep the camera steady. (Ali Rae)

One day in early March, Femi Oke — international journalist and host of Al Jazeera’s daily TV show The Stream — was told by her executive producer to go home and not come back.

She wasn’t being fired. Climbing cases of coronavirus in Washington, D.C., meant that going into work was now too dangerous.

“So there we were, all in our various homes. We had to cancel the next day’s show,” she says. “We had no plan. Nothing.”

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Many people around the world found themselves in a similar position. With less access to sources, staff and colleagues working from home, and an anxiety-inducing news cycle to contend with, COVID-19 presented a big challenge to journalism and journalists.

Yet audiences became more engaged with the news during lockdown. Writers, reporters, and editors adjusted, even swapping the production studio for kitted-out bedrooms. The result? A multi-skilled, agile workforce and a more democratized conception of media production and who can produce it.

Here are the technicalities of how a broadcaster, a documentary maker, and a radio host worked from home during the pandemic.

Femi Oke: Live Broadcasting From Home

The Stream is a 30-minute, conversational show by Al Jazeera English. It looks at the most pressing issues happening around the world and seeks to answer questions such as “how can Bangladesh protect its Hindu community?”

Back in March of 2020, Oke and her team tried to work out how they could do the show remotely, a process that took four weeks. Oke was determined to produce something that wasn’t just her presenting in front of a blank wall. It had to be recognizable as The Stream.

“One of The Stream’s key brandings is gobo projectors displaying Al Jazeera’s logo on a brick wall in the studio,” Oke explains. So Oke’s lighting designer, Michael Corripio, made custom gobos, including the iconic brick wall, and brought those same projections into her living room. Her home backdrop looked so realistic that people told Oke they thought she had an actual brick wall in her home.

Lighting boxes lit up different areas of her room to give that studio effect. On the less high-tech side of things, Oke balanced her laptop on a stack of books so that she was presenting from the right height. As she left the studio so suddenly, she wasn’t able to use one of Al Jazeera’s proper cameras, and learned to live with that which was built into her laptop.

“The installation of the lights was pretty horrible because I wasn’t allowed to be in the same room as the lighting designer due to COVID,” Oke says. Corripio installed the lights, left her house, and directed Oke on how to set up a full lighting kit over the phone.

Next was establishing a virtual control room. Oke used an application called vMix, which her team used to put the show together. Other than that, Oke became her own make-up person, IT person, and presenter.

Setting up her home studio every morning took about 30 minutes. Oke would reset her laptop, reboot the internet, put the lighting on, run a technical check with the crew, and then, finally, prepare for her show.

“If anything goes wrong, it was just me and my laptop,” Oke says. “It was an extraordinary learning curve.”

But the upside of doing The Stream from her living room was that the audience could see that Oke was in her home, just like they were. “I had fantastic conversations with my guests because people were more relaxed,” she says. “I was coming to them virtually, so it added a level of intimacy to our conversation that you just don’t get when you’re in the studio because people think ‘Wow, I’m on TV’ and that can be quite intimidating.”

There were, of course, a fair share of mishaps. The show was broadcast live on YouTube, as a safety net, and then edited the next day. One day Oke’s internet provider did some work and her connection crashed six times. The crew took that particular episode off YouTube and stitched it back together overnight.

After nine months of hosting The Stream from her living room, Oke was relieved to finally be allowed back in the studio. She describes feeling “a lightness” upon re-entering the building: “I no longer had to firefight all these different things. All I could do is concentrate on the audience and guests, and that was really special.”

Because of lockdown, Oke now knows how to light a space properly, how to dress a shot, where the camera should be placed, and the importance of wearing headphones to avoid feedback, among other things. These are essential skills she uses when MCing remote opportunities with United Nations and the African Union, international events that look to remain virtual for the foreseeable.

Moving The Stream into Oke’s home influenced the show editorially too. “One of the biggest things was that I had to work out how to do a show with no script,” she says. “The top of the show was always scripted, the ‘hello, welcome’ bit.”

But when parked at her living room table, Oke created an unscripted opening to each show where she would ask her guests to introduce themselves to the audience rather than doing it herself from a script. “You get this lovely moment where the person frames themselves how they want to. It just puts a more personal stamp on it,” she says.

While Oke doesn’t miss stressful mornings troubleshooting microphone problems, she is grateful to have learned an enormous number of technical skills. And the process galvanized The Stream’s warm, conversational style.

Ali Rae: Making a Documentary From Home

Al Jazeera’s senior digital producer Ali Rae presented, produced, filmed, and edited a five-part documentary series — All Hail the Lockdown — all while working from home. It’s a series that explores the global consequences of COVID-19. And it was made entirely from her small living room in east London.

