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Notable Narrative: Ben Goldfarb and “The Deliciously Fishy Case Of The ‘Codfather'”

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Ben Goldfarb has found a niche in fish. A freelancer based in New Haven, Conn., he regularly covers commercial fisheries and wildlife conservation for magazines such as Science and Boston Magazine. It’s a topic that can easily get too wonky for mainstream readers. So when he heard scuttlebutt about the indictment of a New England fishing mogul known as “The Codfather,” he knew he’d caught a big one.

“There was an affidavit in the case that resembles a Mario Puzo novel.”

“It’s incumbent upon fish journalists to find really powerful characters who can carry these otherwise very abstruse stories,” he said.

Portuguese-born Carlos Rafael had amassed tens of millions of dollars trading in cod, haddock and scallops. Then in 2015, he unwittingly admitted to an undercover IRS agent that he was defrauding the government by selling thousands of pounds of fish under the table and underreporting his catch.

He was indicted in May 2016 on 27 counts of fraud, among other charges. He pleaded guilty this spring, right after Mother Jones ran Goldfarb’s story, which was funded by the nonprofit news organization Food & Environment Reporting Network.

It’s a good example of how an eye-catching narrative can be used to tell a policy story. And of how having a beat — especially an obscure one — can help you jump on stories that resonate nationally.

I talked to Goldfarb about the story; his answers are below, edited for clarity and flow.

Your first sentence is: “The fake Russians met the Codfather on June 3, 2015, at an inconspicuous warehouse on South Front Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts.” Why did you start here?

I was trying to find a way into a story that was ultimately going to be pretty policy-dense and technical. Especially at a time when the influence of Russia on our politics is such a ubiquitous question, I liked the idea of getting Russia in right at the top and drawing in some of the politically conscious people who wouldn’t ordinarily gravitate toward a story about fish and fisheries. I was trying to blend the crime caper with the policy stuff, and the former definitely seemed like the place to begin.

A crewman helps offload catch in New Bedford, Mass.

A crewman helps offload catch in New Bedford, Mass.

You then did three paragraphs of background before getting back to the scene. You covered everything from the size of the seafood industry in New Bedford, Mass., to Rafael’s childhood. Why interrupt the narrative to zoom out so much?

I wanted to further establish Carlos’s character. He certainly comes across as a villain, but he’s also a pretty complicated individual. In many ways, he represents the American Dream.  He arrived here as in immigrant and worked incredibly hard, had this incredible business acumen and built a gigantic fishing empire. In some ways, he’s an admirable figure. There are plenty of people in New Bedford who idolized the guy. It was important to me that he not come across as a one-dimensional villain, and I felt like explaining his backstory and how remarkable his accomplishments were was a good way of arriving that. Honestly, I wish I had room for more of that. And when you walk around New Bedford, you can feel the weight of New England’s maritime history. The streets are made of cobblestone, there are whaling museums, and you can hear Portuguese spoken. It’s a town in which history is so palpable, and I wanted to communicate that in some way. I wanted to cast Carlos as a successor in this really long line of fisherman. In some ways, that history dictates the entire story. It’s this long history of unchecked overfishing that got us to where we are today.

Did you get to talk to Rafael? If not, how did you report personal details about him, including his history and net worth?

He wasn’t doing interviews with anybody. And people in regulatory agencies were pretty clammed up because it was an ongoing investigation. But Carlos was a very public figure — this brash, outspoken, funny, incredibly quotable guy. He was very much on the record over the years, and there had been several local profiles written about him. He’d also participated in an oral history project the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did with local fisherman. That had a huge amount of background about his journey to America. There were many details that didn’t make it into the story, like he wanted to be a priest as a child and worked in a sausage factory as a 14-year-old.

“It’s incumbent upon fish journalists to find really powerful characters who can carry these otherwise very abstruse stories.”

He also had a pretty voluminous paper trail. There was an affidavit in the case that resembles a Mario Puzo novel. The net worth was in there, and it had so much detail about how his whole scheme worked. One of the interesting mysteries of this story for me is why, when the fake Russians arrived at his warehouse, he immediately spilled his guts to them. He told them the entire operation of this fraud probably 10 minutes after meeting them. In talking to other fisherman, one thing that becomes clear about Carlos is that he likes people to know how smart and shrewd and cunning he is. He came across as a very proud man, and one of the things he was proud of was his ability to slip through the cracks of this regulatory system.

You zoom out from the Codfather’s narrative to broader issues, particularly consolidation in the fishing industry and the role of regulation in that. Was that always part of your vision for the story?

A Massachusetts Environmental Agency enforcement office talks to members of the crew on a fishing vessel before they offload their catch in New Bedford, Mass.

A Massachusetts Environmental Agency enforcement office talks to members of the crew on a fishing vessel before they offload their catch in New Bedford, Mass.

There’d been a lot of local stories written about Carlos, but there hadn’t really been anything about how he fit into the bigger picture. I wanted to connect Carlos to the story of a fisheries management system called catch shares, which has swept all over the world and created winners and losers across the fishing industry. If policymakers don’t take steps to mitigate the social impacts of catch shares, we could end up elsewhere with a situation like New England: one big player and smaller fisheries struggling to survive. To me that was the fascination of this story: the ways in which Carlos Rafael was emblematic of bigger changes affecting fisheries around the world and ultimately influencing who it is that brings you your fish. We’re well-connected to where our produce comes from, but we don’t think very much about the provenance of our seafood.

How did you think about making the policy angle interesting to the average reader?

At the end of the day, you have to give this stuff a human face. Obviously, Carlos was a good way of accomplishing that, but there were other fishermen who’d been involved in this process and affected by it. If Carlos was the winner, these guys were the losers. Even if people don’t quite understand how all the policy stuff works, if they come away thinking, “The big guy got bigger, and the little guys got pushed out of the game,” that’s enough for me.

Why did you decide it was the right time to publish the story? The case wasn’t over yet.

That was one thing my editors and I talked about a lot. Do we run it before it settles? Do we hope there’s a trial that will provide another great scene? But throughout the process, the dates for the trial were constantly shifting, and I’d heard from all my sources in the industry that he was going to plead guilty. We had this shifting target and decided to get it out in the world. Getting scooped was part of the fear, but ultimately there was enough to go on. The ending could be this big question: What’s going to happen now? In some ways ending with uncertainty was appropriate, because we’re in a period of total uncertainty for the industry.


A darkness runs through it: a journalist gunned down, a small town’s secrets

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A darkness runs through this week’s post. Most disturbing is the interview with yet another Mexican journalist who was later gunned down for being brave enough to write about the vicious cartels there. And then in the One Great Sentence, French novelist/true crime journalist Colette tries to get inside the mind of a serial killer. And librarians who work next to what locals call “Needle Park” are forced to carry overdose antidotes so junkies don’t die in their bathrooms. Even the fiction, “Peyton Place,” is about incest and murder and dark secrets and small-mindedness. After you read it, go out into the sunshine and enjoy your long weekend.

A protestor holds a sign reading "No more violence against journalists," during a demonstration in Mexico City a day after journalist Javier Valdez was slain in the northern state of Sinaloa.

A protestor holds a sign reading "No more violence against journalists," during a demonstration in Mexico City a day after journalist Javier Valdez was slain in the northern state of Sinaloa.

The truth must be told: a conversation with slain journalist Javier Valdez. Twitter can be a wonderful thing sometimes: Ernesto Priego tweeted that someone should translate a haunting interview of Mexican journalist Javier Valdez just months before he was gunned down. I got in touch with him, and he volunteered to translate it himself, and to write an essay about the dangers reporters and editors in Mexico face. The result is a must-read. As Priego writes: “His journalism told stories that, when put together, reconstructed the horrific jigsaw puzzle of Mexico’s national tragedy.”

The soundtrack: “The Line of Fire,” by Junip. This song, with its musical echoes to David Bowie and Pat Metheny’s “This Is Not America” (a timely song these days), is both beautiful and spooky. When editing certain stories, I used to have it on repeat.

One Great Sentence

“Did he kill? If he did kill, I would swear that it is with this meticulous, somewhat maniacal, admirably lucid care with which he classifies his notes, drafts his papers. Did he kill? Then it is while whistling a little tune, and wearing an apron for fear of stains.”

Colette, “Voici Landru!” Le Matin, November 8, 1921

Read why we think it’s great.

As one fishing vessel leaves the dock another pulls up to offload its catch in New Bedford, Mass.

As one fishing vessel leaves the dock another pulls up to offload its catch in New Bedford, Mass.

Ben Goldfarb and “The Deliciously Fishy Case of ‘The Codfather.'” The first thing I learned from this interview with Ben Goldfarb about his recent article in Mother Jones: There are fish journalists. As in: “It’s incumbent upon fish journalists to find really powerful characters who can carry these otherwise very abstruse stories.” The second thing: His really powerful character was the fishing world’s version of Marlon Brando in “The Godfather.” Interviewer Katia Savchuk says: “It’s a good example of how an eye-catching narrative can be used to tell a policy story. And of how having a beat — especially an obscure one — can help you jump on stories that resonate nationally.”

The soundtrack: “Fisherman’s Blues,” by the Waterboys. Absolutely love this song. That fiddle! And the moment when he finally sings, “And on that fine and fateful day/ I will take thee in my hand/I will ride on a train/ I will be the fisherman/with light in my head, you in my arms.” Lovely.

What I’m reading online: The literary sleuthing in this discovery is so cool: For 50 years, a piece of carbon paper was stuck in the back of a book. Then someone found it and deciphered it, and realized it contained two unseen poems by Sylvia Plath. If you’re young and haven’t ever seen carbon paper, it’s this deeply pigmented paper that made a copy of what you wrote or typed. I’m having a sensory memory of handling it.

Let’s keep the literary vibe going with this Philadelphia Inquirer story about a library near a park people call “Needle Park” because of the number of junkies who hang out there. Now librarians carry OD antidote and conduct overdose “drills” because so many drug tourists are collapsing in and around the library.

And this Elle profile of New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman is a galloping read: vivid, with great momentum. The deck hed says she “may be the greatest political reporter working today.” And the story says: “Her expertise wasn’t just Trump—it was the Trump psyche.”

What’s on my bedside table: It’s been a Peyton Place kind of week. First I spotted it at my favorite used bookstore, Lobster Lane books out on a Maine peninsula, and then I watched it, just for the melodrama and the local scenery — it was filmed in a nearby town. Grace Metalious was a bit heavy-handed in the writing (opening line: “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases…”), but it took guts to write this in New England in the 1950s.

What’s on my turntable: Although I spend most of my time listening to music on Spotify, sometimes I want to hear the needle touching down on vinyl. This week’s vinyl: “‘Round About Midnight,” by Miles Davis. What timing Davis had. Those pauses and then rushes, those coursing streams of music and then the swallowed notes. And he had some of the best covers in album-dom. This isn’t my favorite — that would be “Porgy and Bess” — but it’s still magnificent.

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

5(ish) Questions: Phoebe Zerwick and “The Last Days of Darryl Hunt”

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On her first weekend at The Winston-Salem Journal in 1987, Phoebe Zerwick’s new coworkers took her to a famous crime scene: the place where a man named Darryl Hunt had allegedly raped and murdered a woman three years earlier. If that seems odd, it wasn’t for this North Carolina community. Winston-Salem had been consumed by the crime and Hunt’s trial.

“So that was a remarkable moment: telling something in a different way that would get readers involved.”

Zerwick couldn’t have imagined then that her reporting in the decades to come would not only change Hunt’s life irrevocably, it would change some of her fundamental journalistic assumptions and values.

In 2003, Zerwick began reporting about Hunt, a local man who had been convicted of raping and murdering Deborah Sykes, a woman who worked as a copy editor at the now-defunct Winston-Salem Sentinel. Zerwick’s editor at The Journal had assigned her a basic news article about Hunt’s request for DNA testing. But the article, informed by a tip from a reader, led to a series about Hunt and the Sykes case, and to Hunt’s exoneration and freedom.

But life in the free world was hard for Hunt, who had spent 19 years imprisoned on the false convictions. Zerwick, who remained in touch with Hunt over the years, saw him again in January 2016, when he came to talk to her class at Wake Forest University, where she is an associate professor and director of the school’s journalism program.

It was then that Zerwick realized that for all her reporting about Hunt, she’d never told his story. She was keen to correct that. But then, on March 13, 2016, Hunt was found dead inside a pickup truck. The medical examiner ruled Hunt’s death a suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Zerwick’s interest in Hunt’s story was stirred up again by his death. She decided to report the unfinished story, which was published on The Atavist platform earlier this month. The piece has been controversial, because Zerwick revealed Hunt’s apparent drug use and his lies about having cancer. But she believes those details help us understand the painful realities of Hunt’s life after being wrongfully accused.

“The stories we told shaped Hunt’s life,” she wrote. “Convicted him. Set him free. Made him a champion of justice. But his death seemed to be telling us that these narratives missed something. They didn’t exactly lie, but they weren’t the entire truth either,” she continued. “That’s the trouble with storytelling.”

“This,” she added, “is my attempt to get the story straight.”

I spoke with Zerwick by phone about her years spent reporting about Hunt, about what it means to tell someone else’s story, and what journalists can learn from her experiences covering Hunt’s life and death. The interview has been edited for length and flow.

In advance of our interview, I posted on Facebook (where else?!) that I was reading your Atavist article again in preparation for our conversation. Small world that it is, a friend mentioned that she had you and Darryl talk to a class she was teaching. Long story short, she was taken aback by your Atavist piece, wondering why Darryl can’t just rest in peace. Another friend expressed gratitude for the Atavist story, saying that she hadn’t heard Darryl’s story before and she thought the piece was important for the sake of documenting a life and not letting Darryl’s death be in vain. That’s a heavy place for us to start, but I think it’s an important one, too. How would you respond to these competing reactions?

I suppose part of it was intentional and part of it wasn’t so intentional, but I think, right after he died, I just got curious about what happened and started asking questions, because that’s what I know how to do. As I got more into it, I just felt that it got more intriguing and of course it was so sad, and I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I thought, the only thing I can do, the only thing I know how to do, is look into it and report on it and see if there’s a story for me to write. I suppose it felt like a duty or obligation.

The way I had ended up writing the piece was starting off in my classroom. I remembered seeing him in my classroom just a few weeks before he died, being struck by the fact that I had focused all that energy on investigating his case and then I’d been in touch with him on and off over the years, but I’d never really sat down and talked with him about how his life was like now and these bigger questions of whether he’d ever received justice. I had it in the back of my head that that would be something worthwhile to do. And then he died and the two ideas came together.

Can you talk about the original story, how you found out about him, and how that story unfolded?

I heard about his case my first weekend in North Carolina; a couple of reporters gave me a tour of Winston-Salem and took me to all the highlights, to show me places that I would need to know about as a reporter there. And the first place they took me to was the scene for the Deborah Sykes crime.

As far as getting into that investigative piece, our newsroom had been covering this story since the beginning, so by 2003, it was nearly 20 years. There was a new law on the books in North Carolina that allowed a defendant to ask for DNA testing if they had a claim of innocence, and Darryl, through his attorney, Mark Rabil, filed that motion. My boss, who was the metro editor, Les Gura, I saw him go up to [the newspaper’s] morgue and bring down the whole clips files. We had all these clippings in manila envelopes and we started going through them for this little news story he’d asked me for about Hunt’s request for DNA testing. And then Les Gura said to me, “Wow we should really take a fresh look at it.” At first, I thought, “Oh no, what have I done? I’ve got this huge assignment and how am I going to do it?” I was dreading it a little bit to some extent, because I didn’t see what I was going to be able to uncover in a case that had been covered so extensively already.

The stories we told shaped Hunt’s life. Convicted him. Set him free. Made him a champion of justice. But his death seemed to be telling us that these narratives missed something. They didn’t exactly lie, but they weren’t the entire truth either. That’s the trouble with storytelling. This is my attempt to get the story straight.”

But I went through it fairly methodically, I read everything, I interviewed everybody I could find, and when it came time to write it, what was so daunting about it was that I hadn’t really found any brand-new piece of evidence. We didn’t have the smoking gun. But we decided to tell it as a narrative as opposed to the way the evidence had always been presented. What we ended up with – which was new – was a new way of telling and looking at evidence that had largely already been examined. When we told the story as a narrative, it became way clearer that the case against Darryl Hunt just did not hold up.

And then what happened was, the series started on a Sunday, big circulation day, and that Monday this woman called me and she said, “I’m so glad you wrote that because I’ve known for 20 years that he didn’t do it.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “My daughter-in-law – and you can’t tell her I called — was raped six months after that crime and the police never let her pursue charges against the man she identified, and I’m sure it was the same person who killed Deborah Sykes.” That found its way into the last day of the series. And what did that do? When the state finally got around to doing the DNA testing that Darryl Hunt had asked for, it kind of put local law enforcement on notice that at least the newspaper and the public now knew about this other rape, and it turned out that the woman who called me was right. The man who had been identified by her daughter-in-law as the man who raped her ended up being matched to the Sykes crime.

So that was a remarkable moment: telling something in a different way that would get readers involved. This woman who called me had believed this for 20 years and had never thought to call the newspaper before, and because of the way the piece was written, local officials saw the case in a new way. The style of the writing was new.

That’s really fascinating and really moving and sad because it feels like the information that could have led to Hunt’s exoneration was there all along and all it took was simply – though I know there was nothing simple about it – to change the narrative, to make it narrative.

In a way, it is as simple as changing the narrative. I now work with Mark Rabil [Hunt’s lawyer], who’s on the faculty at Wake Forest Law School, and we’ve talked about this a great deal. We’ve given a talk about this at a law conference that has to do with narrative, and we’re giving another talk about it this summer. The way evidence is presented in court is so constrained by rules of evidence. Everyone is presented by the defense or the prosecutor, and then the other side tears that person apart and it goes one witness at a time. But life doesn’t unfold one witness at a time. So the way a courtroom narrative is constructed doesn’t get the facts out as well or as truthfully as the way a narrative is constructed and organized by time as opposed to character. So I think to some extent it is as simple as telling the narrative in a different way. And the way newspaper stories generally unfold is “he said, she said”; that’s the typical way of covering crimes and courts, and that’s how everybody’s done it since the beginning of time. But that also masks the truth, with a small “t”:  The prosecutors in this case were wrong. And if you give both sides equal weight, it masks what the real story was.

That realization is powerful in a lot of ways. It’s powerful on a big-picture level in terms of potentially reshaping how you approach your work as a journalist, but it’s also really powerful on this individual level because it resulted in the exoneration of an innocent man. I’m wondering what kind of feelings that brought up for you. It seems that’s something to be celebrated, but I wonder whether there was a burden, too.

I didn’t feel it like a burden, but I also did feel some sense of responsibility when it was clear that things hadn’t [turned out well for Hunt]. I don’t think our original series got it wrong, but rather the narrative we’d all constructed—the narratives we construct about all these cases of wrongful conviction: He gets out, everybody’s ecstatic, the journalists get prizes, the filmmakers win awards, and everything is big and great and happy.

