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

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

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

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

• Marcia Facundo is a Dominican-American reporter who has lived in the United States for several decades. She covers Latino, Hispanic, and immigration beats for Politica Ya, a part of Entravision.

• Sanya Mansoor is Muslim reporter for Time. She was a contributor to the BIPOC-led issue, “Visions of Equity,” and has included coverage of the Muslim community in her reporting.

• Serena Daniari is a trans reporter for Them, a Condé Nast publication. She has been reporting on the trans and LGBTQ community the majority of her journalism career.

• Lucy Feldman is senior editor at Time. She has written first-person narratives as an Asian American and she oversees the work of journalists who actively cover their own communities for the magazine. She was the lead editor on Time’s first BIPOC-led issue covering stories important to the BIPOC community.

• Nicole Cardoza is the founder of the Anti-Racism Daily Newsletter, covering issues important to her community and overseeing writers covering their own communities.

• Molly Jong-Fast is an author and opinion writer for Vogue, The Daily Beast, and The Atlantic.

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

For Journalists

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

• Do use your existing relationships and knowledge of any community of which you are a part to make strong directional choices and get access to people that would be beneficial and appropriate sources for your reporting.

• Don’t go to your friends and family as sources; make sure you vet your sources and go above and beyond to make sure that any source you are using is a benefit to your coverage.

• Do push yourself out of your specific sub-community bubble. What other people or experiences are within your broader umbrella community? Open yourself up to experiences that are not innate to you but are a part of your community. Don’t be afraid to use your intimate knowledge of any people or place.

• Do have multiple conversations with your editor. Whether it’s a conversation before getting started on a piece or a discussion during the writing process if you think that you may be leaning into an area too much. Having an open dialogue with your editor, colleagues, or other journalists in your newsroom can be beneficial and allow you to see potential blind spots. Keeping an open and honest dialogue will help you and your editor determine if a particular story or angle of coverage is inappropriate.

• Do continue to fact-check, more so than normal. Leave no room for readers to doubt the accuracy of your reporting.

• Do disclose personal ties, interests, or connections. Be very clear — with both your editors and your readers — about any involvement you have with sources or the subject of a story.

• Do lean into your gut and personal instinct.

• Don’t feel like you have to say yes to covering stories, or every story, about your own community. Individuals should be able to write about what they want; if a story or a request from an editor feels tokenizing, open the dialogue and decline if that’s what feels right.

• Do still follow basic ethical guidelines in journalism: do not accept gifts from sources or people you’re covering, do quote your sources correctly, do not distort fact or context, etc.

For Editors

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

• Do encourage the journalists you work with if they want to cover their own communities. Be supportive.

• Do keep an open dialogue with your journalists. Make sure you’re discussing why they want to cover a particular story and their unique perspective. Be open to discussions about what is integral to the story — as someone from the community, they likely know this better than you.

• Do be a guide; help them edit anything that needs to stay but is coming off as bias or opinionated. Help them balance things out.

• Do go to other editors and consider having them double-check sources. Keep a general dialogue with other editors about what stories or projects you and the journalists you work most closely with are pursuing.

• Do not assume that, because a journalist is from any one particular community, that they will get everything correct or that they do not need you to be a strong editor.

• Do look for new and fresh voices to hire and work with.

For Professors

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

• Do encourage your students to cover their own communities and have open dialogues with them about why it is important and how to do so ethically and effectively. As a professor, your understanding and encouragement is an intricate part in advancing journalism.

• Do highlight the strengths that journalists covering their own communities have in their coverage.

• Do not assume that, because something has not yet become widespread in journalism schools, it is incorrect or bad. Progress starts with a few key individuals, and can take place in any one classroom.

• Do have open and honest discussions about what a journalist is capable of alongside what they cannot do. A great example can be found in Mansoor’s quote above.

• Do take time to highlight the journalists, editors, and publications that are covering their own communities in a way you approve. Make sure you note what their roles are in the entire process. Make them a part of your class syllabus, and their work a part of your assigned reading.

• Do showcase the work of journalists who have been close to the stories they write or the people they report on. There are examples of journalists and editors in this situation that have done their jobs poorly. Share those too. Show a balance for students to compare and contrast.

• Do continue to press the importance of fact-checking, properly vetting sources, and keeping an open dialogue with — or leaning on — an editor when covering these kinds of stories.

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

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Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Read: Stories From the Journalists Included in This Guide

• Lucy Feldman’s essay on how the BIPOC-led issue came together: “The Story Behind Time’s First-Ever BIPOC-Led Issue,” May 13, 2021

• Sanya Mansoor’s coverage of post-9/11 surveillance on the Muslim community in America: “‘Who Else Is Spying on Me?’ Muslim Americans Bring the Fight Against Surveillance to the Supreme Court.,” September 16, 2021

• Marcia Facundo’s coverage of a recent temporary wave from the Agency of Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS): “USCIS Suspende Temporalmente Requisito Para Prueba Médica de la ‘Green Card,’” December 10, 2021

• Molly Jong-Fast’s opinion piece on the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade: “The Supreme Court Is Likely to Overturn Roe — What Then?” October 21, 2021

• Nicole Cardoza’s coverage of the disparities of how missing people are reported in the media and how you can advocate for the missing: “Advocate for the Missing,” September 21, 2021

• Serena Daniari’s coverage of how the start of the pandemic impacted trans surgeries: “Trans Surgeries Postponed Indefinitely Amid Coronavirus Pandemic,” March 25, 2020

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

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

• 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

• Community-Centered: The Evolution of Journalism

• Stay Close: A Guide to Pushing Journalism Forward

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.

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

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

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

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

Lack of Coverage and Understanding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Are the Journalists?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saving the Child, and Other Aspects of Humanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fresh Voices and Other Benefits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support More Stories Like This

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

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

• Community-Centered: The Evolution of Journalism

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Femi Oke: Live Broadcasting From Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

femioke

A post shared by Femi Oke (@femioke)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ali Rae: Making a Documentary From Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip Chryssikos: Hosting a Radio Show From Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Use: Tools to Try

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

• A virtual control room, such as vMix.

  • Using a digital control room app like vMix (alternatives are available) allowed Femi Oke, international journalist and host of Al Jazeera’s daily TV show The Stream, to do a TV show that looked like a real TV show, rather than a Zoom meeting, from a tab on her laptop.

  • Her director could count her down in her ear, guests’ names would appear when they were brought on the show, and other videos could be introduced.

• A microphone that works with your voice.

  • “Everyone’s voice is different,” explains Philip Chryssikos, a freelance voiceover artist and broadcaster. He recommends trying out a bunch of different mics to see what works with your voice. The best one for you is not always the most expensive.

  • “Think about how people will be listening to your show. On massive hi-fi speakers or a little mono speaker? However they listen to it, the sound must be crystal clear without any echo,” Chryssikos says. “Because if the sound sounds good, they will listen for longer.”

• A strong Wi-Fi connection.

  • Ali Rae, Al Jazeera’s senior digital producer, recommends prioritizing fast internet speeds. She was able to upgrade to a faster fiber connection in her area, which made downloading and transferring files much more manageable.

• Plenty of storage in the cloud.

  • Nothing fancy here either. Rae upgraded to 2TB of Google cloud storage. “It made a big difference for organizing, ease of file transfers, watching previews, collaboration on a script, etc.,” she says.

Meet: About the Author

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

Journalists frequently assume a person’s gender based on voice, name, and appearance, and may unintentionally refer to their sources and those they write about incorrectly. Despite a lack of harmful intent, we cannot ignore the damaging effect this can have, or the emotional labor that can be required for trans people to share their experiences with the media.

Denarii Grace, writer, singer-songwriter, and activist, states in their email signature and website that they use both she/her and they/them pronouns and she prefers people “mix it up regularly.” When a media outlet gets it wrong, the process of asking for a correction is a burden. “It can be dehumanizing,” Grace says. “They say, ‘We can’t do this.’”

Editorial decisions and newsroom standards affect how journalists are able to refer to individuals in their work. Remy Green, civil rights lawyer and writer, has run into resistance when they inform journalists of their pronouns, a routine at the end of every interview. Green says other facts are treated differently from pronouns or gender identity: “If I told a reporter I graduated from U. Chicago Law, they wouldn’t tell me, ‘Oh, I’ll have to consult with my editor whether I’m allowed to mention that.’”

To update a story once it’s been published, writers often need to work with an editor or other potential gatekeepers. All these people may have the power to deny a correction request.

Evan Greer knows about gatekeepers. Greer speaks regularly to the press as a musician and director of Fight for the Future, a non-profit advocacy group focusing on digital rights and privacy, advocating for net neutrality and banning facial recognition technology for surveillance. She considers before each interview whether to emphasize her pronouns (which are already in her email signature, website, and Twitter bio), weighing the possibility of getting misgendered live on the air with the risk of being cut from a spot if the producer or journalist turns out to be transphobic. Greer said she was misgendered in a syndicated piece and reached out to around 100 outlets for corrections, a grueling process. Being misgendered on live TV is easier for Greer to correct, as the mistake can be corrected on the spot and that correction cannot be cut. Mistakes in print, especially in a book, cannot be corrected.

“If I’m on TV talking about encryption,” Greer says, “I want to be treated as an expert ... I don’t want it to become a separate conversation about my gender.” Greer created a petition requesting journalists confirm every source’s pronouns, similar to confirming the spelling of a name or a title. As a result of the petition, cis people reached out to Greer, explaining they also get misgendered regularly by the press, with a first name not familiar in American popular culture, or a gender-neutral name (i.e. Taylor or Jesse). We should use people’s pronouns correctly as a baseline, but remain aware that people’s identities are affirmed in other ways also.

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Using the same nuanced language people use to describe their own identity is key. Charlie Arrowood, attorney and Name Change Project counsel at the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF), worked for years to help get the Gender Recognition Act passed in New York. When Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law, Arrowood was featured on a local TV spot with a recorded intro saying Arrowood “identifies as they/them,” even though Arrowood had provided the phrase “identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.”

“I was so taken aback,” Arrowood says, concerned and frustrated that the public would hear this phrase stated as a fact. “Identifies as” can be used to vilify trans people, implying our identities are not real. Someone can “be nonbinary,” but someone cannot be a pair of pronouns.

“I’m in this world professionally,” Arrowood says, noting they always introduce themself to journalists with their pronouns, which “does not even compute. They just ignore it because they haven’t encountered it much.”

Gender is just one aspect of a person’s identity. Trans people’s experience may vary widely by socioeconomic status, disability, or race. Gabrielle Bellot, staff writer at Literary Hub and head instructor at Catapult, writes in an email: “Trans-ness is not related to race in any explicit way ... gender, like race, is the product of social constructs about people.” She notes how marginalized gender intersects with marginalized race: “Black and brown trans women, in particular, are more likely to face discrimination when applying for jobs or simply walking through the world in America.”

Some people’s gender, internal or external, is inseparable from racial or cultural identity. “Throughout my life, my gender has been perceived not only because of my Blackness but because of my [dark] skin color … and my size,” Grace says. Travis Alabanza, writer, performer, and theater maker, wrote in the Huffington Post about how nonbinary people have always existed, and how discussing nonbinary gender identities as though they are new is “erasing the complex, nuanced and rich histories of Black and brown people.” Consider the term Two Spirit, which is specific to the Indigenous community (someone who is not Indigenous cannot be Two Spirit) and describes a range of gender and sexuality, acknowledging traditions of diversity. It is important to report people’s whole identity correctly, including but not limited to gender identity.

