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

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

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

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.

• Stories That Matter: How Serena Daniari Is Highlighting Trans Pandemic Triumphs

• Stories That Matter: How Time Released a BIPOC-Led Issue With 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

“At almost 40 years old, I’m still trying to internally dismantle the ways achieving has been tied to my self-worth,” Jasmine M. Pulido writes in her three-part series for the South Seattle Emerald titled “My Child of Color Is ‘Highly Capable.’ Now What?” Pulido is a Filipina-American writer, scientist, and community activist, among other things, and she is part of a roster of contributors to the Emerald, a non-profit digital news and culture publication that launched in the spring of 2014 with the mission of “amplifying the voice and experience of South Seattle.”

Seattle, like many cities, is historically heavily redlined and segregated; one of the consequences of ongoing inequity and racism is that some communities are underserved and neglected by journalism and media. The Emerald exists to partially fill this space, centering the voices and stories of South Seattle and its surroundings. The need that it meets is made clear by the quantity and quality of its reporting and stories, as well as the fact that it had its most profitable year in 2020, during the height of the pandemic.

Read the South Seattle Emerald Story

“Highly capable” or “gifted” programs are often — perhaps always — both a source and a symptom of inequity in education. While the intentions behind the programs are usually at least understood to be about expanding resource access and meeting students’ needs, in practice they more often perpetuate inequity, feed the school-to-prison pipeline, and actively neglect and oppress students of color. Washington state requires highly capable programs, and in the Seattle Public School District, this takes the form of the Highly Capable Cohort. This program is a local example of a national reckoning going on with “gifted” programs; it is built to serve white students, even as school systems ostensibly try to build equity into it.

We spoke with Pulido about the SPSD’s program, the importance of local journalism, her motives and research behind this series, and how she became a de facto resource for other parents as they navigate this thorny issue with their own children.

What made you want to extrapolate your personal experience with the Seattle Public School District’s Highly Capable Cohort into a reported series for the Emerald? Did you pitch it anywhere else or was it always for the South Seattle Emerald?

Pulido: It was an Emerald thing through and through. I actually had not yet pitched another publication, mostly because I really liked writing for the Emerald and I really liked their mission, so I’ve spent a lot of my time building a relationship with them. I pitched it as its own thing to them. Previously, I had reported for them on medical racism in the Seattle Children’s Clinic, and that was actually my first foray into writing in a more reporter-journalistic style. Usually, I write more first-person pieces, and I run a column where I talk about my thoughts on race, racism, and racial equity in Seattle.

The reason that I wanted to write this from personal experience and tie into what’s happening on a local level and on a national level is because this is such a controversial issue and it’s so personal, and I think that the only way to have a real conversation was to make it a more humanized conversation. From what I had read that was already out in the media, it was all coming from an outsider or objective point of view, but what a lot of parents I had talked to were craving was just feeling some visibility in the struggle. I also think that there is a disconnect that happens, especially when we talk about race, and especially when we talk about it in a liberal progressive place like Seattle, between our personal life and then what’s happening on a more systemic level. I really wanted to highlight that disconnect and try to tie it together, to show how complicated it is for us to navigate trying to make sense of both of those pieces at the same time when it comes to something as personal as your kid.

How did you go about the reporting? How did you decide what shape the story would take?

Pulido: It was a very long process. It started out as, “Oh, my kid is getting into the Highly Capable Program.” There are all these rumors about what that means, but no one has a straight answer. There’s no specific source that just lays it out straight. My original idea was to lay this out very concisely for parents of color who are trying to navigate it so that they can see everything in one document. My understanding was that people were going down rabbit holes doing their own research, and even then were not necessarily getting all the information, so I wanted to make that a little bit easier because parents have such a large mental load in general. It’s one of those things where you’re like: “Why is this not already a thing? Why hasn’t anyone made this yet?” I thought, if I’m going to do that research anyway, why not share that information with everyone?

I started with interviewing educators and then parents to see where the disconnects were happening, and really find out from parents of color the reasons for saying yes or no to the program. What I ended up finding out was there was this very small, hyper-marginalized group of people within the HCC program who it sounded like were being largely dismissed, maybe because they were a very small population, maybe because of being a parent of color in general; wanting to invest in the program could be seen as being like a race traitor, for instance. A theme that I saw emerging was that these parents of color were not at all being taken seriously. The Seattle Public School District continues to say that it is trying to uplift students for educational justice and now here are these students who are for this educational justice and yet the district doesn’t seem to be listening to them. It became clear that the people who I was talking to in the district are really focused on the future and what’s happening in the future, and there was no real talk about what was happening in the present moment for people getting into the program now.

So I thought, OK, this is now a bigger thing where now I have to think about where the program was before and where it’s going to be after, and where it’s going to be that after. It started to become this mega piece; I actually submitted it as one piece. And the Emerald was like: “This is way too long. There’s no way we can do all this. Could you bring it down to 1,000 words or something?” I tried. I’m sure you’ve had this. I tried to edit out all this stuff. I have one document that’s just my process, I have one document that’s the actual document, and then there’s one document of fragments of the original document where I cut and paste stuff that I like, but I’m probably going to take out.

When I edited it down, it just became this very sterile article that I personally felt was a huge disservice to what is really going on emotionally for a lot of people with this program. So I went back to my editor and said, “Please let me publish this whole thing because I don’t feel there’s any justice in publishing it in this sterile format.” I offered a bunch of options and my editor said, “OK, I understand that you feel really strongly about this piece and OK, we’ll keep it. I’ll have someone else edit it out because I won’t have time to edit it.” So I worked with a different editor and she was the one that suggested putting it into three parts. We originally wanted to publish it each day, like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but the Emerald was like: “We don’t ever do that. The best we can do is we could do it once a week.” I was really scared that no one would read it because it was going to be spaced far apart, but also there’s so much information that maybe it does take a week to process and they’ll come back. But it’s gotten a lot of really good response despite my apprehensions about that.

I want to ask you about that response, but before I do that, I want to ask you about what it is that you did end up cutting, and if there was anything that you wish was still in there, or if there was anything that surprised you?

Pulido: It’s hard to say whether things surprise me at this point, but I will say that there was a very large gender piece involved in the HCC program too, which I could not begin to talk about, and especially with my kid being a girl of color, that combination already has its own things to consider. I couldn’t talk about the intersectionality of marginalized identities. I mean, I did somewhat, down one very narrow path, but it definitely left a lot out about gender and about income. If I were to talk about that, I would need to be a book or something.

What kind of response have you gotten to this series, and what impact have you seen it have?

Pulido: I’ve been writing for the Emerald for a year and a half and one of the things that editors told me was that they’ve purposely made the publication so there’s a little bit more of a distance between the writer and what the feedback is or who’s responding [because there is no comments section]. And I don’t leave my email in the actual bio, so anyone who wants to email me has to actually do some work to find me. That being said, I usually get a little bit of a trickle of feedback, and that’s fine. And most of them are my friends. But with the HCC series in particular, I was tagged in a few posts where people were asking about where to find information about the HCC program, and someone’s like, “This was just published by the Emerald.” Or people who are just talking about the Highly Capable Program who want a little bit more input. I actually got an email today from someone whose kid was in the same preschool class as my kid, and they were like, “We don’t know what to do about middle schools.” So now I’m sort of becoming this point person. I’m almost like an unhired guidance counselor for the Seattle Public School District for this program.

I got a couple of really interesting emails from people that I interviewed. One was a white parent who had her child, a white boy, in an HCC program, but she was on the equity committee and they were doing a lot of work for that particular building. She emailed me to say she took her kid out of the program. She was like: “I read your article and I agree with you that a lot of white parents are in equity committees to levy their own guilt for contributing to their inequity.” I didn’t expect to have that response and so that was really interesting. I wasn’t really sure how to respond. Maybe it was more just to tell me what the impact is having on her thought process, but I had a little bit of a mixed feeling about it. I didn’t realize it was going to have an impact, I guess. But it’s amazing that it’s changing the conversation people are having with themselves about it. A school board member reached out to me and said that they had mentioned the HCC program recently and they thought about me and I was like, “That’s great.” I don’t really care if anyone agrees with me, honestly. All I care about is that it’s making people have a more nuanced conversation about it and what’s currently out there. That was my point of the piece.

Another parent reached out to me and said that they’re really upset about the district and the school board, and a lot of parents were understandably pretty upset in general about the way the district and the school board have been handling this program. I chose not to name any parents on purpose and chose not to name any particular political complex involved with the program, because I thought it would detract away from what the actual issue is. I just got off the phone right before you with a private school in California that has a twice exceptional program, and they’re wanting to open up a private school here in Seattle in 2022 that is based off of Seattle parents who had twice exceptional kids who had reached out to them. They wanted to ask me questions about the landscape here and what parents are really wanting based on the interviews I’ve done. And then you reached out to me, so this is definitely the most people who have reached out to me about this article.

Do you think that the Seattle Public School District’s Highly Capable Program is a microcosm for the national debate about gifted education in general, or no? It’s such a segregated city, but a lot of cities are.

Pulido: It’s true. I think, in Seattle’s case, it’s a lot. There are a lot of cities that are racially segregated, but I feel like the thing that makes Seattle so interesting is that Seattle is seen from the outside as a very progressive city. I’ve been here for 15 years and when I first moved here, I saw some of these things are backwards that I did not expect. I think that particular combination of the racial segregation and still not necessarily having a handle of how to approach it, even when we think we’re all on the same page about it I guess, I think that’s the conversation that’s ahead for some people.

I dabble in a couple of different spaces just because I have such an intersecting identity that also looks like passing in a lot of ways. I am in a predominantly white part of Seattle, but then I also work a lot with QTBIPOC spaces and what I’ve noticed is that the conversations they’re having in those spaces are just lightyears ahead of the conversation they’re having in a predominantly white space, even though that space is pretty progressive; it’s like the language is almost totally different. Then I go into Asian-American spaces and they’re somewhere in between. It almost seems like you have to go through a certain process, like there are specific phases that you’re going through when you’re having these conversations, especially around racial equity, and you can’t really go to the next phase without having the conversation before that. I think Seattle, in that sense, is like a microcosm, because they’re in a specific part of the conversation that I think other places are trying to get to, and yet we also haven’t made so much progress as people think we would have. Every level just opens up more questions, right?

I think the biggest thing about Seattle, and I can’t speak for other cities because I don’t know the racial segregation in other cities so well, but it’s so apparent in this one school district — there’s such a line. It’s the ship canal, like there’s a specific line, because of housing laws that makes the contrast so disparate. It’s almost satirical. Even if you look at HCC statistics, they actually have a map on the SPSD website where you can see where most of the students are coming from. It’s laid out pretty transparently. I mean, not transparently because it’s hard to find the page, but then once you find the page, there’s no way to ignore it.

Along those lines, in the final installment of the series, you talk about the SPSD’s plan to phase out the cohort model and turn it into a services model in an attempt to make it more accessible and inclusive. That sounds good in theory, but you also point out that there have been years of a lot of bureaucracy and not a lot of action, and that there’s a lot of mistrust. You write about yourself having hope and skepticism around the work that’s being done. What have you seen change or not change in the last year or since the series was published this summer, especially now that school is starting again?

Pulido: That's a hard question. Here’s where my sympathy comes from: I know a lot of amazing educators. I’m friends with a lot of amazing educators. And, growing up, a lot of my friends in my hometown became educators. Even in doing the interviews, there’s so much passion that comes from the educators when they’re talking about trying to change this mammoth thing that they’re just getting grilled about every single day. I have a lot of sympathy for that. One of the conversations I was having with a former educator was that we’re both well aware that there are some badass educators really trying to push this work forward, and we’re well aware of a lot of communities, organizations, and parents who are really trying to push for it too on the outside. So why is everyone so ineffective? Why is this such a problem? If everyone agrees what the problems are, everyone wants the same thing, everyone’s working really hard and is super passionate, then how come I’m writing this, right?

Someone emailed me and said; “So, you’re optimistic?” And I don’t know if I could say I’m optimistic. I would say I’m skeptical, but trying to maintain some hope, because I believe in educators — and yet they are also this cog in the system, so it’s complicated. That being said, my biggest thing is that all could be happening, but the only thing that really matters in the end is, what’s the impact on the ground? If my kid is just getting the same thing they would have gotten 10 years ago and nothing’s different, then why does it matter?

The other thing I try to keep in mind is not to base my opinion on social media, putting all of the cynicism aside, keeping in mind there are some things that are starting to work. For instance, someone was just talking to me about all of the lunches being free. That’s a huge deal and yet we don’t even know how that came to be. I would love more transparency around that so you can replicate those outcomes in other areas. It should be accessible for everyone. How do we move that to other areas of the education system? I at least tried to put the cynicism aside and be like, there are some things that are working. It’s never going to be enough until it is enough. I definitely have that dichotomy in me. I have to be patient for the larger change, and I’m also really impatient.

Do you have any final thoughts after reporting the story? What are your major takeaways or ideas around the best way to reform or abolish these programs, or in general to better meet the needs of all students?

Pulido: I didn’t realize it was going to get as much traction as it did. I thought it was just going to go out there and some people were going to be cool with it and that was it. Even though I did two months of really intense research trying to put this together, I didn’t realize just how much parents of color really don’t feel listened to. It made it so apparent how important it was to have a voice like that in the media. I didn’t realize it would be such an empowering tool for a lot of parents of color, specifically within Seattle.

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

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

“I hope that I can start to become this point person for how to have these more complicated conversations that get away from blaming any particular person, and get closer to understanding the personal and then the interpersonal and then the political layers that are interacting and adding to the dynamics of the conversation that we’re having at any moment,” Jasmine M. Pulido says. “The other thing I really took away from [reporting this series] was just how many barriers are in place for people who are having an intersectional experience with the school system, and it really bothered me that a lot of parents didn’t feel that they could even vocalize their experience to anyone to begin with. Why aren’t we having a nuanced conversation about their stories? That’s what I like about writing for the Emerald: I get to hear those stories, and a lot of other things I’ve read try to simplify it or reduce it down to this binary narrative and I’m really trying to stay away from that.”

Read: More on Equity in Gifted Programs in Seattle and Beyond    

• For the Associated Press, Bobby Caina Calvan breaks down the national debate and statistics on inequity and gifted programs, citing Seattle as an example: “Schools Debate: Gifted and Talented, or Racist and Elitist?,” October 28, 2021

• For the Seattle Times, Hannah Furfaro writes about the stark black-white divide in the Seattle Public School District’s Highly Capable Cohort program and contextualizes it with statistics about discipline: “Black-White Divide in Seattle Schools’ Gifted Programs, Discipline Rates Among Worst in Nation,” February 17, 2020

• For KUOW, Liz Brazile writes about one Seattle public middle school where a STEM program will be implemented while the HCC program is eliminated: “Washington Middle School to Be Turned Into STEM School; ‘Highly Capable’ Classes Will Go,” January 22, 2020

• In the Stranger, Katie Herzog provides some human and historical context for Seattle’s HCC program: “The Battle Over Seattle Public School’s Gifted Progams Heats Up,” December 4, 2019

Meet: About the Author

Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer. They can be found on Twitter @sarahmariewrote.

The first 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.

Serena Daniari is a journalist, producer, and activist. She remembers being told in journalism classes at New York University not to cover stories that she is connected to in any way because her personal experience will override the facts and reporting. Years later, after becoming a published journalist because of her voice, and sharing her experience with her transition online to family and friends, Daniari is one of the foremost journalists covering the trans community and LGBT issues.

Read the Original Them Story

Her work at Them, and the publication’s ongoing coverage of the LGBT community, is filling a gap that exists elsewhere in media. Crucially, Them’s editorial team has turned to people that are a part of the community in order to correct this imbalance — working from the inside out, rather than outside in. Daniari’s piece, “The Joys and Fears of Transitioning During a Pandemic,” allowed for trans voices to be amplified during the pandemic. And it allowed for positive and unique perspectives to shine through during a time when coverage remained generally negative and dark.

The depth and sensitivity of Daniari’s coverage call into question the age-old rule that many journalists have chosen to keep in their practice — do we really need to avoid covering our own community and stories that we have a personal connection to, or does the coverage lose something when we avoid doing so? Daniari shares her perspective covering the trans community, the value she feels is added when journalists have a personal connection, and how she feels publications and editors should go about working with journalists that are a part of communities whose perspectives have been historically left out of the mainstream media. The interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

To start off, do you want to share a bit about the work you and the team are doing at Them?

Daniari: Absolutely. So, as you probably know, there is a definite lack of LGBTQ-focused media outlets. Even when they do open, many of them have been shuttered in recent years. We do have INTO and Out. But BuzzFeed shuttered its LGBTQ vertical and I think the Huffington Post did the same. I feel like more and more people are talking about our community, specifically trans issues, and trans has become such a force. It’s a major topic in the culture wars. It’s having a moment in the cultural zeitgeist. Yet for some reason, there are fewer and fewer outlets dedicated to covering these stories.

Even when the community is being covered, I noticed, especially when I was first getting started in journalism, there were so many inaccuracies in the ways that these stories were being reported on by cis reporters. This really reflected a general lack of understanding of my community. Oftentimes subjects would be referenced by their dead names or 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. So I sort of decided to bridge this gap in the media, being a trans reporter. That’s why a lot of my work, I feel like, is injected with a personal perspective. Much of my work has a personal essay component to it because it’s hard to divorce myself from being completely objective, to be honest. This obviously comes from the fact that I’ve gone through this experience and I’ve faced a lot of the challenges that I actually report on. But I actually feel like this is a benefit. The work ends up being deeper, and I’m able to go deeper into the story.

Oftentimes my subjects, people in the trans community, have an intense distrust of media because they’ve been hurt by the media so many times. For example, I was reporting about the homicides in Jacksonville in 2018 — there were a string of homicides of Black transgender women. There were a lot of cisgender reporters over there having difficulty getting any access or building any trust with these subjects because these individuals had their sisters killed and the local media was using the wrong names and incorrect pronouns. It’s like, why would these people have any desire to speak to journalists who don’t have any desire themselves to represent you fairly and accurately?

It is extremely important not only to make sure that people and their voices are represented accurately, but can you share a little more about the idea of being a part of a community and coming into a new area where you don’t know individuals, what kind of benefit there is to building trust and just coming in with a better understanding of the situation?

Daniari: Yeah, 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. A lot of the stories that we cover at Them don’t even make a blip on the radar of what most journalists would like to cover. Oftentimes I’ll be reading a story from a publication that has an LGBTQ vertical but doesn’t have a trans journalist as part of their staff or freelance community. Many of these stories neglect to cover some of the issues that are really prescient to the trans community. 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 example, I covered the injectable estrogen shortage a few years ago and it was a big issue for trans women, trans feminine people, and no one was covering it, just I was. Trans women were having a really difficult time accessing what the medical establishment now considers to be a life-saving medication in our community. I remember thinking if there was a shortage of insulin, a massive shortage of medication that a substantial portion of the population needs for health and happiness, well it would be all over the headlines.

I’m very embedded in this world, this community. I know about these stories because I lived through them. I think there’s a personal touch to some of this, but I also have a unique perspective being the only trans person in a newsroom. When I was working at Mic or the Huffington Post, our audience was primarily cis and straight. So to get this audience to care about trans stories, about LGBTQ stories, you have to bring anecdotes and build a connection with them in order to make it more accessible to them and get them to care about this reporting on a fringe community that doesn’t affect their lives. Oftentimes this helps to share the story from a personal perspective because it connects people to the broader issues that are going on. If you do it right then that audience might begin to see trans people for the first time as human beings with a story and not just an abstract community that is just represented in TV or movies as fake characters.

That actually brings up a good point in the fact that, in mainstream news, there is often coverage of the trans community that is based around a violent event or something specifically science- or health-related. How is your work at Them increasing coverage of all of the topics centered around the LGBTQ and trans community, not just the negative news or breaking news items, the coverage that helps to normalize individuals, increase interaction, and build bridges?

Daniari: That’s actually a very central component of my work. I and the rest of the team at Them have noticed that mainstream coverage of the trans community and LGBTQ people is heavily focused on narratives of despair and suffering. Death and violence. Of course, these stories need to be told. There truly is an epidemic of violence against trans folks in this country. It seems to be only getting worse. But I think the problem that comes up when that’s all that is covered is that we begin to view trans people as more of a statistic. These individuals are many things beyond their transness — they are mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers. They deserve to be represented as fully realized human beings. They’re working people, people with accomplishments, people who have legacies and accolades that deserve to be mentioned.

Trans people are more than just the struggles we face. A lot of the work that we do at Them is centered around queer joy and happiness. Not only that, and this may sound strange but queer and trans mediocrity. Queer and trans people just existing and living and being themselves without the need for some grisly attack or horrific event to make their story and their lives worth mentioning.

You know, it’s so interesting, and I feel like I keep having this type of conversation over and over for this series, but we would never be sitting here discussing, like, a white cisgender person and how we need to increase coverage for that community. We’re not asking the question of “can you be white or cis and cover the community fairly?” Because that’s so heavily what the Western media is and knows, yet there are no conversations out there questioning that coverage and who is writing the stories. So it’s interesting that we have to go out of our way to make sure there’s a representation of people who have existed for millennia and asking if it’s OK if people who are from that community write about that community and are they doing it correctly.

Daniari: I think that’s spot on. I feel like, at the beginning of when people really started to focus on and talk about trans issues, I don’t know if maybe Caitlyn Jenner was the turning point for that. But I feel like at that point it was like “write about us! Write about us!” and now the conversation has begun and we’re now asking for people to write about us accurately and respectfully. We need to pay attention to who is in a position to actually be able to do that. So, I think that’s a great point.

Do you think we’re close to mainstream media, and obviously Condé Nast is a major publisher for this publication to be under, but do you think we’re close to a time when mainstream media will cover the community, like you said, in a way that not only highlights the wins but the mediocre stories that deserve to be told?

Daniari: I think there are glimpses and glimmers of that, and I’m optimistic about the future. I envision a world where trans people aren’t being murdered in cold blood, and, hopefully, there’s less intensity to cover that and we can shift our focus to talking about the achievements and triumphs and just everyday realities of love and relationships and sex as it pertains to queer and trans people. All these universal experiences that it almost feels like trans people don’t get to participate in because we’re so busy focusing on the fact that we’re dying and we can’t get health care and we can’t get a job interview and all of these things. So I feel like first society needs to fix itself a bit and then the journalist aspect will follow. Because right now it does make sense to me why these issues are at the forefront. It is hard to show trans people accurately and show the glory of trans people just existing when we really are under attack. So I mean it’s honestly a conundrum, it’s a difficult balance to strike. That’s why I think the solution, at least in the interim, is that whenever I am writing about these urgent or dark matters, that I write beyond the issues and talk to the people, go into the actual communities. Continue to amplify the personal stories within the work, making sure we’re depicting these people as human beings and not just names and statistics.

Yes, and I think you did a really great job of that in “The Joys and Fears of Transitioning During the Pandemic” That’s obviously a very important story to tell from the pandemic. Everybody was talking about their experience but most of the experiences, other than basically the people who were having kids, were really negative. How did you get the idea to focus on the positive of transitioning and how did you find that story?