It hit me when he came to my classroom and he was telling stories that were so sad and tragic, that I had never really told his story, the story of this man. I had told the story of the case. There was something that was very serious that was going on with him that I hadn’t delved into. And so I suppose when he died, I felt that that was a little bit of a burden or a responsibility. But also, the truth is, I was curious; I wanted to find out.

You’re right, it’s not isolated; there are so many examples of “happy ending” exoneration narratives, but it’s way more complicated. There’s trauma. A society left you behind and doesn’t know how to help you reintegrate. I’m wondering, with this piece on The Atavist platform, if you’re hoping that it does anything in terms of, not contesting that narrative necessarily, but complicating it.

Darryl Hunt speaks before a House committee in Raleigh, N.C., in 2005 regarding  a proposed execution moratorium in the state.,

Darryl Hunt speaks before a House committee in Raleigh, N.C., in 2005 regarding a proposed execution moratorium in the state.,

Absolutely. So going back to your first question, about the woman who asked, “Why bother? Why not just let him rest in peace?” I think it’s a more than fair question and it’s something I kept wrestling with, except I think that, yes, stories always draw people in in a way that discussing something in the abstract doesn’t. There’s plenty of research about life after exoneration. Probably not enough, but there is a body of research. There are studies based on interviews that pretty much tell us what Darryl Hunt’s life story tells us: that life after exoneration is really, really hard; many people suffer from drug/alcohol addiction, psychiatric disorders, problems with their relationships, financial problems — all these things you’d expect if you’d had your life taken from you for many years. It’s all interesting and compelling to think about, but people are more often drawn into one person’s story, so yes, I hope that people read it and it opens their eyes to the fact that exoneration alone doesn’t bring about justice.

The other thing I think the piece is relevant for is this whole question of mass incarceration. The trauma Darryl suffered in prison, millions of people are suffering. Most of them are guilty of crimes, but there are a lot of people in this country whose lives are being destroyed in the same way Darryl Hunt’s life was destroyed. At last count I think there were 2,003 known cases of exoneration; that’s a lot of people who were wrongly convicted, imprisoned, and who face the same challenges Darryl faced. And there are probably many more because it’s usually only the big cases that get attention for someone to get exonerated.

I think this is a story that could be told about many people. The moral question, whether it’s the right thing to do, I think it’s a fair question. I don’t know that I know the answer to that.

What lessons can journalists take away from your experiences working on these stories about Darryl Hunt, especially with respect to interrogating ourselves and asking what it means to tell someone else’s story?

The big thing I learned was the whole question of transparency. When I started in journalism, we all talked about objectivity and neutrality. And then I started teaching journalism and a lot of people don’t talk about objectivity as much anymore as about transparency. So I suppose when I was writing this, I felt — I’m not that comfortable writing in the first person, but I felt it was really important because I’m guided by “The Elements of Journalism” that lays out the principles of journalism. I believe in those principles: that we want to be independent, that facts need to be verified, that we speak on behalf of citizens. So this question of transparency is something all of us need to be thinking about.

I have kind of rethought the whole first-person thing, and I thought in this case it added a tremendous amount to the piece, but I also think I could haven’t written it if it wasn’t in the first person. I wasn’t completely independent, I wasn’t completely neutral. Making your biases transparent now feels more important to me than trying to be unbiased. I don’t think every piece needs to be first person – you’d never get anything done. But there are some stories where that works and it’s important, and I suppose that would be a lesson for journalists to draw out of this.

The second thing is what we already know: that things are never what they seem on the surface, so we need to remember that.

Also, nothing replaces calling people you think aren’t going to want to talk to you. Getting out of the office and talking to people … all of those basic lessons.

I suppose the other thing, getting back to the first person, I did something with this that I would have been reluctant to do when I was younger. I was sharing my conclusions with some of the people I interviewed, so it was more a conversation. When I was younger, subjects would ask, “Well, what are you going to say?” And I’d say, “That’s not the point; I’m reporting what other people say.”

The basics still hold: Triple, quadruple check everything. And talk to people. All kinds of people.

“He had gone into another room, to where the buffet was, after he had watched the 12 rounds when he was the heavyweight champeen of the world, back in that last indelible summer when America dared yet dream that it could run and hide from the world, when the handsomest boy loved the prettiest girl, when streetcars still clanged and fistfights were fun, and the smoke hung low when Maggie went off to Paradise.”

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Frank Deford died this week, and I’m not sure sportswriters will see his like again. The beautiful rhythm of his language was some kind of wonderful. I love this bit from The New York Times obit of him: Ross Greenburg, then the president of HBO Sports, told The Los Angeles Times in 2004, “Frank Deford with a pen in his hand is like Michael Jordan with a basketball and Tiger Woods with a driver.” In one of his most famous stories, “The Boxer and The Blonde,” Deford manages to tell at least five love stories: a man for his mother, for his wife, for his city, for his sport, and for his country. This is one of the best last sentences I’ve ever read, both epic and intimate, an elegy not only for a life but a way of life.

 

5(ish) Questions: Dana Priest and the “terrorism industrial complex” post 9/11

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As a college sophomore in 2005, I read Dana Priest’s report about “black sites” –far-flung secret prisons overseas that the CIA used to house terrorist suspects captured from the battlefields. One in Afghanistan, known as the “Salt Pit,” was a former brick factory. Others were found in Eastern Europe.

I was hooked.

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I continued to follow her reports over the years about appalling conditions in Walter Reed Medical Center, which won her and two other Washington Post staffers the 2008 Public Service Pulitzer, and the elaborate “Top Secret America” terrorism industrial complex hiding in plain sight in office parks around the country.

Priest had won her first Pulitzer for the “black sites” reporting, which drew accusations of treason. More than a decade later, the election of President Trump has raised questions — and emotions — about national security issues, including how journalists report on the government.

It seemed like the perfect time to chat with Priest, whose reporting caused the Bush administration to wince, the Obama administration to tackle CIA prisons and the Secretary of the Army to resign.

She spoke by phone at The Washington Post’s offices about her investigations, exercising caution with sensitive sources and treason accusations.

When you started at the Post over three decades ago, what was the political climate like for journalists?

I was an intern during the Cold War (laughs). The very first day I started at the Post, the Iran-Contra scandal was breaking and I believe George Shultz was standing up at a news conference talking about how the Reagan administration had actually traded arms for hostages. I thought: “Where am I! Wow! This is exciting!” The story broke because reporters got pieces of it and forced it out into the open.

Party polarization and partisanism were not as strong as now, but most administrations for as long as I can remember don’t like reporters getting below the surface and figuring out what’s really going on.

Joe Scarborough actually said on the air, if “planes fly into buildings, blame Dana Priest.” NBC made him apologize, but it wasn’t the first time I was called a traitor.

I got in hot water mainly during the Bush administration when reporting on the CIA. They launched a leak investigation that had a chilling effect on sources. They also tried to intimidate reporters and others within the government from talking to reporters about very sensitive things like “black sites” and torture tactics.

How did you discover and begin to inquire about black sites during the Bush administration?

I had been the Pentagon correspondent and wrote extensively about the military.

I wanted to know what they were doing with the prisoners from the battlefield while trying to report on the war in Afghanistan, which was a Special Forces war. Initial inquiries led to some information about POWs being kept in big steel containers and people disappearing.

Three newspapers participated in the unveiling – the Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. We were parting the curtain bit by bit but didn’t have any idea what we were seeing until we saw “rendition” – taking prisoners off the battlefield and sending them out of the country, or capturing them in Pakistan and sending them to other third countries. Nobody had a clue these could be prisons run by the CIA.

The term “black sites” emerged and we wondered — how do you logistically get people there? I started doing reporting overseas to uncover agreements with other countries and plane transits.

This was a classic investigative story where you have tiny bits of information and then cast a web to create a network of sources. You cast the web a little bit further each time, gathering more information that starts to emerge into new knowledge.

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger presents Dana Priest with the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Beat Reporting.

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger presents Dana Priest with the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Beat Reporting.

Your next major national security story, Top Secret America” in 2010, had significant data components. How did you start tracking the fusion centers and terrorism industrial complex?

I collected the information in my brain but nowhere else starting around 2008. It took a long time to report that story. My head hurt all the time because there was just so much! I was just coming off of a story, and “Top Secret America” had been accumulating in my notes. I’d observed huge growth in Washington, running into people from new agencies and new contractors all the time. In one sense Bill Arkin and I were doing a story that was obvious and in front of us but doing it in a way that made all the pieces very concrete. You have to go deep, then step back and go to a 30,000-foot altitude, look down and say, “What does this all mean?”

I had insights through people in the military and intelligence and got one or two decent briefings, then went to a contracting trade conference, where I saw how many contractors there were and what they were talking about.

Bill Arkin created a searchable database by putting a lot of information he’d come across doing other stories, including organizations and contractors, until there were hundreds and he added a way to filter them.

I did a lot of driving around Washington and other places visiting addresses we would find on the web when we looked at organizations. We discovered an alternative geography of the U.S. that could be mapped out hiding in plain sight. Like a cluster of barnacles on a rock, the contractors were all around the big intel agencies, especially in Washington but also in other parts of the U.S. There were offices that existed on paper, then you’d go to the lobby and they didn’t exist in the lobby directory.

After publishing the Black Sites piece and “Top Secret America,” you were accused of being a traitor for exposing the government. How did you address the accusations?

Beats are where it’s at! Solid beat reporting is ideal to start investigations.

Directly after 9/11, the media climate became “wrapped up in the flag,” meaning if a journalist questioned what the Bush administration was doing to keep us safe from terrorism, it meant that he or she was not patriotic. Joe Scarborough actually said on the air, if “planes fly into buildings, blame Dana Priest.” NBC made him apologize, but it wasn’t the first time I was called a traitor.

The first time someone called me a traitor I felt very personally offended. We journalists printed what we did because that is part of our role, but we have a responsibility to think carefully about the potential harm details in our stories can do. I think we have a responsibility to talk with the government about things we get that are classified to understand what could damage national security. Typically, the government would say “everything,” but that’s not acceptable. There was one case where I killed an entire story because I thought of potential consequences. It’s our responsibility to give readers as much detail as possible without giving them too much information that would be able to be used against the U.S.

For example, in the black sites story we didn’t name the countries, instead saying “Eastern Europe.” We provided enough detail for credibility, but because the administration and president argued with editor Len Downie that naming the countries could cause a backlash against them and cause them not to work with the U.S. anymore. Now we know the countries because of the Senate investigation, and we still have good relationships with them.

Your sources have often been foreign government employees and U.S. government officials, so how do you protect them?

When reaching out to people, don’t put them in a position where they can be vulnerable to government leak investigations. Limit electronic communications because that can be traced. That means meeting with people. Don’t talk to others about who your sources are. You want them to help you cast a big enough circle around your target so you can get sources in different areas, departments, agencies and branches in the government. That way you can use a tip from somebody and go to another department and see if you can get it confirmed or a perspective on it.

I recommend my students use Signal. I don’t recommend the PGP keys because they are a big flag a person in the government is doing something that they should not do.

You’ve managed beat reporting and sensitive investigations at the same time. What is your best advice to aspiring investigative journalists?  

Beats are where it’s at! Solid beat reporting is ideal to start investigations. Not only getting to know current people in your beat, but also the people who just left their posts. The former police chief and former senior deputy can give you information because they are no longer constrained, have institutional memory and can be your guide to what’s happening inside. Local police would be a great beat for someone interested in doing investigative work or even national security work because of the sensitive issues police face.

People will open up if you listen carefully. Think about your listening skills when talking to people, including what they don’t say and their body language. Always be respectful to different cultures by showing curiosity and empathy and they will trust you with information.

Jessica Buchleitner is the author of the 50 Women anthology series and producer of a forthcoming book of testimonies from women and girls in Mogadishu, Somalia. She is pursuing a master’s degree in Media Innovation at Northwestern University.

Think it’s a new thing, journalists being called enemies of the people? Read on

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Two journalist heroes are featured in this week’s posts. One of them, literary sportswriter Frank Deford, died this week, and I’m not sure we’ll see his like again. Read the One Great Sentence below and see if you agree. And Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who has won two Pulitzers and been called a traitor by those who opposed her reporting on the CIA’s “black site” prisons, is beyond bad-ass. Here, she talks about her amazing 30-year career.

Darryl Hunt wipes his face as he addresses the family of Deborah Sykes after being freed in 2004 after serving 18 years for Sykes' killing,

Darryl Hunt wipes his face as he addresses the family of Deborah Sykes after being freed in 2004 after serving 18 years for Sykes' killing,

Phoebe Zerwick and “The Last Days of Darryl Hunt.” When Phoebe Zerwick wrote a series of stories that helped exonerate a man wrongfully convicted of murder, everyone loved the happy ending. But Darryl Hunt’s real ending wasn’t a happy one: dead, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. She decided to tell his story this time. “The stories we told shaped Hunt’s life,” she wrote. “Convicted him. Set him free. Made him a champion of justice. But his death seemed to be telling us that these narratives missed something. They didn’t exactly lie, but they weren’t the entire truth either,” she continued. “That’s the trouble with storytelling. This is my attempt to get the story straight.” And I have to pass along a great bit advice from the interview with her: “The basics still hold: Triple, quadruple check everything. And talk to people. All kinds of people.”

The soundtrack: “Me and Bobby McGee,” by Kris Kristofferson. I chose this for its famous chorus, “freedom’s just another word for nothing to lose.” Kristofferson is such a brilliant songwriter; not many songs are as beautifully written as “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”

One Great Sentence

“He had gone into another room, to where the buffet was, after he had watched the 12 rounds when he was the heavyweight champeen of the world, back in that last indelible summer when America dared yet dream that it could run and hide from the world, when the handsomest boy loved the prettiest girl, when streetcars still clanged and fistfights were fun, and the smoke hung low when Maggie went off to Paradise.”

Frank Deford, “The Boxer and The Blonde,” Sports Illustrated, June 17, 1985. Read why we think it’s great.

One of the "black site" prisons used by the CIA to interrogate terrorism suspects. This one, shown in 2005, is an air base in Romania.

One of the "black site" prisons used by the CIA to interrogate terrorism suspects. This one, shown in 2005, is an air base in Romania.

Dana Priest and the “terrorism industrial complex” post 9/11: Dana Priest knows a thing or two about taking on secretive presidential administrations. She says: “Directly after 9/11, the media climate became ‘wrapped up in the flag,’ meaning if a journalist questioned what the Bush administration was doing to keep us safe from terrorism, it meant that he or she was not patriotic. Joe Scarborough actually said on the air, if ‘planes fly into buildings, blame Dana Priest.’ NBC made him apologize, but it wasn’t the first time I was called a traitor.”

The soundtrack: “Reason Is Treason,” by Kasabian. As the Brits would say, this is a proper rock band. And this could be the journalists’ credo, no? “Check the angles from both forces/ Overcome by the need to fight it/Fight it fight it fight it fight it.”

What I’m reading online: “Silicon Valley Murder Mystery: How Drugs and Paranoia Doomed Silk Road.” Vanity Fair ran an excerpt of Nick Bilton’s book on the young founder of Silk Road, and his descent from college-kid Ayn Rand follower to billionaire tech overlord to a man who ordered hits on people who crossed him. Talk about a narrative arc.

I loved the “Fahrenheit 451” vibe of this publishing-as-performance-art outfit that prints books only during the full moon, and only in batches of 69, and then burns any that don’t sell the same night. As the Guardian piece says, “While most books can survive centuries or even millennia, Tunglið – as its two employees tell me – ‘uses all the energy of publishing to fully charge a few hours instead of spreading it out over centuries … For one glorious evening, the book and its author are fully alive. And then, the morning after, everyone can get on with their lives.'”

Speaking of writing that survives centuries, a new biography of famous naturalist Henry David Thoreau sounds fascinating. As the wonderfully bylined Jedediah Purdy writes in The Nation:Thoreau found that the political was personal, and although he hated it for that, because his first attachment was to the personal, he was too honest to pretend otherwise. So he turned it into an art, a means of making sense of his world. He wrote about being trapped in America and in a beautiful, half-ruined world whose beauty and ruin were inseparable.”

What’s on my bedside table: “Onward and Upward in the Garden,” by Katharine S. White. Her husband, E.B. White, may be more famous, but Katharine White was an amazing woman. She began working at The New Yorker in 1925, the year of its founding, and was the fiction editor there for nearly 35 years. She also loved gardening in Maine’s precious growing season. One essay begins, “It is late August as I begin this report. The days, here in Maine, are noticeably shorter, and lovely summer slips through the hand like Edna Millay’s silver fish.” Also worth reading is E.B. White’s introduction.

What’s on my turntable: “Signed, Sealed & Delivered,” by Stevie Wonder. What’s not to love about a cover that shows Wonder (wearing a fabulous velvet sport coat and frilly orange cuffs) sitting in a box with the words “HANDLE WITH CARE” and “FROM DETROIT WITH LOVE”? OK, how about the title song? Which, oddly, doesn’t have the ampersand in the title. But I’m also pretty fond of his soulified cover of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.”

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), I’m Storyboard editor Kari Howard, and you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

In Arab world, an ancient tradition of oral storytelling gets a 21st century spin

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Thirteen-year-old Simav Wooleh took the stage with a disarming smile in front of the audience gathered in a Beirut café. If she was nervous, the only thing that betrayed her was a tendency to fidget with her hands.

“Good evening,” Simav began in English, then switched to Arabic. “Now I want to tell a story about when my dad’s life was threatened in Syria.”

“Once upon a time, it was a sunny day, like usual, five years ago in Aleppo…”

“The most compelling things I know and learned didn’t make it into a news story. News stories just don’t portray the charm and the pain and the humanity enough.”

Simav was taking part in a new wave of oral storytelling in Beirut and elsewhere in the Middle East in recent years that has reimagined an ancient tradition in the region in a 21st century context.

Some of the new events follow a similar format to The Moth, the popular American event and podcast that features live storytellers. But they also build on the legacy of the hakawati, or storyteller, who was long a treasured source of entertainment — and sometimes the only one available.

In the old days, the traditional hakawati would recount legends, fables or stories from the Quran; the new storytelling tradition is often more personal.

Some of the stories are humorous – like a joint mother-son account of one young man’s attempt to run away from home at age 14 and pursue a life of poetry. Others are heartbreaking, like the woman who broke down in tears describing how her favorite son had been killed amid fighting between rival neighborhoods in the city of Tripoli in northern Lebanon.

Often, the events serve as public forum to discuss social issues or process trauma from war and other forms of violence.

On the night when Wooleh performed her piece, the event centered on the stories of a group of Syrian refugee youths living in Lebanon, alongside a group of ex-combatants from Lebanon’s civil war. It was part of the Hakaya storytelling series that a group of friends launched here last year.

Rima Abushakra, one of the founders of the group, is a former journalist and co-owner of Dar Café, a restaurant popular with journalists and bohemians in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood that serves as the forum for the monthly storytelling events.