When a media outlet reports someone’s identity incorrectly, it can feel like an attack. Lydia X. Z. Brown, advocate, organizer, attorney, and writer, was horrified by an Argentinian newspaper article claiming they, an East Asian nonbinary person, identified as a white man. The piece said, in Spanish, that Brown was “born in China, now lives as a white man in the U.S.,” comparing Brown to Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who claims to identify as a Black woman. Brown had written about the word “transracial” being co-opted by Dolezal and others from its decades-long usage for transracial adoption, most often used to describe a white family adopting a person of color. Even though Brown contacted the outlet (in Spanish), they refused to change or take down the untrue sentence.

Misrepresentation is often concerning not only because it may hurt the person in question, but also for what it can attempt to say about an entire community. Portraying Black women as masculine, for example, is a racist tactic. “At least anecdotally, Black trans women in particular [compared to white trans women] are misgendered in death in news reports,” Bellot says, “as if there is a need in the media to link Blackness and masculinity together.”

“When white men, like Michael Phelps, are extraordinary athletes, no one thinks twice about it,” says Imara Jones, journalist, producer, and creator of TransLash Media, on her podcast. “But when Black women — cis or trans — succeed, their very existence is interrogated.”

Despite a culture of discrimination, we do have stories of trans and nonbinary athletes thriving. Frankie de la Cretaz, a nonbinary freelance writer, wrote a Sports Illustrated digital daily cover story about how nonbinary athletes fit into the largely binary world of sports, featuring athletes including Layshia Clarendon, WNBA player. De la Cretaz referred to Clarendon as “they” initially, ending the first paragraph with a parenthetical note, “Clarendon alternately uses she, he and they pronouns,” and alternating between these three pronouns for the rest of the piece, sometimes changing pronouns within the same sentence. De la Cretaz’s writing was clear, straightforward, and they represented Clarendon correctly.

For this story, de la Cretaz interviewed Clarendon multiple times over a few months. After the piece ran, Clarendon responded on Twitter: “To have my story told with such eloquence and nuance is a privilege that should be afforded to all.” For de la Cretaz to share Clarendon’s private experiences, such as top surgery and coming out publicly, and for them to praise the finished result, demonstrates mutual trust and nuance in reporting. The editor for this piece, Julie Kliegman, SI copy chief and a nonbinary person, supported telling Clarendon’s story accurately.

As a meta note, I struggled with whether to specify de la Cretaz’s and Kliegman’s gender identities in this piece. I felt this information was public (in written work and social media bios and posts) and relevant to the point I am making: journalists and editors within the trans community will bring more lived experience and nuance to a story on trans issues. However, I have not specified any other person’s gender identity in the same way in this piece (other than my own).

When Kliegman shared the story about Clarendon on Twitter, she noted that de la Cretaz “is doing work on this issue that no other journalists are,” and linked to the Trans Journalists Association style guide. The TJA style guide is an excellent reference for best practices when reporting on trans people. I’ve also compiled recommendations from people I spoke with in my own reporting.

A Guide to Writing About Trans People Respectfully

→ Refer to trans people the same way as cis people in your stories. You wouldn’t say, “Freddie Mercury, born as a man named [previous name] and who uses he/him pronouns, was a cis male singer.” It only takes a minute to check if a source has pronouns listed on their website, email signature, or social media bio, and another minute to review your piece to confirm the pronouns are correct. If you specify one person’s pronouns (i.e., “Rey Katz, who uses they/them pronouns”) do the same for your other sources also. Best practices may change rapidly, but my judgment call is to not explain pronouns for people who use “they,” “she,” or “he.” Just use the pronoun naturally. For people who use multiple pronouns (i.e., both “he” and “she”) or neopronouns (i.e., “ze/zir”) you may wish to provide a very brief explanation when introducing the person.

→ Use a person’s current name, pronouns, and description of gender identity when referring to them in the past, unless the person you are reporting on specifies otherwise. If you or a source knew the person under a different name or presentation, memories may need to be paraphrased to use the newer identifiers. “It’s too common for reporters to switch pronouns when discussing trans people before they transitioned; unless you’ve received explicit confirmation from the person you’re reporting on, you should ask for their pronouns and then use those pronouns exclusively,” says Gabrielle Bellot, head instructor at Catapult.

→ People are generally familiar with using “they” for an unknown person: “Someone forgot their keys — do you know who?” The Associated Press Stylebook has included “they” as a singular pronoun since 2017, and singular “they” has been present in English at least since 1375. If you don’t know anyone who goes by “they/them” in your everyday life, you may need to practice — I did when I first met someone who used “they/them.” Talk about celebrities. Give your pet “they/them” pronouns, at least temporarily. Say “they” out loud, often. I was bemused when a classmate apologized for referring to me as “you” (“they” does not replace “I” or “you”). A coworker asked me if verbs should be plural when used with my name. (No. It’s “Rey is here,” not “Rey are here,” even though “They are here,” is correct.)

→ Opinions differ on journalists using no pronouns, or using the person’s name instead of a pronoun every time. Some people consider it to be fairly harmless, don’t notice, or even offer no pronouns as an option. Remy Green, a civil rights lawyer and writer, finds it offensive, however, when they ask for their pronouns to be corrected in a piece, and the outlet deletes the pronouns altogether instead of making the correction.

→ Gendered language extends beyond pronouns. Be careful with words for occupations (i.e., “congressman”), relations (i.e., “husband,” “granddaughter,” “mom,” “son”) and groups of people (i.e., “women” or “guys”). Gender-neutral versions of these words exist, if needed: congressperson, spouse, relative, parent, child, grandparent, folks. “Person” or “people” is always a good option, especially in health-care contexts (i.e., “pregnant people,” “people who menstruate,” “people with a risk of prostate cancer”). “Reproductive health care” is a correct and inclusive alternative to “women’s health care.”

→ Readers also make assumptions based on a person’s voice, name, and appearance. Written descriptions are an important part of representing a source’s identity correctly. Don’t emphasize physical characteristics that may lead to misgendering.

→ It can be invasive and damaging to reveal information about someone’s personal medical history — that’s why medical professionals follow HIPAA privacy laws. Some trans people are on hormone replacement therapy and/or have various surgeries, and some do neither. In general, don’t ask about someone’s genitals, whether they take medication or have had surgery, what sex they were assigned at birth, or whether they are intersex. If medical details are essential to your piece, be prepared to explain why and how you intend to use this personal information.

→ Don’t condemn transitioning — or detransitioning. “Media perpetuates this idea that no one would choose to be queer,” says Heron Greenesmith, an attorney and writer. The majority of people who detransition do so due to stigma, family pressure, employment, or the threat of violence, not transition regret. Some folks remain part of the trans community after detransitioning.

→ It’s important to source background information from the trans community when reporting on issues affecting us. If you Google topics such as medical transition or sports performance on hormone replacement therapy, you will find intentionally misleading content. Find a resource by a trans person as your baseline. Interrogate your own knowledge — many myths about trans people have infected the public consciousness.

→ “What is most lacking in mainstream media coverage of trans issues is acknowledgement that trans people can be experts on our own lives,” Cooper Lee Bombardier, writer, visual artist, and MFA instructor, writes in an email. “Letting trans people speak as experts on their own issues, hiring trans writers and journalists, and speaking to a wide range of trans voices are all simple steps that can support more nuanced and in-depth representation.”

→ Articles published on trans issues too often do not cite any trans sources, even in cases when they reached out to the anti-trans opposition. Especially for health care, sports, and legal battles affecting trans people, it seems obvious but too often omitted to reach out to a trans person as an expert.

→ In the journalism community, we can advocate for trans people not only by asking for sources, but by reading and working for publications that hire trans people. “It is important that trans, nonbinary, and agender writers are in the room and are being hired, not just at the lower levels,” says writer and activist Denarii Grace. We should support publications with trans journalists, editors, and leadership.

→ The organizer and attorney Lydia X. Z. Brown asks: “Are you writing about our lives with humanity, empathy, and complexity, or are you writing about our lives in ways that simply uphold stereotypes and a very reductive narrative of what it means to be trans?” We have an opportunity to share true stories about trans people with our audience, and a responsibility to do it well.

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

Support More Stories Like This

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Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Read: Stories That Got It Right

These stories about transgender rights and health care give me hope, help me feel represented, and provide examples to learn from in my own reporting.

• The TransLash Podcast With Imara Jones: In her incredible podcast, especially the Anti-Trans Hate Machine series of four episodes, Imara Jones reports on trans rights and political hate groups, featuring the voices of Black and brown journalists and activists.

• What About the Trans Athletes Who Compete — and Win — in Men’s Sports?: If you appreciated Frankie de la Cretaz’s piece on nonbinary athletes, check out their fantastic article sharing the voices of young transmasculine athletes.

• A Guide to Navigating Birth Control: This exceptional reproductive health guide is not written specifically for trans people, but the journalist, Mara Gordon, uses trans-inclusive language throughout. For example, the words “woman,” “female,” “man,” or “male” do not appear at all in the piece.

Learn: Resources for Trans-Inclusive Journalism

These are some of my favorite resources discussing how to write about trans people with respect.

• Trans Journalists Association Style Guide: A practical, comprehensive resource on how to describe trans people and communities.

• Making Your Writing and Reporting Transgender-Inclusive: A guide focused on science journalism from The Open Notebook.

• Trans Journalists: It’s ‘a Privilege’ to Tell the Stories of the Trans Community: NPR’s All Things Considered interviews three trans journalists.

Meet: About the Author

Rey Katz is a nonbinary, queer writer. They earned a bachelor of science in physics at MIT and a black belt in aikido. You can find them at reywrites.com.

When Marie Solis started her job at Newsweek in October of 2017, she was glad to have a full-time position at a time when many journalists were being forced out of the industry. She wasn’t under any illusions as to what the job entailed: She was told, before she accepted it, that each writer had a traffic goal of a million clicks per month. It sounded like a lot to her, but everyone made it, no problem, she was told — and there was even a bonus for those who surpassed the target.

Solis quickly learned that Newsweek was obsessed with SEO, or search engine optimization.1 Incoming writers were made to attend workshops on how to get their stories to rank higher in search engine results. Editors would rewrite headlines to be more SEO-friendly, often making them intentionally controversial; junior reporters, whose names were on the byline, bore the brunt of the backlash. Solis didn’t often achieve the traffic goal, so she was pulled back into compulsory training — teaching the same material as the first workshop she’d taken — as if that was “the magic solution,” she says. Solis started scheduling interviews with sources in the middle of those hour-long meetings to get out of them early.

“The logic of SEO is, in many cases, diametrically opposed to quality journalism,” Solis says. It prioritizes stories people are looking for, but not the stories people should read, she believes, as it relies on chasing topics that are already trending online. SEO is one of the more visible products of a larger issue: “It really sucks to think that your career has been shaped by these tech giants and these platforms that news sites have made themselves beholden to,” Solis says.

Over the last decade, publications have grown to rely on platforms like Google and Facebook for web traffic, and a number of media executives have become obsessed with metrics. More recently, media companies have realized that subscribers could be a more durable source of support, but their leaders know you can’t convert visitors into subscribers without first acquiring those visitors — and only a percentage of them will eventually subscribe, leading even niche publishers to reach for constant growth.