Daniari: I think the first part is where I think being trans really helped me to write a story like this because, as I mentioned, the trans community is very tight, we’re a small community on social media and a lot of us follow each other from different states and areas. So I started to notice [during the pandemic] an uptick of people who I followed on social media were talking about how they started transitioning. That was a “wow” moment for me, and I began to think about my own transition and why it took me as long as it did.

I started transitioning in 2015, in my senior year of college when I was 21. It took me so long because I was just distracting myself; I was working all the time, I had a full-time academic schedule; I had all these extracurriculars because I was trying to avoid having to deal with myself. There were so many other things that I could do to mask the issues that were really bubbling underneath the surface.

When the pandemic hit, I think a lot of people were not able to do that anymore. The world had to be still and everyone was alone with themselves in their homes and apartments and they now had to contend with hard questions about themselves. I thought to myself that, if the pandemic happened before I started, I’m sure I would have started the process then because you can’t ignore those questions and feelings anymore when it’s just you and all of the rest has been taken away.

It is very interesting because yes, the pandemic has been devastating for everyone, trans people included, but one of the surprising silver linings that emerged for the people I talk to is that, through this isolation, they were finally able to come to terms with their gender identity and become comfortable exploring it and making progress in it. Many people finally had the downtime to undergo procedures and do things they had been wanting to do for a very long time. For surgeries, there is recovery time needed. It’s hard to do if you have a job or you’re in school or have a busy social life. It was like people finally had sort of the freedom and leeway needed to really make yourself transform into the person you’ve always wanted to be, the person you authentically are.

So I reached out to some folks on social media, I also have contacts at the LGBT Center in New York, I reached out to GLSEN to connect me with trans youths who may want to share their stories. The stories that were most impactful were the ones that were featured.

Do you think a cis journalist could have covered this story in the way you did? I mean, even just reaching out for stories via social media?

Daniari: You know, I think it’s questionable. I don’t know if a cis journalist would think this was a story, to be honest, or think about what it must be like to undergo such an immense change during a pandemic. I feel like so much of the coverage of COVID-19 was about returning back to normal, or the death toll, and obviously these are important things that affect everyone. I think a lot of journalists were fixated on that because I think that’s what most people wanted to know about. But my work has always been about finding those stories that fall through the cracks that don’t make mainstream media that are uniquely centered around the experience, needs, questions, or concerns of trans people. So I’m not sure a cis journalist would necessarily have thought of it.

In terms of outreach, trans people do talk to cis journalists, but I do think there’s a level of trust where they know that their story is safe in the hands of this person because they come from my community. They understand this experience in a uniquely personal way, so maybe I can go deeper, share more. Even with like colloquialisms that are unique to our community, things that maybe cisgender journalists have never heard before so there’s maybe an extra added layer of research that they may have to do. I don’t have to because I have lived here; my whole life has been researching trans through being a trans person in America.

What was your favorite part of this piece? The research, the writing, the way it was received….

Daniari: I loved how complicated and in the gray area it was. That’s why the headline is “the joys and fears” — this is a story that, you know, is not like the pandemic was great for being trans or the pandemic was really bad for us. It’s more about exploring the nuances and the competing emotions that come with it. Like, wow, there was a global pandemic happening. Everything’s shut down, life, as we know, is over; that’s extremely crazy. But then there’s this benefit that comes out of it.

One of my subjects compared themselves to being in a cocoon and experiencing a metamorphosis. In the end, they got to come out as who they really are. All of this was riddled with challenges faced too. Some of my subjects lost jobs and were terrified about how they were going to make a living. Some extremely interesting insights came out of it. One of my subjects spoke about how they would get their gender, their femininity, affirmed by their interactions on the street and in the world, their hookups with men. They weren’t able to get that anymore. So it’s all these things that you might not even realize that sort of came to light and it made me understand the pandemic through a different lens, so many different experiences.

This was a universal experience, all of us, not just the trans community, learned a lot about ourselves and our needs and our aspirations. Ultimately that’s what this story is about, taking the transness out of it if you will. It’s a universal experience of finding yourself in a really challenging, unpredictable, and turbulent time.

That is so true. Thank you for sharing. Are all of the journalists and editors at Them part of the community?

Daniari: Yes. All of us are members of the LGBTQ community; I think that’s how it should be, to be honest. That’s why people resonate with Them so much. We have queer youth writing to us all the time about how a story made a difference to them. We did a piece about how autistic trans people use their full bodies to express joy, it’s called “stimming” and we had people write in that they had never read about this ever and it made them feel seen and validated and truly feel visible! I think that’s why it’s important to have people who are LGBTQ or who belong to certain marginalized groups telling our own narratives and being in command of our own narratives.

True, it’s like we said before, we would never be having this conversation 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when newsrooms were completely made up of cis white males, and still are to a degree. It’s insane that we even have to have a conversation about whether or not it’s OK if everybody in one newsroom or publication is part of the same community. But can you share what your journalism education was like? Do you remember being taught by a professor or an editor about how you have to stay away from stories that you’re close to or that you have a tie to because there’s no way you could cover it in a legitimate way?

Daniari: Yes! I have a media degree from NYU and I do remember all of the journalism classes that I took. I think it was ingrained and pounded into my head that you just don’t cover stories that you have a personal connection to because your emotions get involved and you’re no longer able to write objectively. You put too much of your voice into it or whatever. I think at the time, when I was in college, that was what was expected of journalists — a very detached and factual sort of base reporting. But how I actually started my journalism career is very different.

I was actually not a journalist, I was blogging online when I started my transition to my people — my friends and family on Tumblr and Facebook and my WordPress. People started following me and I started developing a following. Trans people would contact me online and thank me for sharing my story. And oh my God, it was silly stuff like make-up tips and sharing how I’m going to get my first hormone shot and things like that. Then an editor reached out to me and asked me to write a piece for Allure, which is another Condé Nast publication, and then another editor and it started a domino effect. Editors wanted me to cover trans issues.

It was so interesting because clearly there’s a gap in that publishers are wanting to cover this issue because the topic is becoming more and more prevalent and more of a talking point. A controversial talking point at that but there’s clearly a need. I was like, I feel like I can fill this need. I understand this community. I also think it’s important to note that, like, I am not claiming to be the voice of all trans people. I don’t think all trans people are the same. Trans people are not a monolith. I mean, there are so many ways to be trans as there are trans people in the world. But I do think that I just get it in a way that a lot of people don’t.

The point I’m trying to make is that I was never expected to divorce my personal story from my reporting. In fact, it was encouraged for me because of how my editors noticed me was me writing about myself. Then I started to write about issues facing trans people. My experiences would inform the way the piece was shaped or the leads I had or who I spoke with, what questions I asked them, how I structured the piece.

So yeah, it’s interesting, but I kind of threw everything I was told in college out of the window, and just went with my gut. I personally think it’s better if you have a personal attachment to the story because you’re more invested and it makes you a better reporter and makes you want to get to the truth of what is happening and who these people are and how we can solve the issues that we’re facing as a community.

So do you think that a trans reporter covering politics at, say, the New York Times would be able to write about legislation impacting the trans community unbiasedly?

Daniari: Absolutely. It’s honestly my hope that trans writers and journalists don’t always get pigeonholed into covering trans issues as I do because I choose to do this. It fulfills me. I do write about other issues as well but I wouldn’t want any journalists to feel like they have to be tied to any sort of subject matter on the basis of their identities.

Trans people are exceedingly competent, intelligent people doing amazing things across industries and are totally capable of reporting on any issues objectively. So yeah, I mean, I hope that newsrooms will hire trans people to cover everything. Science, medicine, politics, culture. Above all, we’re human beings. So we live at the intersection of all of these realities. Not just our transness.

That’s actually some of the conversations that I’m having with multiple journalists at other publications. Some of them mentioned, for example, that editors were turning to Black journalists in the newsroom to cover anything related to BLM and a lot of the violence that went on last year. Some of them were like “Yes, let’s do it!” and then others absolutely did not want to. And they were upset by the fact that their editors came to them to cover it. So yeah, it’s like what you mentioned. Everyone should be able to write about what they want, not just be a voice for their community, because there are some people who do want to be that voice but then there are some people who just want to be human and want to be a journalist and just want to write about anything they want, not their community.

Daniari: Absolutely. Yeah, I think it’s all about a personal choice. I think it’s a personal decision that reporters have to make for themselves. I don’t feel like editors should force anyone or narrow the scope of what any newsroom covers based on any aspect of their identity. Beyond being unfair and small-minded and presumptuous, it’s also putting an immense burden on these reporters. These issues are often very heavy and emotional.

If people come from that experience, they live it outside of office hours and outside of reporting. So it’s putting intense labor on journalists on top of the labor of being a reporter that is not fair and undue if it’s not desired by the person doing it. I think that really needs to be a part of the conversation too and not just assigning a Black reporter to cover BLM or trans reporters to cover trans murders. I mean, that is very toxic, emotional, painful work, especially if the proper resources and support are not provided to the reporters.

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.

Subscribe Now to Support This Project

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next

Continuing coverage of the trans community — the good, the bad, and the average — is Serena Daniari’s goal, and she will continue working toward a world where trans coverage and representation is as standard as any other kind of coverage. She hopes that trans journalists will be accepted and encouraged in newsrooms to cover whatever beat they prefer.

Them is currently working to be a go-to digital resource for the LGBT community. Its editors want to help people all over the country do things like find LGBT therapists in their area, or locate a gender-affirming doctor that takes their insurance. They want to be helpful in answering any and all questions one may have about their community. Look for this in the coming months.

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.

• Stories That Matter: How Serena Daniari Is Highlighting Trans Pandemic Triumphs

Read: More From Serena Daniari and Other Trans Journalists

• Daniari’s story on the shortage of injectable estrogen in Mic: “An Injectable Estrogen Shortage Reminds Trans Women That Our Fight Is Far From Over,” July 19, 2018

• Them’s coverage by Elly Belle on stimming in the autistic trans community: “Trans Autistic People Use Our Whole Bodies to Express Joy,” September 3, 2021

• NPR’s interview with three trans journalists on how they report on news affecting transgender people, and how being a part of the community shapes their stories: “Trans Journalists: It’s ‘a Privilege’ to Tell the Stories of the Trans Community,” April 9, 2021

Meet: About the Author

Jessica Kantor is a freelance journalist who 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.

You are probably reading this on a device built from cobalt. The lustrous, silvery-blue metal is an essential component of most lithium ion batteries, which rely on small cathode structures of cobalt ions for the best energy storage. Your cell phones, airpods, laptops, and pretty much any device you can recharge, including electric vehicles, more than likely has cobalt in it. Alloys of the metal are also used in jet turbines and gas turbine generators, meaning that cobalt is crucial to ending our reliance on fossil fuels, an essential element of the green revolution.

Yet in a statement in April, a wing of the United States Department of Energy said that cobalt is “considered the highest material supply chain risk for electric vehicles,” a gentler way of saying cobalt is at the center of a large amount of human suffering. The various ways cobalt is extracted from the Earth involve little oversight of inhumane working conditions, which often result in death or injury. Thousands of children are employed or enslaved in such mines that burp toxic chemicals and spill into neighborhoods.

Read the Original New Yorker Story

In “The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush,” Nicolas Niarchos, a contributing writer for The New Yorker, traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that often only makes the headlines when an outbreak of Ebola or war occurs. But the nation is enriched with precious metals, which has led to the proliferation of “artisanal” mining, in which people start digging beneath their own houses, crafting tunnels that can spiral many meters below ground. Not surprisingly, residents near these mines have been found to have higher levels of cobalt in their blood and urine, among other health effects.

We talked to Niarchos, who spent more than eight weeks across several trips to get an up-close look at where the majority of the world’s cobalt comes from. The iPhone 13? The 2021 Tesla Model S? The teeth marks of the supply chain are becoming harder to scrub off for the latest and greatest devices. And the companies leading the next chapter of industrialization can’t keep ignoring the conditions under which our future is being constructed.

How did you first start covering Africa and how do you approach a subject that’s continent-sized?

Niarchos: I started writing about refugees in 2015. I’m originally Greek and was traveling home while I was still a full-time fact-checker. And it was a time that a great many refugees were arriving in Greece. And I said to one of my editors, “listen, can I go out and write about this? You don’t have anyone else here.” And they said, “yeah, go and do it.”

At that time I had written a couple of stories for The Nation. And I had written a couple of stories about arts and culture and things like that for The New Yorker. And suddenly, I was in the middle of this very, sort of real reporting situation. What I noticed is that you had a lot of focus on the Syrian refugees, some focus on the Afghan refugees, but already, you’re starting to see a lot of African refugees coming over. So that kind of piqued my interest.

When you’re traveling to Africa, how do you work with translators, interviewing all these different people if it’s not your native language?

Niarchos: Luckily, I speak French and most people in Congo speak French. I had a local journalist with me at all times. It’s a good idea to have somebody just to kind of get you through. There’s a lot of a lot of situations in which you’re stopped by police under false pretenses and so on. I think that local journalists understand how to deal with those situations. And oftentimes, if you were not with a local, you could end up in trouble very quickly.

I was very lucky to have a local journalist, who is a mining journalist by trade. He works for a sort of mining review and they do quite a lot of paid content. But in his free time, he likes to help foreign journalists to come in and report more thoroughly some of the stories that he sees, and can’t report on a day-to-day basis, because he works for an industry publication.

Did you see any change or response from major players in the cobalt industry because of the story? Has Elon Musk acknowledged it?

Niarchos: No, not really. I think Tesla is having a problem getting lithium at the moment. There have been initiatives to look at lower cobalt batteries and [cobalt-free] batteries. At the moment, the technology’s not really there if you want to have long-range electric vehicles.

What I do know is that there were some companies that were, and, unfortunately, it was all off-record conversation, so I can’t really talk about who or where, but there were companies that were upset and would call up and say, “How can you say this?” But they didn’t want to go on record and they didn’t want to explain themselves. So it kind of ended up being them feeling upset, but they were also just completely unwilling to participate.

And whether that’s from a lack of ability to recognize that they’re part of the problem, or for some other reason, that’s basically the limit of what I’ve seen. But on the other side, I haven’t seen, like, a huge groundswell of people being interested.

I mean, there are people who read it on Twitter and that kind of thing, but it’s not as if there’s an end cobalt movement that sort of sprung up around the piece. I am turning the piece into a book. Maybe as these things develop, there will be more scrutiny of this issue.

I really do hope so. I think the profile of this issue really needs to be raised. But it is also really frustrating, like, I’ve interviewed somebody from SpaceX before, and they gave me everything on background. And I’m like, well, this is a totally useless interview, I can’t use any of it. Why did you waste my time with this? Like, if you really want to talk to me about this issue, then you should talk to me about this issue. You know, Apple and Tesla and all these companies are very cryptic. I guess the question is what kind of response would you like to see? Like an end cobalt campaign?

Niarchos: I actually don’t think an end cobalt campaign is the best idea. I think basically what should happen is that all these companies that are profiting off batteries should go into DRC, and if they want to use cobalt, which, you know, why shouldn’t they? There are ways of mining it that are not deleterious to people’s health and not more polluting than mining anything else through industrial mining.

But they should go there, and they should provide alternatives. For them, it’s an incredibly fertile piece of the world as well. So they could create farming alternatives, they could create alternative means of income, they could create battery factories and so on. Then that would require them and also Western governments to deal with some of the real issues around corruption in that country and why they still — even though they have these huge sort of hydroelectric projects, and so on — they still can’t have regular power in most cities.

A real engagement with those infrastructure- and poverty-related issues is very important. And I think also just like really sitting around and thinking what can be done to engage the population of DRC in agriculture, or building or whatever other types of industry are out there. The agriculture one is very interesting, because, actually, I think it’s a great opportunity for whoever tries to make it work. And by that, I mean, you know, most of the DRC is something where 90 percent of the food there is imported or in that region, and prices are super, super high as a result, so it contributes to this cycle of poverty.

If they were able to grow their own food, if they were able to create their own farms, I think you would be able to a. feed the population, b. cut down on pollution with regard to imports, and c. kind of create a sustainable lifestyle for people who live there that doesnt involve mining or going down the mines without any safety equipment or anything like that.

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.

Subscribe Now to Support This Project

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

“I think what happens is that there is a further shift away from this type of artisanal mining. I can’t see it continuing along this road,” Nicolas Niarchos says. “However, there’s a great deal of political instability at the moment in DRC. In fact, in a province in which these mines are based, the governor has kind of fallen out with the president, and he’s kind of been kicked out, and he’s trying to come back and blah, blah, blah. So I think that any change for the next couple of years will probably come slowly. I do think that they’re trying to sell off as many of the mines as possible to turn into large industrial mines. I think that artisanal mining will continue to exist.”

“I think the Chinese are also scrutinizing their businesses at the moment in DRC. And probably they’ll try to instigate some more sort of safety controls and so on,” Niarchos continues. “However, I don’t see the situation improving at the moment, I actually see it deteriorating, and I see Congolese people losing out. I think there was a great moment in which the Congolese government could have sort of turned everything around and privatized in a way that was giving back more to the Congolese people. But in fact, that opportunity, which came at the end of the second Congo War, so at the end of the aughts, they kind of locked themselves into this sort of corrupt cycle that they’re in at the moment. So I see this continuing for quite a while.”

Read: More on the Cobalt Industry in Congo

• Dorothee Baumann-Pauly, an adjunct professor and director of the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights, and researcher Serra Cremer Iyi, both at the Université de Genève, detail how companies in the cobalt supply chain can source responsible cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in The Conversation: “As Cobalt Demand Booms, Companies Must Do More to Protect Congolese Miners,” November 25, 2020

• Prince De Makele Mounguembou, a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, writes about the projected 224 percent increase in cobalt demand by 2030 and how leaders of the electric car revolution, such as Toyota and General Motors, must confront the human rights abuses in their supply chains. For Peace Research Institute Oslo: “Cobalt and the Congo: A Sustainable Green Energy Transition Cannot Be Built on Human Exploitation,” April 21, 2021

• Jevans Nyabiage highlights the outsized role that China, which owns some of the largest cobalt mines and stands as the world’s biggest importer of cobalt, plays in the living conditions of Congolese residents in the South China Morning Post: “Cobalt Blues: Congolese Miners, and China’s Role in Improving Their Conditions,” July 17, 2021

Meet: About the Author

Troy Farah is an independent journalist who covers science, public health, climate, and more for multiple publications including Scientific American, National Geographic, Discover, Vice, and others. He lives near Joshua Tree, California, with his wife and two dogs.

Succession is a show so big that if you haven’t watched it, you’ve heard of it. So big, in fact, that it’s getting prestigious coverage for the premiere of its third season; it’s unusual for shows to get any major stories in any season that isn’t the first or last, or going through some cultish popularity (here’s looking at you, Ted Lasso).

That’s why, when New York magazine unveiled its Fall Preview issue, that the cover story was about Succession was a bit of a surprise. Even less expected was that the magazine had gotten access to two weeks of filming — in Italy, no less!

Read the Original New York Story

Writer Hunter Harris, who used to be on staff at the magazine and had just written a feature on the new Gossip Girl, was sent to sweat it out (literally) with the cast and crew. We talked about the behind-the-scenes aspects to behind-the-scenes reporting.

The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Did you pitch or were you assigned the Succession story?

Harris: I don’t pitch as much as I should. From a writer’s perspective, pitching a cover story or a profile is not usually what happens.

I’m too self-deprecating to think about doing big profiles as an idea, but when my editor at Vulture calls me and is like, “hey, I have this opportunity, would you be interested?” Then it’s like, “of course!” But that seems like such an ambitious pitch; I’ve never heard anyone pitch that.

Do editors actually call you on the phone?

Harris: With this editor, we just wrapped the Gossip Girl story and she was like, “I have another idea to run by you.”

And I was like, “um, sure, let’s talk about it.”

“We have negotiated this amount of time on the site of Succession while they’re filming in Tuscany, and would you be available/interested in going?”

And I was like, “um, yea-ah.”

It happened really fast. I got the assignment maybe two weeks before I actually left, so there wasn’t much time to deliberate — not that I would; it was more of a scheduling thing, like I had my own vacation planned, so I had to cancel that.

What was the timeline of the reporting?

Harris: She sent me an email on June 14th, and we talked that same day — I accepted on June 15th. I left on the 25th and I think I arrived on June 26th. And because I flew into Rome, and it’s kind of complicated to get to where they were shooting to get to Rome, I stayed in Rome for two or three days, while I was waiting for my flight.

I filed July 31st. I got the first proof on August 26th.

So your editor had set this all up for you, but how were the logistics of the trip sorted?

Harris: Because of COVID stuff, HBO was really involved. There was a publicist with me all of the time: I met her over email and we were talking; there was one day that I did seven interviews in a day, so we were coordinating that stuff. Because of the logistical issues with being on set, I had to test every three days, and that was another conversation. And there are only so many hotels in Siena, Pienza, or Cortona, so I stayed at a hotel where a lot of the crew were staying, and I would go in an HBO van to go to set every day. That stuff is coordinated by them; it’s not like I’m just dropped into the middle of the city and faring for myself.

Do you have a packing list for reporting trips like this?

Harris: Honestly, no. It was so extremely hot on set some days as they were shooting outside for some parts, so I was sweating through five dresses in a week. I looked a mess as I’m trying to have various conversations; I’m trying to pat myself to not look oily.

The only thing I brought and used one time was a physical recorder — I just used my phone because it’s easier and I panicked at the airport, as I’d forgotten an adapter for my recorder for a USB port as my computer doesn’t have one. Honestly, it’s so much easier to just record stuff with the Voice Memo app — I don’t know if that’s bad; it probably is.

There’s been a lot written about Succession, and you didn’t have much time to prep, so how did you go about it?

Harris: I’d spent my whole life thinking about Gossip Girl — I feel like I know the show really well as a fan and I’d written a lot about it a lot — same with Succession. I over-prepare for everything, and I do like reading everything, but at a certain point, you just have to be naturally curious about someone. I think that’s the biggest part of choosing a subject or accepting an assignment: That’s half of the work right there. The reading and stuff informs all of that, but you can’t fake caring about someone’s work, and you couldn’t fake that I thought Succession was a great show — that’s kind of impossible.

Something to keep in mind, too, is that these are new seasons of new shows, so I went back and read stuff that Vulture had written about Succession — reacclimate myself. I rewatched the most recent seasons, just so I could get a sense of the thread, but at the same time, I’m not writing about season one of Succession, I’m writing about season three of Succession. It wasn’t until I got the scripts, sit with them, that I could think about questions in that way. But as I am not trying to, and could not, spoil anything, there’s only so much of that that’s even helpful, where I’m not asking questions about specific plot choices. I was writing a piece about what it’s like to be on the set of Succession, so if I say, “what happened on page 39 of the 8th episode?” that’s not a very good question — it’s not interesting, and I would not have been able to include it into the draft anyway, because it would have been a spoiler. But if I’m reading about how the cast have talked about one another before, how they express working together before, or the process of their getting cast — that’s the sort of stuff I have on my mind anyway as a fan of the show and as someone who’s watched the show for a long time.

