By Chip Scanlan

Ellen Barry, who covers mental illness for The New York Times, immersed herself in the chaotic life of Andrey Shevelyov, a man with schizoaffective disorder who preferred living in a tent rather than taking psychiatric medications and living in a group home —  a decision that has devastated his mother and stepfather. Barry read portions of Andrey’s journals, watched the video journals he posted on social media and traveled across the country three times to spend time with him and his family in Vancouver, Washington.

“I wanted to be able to observe the inflection points,” she told me. “Not just reconstruct them, but describe them. Luckily I was able to see a number of interactions between him and his mother that forcefully conveyed the pain and the tension.”

Her work resulted in an intimate profile of “The Man in Room 117,” a 4,000-word tragedy that reveals a bitter truth about America’s struggle to deal with some of its most troubled and vulnerable citizens. From the story:

As affordable apartments all but vanished in American cities, a whole tier of people with disabling mental illness were forced onto the street, where they now live in numbers large enough to disrupt civic life. Many of them are shunted into the criminal justice system, only to return to homelessness upon their release.

Her story, published Jan. 29, 2024, spotlights the consequences of laws that let people with mental illness efuse treatment. State-by-state variations of those laws have been passed as an antidote to the longtime abuses and isolation of institutions. Those well-intended policies have led to unintended consequences: Often patients who decline medication, therapy or specialized housing end up on the streets or at the mercy of systems ill-equipped to help them.

Barry uses struggles faced by Andrey and his parents as a vehicle to explore the tensions around the laws. She frames the story during eight weeks in which Andrey was provided shelter in a hotel while he decides whether he will go back on medication. She weaves observed and reconstructed scenes of Andrey lost to his delusions and of his mother and stepfather who have reached a breaking point, dropping in brief sections of summary narrative that illuminate the bigger societal context.

Mindful of ethical concerns, Barry communicated with Andrey’s parents, Sam and Olga, for two years before meeting Andrey and learning from him directly that he wanted to communicate his ideas and preferences, including his rejection of medications.

The story seems to take a positive turn when Andrey leaves his hotel room and agrees to medication and gets his own apartment, a move enabled by the changing attitudes and shifting resources to transform how the mentally ill are treated in the United States. The progress is short-lived.

Barry is a 16-year veteran of The Times; she served as bureau chief in Delhi and Moscow, and was chief international correspondent based in London before returning to the U.S. In each of those roles, she often wrote about “trauma, loss and how people manage upheaval.” She was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for her profile of a mysterious Indian prince, and on the team that won a 2011 Pulitzer in international reporting.

In an email interview with Nieman Storyboard, Barry talked about her reporting and writing style, advice for writers tackling the subject of mental illness and her epistolary relationship with her editor. The e-conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and is followed by an annotation of “The Man in Room 117.”

How did you come to write “The Man in Room 117”?

Sam Mintonye, Andrey’s stepfather, wrote a letter to my colleague Andy Newman two years ago, after he reported on a homeless man with mental illness who pushed a woman in front of a subway train, killing her. Andy couldn’t follow up because he works for the Metro section and the family was outside of New York so he sent the letter to me. I began corresponding with Sam and Andey’s mother, Olga, who were at that time visiting Andrey in his tent, bringing him food and laundry. We corresponded and spoke occasionally for almost two years; I had no idea if there would ultimately be a story.

Why did you pursue the story?
The U.S. is revisiting our laws around involuntary psychiatric treatment, largely because the number of mentally ill homeless people has begun to interfere with civic life. Most remarkable is a shift on the left toward the view that it is not compassionate to allow someone with psychosis to live outside. I wanted to highlight the tensions inherent in the decision to medicate someone against their will, and how it painfully it divides families. Also, the more I understood about the absurd cycle Andrey was in, bouncing from homelessness to jail to involuntary treatment and back to homelessness, the more I wanted to draw attention to it. It is not a coherent policy, and it makes people sicker.

Andrey was a useful case to look at because, unlike many people living in tents in American cities, he had a supportive family, education, a job and no addiction problem. If it were not for his mental illness, he would never have been homeless. That made it easier to look at the issue of involuntary treatment in isolation.

You spent years overseas for The Times. How does covering mental health issues compare with those assignments?
Mental health treatment is private, which can make it difficult to do what I like best: to watch things happen. And I no longer have the advantage of following news events, which I miss. But for the most part, the job of reporting is always fundamentally the same: You formulate a question, find a way to test it, report the hell out of it and, when you can’t report any more, sit down to write. I’ve done so many beats, and there’s always a steep learning curve as you get your arms around the subject matter. But reporting is reporting.