In September of last year, the Sacramento Bee Guild criticized this approach in an open letter to McClatchy, their paper’s parent company, during negotiations over a contract provision that would tie journalists’ pay to metrics. “The metrics [McClatchy] uses to gauge a story’s performance change often…. The company’s proposal would impede evolution by holding us to measures that quickly become outdated,” the Guild wrote. “McClatchy has repeatedly failed to show how these goals are calculated. They’ve given no evidence why this proposal would make a more sustainable local company.”

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Metrics have always been a part of journalism, as it is, for the most part, a business. In the print-only era, sales were the primary metric: audience data was typically segmented by geography, and that was for the basis of selling advertising. This ad-based model has not changed much since; if anything, it’s become less nuanced for some of the biggest digital publishers. While data is more readily available today, and publishers can segment and target their audience in a variety of ways, in the simplest terms, many online advertisers pay based on the number of times an ad is shown (known as impressions). This leaves outlets trying to get as many eyeballs on a page, by any means, to bolster their revenue.

While the more prominent and reputable legacy publications have realized that prioritizing clicks alone erodes reader trust, many on the fringe game metrics to ensure their survival, with some adopting more aggressive methods than others. A number of publications, in addition to Newsweek, set difficult-to-reach traffic quotas for staff and offer bonuses for exceeding them: The Epoch Times (the free Chinese newspaper affiliated with the Falun Gong cult) hired Steven Klett as a political reporter for $2,500 a month in 2016, with a target of 100,000 weekly hits and bonuses for anything more, as reported by Oscar Schwartz in the Atavist. Others constantly remind writers of their metrics as a motivational tool, or as information they hope will push writers to replicate past stories’ reach: The Independent, one of Britain’s bigger newspapers, has Chartbeat2 displayed on TV screens in its newsroom; Who What Wear’s site report is sent to the whole editorial team — writers are shown their own numbers.

Mastering metrics has built empires. BuzzFeed finalized its purchase of HuffPost seven months ago, and famously uses every digital strategy available to it, from SEO-clickbait to viral YouTube channels to Facebook quizzes. But even for digital-native publications, tailoring content to algorithms that change with little notice can be daunting — and disastrous. In 2013, Facebook added articles to newsfeeds, especially on mobile devices, saying it wanted to promote “high-quality articles” over “meme photos.” Over the next few years, as pages used more tantalizing headlines or posted questions to garner likes (“LIKE if you’re an Aries”), Facebook would strike them down. In June of 2014, the pivot to video began, prioritizing short clips over articles. To keep up, BuzzFeed (and other online-native publications of the time) continually tinkered to suit Facebook’s latest direction, laying off workers and building up new departments in the process.

In 2014, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti and publisher Dao Nguyen claimed to Wired that they weren’t afraid of Facebook or Twitter flipping the algorithms on them again; back then, both social networks cited BuzzFeed as an example of a publisher doing the right things. Peretti argued BuzzFeed was good for Facebook: they supplied content for the social media platform. “There’s a lot of precedent of distribution companies and content companies building businesses together,” Peretti said. This was when Facebook was still avidly promoting content from brands, and before the Great Purge of 2018, when the platform shifted direction and decided to prioritize posts from Facebook friends instead of news organizations, effectively killing organic distribution for outlets.

This year, Facebook is co-opting news for itself: the platform is working with United Kingdom-based outlets for its 2021 Facebook News initiative, with partners including well-known media entities running the political gamut, from The Daily Mail to The Guardian, as well as smaller, regional players, like the Yorkshire Post. Following a regulatory battle with the government, which tried to force Facebook and Google into commercial deals with news organizations, it is doing the same in Australia. (At one point, Australians weren’t even able to post links to news stories by Australian media.)

The deal will pay publishers for content, at least temporarily. Facebook also claims it will support publishers in finding new audiences, expanding their advertising and subscription sources. Facebook further claims 95 percent of the traffic it brings to these outlets will come from new readers. It has expanded Facebook News to Germany recently, and says it will roll out the service in France later this year.

This is not the first time Facebook has tried to “help” media in recent history: Its Journalism Project, launched in 2017, offered grants and training to publications, ranging from the giants — the New York Times and Washington Post — to New Zealand online-only news publication The Spinoff (funding its move to shift contributions from readers to in-house staff members) and regional French newspaper company Groupe Centre France (allowing the publisher to develop a chatbot). These initiatives have helped these companies survive but do little to address what caused their biggest problems in the first place: that online platforms snatched up advertising dollars and took control of traffic flows.

Marie Solis’ Newsweek job was her second in media. She initially moved to New York City in November of 2015 after landing a job at Mic as a general assignment reporter. She was responsible for three or four posts a day, and pitched her editors other stories, but with that volume, there was always a substantial amount of news aggregation. Still, the news desk did encourage reported pieces, and reporters were given days off of aggregation duty to focus on their features.

Anna Swartz started at Mic on the same day as Solis, but on the newswire desk, which was separate from Solis’ news desk. In a naming contortion, the newswire desk wasn’t focused on news; it was all about creating viral stories.

Having a division like this at Mic was an intentional business decision, but Swartz “never felt they were totally willing to be upfront about the focus.” The goal was to try to generate big hits — virality was a topic Mic tried to teach its reporters about — but Swartz felt the company lacked a sense of mastery about it. At that time, Mic’s understanding of what people favored came from reverse-engineering, mainly by replicating proven-viral story styles with attention-grabbing headlines like “In 1 Tweet, J.K. Rowling Gave Gay Muggles the Best Reason Yet to Love Her,” “9 People Who Make Tax Evasion Look Sexy,” and “Avocado Can Be Substituted for Butter to Make the Most Delicious Cake Ever.” Company seminars taught reporters how to write clickbait, specifically how to leave a curiosity gap in headlines to create intrigue.

The separation of news and newswire did not last long: In early 2017, after being shunted to and from now-shuttered Mic-owned women’s vertical The Slay, Solis found herself working alongside Swartz on the now-merged desk. They would choose their quota of stories from a Google Docs list of headlines with search-engine-optimized words next to them, which they would incorporate into their copy. That doc was put together by an editor whose sole job was to look at Google Analytics, then assemble headlines from what was trending for the reporters to complete. “These were all super random topics that were not even necessarily related to what was happening in the news that day,” Solis says. Reporters were simply expected to clear the list.

At that time, going viral organically was still commonplace; Mic’s heavy reliance on SEO and trending stories still produced some hits. But numbers were declining quickly, as algorithms and platform decisions reduced the traffic generated from both viral and non-viral stories. Maxwell Strachan, in HuffPost, reported that Mic’s unique visitors dropped from 21.5 million in December of 2015 to 10.5 million in December of 2016, and almost halved again to 6.1 million in December of 2017.

Mic’s earliest viral hits had come largely from Facebook, before the platform had started cracking down on clickbait. Mic changed its company structure to follow Facebook’s guidance by prioritizing video after these early successes, which ultimately led to its downfall. “I remember seeing the video team just expand exponentially over my time [at Mic],” Solis says. “When we started ... they were in a corner of the office ... by the end of my time there, we were in a much larger office in the World Trade Center and the video team took up half of the floor.” The video department kept occupying more space, eventually bordering Solis’ desk.

This shift precipitated others: editors began only referring to super-viral videos when they talked about “big wins”; Mic moved some reporters into script-writing, telling them that they were shifting to another team. When Solis was laid off in August of 2017, she was told the company was moving in a new direction, devoting more resources to video. A year later, court documents would be unsealed showing Facebook knew it was inflating metrics, including video views, from 150 to 900 percent.

“Looking back,” Swartz says, “it did seem to be a mistake to put so much emphasis into Facebook when it was so out of our control.” Swartz stayed on a year longer than Solis.

 “I had been there long enough to see the cycles,” she says. Snapchat-dedicated staffers had come and gone; near the end of her tenure, she worked on content for Google Stamp — Google’s unlaunched facsimile of Snapchat. She stayed at Mic because she didn’t know what else she wanted to do, and because “there were just so few jobs.” At the end of her time there, Mic was also exploring newsletters. When she was notified about the meeting where she was likely going to be laid off, she wasn’t sure if she should still write her daily newsletter. She didn’t.

Mic was just one of many outlets that got played chasing metrics. It had laid off the reporters who were writing articles in favor of video production, then, suddenly, video didn’t justify the investment. To cut costs, the video departments were emptied out too. Mic still exists today, with millions of followers on social platforms still attached from its heyday, and is about to launch several new written columns.

While start-up media outlets were scrambling after algorithmic success, similar changes were happening at legacy companies. At Hearst, Troy Young was hired as president of digital media in May of 2013 and, with abhorrent behavior, as reported by Benjamin Wallace for New York magazine, he immediately got busy rearranging Hearst’s inner workings. Young promised he would bring commercial success and longevity to the publishing stalwart by merging all the digital teams into one and running them separately from their equivalent print magazines. Young and his deputy, Kate Lewis, were clearly inexperienced in the magazine world, but did increase digital revenues and cut costs.

When a screen displaying Chartbeat statistics was brought into former Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Joanna Coles’ office at the direction of Young’s department, she was struck by the obsession with how technology was going to revolutionize Hearst’s magazines. “I remember the tremendous excitement with which the head of digital came roaring into my office,” she says. Coles says Hearst executives thought looking at Chartbeat would be like magic, that it would generate the next trendy idea. Coles vehemently distrusts this notion, especially for print editors, who need to think of what may remain poignant and relevant several months in advance.

Coles says that Chartbeat itself was not that useful a tool: Based on what it was telling her, back when she was at Cosmo, women wouldn’t read stories about careers or fashion, which to her seemed false. “I’m a huge believer in data,” she says, “but it doesn’t always help you create new things.” When Chartbeat was introduced, it was coupled, Coles says, with “a fundamental lack of understanding of what good content is.” (Chartbeat has since rebranded itself as a tool for helping keep readers on a site instead of guiding newsroom decisions.)

At the same time Hearst was trying to game the system for short-term gains, Stella Bugbee (who has since moved to the New York Times to head its Style section) was rebuilding New York magazine’s The Cut, introducing politics, motherhood, and careers content, and relaunching its website. She tripled The Cut’s staff, more than tripled its unique visitors, increased its advertising revenue every year, and introduced brand partnerships.

“My feeling is everything is data,” Bugbee says, adding that her team definitely used it but they didn’t make “key editorial decisions necessarily on data alone.” She says she avoided quotas, but used the metrics on certain stories to learn about their audience. Instead of the crude targets for pageviews, she asked narrower questions from New York magazine’s data scientists: whether one area of coverage was performing better than others; whether people actually read the 5,000-word stories; how many people were accessing the site on their phones.

“I do think,” Bugbee says, “it has hurt journalism overall, the way we’ve been driven by metrics over the last decade. ... I don’t think it’s been an overall net positive.” She disapproves of publications getting their junior writers to write SEO posts — “that’s not what you want to do to train the new generation of journalism.” When I ask her about what she knows of the Hearst operation — she was one of the people considered for the Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief position when Glenda Bailey resigned in 2020 — she coyly says, “Hearst has been playing some interesting games.”

Chasing social media metrics isn’t confined to newsrooms, Bugbee notes: As humans, we seek out affirmation, whether that’s instant feedback from Twitter or likes when we post thirst traps on Instagram. When media companies think they can make their decisions solely off the numbers, metrics become dangerous. “I think it takes a really subtle hand to look at the data and interpret it meaningfully,” she says. “Anyone who tells you it’s an exact science is full of it.”