Abushakra said her interest in storytelling events was spurred, in part, by the stories she wasn’t able to tell as a reporter.

“The most compelling things I know and learned didn’t make it into a news story,” she said. “News stories just don’t portray the charm and the pain and the humanity enough.”

“People want to be heard, and when you give them a platform, they’re just so amazed that people are willing to listen, especially when their voices are so neglected.”

Dima Matta, a professor, writer and actress, launched the trend of storytelling gatherings in Beirut in 2014 with her Cliffhangers storytelling event. Matta, who grew up listening to her father’s stories of the Lebanese civil war and his youth in his family’s village during many of Beirut’s frequent power cuts, said she sees the new storytelling events as a continuation of the Middle Eastern hakawati tradition, but also as a way of documenting personal histories that would otherwise go untold.

“Now it’s a new chapter where people’s personal stories are given center stage,” she said. “…People want to be heard, and when you give them a platform, they’re just so amazed that people are willing to listen, especially when their voices are so neglected.”

Like the Hakaya group, Matta sometimes deliberately takes on social issues in her events. Most recently, she put on an evening of coming-out stories put on as part of Beirut Pride week, with speakers including Hamed Sinno, frontman of the popular Lebanese indie rock band Mashrou Leila. At another event, she brought residents of a senior home for Palestinian refugees to share their memories.

“For me, storytelling is definitely a form of activism,” Matta said.

The storytelling events, and their willingness to deal with social issues, are growing more popular elsewhere in the region. In Egypt, for instance, a storytelling group called the BuSSy Project holds workshops and events that bring gender issues to center stage, giving a platform to women and men to talk about sexual harassment, domestic violence and other social problems.

Abushakra said it was natural that social issues would become part of the new storytelling tradition.

“They’re realities we face and adapt to and sometimes change,” she said. “It’s hard to escape them, but also we don’t seek to escape them – it’s more to address them in a personal way.”

The audience listens to a story at a Cliffhangers event.

The audience listens to a story at a Cliffhangers event.

Back in the café, Simav launched her story with an account of mundane details: her family getting dressed to go to the market, Wooleh nagging her mother to buy some clothes she spotted in a shop window that were “yani, bijennan” – “like, amazing” – her mother giving in.

The tale quickly turned as the family arrived at a vegetable stand to buy some lettuce to make a salad:

“When we were buying the salad, the lettuce, suddenly a sniper from above the building shot at my dad. But my dad went like this [bending forward], went to take the bag, so [the bullet] went behind him and didn’t hit him.”

Another bystander was less fortunate.

“There was a guy there who was putting things in a car. It hit the guy in the head and the guy died – fell down and died.”

But the point of the story was not simply to recount a traumatic moment. In traditional style, the tale ended with a moral.

In the ensuing panic, Simav said, her father ran off with the head of lettuce without paying. The next day, the family returned to settle the bill.

When Simav asked why they had gone back, she said, her mother told her, “Because in the afterlife there is no money to pay the guy.”

“So from that time, I promised that I won’t take money from anyone and not return it, because in the afterlife, as my mom said, there is no money to pay him,” Simav concluded, with another broad smile. “And this is my story.”

**In the interest of full disclosure, I have also shared a story at one of the Hakaya storytelling events. You can see it here.

“It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.”

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Why is it great? It’s graduation season, so it seemed like a perfect time to revisit this beautiful commencement speech that the writer George Saunders gave at Syracuse University four years ago. It may have been the most unlikely thing ever to go viral, because it focuses on a most unhip, untrendy trait: kindness. Saunders uses the word luminous at the end, and that is the word that springs to mind when I consider this sentence, and this speech. OK, I have to include the luminous passage, because its ending packs such an emotional punch: “That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly. And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful.”


5 Questions: Talal Ansari and “Welcome to America: Now Spy on Your Friends”

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BuzzFeed News reporter Talal Ansari was interested in lists—not listicles.

We see them all the time now when it comes to immigration policy. In January, President Trump listed seven Muslim-majority countries whose citizens were barred from entering the United States. Later, in the face of massive protests, he revised his list to six.

Tomorrow’s journalists exploring the masters of today

We’re occasionally spotlighting the next generation of journalists: students. They’re choosing stories or journalists they like and giving them the Storyboard treatment. We’re pleased to post their efforts.

For Ansari — and for immigrants — this is nothing new.

“I know lists are kind of a big thing now, but it’s always been a big thing,” Ansari told me. It’s what led him to his investigation into the practice of FBI agents pressuring Muslim immigrants who are applying for citizenship, green cards, visas or asylum into becoming informants.

In their investigation “Welcome to America—Now Spy on Your Friends,” Ansari and colleague Siraj Datoo unveil what happens to many immigrants whose countries of origin are identified under the federal program to spot security risks, Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP).

Ansari and Datoo detail how coming from CARRP’s “areas of known terrorist activity” is grounds for the government to delay an application without any explanation, oftentimes for years.

“Welcome to America—Now Spy on Your Friends” exposes how FBI agents have approached some of these applicants and asked them to become informants within their communities, even though this violates guidelines issued by the Attorney-General.

After the ACLU in Southern California reported that the majority of people whose applications were being delayed come from 21 Muslim-majority countries or regions, Ansari knew there was a bigger story. I asked Ansari, who is based in New York and now covers issues facing Muslim Americans, about finding those affected by this practice and his reporting process.

The answers have been slightly edited for length and flow.

I know that you promised anonymity to most of your sources in this piece. But generally speaking, how were you able to find citizenship/green card applicants who were pressured by FBI agents into becoming informants?

“Ultimately, all you have to do is understand that this is not a game. It’s real life and you’re writing about real people, and what you write about people, there will be real consequences.”

It’s just brute force, really. I like to say that journalists’ best friends are lawyers. I don’t think they would think the reverse. They are really a great source of stories, of sources, of knowledge. They get to hear things in rooms that a lot of people just don’t come across. They get clients walking in their doors in ways we could never have. Even though people do reach out to journalists with stories, when someone is truly in need of help, they go to a lawyer. We just started talking to immigration lawyers. We put our name out there. We said what we were looking for. We described to everyone we talked to, “Do you have a client that applied for a green card and, lo and behold, they haven’t heard anything? And, were those clients Muslim?” Sometimes we came as a surprise to them, which was interesting. Occasionally, we would talk to some immigration lawyers and tell them what we were writing about and they would say: “No, I had no idea that this program existed. I think I might have a client or two that might be on this list.”

At one point, I think we had been in discussion with 8-10 individuals that have been possibly affected by this program. Each and every one did not want to go officially on the record because, generally speaking, they’re scared. They are confused. They think that speaking out about their problem will just end up in more problems for their immigration issues. And, some of these people are here on a visa that might have an expiration date. So, they have very little incentive to talk other than to spread the word out of the goodness of their heart and tell their story, in hopes that someone else who is going through the same problem knows that other people are out there. Out of 8-10 people who told us their story off the record, that dwindled down to three who were willing to have their story written about. All three didn’t want to be named.

It seems that most of those you spoke with about their experiences being pressured to cooperate as informants weren’t too concerned about punishment from law enforcement but more fearful of the backlash from their communities. Did this surprise you?

When I first heard that reasoning, I thought that might be a concern but it’s not something that would stop you from wanting your name out there. I don’t remember which one of my subjects explained this to me, but being Muslim in America, you’re part of a mosque. I think one thing the general American Christian public doesn’t get is that mosques aren’t 100% like churches in the sense that there are exactly the same families in the pews every day. No, a taxi driver could come for Friday prayers and so could a family that comes every Friday. It’s a loose-knit community, and it could be a tight-knit community. Once someone hears that you are being denied a green card because the government thinks that you might have some ties or your name put up a red flag for whatever reason — the country you come from, or whoever you put down as your petitioner, or someone you know, a mistake, etc. — it doesn’t really matter. At that point, that person will probably disassociate with you.

People are afraid of being ostracized and being almost double victimized by having this sort of label put on them. I mean, for that reason, they did not want their own American Muslim counterparts to know what kind of problems they were going through. It’s somewhat embarrassing, and also they don’t want to be looked at suspiciously. They’re already being looked at suspiciously by their own government. The last thing that they would want or need is that same sort of atmosphere amongst the people that they probably found a lot of shelter and strength from.

A woman offers legal services at the customs arrival area at LAX in January after President Trump's executive orders barring entry to the U.S. by Muslims from certain countries.

A woman offers legal services at the customs arrival area at LAX in January after President Trump's executive orders barring entry to the U.S. by Muslims from certain countries.

What was the ethical decision-making process like with your editor for this story? Specifically when weighing whether or not to include information that might make your sources identifiable to law enforcement.

I think there’s always tension between a reporter’s desire to tell a good story and an editor’s desire to get the best story possible regardless of, you know, what minutiae there is and problems that the reporter might come across in the subject’s desire to remain anonymous. As the reporter, you have to balance both sides. But then. So once you understand that, you know that you have to err on the side of caution.

I know that there is a longstanding tradition in journalism that no one reads what they wrote back to the person. That’s just not what we do. Otherwise, half of the stories in the world wouldn’t get published because oftentimes what someone says, when it’s read back to them, they don’t like how it sounds. But what you can do is just like, “Hey, so I touched on the fact that you worked with computers. I was wondering if that’s OK.” Or, “Is it all right if we use your initials instead because there are hundreds of millions of people that share that combination of letters?” So, of the three people we profiled, some were a little less cautious. They just did not want their names there. It wasn’t even for purposes of immigration authorities or law enforcement. It was just because they didn’t want their neighbor or their family friend or their cousin reading about it, you know? It was kind of almost shameful and strange. So, I tried to just remain cautious about what they were comfortable with.

Do you wish you had done anything differently in this story?

I guess small things that you just learn over time. Like, I wish the first time I talked to X person, I had been more slow with my introduction, in my getting to know them, instead of being so quick or coming off as like needing them for a story or something like that. Sometimes, by the time you find someone and actually get them on the phone, that could require an insane amount of work. It could be like five people removed to how you got there.

The other thing that people don’t realize is like, I’m not just taking people at their word. As you notice in the story, there’s a lot of hyperlinks to a document cloud. If someone says, “I went to a visa interview on January 5th, 2013,” then I’ll be like, “Oh, OK, do you have an e-mail? Do you have a [document] that will prove to me that you did that?” What I’m getting at is that, as a journalist, you have to make sure everything you’re writing is true. If your piece is going to get fact-checked, then you also want to have everything ready. So, I think sometimes you might come off as really off-putting to the subject that you’re writing about. So, it’s not a singular thing I could tell you. But it’s just a thing you have to learn about: how to be more affable and make them truly understand why you are asking all of these questions.

At the end of the day, you’re not even asking just for a story. I’m asking him to give me his visa card, his applications, to give me e-mails, to give me all that pries into his life so deeply. “Prove to me that you live in X town.” Over time, this can get very stressful for the subject. So in the future, I think there’s ways to go about it that is not overwhelming. I’m not saying I did anything wrong or overwhelmed someone to the point that they were upset. But you can always improve on how you gather all of your information.

What type of response from your readership did you receive on this story?

I think what it really did that I’m happy about was open the eyes of people who are not immigrants themselves or people who are maybe second-/third-/fourth-generation Americans that are so far removed from the immigrant experience of their fathers or grandfathers. It gave them the idea to maybe somewhat know what it must be like to be a foreigner in a land and then a suspected foreigner in a land. How odd it must feel. One of the people I write about, he has been here for 20 years before this all happened. He just never decided to go for the green card. And when [he] did, everything was ruined for them. So, I think it’s opened people’s eyes to a little bit of the Muslim American experience, which was, I think, good, based on what I’ve heard from Muslim Americans. It validated some of their concerns.

“Yeah, we’re quite serious in the newsroom. But we’re still not so serious that we think our words are so heavy that they’re going to fall out of our mouths and hit the center of the Earth.”

I think for a small percentage of the population, some people found out that they themselves might be on this, and that’s why they haven’t gotten a response in years. I did get some e-mails from people just thanking me or saying, “I think I might be on this,” or seeking advice. Obviously, I’m not in a position to give it. Just logically or ethically, I can’t do that.

I don’t know if numbers matter, but it did well in terms of how many views it got. There [are] always the people who after probably not even reading it will just say, “Of course the FBI should be involved in this.” Or, “Of course this should exist.” Literally, that’s it. They’ve made their decision on it. And that’s fine. I mean, people are people. People can have their views. I’m not an advocate for [the subjects of the story]. I just heard a story and I validated it as best as I could and I put it out there for the world to read. So, yeah, it seemed to do fine and obviously did well in the Muslim American and/or immigrant community. But like I said, I think it opened the eyes of people who are so far removed from this kind of world.

Do you find BuzzFeed’s approach to investigative reporting different compared to other news organizations considering your readership?

I would say we are 90% classic legacy journalism. I mean that figuratively and I mean that in a literal way, because a lot of the people we employ come from legacy institutions, like The Times and other places. So we go about it in a certain way, but it’s not that different.

I think sometimes it gives us the leeway to do something more adventurous or more data-driven. I know the investigations team has a really great data investigation section of it. For example, I don’t know if you heard about how we broke the story about match-fixing in tennis. How they use computer algorithms to determine that this many matches and these many players likely are involved in match-fixing. It shook up the tennis world.

I’ve done some fun stuff I thought I’d never do if I worked for some legacy newspaper. I think a lot of journalists have huge egos, and this is across the board — I’m talking about online places, I’m talking about legacy places that are online. But I think there’s like a slight ego at BuzzFeed where you don’t take yourself that seriously. Yeah, we’re quite serious in the newsroom. But we’re still not so serious that we think our words are so heavy that they’re going to fall out of our mouths and hit the center of the Earth. I really think that’s because of the sort of environment that the company as a whole has. I’m assigned sometimes to do some story that five years ago I thought I would never do or that is, quote unquote, beneath me, or an insult to the serious reportage I do. It kind of level-heads you a little bit and you’re willing to think more out of the box and probably see story angles where you previously wouldn’t.

Alexa Mencia is a Chicago-based journalist pursuing a master’s degree at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

“The charm and the pain and the humanity”— what great storytelling is all about

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A quote in one of this week’s posts has stuck in my mind. It’s by a former journalist who started a live-storytelling group in Beirut. What she says applies to that form of oral storytelling, but also to literary journalism in general: “The most compelling things I know and learned didn’t make it into a news story. News stories just don’t portray the charm and the pain and the humanity enough.” That’s it — the charm and the pain and the humanity.

The audience listens to a story at a Cliffhangers event.

The audience listens to a story at a Cliffhangers event.

In Arab world, an ancient tradition of storytelling gets a 21st century spin.  A new wave of oral storytelling is sweeping the Middle East, and the writers are using the forums to talk about touchy subjects like politics, gender issues and the wars in the region. As Abby Sewell writes: “Some of the new events follow a similar format to The Moth, the popular American event and podcast that features live storytellers. But they also build on the legacy of the hakawati, or storyteller, who was long a treasured source of entertainment — and sometimes the only one available. In the old days, the traditional hakawati would recount legends, fables or stories from the Quran; the new storytelling tradition is often more personal.”

The soundtrack: “Tell Me a Story,” by Grouplove. You have to love a band whose first album was called “Never Trust a Happy Song.”

One Great Sentence

“It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.”

George Saunders, commencement speech at Syracuse University, 2013

Read why we think it’s great.

People carry posters during a rally against President Trump's executive order banning travel from a list of Muslim-majority nations.

People carry posters during a rally against President Trump's executive order banning travel from a list of Muslim-majority nations.

Talal Ansari and “Welcome to America: Now Spy on Your Friends.” In another installment of our wonderful series “Tomorrow’s journalists exploring the masters of today,” Medill student Alexa Mencia talks to BuzzFeed News reporter Talal Ansari about his investigation into the practice of FBI agents pressuring Muslim immigrants who are applying for citizenship, green cards, visas or asylum into becoming informants. He says, “I think it’s opened people’s eyes to a little bit of the Muslim American experience.”

The soundtrack: “Spying Glass,” by Massive Attack. “You live in the city/You stay by yourself/You evade all wickedness/Still some people they brand you.”

What I’m reading online: After listening to Miriam Makeba (see below), I wanted to read the Rolling Stone article by South African writer Rian Malan about the colonizing of a South African man’s song for “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” He traces its path to Western stardom from the original writer, Solomon Linda, to Pete Seeger, to the folk circles of America, to a very white band called The Tokens, and the rest is music litigation history. It’s a wonderful feat of accountability journalism. And I had no idea about this bit of trivia: “Miriam Makeba sang her version at JFK’s last birthday party, moments before Marilyn Monroe famously lisped, ‘Happy Birthday, Mister President.'”

And this piece by climber Tommy Caldwell for Outside magazine, Why Alex Honnold’s Free Solo of El Cap Scared Me,” was a fascinating look into the psychology of extreme climbing. The deck says it all: “We all know Alex is the greatest climber of our generation. I trust him with my life. I trust him a little less with his own.”

This Paris Review interview with the poet Donald Hall is great. He talks about playing softball with fellow New Hampshire poet Robert Frost, who was a fierce competitor. “He played a vigorous game of softball but he was also something of a spoiled brat. His team had to win and it was well known that the pitcher should serve Frost a fat pitch. I remember him hitting a double. He fought hard for his team to win and he was willing to change the rules. He had to win at everything. Including poetry.”

What’s on my bedside table: “The Lost Kitchen,” by Erin French. This may be a cookbook, for a crazy-popular restaurant up the road from me, in Freedom, Maine, but French also writes some lovely mini-essays about growing up in Maine and why she loves the seasons here. On spring: “The seemingly everlasting winter has held its grasp far too long. Cabin fever lingers, and we find ourselves bursting with a craving for green grass, budding blossoms, chirping birds, lingering daylight, and the opportunity to shed the layers of clothes we’ve been trudging around in for months now.” Amen.

What’s on my turntable: “Miriam Makeba,” by Miriam Makeba. I was so excited to find this in my local Goodwill this week. It’s the first album from the South African star.  I love this line from her on the liner notes, about her refusal to sing Afrikaner songs — during the height of apartheid, when Afrikaners had absolute power and Xhosas like her were the victims of the racist regime: “When Afrikaners sing in my language, then I will sing in theirs.” The album has the song “Mbube,” which will sound very familiar to fans of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” (See above.)

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), I’m Storyboard editor Kari Howard, and you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

Annotation Tuesday! Mac McClelland and “Delusion Is the Thing With Feathers”

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Mac McClelland is no stranger to risk and discomfort: This is a woman who has reported on rape in Haiti’s tent cities and genocide in Myanmar. But she didn’t expect to fear for her life when she set out to write a story about a birding expedition for Audubon.

“I think I tend toward a conversational style much of the time. Even with topics of great gravity, I’m still just a human telling other humans about something, in the end.”