She was helped by her remote teammates: executive producer Meenakshi Ravi, production assistant Ben Walker, and animators Pierangelo Pirak and Cosimo Kirico. The second season of All Hail accrued more than 1,500,000 views after its first round of promotion.

Looking beyond the daily news briefings and minute-by-minute updates, Rae’s series examines the social and political ramifications of COVID-19 in countries across the world, including India, Spain, China, and Brazil.

Despite not being able to visit the far-flung countries All Hail spotlights, Rae has found value in the working-from-home documentary-making process and sees it creating more opportunities for more collaborative projects in the future. And she can now add a host of niche skills to her resume, including making a floating dolly (a camera wheeled on a cart down a track) from a skateboard.

“I missed bouncing ideas off colleagues in our office,” Rae says, “but even in lockdown, projects like these are never truly done in isolation. Whether I’m receiving editorial feedback on a draft script from my executive producer or sending files to a remote animator — collaboration is always key.”

There were other factors too, besides her remote teammates, that helped Rae complete such a project from the confines of her flat.

As a multi-skilled creative, Rae already owned camera and mic kits. She used three different cameras for All Hail: a Sony A7 III, a Canon G7X, and a GoPro-esque camera, DJI Osmo Action. Alongside this, she used a Neewer lightbox, Freeworld monitor, and RØDE lapel and Blue Yeti microphones.

Coupled with her past multimedia experience was an opportunity created by the pandemic: a world of experts working from home, with much freer schedules. “The only barrier to speaking to someone was a good Wi-Fi connection,” she says.

Author, scholar, and activist Arundhati Roy in India and environmental journalist George Monbiot in the United Kingdom were among those that gave vital insights into the social and ecological disasters coinciding with the pandemic.

Working for such a large media organization, Rae also had access to Al Jazeera’s global archival footage. Crucially, she was given eight months to bring everything together — an important time frame when grappling with temperamental Wi-Fi.

“The issue with working remotely is I had to transfer and download all this archival footage on comparatively slow Wi-Fi. So that’s one production hurdle that you have to take into account,” she says. “And then the other thing to consider is that you often can’t see the archival footage before you download it, so the quality might not be the best, or it might not be what you’re looking for. But you sometimes have to wait for it to be sent from Doha to London, then they’ll digitally transfer it over to you, which can take a little while.”

Another hurdle Rae managed to overcome was making a static setting, her living room, dynamic and distinct from the usual pandemic footage of talking heads over Zoom with a bookcase in the background.

When interviewing people, Rae’s footage switches from the classic webcam view of her speaking into her laptop to another camera positioned on a tripod behind her, framing the back of her head looking at the screen. This gives a behind-the-scenes feel, but also emphasizes the authenticity of the production process — this is one journalist, making a documentary series from home during a pandemic.

To help explain more complex topics, the walls of Rae’s home were turned into a conceptual backdrop (a greenscreen) for explainer animations created by her two animators based in Italy. This helped enliven Zoom interviews, such as providing accompanying visuals to tech writer Evgeny Morozov’s explanations of tech solutionism. The frame starts with Morozov talking via video chat, then it zooms out to a digitized representation of a noticeboard where lines grow from the original frame of Morozov to trace relevant infographics in squares.

The finished product: The Stream’s recognizable brick wall and logos were projected on Femi Oke’s living room walls. (Femi Oke)

“Of course, we could have downloaded nice pre-made templates, but we wanted to situate each graphic in the home to reinforce the lockdown theme,” Rae says. That’s why each explainer starts as a photo ‘frame’ on my wall, to metaphorically represent windows into the lived experiences of others around the world.”

“The opening to each episode also uses a different filming technique,” she continues. “Given the amount of COVID-19 coverage, we wanted to make it creative and engaging, while still being journalistically robust.” Rae used space-morphing techniques (where one image, shape, or animation seamlessly transitions into another), greenscreen masking, stop motion, and 360-degree filming — achieved by mounting her camera on a rotating tripod mount — to commence each episode.

After giving her animators in Italy a rough idea of what she was looking for — something that illustrates the mundane routine of lockdown — for the complex opening sequences, Rae filmed herself around her flat in a high-definition 4K and then sent the animators the massive files to begin playing with. Once the team was happy, the final version was edited into each documentary.

Rae also created her own budget floating dolly, a device that huge film production companies normally use to enable a camera to track forward and backward, as though it’s floating. Think Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock.

“I didn’t have the space to lay down a professional camera track, so instead I used a skateboard and attached a gimbal [a pivoting support device that allows a camera to rotate smoothly] on top of it to keep the camera stable. I simply pushed two desks together and rolled it down the middle,” she explains. “It’s great when an idea works out — but it can also be stressful stretching yourself creatively, while also managing the other aspects of the series as well.”