Many journalists (including those working on the business and finance beats) identify as creative people; some will tell you they went into journalism because they didn’t like math. Half of the journalists at a business newspaper I worked at needed a website to calculate percentage changes. Add to this the lack of consensus on what “audience engagement” actually is or what metrics actually signify, the fact that traffic is being dictated by algorithms, and the rise of AI and machine learning, and you get an industry in which the people who will be screwed over are those who don’t understand data. It would be better if data were inherently evil, because then we could all just rule it out. The nefariousness only comes from the people who misuse it.

Perhaps a lot is already lost in the language used: “Content” that needs to be “optimized.” SEO is so ubiquitous an abbreviation the letters have melded into a singular word — as in, “SEO-optimized.” “Engagement” is a catch-all for everything from thoughtful quote-retweets to the “likes” double-tapped out while we’re watching a TV show on another screen.

Dedicating a newsroom’s resources to a game where the rules and the board are constantly being redrawn by another, much more powerful entity is like trading shares without any edge: It’s r/WallStBets vs. Wall Street’s moneyed and influential hedge funds. When a media outlet chases clicks, it ties its own success to the algorithms powering Google, Facebook, or any other consumer tech company. The danger lies not just in the control these companies exercise over the flow of information to readers, but also in the possibility that they can lie about performance: The “pivot to video” saw journalists getting laid off in favor of bolstering video teams, chasing numbers that turned out to be a mirage.

“You’re always serving the people who give you their money,” Defector co-founder Kelsey McKinney says. Defector is subscriber-funded, after its staff split from Deadspin. Its independence means that, in addition to its usual sports coverage, it can publish a piece on the staff’s favorite birds; there is no need to hit certain numbers to satisfy advertisers. “For us,” McKinney says, “what’s more interesting and important is what we want to cover, and the assumption a reader is smart enough to tell us if they hate what we’re doing.”

Metrics are already ingrained in our writing. The “most read” sections on websites, trending topics on Twitter, headline testing — they make sense. It’s when publications start grasping for relevance in an attempt to inflate their numbers that they are marked for a race to the bottom — when managers start deciding crude, singular measures determine not only performance, but worth. There is ambivalent comfort in the knowledge that these measures will rarely produce anything novel. There is a significant element of unpredictability in what makes a good, interesting, and influential story; that unpredictability may be what saves this industry.

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

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

Read: Footnotes

Paul Nyden, a longtime investigative reporter at the Charleston Gazette, used to say he had two tenets that guided his work. The first was: “Figure out who the bad guys are, and fuck ’em.” And the second was: “Then fuck ’em again.” Not exactly what they teach in J-school. But in West Virginia, where the entire arc of the state’s history has been perverted by a seemingly endless run of bad guys, it’s not only a justifiable approach to journalism; it’s an essential one.

Guys like Johnson N. Camden, one of the state’s founding fathers, who sold out to Standard Oil in the 1870s and then conspired with John D. Rockefeller Sr. to crush West Virginia’s nascent refining industry, before retiring to a private island off the Florida coast. Or William MacCorkle, a son of the Confederacy who got rich helping outside investors get control of the state’s timber and mineral wealth (“I smiled, and the money came,” he wrote in his memoir), then exploited racial fears to get elected governor in 1892.

Or, more recently, Governor Wally Barron, who went to prison in 1971, for — stick with me here — bribing the jury foreman during an earlier trial on charges of, yes, bribery, of which he had been acquitted. Or Arch Moore, the three-term governor who was dogged for years by corruption allegations, and who finally was put away (thanks in part to Nyden’s reporting) in 1990 after pleading guilty to five felonies, including extortion and obstruction of justice.

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L.T. Anderson, a columnist who worked at both the Gazette and its afternoon rival, the Charleston Daily Mail, liked to say that state officeholders would “take hemorrhoids if they were being given away.” Such disregard for the commonweal among those in power helps explain West Virginia’s enduring place at or near the bottom of so many measures of prosperity, from rates of poverty and tobacco use to obesity and drug overdoses. Whether Nyden meant his creed in earnest, or as merely a bit of bravado uttered late at night in the smoky confines of the Red Carpet Lounge, the bar in the shadow of the capitol building where reporters and pols mixed off the record, is beside the point. The reason those lines became part of Charleston’s journalism lore is because they distilled, in thrillingly profane fashion, what the Gazette stood for.

In the waning decades of the 20th century, the Gazette was the state’s alpha watchdog, going after the coal industry — the dominant economic, political, and cultural force — and the corruption and environmental abuse that accumulated in its wake, with persistence and ferocity. Led by publisher W.E. Chilton III, the Yale University-educated scion of the family who had owned the paper since 1907, the Gazette’s unofficial motto, which Chilton coined in a 1983 speech to the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, was “sustained outrage.” Chilton, known to all as Ned, was a cantankerous liberal, unapologetically so. He was an early champion of racial equality, denounced capital punishment as “legal murder,” and was willing to lash the pillars of local advertising, such as car dealers (in a series called “Ripoff?” that found evidence of odometer tampering) and realtors (accusing them of “bigotry” when they sought to block enforcement of fair housing laws). Until his death in 1987, at age 65, Chilton wielded the Gazette’s editorial page like a cudgel against anyone and anything that ran afoul of his uncompromising sense of right and wrong.

Not surprisingly, Chilton and the Gazette made a lot of enemies. Even before his conviction, Governor Moore referred to the paper as “the morning sick call.” Complaints that it was “too negative,” “too liberal,” and an impediment to economic development, have simmered for decades among the business and political establishment — a sentiment that has sharpened in recent years, as the state turned from solid blue to the reddest of reds, handing the legislature to the GOP for the first time since 1930, and giving Donald Trump nearly 70 percent of its votes.

Nyden, who retired in 2015 when the Gazette and the Daily Mail merged, died of a heart attack on January 6th, 2018, at age 72. It was nine months after the Gazette-Mail won a Pulitzer Prize — its first for reporting — for a Nyden-esque investigation of the ocean of prescription opioids pumped into the state by pharmaceutical giants, and just weeks before the paper filed for bankruptcy, felled by debt and plummeting ad revenue. (The announcement prompted a coal-industry lawyer to publicly mock the Gazette-Mail’s star environmental reporter, Ken Ward Jr., suggesting he might soon be unemployed.)

A little more than a month later, the Chiltons sold the paper to a group of investors for $11.5 million, ending more than a century of family ownership. Some of the new owners, including the lead investor, Doug Reynolds, a businessman with political ambitions, have financial ties to the natural gas industry. As coal fades, natural gas is being hyped as the “cleaner” fossil fuel (a debatable claim) that can fill the economic void and usher in a new era of prosperity in the Mountain State.

I grew up in Charleston and began my journalism career there. When I visited last summer, the extreme swings of fortune at the Gazette-Mail — from the Pulitzer to the auction block in less than a year — had people wondering about the paper’s fate. What kind of newspaper did the new owners want? Would “sustained outrage” be replaced by something more complacent? And if so, what would that mean for the future of West Virginia?

The concern was understandable. The Gazette-Mail bankruptcy was another chapter in the protracted decline of local journalism in America that has played out over the last 20 years. As digital media undercut the advertising-based business model that had supported newsrooms for more than a century, newspapers across the country shed reporters and lowered their ambitions as they searched — so far in vain — for a solution. “Do more with less” became the industry’s pitiable battle cry. When the Great Recession hit, private equity funds, pension funds, and other investment partnerships began buying up these “distressed assets,” squeezing out profit by strangling what remained of the newspapers’ public-service muscle — the accountability journalism that kept readers aware of what the powerful were up to in their communities. Between 2007 and 2015, the number of full-time daily newspaper reporters in America dropped 40 percent, from 55,000 to 32,900.

That loss of coverage has been described, without exaggeration, as a threat to democracy. In November of 2018, a trio of political science and communications professors published the findings of a long-term study of communities where local newspapers have died. They found that, as local papers close, political polarization grows, and accountability in the public sphere may shrink. “Residents of cities without sources of local news are losing their ability to hold their political representatives accountable in ways that encourage ethical and effective representation,” said Johanna Dunaway, one of the study’s authors.

Doug Reynolds sees opportunity in this decline. “When things are bad in an industry, that’s the time to get in,” he told me. In 2013, he launched HD Media, which now owns half a dozen other newspapers in the state besides the Gazette-Mail, including the Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, the state’s second-largest city. But Reynolds insists there is no plan to strip these papers; to the contrary, he says he will “grow” the Gazette-Mail newsroom once he shores up the paper’s finances. “The truth of it is, we could lay off half the newsroom tomorrow, and our profits would go up the next day,” he said. “But over time, it would be a bad business decision.”

Everything, it seems, is a business decision to Reynolds. When he bought the Gazette-Mail, he laid off 11 people — four from the newsroom, including the executive editor, leaving 42 employees. Since then, several people have left, and those vacancies have not been filled. “We had to get sustainable with the revenue we got,” he told me. “Newspapers are first and foremost a business.”

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We were sitting at a conference table in the old Daily Mail newsroom, across the hall from the Gazette-Mail. The newsroom, vacant since the merger in 2015, was eerily intact — including the cubicle where I sat a quarter of a century earlier — like a scene from one of those day-after films. It was the end of June, and the air outside was heavy with the promise of a thunderstorm. It was heavy, too, with more political chicanery: the legislature had begun debating whether to impeach “one or more” of the state’s Supreme Court justices, and a mysterious scandal was brewing involving $150 million in federal flood relief that, as one reporter put it, got lost in the “blender of state bureaucracy” and was never spent on what it was intended for — replacing or repairing homes lost to a flood in 2016 that killed 23 people. The whole town felt weary.

Reynolds, though, exuded confidence. His face was thin and boyish, his sandy-blond hair clipped short. He had spent a decade in the legislature, lost a bid to be attorney general in 2016, and had been mentioned as a possible candidate for higher office. His father is Marshall T. Reynolds, the tobacco-chewing tycoon from Huntington, where Doug was born. The elder Reynolds rose from working-class roots to build a business empire that includes banking and real estate. And he did it by bucking the stuffy establishment in Huntington, where who one’s father is has historically mattered more than anything else. So there is affinity for the striver in Doug Reynolds’ DNA.

I asked him to describe his journalism philosophy, and he did so in a single sentence: “You’ve got to kind of balance what people want to hear with what they need to hear.” It wasn’t “sustained outrage,” but it wasn’t the rapacious indifference of the vulture capitalists either. Finding that balance, never easy, will be even harder in a newspaper business that continues to struggle. It will be harder still given that Reynolds is entangled in what could be the biggest economic shift in the state since industrialization: the pursuit of shale gas.

West Virginia sits atop a large swath of the Marcellus Shale, the 400-million-year-old rock formation that stretches across the Appalachian Basin and is one of the largest reservoirs of recoverable gas in the country. Since the mid-2000s, energy companies have been tapping the Marcellus, using a combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking, for short) to pump water, sand, and chemicals into the ground to free gas from deposits that were previously thought unreachable. Thanks to this new technology, natural gas production in West Virginia surged more than five-fold in less than a decade, from more than 240 billion cubic feet in 2008 to nearly 1.4 trillion cubic feet in 2016.