She also didn’t expect to climb mountains of slippery clay for 12 hours straight. Or ride without seat belts on switchbacks with foot-deep holes. Or suffer from diarrhea when the only privy around was doorless and had been nicknamed “The Worst Toilet in the World” (by a man who had seen some pretty damn bad ones).

But sometimes the things you don’t expect — and yes, the things you suffer through — make for the best stories.

McClelland’s story, about a pair of birders on a quest to discover whether the elusive (and probably extinct) ivory-billed woodpecker survived in Cuba, wasn’t really about birds. No, it explored what motivates people (including, say, journalists) to go to extreme lengths for a cause many would consider pointless.

In the piece, which was a finalist for the 2017 National Magazine Award in feature writing, McClelland reveals the impeccable timing of a comic and the unexpected rhythms of a Beat writer (who happens to be funny).

McClelland, who was a reporter at Mother Jones until 2013, is a full-time freelancer based in San Francisco. Her memoir, “Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story,” came out in 2015.

Did you have any idea what you were in for when you set out to report this piece?

I didn’t. It was a pretty fast turnaround. After I had already accepted the assignment, I started reading about Tim Gallagher (one of the birders I was writing about) and how he would sleep in cars and canoes. It sounded terrible, and I thought, “This guy has a really high tolerance for discomfort.” But when I talked to him on the phone, he said we’d be camping in the jungle for five days out of two weeks, and for the rest of the time we’d stay in bed and breakfasts. I’m not a camper at all. We ended up camping pretty much the whole time, and you wouldn’t even describe it as camping. I had no idea these guys were so extreme with a capital “E,” and I was not prepared for that.

In some of your stories, including this one, your personal safety is sometimes at risk. How did you balance your concern for your own safety with getting the story or protecting your relationship with sources?

I certainly didn’t take a stance of, “Hey, I’m just a journalist. No matter what happens, I’m going to follow blindly because I’m a machine observer with no human needs.” I was pushing back. There were four of us: two birders, a journalist and a photographer. It wasn’t that they were going to take these risks and we were going to watch. We were all going to get into that Jeep in the dark in the rain and try to drive up that wet rock. At points, there was dissent in the group about what exactly we should be doing and when. I wasn’t trying to mold everything to my own preferences and schedule, but when something particularly dangerous came up, I would say, “Can we wait until it’s light outside like these locals were suggesting?” What I voiced didn’t affect anything other than one of the birders’ level of irritation with me. But I was advocating for safety — I didn’t want them to die, either. I believe I’m generally considered cooperative and not that hard to work with, but when I’m disrespected in terms of very basic safety, because it is my life at stake, we argued a lot.

Your writing has a quick pace to it, even though the story is about something many people would find boring: birding. What do you think gives your writing that dynamism?

My sense is that pacing is probably set by the length of the sentences. I write very long sentences and very short ones. I never start a sentence thinking, “This is going to be a long one.” I write things as I write them and look for rhythm when I read them back over. When I decide whether something needs to be lengthened or shortened, it’s based on rhythm and feeling. People tell me I talk fast, and my inclination to write really long sentences might be a product of that. Or it might come from the fact that I’m sort of energetic.

You often include yourself in your features (even on serious topics, such as genocide) and have also written a memoir and personal essays. What are the benefits and challenges of putting yourself out there that way?

“I write very long sentences and very short ones. I never start a sentence thinking, ‘This is going to be a long one.’ I write things as I write them and look for rhythm when I read them back over. When I decide whether something needs to be lengthened or shortened, it’s based on rhythm and feeling.”

I came up at Mother Jones, and my editors there had no issue with first person. It never occurred to me that it would be wrong, and no one ever told me not to do it. I didn’t go to journalism school. I get the impression from some of my friends that the first-person gets beaten out of you there or is at least heavily discouraged. There were times that I had concerns that some editors wouldn’t want to work with me, because I was disclosing very personal things about my mental health. I was worried that it would give me less credibility or editors would say, “This chick is nutballs.” It’s hard not to wonder what people are going to think and how you will be judged — that’s a very human thing.

But it’s a feeling I had to embrace and work through. Anytime I was using the first person, I was doing it for a reason. And it has never been a problem in terms of hiring. There could be editors out there that thought about calling me and didn’t, but there has been no lack of possibilities in terms of outlets and people to work with. When it comes down to it, everyone struggles, so the fact that I’m saying it publicly isn’t an issue if you have any sense of humanity or compassion.

My questions are in red, her responses in blue. To read the story without annotations first, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button.

Delusion is the Thing With Feathers

By Mac McClelland

Audubon. May-June 2016

“Here ends our happiness,” the driver says, approaching the end of the pavement and stopping the government truck. It has no seatbelts or roll bar, and apparently very little in the way of shocks, but the two birders on board are happy, now and these past six days, despite how the particulars of their expedition may have struck others—say, the writer and photographer also on board—as uncomfortable. Or, frankly, miserable. Why did you decide to include yourself and the photographer in the piece? Why introduce your presence and personal discomfort so close to the beginning? Well, it occurred to me on the first day in Cuba to write about myself in the third person, and while it came as an inspiration, not a hard-thought-out consideration, I think its purpose is first to acknowledge that my impression of these events is through my own lens, but more importantly to set myself (and the photographer) up as the straight man to the endeavors of these extreme enthusiasts. Tim Gallagher, 65, and Martjan Lammertink, 44, went through worse in their searches for Campephilus woodpeckers in other countries before they landed in Cuba to look for the granddaddy of all finds, the elusive and by most accounts extinct Ivory-bill. No one has looked hard here for a long time, in this last half-plausible place. Someone should really look in Cuba, people who know and care about such things have been saying, and so here Gallagher and Lammertink are. With, as it happens, not much they aren’t willing to do—suffer; die—to get that done. Why did you choose to open the piece this way – the group in a truck six days in, then some background about what you’re doing there – as opposed to a different kind of scene, say, putting out bird calls? The moment the driver said, “Here ends our happiness,” I knew it would be the beginning or the end of an important section of the piece; when I got home it just seemed obvious as the starting point. Thinking now about why that seemed obvious, it’s the simple drama of it, the weirdness of it, and the way that it encompasses the whole theme of the piece: that these birders put their passion way before what many people would consider comfort or self-care.

There was the crush of last-minute getting-ready, Gallagher tying up loose ends as editor-in-chief of Living Bird at his office in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. There was Lammertink on a 22-hour bus to a Brazilian airport from interior Argentina, where the Dutch ornithologist works for the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, followed by 19 hours of airports and planes to Ithaca, New York. There were the two of them at Walmart together buying pots and pans and tents and staying up late packing and waking up early to drive, along with the writer, more than four hours to Toronto and then landing late in Holguín, east Cuba, Gallagher more than two personal airline bottles of prosecco deep, to deal with the even later arrival of the photographer. What do you think using the “there was/there were” construction accomplished here? I liked the rhythm of it. I suppose it accomplishes a sense of monotony, the slog of preparation. No sooner had they had breakfast at their budget homestay the next morning, after four hours of sleep for Lammertink and maybe five for Gallagher, than maps were spread open across a table and Carlos Peña, a Cuban natural history specialist, stopped by to help strategize. This is where the paved road ends. Pointing, leaning. This is where any road ends. This is where you might be able to pick up some mules to help with transport. Then it was out to a grocery store for rice and pasta and eggs and water before a quick lunch and into the car for the first leg of the long trip, to Farallones de Moa. Toward the mountains. Into the woods. Why did you want the reader to know the background here in the second paragraph? Having set up in the first graf that they are prepared to do anything in search of this bird, I’m fleshing out what exactly that entails, from the beginning.

The rented car was a 1955 Willys: two and a half seats in the front and two very narrow benches bolted longways into the back. The group’s hundreds of pounds of gear, food, and luggage were piled up in between and on top of half of them, leaving Gallagher and the photographer to squeeze onto the ends of opposite little pews, hunching over to keep their heads off the low metal roof. At breakfast the writer again expressed her wish that there were seatbelts, which she generally tries to secure on work trips when she is in charge of logistics; while the photographer kindly validated her feelings by saying this was a normal human desire, Lammertink did not deign to respond. Why did you choose to write about yourself in the third person? Flash of inspiration, as I mentioned, but I think it makes it funnier—and fairer, though of course there’s no true “fair” when I’m the only one in control of the words—if I’m observing myself with the same voice as I am everyone/everything else. It may have also had a helpful degree of dissociation to it, writing this in my head in the third (versus first) person as it was all happening, since I really did hate a lot about this trip. Gallagher, maybe a bit tipsily, had slapped her knee and laughed about it the night before as their young driver sped the proto-jeep away from the airport around the proliferation of horse-drawn carts on the street in the dark. Now, as they prepared to drive the first three of the many, many hours they’d spend on Cuban roads over two weeks, Lammertink invited the writer to cram herself into the only place she would fit, between him and the driver. “It’ll just be much more fatal in an accident,” he said of sitting in the front, then laughed, the fact that car accidents cause the most American deaths abroad being funny.

Ha ha! You have some pretty colloquial interjections like this throughout. What do you think it adds in this case? I think it highlights how unconcerned Lammertink is about death.

But of course, this is birding. Go dangerous or go home.

The target destination was Ojito de Agua, an area beyond Farallones in the mountains of Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt. In 1986, Cuban biologists Giraldo Alayón and Alberto Estrada found Ivory-bills there, and a few weeks later they and the eminent woodpecker specialists Lester Short and Jennifer Horne confirmed the sightings there. Lammertink himself spent eight months in 1991 and 1993 looking for them there. Ojito de Agua has been protected for 30 years now—since the sightings—so maybe, Lammertink hopes, the habitat might now be more hospitable to Ivory-bills.

In the car to Farallones, Gallagher bounced his old bones about in the back with zero complaints and inhuman patience. I love the image of “bounced his old bones about.” Do you have a process for coming up with evocative imagery like this, or does it just come to you? The latter. IS there a process for coming up with evocative imagery? If so, I would actually like to know it (dead serious). Dust swirled in through the open and broken windows, more as they got farther from the city, five miles an hour and less when the pavement expired and the road turned uphill and rocky and deeply, deeply rutted. What do you think the repetition of “deeply” does here? Some of these holes are like a foot deep. One “deep” legit did not convey it, in my opinion. He cheerfully schlepped in his Wellingtons through mud and across narrow planks over ravines to a jungle shack lent to them by a coffee farmer who never, ever buttons his shirt Ha ha! Did you try to make this piece humorous, or did that arise naturally as you recounted the events? I definitely wasn’t consciously on the lookout for hilarious details; luckily, I noticed them when they presented themselves. —then back out again after the regional Protected Areas official told the foreigners by phone that he wouldn’t allow them into the forest from there. And that nor were they allowed in Farallones at all. As a tiny muddy village, it has no amenities or services for visitors, including—most importantly—permission to host them.

So it was on to Baracoa, a lovely if mildly shabby beach town four and a half hours of mostly jolting non-road farther east, to meet with the evicting regional Protected Areas official, whereupon he sent them back again some two hours west, to the national park’s visitor’s center on Bahía de Taco, a parking-lot-size patch of grass separating the non-road from the ocean where the group was to sleep for two nights in a different, more official jungle shack while the Protected Areas agency considered whether to allow them to venture deep into the national park. Students of writing often learn to shorten their sentences, but you have some pretty long ones here. Do you have long sentences in all your pieces? What do you like about them? How does one do it right? I do have long sentences in probably most, if not all, of my pieces. I don’t set out to make them long, but they come out that way. Sometimes when I’m reading back over them, I realize the lengthiness doesn’t serve the contents of that sentence—I need readers to pause, or absorb, or have the breaths of a period to get from it what I want them to. But sometimes I think the length does evoke a pace or a feeling (exhaustion, maybe, in this case), and that’s, in my opinion, when it’s right.

At Taco Bay, the sand flies were savage. There was no plumbing but a vat of carried-up river water from which the group could draw buckets to bathe beside the non-road. Everyone, even the birders, hated the bathroom, a multiperson outhouse that did not enjoy much in the way of maintenance. When the supply of potable water they’d hauled in ran out, the writer taught herself how to use the $250 worth of water-filtration and UV-sterilization equipment she had bought before embarking (she and the photographer, who are accustomed to hardships but of a different kind, have discovered that they are wearing matching new pairs of technical wicking antimicrobial quick-drying underpants). Gallagher helped her purify water for the group, impressed with how much more convenient it was than a camping straw, which filters bacteria one sip at a time and does not filter viruses and which was all he carried in his bag, though he has neither a naiveté about waterborne illness nor an ironclad digestive tract. A partial list of places where Gallagher has suffered severe gastrointestinal distress includes: Mexico, Costa Rica, and Peru. In Mexico, he also got Hepatitis A. Which is a virus. Was it your plan when you set out to focus on the personal side of extreme birding, the experience of it? It was my assignment to cover the birders, not the birding per se. I didn’t know or anticipate the level to which that would involve personal care, though, no.

But this wasn’t a “hard” trip. A hard trip, that would be something like—speaking of—Mexico, where in 2010 Gallagher and Lammertink, in quest of Imperials, a possibly also extinct and even larger—the largest—woodpecker species, were headed into cartel lands so dangerous that every one of the Mexican biologists who had been recruited to go with them dropped out. You have some elements (“speaking of,” “the largest”) that make the story read as quite conversational. Is that something you were aiming for in this piece, or do you always tend toward a conversational style? I think I tend toward a conversational style much of the time. Even with topics of great gravity, I’m still just a human telling other humans about something, in the end. Gallagher and Lammertink went anyway, and in one of the villages on the way, three houses were burned to the ground, one man kidnapped for ransom; as they drove through the area, they passed locals fleeing the other way. But they pressed on, crossing paths with armed traffickers and enlisting smugglers and Uzi-carrying locals as guides, Gallagher praying that if he got killed his wife would find his notes and finish the book he was working on, and when they emerged from those mountains alive, the forest ranger who had—under great protest—helped them get in broke down crying.

Or, a hard trip would be something like Argentina, where Gallagher and Lammertink trekked high and low and high and higher and low and high again following radio-tagged Helmeted Woodpeckers (a species that indisputably exists) over the jungle hills starting at 4 a.m. daily and for 14 hours a day while it poured relentlessly and mosquitos infected with botfly eggs bit them and dropped maggot larvae onto their bodies, where they burrowed and grew and thrived. This sentence has a great rhythm to it. Do you read your sentences out loud to yourself? Thank you! I don’t believe I did. I don’t usually unless I can’t hear it adequately in my head, but usually I feel like I can. Lammertink said nothing about the pain, but Gallagher caught him flinching once as one crunched away at the shoulder tissue under his skin. (Gallagher himself finally reached a breaking point and dug his infestation, and his skin and thigh tissue, out wholesale with a knife.) Living in Argentina and tramping often into the jungles after Helmeted Woodpeckers, Lammertink averages 40 botfly cases per year. In the shower on the first morning here in Cuba, he squeezed a mass of yellow pus and partly liquefied dead-botfly parts out of a hole in his forearm.

Cuba is nothing. They don’t even have botflies in Cuba!

Still, the driver of the government truck is right. Things do get worse. By the time they do, the team has driven back east again to Baracoa, and then south through the mountains and switchbacks to the ocean clear on the other side of the island and west again from there, the views gorgeous with beach to the left and dramatic desert rock to the right on the way to Guantánamo, to another Protected Areas office to beg, barter, and finally secure the coveted clearance into Ojito de Agua. They have left the rented Willys and loaded more provisions into this government jeep driven by this government employee, though after a too-brief stint at the mechanic’s it is barely or in the opinion of at least one national park staffer not at all ready to complete the trip up the half-road on the mountain ahead. In even the best scenario, it is unlikely that the group will reach their destination, a manned national park station seven miles up deep mud and rock, before dark; twilight approaches, and the forecast calls for rain, which will render the way unpassable by jeep for sure.

The government driver tries anyway. He takes a deep breath and gathers himself when the pavement ends, and they crash forward through the uneven landscape, jeep rocking violently and Gallagher and the media trying to keep from slamming into one another in the backseat. Until they stop. Stuck. Mired in a deep mud trench. In contrast to your long sentences, you have some abrupt ones, such as these. How do you use short sentences? Pretty literally here, as the subject is stopping, sticking. Sometimes I use them for rhythm, or to get something important across very simply. Everyone ejects, and rocks are collected and thrown under the tires and into the muck ahead, and after a while the truck is dislodged. And then more crashing—and some very near tipping—and then they get stuck again. And the driver kills the battery trying to drive out. And everyone again decamps, and the gear and luggage and provisions are offloaded, splayed around the muddy clearing, and the driver runs away, and after a long time he returns leading two yoked oxen from a farm somewhere and they’re tied to the truck and everybody pushes and rocks it while the farmer beats the oxen relentlessly, breaking branches and then entire small trees over their backs and across their faces until they break free and escape and don’t trample anybody but have to be chased down and wrangled and re-tied to the truck.

After a couple of hours of this, Gallagher turns to the writer and remarks, “This gives you a little idea of how hard it is to study these birds. And why nobody’s doin’ it.”

It grows dark.

It starts to pour.

Really, she has no idea.

In photographs, the Ivory-bill has something human about it. There’s a sentience to the weirdly alert yellow eyes, an intensity to its regard that, combined with a wide stance—rare in the bird world—reads almost like standoffishness. In pictures from 1938 of a large juvenile perched on naturalist J.J. Kuhn’s arm in Louisiana’s Singer Tract, the bird’s big, slightly opened beak looks a breath away from expressing fully formed sentences. This is a lively description. Do you think that comparing animals to humans is key to describing them well? I don’t know! Honestly, I don’t have much call to describe animals in my work. When I saw this photograph, I just immediately thought: Jesus, that thing looks like it’s about to start talking. (Look at it!)

In stuffed specimen form, the Ivory-bill looks like a raggedy nightmare. Dead-eyed or eyeless and old, the ones in the Cornell Ornithology Lab’s vault were only depressing to behold when Gallagher and Lammertink brought them out past multiple security doors for the writer to inspect before heading to Cuba. One specimen there, mounted on a piece of wood, was previously a decoration out on someone’s smoking porch or something, the feathers weathered and broken down. In the collections manager’s office, another mounted specimen has its serrated tongue intact and extending between open bills, but when the thing was gingerly lifted up for the writer’s closer review, one long toe-claw fell off.

No wonder Gallagher was so thrilled to see a live one tear through the sky in the Arkansas bottomland swamp in 2004. He had been obsessed with birds for as long as he could remember, once in his early teens lying facedown on the ground in the sun of the California mountains for hours looking dead so a Turkey Vulture would land on him. (By the time the experiment was reluctantly abandoned as a failure, he was so burned and dehydrated that he barely had the strength to ride his bike back down the hill and home.) And then there he was, after so much searching, rediscovering the bird world’s most coveted and iconic ghost species. Or so he, and several other searchers whom the Lab of Ornithology subsequently enlisted to scour swamp forests across the South for five years, spending several million dollars, maintains—though the only video they captured is highly contested as proof.