How far ahead of time did you get the scripts and how many did you get given?

Harris: Two, and not until maybe my third or fourth day on set. It was a lot of homework when I wasn’t on set. I was also working on another profile at the same time, so it was more work for a different story, so it was a lot.

Is getting scripts normal for these stories?

Harris: Yea-ah. Yea-ah. I think, for the Gossip Girl story, I had seen the locked cuts for the first three episodes, and they gave me the script of the episode they were shooting that I was observing, so I read it when I got there. But with Succession, the timing was different, because they were still working on the show.

Seeing as you were on location, were you spending time with the cast and crew outside of these interviews?

Harris: It wasn’t like I was having these very intimate dinners with them. This is what I learned on the Gossip Girl set: Someone said, “you’ll see at the end of the day, at eight o’clock, everyone just vanishes” and that’s just how it is. At a certain point, after the work was done, people would just not be available to me, which I felt to be respectful and normal and fine.

Something I did think about and find was that it is difficult to interview someone at the end of the work day — like this. Someone isn’t always as concise, or maybe thoughtful as you would like them to be, but sometimes you also get more interesting observations that way, so it is based on logistics and whatever you can make happen.

Where were you doing the interviews?

Harris: For the bunch of interviews I did in one day, we were in a hotel lounge area talking. Another time, I went to the villa Kieran Culkin was staying in, and that was on location.

I thought interviewing while people are working was distracting for all of us, so I didn’t do so much of that. It’s also not so much “I have five questions for you right now, answer them in three minutes” and they come off set, go back on set, back into character.

But on the Gossip Girl story, because I was on set for only two days, then I was doing stuff in between doing stuff. The showrunner, Josh Safran, he told me this thing, “I have cocaine for blood,” because he likes to be overstimulated. We’d be talking, I’d ask him five questions, and then he’d be like, “hold on,” direct someone, direct an actor, tell someone they missed their mark, and then, “OK, give me three more questions,” answer those questions, afterward, look at the monitor, “Josh, is this OK?” “Yes, it’s OK.”

In between set-ups, I would be writing all these things to come back to — I would cross them out so I would know I had covered in some way. That was really a thinking-on-your-feet situation. This person is expecting more questions from me in 30 seconds, and where does this conversation need to go? What am I missing? What do I have?

What was very instructive to me in both these experiences is that I spent a lot of time while I was at New York magazine — it was only part of my job and something I enjoyed to do — doing party reporting. I mean, it’s kind of the training for any kind of journalism, really. If you’re at a red carpet, at a party, at some kind of event, and you get 30 seconds with Julianne Moore — it’s like, what is something interesting I can ask her that I’m going to be the only journalist on the red carpet who’s going to ask her this question? What is there she’s going to be surprised by? What can I get a good answer or response to? That’s 30 thoughts that go through your mind in like five seconds, for you to ask the question, get an interesting answer, and write it up pretty quickly. Years of doing that sort of reporting was a really good training ground to thinking on your feet and being adaptable, and also how to interview someone who’s doing a job, who’s literally working as they’re talking to you. Whereas other interviews, you get three hours over lunch in Park Avenue, or something like that, or something that’s a really ideal setting to open your heart to someone, right?

As your phone is being used to record, do you take notes by hand?

Harris: I always keep a list of questions on Notes app, so I can rearrange and group by theme. Usually the night before, the morning of, I’ll write them out in my notebook — I just find it easier to have questions written on paper than having to scroll through a phone, especially when the phone’s recording audio.

I always take notes by hand in my notebook. It’s usually on a different page to the one where I write all my questions out, just so I can flip back and forth, and make notes so it’s not getting too crowded on the page.

What things do you take notes about?

Harris: What they’re wearing, how they’re sitting, what they ordered, just a vibe that I’m feeling. If they say something a certain way — is it sarcastically said, if they sound exasperated when they say a certain thing — I’ll write that. Sometimes it is not a full quote, but a timestamp — if I’m looking at my recorder, and I see something at the 17:30 mark, I’ll make a note of that, so I know when to come back to it.

Also, if they mention something, like how Jeremy Strong [who plays Kendall Roy on Succession] told me a couple of book titles he had discussed with [Succession creator] Jesse Armstrong — I made a note of those in my notebook, so I wouldn’t have to go back to the transcription to find them, and when I’m talking to Jesse about them, I remember what the book title was and remember to ask about a conversation Strong had referenced their having.

Do you transcribe all your interviews?

Harris: No. I transcribed a lot of interviews as an intern — I really like it, but I also hate the sound of my own voice, and how I sound when I’m interviewing. It’s not that I hate the sound of my own voice, I’m just like, why did I phrase it that way? I also think interviews are inherently really awkward, or, at least, a lot of really good interviews are inherently awkward, so there’s a pause when you’re waiting for someone to think of something, or for them to change their mind, and I just don’t really like it. So I either find someone to transcribe for me — whom I pay obviously — or I use Rev, which I did for the Succession story because I was doubly, triply, quadruply really nervous about spoilers — so it’s not like someone else is going to listen to my interviews.

It’s a cost-benefit analysis: If it’s going to take me four days to transcribe this thing, that would be better for me writing it, not doing this work that can be done by someone else. Usually, I will ask for a transcription budget. Some places will be like, “our intern can do it,” or “you can send me the audio and I’ll send it to Rev myself,” or if I need it right away, I’ll send it to Rev myself and they reimburse me.

Did you have an outline when you were writing the story?

Harris: I did have an outline — I don’t usually. It was instructive in that it was me throwing out ideas — “I think this is really interesting, I think we should talk about this a lot” — and the editor being like, “maybe we should spend less time on the writers’ room, maybe you should spend more time with specific actors and setting the scene there more.” That’s something that came through on the outline — there wasn’t a lot of space to talk about the writers’ room process, which was something I was really interested in.

It was a real mind puzzle of what is the most interesting version of this. Whereas, for a straight profile of one person, the story does feel a bit clearer, as there aren’t as many directions for it to go because you’re basing it off a few conversations, not synthesizing 30 conversations in one piece, which I felt was very challenging to me as a writer (and something I hadn’t done before).

I knew from when Brian Cox [who plays Logan Roy] talked about being tired of filming in Italy, that I wanted the quote to be the end of the piece because I thought it was really funny. I was writing my way to that end.

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

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

The third season premieres on October 17th. Given how careful Hunter Harris was to not give away spoilers, we have nothing further to tell you, sorry. In the meantime, here’s the trailer:

Read: More on Succession

• A profile of Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession, in The New Yorker: “The Real C.E.O. of ‘Succession’,” August 23, 2021

• An oral history of the making of the show, from conception through to now, in the Guardian: “‘Why Do I Want to Write About These Awful, Rich, Evil People?’: the Making of Succession,” October 2, 2021

• While the Roys are based off a number of media families, reacquaint yourself with the Murdochs, whose lives seem to be reflected in the show, in this New York Times Magazine story: “How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World,” April 3, 2019

Meet: About the Author

Brian Ng is a writer from Aotearoa–New Zealand living in Paris.

Patrick Hruby writes primarily about sports. That makes him an unlikely candidate to author a disturbing story about 9/11 first responders. Yet it was Hruby who recently revealed that the health problems of many firefighters, cops and others who worked at the site of the fallen World Trade Center are not limited to their lungs, or even to an increased likelihood of various cancers.

Read the Original Washington Post Story

As he uncovers in a gripping feature in The Washington Post Magazine, a startling number of these heroes, who are now in their 50s, are suffering from dementia and other types of cognitive impairment far more common to people in their 70s or 80s. For many, it seems, the physical and psychological toll of that grim work has been long-lasting — and, for some, devastating.

We talked with Hruby, who has previously worked for ESPN and Vice, about how he found this previously untold story, and how his experiences as a sportswriter actually made him the perfect person to tell it. The interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

How did a sportswriter come to write about 9/11 first responders?

Hruby: I have written many stories about former football players with dementia and other cognitive issues. I’ve spent time with their families. As a reporter, this makes it easier to connect with people — to understand what they’re going through, to know what questions to ask when you talk to them.

That experience also helped build trust. When you’re writing about people who have dementia, or brain injuries, that’s important. It’s an extremely difficult thing to live with, both for the people suffering from the injury, and for the people around them.

So how specifically did you come across this story?

Hruby: I had been working on a piece The Washington Post Magazine published last fall. It was about scientists who are attempting to come up with ways to detect BTE, the repetitive brain-trauma disease that has been linked to boxing and other sports. Right now, they can only detect it for certain once you’re dead.

As I was doing that story, one of the scientists working on that research, Sam Gandy, mentioned to me the 9/11 first responders. He works at Mount Sinai in New York; he has done a lot of Alzheimer’s work throughout his career. He told me they were starting to see these same things we see in football players in first responders. That sounded like a story.

He connected me to the main researchers who are looking at the 9/11 first responders. These researchers have been publishing studies in academic journals about this for a couple of years, but outside of a couple of relatively obscure science websites, and a couple of small stories in the New York Post and New York Daily News, there was nothing out there on this.

What was your initial reaction to this information?

Hruby: I was really shocked. A lot of us know the 9/11 first responders have had a lot of health problems over the years. The fight over federal funding for care, which Jon Stewart got involved with, was heavily publicized — rightfully so. Through that, I think a lot of us learned that they’re suffering from lung conditions, and were starting to have cancers and other weird diseases (at disproportionate rates). But almost no one had written about brain conditions. I thought there was an important story to tell here — and since I have experience telling this type of story, I’m going to tell it.

Since cognitive problems weren’t on anyone’s radar, how did the researchers come to study this issue?

Hruby: They weren’t expecting to find anything drastic. The idea was they would measure baseline levels of mental functioning, which would allow them to accurately measure the decline if problems developed over time. What shocked them was when they tested these people, who were then in their 50s, the percentage of them that already had something wrong was much higher than expected.

It’s not that every single responder was having these problems, or that all of these problems are super obvious. They can be as simple as you’re driving around and you can’t remember how to get home. But you’re seeing it at a much higher rate than you would expect otherwise. That’s also true of football players.

How did you get in contact with first responders who were suffering from these problems, or members of their families? Were they reluctant to talk?

Hruby: I went through the researchers. These clinics both study the responders and provide care. There’s a good, trusting relationship between some of the research coordinators at this Long Island clinic and some of the first responders. They were very good about putting together a group of responders who were willing to talk to me. Most of the interviews were done at the clinic (part of Stony Brook University’s WTC Health and Wellness Program), which was really helpful. It’s a difficult thing to share about this, but they felt safe there.

Most of the people I talked to were firefighters and cops. Some were there that day, some came in that night, some the next day. Some were there for months, others for lesser amounts of time. Some had pretty severe cognitive impairment, some not so much. Almost all of them had other health conditions as well.

I met the couple I focused on in the story, Ron and Dawn Kirchner, separately through one of the researchers. They wanted to raise awareness, to tell other people they were not alone — to do some good. Otherwise, there’s no point to expose these painful things to the public.

How did you approach this tough topic when you interviewed them?

Hruby: I tried to let people just talk. I had lots of things I want to ask them about, but I mainly wanted them to tell me what’s important to them. This worked really well. It’s touching to me to realize that people find personal value in talking to a journalist. There’s a real psychological benefit to unburdening yourself to someone who cares about your situation, but doesn’t know you personally. I’m not a therapist, but I’m happy that I can be there for them in that way.

As a writer, was your goal to get out of the way and tell the story simply and clearly?

Hruby: Yes. The cliché about showing, not telling, is totally true. The science part of this is pretty compelling. If the scientists are shocked, the average reader is probably also going to be shocked. What matters is to put it into plain English, and pull out what matters to the general reader. That’s an art in itself.

I feel like I’m a translator. How can I translate these findings so that they make sense to the average person? My job is not to tell you how to feel about all this. If you’re not a psychopath, I know how you’re going to feel. I know how I felt reporting about it, but I don’t need to share that. The story, the images — they speak for themselves. Me trying to make a statement would take away from that.

It’s kind of a gut punch when, after you go into great detail about Ron Kirchner’s mental deterioration, you hit us with his age: 51.

Hruby: It’s like how a magic trick works. What are you going to show the audience, and when are you going to show it? I’m not writing a murder mystery, but you want to have some level of suspense, so the story carries you through — especially a story like this, which has so much scientific information.

It has to be logically organized so you can follow it. What you learn in section one helps you understand section three. You have to be conscious of that, but you also want the details to be revealed in a way that has the most power. The construction of how that unfolds takes a lot of thought, and a lot of work. So it’s not about writing beautiful sentences. The story doesn’t need that.

Does the fact this subject has gotten so little coverage to date reflect our society’s tendency to avoid dealing with mental-health issues?

Hruby: Absolutely. Even though we’ve come a long way, there’s still a lot of stigma around mental-health stuff. People have a tough time talking about it. The fact it’s connected to 9/11 is also a factor. That was an enormously traumatic event. People don’t always want to relive trauma; often, they want to forget it. I understand that myself. When you put those two things together, you can see why people don’t necessarily want to talk about it, or read about it, or write about it.

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.

Subscribe Now to Support This Project

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

Patrick Hruby has gotten thank you notes from other first responders and their families, who express appreciation at him bringing up this issue. He has yet to hear from anyone in government, however, so don’t expect any public hearings on this issue any time soon. The research is continuing.

“I hope more people become aware of this issue (thanks to the article),” he says. “That could mean more money for more research. Knowing about a problem is the first step toward solving it. As journalists, that’s the best thing we can do.”

Read: More on Cognitive Impairment

• This article, published in an academic journal in January, takes an in-depth look into the issue of mental impairment among 9/11 first responders: “A Workshop on Cognitive Aging and Impairment in the 9/11-Exposed Population,” January 14, 2021

• Patrick Hruby’s expose on concussions, football players, and mental disorders, also from The Washington Post Magazine: “Damage Assessment,” September 2, 2020

• A 2020 study found that suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder may double the likelihood a person suffers from dementia later in life: “PTSD May Double Risk of Dementia,” September 15, 2020

Meet: About the Author

Tom Jacobs is a former senior staff writer for Santa Barbara-based Pacific Standard magazine, and a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. He tracks and analyzes trends in the arts and social sciences, with an emphasis on psychology, the role of culture, and the cultivation of creativity. A native of Chicago, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University.

Alice Taylor's colleague was murdered. Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese anti-corruption journalist, was in her gray Peugeot when the bomb exploded. The shockwaves rattled Galizia’s home up the pebbled street, and news of the event shook Taylor some 500 miles away.

When Taylor lived in Malta she wrote for the same paper as Galizia, whose work inspired Taylor to become a journalist in the first place. Taylor has since resettled in Tirana, Albania, where she is one of a handful of English-language investigative reporters.

Albania was the last European nation to transition from communism to democracy. For over four decades, the cordoned-off country — the North Korea of the day — was ruled by Enver Hoxha, a paranoid, hard-line Stalinist who once called Nikita Khrushchev “anti-Marxist and a defeatist.” He severed contact with the outside world, including former allies in the Soviet Union and China, potting the borders with hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers to create a wall-less defense system against invasion.

Read the Original Exit News Story

Today, the young democracy is still finding its footing, especially its relationship to the fourth estate. Albania ranks 83rd on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. Journalists face an increasingly hostile environment, highlighted by Prime Minister Edi Rama’s urging to the public to “protect themselves against the media” during the pandemic and a proposed “anti-defamation” package that would muzzle reporters. The potential law is pending in parliament.

Despite being the target of a government smear campaign, Alice Taylor reports on politics, corruption, financial crime, human rights issues, gender equality, and media freedom. She first reported on a web of government-supported fake profiles on social media in 2019, which spawned over two years of investigations that unveiled how Albanian politicians weaponize Facebook to manipulate public opinion. We spoke with Taylor via Zoom about the state of the media in Albania, how she carried out the investigations, and what it is like to operate in a hostile media environment. The interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

After the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017, you vowed never to write about politics or organized crime again. But here you are. Why did you go back into investigative journalism?

Taylor: In the years since she died, I have gone back and forth between whether I should quit or continue. I've had this battle within myself a few times but I feel I have a responsibility to carry on in her name. That’s something quite personal to me though.

In Albania, it’s definitely about wanting something better for the country because I love it. I love living here. I have an Albanian partner and a daughter. I think once you make a decision to base your life somewhere and you really integrate yourself and make the decision to raise children in a place, that very much shapes how you want the society to be. I love my friends and family and I think the country deserves better.

When I first came to Albania, I was still covering Malta and was actually writing a travel blog locally. Then someone from Exit News contacted me and asked if I wanted to write a column about culture and travel from an expat perspective. I was going around and seeing damage caused by hydroplants, as one example, and I think being a journalist, that inquisitiveness — the desire to report, the hunger for a story, the need to hold someone to account if you see something wrong — you can’t just switch that off. So I got sucked back into it, but it happened gradually.

Can you talk to the media environment you’re operating in as a journalist in Albania?

Taylor: There’s a lot of self-censorship, a lack of independent media organizations, poor working conditions and protections for journalists, legal harassment, and a new “anti-defamation” package.

There are many Albanian journalists who don’t want to use their own name in their writing because they’re worried about repercussions if they write something critical. Examples could be a family member losing a business permit or being fired from their government job.

Then you have the five or so main media companies who are owned by very rich, powerful businessmen. They have their fingers in lots of different pies from education to real estate to banking, etc. One of the big TV companies here is owned by a construction company, which gets lots of government contracts.

Their portals can turn into propaganda platforms. They won’t criticize, they’ll publish government news in a favorable light, not focus on scandals or undertake investigations, because they’re reliant on this sort of government link.

The result is that journalists who work for these companies end up going away from the difficult stories. They will not publish certain things.

There are issues with labor laws as well. Journalists may have a contract, they may not. Even if they have one they may not want to enforce it or the contract doesn’t protect them adequately. Wages are often withheld for two or three months, and wages are often very low [editor’s note: the average monthly salary as of 2021 was €454, or $535]. Journalists don’t get holiday or sick pay or time off. They work extremely long hours. There’s a lot of sexism in Albania, in newsrooms as well, from women getting paid less to blatant sexual harassment.

You also have the threat of lawsuits. We’ve seen journalists who have published extremely well researched, very thorough and accurate stories being slapped, quite literally, with these SLAPPSs [Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation], which are designed to shut the story down. These are often intended to financially cripple the journalists or the media portal. There are also a lot of regular lawsuits in the Albanian courts filed by politicians against journalists.

Lastly, we have this “anti-defamation” law, which would bring all online media in the country under the direct supervision of a government-appointed board. They just elected the former director of communications for the prime minister to head the board. So he’s essentially put his chief propagandist in charge, who will rule on the future of all online Albanian media.

This board will have judicial powers without being a judicial body. They will be able to shut down media and impose fines of tens of thousands of Euros, and the organizations will only be allowed to appeal the ruling once they’ve paid the fine. Organizations can be banned for things such as causing panic, spreading fake news or threats to national security — extremely vague language, which could basically constitute anybody who dares to criticize the government.

Are you ever concerned for your own physical safety?

Taylor: I did an anonymous survey recently of journalistic colleagues, and about 80 percent have received some kind of physical threat as a result of their work. Beyond that there are organized smear campaigns against journalists, online trolls, sexual and general harassment, death threats, abuse.

Having witnessed what happened prior to Daphne’s murder, the ruling party was actively involved in creating an environment where journalists were denigrated and dehumanized, where there were campaigns to delegitimize them, and these things contributed to an environment in which a journalist could be murdered.

And some media organizations, like the International Press Institute and Reporters Without Borders, have also commented that this is what is happening in Albania.

The prime minister, Edi Rama, the mayor of Tirana, Erion Veliaj, and other politicians openly denigrate and use offensive language against journalists, in public, on television shows, during press conferences and to the media. Other politicians don’t condemn the attacks against journalists, and, in the last few years, the police have yet to convict anyone for crimes against journalists.

You have the bodyguards of Mayor Veliaj assaulting journalists who were trying to ask him questions. You have the police who have assaulted, I think, six journalists in the last year, when they’re conducting their work. When you have this going on, you’re essentially telling people that journalists are the enemy and that it is fine to be abusive and physically violent to them. This creates a dangerous situation where impunity rules and journalists are positioned as the enemy.

While there hasn’t been a murder of a journalist since 2011, violence is already acceptable, and the foundation is being laid for an environment where a journalist can be killed without repercussion.

You start the 2019 article describing the incident where the government used tear gas at 6 a.m. to remove residents from their homes, and then demolished the housing. All of this without compensation for the displaced. Later that day, you saw a rush of support for the ruling party’s actions on Facebook. Was this the first time you noticed suspicious pro-government activity online?

Taylor: It seemed that there was a concerted effort to frame the narrative online in 2019. People had talked for a long time about networks of trolls and that there may be people, perhaps even employed within the offices of the municipality and of the prime minister, whose primary role is to frame the story online. I’d heard a lot about this, but it was this incident where I began to see quite a lot of pro-government comments on Facebook.

As the year went on, I noticed these posts pick up in periods of criticism and especially prior to the local elections in June. It was a very important time because, in January, there was a big government scandal. Some prosecution wiretaps were leaked to the public, which suggested that the prime minister and various other officials have been involved in voter buying, intimidation, and manipulation. This was huge news and there were ongoing protests throughout the year, up until the summer. There was violence, there was lots of unrest, people put in prison.

All the while the action of these trolls was stepping up a gear, among other actions. There were more posts being taken down, many pro-government posts and memes being posted, and during livestreams of the prime minister or the mayor of Tirana, the comments were full of, “you’re the best!,” “we love you!,” “you’re what we need for the future of the country!”

How did you go about investigating this? What steps did you take?

Taylor: I identified suspicious comments on government posts. From each comment, I would click on the name, which would reveal it was a Page, not a profile. I would then look and see that the page — almost all of them were created in the previous two months — and looked through whether there was any recent activity. If so, what they were posting, if they liked any other content. Quite often there hadn’t been much activity. Then I would do a reverse Google Images search of the main photo, which often spat out that it was Sheryl Sandberg or some Iranian model or something. And I stored it all in a document. From all of this I took an educated guess that these were fake profiles. I found hundreds in total.

In our second investigation, prior to the general elections in 2021, I worked with an Albanian colleague. Together we went through the list, and new Pages that we found, and we were able to identify Pages that we thought were probably linked to the same profile because they might have written in a slight dialect or a particular style [editor’s note: profiles can set up hundreds of Pages, all run from the same account]. We would also sit in on livestream events and check the profiles that were popping up in the discussion.

It was from this that we also noticed there was a high number of government employees on these livestreams. Police, teachers, people working in ministries, etc. and this then ties into an offshoot investigation I did. Essentially, I found that part of their job description is to attend livestreams and comment in support of their leader.

In your article about that investigation, “Socialist Party Uses State Employees to Share Propaganda on Social Media,” many of your sources are anonymous. What are your guidelines or policy for using anonymous sources?