This is the most important story Reynolds’ papers must cover, one that is likely to shape the post-coal future of the state. And it is a story in which Reynolds is a player on both sides. In addition to owning his newspapers, he is president and chief executive officer of Energy Services of America, which makes natural-gas pipelines. Brian Jarvis, another principal in the group that bought the Gazette-Mail, also is a two-way player. He is president of NCWV Media, which owns newspapers in the north-central part of the state, and also of Hydrocarbon Well Services, an oil and gas service operation.

Some of the biggest energy companies in the country are chasing gas in West Virginia, including Pittsburgh-based EQT, Denver-based Antero Resources, and Richmond-based Dominion Energy. There are several major pipelines underway and numerous smaller projects. In the fall of 2017, as part of President Donald Trump’s trip to China, West Virginia signed a memo of understanding for China Energy to invest $83 billion over 20 years in the state’s natural gas infrastructure. “For crying out loud, it absolutely takes your breath,” gushed Governor Jim Justice, a billionaire who was elected in 2016 and who touts his friendship with Trump, over the size of the China deal. His administration has refused to release the details of that memo.

The grand vision, according to gas proponents, is that the boom will revitalize the state’s chemical industry, which thrived in the middle of last century when the region around Charleston was known as “Chemical Valley.” Plants run by Union Carbide, Monsanto, and others made everything from Agent Orange to methyl isocyanate (the stuff that killed thousands in Bhopal, India, when it leaked in 1984) and employed some 40,000 people in towns up and down the Kanawha River with names like Alloy and Nitro. What the backers of this vision are less interested in recalling is how effluent and emissions from those plants fouled the river; tainted the air, soil, and groundwater; and did untold damage to the health of residents. Leaks and explosions, sometimes fatal, were not uncommon. But the local economy grew, and in West Virginia such collateral damage has always been the price of development.

There is a lot of money on the table, a lot of big talk, and a lot of competing interests swirling around the current gas boom. It is at this point when things have often gone cockeyed in West Virginia. Some things already have. In 2017, Bray Cary, a local businessman, joined the governor’s administration as an unpaid “citizen volunteer.” At the time, Cary sat on the board of EQT, the Pittsburgh-based energy giant that is the second-largest producer of gas in West Virginia, and he is also a major stockholder in the company. Yet it was only after the Gazette-Mail raised questions about his role in the administration that Cary was made to sign a non-disclosure agreement. State lawmakers, acknowledging the myriad potential problems with this situation, passed the so-called Bray Cary bill, requiring “public servant volunteers” who work in official capacities in the government to file ethics disclosures.

But it remains the case that a guy with close ties to, and a financial stake in, a multi-billion-dollar energy company that intends to make a lot of money in West Virginia is whispering daily in the governor’s ear. What could go wrong?

The debate over economic development in West Virginia, and particularly the role of extractive industries, is an emotional one with a deep and troubled backstory. Coal has defined West Virginia for more than a century, giving tens of thousands of people a livelihood and an identity. As a friend who mined coal for 13 years said to me, “Coal put my kids through college.” But it also gutted the state physically, shortchanged it economically, and left a legacy of environmental ruin, shattered communities, and shattered bodies. It’s hardly a stretch to see how the rush to shale gas, which has been shown to pollute both surface and groundwater, could end in a similarly dismal cul-de-sac.

If there is one person who embodies the complexity Reynolds faces in trying to strike the balance he seeks in the Gazette-Mail’s coverage, it is Ken Ward Jr., the paper’s 51-year-old environmental reporter. Ward, who grew up in a manufacturing town in Mineral County, near the Maryland border, joined the Gazette in 1991. Four years earlier, when Ned Chilton died, the outpouring of tributes contained a note of anxiety that corruption would flourish in the state without him to keep it in check. “If it had not been for Ned Chilton,” one law-enforcement official said at the time, “the politicians would have carried away the statehouse, the courthouse, and city hall.” But Ward, as much as anyone, helped ensure that “sustained outrage” continued to define Gazette journalism. He embraced Paul Nyden’s belief that journalism’s highest calling was not some feckless notion of “objectivity,” but rather to follow the paper trail and expose the many ways the powerful exploit the powerless. Fuck ’em, in other words, but do it with the facts.

Over the next 20 years, Ward gained national prominence for his reporting on mine safety and the environmental costs of coal; among industry leaders and their political allies, he gained a reputation as a major pain in the butt.

Then, on April 5th, 2010, an explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia killed 29 miners. It was the country’s deadliest coal-mining disaster in 40 years. The ensuing investigation described a culture of disregard for safety and environmental regulations within Massey, the nation’s fourth-largest producer of coal at the time. Eighteen corporate officials refused to cooperate with the investigation, invoking their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

What happened at Upper Big Branch was the culmination of the state’s legacy of corruption — a choice made a century earlier to surrender its soul to the coal industry, underfunding regulatory enforcement even as it made endless concessions to coal’s economic, political, and cultural power. It also was the start of a six-year-long story that was unprecedented in the state’s history, one that resulted in Don Blankenship, the Massey chief executive officer and a powerful figure in the state and beyond, going to prison for conspiring to violate safety and health standards.

And it was a story for which Ward had been preparing since he started at the paper. The entire media ecosystem seemed to rely, to varying degrees, on his reporting and institutional knowledge during the days and months after the explosion. He even made a cameo, indirectly, at Blankenship’s trial, when prosecutors played a recording of Blankenship on the phone, less than a year before the explosion at Upper Big Branch, fretting about the prospect of a memo from one of his safety inspectors becoming public. The memo was damning, citing not just specific safety concerns but a culture of putting profit before safety. On the recording, Blankenship describes the memo as “worse than a Charleston Gazette article.”

But the piece of this story that means the most to Ward, that still causes his voice to crack years later, happened during one of the least consequential moments in the Blankenship saga. When the verdict was on appeal, Ward drove five hours to Richmond, Virginia, to hear oral arguments. “We don’t typically go to Richmond to cover trials,” he says, “but when I walked into the federal courthouse there, I saw some family members of the victims, and one of them saw me and said, ‘We knew the Gazette would be here.’”

In 2018, Ward was selected for the inaugural class of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, an effort to support investigative journalism at smaller papers around the country by paying reporters’ salaries for a year, helping them develop stories around a theme, and then co-publishing those stories. Ward’s project was to scrutinize the state’s natural-gas boom from a provocative standpoint: Is West Virginia making the same regulatory mistakes with gas that it made more than a century ago with coal? It was a line of inquiry Ned Chilton would have applauded.

In an early story for the project, Ward got right to the point: “Elected officials have sided with natural gas companies on tax proposals and property rights legislation,” he wrote. “Industry lobbyists have convinced regulators to soften new rules aimed at protecting residents and their communities from drilling damage.”

The litany of ominous decisions about the regulation of fracking that Ward unpacked was depressing, from Governor Justice vowing, in his first state-of-the-state address, that his Department of Environmental Protection would stop saying no to business and industry, to the governor’s hasty retreat, in the face of industry complaints, from the idea of hiking the severance tax on natural gas to give striking teachers a pay raise. It also was depressingly familiar. As Ward notes, miners, too, were promised prosperity, but “today some of the places that have produced the most coal are among the region’s poorest.”

It can sometimes seem that, if it weren’t for Ward, no one would be pointing all this out. In August of 2018, for example, federal courts halted work on two major pipelines being built through West Virginia after finding that several agencies had failed to follow environmental regulations when approving the projects. Ward, along with two other reporters, dug into the record and produced a story that showed that federal and state watchdogs tasked with enforcing environmental laws had “moved repeatedly to clear roadblocks and expedite” the pipeline projects. Two days later, a website for some of the papers owned by Gazette-Mail investor Brian Jarvis weighed in with a story that assured readers the pipelines were moving forward, despite the temporary setback; and the Exponent-Telegram, another of Jarvis’ papers, published an editorial warning that “lengthy delays could cost the state a future residents richly deserve and throw us further behind our neighbors.”

When I asked Reynolds about Ward’s series, he called it “the most important thing we’ve done in my short time here. There’s a huge change happening, and an incredible amount of wealth is being created. So the logical question is, where are we going to be at the end of all this?”

And what about Ward’s contention that the state could lose out on its fair share of that “incredible wealth" the gas boom is generating, as it did with coal?

Reynolds paused before he answered. “There is not a doubt in my mind that the state, in this current environment, will take less than other states are going to take.”

Why? “Because the people who run the gas industry have more influence here,” Reynolds said. “The public decides the kind of people they want running the state. They want less regulation, less environmental regulation — things that both Governor Justice and President Trump talk about all the time. No one has won elections in West Virginia lately saying they’re going to make sure these mining permits are held to the highest standard.”

The most obvious effort so far to “balance” the kind of reporting that Ward is doing with more positive coverage is a new weekly section called Daily Mail WV. It launched in June of 2018, designed to appeal to potential readers and advertisers who either think the rest of the paper is too liberal or anti-business, or who just miss the Daily Mail. After the merger, a few thousand Daily Mail subscribers dropped out, and overall circulation continued to decline; it was enough to convince Reynolds and his team that the Daily Mail brand still had value.

The Charleston Daily Mail, where I worked from 1990 to 1994, entered a joint operating agreement with the Gazette in 1958, which meant the two papers shared advertising and circulation services, as well as a building. The Daily Mail was the more conservative paper, particularly on the editorial page. The newsrooms were sharply competitive. Separated by a hallway, we had different cultures, different physical vibes. At the Daily Mail, a dress code mandated coats and ties, while at the Gazette jeans were fine. Our newsroom was bright and airy; the Gazette’s was cavelike, dug-in. The desire to outdo your counterpart fostered a vibrant news culture that surely benefited readers. It was the tail end of the good years for daily newspapers. Watergate remained a palpable touchstone of great journalism; the Internet was a few years off. And the idea that Charleston, West Virginia, still had competing dailies was a point of pride.

Kelly Merritt, a former public-relations guy who edited the new section during its first 10 months (he left in March for a job with a gas company), said the idea was to evoke something of the old Daily Mail, particularly its business features. “The spirit of those features was being open to looking at anything in a positive light, not always from the standpoint of ‘somebody’s out there doing something bad, and we’re going to catch ’em by golly.’”

The Daily Mail I knew wasn’t a fire-breathing crusader like Chilton’s Gazette, but it was a good newspaper that produced its own brand of watchdog journalism, winning a Pulitzer for editorial writing in 1975. I don’t recognize much of that paper in Daily Mail WV, which offers a mix of business-focused opinion pieces and features that is singularly bullish on the future of West Virginia.

The first installment featured Governor Justice assessing, “in his own words,” his first two years in office. Unemployment in West Virginia is among the highest in the country, at 4.8 percent; it’s one of only a very few states where the poverty rate has risen in recent years; and, according to a 2017 report, the state has the third-highest percentage of residents living in “economically distressed” zip codes. Yet the governor was allowed to proclaim, without contradiction: “The goodness is just going to come and keep coming. ... It is truly unbelievable what’s happening.”

Once the governor set the tone, the section went on to address, among other things, the gas boom’s potential to revive the chemical industry (of course); the importance of commercial river traffic in the state (including a half-page ad from the main source in the lead story and a “hats off” editorial to that source); and the governor’s road-building program (with two stories that quoted no critics of the program, and a full-page ad from the Contractors Association of West Virginia saying how great the program is).