As a teenager, Lammertink, too, tried to attract the close attention of a vulture, attempting first to buy a dead sheep but ultimately resorting to sprinkling a doll in tomato-sauce blood and leaving it under the raptors’ flight path. (This experiment also failed.) He was one of Cornell’s Ivory-bill searchers 10 years ago, but not a beholder of one of the six other sightings named in the paper the Lab eventually published. He still believes his colleagues, but he thinks the bird or birds they saw have probably since died. He is highly skeptical that any Ivory-bills still survive in Cuba, the only other place besides the Southeast United States they’ve ever been known to live: The title of the paper he published after searching here in the ’90s is “Status of Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis in Cuba: almost certainly extinct.” He wrote another piece for the journal of the Neotropical Bird Club called “No more hope for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis.” But maybe, he thinks now, the birds weren’t there then, in the few remaining patches of pine forest where American researcher George Lamb definitely saw (and obtained photographic proof of) them in 1956, the last such universally accepted records on Earth. Maybe they found suitable habitat in the lowland hardwoods nearby, where maybe they held on until the newly protected pine forest regenerated enough for them to return. You chose some telling nuggets from the researchers’ pasts, but you didn’t go into too much detail about their backgrounds or lives back home in the story. Why not? That’s a good point. I didn’t witness them in their home lives — that’s probably a large part of it. Also I was covering their work personalities and had more material than I could use on that front already.

On that note: The national park guide assigned to the group at Bahía de Taco, who goes by El Indio, said he saw an Ivory-bill with his father just 24 years ago, right in those lowland hardwoods, where the birds would generally not be expected to live.

And so the group looked there, in the lowland hardwoods. From Bahía de Taco they set out on what Gallagher invariably calls a “death march”: 12 hours and, according to the photographer’s iPhone, 99 flights of stairs’ worth of elevation over often extraordinarily slippery red clay scouring for Ivory-bill markings or oval nest cavities in trees. It was on that day that they first broke out the double-knocker.

The double-knocker is an innovation of Lammertink’s own design and construction. An online video documents him using it to attract another Campephilus woodpecker, the Pale-billed, which exists from Mexico to Panama, strapping the small wooden box to a tree with rope, pulling out a contraption made of two dowel rods that he sways back then swings into the box, one dowel and then the other making contact, mimicking the distinctive Campephilus sound: BAM-bam. In the video, recorded in Costa Rica, he does this, and then, from a distance: A Pale-billed knocks back.

! A sentence consisting of just an exclamation point! That’s bold. Tell me about using a punctuation mark this way. A whole paragraph, even. When I was writing this scene, I was trying to get across how stunning and surprising this is (to me, anyway). This seemed like the way to do it. Also an underlying theme of this piece is how ridiculous everything and everyone in the world is, so a (ridiculous) paragraph consisting entirely of an exclamation point seems appropriate.

In the forest near Bahía de Taco, Lammertink trudged off the path beaten for park visitors and through the brush up an incline, finding a pine tree in a growth of quebrahachas, the type of tree El Indio said were dominant where he had his sighting not far from there. Everyone stood silently as Lammertink prepared. He pulled out the box. He strapped it up. He set the dowel contraption on top of it. He opened his notebook. He marked down the time and GPS coordinates. He pulled out an MP3 player attached to a speaker wrapped in camouflage. And then, after much such settling in, he swayed back, and struck.

BAM-bam.

Everyone was silent.

Lammertink looked around slowly.

He waited 22 to 23 seconds, checking his watch, then struck again.

BAM-bam.

He waited.

He struck again.

And again.

There are a few places in the story where you give a series of sentences their own paragraph. What effect are you going for with this technique? What’s the right time to use it? Pacing, baby. Good god this was fucking boring. But still tinged with so much anticipation, so the drama of sentence-long paragraphs feels doubly appropriate.

After 10 double-knocks, he put the dowels down, picking up his MP3 player and speaker. He scrolled through his playlist, then pressed play, holding the speaker aloft as the recording of an Ivory-bill, the only existing recording of an Ivory-bill, from 1935, played, underlain by heavy static. People say it sounds like a horn. Or a baby goat. Kent. Kent-kent. Lammertink turned in slow circles blasting it, and Gallagher kept his ears alert as the sound played for 90 seconds. Then he turned it off, and waited.

He put his hands on his hips. He checked his watch.

Gallagher didn’t move.

Then they started the process over, in the same spot.

BAM-bam.

A double-knock session takes about 30 minutes. With other Campephilus species, Lammertink has waited as long as 20 minutes afterward for them to respond to a call. When he thought they’d waited long enough this time, the group all sitting and standing silently there in the forest, they picked up the bags and waters and cameras they’d set down and took off again, hiking 500 meters farther into the forest to try again. The call carries at least half that far, so to maximize exposure in the limited amount of time available to any one man, Lammertink spaces them out thusly. After the second session, they hiked another 500 meters, and tried again.

Those 30 minutes, knocking and waiting the third time, it was getting late in the day. It was hot, and mosquitos landed on the motionless party. At some point, the photographer wandered off a bit. Gallagher sat down farther back on the path and rested. The writer practiced her yogic Mountain Pose. What purpose does it serve, you think, to include what you and the photographer were doing? It conveys a sense of killing time, which is what everyone was doing. Additionally my including the yoga pose makes a kind of fun of me; there are a lot of people who would think only a certain kind of person (-slash-douchebag) would be (absurdly) doing a yoga pose. A huge bird suddenly broke through the trees and soared into view, sweeping and grand and even with some white underside. But it was only a Turkey Vulture, buzzing close to remind them that life is fleeting.

There have been times when Lammertink used the double-knocker in places where he knew for a fact Campephilus woodpeckers were nearby (-slash-existed), and they didn’t respond. To get one to do so on this trip in a territory this large, he conceded to the photographer, would be very lucky. To not get one proves nothing.

So: There is not a moment to waste. Not in Bahía de Taco double-knocking, and especially not after Lammertink walked to El Indio’s father’s house and interviewed him and asked him what sound the Ivory-bill had made when he saw the bird with his son 24 years ago and the man made the wroooong, very wrong sound of a different bird, and the wrong wing description to boot. This is another sentence where you’re using a colloquial expression (“wroooong”) and repetition. Why are these narrative devices effective here? It was a big moment for the birders, and I think they convey the boo/hiss/head-shake/letdown of it. There’s lots of other ways you could do that, of course. The reason I can get away with the colloquialism, which is another way of looking at “effective,” is because of the conversational style you noted throughout. As El Indio was only seven at the time, his recollection likely colored by his father’s identification of the species, both of the accounts of these two—the only two—witnesses to the exciting possibility that the Ivory-bill did or could live in non-pine forest in eastern Cuba were therefore called into question.

It was a disappointing development, one that Lammertink would henceforth refer to as “The Twist.”

So not a moment to waste getting out of Bahía de Taco—though the forest there was chockful of other species sightings: Scaly-naped Pigeon and Cuban Trogon and Stygian Owl; Cuban Amazon, Cuban Pewee, West Indian Woodpecker, Cuban Tody, Cuban Solitaire, Great Lizard-Cuckoo, Black-and-white Warbler, Cuban Green Woodpecker. Not a moment to waste getting to Guantánamo and getting permission—no time to care or alert the authorities about the endangered parrot being kept illegally caged on the floor of the kitchen in the restaurant where they ate in town—and getting back out to push up the mountain, not a moment to wait for a new day with more light remaining and less chance of rain or a fully fixed vehicle that might not die when it gets stuck.

That night, after hours of human pushing and oxen pulling, the jeep is freed. And with more pushing and pulling, it is rolled backward, and pop-started. But it cannot make it up the now rain-slicked mountain rock, though the driver tries for a terrifying 20 minutes with all the equipment and group again loaded inside. There is a Cuban military outpost a ways back down; the group makes its way there in the downpour, in the dark, and begs a patch of concrete floor to sleep on in a dwelling containing what Gallagher will refer to for the rest of the trip and maybe the rest of his life as The Worst Toilet in the World.

“This will be a great story to tell later,” he keeps saying. He’s been saying this for six days. He will continue to say it for eight more. Can you clarify why you chose the timeline you did for the story, which isn’t purely chronological? You start on the sixth day of the journey and keep coming back to it, while going back in time throughout. I think choosing the first scene is what chose the rest of the timeline. If I wanted to start there, which I did, I had to go back to explain what we were doing and where we were, until I got caught up to the present of that scene again. But the writer is in no mood to agree with the principle that a good story is better than a good time, partly because she has become afflicted with diarrhea—the group has concluded that there must have been an accidental ingestion of a drop from the Bahía de Taco vat of river water—but also because people (read: men) who constantly tell stories of bad times are tedious, and she is basically certain she could write an equally compelling scene if this Cuban restricted-jungle military outpost in the mountains above Guantánamo had turned out to be home to a team of scrappy dogs attired in miniature formalwear and trained to serve cocktails to visitors—which would be a good time—rather than a toilet that in addition to being The Worst has no door to separate anyone who’s using it from her comrades. This sounds like hell. Tell me about choosing to include these personal thoughts and experiences. Ugh. It really was extremely terrible. Diarrhea and extreme discomfort, gastrointestinal and otherwise, are set up in the piece as a regular feature of these trips, so a scene about what that can look like seemed relevant; it just so happened that I was the one with the diarrhea this time.

Earlier, the photographer sidled next to the writer and asked, as they both turned their faces away from the merciless beating of the oxen, a patch of protected Cuban forest being deforested with the tearing down of ever-larger branches and trees with which to assault them, “Do you ever wonder if this is all worth it? For a bird?” The two of them snickered darkly. Just moments before, a chunk of wood had cracked off an oxen-beating club as it broke over the animal’s hide and shot past the photographer’s head, missing him by maybe an inch. “One that almost definitely doesn’t exist?” Did you ever bring this up with the birders directly to get their response? I don’t know if I ever directly asked them, “How is this possibly worth this?” But they answered and addressed it all the time, as Gallagher does later in the piece when he’s talking about hope, and fishing, or as Lammertink does when he says if he dies it’s in the service of something greater. They were extremely cognizant of that question, as it seemed to hang over the whole venture, on their own.

“There is definitely a subset of people who are driven to this,” famed birder and Pulitzer finalist Scott Weidensaul will later explain to the writer. There are birders (and other field biologists), he will say, who are driven to the extent of, “Let’s save 45 minutes of field time tomorrow by finishing this hike tonight in the dark, even though we may fall and break our necks.” He has himself made “really bad decisions,” he says, for which he could have died. Even in the absence of bad decisions, outcomes can be fatal. Ted Parker, another famed birder, did die, along with premier neotropical botanist Alwyn Gentry and leading Ecuadoran conservationist Eduardo Aspiazu Estrada, in a plane crash doing a treetop survey; so did Phoebe Snetsinger, then the most prolific birder in history, when her van rolled in Madagascar. Nathaniel Gerhart died in 2007 in a car accident in Indonesia—three years after he discovered previously unknown habitat of the Selva Cacique—and so did Siarhei Abramchuk in 2010, from an encephalitis-bearing tick bite in Belarus. Subramanian Bhupathy, head of conservation biology at the Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History in India, died in 2014 after slipping down a hill and landing with a bamboo spike in his eye.

“I’m not saying that that’s a decision I would necessarily make,” Weidensaul will say of the hypothetical dangerous night hike. Though “part of that just becomes if you’ve gotten away with it in the past, you assume you’re gonna get away with it in the future,” he’s taking fewer risks now. But “I certainly understand what drives somebody to make that kind of a decision. Just this driving passion to push yourself to the limit because you don’t know what’s on the other side of the next hill. Because you don’t know what you’re gonna find, and if at the end of the day you haven’t done everything you possibly can, you leave yourself wondering: Well, what if I had?” Of Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt, Weidensaul says, “If there’s a reason there’s an Ivory-bill anywhere, it’s there, it’s because those are the places that are most difficult to get into.” It seems like you had the opportunity here to go deeper into the history of birding as a profession. Did you think about doing that? No, I didn’t. It didn’t even occur to me. These guys are my slice of birding life.

When the group wakes up at dawn in the military outpost below Ojito de Agua, Lammertink secures four mules to carry gear. Two national park guards also arrive to accompany them. The sun comes out blazing. They climb uphill. When they make it to the manned station several miles up in the afternoon, they stop for a moment—but then continue on, five miles more to the clearing at Ojito de Agua, where Lammertink wants to make camp and mount searches. The writer, who has been ingesting food but has effectively not eaten in two days because of the diarrhea, becomes too weak to stand; they put her on a mule. They put Gallagher, who is growing increasingly tired, on another one. They reach Ojito de Agua shortly before dark, and it starts to rain as they set up their tents. The Cubans fill the designated treated-water receptacle with untreated water; Lammertink, the only fluent Spanish speaker, has not explained to them that the Americans are designating such a receptacle or why because he personally is not bothering with water treatment from this mountain spring. A partial list of untreated-water tragedies that have occurred in Lammertink’s previous fieldwork includes: the death of a human man. That time even Lammertink didn’t trust the water, so sketchy were the sources they were pulling it from in the Bornean jungle, but the field assistant, a local, wouldn’t listen to anyone’s warnings. Diphtheria came on fast after he went back home and turned worse quickly; by the time his family went for medical help, there was nothing anyone could do.

The photographer almost drinks the untreated water before the mistake is discovered.

The writer has already drunk a liter of it.

At Ojito de Agua, everyone in the small camp bathes and washes their hands and dishes in a stream that the mules are pissing and shitting in and near. The second night, one of the mules awakens the camp, moaning and thrashing and crashing around; it lies down, and then, to the great astonishment and helplessness of its Cuban masters, violently dies. Wow. This image, and the one above of the oxen being beaten and fleeing, are powerful. Did you see them as metaphors? Of conveying something about Cuba? To me they were examples of what a shitshow the excursion was and how great the sacrifices are that get made.

“This is not what normal birding is like,” Gallagher clarifies at some point to the writer, in case this has been lost on her.

It starts to pour again. In the morning, they break dead-mule camp for fear of infection and rotting-mule smell and hike three miles to another, smaller clearing, perched on the side of a cliff where mosquitos are swarming in great clouds. It rains again when they arrive to set up for three nights among the trees and underbrush, which in this area are covered with sharp thorns and spikes of varying lengths. When Lammertink stayed here 25 years ago, he brushed up against a plant that turned his forearm into a bloated, oozing, yellow-pus-seeping rash of open blisters that didn’t close for five months, and then didn’t fade from scarring for “years.” He doesn’t know which plant it was, so he can’t point it out.

But.

In between the moving, and machete-swinging through non-trails, and basic surviving:

Silence.

Between sweating and getting snagged and rained on, slipping over wet rocks in the middle or right on the side of a mountain, 20 flights of elevation before even 7:30 a.m. one day (the writer climbing under her own power, as her stool has miraculously solidified):

They stop. They strap up the double-knocker. They turn on recorders, and write down coordinates, and call to the Ivory-bill.

BAM-bam.

They wait, collectively, for hours, sitting or standing quietly, for a response. BAM-bam. Waiting. Kent-kent through the speakers; waiting. Hiking and trudging and starting over. In all that stillness and hard staring, it’s easy to understand how an anticipation broken by a bird finally bursting forth would evoke sobs, as it immediately did in the guy Gallagher saw the Ivory-bill with in 2004—after they’d dodged countless close calls with poisonous water moccasins in the southeastern American swamp.

But in Cuba, one never does burst forth. How did you think about building tension in recounting what is essentially a failed expedition? I think it came a bit ready-made, since we spent so many hours sitting waiting for something to happen that we weren’t sure could or would happen but hoped for, which is tense by nature. We didn’t know the expedition was failed then yet, and since the reader is with us in time, they get that tension, too. Worse, there are not even any signs in this place, the last place in the country where Ivory-bills lived, that they were here anytime recently. There are no foraging signs, none of the bark-scaling and bark-stripping Ivory-bills do. No recent cavities. The forest is not even as Ivory-bill-friendly as Lammertink would like. Though protected, it’s dense. The regrowth pines don’t have enough light and space to grow into big Ivory-bill habitat. There are no reports among locals, not even crappy secondhand rumors that one has been seen or heard in decades, excepting one witness who they will go check out when they leave the woods. It wouldn’t be the first instinct of many writers to use “crappy” here instead of, say, “flimsy” or “dubious.” Tell me about that word choice. Crappy seems even worse than flimsy or dubious. They were so desperately looking for any shred of any quality that even the lowest would have been clung to. All of the interviews with potential witnesses they’ve tracked down so far have been hopeless: The one with El Indio’s father that contained The Twist, the one with the former logger they passed on the way to the national park station who said no one had seen the bird after the ’80s, the one with the 91-year-old in Farallones who said Ivory-bills were everywhere when he was a kid but not since, and kept trying to steer the conversation away from extinct birds (“He says, ‘We’re all made out of dust and to dust we will return,’ ” Lammertink translated. “His wife passed away three years ago, and he believes she now lives in eternity, or something”) as Lammertink mightily steered it toward extinct birds again and again (“There’s probably at this age more pressing questions than Ivory-bills,” he said as he finally gave up).

Sitting down in camp on the final night, Lammertink pronounces that the worst day in the field is better than the best day in the office. He became captivated by woodpeckers in general and Ivory-bills in specific when he picked up a book on the bird family by chance in a library at age 11. When he graduated high school, he worked at a dairy factory to save money to finance his trip to come here and look for them, and this time, he is satisfied with how much ground he’s covered. He is hungry, since he ate only a handful of stale crackers for lunch on another hard-charging day of traveling and double-knocking, and thirsty, since he lost his water bottle at some point in doing so. Having observed the character of his interactions with the other members of the group for almost two weeks, the writer has circled in her notes to ask him if he likes birds better than people, but on this last night she sits down next to him and asks instead if he cares more about birds than he does about himself. It’s interesting that you let readers in on your reporting process a bit here. Do you do that often? Why? I don’t think I do that often; in this case, it’s a nod to what I think about his character, while at the same time underlining the fact that it’s only my opinion.

He pauses for a long, long time, and stutters. He allows when pressed that the botflies are a gross and painful annoyance but a small one, and maybe he should put more DEET on his clothes. But when you’re getting up close on a bird and you feel a mosquito land, you can’t just be swatting around like a maniac. No. You can barely dare to breathe. He doesn’t think he would kill himself over a bird. Not deliberately. Yes he’s had dengue fever and malaria, and he died once. Well didn’t quite die, but came close to dying, when he and a field assistant were swarmed by thousands of bees in Borneo. They were in and out of consciousness after, ferocious puking and diarrhea while some villagers tried to pluck thousands of stingers from their faces and backs and arms, and others stood around saying they wouldn’t make it for sure. It was an Oriental Honey-buzzard, which rips open bees’ nests, that had whipped them up and caused the whole event; Lammertink had never seen one of the birds, and he was pretty excited until the bees attacked. He and the field assistant are married now and have two children. “I’ve been doing this now for, let’s see, 25 years, fieldwork in tropical areas, and you know, I’m still alive,” he says. He laughs. “So, why not do it for another 25 years?” He is not a thrill seeker. Not even a risk seeker, he says. He acknowledges that some of the work he does is risky, “but it’s always for some kind of conservation project, and if something goes terribly wrong, at least in my last moments, I know it was for some greater cause.”