Taylor: This was something I had a huge debate with my editor about because these are people employed by the government. These are people who, if I publish their name, will lose their job. Even with initials — if it’s D.E. working in the police department, the authorities can narrow it down, you know? — and I don’t want to be responsible for people losing their jobs. The concern was that people might accuse it of being fake news, by not naming sources.

One important factor: Everyone in Albania knows this happens. Often they have a cousin who has to do it or their neighbor has to. Publishing this story was a public declaration of what most people already knew, but I was the first to bring it out of the shadows and make it public. So, it wasn’t like it was unbelievable.

How did you approach the sources?

Taylor: I saw all these messages from government employees and reached out. I connected with a handful of people in the police department and various ministries. I was shown firsthand their profiles and WhatsApp groups, where they are instructed to post between two and four links per day.

I was then able to look at other employees of the state (it shows their professions in their profile) and you could see that they were all posting the same stuff. Many profiles had minimal other activity aside from them posting speeches of their boss, government propaganda, government news, etc. I was then able to search for other employees on Facebook and see that they were posting the same stuff that was posted in the WhatsApp group I had seen.

Also, I spoke to people directly about other activities they had to do offline. One of them told me how he was made to go to electoral rallies even though he’s a registered member of the opposition party.

What is the perception of news and the relationship to media in the country?

Taylor: People have a great trust in TV and radio here, which has been shown in some recent studies. They don’t trust the government per se, but they trust certain TV programs. And I don’t think they understand that what they’re being shown is not always the truth, or where the motivations for certain narratives come from.

I think in a country where English isn’t a commonly spoken language, a lack of media literacy becomes even more serious and the government has no intention of introducing it in schools.

A lot of people don’t speak English, so they don’t have the ability to fact check. I know how much I rely on my language to fact check; to look at papers and studies and interviews and testimonies and court documents. If I didn’t have access to this or that resource, the internet, etc., it would be extremely difficult to do my job. For example, with my articles, people sometimes accuse it of being fake news. And I’m like, well here’s the evidence, and they don’t really understand what evidence is.

I think the past of Albania — it being closed off, an environment of not asking questions, people who were brought up to accept things on face value ​​— has an influence. So today, if they’re reading pro-government media and they’re seeing hundreds of positive comments, they take it at face value. I see this issue a lot with COVID misinformation at the moment. People read fake news in Albanian and have no intention of researching it, fact-checking it, or trying to see if there is any actual evidence to support it.

It’s a very complex issue and certainly something I don’t have a full understanding of, but am trying to untangle.

About a year later, your findings were corroborated by Sophie Zhang, the whistleblower from Facebook. In her internal memo, she said she came across “blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry.” What did you think when you heard this?

Taylor: I was thrilled when I found out that the same act, that pattern, had been picked up by Sophie. I mean, it was happening.

Sophie said she felt that her inaction could have contributed to devastating consequences for Albania [editor’s note: Sophie spoke with Taylor for an article]. She feels that the networks that she discovered — which confirmed what I had already found — were big enough to have a significant impact on democracy.

Based on what we’ve seen elsewhere and how we understand the way that humans behave, if you see a hundred comments saying, “this is great, this is great, this is great!,” you start to think this is great, and there’s no reason why that can’t apply on Facebook as well.

The local elections in 2019 [editor’s note: the Socialist Party won in all but one municipality and ran uncontested in most], when I revealed this was happening, the article was republished in a lot of media portals in Albania. I think this took the wind out of the government’s sails a bit; it was quite big news here.

People were pissed off, excuse my language. They were disillusioned, they didn’t want to take part in a single-party election. The turnout was essentially just people who work for the state. Nobody else really bothered to vote. So I mean the whole thing was a farce anyway, but I think my revelation was just another straw for people feeling disillusioned, more pissed off and maybe not voting, because they felt they’d been misled. But I can’t prove that.

This was also highlighted in the recent OSCE [Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights] report. It noted concern about “the misuse of social networks by politicians during and beyond the campaign period.” In a small country like Albania, 10,000 votes is a seat in parliament. The next local election will be in 2023 and the government has been advised to make significant electoral reforms before then.

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

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

“We will have an opposition in Parliament, in September, for the first time in two years,” says Alice Taylor. “But, I see the Socialist Party being in power for the foreseeable future because of the grip that they have. Every municipality in the country is under the Socialist Party. That means every institution, every authority, every road sweeper and their family up to the highest MPs and officials, police, army, doctors, and nurses, are essentially under the de facto control of one party.”

“I think that attempts to crackdown on the media will increase,” Taylor continues. “What happens with the path toward the European Union will have an impact as well [editor’s note: Albania applied for E.U. membership in 2009 and has been an official candidate for accession since 2014]. Albania is such a dynamic place, though, so who knows? What I do know is that there are a growing number of journalists in Albania, younger journalists, who are incredibly talented, incredibly brave, who are resourceful, who are professional and who are desperate to try and ignore the attempts to silence them and to create a better media environment. And that’s really great to see. So I have some hope.”

Read: More on the Media Landscape in Albania

• Meet the dictator, Enver Hoxha, who ruled the country for four decades, in this 1985 obituary from the New York Times’ archives: “Enver Hoxha, Mastermind of Albania’s Isolation,” April 12, 1985

• A panel discussion among Albanian journalists going in-depth about the challenges of reporting due to the current media climate: “Explaining Albania: Solutions and Self-Regulation Amid a Challenging Media Freedom Environment in Albania,” December 3, 2020

• An overview about declining media freedom across the European Union generally and what role the E.U. can play in reducing authoritarian grip on media: “Explaining Albania: Pavol Szalai From Reporters Without Borders on Declining Media Freedom in the E.U. and the Balkans,” June 16, 2021

Meet: About the Author

Aaron Gerry is a freelance journalist and traveling rock climber. His work can be found in ESPN, Climbing, Gym Climber, Calvert Journal, SAPIENS, and other publications. He often writes about the impact of sport on developing economies.

Helen Branswell, the global health and infectious diseases reporter for STAT, the medicine, health, and life sciences site from the parent company of the Boston Globe, joined the publication at the time of its launch in 2015. The 15 years of experience reporting on health with the Canadian Press that she brought to the site — she first reported on infectious diseases during Toronto’s 2003 SARS outbreak and has since covered Ebola, Zika, the H1N1 flu pandemic — would prepare her for perhaps one of her most difficult assignments to date.

In the summer of 2004, Branswell was embedded in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a CDC Knight Fellow. In 2010 and 2011, she focused on polio eradication as a Nieman Global Health Fellow at Harvard. Today, she leads STAT’s coronavirus pandemic coverage.

Read Helen Branswell's STAT Stories

We talked to Branswell about the reporting and writing of her early 2020 coverage — which was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize — of the first reports of a “mysterious and growing cluster of unexplained pneumonia cases in the Chinese city of Wuhan,” which introduced the United States to the escalating coronavirus crisis.

Reading these stories now is pretty eerie, being where we are now with COVID. I remember the first whispers of a possibly new virus coming out of China in mid-February of 2020, but you were on the scene well before that. Can you talk a bit about how a global health story like COVID first lands on your radar?

Branswell: Before I joined STAT I was based in Toronto working for the Canadian Press, and Toronto was one the only places outside of Asia that was affected during the SARS outbreak of 2003. A lot of what is happening now — and happened in 2020 — happened then: no public gatherings, hospitals stopping everything but essential services....

That was my first time covering an outbreak, but it was a critical experience for COVID. It set me on the path of trying to focus on infectious diseases. I’ve covered all sorts of health stories, but whenever I’ve had time, I focus on infectious diseases.

Fast forward to 2019, New Year’s Day. I had the day off. I’d gone to Canada to spend Christmas with family, and that afternoon I got an email from ProMedMail, a listserv run by the international society for infectious diseases. It’s essentially an early warning system for disease outbreaks.

Like many listservs, they send out a lot of emails, multiple each day, but this one, the subject line was something like unexplained pneumonia and China, and that caught my attention right away. A new disease coming out of China is not unheard of; it’s a place where this happens. There’s a very unique intersection of lots of people and a variety of cultures; there have historically been various food-borne diseases that have come out of China.

But this email reminded me immediately of 2003 and SARS. That afternoon I tweeted something like, Hopefully this is nothing but it’s giving me SARS flashbacks. And I started pinging some people and sources fairly quickly.

I got back to work January 2nd. I had a major piece coming out, this very long, magazine-length piece on an Ebola vaccine. When I got back to the office I had edits on that, which took the better part of the next few days. But I had my ear to the ground on the cases of this new disease in China. I definitely didn’t know we were going to get to where we are now, but I knew I needed to follow this story.

What were the differences in reporting between the work you were doing in early 2020 and the 2003 SARS epidemic?

Branswell: In the first SARS outbreak I wasn’t covering it until it became apparent that Toronto had cases. I wasn’t writing about the outbreak in China; I was writing about what was happening locally in Canada.

This time I started from the very beginning. The story was in China so I was reporting on what was happening there, and how that had the potential to spread outside of China like SARS did.

Would it be fair to say that reporting on SARS in 2003 prepared you for reporting on the early days of COVID?

Branswell: Yes, definitely. The reporting I did on SARS sort of predisposed me to see the early COVID news as important, and that experience gave me a mental list of people to approach.

I’m glad you mentioned that. I really wanted to ask about your sources for those early stories. How much were you able to rely on existing sources and experts, and how did your list of sources change or evolve?

Branswell: In my early COVID reporting I was using mostly people I had spoken to a lot over the years. As the outbreak got established in the U.S. I was using a much broader range of expertise in sourcing, but initially it was mostly people I’ve known for quite a long time.

What, if anything, would you say changed about the work that you were doing between these early stories and post-March of 2020, when lockdowns started going into effect in the U.S.?

Branswell: For starters, I left the office. I stopped going into the office before it closed. I couldn’t afford to get sick, and I knew it was not prudent to be going to the office anymore.

I don’t know that I would say there was any kind of a quantifiable shift other than the story just became exponentially larger. Initially it was me covering it, and then it was me and my colleague Drew Joseph, and then it was me and Drew and Sharon Begley. Then it was everybody. There were just so many angles to it. And so much other stuff just stopped. There weren’t a lot of high-profile cancer studies being published in 2020, you know? It was always too big to handle. It was difficult to try to find out where to bite into the apple, if you will; what was a story that still needed to be covered that wasn’t being told by dozens of other outlets already.

It was great to have the help. We’re not a very big operation, but with this story consuming everything else, we really had to coordinate more with one another. And at that point everyone was out of the office, so we were also learning to work remotely together.

What would you say was your specialty once everyone — both at STAT and in so much coverage in outlets across the country — was working on a COVID story? Or when every story was a COVID story?

Branswell: People still looked to me for the trajectory of the outbreak. Since everything else, health-news wise, was really gone and I was our original global health and infectious diseases reporter. I’ve also written a lot about vaccines and the science of vaccine development, so I’d say I became the one to focus on long-term implications and possible trajectories.

Your January 22nd, 2020, piece, “The Basics: What We Know — and Don’t Know — About the Virus Spreading in China and Beyond,” is a massive info dump/update on everything COVID. At the beginning of the piece you write, “It’s only been three weeks since Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization about an outbreak of unusual pneumonia cases.” Can you tell us what those three weeks were like?

Branswell: Ha. I had a trip to Hawaii booked for January of 2020. I was to leave on Friday the 10th and come back the weekend of MLK Day. I took a red-eye and was back in Boston on Sunday, the 19th. After I’d written my second COVID-related piece, I sent an email to my editor and said: “I can’t tell you how big this is going to be, but I also can’t tell you it’s going to be small, that it’s going to be wrapped up soon. I can cancel my trip if you want me to cancel my trip.”

The STAT editors didn’t think I needed to do that, so I was gone for a week in mid-January. The day I got back, my editor called and said, “We need a story.” The numbers in China had jumped pretty significantly over the weekend, from about 100 to about 200. So we put together everything we knew so far.

And I’ve written, I think, every day since then.

The word that comes to mind when I think of working on a breaking news story that was still very much a breaking news story for five months is agony — can you share a bit about the emotional and psychological work that went into writing and reporting these early stories?

Branswell: I’m a reporter and this is my beat. Any time you’re covering a breaking news story you get really engrossed, and the thought of walking away and not writing about it just isn’t really the way we work, as journalists. And the world was in such a strange place that working was almost a relief. I know some people who were not working in the spring of 2020 and they found the time long, and some of them spent a lot of time fretting because all they had to do was read stuff and worry.

After the first SARS outbreak I spent a lot of time reporting on pandemics, mostly thinking about flu pandemics, but how a major worldwide outbreak might unfold, how we might get vaccines, how long it might take. There was a lot of pandemic planning being done in the years after SARS and I reported on that. So, mentally, I had a fairly good picture of where things were going to go. They went there a lot faster than I had thought: I knew there were going to be shortages of PPE, but I didn’t know health-care professionals in the U.S. were going to be wearing garbage bags in the spring of 2020.

But there was about a week in March of 2020, near the end of the month but early on in the work-from-home and ordered lockdown, where I had a really hard time, mentally. I was really worried about how bad it was going to get. I was worried that there might be violence, that unemployed people would go looking for food to feed their kids and who could blame them, but I was afraid there could be significant, pandemic-related social unrest. I was scared, I guess I would say. I was looking down the tunnel or down the line and I was afraid of what I saw there. And I was having a really hard time.

My editor was really responsive, the Globe has an employee assistance program, they were able to help me find a therapist who could take me on, and I did a few sessions with a counselor who helped me put things in perspective. Things were better after that.

It’s certainly been long. This past March, maybe there’s something about the anniversary, I was beyond exhaustion and had to take a week off, which I’d sort of been avoiding doing. I didn’t think a week in my apartment could be very therapeutic, but I got to the point where I had to take some time off and I did.

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

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

“It’s a weird, big story, and it continues to be,” STAT’s Helen Branswell says of the COVID-19 pandemic. “There’s no end in sight, really. I am still on the COVID beat, and I think it’ll be that way for a long time.”

“COVID is going to be with us,” she adds. “There will be a time when it is not a crisis, when the acute phase of the pandemic ends and this is just something that maybe flares in the winter like flu, or infects fewer people due to immunity, and I’m looking forward to that. At that point I think it will be part of the mix of things that I cover, but right now, this is what I’ll be writing about for quite a while.”

Read: More of STAT’s COVID-19 Coverage

• A regularly updated dashboard from STAT, in partnership with Applied XL, provides a look at the virus’ reach over time and around the world: “The COVID-19 Tracker”

• As new variants emerge and the pandemic continues, STAT answers all of our questions about the vaccines many of us received earlier this year — and whether they’ll need to be updated: “When and How Will We Know If We Need COVID-19 Booster Shots?” July 12, 2021

• This won’t be the last pandemic we face, and more vaccines will be needed: “12 Lessons COVID-19 Taught Us About Developing Vaccines During a Pandemic,” June 30, 2021

Meet: About the Author

Haley Hamilton is a Boston-based freelance writer and bartender. Her writing can be found in Catapult, MEL, Eater, Greatist, Bustle, Boston’s alt-weekly DigBoston, and other digital publications.

Social-justice protests are common on university campuses. Especially in recent years, students and faculty have been among the most vocal opponents of economic inequality and white privilege.

But there’s a certain irony to holding rallies on the quad. In many cases, the institutions these activists are affiliated with owe their existence to the forces they are fighting against.

Schools such as the University of California–Berkeley, where Robert Lee earned his Ph.D., received some of their earliest seed money through a federal program in which they were granted tracts of valuable land. While this may have been a wise investment for a growing nation, the legacy is complicated by a forgotten fact: The land — more than 10 million acres in total — had previously belonged to Indigenous nations.

Read the Original HCN Story

“The gift of free land is part of the story of where these universities came from,” says Lee, who co-authored a remarkable project that was published last year in High Country News. “Our story looks at the underside of that. These are resources that were appropriated from Indigenous people, and transferred to the universities from the federal government.”

The direct line between the taking of Native American land and the establishment of some of our most prestigious universities was drawn by a remarkable collaboration of journalists and academics led by Lee and Tristan Ahtone. Their work, which includes a downloadable database available for further research, won a 2021 Sigma Award and a George Polk Award.

Lee, who is currently a university lecturer in American history at the University of Cambridge, spoke with The Postscript about the origins and continuing impact of the project. The interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Let’s start with some basic definitions. What exactly is a land-grant university?

Lee: When people talk about land-grant universities, they usually are referring to the universities that were created or funded through the Morrill Act of 1862. That’s the Civil War-era law that created a funding system for universities — most of them public, state-run universities, but a few that are privately funded like M.I.T. Some of them are flagship universities, like UC–Berkeley or the University of Minnesota.

These universities would get land out of the public domain of the United States, which was created through the taking of land from Indigenous nations. That land was used to raise perpetual endowments for the universities. So this physical grant of land was seed funding for the universities. Today, there are around 112 land-grant universities. Only about half of them were original beneficiaries of the Morrill Act of 1862. Others were added over time.

This was fairly progressive legislation for its day, wasn’t it? It was an attempt to kick-start a widespread system of higher education in the U.S. The rub is how the land was obtained.

Lee: That’s right. The Morrill Act grew out of a big push for scientific and agricultural higher education in the 19th century. The phrase you’ll see a lot in the literature is “democracy’s colleges.” It represented the opening up of higher education to the sons and daughters of the white middle class. You see that expressed in murals in many of these universities, in statues of Justin Morrill (the Vermont senator who sponsored the legislation), and in the naming of buildings such as “Morrill Halls.” But rather than looking at this gift of free land as a “wealth donation,” we approached it as a “resource transfer,” in which land was transferred from Indigenous nations to the universities through the federal government.

How did this project get started?

Lee: I work on land and U.S. expansion in the American West. I had spent a lot of time with the Bureau of Land Management’s land-patent records — the deeds that the U.S. would sell or gift. I had gotten to the stage of figuring out just how much work it would take to unpack the Morrill Act entirely. It distributed nearly 11 million acres of land — an area about the size of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut combined.

In 2018, when I was a post-doc at Harvard University, I gave a presentation on this research. It included an appeal for help. I hoped to do this project in a collaborative way, and to get the resources and manpower to be able to do it comprehensively. Tristan was in the audience. It was a fortuitous meeting! We run in different circles — he’s a journalist, I’m a historian — but we were able to put our two skill-sets together to produce this project.

That’s when this process really kicked off, in early 2018. It took another two years of research, putting the material together, and building the database, to get to the point where we released the project in the spring of 2020 — just as everything was falling apart due to COVID.

Why go the journalism route rather than academic publishing?

Lee: It’s really a hybrid of the two. It’s trying to push the typical barriers that we have between disciplines. It’s powerful to go outside traditional channels of academia for a whole host of reasons. In this project, we’re working with a lot of data that doesn’t lend itself to the format of a traditional journal article. It has contemporary relevance that isn’t as obvious with a lot of historical research. So it seemed important to get this information out there in a journalistic way. It cuts across disciplines. We are working with tools that are often used by historians, geographers, and economists, and taking those bits and pieces and put them into a public-facing work of scholarship.

How did the collaboration actually work? Journalists and historians generally work on different time frames, to put it mildly.

Lee: We started this just as Tristan was leaving Harvard, so most of this was done remotely. We were doing remote work before it became fashionable! I would occasionally go on trips to pick up materials from archives. It then became even more remote when I moved to England to take up my current position.

Tristan and I were collecting material and trying to get funding from various places. Then we recruited other members of the collaboration, including a photographer, a web designer. The time scale did become uncomfortable for me as a historian at the end. The last four or five months was a compressed period of work, including sharing Google docs and conducting virtual meetings on Zoom.

At one point, we figured out we were missing a piece of evidence that we needed — a list of parcels in New Mexico. Our photographer, Kalen Goodluck, lived in New Mexico; she was able to go to the archive and FaceTime with me from there, so I could tell them what we needed. He then grabbed it off of the microfilm. So it wound up working really well in the end.

It sounds like your research required you — and others — to physically go to various archives to find information that isn’t available online. Is that right?

Lee: It’s a mix. One of the challenges of putting together the data set is it wasn’t certain how much land there was. We had to figure out the size of the bucket we were trying to fill before we could figure out how to fill it. We eventually realized we could fill 80 to 85 percent of it with digital material. The rest had to come from national archives, university archives, state archives. In the end, we found there were approximately 80,000 of these parcels (that were taken by the government and given to universities) scattered across 24 states. We had to transcribe about 10,000 of them by hand.

When you say “transcribe by hand,” what do you mean?

Lee: We had to transcribe the public land survey system notation. When you fly over the U.S., you see all the squares out of the plane window when you look down. All of that was public-domain land, and it got surveyed in a specific way. We had to digitally generate representations of the parcels based on public land survey data. That way we could (come up with) geo-data you can put into your phone and then drive to the parcels and stand on the actual piece of land.

Once we located a parcel, we could use data on 19th-century treaties based on collections that have been digitized in the past few years. Then, using relatively straightforward tools, we could match the location. If you know where the parcels are that were ceded, and you know which universities are connected with the parcels, you can connect the university to the Indigenous nation (that was its involuntary benefactor) through the parcel.

I gather the universities were not eager to talk about this.

Lee: We put all of the responses on the individual university pages on the website, landgrabu.org. I think we got responses from about half of them. Most of those were a single response that was created by the organization of land-grant universities. However, after the story came out, we got a strong reaction from students, faculty and staff. We’ve seen a lot of interest in thinking about the ramifications of the legacy of building these universities with appropriated Indigenous land.

You mention in the piece that South Dakota State University has increased scholarship money for Native American students in recognition of this history. Are other universities considering this?

Lee: It hasn’t happened elsewhere, but I think it will be considered. South Dakota State was way ahead of the curve in terms of reallocating the funds they received from the Morrill Act, which are considerable compared to some other universities. They were doing this before we began working on the story. They supplemented their Morrill Act funds through fundraising that was connected to their efforts to create a new Indigenous Students Center.

Are people still contacting you about the story? What kind of reactions are you getting?

Lee: There has been a wide range. Within a few months of publication, petitions started to emerge at universities, including Cornell and the University of Florida, calling for a look into this history and more resources for Indigenous students. A number of initiatives have been organized by faculty, staff, and students to look into the consequences of the Morrill Act at their universities. At Cornell, there is an Indigenous Dispossession Project that is looking into this. They are in the process of contacting all of the nations that were affected by this process. This is going on at a bunch of places. At the University of Washington, they changed their land acknowledgement statement to incorporate the data from the project. People are looking into this at the University of Minnesota, and at the University of Wisconsin.

There are two big questions: What to do in the light of this history, and how to go about doing it. Both have a lot of moving parts, and it’ll take time for universities to figure this out. But there are a lot of people who are interested in taking up those questions.

Do you see this as part of the larger social-justice movement that is taking place today? Clearly this hasn’t been looked into in any depth until now is we don’t really want to explore the dark side of our origin stories.

Lee: I do think it’s a social-justice issue. It’s an issue of how we allocate resources as a society. Every square mile of the United States was once Indigenous land. That includes the places where we live and work. It’s easy to push that under the rug, but it becomes more real when you break it down into its constituent parts. We’re uncovering how specific plots of land were taken from specific Indigenous nations, and how these were given to universities that were able to convert them into opportunity and prosperity. It’s a question of how to repay those debts.