An issue on recycling celebrated A. James Manchin, the late uncle of United States Senator Joe Manchin, for his work in the 1970s purging junked cars and appliances from the state’s hills and hollows. The column included only a couple of gently worded sentences about Manchin’s “fall from grace.” Allow me to fill in the picture. Manchin, who served as state treasurer from 1985 to 1989, was impeached for losing nearly $300 million from the state’s Consolidated Fund through bad investments, and then covering up the losses for a year, in part by falsifying records. (His assistant treasurer, Arnold Margolin, went to prison for lying about the losses and his role in the cover-up.) The special prosecutor who investigated the case said Manchin “would have had to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to have been aware ... of precisely what was transpiring.” Yet that is what A. James claimed, insisting he was “a victim of the system.” Manchin was no hero. He was just another “public servant” who failed the state and its people.

There is nothing wrong with optimism in news coverage, when it’s warranted. But it’s hard not to see Daily Mail WV in the context of a broader rumbling about the need to counter negative perceptions of the state, to “change the narrative.” West Virginia has spent much of its life in a defensive crouch, poised to take offense at every insult hurled its way, of which there have been many. More than most, the state has been defined by negative stereotype — some of it earned, much of it not: the ignorant hillbilly, the book-banning xenophobe. Of late there has been an increasingly audible retort, mostly from a crop of community-media start-ups, that focuses on stories of reinvention and progress (#uplift).

I sympathize. But I also see how good-faith efforts to complicate the simplistic portrayal of West Virginia in the national media play into Governor Justice’s persistent haranguing of the Gazette-Mail to be more positive. Like Trump, the governor lashes out at any critical story — about his failure to put his billion-dollar businesses into a blind trust, or the history of safety violations and unpaid fines at his coal mines, or the millions in back taxes he owed. He obsessively berates the paper and its reporters. By ignoring this kind of “negative” context, stories like those I described in Daily Mail WV give cover to incompetence and claims of “fake news.”

Reynolds, of course, describes the new section in business terms. He needed revenue fast, and this section provided some — more than $15,000 worth of advertising in the first 11 weeks (compared to less than $1,000 in the two months prior for the section it replaced). “The goal was not to create an anti-Gazette section,” he says. “We’re going to try new things. I’d do a section on rabbits and bunnies if enough people who care about rabbits and bunnies would support it.”

The day after my meeting with Reynolds, I sat in the balcony in the House of Delegates chamber, listening to lawmakers debate the timing of their impeachment investigation into the Supreme Court justices for a range of ethical violations, including elaborate office renovations and misuse of state vehicles and other property. The capitol building, designed by the architect Cass Gilbert, is impressive, its soaring, gilded dome gazing down across a gentle bend in the Kanawha River. But the cool limestone facade and marble corridors always struck me as jarringly mismatched to the lowbrow bullshit that too often transpired within.

I thought of all the hours I spent in that chamber listening to tedious and inelegant debates, full of righteous claims about “serving the good people of West Virginia.” To be sure, I covered some elected officials who tried their best to do just that. But my time at the Daily Mail overlapped with a spate of public corruption unmatched until, perhaps, this current one. It wasn’t just Arch Moore and A. James Manchin who went down back then, but two successive senate presidents (for extortion) and the head of the state lottery and the lottery’s attorney (for insider trading). Sammy D’Annunzio, a powerful lobbyist who was neck-deep in the statehouse corruption, committed suicide. Good times.

Later, I walked over to the Red Carpet, sweating through my shirt in the steamy afternoon heat. Little had changed there either. Same squat, gray cinderblock box, no windows. I even ran into a couple of people I knew from the old days. Inside, bathed in the dim glow of video gambling machines, the Carpet was still the kind of bar where you could forget what time of day it was — pleasantly so. The beers were still cold and cheap, and before long I was thinking about the past — mine, but also West Virginia’s.

It occurred to me that in all of this — the hyping of natural gas, the clamor for “positive” news — there was more than a whiff of the happy talk that reverberated through West Virginia in the late 19th century, as the new state was quickly being turned into a fuel depot for the Industrial Revolution. The men who built the state insisted that West Virginia, rich with coal and timber and located near the emerging industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest, was destined to prosper.

J.H. Diss Debar, a land speculator and designer of the state seal who later went to prison for running a confidence game, captured the sentiment with carnival-barker aplomb in an 1870 treatise on the state’s virtues: That “a State ... so full of the varied treasures of the forest and the mine ... should lack inhabitants, or the hum of industry, or the show of wealth is an absurdity in the present and an impossibility in the future.”

That sounds not unlike this bit of puffery, circa 2013, from Earl Ray Tomblin, who preceded Jim Justice as governor: “The shale development and the potential economic growth and jobs that will come with the revitalization of the manufacturing sector are astounding; and West Virginia is right at the center of it all.”

From the start, West Virginians lacked the money they needed to develop the mines and timbering operations for themselves. That’s why Johnson Camden, Governor MacCorkle, and their ilk rigged the political and judicial systems to suit the out-of-state money men. This lack of homegrown capital remains a problem in the gas-boom era; that’s why the big projects are led, once again, by out-of-state companies. The past is never very far away in West Virginia.

In August of 2018, the Republican-controlled House of Delegates voted to impeach all four of the remaining Supreme Court justices. The former chief justice, who — no joke — once published a book decrying the history of political corruption in West Virginia, also was indicted on 22 federal charges, including fraud and witness tampering. A fifth justice, who resigned before he could be impeached, pleaded guilty to wire fraud. Democrats claimed the wholesale impeachment was a political ploy by Republicans to remake the court. Maybe it was. The senate trials were tragicomic, the whole thing a disgrace.

This year, the legislature adjourned without even granting a hearing to a handful of bills that sought to address residents’ concerns about air, water, and noise pollution caused by the gas boom. And EQT, the energy giant, agreed to pay $53.5 million to settle a lawsuit that claimed the company was cheating thousands of state residents and businesses on royalty payments — even as a new report found that the economic windfall promised by gas proponents was overhyped.

At the Gazette-Mail, meanwhile, the post-Chilton future is becoming visible. ProPublica renewed its partnership with Ken Ward for a second year; Report for America, which places journalists in underserved areas, also renewed the reporter it had at the paper last year and added a second one to cover poverty in southern West Virginia; there is a Gazette-Mail podcast; and digital subscriptions are up more than 40 percent from last year, goosed by a temporary deal of 99 cents a month. However, news of at least one additional layoff followed in July.

Doug Reynolds is not Ned Chilton. But maybe Ned Chilton wouldn’t be the same newsman today as the one we celebrate. After all, Chilton’s conviction that a newspaper’s pursuit of profit could and must coexist with its commitment to public service is a far more difficult proposition now. Reynolds is clear that he intends to profit from journalism. And he seems fine with the public-service end of that equation, as long as it can be monetized. “The bottom line,” he told me, “is I don’t care if people are happy or sad about our coverage, as long as they aren’t ambivalent.” Maybe that’s the best we can hope for these days.

I worry, though, that it won’t be enough. West Virginia is at a crossroads. With coal in decline, the state has a chance to diversify its economy, to build a future that is environmentally sustainable, one in which opportunity and prosperity are more broadly shared. But for that to happen, it needs leaders who actually put the public interest first — and a vigorous watchdog to make sure they do.

In his 1976 history of the state, John Alexander Williams explained the problem this way: “West Virginia ... remained the way it was because the most powerful West Virginians liked it that way.” There’s an unsettling echo of that sentiment in Reynolds’ comment about the undue influence of the gas industry among the state’s power brokers. And that is the narrative that has to change. Until it does, all the “positive” media coverage in the world won’t make a difference in West Virginia’s economic fortunes, or in the fate of its people. What might, though, is journalism that’s brash and unsparing — maybe even a little outraged.

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

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Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published on July 23rd, 2019, in Pacific Standard, a magazine that reported on social, economic, and environmental justice issues from its headquarters in Santa Barbara, California, between 2008 and 2019.

Support: Mountain State Spotlight

Mountain State Spotlight is an independent, civic news organization that tells stories of importance to West Virginians about the issues and challenges facing their communities. Its mission is linked to the journalism philosophy of late Charleston Gazette Publisher W.E. “Ned” Chilton III: “To help West Virginians improve their state by producing ‘sustained outrage’ journalism that exposes abuses of power by government, business and other institutions.”

Meet: About the Author

Brent Cunningham is executive editor of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a former deputy editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. From 1990 to 1994, he was a reporter at the Charleston Daily Mail.

I was sitting in front of a laptop alone in my room, sending out my first ever story pitch with a cup of my morning chai in hand. I’d just moved to a new city and, that morning, in unfamiliar settings — and two months into a global pandemic that had left me stuck inside and confused about the future — I had no idea whether what I was doing was remotely correct.

If you Google “how to pitch,” “how to write a pitch,” or some combination of keywords to get a sense of what editors are looking for, you’ll get a lot of results. I remember scrolling endlessly, feeling so overwhelmed with all of the information on my screen that I accidentally let my tea go cold. My mother asked me what I was up to and and I played it off as if I was just calmly browsing without an agenda. I didn’t know how to answer her; at that point, I wasn’t sure how to even describe the path I was trying to go down.

Sometimes, even with so much information at your fingertips, it can still feel like something is missing. That first day wasn’t the only day that I went down a rabbit hole. In the beginning, most of my work days would feel exhausting; when they ended, I felt that I had found out so much and yet understood so little.

I made the decision to start freelancing in July of 2020, two months after finishing my exams and right after moving from my hometown in Karachi, Pakistan, to Lahore to be with my family. Over the previous two months, with my parents’ insistent that I take a break and worry about the future after I had some time to relax, I had been selling bookmarks I painted — a way of raising charity for some causes close to my heart — before chancing upon freelance journalism.

I use that verb because it was a field no one around me knew anything about. I had been looking for opportunities in research in my country, hoping I could do something that would make a difference, but opportunities were limited, and most were based in Islamabad, where I was unable to relocate.

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It was at this point that I started considering writing more seriously. I was already working on my own platform, called Perspective, which I had started in September of 2019 as a way of filling a gap I saw in Pakistani media, a way of putting forward a feminist lens on local affairs for a younger audience. Transitioning from research to reporting was alluring: I wanted to do something I had control over, and create constructive work. And that’s how I found myself working on story pitches. But there were no clear guidelines, and no one to ask for help.

Twitter became my go-to resource — I could work anywhere and reach anyone from Lahore. I slowly started building a network of people all across the industry, and I found myself gravitating toward accounts of student or early career journalists who seemed to be following the same path as me. During these early attempts at networking, I came across a tweet calling for the creation of a place for young women in journalism looking to feel supported, and soon became part of the Tangent, an informal group chat named after an inside joke among its members. Started by student, freelancer, and editorial assistant Imogen Brighty-Potts, the Tangent provides a relaxed space for early career journalists to share thoughts, vent, and ask for advice.

“I felt so out of the loop and alone. I turned to social media for reassurance and support,” says Brighty-Potts, who may have felt alone but was anything but. “My only work previously was in a bar or restaurant so I was around loads of people,” Brighty-Potts says. “Turning to desk work at home was a really weird experience.” And so the Tangent was born, when Brighty-Potts put out a call on Twitter to see if anyone feeling the same way was interested in creating a mutual support space. “Hundreds of people wanted one,” she says, “so I made a group chat and now when any of us need support or have a question, bearing in mind we are all at different stages in our career, we have somewhere.”

Even after the Tangent was established we often had new members join. So many people wanted to be a part of such a community that it was clear others likely felt the same way I had in those first days of freelancing. Many members of the group also had their own projects they were working on, such as magazines or podcasts, aimed at being inclusive and supportive to early career journalists seeking guidance. And it was through these networks that I started coming across other social media-based spaces, like Gals in Journalism and the Young Journalist Community.