In the morning, Lammertink, who can endure almost anything but cannot abide an unshaven face, shaves by feel beside the cold creek. The group packs up camp. They march eight miles over a mountain ridge and out of the forest, stopping for a last double-knock session, finally coming out the side opposite the one they entered—north, back up in Farallones. Both birders say, as they emerge filthy from the trees, that it does seem like the Ivory-bill is dead in Cuba. Lammertink’s earlier conclusions, he re-concludes, are confirmed. The little bit of hope he was holding is squashed. What was your process for interviewing, taking notes and/or recording on a multi-day trip like this? As it happens, the Radiolab producers had sent me a radio kit to take along in case we wanted to make a story of it later, so I had nearly all of our interviews as well as random interactions on tape. Then I went back and transcribed only the parts I wanted for the story. Normally I would just take notes most or all of the time, and record only very dense or official interviews.

But.

Wait.

The Ivory-bill is not given up so easily.

After a night of sleep back at the first jungle shack, the birders decide, while the photographer and writer are out of earshot, that they will go back into the woods. Today. There is still that last witness, who someone said saw one in 2008 and heard one in 2011. They haven’t interviewed him yet. They are on their way to interview him this morning. If he seems credible, they will ditch the writer and photographer and round up some mules and hike right back into the mountains for another double-knock session tonight, and another at dawn, and then try to race back out and to a driver and to the airport hours away over barely-roads to make their flight tomorrow.

There’s hope! Gallagher thinks, perking up out of his dire exhaustion, in which he barely staggered out of the woods just yesterday. We can still do this!

The witness says he saw Ivory-bills, all right.

He saw them in 1971.

Gallagher is crushed. His throat is thick with grief and near-crying when he comes into the writer’s hotel room the next day to confess the plan to jettison her and continue the expedition, foiled only by the confirmation of a faulty report. “I just suddenly . . .” he says. “I thought: These birds are really gone.” His swallows are heavy. Nice image. Do you think actively about engaging the various senses in your descriptions? No, I don’t think I do. I describe what stands out to me, and frankly I’ve noticed that that often leaves holes in describing what things look like, specifically. “I mean, I’m the most optimistic person in the world, and it was just . . . inescapable to me. And I almost felt guilty, as though, like, me giving up made it so. It was really like having a loved one on a ventilator or something, and they’re already gone, and you just have to make that decision to give up.”

He thinks other people should keep looking here. Even though he feels sure the birds aren’t here. He doesn’t know why. He says it’s hard to say. He himself won’t come back, though, unless there’s a solid sighting. This is it for him.

Here in Cuba, anyway! He’s talking about the Cuban Ivory-bill. He will continue to float the rivers and bayous of the American Southeast looking—Oh yes!, he says. Because that’s who he is. He will never give up the dream of finding one in America, though he’s been mired in controversy since the first time he proclaimed that he had—the catalyst of the highest-profile birder fight in modern history. Weidensaul, when saying on the record that he considers Gallagher’s sighting “persuasive,” equates that admission to “driving nails into the coffin of my professional reputation.”

“I need to go, to exclude the possibility that they’re there,” Lammertink had said at the Toronto airport, before they left. “It’s too important not to check.” Why did you leave this sentiment – which preceded the whole journey – until this point in the piece? I think it means more here, when you know what the hell they’ve been up to, when up top beforehand it’d be an emptier, or less resonant, sentiment.

“Of course, it’s a real long shot, and probably nothing will happen,” Gallagher had said the same day. “But as in fishing, if you don’t put your fly in the water, there’s no chance you’re gonna catch anything. You could go to some stream and go, This is a terrible-looking stream, or whatever, or unlikely to have trout, but I’ll cast the fly out there. And I’ve caught trout in some really unusual places.” If he can keep that kind of hope up for trout, what can’t he do for birds, with which he’s been in love since he was talking to them out on his grandmother’s porch as a three-year-old while his father, a sailor who was sunk three times in World War II and came back a scary drunk, knocked her around inside. Why did you include this background here, instead of higher up, when you were talking about his early interest in birds? Kind of the same as the above detail, I think. “Someone’s gotta do it, or it’s not gonna get done.”

The writer and the photographer don’t understand, haven’t understood, the risks the birders take. But one could argue that the writer and photographer do—that they are on this very trip doing—the same for their own work. Yes , I’m glad you address this head-on. This occurred to me. Had you thought about this before setting out on this journey? No, I hadn’t, because I had not at all been adequately briefed on what exactly this journey was going to entail. The birders’ passion does bring maybe balance but certainly conservation successes sometimes to this planet. The sightings in the ’80s got the forest they’ve just exited protected, and perhaps not a moment too soon—three of the areas where George Lamb photographed the Ivory-bills in the ’50s are completely logged and mined out, in a country that is really just now opening up and increasing infrastructure and investment. Gallagher’s alleged 2004 sighting helped get more of a singular and threatened American landscape preserved. It’s hard to argue that it was a bad outcome, regardless of whether there were Ivory-bills in it. Back in the day, early explorers did outrageous things to discover the world when it was still wild and unknown. So do their modern counterparts, who are trying to prove it still is, and to keep little pieces of it that way. Why did you think a sort of “moral of the story” paragraph was important here? It felt more like an acknowledgment of their rightness, in a way, than a moral. Who am I to judge them?

On the way to Farallones, back on the first day, the group stopped by the side of the road for a bathroom break. Though it’s currently the only road connecting all the cities in Cuba’s northeast, they didn’t bother to properly pull over. They climbed out, dusty and jeep-shook. Not a car passed. After they’d all returned from their visits to the surrounding woods, they stood stretching their legs quietly until Gallagher intoned, in his best voiceover impression as he gazed toward the trees, “And they stopped for a bathroom break, and suddenly, there was an Ivory-bill!,” his face lit brighter than two bottles of prosecco at the possibility. Why did you choose this ending for the story? The moment stood out for me when it was happening, and spoke, I thought even then, to the relentlessness of both the hope and the searching. As an ending it highlights to how everywhere, anytime, before this trip and beyond, it never dies.

“The great mistake is to live in Mexico and to be a journalist.”

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Tomorrow, Storyboard and its sister Nieman Foundation outlets, Nieman Lab and Nieman Reports, will join journalists and writers the world over to honor the incredibly brave Mexican journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas on the one-month anniversary of his killing. It seemed the right time to publish this sentence, which proved hauntingly prophetic. But it revealed so many other things, including his resolve to keep reporting on the country’s drug cartels even while under that existential threat from them and a taste of black humor, which sometimes can be a comfort in a time of sorrow. (Read Ernesto Priego’s essay about Valdez and his translation of one of the journalist’s last interviews here. And join the effort to draw attention to the dangers Mexican journalists face by posting essays or Tweets with the hashtag #ourvoiceisourstrength and/or #nuestravozesnuestrafuerza.)

Honoring Mexican journalist Javier Valdez: Today, and always, our voice is our strength

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One month ago today, an assassin fired 12 bullets at Mexican journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas as he drove away from the office of Ríodoce, where he had long filed some of the most searing journalism on that country’s drug war. The bullets pierced Valdez’s forehead and hands, symbolic hits, many believe (the “doce” in “Ríodoce” means “12”), and left him dying on a street in Culiacán, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa. His Panama hat, a trademark of sorts, landed next to him, blocking his face.

“I want to work with others to make sure we don’t remember him as just another in line of inconsequential deaths of journalists in Mexico.”

Valdez wasn’t the first journalist to be killed in Mexico this year. The country is one of the world’s most dangerous for journalists, especially those who write, as Valdez did, about drugs, corruption and other forms of crime and trafficking. But something about Valdez’s brazen assassination struck a nerve, and it wasn’t long before his colleagues at home and abroad began mobilizing to not only commemorate the journalist’s life and mourn his death, but to organize an online event that they hoped would serve as a pressure point on the Mexican government and the international community.

Organizers invited journalists around the world to participate in today’s event, writing:

“Our voice is our strength: join us​ in publishing or broadcasting news articles, opinion pieces, editorials, political cartoons, blogs, photographs, tweets, Facebook posts, or any other form of journalism to be published on Thursday, June 15, one month after Javier’s murder. The content is up to you — you can address his killing specifically, attacks on Mexico’s press in general, the impact of violence and impunity on freedom of expression, the government’s inaction, its failure to protect its journalists, the response of journalists worldwide. If all you’re able to do is a link to a published article or post that says it all for you, that too is welcome.

“We only ask that you tag your piece, post or Tweet with the hashtag #ourvoiceisourstrength and/or #nuestravozesnuestrafuerza as a ​way of signaling to the Mexican government and to Mexico’s press that this is a collective effort.”

I spoke with Ricardo Sandoval Palos, one of the journalists involved in organizing the #ourvoiceisourstrength/#nuestravozesnuestrafuerza, via Faceook and email about the initiative, and about Valdez’s life and work.

Maria Herrera, a mother who became active in the search for Mexico's missing after four of her sons disappeared, weeps after speaking about murdered journalist Javier Valdez during a protest a day after he was slain.

Maria Herrera, a mother who became active in the search for Mexico's missing after four of her sons disappeared, weeps after speaking about murdered journalist Javier Valdez during a protest a day after he was slain.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 12 journalists have been killed in Mexico so far this year. Forty-eight were killed in Mexico in 2016. Why was Javier’s death a tipping point, and what did his death mean to you personally ?

Javier Valdez Cárdenas was a muckraking columnist for the Ríodoce weekly newspaper and website, based in Culiacán, on Mexico’s west coast in the state of Sinaloa. Consider what I just described: “Muckraking” and “Sinaloa” are not words you’d usually associate in the same sentence about coverage of Mexico’s complicated, bloody war against drug traffickers.

The city of Culiacán is the geographical epicenter of Mexico’s illicit drug trade, and it has always been dangerous for honest cops, prosecutors and journalists to do their jobs, so it was marvelous to watch Ríodoce emerge as the go-to source for the real stories about drug violence and corruption. I am a journalist who’s written about Mexico for decades, for U.S. audiences, and had never seen such bold coverage in a local publication.

Remember, in Mexico many local outlets have sworn off anything more than cursory coverage of drug-related crime. For many, the decision was easy: Too many publishers and editors have seen family and staff members kidnapped or killed, grenades tossed into their newsrooms, and their walls riddled with bullets.

“So why is Javier’s death a tipping point? Javier’s was a leading voice in Mexico’s coverage of this terrible wave of violence. Despite his personal modesty, as a stellar columnist among a community of journalists who censored themselves, he was a defender of Mexican democracy.”

Javier had been a writer for a local daily newspaper before he and a couple of partners split off to found Ríodoce. His writing flourished – influenced by his noir favorite, Dashiell Hammett – and journalists around the world began to follow his chronicles of life and death in Sinaloa. Many went to Mexico and sought Javier’s guidance and counsel for their own coverage of the war on drugs. For that, and the daily risk he faced, he was honored with international press freedom awards.

The numbers are in dispute, but only because different international and Mexican observers use different standards to classify motive for crimes against journalists. I agree that at least 100 journalists have been killed or have disappeared because of their work in the last 25 years.

So why is Javier’s death a tipping point? Javier’s was a leading voice in Mexico’s coverage of this terrible wave of violence. Despite his personal modesty, as a stellar columnist among a community of journalists who censored themselves, he was a defender of Mexican democracy. He represented the best kind of coverage professional journalism can offer amid crisis and conflict. And since many journalists around the world knew him and relied on him, his murder has hit close to home.

For me, personally, it was a reminder of the cost of speaking truth to power. I have been threatened for my own work on crime and trafficking in Mexico, but it was nothing compared with what Javier and other Mexican colleagues lived with, day in, day out. I could jump on a plane and return to the safety of my home in the U.S., in a country where the Bill of Rights singles out the press with protected status. Javier had graciously declined my offers in the past to talk about his work to U.S. radio audiences, and I understood why.

Tell us about the June 15 initiative, #ourvoiceisourstrength / #nuestravozesnuestrafuerza. Who’s behind it? What’s the goal?

We started the campaign to show our Mexican colleagues that they are not alone in their outrage and fear. We thought that if we gathered enough global voices, it could serve as a pressure point on a Mexican government notorious for its inaction after dozens of murders and assaults on journalists. Mexican politicians do respond to international pressure, and that’s what we hope is building here.

I just hope now we can establish Javier’s legacy as his writing, his books and the tenor of his chronicles of Culiacán. I want to work with others to make sure we don’t remember him as just another in line of inconsequential deaths of journalists in Mexico. This time we have to care.

We also hope the noise we’re making here resonates with international political organizations that can, in turn, apply their own pressure on the Mexican government. Mexico wants to be a player on the international commercial stage, but it should be reminded that respect for rule of law is part of the bargain: Outside of China, at least some positive respect for rule of law is a common characteristic of the world’s thriving economies.

Beyond the June 15 effort, what needs to happen, both at a political level and an international level, to support and protect Mexico’s journalists?

It would be a great thing if violence against journalists could become a question for Mexican presidential candidates. I don’t know if there’s enough support in the general public to make it happen, as crimes against journalists probably, justifiably, take a back seat to personal well-being and security. But by making freedom of expression the issue, and that all Mexicans have that right, the persistent questioning of candidates on this point could strike a chord.

Talk to us about journalism in Mexico generally, especially in the wake of Javier’s death.

Valdez in March with his latest book.

Valdez in March with his latest book.

Remember that Ríodoce and Valdez’s writings are not the only recent beacons in Mexican journalism: Aristegui Reports, Animal Político and newspapers in Juárez and Tijuana have shown resilience and bravery in publishing. There is an exciting new collective, Quinto Elemento, comprised of some of Mexico’s best investigative reporters, that is working to redraw the Mexican journalism landscape. It won’t be easy, but what’s grand is that these sites and outlets have gotten around the traditional barrier to a free media in Mexico.

It used to be that the government controlled every aspect of publishing and broadcasting in Mexico, from the newsprint supply to the broadband space. The Internet has put an end to that. Throughout Latin America, online news outlets are emerging with fresh, independent voices such as El Faro in El Salvador, Plaza Pública in Guatemala, Ojo Público in Peru and the Connectas network of investigative reporters, which started in Colombia. Stories going international at the speed of information have also strengthened the investigative muscle of newspapers in Argentina and Brazil, where persistent reporters like Hugo Alconada and James Alberti have exposed political corruption and triggered changes in government.

Much of this change has come about because of the new power of online publishing and social media. Our own call would have been muted were it not for our ability to fire up a special page on Facebook and draw international attention to the effort and to Javier’s death. Our tweets have been replicated and multiplied. And what will heighten the impact of this campaign is the use of the common hashtag #ourvoiceisourstrength, in Spanish as well: #nuestravozesnuestrafuerza. This will tell us how much impact we’ve had with this.

We’ve heard from dozens of journalists across the U.S., Latin America and Europe, and Mexican journalists are planning public events on the 15th to amplify the message. Remember, this all started with a simple email from Kate Doyle, of the National Security Archives, asking what we could do keep alive the memory of Javier’s work and help our Mexican colleagues push their government into action.  Let’s see where social media takes us on June 15.

(You can read Ernesto Priego’s translation of one of Valdez’s last interviews here.)

Now’s a good time to read some highlights of the global effort to honor Javier Valdez

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Today, journalists around the world came together to honor slain Mexican journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas on the one-month anniversary of his assassination. The global campaign, known as “Our voice is our strength” or, in Spanish, “Nuestra voz es nuestra fuerza,” saw journalists offer essays, posts, tweets and images to express their solidarity and outrage at the killing of a journalist who risked, and lost, his life to cover the drug cartels in his country.

Earlier today, Storyboard published an interview with the one of the organizers of the event. Now, we’d like to offer some of the highlights of the day.

For Storyboard sister site Nieman Reports, organizers Alfredo Corchado and Ricardo Sandoval Palos say Valdez’s murder is a test for Mexican democracy. They write:

“We are sons of Mexico, born in the country’s rural north. We were educated in the United States as children of immigrant farm workers. We returned to Mexico as correspondents for American news audiences, chronicling life in a country that wasn’t “foreign” to us. We’ve also come face-to-face with risks that emerge from covering the illicit drug trade. This is why we’re writing now in the name of Javier Valdez. We want the dastardly crime that claimed his life to not be forgotten.”

In the New York Review of Books, in a piece headlined “Mexico: A Voice Against the Darkness,” Alma Guillermoprieto has a take with a taste of gallows humor:

“On reflection, I was grateful that, unlike many of the more than one hundred reporters killed in Mexico over the last quarter century, he was not abducted, tortured for hours or days, maimed, dismembered, hung lifeless from an overpass for all to see.  No doubt Valdez owed his comparatively charitable execution—he was merely pulled from his car and shot twelve times—to his prominence.”

Former Los Angeles Times reporter and “Dreamland” author Sam Quinones appeals to Mexico to change things from the ground up in an essay titled “The lessons in a brave man’s death”:

“As we examine all the reasons why brave people like Javier Valdez have fallen, Mexico needs to look to its local government and build up its institutions, its capacity, its ability to protect its citizens and the ability to find justice for them when it cannot. Like politics, justice is local. Ensuring that would be the greatest tribute to a brave man.”

In the Times of San Diego, Everard Meade writes in an opinion piece headlined “Remembering Javier Valdez Cárdenas and Other Victims of Terror in Mexico”:

“The only antidote to the crippling fear and isolation that an atrocity like this produces is to tell precisely the kinds of stories in which Javier specialized — stories that showcase our common humanity, that reduce the distance between victims and perpetrators, reporters and readers.”

In another opinion piece, in the Houston Chronicle, former AP Mexico-Central America bureau chief Katherine Corcoran connects the killing to the rising rhetoric against journalists in the United States:

“Amid the accusations and insults President Trump hurls at the U.S. media, it’s easy to ignore that there is a real, shooting war on the press — and it’s happening in Mexico.”

The lunacy and the sorrow: journalists capturing the sweep of our lives

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This week’s posts captured the lunacy and sorrow of life. In the former, writer Mac McClelland talks about her hilariously awful expedition with extreme birders (yes, there is such a thing) for Audubon magazine. In the latter, journalists the world over joined together to honor Mexican journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas on the one-month anniversary of his assassination. The name of the campaign, “Our voice is our strength,” is such a powerful, and beautiful, one for journalists.

Like Tippi Hedren in this photo from "The Birds," Mac McClelland didn't have a lot of fun on her birding expedition

Like Tippi Hedren in this photo from "The Birds," Mac McClelland didn't have a lot of fun on her birding expedition

Mac McClelland and “Delusion Is the Thing With Feathers.” I absolutely loved McClelland’s article about a crazy birding expedition in Cuba. So many things were wonderful: the headline referencing an Emily Dickinson poem; the decision to use the third person instead of the first; the bold move of having a paragraph consist solely of one exclamation mark; and the laugh-out-loud humor of the piece. As contributor Katia Savchuk writes: “McClelland reveals the impeccable timing of a comic and the unexpected rhythms of a Beat writer (who happens to be funny).”