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

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

Robert Lee is continuing to work on Morrill Act-related projects, and hopes to publish additional information later this year. But his long-term goal is to encourage a new field of research.

“We took a bird’s eye view of the problem,” he notes. “We located all the land and unspooled the knot that connected the universities to the Indigenous nations whose land was taken. We didn’t tell the stories in depth of what happened at these universities as a result. How much money was earned over time? Who did that benefit? What were the implications of this type of funding over time? One of the hopes of the project is to try to stimulate people at the universities where these materials are available to try to answer these questions.”

“I would love to see seminars at some of these schools, where students go into their local archives and try to figure out the implications of land-grant funding for those universities,” Lee adds. “We’re starting to see some of that happen.”

Read: More on Land-Grant Universities

• A sanitized but still informative short history of the land-grant university system from the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities: “Land-Grant University FAQ”

• A professor of American studies places land-grant universities in the context of systemic racism: “Higher Education’s Racial Reckoning Reaches Far Beyond Slavery,” April 1, 2021

• A local story on the Indigenous Students Center at South Dakota State University, built in part with the proceeds from the original land grant: “Construction Wraps Up on South Dakota State University’s American Indian Student Center,” July 15, 2020

Meet: About the Author

Tom Jacobs is a former senior staff writer for Santa Barbara-based Pacific Standard magazine, and a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. He tracks and analyzes trends in the arts and social sciences, with an emphasis on psychology, the role of culture, and the cultivation of creativity. A native of Chicago, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University.

The dynamic is frustratingly familiar: Science gifts us with a breakthrough product, only to face a reluctant, skeptical public. Fear of the new combines with a lack of trust in authority to produce a defiant attitude of “I don’t want this stuff in my body.”

Yes, that describes many people who refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine. But it also fits another group, which overlaps significantly with anti-vaxxers: People who are wary, and in some cases terrified, of genetically modified foods.

Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, were originally introduced to the mass public in a negative light, when the chemical company Monsanto used the technology as a way of allowing it to use greater amounts of its pesticide Roundup on certain crops. That controversy convinced a lot of people that GMOs are inherently bad, when in fact they have great potential to make food tastier and more nutritious — as well as to keep crops healthy as climate change plays havoc with traditional weather patterns.

Read the Original Story

Jennifer Kahn makes this point in the July 25th, 2021, issue of The New York Times Magazine, which has a juicy, delicious-looking purple tomato on the cover. The genetically modified fruit, which contains high levels of antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds, was bred by British biologist Cathie Martin, who at the age of 66 is doing cutting-edge research that could change what we place on our cutting boards.

Kahn, a contributing writer to the magazine and a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, spoke with The Postscript about her story and the sometimes-angry reaction she has received. The interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

The only time I have come across the initials GMO in recent years is when I noticed a “GMO Free” label on a package of food. No doubt this led me to assume that GMOs are inherently bad — if they weren’t, why would the makers of this product be touting their absence? Was that true of you as well, and if so, when did you start questioning that assumption?

Kahn: Because I come from a science background, I was never radically suspicious of GMOs. But like most people of my particular socioeconomic position, I wanted to be healthy. I had a vague idea that eating organic was better for both me and the planet, although it turns out to be more complicated than that. For the reader I was aiming at — someone like me — there wasn’t a profound aversion to GMOs, but there was a general sense of “Isn’t this not great? Do we really know what they do to us?”

That describes a good percentage of the readers of The New York Times Magazine.

Kahn: Yes, the WWWs — well, wealthy, and worried.

What initially inspired you to dig into this issue?

Kahn: Initially I pitched it as a smaller story — a look at Cathie Martin’s purple tomato. But one of the editors there, Bill Wasik, was very interested in this topic. He felt this was the moment to revisit this question of why we’re so against GMOs. I ended up being glad he felt that way. It felt like a good time to revisit this question.

Yes, we now have genetic engineering as well as genetic modification, but I’m fuzzy on what the difference is. Can you explain in very basic terms?

Kahn: It’s really hard to grasp. People I know and love — including my husband — still don’t get the distinction. GMO is something that has a gene from another organism. To use an extreme example, if you have an apple and you take a gene from a jellyfish and put it in the apple, that’s a GMO. But it’s also a GMO if you take a gene from a crab apple, since that’s a different species.

Genetic engineering, at least the way I’m using it, means the genome of the thing itself has been changed. You discover an apple has a gene that codes for the apple being very bitter. If you knock that out, you end up with a sweeter apple. So you’re just changing a gene within the genome of the apple. You’re not introducing anything foreign.

From a lay perspective, that seems a little less scary. Maybe we all saw too many science fiction movies as kids, but the idea of mixing the genes of two species creeps a lot of people out.

Kahn: Clearly, it does! At a gut level, it feels wrong or unnatural, or like we’re violating something profound. When I gave the example of taking a scorpion gene and inserting it into an apple, I myself had a negative visceral response! But in fact, you could put a gene from a scorpion into an apple and be safer than if you took a gene from a tomato and put it into an apple. Tomatoes produce a toxin that can kill you just as well as a scorpion can. We just don’t think of them that way.

I did not know the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was grounded in science. That aside, you’re arguing that gene edits can actually produce better, more nutritious foods, or make foods that are already nutritious taste better.

Kahn: Absolutely. What people don’t necessarily realize is an individual gene is like a single, tiny instruction — like “add a teaspoon of salt” in a recipe. It’s one line in a very elaborate recipe. Some genes change things directly, like contributing to the production of Vitamin C. Others do things indirectly. For example, to keep an apple from browning, you can squeeze lemon on it — or you can find a way to make the apple create a little more Vitamin C.

A lot of this involves knocking out genes that are producing something you don’t want. There’s a compound in the peels of cucumbers that repels spider bites. It also makes the peel very bitter. Cucumber breeders ages ago set out to dial this down, since nobody likes the bitter peel. You can do that by modifying the gene.

Humans have been creating new and better varieties of plants for many centuries. Do you see genetic engineering as a continuation of that tradition, or is there something fundamentally different about it?

Kahn: This is one of the big fracture points. To people who are worried about GMOs, it feels like an enormous jump. It’s true that GMOs would never occur in nature. In that sense, it’s different. But I was really surprised to learn how chaotic and haphazard ordinary breeding is. When you cross-breed two plants, it can involve hundreds of genes, even if you’re looking for a single gene that, say, makes the apple sweeter or bigger. Because it’s conventional breeding, you’re not required to sequence the genes (of this hybrid species) and find out what other genes have been dragged along. There’s no way of knowing if they’ve made the apple more or less healthy, or more or less dangerous. It’s a crapshoot. People want strict regulations of GMOs, but that process is often much more precise. They’re sticking in a single gene.

Perhaps because it’s done in a lab rather than a greenhouse, it feels scarier somehow.

Kahn: That’s it. Plenty of people have written me saying “I don’t want to eat anything that came out of a lab.” But once you’ve made the genetic change in the lab, the process is no different than cross-breeding. You make a seed and grow that seed into a tree that produces apples.

Do we consume GMOs every day without realizing it?

Kahn: I found a statistic I couldn’t verify from the Grocery Manufacturers Association that said 70 to 80 percent of processed foods contain GMOs. Now, sometimes the act of processing basically eliminates the genetic material. One thing that worries folks who are anxious about GMOs is if you are eating this in a whole food like an apple, it might be a lot more than you would get in processed food products.

But processed foods have their own issues.

Kahn: That’s one of the ironies of all this. There are so many things we know are terrible for us. Potatoes produce a carcinogen when they’re fried, and yet we eat French fries. We know sugar is bad for us. But we don’t blink at that stuff. Then we have these remote, hypothetical concerns about GMOs. It’s one of the perverse ways we think about what we ingest.

Where did you find Cathie Martin and her purple tomato?

Kahn: I read an article a while ago where she was mentioned. I thought it was interesting, because I, like most people, had defaulted to thinking about GMOs as products of Big Ag. The fact there was somebody out there making this little tomato who wasn’t part of big agriculture was interesting. She was trying to make it healthier, not pest-resistant so she could sell more herbicides. Her story was the opposite of what we conceive of GMOs. I was trying to separate the technology from how it has historically been used, and by whom.

What kind of reaction have you been getting to the piece? Have you been accused of being a tool of Big Ag?

Kahn: I’m definitely a tool of Big Ag, according to the emails I have gotten. It’s not as bad as writing about QAnon, but I’ve gotten emails asking “How stupid are you?” There was also a Twitter campaign, which didn’t really engage with any of the points the piece made. It was outraged that the piece didn’t only talk about Monsanto and Roundup and excoriating Big Ag. I did get a lot of that.

The problems associated with Big Ag are a separate issue from GMOs. GMOs are not the primary drivers of the rise in monoculture, the rise in consolidation in farming, even the rise in pesticide use. People are unhappy that agriculture has become industrialized, but that would be true whether or not we had GMOs.

There are specific cases where GMOs do contribute to this trend, including with the herbicide Roundup. But there are lots of counter-examples. They used to spray broad-spectrum pesticides on crops that would kill all kinds of insects. This contributed to the insect die-off we’re now facing. By making crops that use genes taken from a bacterium, the plants make the pesticide themselves, and it allows them to resist these little caterpillars that would otherwise destroy them. As a result, pesticide use has gone down.

So used correctly and wisely, GMOs could reduce pesticide use, which would be a good thing.

Kahn: You’re exactly right. The other thing people don’t think about is how terrible it is when you lose crops to insects or flooding; it’s a disaster. You end up needing to farm still more land and use still more herbicides and pesticides. The ones you used on the original crop have just gone into the groundwater. If you can produce a more tolerant variety of rice that can survive being submerged for 14 days rather than three days, you can save an enormous amount of waste. We can’t afford to have agriculture take up more land than it is already taking up.

Has writing this piece changed what you feed yourself and your family?

Kahn: It hasn’t, only because there’s really no GMO produce on the market. I still find myself thinking that if I saw a display that said “GMO apples,” I have to fight a tiny, visceral part of me that says “I want something else.” I have to reassert my rational mind — just as we might get a little sketched out by getting a shot, but we do it. I’m not immune to the desire to want things that are “natural” — whatever that means in my mind!

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

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

Jennifer Kahn doesn’t see anti-GMO attitudes changing over the short run, but she suspects that as smaller projects like Cathie Martin’s purple tomato begin to proliferate, feelings could gradually evolve. “The way Cathie is launching her tomato is really smart: Give the seeds to home gardeners,” she said. “That means people are opting in.”

She also suspects minds will be changed as GMO technology allows farmers to adjust to new threats, including those caused or exacerbated by climate change. “Hawaii is very anti-GMO,” she noted, “but when they found that GMO technology could be used to save the papaya industry, people got on board.”

Read: More on Genetically Modified Organisms

• A solid overview of the risks and benefits of GMOs from National Geographic: “Food: How Altered?” October 9, 2009

• A Time magazine report from 2015 on how GMOs are in the foods we eat every day: “These Charts Show Every Genetically Modified Food People Already Eat in the U.S.,” April 30, 2015

• For in-depth reading, check out a Harvard University report from 2015 on the history and impact of GMOs, including the controversy over the pesticide Roundup: “Signal to Noise Special Edition: GMOs and Our Food,” August 10, 2015

Meet: About the Author

Tom Jacobs is a former senior staff writer for Santa Barbara-based Pacific Standard magazine, and a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. He tracks and analyzes trends in the arts and social sciences, with an emphasis on psychology, the role of culture, and the cultivation of creativity. A native of Chicago, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University.

Police dogs can give law enforcement a cute and even playful image. Some even have their own social media accounts. But how many of their followers know that these dogs are sometimes used as weapons? Thousands of Americans are injured by police dogs every year, but there are no national standards for their training or use. While some bites are accidental, records and videos show it’s not unheard of to send a “bite dog” after a suspect.

Abbie VanSickle has spent years reporting on law enforcement and criminal justice, and the extent of the problem surprised even her. It started when Challen Stephens, an editor for AL.com, came across a case in which the same police dog, handled by the same officer, had injured multiple people. Stephens reached out to an editor at non-profit newsroom The Marshall Project, and a collaboration came together. Hundreds of court documents, violent videos, and emotional interviews later, the team — which also included contributors from the IndyStar and the Invisible Institute — published “Mauled: When Police Dogs Are Weapons.”

Read the Original Marshall Project Story

“As we started to see some of the patterns, we noticed we had a lot of cases of bystanders, and we had a lot of cases of dogs attacking their own handlers or other officers,” VanSickle said.

At first, the biggest challenges were the sheer number of incidents to work through, and the emotional toll of reading and watching them all. By the time of publication, the COVID-19 pandemic had amplified those hurdles, especially as the contributors to the project were spread across the country.

Still, the work made waves. From Washington State, to Indiana, to Louisiana, the investigation seems to have nudged law enforcement to reevaluate how it uses dogs. And in June of 2021, the “Mauled” team won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for their work.

First, I want to congratulate you and your team on your work on this and the Pulitzer.

VanSickle: It’s totally surreal. I was completely shocked. And also, that it happened during COVID when I’m just working from home is even weirder, because I’m literally working sitting in my bed or in my PJs, with my kids. It’s just very funny, but it is amazing.

I would love to know what first led you to investigate police dog injuries.

VanSickle: So, the first grain of the story came from Challen Stephens. He’s with AL.com. He had heard about a federal case with a police dog that had injured a number of people, the same dog and the same handler. He had talked with my editor about that case, and my editor mentioned it to me, and [asked if I thought there was] anything bigger nationally about this. I feel like it’s a credit both to [Stephens] and to local journalism that he spotted this case as a problem. And then it’s also a credit to The Marshall Project, and to non-profit journalism, that we had the time and the space to be able to really dig into this area. I think, without both of those things together, it would have been hard to do the project.

Our first meeting together with Challen and our editors was in December of 2019. By that meeting, I had already done just some basic reporting, reached out to some people who had been quoted in stories about police dog attacks before and done clip searches, and Challen and I both were pretty confident that we had a really important story. But we were just starting.

What was the process for working through all the raw information and the primary sources to come out with these stories?

VanSickle: Challen and I, at the beginning, had no idea how many cases we would find. I thought it would be maybe a handful of cases. First we realized there wasn’t national data, so it’s not like we could just go and pull a database and see things like: How many cases are there? What was the age of the person? What was the race? What was the circumstance? Were they armed? What was the underlying crime, if there was one? Was it as a bystander? So, we created just an Excel spreadsheet with the fields that we thought we were interested in, and then started doing a few things: One was just clip searches to find any local mention of a police dog incident. Then, from those cases, we would call either the person or the lawyer or find a court case. And from there, then I would look to see if those lawyers had done other police dog cases, and I would do a PACER search, you know, federal court cases that particular lawyer had done and then pull all of those cases. And then the spreadsheet just sort of exploded.

As we started to see some of the patterns, we noticed we had a lot of cases of bystanders, and we had a lot of cases of dogs attacking their own handlers or other officers. We did not have many cases where people were armed. And so let’s say we had a local news story, and then we found the underlying court case, so then I would link to that underlying court case document, and then we had a video so that I would link to that video, and then we would have maybe the official law enforcement body cam videos, then I would link to that. So we had, you know, some master way to try to keep all of this organized as best we could.

So this is the really fun, sexy part of investigative reporting, right?

VanSickle: Yeah, I mean, I think so much of the story was working on that sort of internal organization to be able to see patterns and to be able to keep organized. Also, once we partnered with the IndyStar and Invisible Institute, to also be able to share it with them so they can see, and then we could exchange what we all had.

The piece is really multiple pieces, and they kind of range across a variety of media. I’m curious about how you and your team decided which parts to tell in which different ways?

VanSickle: There are a number of different stories and also different storytelling formats. One of the things that stood out to us in early reporting were the videos, because it’s one thing to hear that police use dogs to find people, and it felt like a very different thing to see what it looked like, and especially to hear what that sounded like. So, we definitely wanted to be able to show the public some of the videos that we had seen. But also, and I feel like this is a big credit to Cilena [Fang], our photo and multimedia editor, and to the other people working on this massive team who helped to edit the videos and really think through the process of making sure we had consent from people. We really wanted informed consent from people to use their videos, even if the videos have already been out on Facebook, as many of them have been, or if the police departments themselves release them. It still felt really important to make sure no one was surprised, and that people really had agreed to participate in the project. It was definitely something that we had group discussions about: How much of the videos do we show? Because we want to be able to get the point across that this is what this looks like, without feeling like we were excluding anyone’s experience or overwhelming people.

I was kind of struck by the beginning piece, about how these dogs are often depicted as cute and they can be disarming, and they can make police seem more friendly. I definitely have experienced that. I’m curious how that phenomenon affected your reporting.

VanSickle: I had spent a lot of my professional life reporting about criminal justice and up until this point I really didn’t know about how bite dogs in particular were used — the dogs that are used to find and bite people. We definitely saw the complexity of people’s views about dogs come out in the reporting. There was a lawyer in L.A. who talked about the “Lassie Effect” or “Rin Tin Tin Effect,” you know, the idea that it was very difficult for him to take cases like this in front of the jury, because people have such fond memories, either of their own dogs or of these dogs when they’re shown to them. [They see them as] very harmless. And that’s a difficult thing for lawyers who bring these cases. [IndyStar’s] Ryan Martin reported on a dog in Indianapolis, a police dog who had become kind of like a social media presence as a funny and cute animal. But then what the dog is actually asked to do, its work is not at all cute or cuddly. And so that duality, it came out in so many different ways.

There’s sometimes debate over whether to take police statements at their word, and also whether reporters can be too aggressive with reporting on law enforcement. How did you approach interviewing law enforcement for this project?

VanSickle: The image of an investigative reporter as somebody who’s looking for a gotcha moment is not how I approach my work. I don’t think it would work well with my personality to try to do that. I’m really trying to understand how something works. And so I’m really grateful especially to law enforcement officers and former law enforcement officers who work on these cases as experts now, or people who have had real experience, like the Oakland Police Department, who let me come and watch one of their canine trainings. I think that being able to actually see something, and really understand how something works, it’s kind of at the heart of what I’m trying to do.

I really want to know, like: Where did the dogs come from? And how do you train them? And I actually found many people, especially the former law enforcement officers, who believe that the dogs have a place in law enforcement, and were really frustrated when they felt like a department was falling short of standards. They were very frustrated if they saw cases where a dog was not trained properly, or the officer was not doing things according to how they were trained. They were really crucial voices for me because that was a real education; I didn’t know what kinds of things they looked for in dogs, I didn’t know what was considered an acceptable practice and what was not. The most fun part of journalism anyway is diving into something I don’t know that much about and really trying to understand it, and kind of puzzle through, and hopefully at the other end come out with something that’s helpful to the public to make their own decisions.

What was the hardest part of this process?

VanSickle: So, the hardest part of this project, I think, was the hardest part for every American in the last year, which is that we started the project in the “before times,” of being able to travel. My last reporting trip before COVID was to go to San Diego and sit in a federal courtroom and watch a jury trial of one of the dog cases. And that was so important, to be able to see what a juror’s face looks like as they respond to evidence, or to see what somebody’s testifying about their own experience of being, in this case, bitten on the head by a police dog. And to see the officer. All those things are so crucial to make sure that we’ve got the story right. And then suddenly, you know, on March 13th, 2020, I was suddenly at my house, with my two kids who were at the time one and four, trying to figure out how to keep going and just adapt. The challenge for me personally was just, you know, having the kids at home, figuring out childcare so that I could keep going forward on the story. I would sit in the car and do interviews, because that was the only quiet place that I could go. And then we had forest fires in California on top of that, just as we were getting ready to publish. So these outside things, and trying to adapt to them while making sure to keep constant momentum on the story, just for me personally, I think that was the biggest challenge.

What impact have you seen since publication?

VanSickle: Just as we were publishing the Indianapolis story, that department announced policy changes to the way that they were using the dogs. And they were very aware of our story. [Martin] had been interviewing them for months. We worked with the Advocate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, because we heard about a police department [where they’re using dogs] frequently on juveniles. And it turned out that paper had also been kind of digging at that issue. And so we worked with them on a story, and the mayor immediately announced changes after that story was published.

And then in Washington State, some legislators there, they’ve created a working group to re-examine the way that law enforcement agencies use the dogs. My understanding is the working group is just kind of getting started and they haven’t made their recommendations yet, but legislators there I had reached out to, I know that they were interested in the stories that we published and some information that we had. We started this reporting before George Floyd was killed, and so before there was a sort of, like, reignited national attention specifically on police force. I think it’s become part of a national discussion that we all continue to see unfold about policing.

It’s encouraging to see a collaborative effort between papers from different parts of the country, plus a non-profit newsroom like The Marshall Project. How did that collaboration facilitate this work?

VanSickle: I feel like this project was just a giant team effort. It really took everybody, from our illustrator [to] all the local partners that we had trying to put the stories together for their audiences. I feel really proud to have worked on something that I hope is, if not a model, at least one example of a way that we can all work together. And I really hope to be able to be involved in projects like that in the future, because I think it’s really a powerful example of all of us being stronger together than alone.

And it was really fun too! I think that’s important. Of course, the stories themselves are incredibly serious. I don’t mean to make light of that in any way. But I also think it felt very meaningful for me to work with other journalists throughout the country, to collaborate together.

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The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

The “Mauled” team tracked police dog bite incidents that took place from 2010 to 2020. A database, including descriptions and videos of these incidents, can be found on the project’s web page. But there are so many cases, the group has decided not to continue updating the page. Abbie VanSickle does continue to receive leads a couple of times a week, either from reporters who want to do stories about police dog bites in their own communities, or readers who want to know how to get information about how their own police departments use dogs.

VanSickle believes this work is part of the larger, evolving conversation about police use of force in America. She is curious to see whether the use of police dogs increases as an alternative to higher levels of force.

“This is just a particular corner of [that larger discussion],” she said. “It is still fascinating to try to understand what is happening, and will that change?”

Read: More on Police Brutality

• James Baldwin, in a 1966 issue of The Nation, introduces readers to a Harlem that “is policed like occupied territory,” where law enforcement’s primary goal is to protect the interests of white businesses: “A Report From Occupied Territory,” July 11, 1966

• Radley Balko on the use of SWAT teams and the rise of paramilitary force: “‘Why Did You Shoot Me? I Was Reading a Book’: The New Warrior Cop Is Out of Control,” July 7, 2013

• In another story for The Marshall Project, produced in collaboration with the New York Times, Tom Robbins reports on all of the things that haven’t changed at one of America’s most notorious prisons since the riot of 1971, : “Attica’s Ghosts,” February 28, 2015

Meet About the Author

Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips is a journalist, editor, and health and science communicator based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the author of The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World.

A few years ago, Radiolab producer Latif Nasser was procrastinating on Twitter when he saw his name in a tweet from a non-profit law firm. Except, the tweet wasn’t about him, it was about a Moroccan man named Abdul Latif Nasser who was in detention at Guantanamo Bay for alleged terrorism. His lawyer had been tweeting at the president to try to get him released.