The Young Journalist Community stands out for being so interactive. A Facebook group with more than 5,000 members, the YJC provides early career journalists with a supportive space to share queries, find resources, and even interact with editors in a relaxed, casual setting. It’s nothing like cold-emailing a pitch to someone you’ve never worked with before.

“I could see that there were other people who felt the same [as I did] but there didn’t seem to be a cohesive space for people to ask questions and vent their problems,” says the YJC’s founder, Asyia Iftikhar, who is also a freelance journalist. “Especially since on Twitter and social media in general there seems to be this image that everything has to be perfect and everyone knows what they are doing.” Like the Tangent, the YJC started with a single tweet, a public call for support: “I put out a tweet that went viral in the journalism community and thus YJC was born,” Iftikhar says.

I remember attending one of the Young Journalist Community’s first sessions with Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, then the editor-in-chief at Gal-dem. I marveled at how easy to talk to she seemed, and how accessible the YJC had made that session.

Iftikhar shares how she, too, has benefited from what she has created. “Without places like the YJC and Twitter community spaces I don’t know if I would have gotten as far as I have today,” she says. “They have been invaluable to undoing a lot of the gatekeeping in this industry, and I have seen, even over this past year, how these spaces have been usefully developed to support anyone who needs it. It has supported me in finding paid work, gaining experience in writing,” and more, she says.

Finding support in groups like the YJC has motivated Yasmin Al-Najar, a freelance journalist based in Manchester, England, to pay it forward. She maintains a spreadsheet with contacts of editors and publications that she is open to sharing with other journalists who may be looking to add to their own lists. “These groups are really supportive, and it’s a lovely feeling when people celebrate your work and send messages about how your article made them think about [a subject] in a different way or how they enjoy reading your work or can resonate with it,” says Al-Najar, whose desire to give back as much as she gets from the group is shared by many of the YJC’s members.

While many of these groups are defined by their membership and serve primarily as a means of networking, they often provide additional avenues for professional development. Like the YJC’s session with Brinkhurst-Cuff was for me, workshops can be very beneficial, particularly for those who may not be getting access to other developmental resources due to not being affiliated with a traditional employer.

“I have found two main types of support that are key for your career. One focused on building or strengthening skills through continuing education and workshops, and the other centered around creating a support system of like-minded professionals that could be a cheerleader squad and provide advice for career and personal development,” says Alex Menendez, the press and communications lead at LMF Network, a social enterprise focusing on workshops, mentorship, and career development. The LMF Network isn’t limited to journalists, but does work on providing access to the skill development, mentors, and industry experts that early career journalists can benefit from.

And many are taking advantage of these resources. “Our second cohort had more than 600 participants from 14 countries; most of them were women or identified as gender-fluid from [Black, Asian, and minority ethnic] backgrounds,” says Menendez. With so much interest, it’s clear that the more informal Facebook groups and text communities are crucial for providing ongoing support. That so many of these spaces are still being created by early career journalists themselves speaks to their need, and how much more is likely needed.

Individuals like Brighty-Potts or Iftikhar, who have taken the leap to go out of their way and create their own spaces, have now set a precedent within the journalism industry. Groups like theirs will continue to inspire people to reach out when they need support — and to extend it to others. “Support is out there. Just ask, start conversations, and reach out to people you think are cool — in a non-creepy way,” Brighty-Potts says.

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

Support More Stories Like This

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Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Explore: Online Communities for Early Career Journalists

• Gals in Journalism: Focusing mainly on marginalized genders entering the world of journalism, GIJ highlights opportunities, events, and articles the group enjoys.

• Young Journalist Community: A discussion group for early career journalists, including reporters, writers, and editors. The group shares a number of opportunities to find pitching leads, discusses ideas, and promotes student journalism jobs.

• Freelancing for Journalists: Set up by the hosts of the podcast Freelancing for Journalists, this Facebook group is a place where new journalists can learn the ins and outs of freelancing and ask questions freely.

Learn: An Introduction to Freelancing

There are so many resources available for early career journalists that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Here are just a few of my favorites, the ones that helped me to get started in the business.

• Journo Resources: Started by Jem Collins in 2016, JR focuses on sharing job opportunities, advice articles, and personal experiences by those in the journalism industry. It also offers much-needed guidance on pitching, invoicing, and managing finances as a journalist.

• Empoword Journalism: A publication with content geared toward uplifting and supporting journalists, especially those newer to the business.

• The Freelance Sessions: The Freelance Sessions provides opportunities for anyone wanting to participate in tailored workshops and pitching clinics; it targets different topics and categories in journalism that can be very helpful for anyone looking to find and develop their beat.

Meet: About the Author

Anmol Irfan is a Muslim-Pakistani freelance journalist and the founder of Perspective. She writes about gender, identity, and global politics with a focus on South Asia.

“What queer disease is this,” wrote the late-19th-century psychologist William James, “of holding things and staring at them like that for hours, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life.” The physical act of sustained reading is certainly strange. It can even be off-putting. In the novel Middlemarch, the stodgy Mr. Featherstone observes as much when he discovers his servant, Mary Garth, lost in a novel. “I can’t abide to see her reading to herself,” he says. But for the person hunched over Middlemarch, losing oneself in such a way is a rarefied form of bliss. It’s beyond reproach.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of reading is that, for all the pleasures of the text, we must be taught to do it. Recognizing symbols and signs, as well as the ability to assign them meaning, might be innate to the human brain, but directing these abilities to follow words on the page — a relatively new skill in human history — requires instruction. Like a child learning to ride a bike without training wheels, the magical moment comes when the parent lets go and the child pedals off — and keeps going. “The most significant kind of learning,” writes the Stanford University reading specialist Elliot Eisner, “creates a desire to pursue learning in that field when one doesn’t have to.” The wonder of experiencing a novel (or the sensation of coasting on two wheels) can be habit-forming.

Unfortunately, considerable evidence suggests that Americans are both reading less and reading with less intensity. It’s not unusual to hear well-educated adults who once read regularly now lament the decline in their bookish habits. In a widely circulated 2015 Medium article (“Why Can’t We Read Anymore?”), Hugh McGuire, who founded Librivox, which distributes public-domain audiobooks, highlighted the frenetic nature of digital life as the primary reason for why he was “finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters.” According to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, the typical American adult now reads only four books a year. Twenty-seven percent didn't read a single book in 2015, and a 2016 report from the National Endowment for the Arts found that reading had dropped, as the Washington Post summarized it, “to at least a three-decade low.”

As the art of close reading — a finely grained analysis of a text — has declined, a cohort of experts has emerged to reverse the trend and encourage stronger reading habits. Their solution has a kind of old-school simplicity to it: We need to allow the physicality of the book itself to lure us back into the pleasures of reading.

Young readers of every generation have faced unique challenges when it comes to staying engaged in a book. But those whose job it is to nurture bibliophilia today compete with more than a radio or a television set that gets a few fuzzy stations. They compete with a universe of data — much of it wildly entertaining — that can be accessed immediately and from virtually any location. Getting lost in a book now means willfully tuning out more distraction than humans have ever encountered before. It’s a challenge for anyone to accomplish, much less a digital native whose young brain is virtually hardwired to the Internet.

And it’s not just the sheer volume of data that’s significant. It’s also the narratives that are rewarded in the digital realm. Research shows that teenagers are especially eager, in the context of social media, to present a story of their lives for consumption. According to a Pew study from mid-2013, 91 percent of teens in the United States were posting photographs of themselves (up from 79 percent less than a decade before, at the height of Myspace’s popularity), 92 percent posted their real names, 84 percent posted their interests, and 62 percent posted their relationship status. Such intimate interactions, situated in the interstices of virtual space, are something teens appear to genuinely enjoy, with a majority of them having had an experience online “that made them feel good about themselves.” Thus today’s reading specialists contend with more than just cat GIFs, listicles, and YouTube: They must convince potential readers that the narratives recorded in hoary old texts can be just as engaging as scrolling through a carefully packaged Instagram story.

In a jungle of entertainment, how do we cultivate an addiction to reading?

“Reading,” says Steve Mannheimer, professor of media arts and science at Indiana University, “doesn’t occur without some fairly specific and concrete combination of physical objects, environment, and purpose.” So one technique is to focus on the book as a book. “Intuitively, I would say that the paper book invites far more physical manipulation with at least the fingers and hands,” he says. “All that finger/hand fidgeting is part of the cognitive process, or at least reinforces the cognitive process of reading.”

There’s other evidence that a traditional book, rather than an electronic tablet, makes for a more engaged reading experience. During research for a paper published in 2014, Anne Mangen, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Stavanger in Norway, compared the reading experience of iPad users and paper traditionalists reading the same material. She found that readers felt less transported by the writing and less able to resist distractions when reading on an iPad than on paper. “When you read on paper you can sense with your fingers a pile of pages on the left growing, and shrinking on the right,” she told the Guardian. Such a “tactile sense of progress,” she suggested, helps readers better follow the storyline.

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In a review paper, Australian scholars Stewart Todhunter and Penny de Byl argue that “the ability to touch and smell a book has an innate power, engaging readers in a way not yet possible through pure digitized versions of the same media.” They write that the “human perception of tangibility” is directly linked to the production of knowledge, a connection that originates in an infant’s ability to mentally grasp objects not available for immediate observation. “Although it is possible to touch an ebook,” they write, “the interactivity does not endow the same effect” as an actual book. The fact that “it is not the actual book itself being touched but the device on which it resides” is a distinction that, when it comes to forming reading habits, matters.

The reason for this difference may come down to what the scholars Jim Gerlach and Peter Buxmann call “haptic dissonance”: an alienation from the book as physical book. To better understand this phenomenon, the researchers surveyed avid readers — people who read, on average, 30 books a year — and had them imagine reading a hardcover book and on an e-reader. The study found that 93.3 percent identified “the feel of a page and the paper” and 80 percent identified “the feel of turning a page” as important aspects of reading. When they turned to the e-readers, 56.7 percent explicitly “miss[ed] the paper while turning the pages” while a third reported that, “while holding the book, I can’t feel the progress I’ve made.” Summarizing the research on “the reading brain in the digital age,” Ferris Jabr writes in Scientific American, “evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way.”

Another thing electronic books cannot provide is something that many reading experts believe is essential for creating an environment conducive to lifelong reading: a room filled with actual books. Lisa Sumner, an English teacher at Bluffton High School in Bluffton, South Carolina, considers it her “life’s work” to be “guiding people to read rigorously.” When we speak about her classroom strategies, she stresses, more than any other factor, the importance of having “a huge classroom library,” with physical books from floor to ceiling there to be grabbed, handled, smelled, shared, and browsed at will. “Being around books does something to people,” she says. “Being in a room where every wall is full of books is a visual reminder” that Sumner thinks is critical to becoming a “book person.”

One study backs up Sumner’s assessment, by identifying a correlation between growing up with a large library of physical books and academic achievement. According to a comprehensive 2010 study published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, home library size strongly influences the level of education a child will go on to receive. A house with 500 books, according to the study, “would propel a child 3.2 years further in education” than a home without books.