The soundtrack: “Feathery,” by Milky Chance. “Even though love is going to kill me/I will try.” That line seems to fit the extreme birders, whose love/obsession may yet kill them.

One Great Sentence

“The great mistake is to live in Mexico and to be a journalist.”

Javier Valdez Cárdenas, from his 2016 book, “Narcoperiodismo.” Read why we think it’s great.

A protestor holds a sign reading "No more violence against journalists," during a demonstration in Mexico City a day after journalist Javier Valdez was slain in the northern state of Sinaloa.

A protestor holds a sign reading "No more violence against journalists," during a demonstration in Mexico City a day after journalist Javier Valdez was slain in the northern state of Sinaloa.

Honoring slain journalist Javier Valdez: Today, and always, our voice is our strength. Storyboard contributor Julie Schwietert Collazo interviewed Ricardo Sandoval Palos, one of the organizers of the #ourvoiceisourstrength campaign, and this is his moving answer about why, after all the murders of Mexican journalists, the killing of Javier Valdez was the straw that broke the camel’s back: “So why is Javier’s death a tipping point? Javier’s was a leading voice in Mexico’s coverage of this terrible wave of violence. Despite his personal modesty, as a stellar columnist among a community of journalists who censored themselves, he was a defender of Mexican democracy. He represented the best kind of coverage professional journalism can offer amid crisis and conflict. And since many journalists around the world knew him and relied on him, his murder has hit close to home.”

The soundtrack: “Shine a Light,” by Spiritualized. One of my favorite bands, and this song never fails to move me. “When I’m tired and all alone/Lord shine a light on me.” Hopefully, the global campaign showed Mexican journalists that they may be tired, but they’re not all alone.

What I’m reading online: Paying a price for 8 days of flying in America. In a pretty heavy week, I needed some escapism, so I went to this New York Times piece by the reliably funny Sarah Lyall about the hell that is air travel in America today. The story is full of priceless lines, but I have to go with one about a “caste system that can turn an airplane into a microcosm of ‘The Hunger Games.’ The elite bask in an airborne version of Panem, enjoying over-the-top frivolities distant from the tedium of normal life, while the masses scrap over scant resources, dreaming of revolution.”

On a darker note, I hope to feature this Marshall Project story by Maurice Chammah soon on Storyboard. It’s about a father wrongfully accused of sexually abusing his children. Question marks in headlines have become an overused clickbait device, but this time it works: “Katie’s father went to prison for raping her and her brothers. It was an unthinkable crime that broke her family apart. So why couldn’t she remember it?”

What’s on my bedside table: “To the Lighthouse,” by Virginia Woolf. I got this for 20 cents at my local library (along with a clutch of Hardy Boy books — my high-low haul). A endlessly praised book, and a beautiful cover. I had never read it before, which is a bit hard to believe, because at the very least I love the Isle of Skye, where it’s set. I’m just starting on it now. But the opening of the second paragraph is stunning: “To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch.”

What’s on my turntable: “Full Moon,” by Kris and Rita. That would be Kris Kristofferson and his then-love, Rita Coolidge. I see on Wikipedia they had gotten married three weeks before the release of the album. Someone I know said he saw Coolidge playing on the Sunset Strip back in the ’70s and Kristofferson was in the audience with a look of total adoration on his face. Sigh.

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), I’m Storyboard editor Kari Howard, and you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.


Notable Narrative: Susan Dominus and “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?”

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When Susan Dominus set out to write a story about relationships and romance for The New York Times Magazine, her initial assignment had her talking to couples who have experienced, and recovered from, infidelity. The relationship therapists she spoke with pointed her in a different direction: couples who had opened their marriages.

“I went from thinking, ‘What’s wrong with these people?’ to thinking, ‘I don’t want this, but what’s wrong with me?” And that was surprising to discover.”

Those conversations were the spark of more than a year spent reporting and writing about open relationships. Dominus embedded with couples at every stage of the open relationship, from the beginners struggling to acclimate to a married couple who lived with the wife’s boyfriend. Yes, you read that right. Along the way, Dominus danced with her own visceral reactions to the subject matter, creating an internal monologue that she wove into the larger narrative, creating a revealing, emotive and intimate portrait of a new kind of romance.

In our conversation, Dominus, a staff writer for the magazine, talked about why she focused on the couples she did, why she included her own reactions and what she thinks about the incensed comments from readers.

This is a topic that anyone in any kind of long-term relationship has probably thought about, however briefly, at one time or another. What made you want to approach the story at all, and then in the way that you did?

Well, the story started out when my editor wanted me to look into how a couple who has experienced an infidelity recovers from that, and how they rebuild trust in a relationship. They wanted to do a really close look at one couple and follow their story. I reached out to a couple therapists in the hopes of meeting such a couple, but couples who have dealt with an infidelity are actually very ashamed, often, both the perpetrator and the victim of the affair. They didn’t really want to talk. But in the course of these interviews with the psychologists, one of them said, “You know, sometimes what these couples decide to do is open their marriages after they’ve had an affair.” And I thought, from a pure narrative point of view, I’d be really curious to see what that’s like, as a couple takes these risks for the first time in their lives, going out and meeting other people and coming back and reporting to each other about it. So I pitched it to my editors and everybody went for it.

Very quickly, I found couples who were not only open already, but I was able to find a couple on the brink of opening it for the first time, and were willing to let me come with them on that journey from a journalistic point of view. I was surprised that that was something I was able to find, but I did.

So is that why you started the story with Daniel and Elizabeth, who were undergoing this process in real time, and made them such an integral part of it? You must’ve spent a lot of time with them, as well, to elicit this level of detail.

“One thing I would say is that people who have complicated emotions don’t usually feel compelled to write something in the comments.”

Exactly, that’s why I worked with them, and yes, I spoke to them often on the phone, I visited them, I met their children. I’m going to meet them for dinner next week, so I always had a feeling we would keep in touch. They’re really wonderful people.

There was another couple that was about to open their marriage when I met them — near the end of the piece, there’s that couple that ends up divorcing? I had literally been there in their apartment as they were writing each other’s Tinder profiles. They were really gearing up for it. But there were things that were problematic about their relationship beforehand that made me think the openness was going to be a Band-Aid that wasn’t going to fix it. I was surprised, because for a while things were going very well between them, but ultimately their differences and attitudes towards monogamy were what broke them up.

Could you have written this story from a strictly objective point of view? Did you always plan to include yourself and your own existential crises and hang-ups in the piece?

I think it could be done, of course every story could be done that way and be done really, really well. I just felt that because I was taking readers so far out of their comfort zone, it might connect them to the material to have someone who herself was kind of on this journey, and starting out in one place and ending up somewhere else. Which is not to say open to open marriage, but  I wrote those sections really quickly and naturally, and they felt really fun to write and my editors really liked them, so we kept them in.

Looking back now, did you find that ultimate value, in the final story, of making yourself a character to help the reader along?

I mean, yes and no, I guess. It’s hard to know, because the comments were so vitriolic, for the most part. What was really fascinating to me about the comments was how taboo the subject matter was. Even how people in my life responded to me, being subtly or overtly kind of hostile to me when speaking about it, as if I had been proselytizing for this rather than simply writing about it. I think it just kicks up a lot of emotions for people and makes them feel uncomfortable in ways they’re not even aware of.

It seems that where our country cannot locate consensus on anything from abortion to guns to mass incarceration, the NYT comments section can at least agree that what these couples are practicing is ridiculous, impossible, a bridge too far even for progressive-minded couples. Does that kind of vitriolic reaction affect your approach as a writer?

One thing I would say is that people who have complicated emotions don’t usually feel compelled to write something in the comments. There were probably a lot of people who read the piece and thought: “You know, I don’t know what I think. These people do seem kind of crazy, but on the other hand, monogamy does seem kind of repressive. And also, they do seem kind of happy. Huh!”

“Reporting this story, I did suddenly think that my marriage is one of the best things I have in my life, and yet I don’t appreciate it, we don’t really rejoice in it, we don’t dedicate ourselves to it, we don’t spend enough time making it better. I did really feel like I was coasting, rather than being really present in my relationship.”

Those people don’t post. The people who post want to feel good about whatever moral stance they’re taking and feel like they’re exercising their moral muscles and patting themselves on the back for having really strong convictions. The comments don’t necessarily reflect the range of reader experiences; they reflect the extreme reactions most people do have to open marriages.

I was particularly struck by the Zaeli Kane and Joe Spurr (and Blake Wilson) anecdote, as it seems you were. They seem to have reached the enlightened plane that every couple that embarks on an open relationship is looking for. Reading it, I felt, like you did in the piece, a mix of disgust, at myself for my own reactionary conservatism, and admiration for what they were doing. Were you intentionally trying to push readers to explore their own thoughts on relationships, or were you just telling your sources’ story?

As I said, I feel like the entire piece was taking the reader on a journey. You know, here’s a kind of suburban married couple, and one of them is seeing someone outside of their relationship, but it’s a committed, loving thing. In some ways that seemed like the easiest jumping-off point, and then I wanted to end the piece with the hardest concept to grasp, which was that these three people are living together, two are kissing each other in front of the other partner, and then to sort of admit and recognize, about myself, that there’s a limit to my open-mindedness. It was a good way of getting at that as open-minded as I am about the idea, there’s something visceral, maybe primal, in me that rebels at the concept of that.

Where did you ultimately end up on this topic? And is it normal for you to be affected by a story on these emotional levels?

 I would say the story had a more visceral effect on me than most, but the thing that I admired most about these couples is that you may not like the way that they were committing themselves to the idea of love, but they all took love incredibly seriously. They spent a lot of time thinking about what they wanted out of their relationships in life. I’m very, very happily married, but like many couples in which the parents work and there are two kids, sometimes you do coast on autopilot. And reporting this story, I did suddenly think that my marriage is one of the best things I have in my life, and yet I don’t appreciate it, we don’t really rejoice in it, we don’t dedicate ourselves to it, we don’t spend enough time making it better. I did really feel like I was coasting, rather than being really present in my relationship.

Where do you go from here? More relationship and romance stories, or something else?

I’m hugely relieved to have moved on from this topic. [Laughs] It was really interesting, and I really care about the people I reported on. I learned a lot, but it’s very hard doing that kind of intimate reporting. Also, to be honest, there is so much going on in the news and in the world right now that on the one hand, I think it’s important to acknowledge that our private lives are hugely significant and how we conduct ourselves in our homes is a big part of who we are, but it’s also nice to turn outward. And I’d like to do more of that.

“We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.”

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Why is it great? Tom Stoppard is one of our greatest wordsmiths, wildly intelligent and witty, while still revealing the pathos of his characters. This line is a perfect example of his genius. It uses a metaphor, a bit of wordplay, to capture something deep about human existence. And the rhythm of the language as the sentence reaches its end is breathtakingly beautiful: “a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.”

5(ish) Questions: Bonnie Ford and “The Promise Rio Couldn’t Keep”

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The 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics offered a host of memorable storylines: 28-time medal winner Michael Phelps’ final race, Ryan Lochte’s bizarre fabrication of a gunpoint robbery, and the “will they, won’t they” speculation as to which athletes might skip the Games to avoid Brazil’s Zika epidemic. And, of course, the bevvy of athletes who fell ill competing in the sewage-infested rivers and lakes that hosted the Games’ sailing, rowing and open water swimming events.

Tomorrow’s journalists exploring the masters of today

We’re occasionally spotlighting the next generation of journalists: students. They’re choosing stories or journalists they like and giving them the Storyboard treatment. We’re pleased to post their efforts.

You’d be forgiven for forgetting the last storyline, because it didn’t happen—only one athlete who competed in the contaminated sites fell ill, and doctors did not conclusively link that illness to any cause. This outcome upended expectations for those who followed the doomsday scenario first reported in July 2015 by the Associated Press, which, relying on the results of its own independent water testing, predicted that Olympic athletes would swim and sail “in waters so contaminated with human feces that they risk becoming violently ill and unable to compete in the games.” The AP’s analysis soon found its way into major news outlets, including CNN and The Atlantic, which cited the findings alongside reports of athletes getting sick during practice runs on Rio’s courses.

ESPN senior writer Bonnie D. Ford offered a lonely counter to the dominant narrative. Her February 2016 piece, “The Promise Rio Couldn’t Keep,” held that, although Rio’s waters wouldn’t be cleaned to the standards outlined in the city’s Olympic bid, that had little do with athletes’ health. Olympians competing in open water events would likely be fine, she wrote, and Brazilian citizens, not athletes, would pay the price for the government’s failures to improve water treatment infrastructure.

Balancing scientific explanation with personal narratives, Ford told a nuanced story that, while offering no easy answers, painted a picture more reflective of the lived human experience than a purely data-driven one. It isn’t merely serendipitous that Ford’s expert weaving of history, science and first-hand accounts accurately predicted the impact of Brazil’s water pollution during the Games—it’s the outcome of a well-reported story.

Ford’s piece is effective not only because of its exceptional sourcing—by employing a sports lens to describe complex social, political, and ecological issues, Ford brings knowledge to bear for an audience that might otherwise never hear about it. As ESPN lays off its reporters in favor of broadcast rights and pundits, Ford’s brilliant piece reminds us that great sports journalism can play an integral role in—pardon the pun—leveling the playing field of civic discourse and engagement.

I spoke with Ford about the story, how it pained her a bit to contradict the AP project and her commitment to athletes’ rights. The interview has been edited for length and flow.

Two weeks before the Games began, trash floats on the water near where sailing athletes would compete.

Two weeks before the Games began, trash floats on the water near where sailing athletes would compete.

Where did the idea for the Rio water story originate from?

Let’s see…summer of 2015 the Associated Press blew out a big investigation where they did their own testing of bacterial and viral levels in the waters around Rio. We [ESPN’s international sport group and “Outside the Lines”; reporter Tom Farrey and producer Justine Gubar contributed to reporting] caucused about, “How can we advance this story?” and there was not really even a question, sort of like, “We’re going to do this, it’s just a matter of how and when.” We all agreed that it needed to be a piece that accomplished two things. It needed to look into the issue from the standpoint of social-cultural-political aspects in Rio, but we also needed to talk directly to athletes and how this was going to affect the Olympics. So, while we did not doubt the findings of the AP whatsoever, in terms of levels, what really needed to be explored in the story was, “OK, the water’s dirty, the sanitation’s terrible, this promise has been made to clean up based on the award of the Olympic bid, but is this going to truly affect the health of the athletes or the way the competition unfolds at the Olympics, and what’s going to be the legacy? Is this promise going to be kept, and how is that going to affect the folks down there, the folks that live there all the time?”

“I wanted to know: ‘How is this going to affect people? How is this going to affect the Olympics? How is it going to affect the athletes?’ Curiosity is the key, it really is. No assumptions, just curiosity.”

I’m very proud of the piece because I think we did manage to hit that balance of, you’re not writing a term paper, you’re not writing “The History of Sanitation in Brazil.” On the other hand, you have to know something about that. We had to interview officials, we had to get them on the record, and we had the human aspect as portrayed through Brazilian Olympic sailing family the Graels and the family in the favela. Hopefully the piece did its job in telling people that while things were far from ideal down there, and the promise of cleaning Rio’s water was not going to be kept in a very significant way, that the chances of any particular athlete getting sick were probably not that great. That was a very different conclusion than what our colleagues at the AP had reached. They had some scientists on the record saying, “There’s a 99% chance that you’re going to get sick if you ingest just three teaspoons of water,” and I just didn’t find that to be true. It pained me to feel as if, in a way, I was contradicting some pieces that had tremendous impact and started the global conversation, but that’s the way it goes sometimes — you have to start with an open mind. You can’t start with a conclusion; you have to start with a question.

It does seem to anticipate what bore out in Rio: the water wasn’t a focal point of the three weeks or so of coverage.

Let’s not forget, though, the harsh spotlight that the AP and then many, many others, including us, shone on that problem I think held the authorities feet to the fire. They understood that if a TV set drifted onto the sailing course, it would have been terrible optics for the Olympics themselves and Brazil, as well. I do think that, to the extent they were able to tackle a problem that was decades in the making, I think they did what they could to make sure the competitive venues were as safe as they could be. Had that journalism not been done, who knows? Maybe things wouldn’t have been as good. It’s a larger point: Right now, as we speak, I gotta wonder, are the eco-barriers still in place? Are the eco-boats still patrolling? Is there any hope that any of these sanitation projects, which have been political footballs for years, are going to be completed? It doesn’t look very good right now; I’ve been talking to people on the ground there because I’m getting ready to write a more general column about conditions there, and if anything, it seems things have deteriorated since the Olympics.

And that’s too bad, because oftentimes, these sites have staying power, whether it’s as resorts or as the next training venue for athletes.

These staggeringly beautiful beaches, which should be a great source of recreation and pleasure who live there, some of them are toxic. Not Copacabana, but others that are in the heart of the city. They didn’t get any Olympic “bump.”

How do you think your piece fits into the larger landscape of reporting that came out before the Olympics, especially as a character-driven, longform piece?

I’ve been a sports writer now for 23 years, and I was a cityside reporter before that, and one of the things that’s always fascinated me is how Olympic athletes view their work, their jobs, because they’re in a quite different position from our professional team athletes. They are representing a country; they, in most cases, are not making a lot of money doing it; they are virtually unrecognized and unknown except for every four years; and also, in a lot of cases, they’re doing sports that people don’t understand very well, other than the obvious track, gymnastic, swimming. There are a lot more arcane sports in the Olympics, which is why we Olympic reporters tend to focus on people and not Xs and Os. The athletes’ rights,  or working conditions, have always been of interest to me. Years ago there was an elite open-water swimmer from Philadelphia, my area, who drowned in a 10-kilometer race in the Middle East. He was an Olympic prospect. I did a long spool of investigative stories about that, determined there was negligence and, in fact, a lot of these races did not have adequate safety along the water.

“I would be shirking my responsibility as a journalist if I didn’t write about complicated social and cultural and financial issues in sport.”

What I wanted to make clear in the piece is that the athletes don’t have a lot of choice here. They don’t have a lot of power. I think all of us can relate to workplace situations where we don’t have a lot of power, where we’re making tradeoffs between ambition and personal safety or comfort. Sarah True, the triathlete, what she said about how she felt about going, was one of the hearts of the piece. She might get sick, but she’s going to go anyway; this is her dream. But she feels kind of guilty because she’s going to jet in and out and there are things that will be left behind. I want my pieces to be as widely read and discussed as possible, and that means finding people and faces and not just “he said, she said,” scientific or political debate. There were a lot of good stories done about the water conditions, but I feel as if ours was the most comprehensive.

How did you use the few threads you had to put this in-depth story together?