Having come out the other side of lockdown, what has Rae learned about the filmmaking process?

“The big thing I had to grapple with was navigating the broadcast specs for TV, which would normally be done at our broadcast center in the Shard,” she says. “There are a bunch of technical hurdles pre- and post-production you need to meet in order for something to be broadcast on TV. “For example, you need to meet broadcast specs for photosensitivity levels, audio levels, branding on-screen, and even provide detailed documents that outline copyright information for every bit of footage used.”

“This process has made me realize that if you can build successful working relationships despite the challenges of remote working, there’s a real opportunity to consider flexibility in terms of where people are based for future projects,” she continues. “It has opened up my thinking for collaboration around the world — and that’s exciting.”

Philip Chryssikos: Hosting a Radio Show From Home

Philip Chryssikos is a freelance voiceover artist and broadcaster who hosted radio shows for LBC from his nine-foot-by-10-foot spare room during lockdown.

Chryssikos had already soundproofed his spare room for voiceover work before the pandemic. This eased the transition of presenting live radio away from LBC’s London studio.

His room’s walls are quilted in two-foot-by-two-foot black and purple square tiles that span across the ceiling and around the door handle. They’re professional, studio-grade, acoustically treated tiles from EQ Acoustics, which Chryssikos installed manually using 3M Velcro strips.

“It deadens the sound, instead of having reflections that would bounce around. If you clap in a room and you can hear slight reverberation, it’s there,” Chryssikos explains. “I even went as far as putting some matting on the desk as well to kill the sound.” Good sound quality keeps listeners listening, so mastering this is essential.

In total, the soundproofing cost approximately $3,300, a calculated investment that was worth it for Chryssikos’ career. “Weigh up the pros and cons. Make sure you can do what you can afford to do in your budget,” he says.

But what if you can’t afford studio-grade soundproofing panels? Don’t worry. Chryssikos recommends using a duvet instead.

“You need to think about where you’re projecting to. Use four poles with something solid underneath them and just drape a duvet over them,” he explains. “You may not make it 100 percent soundproofed but even 90 or 80 is going to sound far better than zero.”

There are other easy tricks Chryssikos uses, such as his silent Logitech mouse so that clicking remains undetected. He stacks his computer away in a cupboard so there’s no whirring. Then on his desk, Chryssikos has two dual-screen monitors and a little mixing desk so that he can use faders while on air. Most importantly, the operation was not Wi-Fi enabled. Everything was hardwired back to his router, eliminating dropouts.

Choosing the right microphone that works with your voice is also crucial, Chryssikos advises. He uses the Orpheus mic from Suntronic, which cost approximately $500.

“It made my voice sound like silky smooth Galaxy chocolate. It was completely different to the Røde mic I was using before,” Chryssikos says. “It was an absolute game-changer. When you are recording or doing anything on a microphone, everyone’s conscious of their voice and if you’re happy with how you sound it makes you feel confident.”

Confidence is one of the key takeaways from Chryssikos’ year of broadcasting to the U.K. and beyond during the height of a global pandemic. “It’s moved my skills,” he reflects. Being able to wear many different hats behind the mic has bolstered Chryssikos’ confidence to work anywhere across the country as a voiceover artist and radio host.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Use: Tools to Try

Which piece of equipment couldn’t our interviewees live without when working from home?

A virtual control room, such as vMix.
- Using a digital control room app like vMix (alternatives are available) allowed Femi Oke, international journalist and host of Al Jazeera’s daily TV show The Stream, to do a TV show that looked like a real TV show, rather than a Zoom meeting, from a tab on her laptop.
- Her director could count her down in her ear, guests’ names would appear when they were brought on the show, and other videos could be introduced.
A microphone that works with your voice.
- “Everyone’s voice is different,” explains Philip Chryssikos, a freelance voiceover artist and broadcaster. He recommends trying out a bunch of different mics to see what works with your voice. The best one for you is not always the most expensive.
- “Think about how people will be listening to your show. On massive hi-fi speakers or a little mono speaker? However they listen to it, the sound must be crystal clear without any echo,” Chryssikos says. “Because if the sound sounds good, they will listen for longer.”
A strong Wi-Fi connection.
- Ali Rae, Al Jazeera’s senior digital producer, recommends prioritizing fast internet speeds. She was able to upgrade to a faster fiber connection in her area, which made downloading and transferring files much more manageable.
Plenty of storage in the cloud.
- Nothing fancy here either. Rae upgraded to 2TB of Google cloud storage. “It made a big difference for organizing, ease of file transfers, watching previews, collaboration on a script, etc.,” she says.

Meet: About the Author

Frankie Lister-Fell is a newspaper reporter and freelance journalist based in London. She writes about local democracy, culture, and good journalism.