Sumner takes her teaching cues from New Hampshire-based reading specialist Penny Kittle. Kittle, too, reiterates the importance of the physical book — not so much because students necessarily read better when turning pages, but because physical books tend to encourage an educational atmosphere that fosters book-related interaction. “I will talk to anyone I see with a book,” Kittle says. She wants her students to feel the same way. As she understands it, “being in a community with other readers is essential.” Novel reading may not be, as Suzanne Keen, author of Empathy and the Novel writes, “a team sport.” But it can definitely be the basis on which a range of people will share thoughts in a collegial setting. People who put names to such things call it “dialogic reading.” Carrying a copy of Ulysses around town, or even having one on a shelf, can be a book reader's equivalent to a status update on Facebook.

To that end, Kittle, like Sumner, lines the walls of her classroom with scores of books. She, too, asks her students to survey what’s available and discover what might suit their interests. Because every class begins with discussion of a book—followed by 15 minutes of individual reading time — these teachers want students to know what their peers are reading by seeing the physical books they hold in their hands. Kittle explains that a love of reading happens “when one book leads into another,” a patient process of accumulation that may be more satisfying, she believes, when the objects consumed are tangible. Her students keep careful count of the number of books they have read in a year and refer to that figure with a certain level of pride. Of course, there are many technologically sophisticated ways to track and display your reading progress online, but the experts I spoke to — including Kittle — all agreed that, for their students at least, it helped to see what they had read laid out in front of them in the form of actual books.

And indeed the physical book seems on the verge of a comeback. Actual bookstores are experiencing a notable resurgence. According to the American Booksellers Association, the number of independent bookstores rose 27 percent between 2009 and 2014. The organization's chief executive, Oren Teicher, told the New York Times that, “despite all the quantum leaps in technology, the fact is nothing beats a physical, bricks-and-mortar store to discover books that you didn’t know about.” One case study on the reading habits of middle school boys strongly supports the benefits of browsing a traditional bookstore. Seeking to place subjects in “as textually rich an environment as possible,” the researchers chose not Amazon but “a large independent bookstore,” where the kids were asked to fill an actual shopping basket with actual books. Average browsing time was over 30 minutes (with one boy browsing as long as 72 minutes) — an engagement that would likely not have happened with an algorithm choosing books for you to buy online. (Data on time spent book browsing online is not available, but, for a close comparison, consumers spend about 60 to 90 seconds on Netflix browsing for movies.) If reading specialists such as Sumner and Kittle have their way, it is the next generation — those raised on screens — who will be doing the browsing.

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

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Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

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A version of this story was first published on February 12th, 2018, in Pacific Standard, a magazine that reported on social, economic, and environmental justice issues from its headquarters in Santa Barbara, California, between 2008 and 2019.

Meet: About the Author

James McWilliams is a professor at Texas State University, and the author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly and A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America. His writing on food, agriculture, and animals has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, the Washington Post, Slate, The Atlantic, and others.

It is now coming up on four years since I added my voice to the brave women reporting the sexual violence of Harvey Weinstein. (Weinstein has denied all allegations of sexual misconduct.) In that time, I have had the privilege of getting to know many silence breakers — not only women targeted by Weinstein, but also those coming forward about Bill Cosby, James Toback, Dustin Hoffman, Donald Trump, and R. Kelly. Women (and some men) come to me because of my trauma knowledge, and because I’m a fellow survivor and I get it.

One consequence of coming forward about a high-profile abuser is media attention. Often, our interactions with the people who claim to be helping us “get our story out there” have ended up resurfacing feelings of exploitation and powerlessness that are associated with the original trauma.

I have been asked to take part in several documentaries about Weinstein. On one memorable occasion, I spent three and a half hours in front of the camera in my usual attempt to link my story to the mind-blowing science about the impacts of trauma. As usual, my interview was edited down to 15 seconds and detailed only the body parts Weinstein attempted to grope.

There is a cost to the telling and retelling of our stories. I was reminded of this again when I was invited to take part in a gathering to provide storylines for a #MeToo theater production. Despite very good intentions, the organizers were not trained in how to conduct interviews with trauma survivors. Some of us got “triggered” (an activation of the autonomic nervous system), and one survivor even started to re-experience her assault. I had tried to forestall this by suggesting we stick to headlines only (i.e. no gory details). Unfortunately, since many of the other survivors are actresses and are used to being encouraged to go deep into their emotions to find truth for their acting work, they didn’t understand that revisiting the trauma may activate the stress response and even aggravate post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

Dr. Judith L. Herman writes that “trauma robs the victim of a sense of power and control over her own life; therefore, the guiding principle of recovery is to restore power and control to the survivor.” It has made me angry and distressed to see this fundamental aspect of trauma recovery overlooked by media through ignorance or through the business-as-usual model. (The criminal justice system is little better: I have been interviewed by three jurisdictions pursuing the various Weinstein criminal cases, and they have ranged from weak to woeful in terms of trauma-informed practice.)

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I don’t believe that most media professionals wake up in the morning wanting to harm someone. They just want do a good job and would be delighted if they could have some tangible pointers about how to “do no harm” in the process. That’s why I’d like to offer some preliminary thinking on a code of conduct that could be adopted for media interviews with survivors. The code should include informed consent for participation in interviews, filmed or otherwise. As Dr. Bruce Perry, founder of the Child Trauma Academy, confirms, survivors in these high-profile cases can either go into a cocoon of self-protection or else speak indiscriminately. Too often, I think, we survivors are misled into thinking that a kind reporter or sympathetic producer is a safe person, and then find ourselves re-traumatized by our subsequent lack of control in the editing and distribution of the interviews.

Not only do survivors suffer a loss of power and control, but we also rarely benefit from the emotional culling of our stories. I feel the disparity when a Weinstein documentary sells for seven figures while I lie awake worrying about funding for my small non-profit that serves survivors. My goal is not and has never been to get money for telling my story, but I wish the production companies would give a thought when they celebrate the success of their film to the fact that it is our pain that gave it birth. As silence-breakers struggle with the fallout of coming forward, there is scant acknowledgement that it is our courage that accrued media profits and paid reporters’ salaries, little sense of a duty of care, and many of us are left feeling even more violated than when Harvey put his pudgy hands on us.

I would like to see a code of conduct for journalists and documentarians when working with trauma survivors, a code that will be upheld by those commissioning or paying for the end product. The code would include, at minimum:

• Ongoing informed consent. This would involve explaining how much of the interview is likely to make it into the final edit, who else will appear in the piece, the themes that are likely to be selected, and the framing of the story, if that is already known. Predictability and trustworthiness (along with safety, collaboration, and offering choices) are important principles of trauma-informed practice.

• Psycho-education for crew. Reporters and crews should know how the nervous system responds to trauma and how to support the interviewee. Some ways of supporting the interviewee:

  • Limiting interviews to no more than an hour at a time and offering lots of breaks.

  • Offering choices, for example, of where to sit. (Your ideal set-up of bright lights, limited movement on a hard chair, and surrounding darkness may make for a good aesthetic but are all additional stressors on the nervous system of the interviewee.)

  • Asking interviewees what helps when they are stressed, and encouraging them to use those techniques (e.g. shaking out their hands, sipping cold water, or taking deep breaths). If the interviewee gets stuck in an agitated, panicky state (hyperarousal) or, conversely, withdraws or appears emotionally numb (hypoarousal), shut the interview down.

• Psycho-education for survivors. It is important for survivors to understand:

  • How trauma affects the brain and nervous system.

  • How trauma shows up in behavior.

  • How to identify the signs that your nervous system is getting activated, and how to get it back in balance.

  • The wide variety of body-based interventions that can help reverse the effects of trauma.

  • Factors that promote post-traumatic growth, not least of these being empowerment (reclaiming your power and your voice).

• Counseling for survivors. Depending on how much time the survivor has had to process the trauma, how recently they have gone public, and the degree of backlash (or deafening silence) surrounding their story, survivors may need ongoing counseling support.

• An assessment for survivors to make sure they have supports in place before filming begins. It is not enough that the survivor “wants” to do the interview. If you were a family member, would you allow this person to sign important documents in their current state? If not, then why are you allowing them to decide to participate in something that might lead to future regret and embarrassment?

• Collaborative decision-making about edits, the chosen narrative, and the tenor of the marketing.

I recognize this last point is a total reversal in the existing power structure in media. No one likes to give up power, and those who have it usually come up with all kinds of reasons not to relinquish it. Reporters and documentarians will argue that survivor input threatens “objectivity.” But if objectivity is the goal, then allow the survivor to comment on the chosen narrative once it becomes clear; if we disagree with how the information is being framed, this disagreement should also appear in the report or documentary. Isn’t offering both sides of the story fundamental to “objectivity”?

I told one documentary producer how sad it was that the survivors who participated in her well-funded film didn’t even get as much as a bunch of flowers. Such a gesture might have helped us feel more like collaborators and less like something served up for dinner. She argued that any perceived incentive, even flowers, would contravene very strict rules about compensation, which are “industry standard.” Thankfully, those standards are not universal. When I was interviewed for Japanese national television, I was presented with a small glass figurine. While filmmakers fill their mantlepieces with awards, this small gift is the only tangible recognition I have ever received that my story has made a difference. If, in some quarters, that contravenes “industry standards,” then I think those rules need to be re-examined.

Ultimately, I would like to see some of the power and control shift to survivors so we can depict ourselves as exactly that: survivors, not mere hand-wringing victims of Weinstein and other predators, which is how the media loves to portray us. We are survivors. We survived. We are strong and knowledgeable and have used our experiences to become empowered as activists, artists, teachers, and counselors. Who is making a documentary about that?

I would also like to see information about trauma and resilience getting directly into the hands of survivors. With that as our goal, Echo, the non-profit I lead, provides trauma training for survivors and trauma-informed parenting classes, as well as training for professionals in trauma-informed practice. We also consult with organizations on trauma and how it is linked to toxic workplace culture.

It would be a huge first step for interviewers to be open-minded enough to imagine reporting in a collaborative style with trauma survivors. We are fed up with those who interview us but don’t really listen to us, because they presume that an expertise in storytelling means they know better — even about trauma.

In the language of trauma-informed care, we talk about taking on the role of “compassionate witness” as opposed to “expert” when interacting with a survivor, operating from a “power-with” versus a “power-over” approach.

If more people in media were to embrace that approach, we would see better stories, more cooperation from those who quite understandably distrust media (now I know why some of the big-name actresses who came forward about Weinstein don’t give interviews), and, most importantly, we would empower survivors rather than re-traumatizing them.

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

Support More Stories Like This

The Postscript

Additional content and context, added to everything we do.

Collaborate: Partnership Credit

A version of this story was first published on August 1st, 2019, in Pacific Standard, a magazine that reported on social, economic, and environmental justice issues from its headquarters in Santa Barbara, California, between 2008 and 2019.

Support: Echo

Echo is a non-profit with a mission to educate families, communities, and professionals about trauma and resilience in order to promote survivor empowerment, resolve individual and community-level trauma, and create the safe, stable, nurturing relationships that break the cycle of generational trauma.

Meet: About the Author

Louise Godbold has worked variously as a commercials producer in Europe, a “development girl” in Hollywood, and, for the last 20 years, in social programs. In 2010, she became dedicated to helping those with trauma when she started work at Echo, a non-profit that now, under her leadership, specializes in trauma training. Louise was one of the first women to come forward in October of 2017 about Harvey Weinstein. Since that time, Louise has conducted trauma training for sexual assault survivors and their supporters in the entertainment industry, and has given television and press interviews internationally on the topics of trauma and resilience.