It boils down to something very simple, and that’s genuine curiosity. I read the AP stories and was horrified, but I wanted to know more. I wanted to know: “How is this going to affect people? How is this going to affect the Olympics? How is it going to affect the athletes?” Curiosity is the key, it really is. No assumptions, just curiosity. The other thing about investigative projects is, start to finish, this was about a six-month project. I was doing other things during that time, it wasn’t just this, but I find, anyways, in order for something to really hold my attention for that long, for me to be passionate about something for that long, I better start with a really big dose of curiosity, because if you’re just doing it out of obligation, it’s not gonna be as compelling.

In terms of bringing the story together, what were the storytelling decisions you made along the way?

I broke it down, and the sections were pretty clear to me because they were scenes, essentially. The lead section and the second section were probably the most challenging because I wanted to start with a very strong theme and person, but then I had to flip pretty quickly into that nut graf of why you should read this. That required a lot of finessing and work and editing to get that down to something that was meaningful but adjustable. Lead scene, nut graf, a little bit of yin-yang there between here’s what they said they would do, what hasn’t been done, and here’s somebody saying, “Well, I think it’s going to be fine,” and then transition into why it’s not fine. And then, I don’t know–the writing was challenging just because I was trying to tie together a lot of different things, but I was really helped by things I saw and the places where I had my feet on the ground. That moved the whole thing along.

I can’t really think of any major interview or character that I explored that didn’t wind up in the story, didn’t wind up being not worth including. Again, it’s simple—you want people to read the piece. You don’t want them to feel like they’re reading some treatise about water sanitation. I used the people as vehicles for the more technical or dry information.

Why do you like this kind of reporting?

I mentioned how long I’ve been a journalist—it’ll be 36 years this June—and I have a horror of being bored. When you’re a reporter and you’re fitting news stories or features into the 800-, 1,000-, 3,000-, even 5,000-word boxes for that long, it can become formulaic, it can seem repetitive, particularly when it’s every year or every four years you’re covering the same event: the same teams, the same challenges … there’s a lot of sameness. My No. 1 job is always to keep myself interested, because if I’m not interested, then what’s under my byline isn’t going to be interesting. And then, as a senior writer, I feel as if it’s my responsibility. I’ve got all this experience–on the city side, I covered cops and courts, politics, a lot of different areas, and then went into sports and did a ton of event coverage and a lot of athletes profiles, what you do when you first get into it. When I got to ESPN, I was encouraged to be more analytical, to write more news analysis and bring all that experience to the table. I feel a real responsibility to take on nuanced issues, because what good has this career been if I don’t do that? Writing about athletes’ rights and safety; about athletes’ mental health; about anti-doping, doping and all of the challenges that causes for the sport’s industry, the interaction of sports, society, culture, sexual abuse and assault, all of those things, unfortunately, are never going to go away in sports any more than they’re going to go away in the general culture. I would be shirking my responsibility as a journalist if I didn’t write about complicated social and cultural and financial issues in sport.

It’s officially summer: Don’t forget to take some great reads along to the beach

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This week I celebrated the summer solstice watching a fiddle band atop a hill with sweeping views of the Maine coast and hillsides as the sun slowly lowered into a purple sunset. What did you do to mark the beginning of summer? One of our posts this week fits the summer theme: We interview an investigative sports reporter about her contrarian piece on the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. And for a bit more summer inspiration, may I recommend the album on my turntable (see below)?

Paul Newman once said famously of his fidelity to his wife, Joanne Woodward: "I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?" But not all couples are into steak all the time..

Paul Newman once said famously of his fidelity to his wife, Joanne Woodward: "I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?" But not all couples are into steak all the time..

Susan Dominus and “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?” The New York Times Magazine writer talks about how her controversial story changed her views on non-monogamy — and made her appreciate her own marriage more. This quote is wonderful: “Reporting this story, I did suddenly think that my marriage is one of the best things I have in my life, and yet I don’t appreciate it, we don’t really rejoice in it, we don’t dedicate ourselves to it, we don’t spend enough time making it better. I did really feel like I was coasting, rather than being really present in my relationship.”

The soundtrack: “Marriage Is for Old Folks,” by Nina Simone. She has such fun with this song, and it fits the story so well. Like this line: “One husband, one wife, whaddya got/Two people sentenced for life.”

One Great Sentence

“We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.”

Tom Stoppard, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Read why we think it’s great.

Competitors run to the water for the start of the women's triathlon event at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Competitors run to the water for the start of the women's triathlon event at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Bonnie Ford and “The Promise Rio Couldn’t Keep.” As other outlets predicted disaster for the 2016 Olympics water events in polluted Rio de Janeiro, the writer for ESPN’s Outside the Lines painted a picture more reflective of the lived human experience than a purely data-driven one. This is a great interview by Medill student Kara Voght, who’s taking part in our series “Tomorrow’s journalists exploring the masters of today.” If you’re a journalism professor — or a student — and are interested in participating, drop me a line. I love having the next generation on Storyboard.

The soundtrack: “Dirty Water,” by the Standells. One of the best garage-rock songs of all time. And it’s nice to give a hometown band some love (even if they’re not exactly praising the quality of the water in the Charles, or much else about Boston).

What I’m reading online: Last week I totally forgot to mention the best read of the week, a story that went viral about a woman who drowned a rabid raccoon in a Maine pond. I love this not just because it’s standout local journalism a few towns over from me. Everything about it is well-told: the hilarious lede, the quotes that are so good you almost can’t believe them, the wonderful bits of color scattered throughout. You may have already read it by now, but I didn’t want to neglect a shout-out to the writer, Alex Acquisto.

This Nick Paumgarten New Yorker profile of Josh Tillman, who performs as Father John Misty, peels back all the layers of artifice around the singer. I’ve had “I Love You, Honeybear” on repeat in my car for its revelatory feeling of a cynic overcome by love, but one friend says he read an insufferable interview with Tillman and can’t listen to him. This profile riffs off that obnoxious persona, and tries to see the human behind it.

And if you’re in need of another rabbit hole to fall into online, may I suggest the wonderful Public Domain Review? I happened on it this week and found this “who-knew?” piece on W.E.B. Du Bois’ genius for data visualization and beautiful graphic design. But I could have spent way too much time scrolling their archives of material in the public domain.

What’s on my bedside table: “Anything Is Possible,” by Elizabeth Strout. I just got this, the latest book from the brilliant Maine writer, at the library. (Can I take a moment to praise local libraries and how they make the newest hardbacks available to all?) In the opening story, she manages to capture the arc of one man’s life in just three paragraphs, from second-generaton dairy owner to janitor at his kids’ new rundown school “wearing a white shirt that had Tommy stitched on it in red.” That mini-novel ends with these words: “Well. They had all lived through it.” It’s the “well” that makes it wonderful.

What’s on my turntable: “Supernova,” by Ray LaMontagne. It’s the first week of summer, and this album feels very summery to me. I remember listening to it on a portable turntable on a hilltop in Malibu, sitting next to a vintage airstream. He was singing about hitching a ride down PCH, and I could see PCH below me with its stream of beachgoers and surfers. The sound of his voice echoed off the canyons, and that 70s California vibe seemed exactly right.

If you want to chat about storytelling (or music), I’m Storyboard editor Kari Howard, and you can reach me at editor@niemanstoryboard.org. Or you can find me at @karihow on Twitter.

Notable Narrative: Jason Fagone and “What Bullets Do to Bodies”

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Gun violence is one of America’s most pervasive, polarizing issues, and journalism has responded with thousands of articles tackling the subject, including a raft of forgettable think pieces, trend pieces, explainers and data-driven dross.

America’s gun violence epidemic

This week on Storyboard we’re spotlighting stellar literary journalism about America’s gun violence epidemic from the Huffington Post’s Highline, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and Mother Jones. We welcome your suggestions on other stunning stories about this plague. And please read this great story in Nieman Reports on how newsrooms are covering mass shootings.

And then there’s Jason Fagone’s recent, revelatory story for Huffington Post Highline, “What Bullets Do to Bodies.”

Early in the piece, Fagone writes: “We get names, places, anguished Facebook posts, wonky articles full of statistics on crime rates and risk, Twitter arguments about the Second Amendment—everything except the blood, the pictures of bodies torn by bullets. That part is concealed, sanitized. More than 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds each year in America, around 75,000 more are injured, and we have no visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot.”

Trauma surgeon Amy Goldberg does.

Like many of the protagonists that pepper Fagone’s articles and books, Goldberg is a master of her craft, a larger-than-life figure with special access to something most of us don’t know. Goldberg has spent almost her entire 30-year career as a trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, located in one of the most dangerous areas of the country. She has treated hundreds if not thousands of gun violence patients, witnessed the intransigence of Congress and started her own gun-violence programs through the hospital.

Through the profile of Goldberg, Fagone was able to inhabit a fresh ecosystem within the predictable world of gun violence journalism.

I spoke to Fagone by phone, where we discussed overnight reporting trips to the trauma wing at Temple, finding hope in despair, the many barriers to reporting in a hospital and the bittersweet reader reactions.

The interview has been edited slightly for length and flow.

The trauma unit at Temple University Hospital, in a rare moment of calm.

The trauma unit at Temple University Hospital, in a rare moment of calm.

Can you talk about how this story got off the ground? What was your original concept for the piece?

I had been out with friends a couple of years ago, and one of them was a former Philadelphia city prosecutor who worked on gun cases. We were just talking in a cab, and he was telling me about Temple Hospital, and said if I really wanted to understand the gun epidemic in Philly, I should go spend a weekend at Temple University Hospital and watch them treating gunshot patients coming in. I thought that was interesting, that that would be something worth doing, and it was something I didn’t know anything about. I thought it would be worth doing because trauma surgeons see a part of the epidemic that the rest of us don’t. They’re really the only ones that can’t look away from gun violence, because it’s their job to fix people who are hurt.

But I kind of put it in the back of my mind, because in the beginning, I had the sense that it would be tough to get access to the trauma ward of a hospital. Then recently, I saw a news story about Dr. Amy Goldberg becoming chair of surgery, and then I thought that was interesting, because I imagined there weren’t a lot of women chairs of surgery at major teaching hospitals, and that turns out to be true: There are 16 in the United States. So, that seemed significant, and then I read about some of their outreach programs where they go into the community and bring members of the community into the hospital and actually teach them about what trauma surgeons have to do to save people who are shot. I pitched them a simple profile of Goldberg, asking to shadow Goldberg on a call shift, watch her perform surgery and try to understand her view of gun violence and what she sees in the trauma bay. At that point there were some back-and-forth negotiations about patient privacy. We ended up signing a piece of paper with them saying that I’m not a doctor, I’m not going to be performing any surgery in the hospital, and that I must abide by patient privacy regulations and cannot use any information or interview anyone who has not given consent.

What do you think you were able to reveal about gun violence in general — the various costs, to physical life, to emotional well-being, to communities, to doctors and surgeons — by narrowing your narrative down to this individual surgeon?

“I thought it would be worth doing because trauma surgeons see a part of the epidemic that the rest of us don’t. They’re really the only ones that can’t look away from gun violence, because it’s their job to fix people who are hurt.”

I think with any profile, you’re not just writing about the person but about the world that they move in. You’re learning about the person, but at the same time you’re learning about the world that they have access to but you don’t, that you don’t normally get to see. Kind of the idea with pitching a profile of Goldberg was that not only is she, in her own right, a compelling person, someone who has worked for 30 years in the same institution doing this very intense, difficult and high-stakes work, but she also has a view, a window into this bigger problem that most people don’t have.

Then I had that first conversation with her, which ended up in the lead of the story, where almost straight off the bat she was almost berating me — and berating all journalists by extension — about our impotence in being able to get the story across, or affecting any type of change. I think it was right after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, which was horrifying, and I think she was horrified. Horrified. She’s being doing this for 30 years. How many regular, week-in, week-out handgun shootings has she seen? And that’s where she made the connection from mass shootings and the kind of violence she deals with in north Philly, which is what she says later in the piece, something like, “If America didn’t care about 20 white kids getting murdered in Sandy Hook, there’s no way they can care about black patients that I treat in north Philadelphia.”

I wanted to ask about that quote. It feels like a real cynicism towards change. Yet she is doing so much, on top of her surgery, to change the violence outcomes in her community.

Something about that really resonated with me. How does someone who’s been doing this work fight that despair, in a culture that’s not doing anything about it? There’s no help that’s coming through. The cavalry isn’t coming. She has to know that, and she has to go into work every day knowing that, and find a way to keep doing it, and find a way to keep marshaling resources of her hospital within a larger culture that’s not giving her any help. Eventually the story became about that despair, both the larger despair of the national gun debate, and the smaller despair that she deals with every day, and how she overcomes that.

What was your experience like in the hospital, shadowing Goldberg?

I spent around 100 hours with Goldberg on call, two or three 24-hour shifts and the rest 12-hour overnight shifts. Obviously she’s not performing surgery all of that time. A lot of that time was down time, where nothing’s happening. Basically we were just there with a trauma pager, and whenever it would go off, we would make a decision about whether to go down to the ER and try to get into the trauma bay. Whenever it was a gunshot patient, we went, as well as for some other types of surgeries.

I didn’t see a thoracotomy, so I didn’t see the most dramatic intervention they have to do, where they have to open the chest. It was partially the randomness of the days, the unpredictability of the days, and the fact that on all the days I went, those were not days that needed thoracotomies. I did observe gun surgeries and other kinds of trauma surgeries, like pedestrians hit by automobiles, and so on.

Could you have done this with a regular trauma surgeon? How was the story made whole by the character of Goldberg?

I think you really need that central person to hold your attention. Don’t you think so? I kind of felt that you need that person who can hold your hand and walk you through it, and someone who is willing to be open about these things in a way that doctors often aren’t. And also patient privacy regulations are very onerous, so it’s a little bit of a risk to let a reporter into a hospital. Hospitals are sort of inimical environments to journalists. So we were very concerned about that, and very aware of that the whole time. We worked very closely with them to make sure we weren’t putting any patient privacy rights at risk. There were two levels of consent. If there was verbal consent, I could observe a surgery, but beyond that if I wanted to interview a patient, it required signing a consent form. There were a lot of people who said no, and a lot where it just wasn’t possible because the people weren’t conscious when they came in. That’s one of the reasons the story took so long to do, because it’s just extremely difficult for journalists working in a hospital.

But the story really required a commitment to openness from Goldberg, her colleagues and the hospital. They had to really want to tell the story, and without that commitment, it wouldn’t have been possible.

Looking at all that Goldberg has had to do, almost unilaterally, to prevent and intervene on gun violence, it presents a damning case against our government’s intransigence. Is that what you were trying to build, but not blatantly say (except in the article’s description)? Do you think that these community-based efforts could be more effective than federal policies?

That’s a good question. I really don’t know; I feel like I’m not qualified to answer that. Part of what appealed to me about that story was that it kind of sidestepped a lot of the usual ways of talking about gun violence. I find a lot of arguments about gun violence to be saturated, in a really irritating way, with statistics about risk, or a distorting, beside-the-point focus on crime rates going down or crime rates going up. I wasn’t as interested in that as I was in Goldberg’s lived experience of doing this work for 30 years. In the way that this story connected with people, I think that’s what they connected with. It’s not really talking about it in the usual way, right. It’s talking about this one person’s efforts, and her team’s efforts, to help their patients in their part of the city. And doing heroically, I’d say, and very methodically, with a lot of meticulous research, and doing it kind of day-in, month-in, year-in and year-out. That’s what striking about it to me. And I also probably absorbed some of their disdain with how lots of journalists and experts talk about it. They’re not as interested in speaking on panels, but more interested in doing things in the science, gathering data and doing things in small concrete ways that make things better. Scott Charles’ gun lock program is emblematic of that, to me. Gun locks are a small, concrete way of making gun violence better. Scott found a source of gun locks and just started giving them away for free. And I think he would rather give away a box of gun locks than go speak on a dais somewhere, and that’s kind of the whole ethos of the program.

“How does someone who’s been doing this work fight that despair, in a culture that’s not doing anything about it? There’s no help that’s coming through. The cavalry isn’t coming. She has to know that, and she has to go into work every day knowing that, and find a way to keep doing it, and find a way to keep marshaling resources of her hospital within a larger culture that’s not giving her any help.”

What was the reaction to the piece like?

It surprised me, because the story began with the futility of our journalistic endeavors around guns, but I think people connected to it because they connected to her. The story resonated because something about her experience — and her way of speaking about her experience — resonated. That’s been really gratifying. I’ve gotten emails from readers of the story that are unlike emails I’ve gotten on any other story. The other day I got an email from a guy who said he was a staunch Second Amendment supporter before he read the story, and it made him rethink his views. I got a number of emails from people who said they don’t normally like the media that much [chuckles], they don’t like reporters, but they thought the story had more depth than things they normally read. Those are kind of bittersweet emails to get, I guess. But yeah, I feel like it really did resonate with people somehow. I’m not exactly certain why, but I know that it did.

What are you looking for with a story, and how did this fit?

I’m always looking for someone like Goldberg. A master at what they do, who has access to a world that we don’t normally see or know that much about. To watch a professional work at that level is always great. And her being willing to talk about it, and be fairly open about the emotional toll that it takes on her and other people, that’s something else you look for: Someone who is willing to speak to you, fairly candidly. And the aspect of it where I was getting to see and be shown something people don’t normally see, that was a goal, too. I hate having to compete with other reporters. I just despise it. I’ve done kinds of reporting where I’m in the room with 30 other journalists, and I will do anything to not have to do that. If it means I will have to go very far out of my way, I will, because I can’t stand reporting a story other journalists are reporting.

I live in Philly, I’m not that far from the hospital, so I could take my time with it. I was local to them, so I could get into the hospital fairly easily and come back again and again. It wasn’t like I was flying in from somewhere else and if I didn’t get the story in one day, that’s it. And this was a story that I felt fairly passionate about. As soon as I got in, and soon as I talked to Goldberg, I just saw how passionate they were about what they do. They had such a unique perspective on this national issue, and you combine that with their passion and their belief, and it was really kind of novel to me. There’s something compelling, really irresistible about that. That keeps you going, and that was definitely the case here.

You’re from Philly and the story is a very Philly-centric one. Since this was for a national outlet, were you tempted to nationalize the story at all?

No. Why? No. There was never a discussion about that with our editors, either. They wanted to know about her experience at Temple University Hospital in north Philadelphia. I think it speaks to other hospitals and other trauma centers around the country, too, though. There’s nothing that a surgeon at the Cook County trauma center in Chicago, or in Los Angeles, or Atlanta, wouldn’t recognize as being part of their experience. Temple isn’t unique in that sense. It’s very similar to these other trauma centers in large urban areas around the country, and the kinds of expertise that they have, and the types of interventions they do is similar to what is done everywhere. But I do think there are very few people like Goldberg, who has spent 30 years at the same large trauma center and literally treated thousands of gunshot patients. Thirty years. There’s just so few people who have her broad view of it, and her standing to speak about it.

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