By that point, Abdul Latif Nasser had been in Guantanamo without charges or trial for 15 years. Despite being cleared for transfer home to Morocco, “the other Latif” was still in prison, and no one could explain why. Journalist Nasser, whose work typically focuses more on the science and culture of things like robots, snowflakes, and laughter, was determined to find out.

“It had this weird resonance for me,” he said. Not only because the two had the same uncommon name, but because Abdul Latif Nasser had apparently been just like him in some ways — a “nerdy, suburban kid” before the events that led to his detention.

Listen to the Original Radiolab Podcast

Despite government roadblocks, no access to the main character of the story, and initial skepticism from his editors, Nasser and his Radiolab team dug in for three years of labyrinthine reporting to ultimately produce a podcast called The Other Latif. Like most journalism to come out of Radiolab, the series doesn’t come to a neat ending. It isn’t clear in the end who the listener should believe — or even who Nasser himself believes. Then on July 19th, 2021, more than a year after the final episode of the series aired, a two-minute bonus episode appeared in the Radiolab feed. A breathless Nasser shared the news that the subject had been released, and there would be “more to come.”

Nasser and his team don’t take any credit for Abdul Latif Nasser’s freedom; he was, after all, already technically free before they began their reporting. But, the publicity doesn’t seem to have hurt. While waiting to hear whether he’d finally get to interview the man who inspired the series, Nasser answered some questions about how and why he pushed so hard to make this podcast happen.

How did you go from that weird moment on Twitter to spending three years reporting this story?

Nasser: To kind of pull the curtain back a little bit, I pitched it to Radiolab and it was a dud in the pitch meeting, for reasons that I can completely understand now. I look back on our meeting notes and there were five comments on that pitch in the room — three of them were me trying to gin up interest. One of them was from our former cohost, Robert Krulwich. He was like, “this sounds dangerous, don't do it.” And then one was from one of my colleagues, who would end up being a producer on the series, actually. She said: “The injustice at Guantanamo Bay doesn't feel super surprising, you know, this would have been an interesting story 13 years ago.” And the second thing she pointed out, which was very true, was that I didn't have access to the main character.

But I was still sort of obsessed with this guy, and I didn’t know what to do, and then I was very lucky that one of my colleagues, Suzie Lechtenberg, she kind of got obsessed [along] with me. And together we doubled down like, OK, what if this wasn't an episode? What if it was a series? Like, what if we took a thing that we don't know how to make it a one episode thing and we commit to six episodes?

But what a great situation to be in to say, “well, everyone said no, but let's do something even crazier.”

Nasser: Yes, exactly. And this is not the kind of reporting I or we do at Radiolab. I'm much more accustomed to science reporting or culture reporting. I've even done some sports reporting, but I've never done anything anywhere close to national security or terrorism or anything like that. I just happened to be the guy with the same name. We were sort of just making it up as we went along, seeking out other people in the field who we really respected, people like [investigative journalist] Carol Rosenberg. We just called them like: “Here’s what we got, like, what do we do?” And so many people were so kind to us, but it really did at the beginning feel like an impossible story.

I can’t help but wonder, like Robert said, “that's dangerous, don't do it….” How did your family feel about it once you got into it?

Nasser: I didn't really tell them, to be honest. At the beginning, I remember I was at a family gathering around Christmas, and I was gonna bring it up because obviously they all have the same last name too. But I think Muslim Americans, not to speak broadly, but the American Muslim community is tired of these stories, Muslim terrorist stories. I wasn’t, like, proudly doing this story. It just had grabbed me, and we were like, how do we do this in a way that we feel good about?

And how did you answer that question?

Nasser: It was slow, we spent years on it. A lot of that time was in the background while we were doing other stories, and we would be like, really, really banging our heads against it. Three years of just sort of groping in the dark and doing interviews, so many marathon interviews, hours long, where you’d have, like, one tiny nugget of information out of it. And you’d be so grateful for that. And then we’d go to sleep, and then wake up in the morning thinking: “I don’t even know if I believe that. There’s 10 reasons to distrust that thing that I worked so hard to get yesterday.” And then am I back at square one or not? It was a kind of reporting, I think, where everyone was trying to spin me, sources were so hard to get on the record. It was using so many different muscles as a journalist that I wasn’t used to using as a science journalist or in my normal stories.

I'm glad you went there about not being sure what to believe. It seemed like a major theme of the series was the slipperiness of the truth. I was curious how that affected your reporting.

Nasser: I was lucky that the way we ended up doing it sort of fit with the house style of Radiolab, which is that so much of it is about the journey. Every story is, in a way, a reporter’s journey to learn about that story, and, in this case, if it wasn’t for that frame, it would be a way harder story to tell.

Logistically, what was it like trying to interview someone in Guantanamo?

Nasser: We weren’t allowed to interview [Abdul Latif Nasser] because the government basically cites the Geneva Convention, which felt very ironic. So that was frustrating, especially because he’s cleared on paper. We had to use all these sorts of tricks to try to get around that: we talked to his family, we talked to former [inmates] who knew him. Then we would try to talk to him in this indirect way through his lawyers.

Basically, anything that comes out of his mouth, or he writes down on paper, is immediately classified, so any communication we get is censored and monitored. I would write a letter, send it to his lawyer, and his lawyer would basically give him the gist of it. She would have a conversation with him, he would talk to her, she would then kind of take notes, and those notes would have to be declassified. She had every reason to kind of filter it in one way. And then the government had every reason to filter the other way. So it was passing through two completely opposite filters, and then what even came out the other end? It was such an absurd way to correspond with somebody.

When we did get one letter, it was actually so beautiful, and so personal seeming and so intimate that it was kind of a shock, knowing that it had gone through these crazy steps, and yet it came out sounding like it came from a human being. That was the moment when it became clear that oh, this is a series, like there is a human being in the middle of all of this. And that’s the thing that I used to sort of persuade my editors, like, this is for real. Three years of that, and not just with [his lawyer], with everybody. It felt like everybody we were talking to, that was the exact experience over and over.

And you had three years of that. Where did you get that persistence from?

Nasser: I turned out to be wrong in this belief, but it just felt to me at the time that, if I don’t do this, nobody’s gonna do it. This guy’s been in there for 15 years. Nobody’s written about it really, besides activists basically, and his lawyer, and even then in a sort of flat way. And then it turns out that there were other reporters who did stories about him that were quite good. But still, I felt like I had to persist through that, because I had this curiosity about this guy who has my name.

We would often joke that this was the closest thing that this guy has gotten to a trial in 20 years. Us doing our podcast without him was the closest thing this guy got to a trial. That felt like this burden where I was like, OK, we need to do this right, because otherwise this guy is an abstraction of the world that is that way on purpose.

If people right now know the name of anybody at Guantanamo, it’s probably Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and I think the reason is that there were almost 800 guys there. Could you name even two of them? These guys, they were not allowed to speak for themselves. They were not allowed to get their stories out there. They were painted as the worst of the worst, and then you never heard anything else after that.

What was it like to interview former detainees and hear about their experiences?

Nasser: Those interviews were kind of devastating. They were so hard. And we worked so hard to get them. I’m sure you know, as a journalist, there are times when you do an interview, and you’re like, “oh, that bombed.” Like: “That couldn't have gone worse. Now I’m going to be up all night, thinking of how I could have done that differently.” We had someone come in from the Poynter Center to talk about trauma-informed journalism, and in hearing her talk about how to talk to torture victims and things like that I was like, “oh, yeah, this is exactly what happened.”

First of all, it was so hard to find these guys. They’re sort of all over the world. They’re just in a lot of different countries and in a lot of different situations. A lot of them, they just didn’t want to talk. And if they did want to talk, they didn’t want to talk on the record. If they did want to talk on the record ... it became very instantly clear that I was sort of asking them questions in the same ways that their interrogators were. I was trying to be nice and friendly and gentle, sort of a lot of the same tactics [an interrogator would use]. I was asking them very, very difficult, personal questions and that was putting them through a lot of the trauma that they had already been through from torture, or from prolonged detention and solitary confinement. We did several of these that were so tender, so difficult. One of them, I was interviewing somebody and he told me that, for the 48 hours before I talked to him, he had extreme diarrhea, vomiting, at the prospect of even just talking to me. It was so difficult for him. But he realized why it was valuable, you know, how many people can talk to you about what it’s like to be imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay? [Some former detainees] decided they didn’t want to talk after all. I don’t blame them. Some of them are in very precarious positions. For the few that did, I’m still really impressed that they would do that.

Where were you when you heard that the other Latif had been released, and how did that feel?

Nasser: We’ve been hearing rumors about it for so long, and then I finally got a call from a credible government source who told me: “It’s about to happen.” And I was still like: “I don’t believe it. Let me know when he touches down, and then I will believe it.”

So that whole night when it was supposed to happen, my colleagues and I were texting all night long, and most of the time I was in my office or pacing through my living room while my kids were sleeping, and the lights were all off. And I’m just texting furiously, trying to figure out what is happening. And by that moment, it was around 7 a.m. Morocco time, which was like the middle of the night here in L.A. When he actually landed and we heard from our Moroccan colleague that he was there, it was just amazing. It just felt like a thing that had been impossible for the prior five years, and all of a sudden it just happened.

Based on my reporting, based on the promise that the U.S. government has made to him, this guy does not belong in [Guantanamo] anymore. And so for him to get out, I was happy for him. I was happy for his family, I was happy for this country. I was like: “Oh, this is good. We’re making good on a promise we made five years ago. Five years too late, but still, we’re making good on it.” But I did feel sort of shocked.

Do you feel like you and your team played any role in this? Or was it just the timing?

Nasser: He was cleared for transfer home to Morocco before we even started recording the story. So on paper he was a free man already. Did we have anything to do with that? I don’t know. Although, it’s funny, I got a message shortly after his release from a friend of mine who works in the Department of Justice telling me: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease. It couldn’t have hurt that you brought all this attention to his case.” And there’s a kind of a bittersweetness in that, in that there’s 10 other guys that are in this same situation. You know, there’s 10 other guys who are cleared on paper basically, and should be allowed to just walk out of Guantanamo Bay, but they can’t.

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

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

Latif Nasser plans to visit “the other Latif” in Morocco as soon as possible, and he’s hopeful the man will finally sit down for an interview. Shortly after his release, Abdul Latif’s lawyer told Nasser that her client hadn’t made a decision yet — he’d been a little busy. Plus, he hadn’t been allowed to listen to the show while detained, and he’d like to do that first. Nasser wants to report on this part of Abdul Latif’s story, but he also wants to hear from the source about what he and his team might have gotten wrong.

It’s hard to get people interested in stories about Guantanamo Bay in 2021. Nasser doesn’t share a name with any of the 10 men who remain there, and he isn’t sure how to make their stories newsworthy, but he hopes to be able to tell them someday.

“There are a few of them with stories I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since we made this series,” Nasser said. “There are still a few stories there that I find so interesting, and surprising, and actually quite different from this story.”

Read: More on Guantanamo Bay

• Described as the “Switzerland of South America,” Uruguay has served as a refuge for many without a place to call home, including a number of former detainees at Guantanamo: “After Years in Guantanamo, Ex-Detainees Find Little Solace in Uruguay,” March 21, 2015

• Ten years after the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Todd Purdum interviewed dozens of lawyers, soldiers, and others to assemble an oral history of the facility: “Guantanamo: An Oral History,” January 11, 2012

• After more than a dozen years behind bars, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee spent two days telling his story to the Toronto Star: “In His Own Words: Omad Khadr,” May 27, 2015

Meet: About the Author

Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips is a journalist, editor, and health and science communicator based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the author of The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World.

Ben Mauk’s reporting on Xinjiang has taken years. It began in 2018, when he was in Kazakhstan, writing a story about the Belt and Road Initiative for The New York Times Magazine; he thought it’d be a labor story, not one that would cross into systems.

Yet when he was in Zharkent, a Kazakh town that was supposed to be The Next Big City, what was going on over the border in China was “foremost in people’s minds.” They had family members on the other side; back when the border was porous, people went back and forth frequently.

By then, CNN, the Washington Post, Reuters, and several smaller Eurasian-based news outlets had done pieces on the “re-education centers,” in which Uighur detainees were drilled in Mandarin, kept in cramped conditions, and strongly pushed to renounce key aspects of their identities by the “teachers” and guards installed by the Chinese government. Academics, whose Uighur colleagues had disappeared, were also sounding the alarm. But there wasn’t much magazine reporting done yet — if there was any at all.

Read the Original New Yorker Story

By serendipity, during Mauk’s visit, a very public extradition trial of a woman who’d been forced to teach at one of these camps was taking place — she was fighting to not be returned to China, after she’d publicly testified as to what was going on in the camps. Members of Kazakhstan’s civil society were there, including, unbeknown to Mauk at the time, several activists who would help connect him to interviewees in the future. It became clear to him that all his Times Magazine reporting was going to converge on this trial, which was an indication that the real story was taking place only several miles away, even though a lot of the material he’d gathered in that trip would not make it into that article.

It was obvious this was a “critically under-covered story,” one he would devote himself to, including a diary piece for the London Review of Books, an oral history of the camps for The Believer, and not just a feature for The New Yorker, but a VR film too, on three subjects who’d been detained in the same camp — an improbable find. In total, he made four trips to Kazakhstan.

We spoke via Zoom, both from our childhood homes, about the substance of his reporting, as well as the hows and wherefores about freelancing and writing in general. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Is this kind of story able to be pursued by someone without a magazine or publication that’s able to pay expenses?

Mauk: I would say it pays to be very creative about funding. Since before I was reporting for places like the New York Times, I had sought grants from places like the Pulitzer Center [on Crisis Reporting], for example, which has given me five reporting grants.

When I went to Kazakhstan in April of 2018, I had already been assured of funding from the Jamal Khashoggi Award and the NYU Matthew Powers reporting award, both of which went to fund the Believer and London Review of Books pieces. I didn’t pay out of pocket for the reporting on that trip; both were awards I applied to specifically to fund my Xinjiang reporting.

Do those grants cover enough, in addition to whatever the magazine can front?

Mauk: Yes, they do. [Laughs.]

Sometimes students or early career journalists will ask me if they should fund their own travel and reporting for a story, and without knowing more, I would say “no.” I don’t think impecunious freelance writers like us should have to pay our way to report a story when we don’t even know if it’s going to run. None of this advice applies to the independently wealthy.

But in terms of freelancing, it’s like, who’s able to put in that kind of time? Who’s able to put their life on hold and fly to Kazakhstan? Obviously, it requires interest from publications, or some kind of financial security. In fact, I was invited to speak at a media conference the first time I went back, and I was like: “Hey! Can I stay an extra week?” And they said sure, so I stayed. I did interviews probably like nine or 10 hours a day, just in that extra week.

I remember that trip in April was exhausting, it was wall-to-wall hearing these stories — it was not a permanent state of affairs and if I wanted to collect these accounts, I had to get there and not waste any time. I remember my interpreter and I would go, at the end of the day, to a fast food place and sit, so dead we couldn’t even talk to each other.

Those interviews made up a bulk of your 24,000-word oral history for The Believer. How did you get them on board?

Mauk: You can probably count on three fingers a place you could send something like that, and have them actually consider it. It’s just a really huge commitment in terms of page count — it’s 40 pages in The Believer — in terms of dealing with such a big piece, in terms of being willing to own a work of journalism and the liability that comes with this — levying accusations against the Chinese government. The most important thing for me was to get the interviews out and in unexpurgated form. I knew James [Yeh, then features editor] socially already, so I called him in February of 2019, before going to Kazakhstan in April, and talked about the idea. He was the only editor I approached with the story.

Had I taken this to The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Yorker or whatever — a big glossy — it would not have been 24,000 words, for one thing, because they don’t run stuff that length and haven’t for a long, long time. But, for me, it was important to do right by the stories people had given me. Each person was desperate. Of course, as a journalist, you’re always emphasizing “all we can do is report, and you should not expect anything to come of it.” I don’t want people to have false hopes about talking to me. Nevertheless, you do feel like people have trusted you with something. In this case, I was so affected by the material that it was important to me that it come out in a place that could appreciate that fact, and appreciate this was not merely a news piece, that it was trying to be an oral history. I wanted them to run the whole thing.

And James really fought for it — it wasn’t like an automatic yes. James really saw the value in doing it that way.

Did you expect people to read all those 24,000 words?

Mauk: Heh heh heh, heh. Yes.

So why an oral history?

Mauk: I wanted to publish an oral history in the mode of Studs Terkel or Svetlana Alexievich because I thought that was the form best sorted to this material. I had wearied of refugee articles that took this main-character approach and tried to heavily psychologize the experience of the refugee — that always felt like cheating to me; it felt manipulative. I didn’t want to perform analysis on it, or do the writerly thing, where I wrap quotes together and then summarize their meaning or their import. I just wanted to edit into chronological shape with the interviews, add a few pieces of context here and there, and then just get out of the way, let the material do what it wanted to do.

You obviously think a lot about narrative structures; you wrote a bit about them in your newsletter’s first iteration. You also went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Has your fiction experience influenced your thoughts on this matter?

Mauk: Non-fiction is unforgiving in terms of structure. If your piece has an insufficient or poorly thought-out structure, disclosing information in a way that is failing to communicate what you want, then the piece is a failure.

On the other hand, I’ve read novels that I’ve liked very much that have appeared to have almost no structure whatsoever, or seem to have been written just by starting at the beginning and going to the end, which is not to say you can’t have an intricately structured novel, or that fiction writers don’t think about structure — they certainly do, and I certainly did, maybe to a fault, when I was writing fiction — but I do think that fiction is a much more forgiving genre in terms of the way in which information is disclosed.

There are other demands of fiction: The psychological demands are much more stringent than in a work of non-fiction. In fact, I think my own non-fiction work strives to say as little about the psychology of the subjects as possible, quite consciously, but even when I’m reading a piece of non-fiction where I’m thinking a writer has failed to convince me on a subject’s psychological make-up, that does not make a work an automatic failure to me.

I’m somewhat critical of non-fiction that aspires to the qualities of fiction because I think they do different things well. Different moments will land differently in a non-fiction piece. Something that’s too tidy or coincidental in a novel, if it happens in a non-fiction piece, it’s because it happened. It’s quite a different resonance because our shared reality is the presupposition of all non-fiction writing and that creates different expectations from a reader. I also think one thing the fiction writer can say is that they control every feature — some fiction writers don’t agree with this — they are basically in charge of the inner lives of their characters, which, of course, is not the case in non-fiction: You should not get it in your head that you can divine a neat narrative arc for your characters — people’s lives don’t become tidy like that.

I hate — maybe hate’s a strong word — I dislike when people try to praise non-fiction writing as “novelistic,” which I often find they mean it has a lot of concrete details. I do try to resist the urge to psychologize subjects, because you don’t know that they’re feeling what they say they’re feeling; I do think, to a certain extent, you can take a subject at their word if they say “I was scared,” but I think the best thing a non-fiction writer can do is show characters’ motion and use that to illuminate these larger structures the non-fiction piece will often be about. I think non-fiction explains systems really well. I think it’s possible to really open a system for readers in ways that are special to the genre.

So you’ve done several reporting trips to Kazakhstan now, and have all this testimony. What made you think about collaborating on a VR film?

Mauk: I had talked with Sam Wolson, a VR filmmaker living in the same neighborhood in Berlin at the same time as me, about someday doing a project together. When I returned after a trip to Kazakhstan in 2019, having met these three ex-detainees who had been in the same detention center at the same time, I approached him. This struck us both as a compelling project because we had this unprecedented group of guys, all of whom could talk about the same facility, whose detentions overlapped, they had met each other there, their stories were extremely cross-corroborating, they were all very reliable witnesses.

Sam has often said one really needs to work for the right kind of project for VR because if you don’t, you end up with something that feels gimmicky and unnecessary. This was a story that had a lot of inherent drama in the spaces that we were talking about, where, in fact, what was most journalistically valuable about the material that I had gathered was the nature of these spaces — what they looked and sounded like, and the things that happened in them. It’s an authoritarian space that’s inaccessible. All this stuff put together makes it a subject that VR can illuminate in a special way.

So we put together a pitch, and we took it to a couple places. It was obviously going to be a large project; it was not going to be cheap. There were varying levels of enthusiasm; no one said no outright, but obviously The New Yorker was going to be the place that would run it.

How long did it take for The New Yorker to say yes?

Mauk: That process took over maybe a month and a half talking about it on Zoom calls and emails and stuff. At one point, we had a Zoom call with a terrifying number of people on it — 15 or 20 people — which is a lot, just as we were cementing the project in place. It was a process, not because anyone was slow or hesitant, but we were thinking through the problem of what this project was going to look like, because it’s formally different to what we had done before, and what The New Yorker had done before.

Even when we went to Kazakhstan together in December, we didn’t exactly know it was going to be a VR film or if it was going to be online with an interactive element. Were we going to do an article along with a VR project? All of this was up in the air.

We had partial deadlines where we were going to decide what we were going to do with the material once we had synthesized it and figured out what kind of stories we had.

At the same time, I wanted to write a feature about them. I didn’t want it to just be a film, and I didn’t think there’s really a good one-stop shop narrative feature piece about Xinjiang and I wanted to write that — this is back in September of 2019. I wanted it to be a panoramic view of Xinjiang, as told by several of its residents.

The bulk of that discussion happened after that trip, when we came back and had all this incredible material, not just from the three main subjects of the film, but many other people that I’d interviewed on that trip who end up as subjects in the [feature].

How did you go about writing it up?

Mauk: I wrote the first draft pretty early; I’d say I finished it by June of 2020, and it came out in February of 2021. So a lot did come out and a lot did change, but the structure of my piece never radically changed; little things did, but I would say that, more than other stories I’d written, it stayed kind of true to its initial vision pretty nicely through to the end. Even down to the visuals and how they would interact with the text.

As you were writing, were you planning where the interactive elements were going to be?

Mauk: Sam, Matt Huynh (the artist), Monica Racic (the editor), Sandra Garcia (who led the interactive department), and I storyboarded this story, as you might a film, even before I really finished a draft. We talked about what we might want to be interactive in this piece, and it definitely shaped how I wrote it too: I wrote it very differently to something that would have no illustrations, or have photos, or whatever. There was never any question, in my mind, that a map would be required. This was the first time I’d written a story where I knew it was going to have these strong visual components, and audio components, before I drafted it, and it influenced how I wrote the piece.

One thing I like about this New Yorker project is that I envisioned it as something that was polyphonic. As with the Believer piece, albeit on a different scale, and using different forms, the polyphony of the voices was important to the strength of the piece — it was how we got a robust sense of what the truth is for people living in Xinjiang and I think that same effect is not conveyed by a story that is laser-focused on a single subject.

What’s the biggest problem you faced with placing these stories?

Mauk: The issue is that it’s quite difficult to find room in a newspaper or magazine for coverage of any foreign topic; that already puts someone who’s working on a foreign beat at a disadvantage. Of course, there is editorial interest in China, because of geopolitical tensions with the United States, and China’s economic importance. I’ve found it’s hard to get editors interested in stories of mine if they’re about a country that’s not viewed as relevant to U.S. economic interests, and that is a failing of the media ecosystem, but I don’t think that’s anything to do with an absence of talented writers or editors. Often, you will pitch a story and an editor will be really interested in it, and it just fails to land as it moves up the chain. Many people with divergent interests have to agree that it’s an important story for their readership.

Throughout 2020, I failed to place several stories that I wanted to find a home for. Maybe they were about smaller countries, or countries where the U.S. might have preconceived ideas about. I put as little emphasis on “U.S. readers will care about this because blah, blah, blah.” Part of this is because, like a place like The New York Times Magazine, they have a very international audience, so it’s not just U.S. readers; it’s readers from all over.

I try to find a story that’s interesting, that I don’t think has been told, for which there’d be value in my telling it. For me, often the most salient cases of the topics I like to write about are taking place outside the U.S., which is not to say the U.S. does not have a hand in what’s happening, but it does mean that it may be a little bit of an uphill battle in certain respects. All you can do is present the story as one that is vital and important — the chips fall where they fall.

A lot, not a lot, let’s say some publications that do publish excellent foreign coverage view themselves as a primarily domestic publication. Maybe half their readership’s in New York City, for example, so they may feel they’re a New York publication, even if they publish reports from all over the world.

Are we both thinking about the same publication there?

Mauk: I’m not actually trying to target one publication here, I think this is systemic. Part of the reason why I pick on New York is because virtually the whole magazine industry is based there, so it’s an easy one to pick.

Anyway, I think there’s a preponderance of people writing about Xinjiang and other important human rights issues, and issues related to China, and Asia more generally. I would say it is always a struggle to get stuff published for these larger reasons of what the landscape looks like.

What are you doing next with your Xinjiang reporting?

Mauk: I have a book review coming that includes some content I wish could’ve made it into the New Yorker piece but didn’t. That’s probably going to be the last thing on Xinjiang for a while; I already have some stuff in the hopper about other subjects that’s going to come out, but probably I will be working on my book for the next long while.

Do you think Western outlets will keep reporting on Xinjiang, or do you think it will fade away like other major news events?

Mauk: I think it will continue because it has become such a poker chip for the U.S. in its foreign policy interests. I think it is just part of this anti-China stuff in the U.S., which I find a little scary, and that’s part of the reason why I think it’s important to produce really high-quality journalism on this subject and to show the situation as it is. I think the reporting has been very good — there’s been really good reporting in the Times, BuzzFeed, NPR. I think the rhetoric that surrounds the reporting — the opinion pieces or the political posturing — that’s a different matter and that’ll be of the quality that you’d expect.

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.

Subscribe Now to Support This Project

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

The trouble with these international events is that media attention inevitably moves away from them. Ben Mauk established himself as a foreign affairs journalist while reporting on the record number of refugees entering Europe — Germany, specifically, for him — but a year after outlets started talking about a “refugee crisis” (scary quotes intentional), the news cycle moved on. With Xinjiang, the international community is dealing with a nation that is not only a leviathan in the larger geopolitical context, but also intent on controlling the narrative.

This being said, Mauk thinks the international attention has made a difference. China’s claims “have certainly changed radically,” he says, since he started reporting on the subject in 2018 — it has since confirmed these camps exist, for one. The pressure from constant reporting has led to people being released from detention. What’s more, the fact China is such a geopolitical force means it’s unlikely Xinjiang will disappear from the discourse any time soon.

Read: More on Xinjiang and China’s Control of Autonomous States

• Megha Rajagopalan and Alison Killing have been analyzing satellite images of the camps to determine their reach and their growth in a multi-part investigation in BuzzFeed News: “China Can Lock Up a Million Muslims in Xinjiang at Once,” July 21, 2021

• Austin Ramzy and Christ Buckley revealed a 403-page document leak from the Chinese government about its Xinjiang activities in the New York Times: “‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims,” November 16, 2019

• Lavender Au talks to and about a teen boy arrested and jailed for spray-painting a bakery as part of the Hong Kong protests, and not just his birth parents, but also his adopted “protest parents” in the New York Review of Books: “The Protest Families of Pro-Democracy Hong Kong,” May 22, 2021

Meet: About the Author

Brian Ng is a writer, originally from Aotearoa–New Zealand, currently living in Te Awa Kairangi–Lower Hutt.

When Daniel Brook read about the attempt to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama earlier this year, he found himself questioning the narrative that dominated much of the mainstream media coverage. Story after story spoke of what an unlikely, unpromising place this was to stage the first attempt to unionize workers at the gigantic company.

Brook knew better. Thanks to a tip from his father, who was born and raised in Birmingham, he had read several histories of the area. He knew that, as a major steel-producing region — the Pittsburgh of the South, as it was often called — greater Birmingham was a hotbed of union activity in the New Deal era and well beyond.

Given that history, he saw the attempt to unionize the warehouse in nearby Bessemer, Alabama, as not strange at all, but rather a shoot that had emerged from dormant but fertile ground. Intrigued by this attempt at rebirth, he took three road trips to the area from his New Orleans home beginning in February to talk to both current and former employees.

Read the Original Harper's Story

His feature story, “Hard Bargain: How Amazon Turned a Generation Against Labor,” is in the July issue of Harper’s magazine. It is a welcome correction to the historical amnesia of much of the coverage as well as convincing evidence that on-the-ground reporting remains the best way to debunk stereotypes and discover people’s deeper motivations. In short, he went in expecting to find a racial divide — and ended up finding a generational one.

Brook is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The Nation, among other publications. His books include The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction, A History of Future Cities, and The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.

Was it your idea to report on the Amazon organizing drive?

Brook: Yes, I pitched the story to Harper’s. I saw a story in the Washington Post just as I was starting to dip my toe back into in-person reporting after the COVID quarantine period. I knew I could drive up to Bessemer from New Orleans and wouldn’t have to get on an airplane.

I knew there had been auto plants in Mississippi and Tennessee that tried and failed to unionize. Those efforts had a strong racial breakdown; African-American workers were much more pro-union than white workers. I thought I was likely walking into a similar situation. But when I got to Bessemer, I realized there weren’t enough white workers for it to matter what they thought in this particular election.

I didn’t realize the workforce is more than 80 percent African American. Does that reflect the racial make-up of the area, or are other factors at play?

Brook: Jefferson County is 40 percent black; the workforce at the lowest level of that plant is over 80 percent. That seems to be a general trend with Amazon’s hiring nationally. Shortly after my piece came out, the New York Times got ahold of some hard data on Amazon’s workforce. They found that, at the lowest job-category level in Amazon’s warehouses, the workforce was plurality Black in 2019. In sheer numbers, they had more black employees than white employees, even though America has 4.5 white people for every black person. So you can see that Blacks are radically overrepresented. How much of that is systemic racism vs. intentional hiring patterns is not clear. It’s a question Amazon won’t address.

So there was no racial divide to navigate, but you did find an enormous generation gap in terms of support for the union. Were you expecting that?

Brook: That surprised me. I went to places that were very white, working-class, overtly Trumpy social spaces, and found the older people were reflexively pro-union. I went to young, woke, African-American places like the local vegan soul food restaurant, and found a fair amount of either skepticism about the union or agnosticism about labor organizing.

What is that about?

Brook: There was not a sense among younger people about the importance of the labor movement to the larger civil rights struggle. There wasn’t a sense that participation in a Black Lives Matter protest, or voting for the Joe Biden–Kamala Harris ticket, should translate into support for a labor union. You can write volumes about the links between the labor movement and the civil rights movement. [Martin Luther King Jr.’s] March on Washington was put together, logistically, by the labor movement. But the way civil rights history is taught in America, all mention of labor organizing as central to the movement has disappeared.

At the other end of the spectrum, you had older people — including Donald Trump voters — who were reflexively pro-union. Unions were part of the social structure of Birmingham for earlier generations.

A lot of the older workers who got the organizing drive started had been union members doing other jobs in the Birmingham area. I met one who had worked for U.S. Steel. The individual who started the drive had worked in a unionized auto parts plant earlier in his career.

How willing were people to talk to you?

Brook: It was easy to find people who work at Amazon to talk to, because there were so many of them; almost 6,000 people were eligible to vote in that election. Everyone in the city worked there, used to work there, or knew someone who worked there. I could get current workers to talk a little, and former workers to talk a lot.

I found a lot more “no” voters than “yes” voters. I was a little concerned that reflected selection bias, with people who supported the union being less likely to talk to a reporter. But once the votes were counted, there were about two “no” voters for every “yes” voter.

Had Amazon instructed workers to avoid talking to the media?

Brook: I don’t know. When I was looking for sources, one worker put up my cell phone number in the break room, and it was taken down. The company in general is incredibly press-shy, which is ironic given that Jeff Bezos owns one of the country’s leading newspapers. They were almost impossible to get anything out of — beyond anything I have ever encountered in my career. I kept asking for a local company representative who could show me around the plant or just meet with me to discuss their strategy, but it never happened. The company did respond to fact-checking from the magazine, rather selectively.

They closed the warehouse to the media, so almost everything I learned about the campaign is from talking to workers in the parking lot — and almost all of them voted “no.” They had a very elaborate campaign inside the plant. There was swag! There were little hanging “vote no” signs to hang on the mirror of your car.

Why hide all that from the public? Were they afraid of bad publicity?

Brook: They’re in sort of a weird spot. In principle, they subscribe to all of the United Nations and International Labour Organization conventions. They say that on their website. They never fully acknowledged that they ran a “vote no”’ campaign, I think because that would make it impossible to claim in good faith that they’re supporters of the ILO labor rights conventions and the U.N. human rights conventions. “‘Vote no”’ campaigns run afoul of that. They’re considered coercive.

What mistakes did the union organizers make, in your view?

Brook: I was surprised that the union never did anything as simple as have a day when people wear pro-union shirts to work, which you can’t be fired for. Also, Biden made a statement in support of the union, but not until halfway through the voting period. That’s like endorsing somebody at 3 p.m. on election day. Most of the votes had already been cast.

One of the things the union has been saying is “it’s hard to organize the warehouses because there’s so much turnover.” The turnover rate is enormous; in general, these Amazon warehouses have over 100 percent turnover annually, which means more people quit every year than ever work at the facility at any given time.

I talked to a lot of people who said “I’d support the union if I still worked there, but I don’t anymore.” But if you have so many people there who hate it so much that they’re going to quit, can’t you mobilize that dead-ender corps?

The worker you spotlight in the story, Carrington Byers, has his own cosmetic company, and he clearly sees his Amazon job as one small step on his road to wealth and success. Did his story, and others’, suggest to you that the American dream of making it rich is alive and well, and this makes collective action difficult?

Brook: Not everyone in the plant had a side hustle like Carrington. The attitude was more, “this is just another gig.” I talked to one worker who quit and went back to waitressing, which she found preferable to basically working in a factory.

At the vegan soul-food restaurant, I spoke with a lot of young men who were self-employed. They did things like painting houses, home repair, construction. I got the sense that they may be making more money at the Amazon warehouse, but it wasn’t worth it. It was too demeaning. That resonated with me. Being a freelancer, I lose out in terms of dollars, but I don’t have a supervisor breathing down my neck. As long as I hit my deadlines, people leave me alone.

That said, when I worked at a newspaper, I did try to organize the workers — unsuccessfully. That was at the Philadelphia City Paper, an alt-weekly that no longer exists. There’s currently an uptick in organizing among journalists, which I think is long overdue.

Speaking of membership organizations, are you a member of Amazon Prime?

Brook: I am not. But I have shopped at Amazon. During the pandemic, I needed some record sleeves. I have a family friend who runs a local record store; I could have done whatever was necessary to buy it from their store. But I bought them from Amazon. They came from the Bessemer warehouse. So I am a customer of the Bessemer warehouse.

I have very mixed feelings about that. But the issue of monopoly power is central to any debate about shopping in the age of Amazon. The real way to solve a problem like Amazon is through trust-busting and regulation — not consumer action.

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

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

“This story is not over by any means,” according to Daniel Brook, who notes the National Labor Relations Board is weighing the various objections to the company’s behavior during the union election. “It seems very likely that the NLRB will find merit in one or more of the union’s objections to how the vote was conducted,” he said. “I think it’ll be very likely to order another election at that plant.”

Looking at the bigger picture, he notes that the Teamsters “now have a national campaign to organize its workers. There’s a lot of worker activism at Amazon facilities across America right now.” That said, he argues that the real question is whether such efforts can succeed “without reforms of American labor law, and without stricter application of anti-trust laws.”

“The penalties for breaking labor laws are so light that it’s almost in the company’s interest to violate the law,” he says. “If it is found that they violated the law, there is another election. If the worst penalty for any crime was just getting a do-over, there would be a lot more crimes!”

Read: More on Working at Amazon

• The New York Times digs deep into Amazon’s operations, and examines the poor treatment alleged by many of its workers: “The Amazon That Customers Don’t See,” June 15, 2021

• Molly Kinder, who studies the present and future of work for the Brookings Institution, discusses the failed unionization attempt in this podcast: “What Does the Amazon Union Effort Signify for Labor in America?” April 9, 2021

• The Teamsters spell out their big-picture plans for unionizing Amazon workers: “Teamsters Union Votes to Make Organizing Amazon Workers a Priority,” June 24, 2021

Meet: About the Author

Tom Jacobs is a former senior staff writer for Santa Barbara-based Pacific Standard magazine, and a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. He tracks and analyzes trends in the arts and social sciences, with an emphasis on psychology, the role of culture, and the cultivation of creativity. A native of Chicago, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University.

The residents of Rameswaram, a tiny fishing town on Pamban Island, are familiar with severe cyclonic storms and natural disasters. A remnant of the land bridge that once connected southern India and Sri Lanka, islands like Pamban have been plagued by tropical cyclones for decades. Scientists say climate change has only made this worse.

As the Indian Ocean heats up, cyclonic storms, which are known to increase in intensity over warmer waters, are steadily growing worse, and becoming more frequent. Dhanushkodi, a now-abandoned town on Pamban Island, was devastated by one of the most powerful storms to ever strike India — and that was nearly 60 years ago, in 1964.

But on December 4th, 2018, with Cyclone Gaja looming over the island, the fisher community leapt into action and used radio broadcasts to save hundreds of lives. Jockeys at Kadal Osai (meaning “sound or music of the sea”), a four-year-old local community radio station on Pamban Island, broadcast information about the storm throughout the night. “When I got information that if all boats on the northern side of the island were shifted away, they should be safe from the storm, I immediately got onto the radio and began broadcasting this message repeatedly,” P Lenin, one of the jockeys at Kadal Osai, told Sibi Arasu for a story in Climate Home News, an independent news site covering the climate crisis.

The Original Climate Home News Story

“Kadal Osai helped a lot of people during Cyclone Gaja,” says Arasu, a Bengaluru-based environment journalist whose story on Kadal Osai was part of a reporting initiative focused on communities, mainly in developing nations, that are suffering the worst effects of climate change despite contributing very little to it. “Tamil Nadu [a state in southern India] is at the forefront of climate change, and Rameswaram is surrounded by the sea. So it is frequently battered by strong winds and cyclones,” he added.

Arasu, who is intrigued by how local community radio programs have helped local communities, often marginalized or overlooked by mainstream media, spoke to The Postscript about his pursuit of this story. He discussed the resilience shown by the islanders, and the takeaways for other communities experiencing climate change. The interview has been edited for concision and clarity

The east coast of India has always been prone to cyclones, which are particularly devastating to island towns. But the media tends to cover cyclone-hit urban areas more extensively than it does smaller towns. How did you come by the story of Kadal Osai and Pamban Island?

Arasu: There’s a group called the CJRF [Climate Justice Resilience Fund], and they have partnered with a publication called Climate Home News. I came across a call for pitches through various newsletters and my freelance reporter network, about how Climate Home News had funds to commission stories on how climate change is affecting people living in the Bay of Bengal. That’s what got me thinking about this.

When I saw the pitch call, I thought — being from Chennai, and familiar with the Bay of Bengal — it made sense for me to pitch. I was working on another story about climate change adaptation in the Bay of Bengal region, so I wanted to come up with a few more ideas that would fit Climate Home News, and some of the ideas I came up with then were about how community radio in general, not just Kadal Osai, but other stations as well, have been extremely effective in warning people about the risks of climate change.

I think there’s another community radio program in Odisha, and there are a few other initiatives that have been extremely effective in helping people evacuate to safer ground when a cyclone or something has happened. So I thought that was a great use of this platform.

The thing with community radio is that the range, or the distance over which it can be listened to, is not much. The range is very minimal compared to other radio programs. I think they can go up to about 20-30 kilometers [roughly 12-19 miles], if I’m not mistaken. And community radio is also subject to India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which sometimes acts as a hurdle in the effective functioning of radio stations. For instance, one stipulation is that these stations can’t cover politics; another is that they have to make sure their program reaches a certain radius from where the station is located.

But because of — or maybe despite — all of these conditions, community radio has been a really effective and efficient platform to connect with people who live in regions that are otherwise a bit disconnected, because of reasons like a lack of infrastructure.

Even in Chhattisgarh, there’s a great community radio program called CGNet Swara that has provided communication to the Adivasi community [an umbrella term for tribal communities in India] in the region. So I’d also pitched a few other ideas about the effects of climate change in the Bay of Bengal region. But the editors really liked this idea.

What made you decide to cover it?

Arasu: I had seen a few reports about community radio in the papers and I’ve also reported other Rameswaram pieces, so, in my work as a journalist, there have been multiple occasions where I have gotten in touch with sources in the area. I’m quite familiar with that region. Once I realized that it was very easy for me to get in touch with the people who run the radio channel, I knew it was a go.

The channel is run by Gayatri Usman, who is the manager of sorts, and the funding comes from a fisherperson who is now a successful businessperson.

I got in touch with Gayatri and she was really helpful; she was more than happy for a piece to be done on her radio channel and I spoke to her in great detail. Then she connected me to one of her jockeys, P Lenin. I spoke to him at length as well.

He’s actually from the fisher community, went on to graduate, and I think he was working in Chennai, but he had decided to come back to his hometown and had taken up this job, and he’s been at the radio station for the last two years. He’s a very enthusiastic journalist. I went through some of their episodes on Spotify (I speak Tamil, of course), so I went over their episodes, and spoke to a few of their listeners, both men and women. I had some really productive conversations with them, where they talked about how they relate to the radio station, and feel it truly is [a part of their] own community.

It was lovely to speak to all these stakeholders, and after these conversations — that happened over a week — I sent in my draft to the editor of Climate Home News. She got back with some suggestions and questions, and revised the piece to suit an international audience that may not be familiar with Pamban Island or Rameswaram, or India. It was carried on their site soon after.

What were your favorite parts of reporting this story? Can you tell us a bit about how your interactions with the islanders went? What did you learn about their lives?

Arasu: One happy fallout of this exercise is that, unlike many of the other stories I’ve done, I’ve managed to have lasting relationships with the people at Kadal Osai, as well as some of the fisherwomen I spoke to.

Some of them have had to find alternate sources of income, because climate change has caused fish stock to deplete. Some of them are making and selling jewelry and other crafts. The government is encouraging them. There’s an organization called CMFRI [Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute], where the Rameshwaram branch is encouraging residents to take up seaweed farming.

I spoke to the director of the CMFRI about his views on Kadal Osai, because [the station] often gets these experts onto their show for interviews. So I’ve been in touch with those people ever since, and we have a good relationship. We’ve been in touch with regards to other stories as well.

You spoke of how community radio programs across the world and India have been successful in warning people of the dangers of climate change, and helping to keep communities safe when natural disasters occur. Could you tell us more about some of these programs?

Arasu: So there are a few community radio programs that I’ve heard of, and they do great work. CGNet Swara is one, like I mentioned. Then there’s GraamVaani in Jharkhand [a state in the north of India], and Radio Namaskar in Odisha [a state bordering India’s east coast], which has been awarded three community radio awards by the government of India.

The Radio Namaskar station is based out of Konark [home to India’s famous Sun Temple] in Odisha, and they really helped people during Cyclone Fani. The jockeys informed listeners about the direction from which the cyclone was approaching, which enabled many villagers to travel to safety. So the radio literally saved their lives.

Similarly, Kadal Osai also helped a lot of people during Cyclone Gaja. One of India’s worst cyclones destroyed the town of Dhanushkodi, which is at the edge of Rameswaram. The cyclone literally flattened the town. So that region has seen a lot of loss due to natural disasters, and the station, Kadal Osai, is playing a part in helping people become resilient to climate change as well as adapt to it and mitigate the effects.

Has the government of India stepped forward to help the people of Pamban Island, offering financial aid or any other form of support?

Arasu: I think it differs from case to case. Maybe in certain situations [people have] received aid, and in others they haven’t. I won’t be able to give you a general answer. It really depends.

How was your story received? What impact would you say it has had?

Arasu: I think this story was very well-received. I don’t think an international publication had reported on Kadal Osai before; I could be wrong. I think it got good feedback on social media. Climate Home News is a platform that is followed by a lot of people who are in the business of climate change, so I think it made a qualitative impact too, because the people who are dealing with, say, climate negotiations or are doing academic research into it … I have a feeling this reached a lot of them. While earlier stories might not have reached such a targeted audience, this one did.

Are there takeaways or lessons other fishing communities can take from the people of Pamban Island and their widely successful community radio channel?

Arasu: The people of Pamban Island and Rameshwaram are extremely entrepreneurial, despite all of the difficulties they face, like the harsh weather and living in a high-security area because of India’s maritime boundary line with Sri Lanka. They are very enthusiastic and optimistic people. And they’re very aware and vocal about their rights.

One lesson other fishing communities across India or elsewhere in the developing world can take away from them is about how these kinds of small initiatives can have a really big footprint. There’s also a positive feedback loop where the communities are becoming more empowered, while the station also becomes a more confident media entity, because of the appreciation they are getting.

The station itself was started by a fisherperson from the community. The initiative itself was not something that a funding agency or a Western or international organization like the United Nations set up. A local person started and set up the entire initiative. And it’s benefiting his own community; you can do things to make your own life better is the lesson here.

When reporting the story, what steps, if any, did you take to center diverse voices, and to produce a balanced story? Did you make a conscious effort to reach out to a diverse group of sources?

Arasu: I’ve tried to include as many voices as possible — from Indigenous communities and from women — in my stories, and to have a gender and caste balance wherever possible.

For this story, I spoke to fishermen as well as fisherwomen, quite deliberately. In terms of experts, like the CMFRI people, most were men, so I didn’t have a choice. At the radio station, I just let them decide who I spoke to. It was their prerogative. But the station is woman-led and is run by Usman, who I spoke to in great detail.

How heavily do the people of Pamban Island rely on fishing to earn a livelihood? What’s a typical day in their lives like?

Arasu: Fishing is their primary source of livelihood. During the fishing season, I think fishers, if I’m not mistaken, go into the sea before dawn breaks, and spend a whole day and sometimes a night at sea, and then come back. There are a lot of trawlers in the region. A lot of people work in these large, mechanized trawlers that go deep into the sea. And there are a lot of small-scale fishermen as well; they use catamarans or smaller boats for their fishing activities.

There’s also a lot of tourism; there’s this big Rama temple on the island, so religious tourists come from all over the country and the world to visit. Rameswaram is a part of the Char Dham [four pilgrimage sites in India that are believed to help pilgrims attain “moksha,” or salvation]. So there’s a lot of footfall, especially from Hindu religious tourists.

The island is very long, and not very broad. I think the broadest it is is about 10 kilometers [roughly six miles]. It is heavily affected by climate change because of its location. It borders the Gulf of Mannar, and has great biodiversity in its waters.

You mentioned not being to travel for this story, owing to COVID-19 restrictions. Do you think that affected the story?

Arasu: I didn’t undertake any travel for this story because of COVID restrictions, but I’ve traveled to the region multiple times before. So I know how the place looks and what the people are like, which helped me set the scene, even though I couldn’t travel for this particular story.

It would have been amazing if I could have traveled. There’s nothing like actually being on the ground while reporting. But given the circumstances, this was OK; I was already familiar with the area and its people.

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.

Subscribe Now to Support This Project

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

“They really want to report more about climate change and the environment. And they’re trying to work toward growing their audience,” says Sibi Arasu of Kadal Osai. “One of the most effective things about the radio station is that they inform the community about schemes that are meant for them — government schemes that they might not have heard of otherwise. And listeners can call up [with] any questions that they have. It was a highly successful effort, and it continues to be a highly successful effort. And, if I’m not mistaken, they are trying to expand their range, for how far the channel can be broadcast.”

Read: More on Life on Pamban Island

• Poonam Binayak’s story for Culture Trip on the aftermath of the 1964 cyclone that ravaged Dhanushkodi, leaving it uninhabitable: “The Story Behind the Lost Land of Dhanushkodi in India,” November 7, 2017

• Meenakshi J reports for the BBC’s Future Planet on India’s seaweed boom: “The World’s Fastest-Growing Source of Food,” December 15, 2020

• Akshaya Nath’s reporting for DailyO highlights the consequences of conflict between the Sri Lankan and Indian navies: “Rameswaram Fishing Community Is Haunted by the Death of a 21-Year-Old Boy,” March 16, 2017

Meet: About the Author

Aishwarya Jagani is a copywriter-turned-journalist who writes about technology and its impact. Based out of India, she has reported on authoritarian tech, climate change, racism, and diversity, and her work has appeared in publications including Bustle, The Quint, Digital Privacy News, The Spill, and Kaspersky’s Secure Futures.

Over the past few years, reporters on the politics beat in North Carolina have increasingly found themselves splitting time between the General Assembly building in Raleigh and the halls of higher education across the state, where administrative proceedings have become increasingly partisan.

Reporting for non-profit newsroom NC Policy Watch, Joe Killian has spent much of this year covering the controversy over the hiring of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones to the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill’s journalism school. As soon as the school’s Board of Trustees announced its plans to offer Hannah-Jones a tenured professorship, news backlash flooded local and national outlets. Conservative activist groups connected to the UNC system’s Board of Governors took issue with the hire, citing questions of objectivity related to Hannah-Jones’ work on the 1619 Project. Walter Hussman, the journalism school’s donor namesake and a longtime newspaper publisher, was among those who expressed reservations about appointing Hannah-Jones to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.

Read the Original NC Policy Watch Story

In May, two months before Hannah-Jones was set to join UNC, Killian broke the news that the Board of Trustees had changed its mind. The new plan was to withhold a vote on tenure for Hannah-Jones until she’d served in the role for at least five years. This was unprecedented, and led Killian to investigate the byzantine system that connects North Carolina politicians and political activists with the administration of the state’s 16 public universities.

As Killian first reported, though the Board of Trustees ultimately held a public vote to grant Hannah-Jones tenure, she declined in favor of Howard University. Below, Killian explains how he got the story, and why it’s not over for UNC, which has become a focal point for national issues of equity and free speech during the racial reckoning of the past several years.

You don’t typically report on higher ed — you’re a politics and policy guy. How did you end up breaking this particular story?

Killian: Unfortunately, higher education is a political beat now. Public higher education has never been more politicized in North Carolina, so it’s partisan, it’s political, and it’s contentious. And in those spaces are where investigative reporters go. [There’s been] massive turnover in leadership, political scandals, just real stuff that you’d see in politics but you don’t often see in higher education.

If you’re reporting anything long enough, and you do good sourcing and you don’t burn your sources, people will come to you with stuff, so I began hearing about Nikole Hannah-Jones being hired even before it was public. Particularly in conservative political circles, people were talking about it before any news got out. A number of people who are directly connected to the UNC system and its Board of Governors and the Board of Trustees are also connected to conservative activism and activist publications and organizations, so there was some back and forth between those folks, and I was listening and trying to discern how big of a problem that might be.

Then the deal was struck to essentially keep the tenure question from coming to a vote by the Board of Trustees, which is unusual. It happens all the time in politics; at the North Carolina General Assembly it’s not unusual for something to go into a committee and die, but to never see a public vote with something like tenure appointment? That’s very unusual. Nobody can point to another instance in the school’s history.

I understand some major parts of this process were private. How did you do your reporting?

Killian: The committee discussions about this, to the degree that there were any, those things can be and were held in closed sessions, and the board held a closed session at its last meeting for three hours before it held a public vote. But, I mean, the truth is people talk. And especially if the board’s large enough, and there are enough people who are dissatisfied with the transparency, somebody’s going to talk.

This has gotten very cloak and dagger over at UNC. I’ve got people who are very deep in the UNC system and at these schools who call me on my mobile phone, contact me over the Signal app, who, you know, send me documents in an encrypted way, because there’s a lot of political retribution for people who speak out. They’ve been warned not to talk about closed sessions or personnel matters, not just things that are closely held but just expressing opinions. People get pushed out of jobs, people get called on the carpet, things get defunded, people lose their positions on boards just for making the sort of observations that should be protected by the First Amendment. So, my recent work on things involving the Board of Governors and the Boards of Trustees of universities has relied to some extent on comments from people to whom I have granted anonymity. And that is always a very strange and dangerous area to get into for a reporter, and I don’t like doing it. I’ve had to deal with it more than ever when reporting on these things, because it’s not just a matter of being afraid of losing your job, which they certainly are, or political or financial retribution, which certainly happens, but also there is a clamp down on information that should be public information — the lack of press conferences where you could actually ask a question.

You got some flak on Twitter about whether your reporting on this was “objective,” which has also been a big piece of the controversy over Nikole Hannah-Jones herself. You’ve argued that it’s more important to be “fair” than to be objective. Can you expand on that?

Killian: When I was 16 years old, first getting involved in journalism, an early mentor of mine said to me: “People don’t want us to be objective, they want us to be fair.” Every reporter is bringing something to stories; there’s no harm in letting people know you are a whole person and that you are bringing something to the story. I would never misquote someone, take their quote out of context. I wouldn’t write something about somebody without calling them and getting some sort of response. Over time, if you are reasonable, then even if you’re not happy with the things I’m reporting you have to acknowledge that I’m fair to you.

Walter Hussman, I had an hour-plus interview with him and the piece that I produced, I’m sure, to some extent, he wasn’t terribly happy about. But he can’t say that I’m misquoting him on anything. I read him sections of the piece I thought that he might object to and got his reaction to things people said about him. He wasn’t surprised by any of it, and he hasn’t come forward and said anything that we’ve written is wrong or unfair.

Journalism is a fairly small world and I’m friendly with conservative journalists. I think that ideology is one thing, but if you’re a bad reporter, you’re a bad reporter.

You’ve said you treat sources for and subjects in your stories with the same respect you do readers. What does that mean to you and how did you come to that approach?

Killian: I talk about personal stuff with sources and with readers. If somebody calls me up and talks about something that I’ve written about the military, I let them know, my dad was a career Marine, that’s where I come from when I write about things dealing with the military. If somebody calls me up to talk about, you know, policing, I let them know I was a cops and courts reporter for years. I’m married, I have friends who are gay and lesbian, transgender, I come from an interracial family, these are personal things that aren’t necessarily anybody’s business, but I’m also not ashamed of any of them and they do absolutely inform my work. I think it assumes a certain lack of intelligence in your readers to assume that if you do a certain number of things, they’re not going to be able to tell whether or not you have personal opinions or you have life experiences.

Nikole Hannah-Jones gave you an exclusive interview when the main drama was over. Why did she choose you?

Killian: She was open about why she chose me, which is that we broke the story here in North Carolina, and it turned into a national and an international story. But we stayed on it too, and we pulled that thread and we got things that otherwise hadn’t been reported. Nikole Hannah-Jones comes from newsrooms, you know, she started off at the Chapel Hill News, a very small publication. Anybody who has that background knows what it’s like to be working on a big story and to really be breaking stuff, and then in comes the New York Times and the Washington Post and NBC News, and suddenly the people who are the principles in this forget you. I don’t blame them for that, but Nikole Hannah-Jones had that experience and she’s been in situations where she’s reporting something and suddenly a bigger dog comes in and eats your lunch, so knowing that, and appreciating the reporting that we did throughout this, she said, “I’d be happy to talk to you when I’m ready to talk publicly.” It shows that she remembers where she came from.

You’ve talked a bit about differences in your interview experiences with the two main characters in this saga — Nikole Hannah-Jones and Walter Hussman. Why were those differences important and how did they shape your reporting?

Killian: There are some people who are a little bit skittish about talking to reporters because they just haven’t done it a lot, and then there are people who are very smooth, because they do it all the time. Walter Hussman, it was very apparent to me right away, this guy gives a lot of interviews. It was very folksy and warm. I’d been pursuing an interview with him and not getting one, then the excellent article that John Drescher wrote in The Assembly came out and [then] Hussman did call me back. Right away he began with, “Joe, you and I are both reporters.” It’s a nice tool because it does the thing that you’re supposed to be doing, finding some common ground. But Nikole Hannah-Jones didn’t do that with me; she didn’t really have to, because it was apparent.

She’s a Black woman, so she’s faced things in journalism I’ve never faced and will never face. And she’s had a lot more success because she’s a lot more talented. But if you look at her story and you look at my story, we both come from working class roots … we both got into journalism and worked our way from very small publications up, covering a lot of the same beats. With Hussman I think there’s a disconnect, because I do think he really thinks of himself as not only a journalist and somebody who’s been a reporter, but also an expert. He’s coming down the mountain to hand you the tablets on what journalism is and what it should be. Hussman’s views about objectivity and his core values of journalism come primarily from his many decades as the publisher and owner of a media empire that he inherited. I also think that, when you talk about objectivity the way that he does, you’re talking about a very specific, narrow experience of journalism. The Black press, the Asian press, the Latinx press, the queer press, the native press, they don’t have and never have had the luxury of deciding that being objective is the highest and best purpose of journalism.

Were you surprised by the virality of this particular story, given its focus on something as banal as academic tenure?

Killian: I think I was a little initially, but when you sit back and think about it, it makes a lot of sense, because it just kind of has everything. Right now, we’re in one of a series of tense, terrible racial moments in this country, and this is part of an ongoing argument about race and politics and the history of America. Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 Project has been part of the political argument, but it’s turned into sort of a second “Satanic Panic” over things like critical race theory and, you know, what the purpose of teaching history is supposed to be. And because that political conversation is ongoing and it’s white-hot right now, then somebody like Nikole Hannah-Jones being in a tenure flap with the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, it was bound to blow up into something like this once the facts were out there.

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

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

Joe Killian said this experience has shaken trust among faculty and students at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, who have expressed to him that they don’t feel supported. The Board of Trustees has some new members, who come from even more hardline conservative activist backgrounds. Meanwhile, some of those coming off their terms on the board this year have said they’re unsure about the status of their political careers going forward.

“It’s not over,” Killian said, also pointing to the “racial reckoning” that has been ignited and will continue to burn on UNC–Chapel Hill’s campus and around the country. “Nikole Hannah Jones is gonna be at Howard,” he added, “but the problems that she faced here don’t go anywhere.”

Read: More on Nikole Hannah-Jones & UNC–Chapel Hill

• Sally Greene on race and free speech at UNC in the American Scholar: “When History Rhymes,” July 8, 2021

• John Drescher about what might be next for the UNC Board of Trustees in The Assembly: “The Struggle for Power at UNC,” July 7, 2021

• A deeper dive into what this was like for Nikole Hannah-Jones, by Kate Murphy at the Raleigh News & Observer: “The 3 Critical Moments That Gave Nikole Hannah-Jones the Clarity to Turn Down UNC,” July 10, 2021

• Walter Hussman stands by his actions: “UNC Donor Says He Has No Regrets About His Role in the Journalism School Losing Nikole Hannah-Jones” by Rick Edmonds in Poynter, July 6, 2021

The Golden Globes have long been seen as the sketchy sibling of the Oscars and the Emmys. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization of little-known journalists that bestows the annual awards, is routinely dismissed as a group of grifters and clowns who play a useful role in the Hollywood hype machine. As long as publicity-seeking stars kept attending the nationally televised ceremony, and millions of viewers kept tuning in, few in the industry felt the need to ask who the 87 voting members were, or how they made their choices.

Journalists have periodically tried to pierce this secrecy over the decades, to little avail. That all changed earlier this year. On February 21st, the Los Angeles Times published a lengthy expose providing evidence of widespread corruption, including schemes by which the non-profit organization enriched many of its members. An accompanying story highlighted an even more startling fact: The organization did not have a single Black member.

Read the Original L.A. Times Story

This time, people with clout took notice. Hollywood insiders, led by prominent creators of color, began protesting on social media. Over the following weeks, the pressure for reform gradually grew, culminating in NBC’s May 10th announcement that the Globes, which were first presented in 1944, will be on hiatus next year. Whether they return the year after is anyone’s guess.

This strong response has been a pleasant surprise to Times reporters Stacy Perman and Josh Rottenberg, who spent six months writing and rewriting the initial stories — and are still on the beat. “When we were working on the story, it didn’t occur to us in our wildest dreams that not only would NBC pull the show, but Tom Cruise would return his Golden Globes,” Rottenberg said.

“While we were working on it, a lot of people asked us why we were even bothering,” Perman added. “Much later, when we were pursuing subsequent stories, I had a conversation with a studio executive who said a lot of this was known, but, [because of] the way it was laid out in the story, ‘a lot of us realized it just wasn’t OK anymore.’”

Perman and Rottenberg talked about their pursuit of the story, how it came together, and its long afterlife in an interview with The Postscript. It has been edited for concision and clarity.

The idea that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is prone to corruption is hardly new. In the 1980s, there were credible allegations that a man essentially bought a Golden Globe for his girlfriend, actress Pia Zadora. Why did the two of you decide to take a deep dive into an organization that so many have written about before?

Rottenberg: It’s true that the HFPA’s shenanigans are well-trod ground. The impetus was the lawsuit this Norwegian journalist, Kjersti Flaa, filed accusing the HFPA as operating as a sort of cartel and institutionalizing a culture of corruption. I got an email from my editor last August asking me to look into it. I remember he said, “this could lead somewhere, or nowhere at all.”

Our feeling at the beginning was: Was there anything new to say about the HFPA? But as we went on, we found a lot that had not been reported before. Also, while some of the broad strokes were known, it’s a different time now. With all these organizations inside and outside Hollywood engaging in a reckoning about race, it all hit differently. While the HFPA had certainly taken its hits over the years, it had never done so in the context of social media, Black Lives Matter, and Time’s Up.

Perman: There was also a lot of pent-up frustration with the organization within the industry. People had reached a boiling point. Also, we got a hold of a lot of financial documents that backed up a lot of the rumors, accusations, and claims about the group.

Were people who had kept quiet in the past now willing to talk to you?

Perman: It was an interesting challenge, in that a lot of people didn’t want to speak, but they also wanted the story told. We worked on the initial stories for six months. A lot of that time was getting an understanding of the players, cultivating sources, getting people to talk to us, getting ahold of documents. It was a laborious process.

Rottenberg: Within the HFPA, there is a well-known code of silence. Although they’re journalists, they don’t talk to the press about how they actually operate — or even who is in the group. They operate in their own shadowy little corner and don’t interface with other journalists covering Hollywood.

Within the industry, there was a sense of “we know what the deal is, but we don’t want to talk about it.” The ecosystem that empowered this group doesn’t reflect well on a lot of people. So getting people to talk on the record was incredibly challenging. Now that the information is out there, the taboo has lifted a little bit, and people are talking more openly.

Perman: After our story came out, the Hollywood publicists announced they were withholding their talent from (engaging with) the group. That became a big turning point. They told us they wanted to do this a year earlier, but they felt they couldn’t. It was basically our story that allowed them to do it at this point at time.

It is interesting that, of all the players involved, it was the publicists who were the first ones to actually take decisive action. Did it surprise you that they were the people who said “no”?

Perman: That was very, very surprising. It turns out they wield a lot more power than even they understood, particularly when they marshaled it in a critical mass.

Rottenberg: I was stunned when that happened. These people who profited directly from the Globes said “we’re turning off this machine until this gets cleaned up.”

The Globes run on stardom. That’s the currency of the HFPA, their life blood. There was a lot of talent in Hollywood that was fed up with what they had to do to court the HFPA year-in and year-out — the way the press conferences were run, the kinds of questions that were asked. There was pressure from a lot of the talent to say “enough is enough.” The publicists eventually forced the hand of NBC, but the decision to pull the plug on the Golden Globes for next year came almost two months later.

It took a lot of time for the other players to reckon with this. No one wants to be the one who pulls the plug, because everyone makes a lot of money from it. That’s why it has gone on for all these years. But now that we’re in this new moment, we’re seeing everybody recalibrate what they get out of this vs. the cost of being associated with it.

Going back and rereading your original story, it was mainly about corruption. But a lot of the reaction was driven by your revelation that the HFPA had no Black members. Did that surprise you? Did it require you to shift your focus a bit?

Perman: There were two aspects to the story that surprised us when they caught fire: The news about the HPFA having no Black members, and the Emily in Paris junket. Both got a lot of attention, and they pulled the rest of the story into the conversation.

Why did the controversy over Emily in Paris, a Netflix show that was nominated for best comedy series after 30 HFPA members who were flown to France and wined and dined on the set, raise so many eyebrows? Hasn’t this sort of thing been happening for many years?

Perman: The HFPA has a reputation for being easily influenced, and this put a fine point on that. This was a strange nomination; it wasn’t on any critic’s Top Five list. It took the whispers that had long surrounded the HFPA and filled in the blanks.

It’s fascinating that the HFPA is being forced to answer for its self-dealing and corruption in large part because people are upset not about that, but about the organization’s lack of diversity.

Perman: There is some overlap between the diversity issue and their ethical lapses and financial conduct. Soon after the initial stories ran, [film director] Ava DuVernay and [television producer] Shonda Rhimes went on social media to say their Black-led content was snubbed.

Rottenberg: Emily in Paris is a frothy show about a white woman. Even one of the writers on the show called it a show about white privilege, and she was surprised it was nominated. I May Destroy You is a show that deals with issues of race and has a Black woman at the center of it. It was in a different category than Emily in Paris, but the fact that show was overlooked and Emily in Paris was nominated tied together the two issues (of alleged racism and corruption).

Besides simply conveying so much information, what was your biggest challenge in writing the initial story?

Rottenberg: One of the tricky things was the audience for the story straddles the industry, which understands the history and how this ecosystem works, and the people who just watch the Golden Globes but know nothing about the HFPA. We had to figure out how to present the piece in such a way that it resonated with both of those audiences.

This was a very long piece for the L.A. Times to run. There were different ways we could have broken it down. It was one of the top editors, pretty late in the process, who said we should take all the information about who is and is not in the group and break it out into a sort of sidebar. That took some of the pressure off.

What guidelines were you working under regarding using anonymous sources?

Perman: If we use an unnamed source, we generally have corroboration, either by documentation or another source who backed up what they said. You always have to evaluate the credibility of sources, but, in many cases, we had multiple sources telling us the same piece of information. If a piece of information came from was a single source who wouldn’t go on the record, that wouldn’t meet our standards.

So are you still on this beat?

Rottenberg: We’re constantly joking that we’re going to be on this until the end of time. We are going onto the fifth month (since our initial story ran), and there are still elements emerging. In saying the show will not air in 2022, the can has been kicked down the road. There’s a lot still to come. So even as we do other stories, we’re staying on top of the continuing drama.

How did this go from an inside-Hollywood story to something much larger?

Perman: I think this story, even though it’s very specific to the entertainment industry, touches on a lot of larger themes, like racial justice, the #metoo movement, equity, representation, power, money, and influence. People are trying to figure out how all of those are changing, and how it affects them. If you peel off the celebrity aspect of the story, there are a lot of relatable social issues. Institutions of all types are having a reckoning and being held accountable. This story fits into all of that.

Rottenberg: The story of the HFPA is these are people who should have almost no power — but because they give out this award, and Hollywood saw an opportunity to leverage the group and its award for their own benefit, that invested the whole thing with this importance it wouldn’t have had otherwise. But that’s also why it was kind of a house of cards.

The actual wizard behind the curtain is this random group of journalists representing mostly obscure outlets, if any. They were bestowed this power, but it’s now clear that it can easily and quickly be taken away. To me, that’s endlessly fascinating.

When you put it in those thematic terms, it sounds like this saga could be made into a good movie.

Perman: That would be very meta.

Rottenberg: The characters are almost too weird to believe, in some cases. It could be a movie like The Big Short, but it’s very much an open question whether Hollywood would want to tell this story. It doesn’t exactly reflect well on the industry.

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.

Subscribe Now to Support This Project

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Predict: What Happens Next?

Neither Stacy Perman nor Josh Rottenberg were willing to hazard a guess as to whether the Golden Globes will come back. Perman noted that Hollywood is currently dealing with “awards fatigue”; the ratings of virtually all of the major awards shows have been down this year. If that pattern holds next year, it could dampen enthusiasm for bringing back the Globes in 2023.

On the other hand, Rottenberg cautioned, “this is an award show that has been kicked off television twice before, and they’ve managed to come back.” He continued: “There’s so much money involved that there’s an incentive to try to make it work. Ultimately it’s going to be up to the celebrities — and the audience.”

Read: More on the Golden Globes

• Scott Feinberg at the Hollywood Reporter puts the current scandals in perspective: “Are the Golden Globes Done For?” May 12, 2021

• Chris Lee’s reporting for Vulture confirms and follows up on some of the L.A. Times’ reporting: “How the Golden Globes Canceled Themselves,” May 14, 2021

• Golden Oldie: A 1996 Washington Post story from Sharon Waxman about how questionable the Hollywood Foreign Press Association seemed even then: “Fool’s Gold,” December 6, 1996

Meet: About the Author

Tom Jacobs is a former senior staff writer for Santa Barbara-based Pacific Standard magazine, and a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. He tracks and analyzes trends in the arts and social sciences, with an emphasis on psychology, the role of culture, and the cultivation of creativity. A native of Chicago, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University.