 What advice would you give writers who tackle the subject of mental illness?
It’s slow work; don’t expect stories that fly onto the front page. But it’s rewarding because so many families are living this reality and feel their experience is not represented in public forums.

What’s the most important lesson you learned from reporting Andrey’s story?
I spent a fair amount of time driving Andrey’s mom to visit him because she does not have a driver’s license. Early in my career, I would have been reluctant to do that because I might have seen it as getting too involved. But it made all the difference, driving around with her. It enriched my understanding, and brought me into the room when I needed to be there.

Were there books, articles or writers who inspire and influence your narrative nonfiction in general and specifically this story?
I reread Rachel Aviv’s great story “God Knows Where I Am,” Stephanie McCrummen’s haunting story “Behind the Yellow Door,” and Bob Kolker’s writing about schizophrenia, especially “Why Was Joshua Held for More Than Two Years For Someone Else’s Crimes?” I also like to read short stories to get a feeling for plotline and structure. I like Chekhov, because I think he is such a good reporter.

I noticed in the comments posted about your story that you engaged with readers, which, while not unheard of, has not been that usual for a Times reporter. Why did you engage in a dialogue with readers who commented on your story?
We are being encouraged to do this. Generally when I write about psychiatry the comments are fantastic — well-informed, reflective. On this one, so many of the comments were people telling stories about a family member and their agonizing efforts to keep them safe. I got letters for days and days. I can’t get some of them out of my head.

What role did editors play in the process of reporting and writing the story?
I like to talk and talk and talk while I’m reporting. I wrote reporting memos every time I visited Andrey, in the form of a letter that I sent to my editor. There were about 10 of those by the end of the process. I put them all in a binder with my other notes and documents, and they helped enormously when I sat down to compress it all. Those memos helped me understand when a moment really landed, when my editor had a feeling in her stomach from a scene I described.

I’m sure I’m very annoying to edit because I’m needy. I like to talk a lot.

ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Barry’s answers in blue. To read the story without annotations, click the HIDE ANNOTATIONS button in the right-hand menu of your monitor or at the top of your mobile screen.

The Man in Room 117

Andrey Shevelyov would rather live on the street than take antipsychotic medication. Should it be his decision to make?

Jan. 28, 2024

ALONE WITH HIS MOTHER for the first time in almost a year, Andrey Shevelyov had a question: Could he come home? Your lede feels like an invitation: I have something important, something interesting to tell you. How did you decide on it? This was my first lede. Then I threw it out and wrote a whole draft with a different lede. That didn’t work, so I went back to the first lede. I needed the story to begin with action, to present the stakes immediately. I wanted it to plunge forward. I knew, as well, that the story would end with the scary scene between the two of them, Andrey and Olga, so I thought the two scenes would act like bookends.

She sat beside him and stroked his head. The hotel room had a sour, rancid smell, and clothes lay mounded in a corner. His fingernails were long and curved and ridged with dirt. In jail, they cut off his hair, which had been matted and infested with lice. Two things here. First, smells are tripwires that explode in the brain, summoning forth memories. Yet too few writers employ them. You introduced one in the second graf. Why? Olga’s tender gesture of stroking Andrey’s head, against the squalor of the setting, treats him him as if he were her perfect child. She treasures him. People who pass him as a homeless man may not see that. I felt it keenly, and I wanted the reader to feel it. Then the description of Andrey’s physical state. How did you get it? He told her about the lice when they were discussing his haircut. The same description was in his medical records, which the family shared with me.

Clean-shaven now, Andrey looked younger than his 31 years, like the gentle, artistic boy he had been before the psychosis

took hold. “Zaichik,” his mother called him, a childhood nickname. Bunny rabbit. She pushed a strand of hair over his ear. He lay back on the bed and smiled, and a dimple appeared on his cheek.

“I like living with you also,” said Olga Mintonye, but it was not an honest answer.

Three years ago, when he stopped taking his antipsychotic medication, her son withdrew into delusions, erupting in unpredictable and menacing outbursts. Fearful of being evicted from their apartment, she and her husband, Sam, sought a no-contact order to keep Andrey away.

Since then, he had lived in a tent, wandering Vancouver, Wash., in ragged clothing and carrying machetes for protection. Twice, he had been in jail, ranting in his cell about the C.I.A. Three times, he was confined to psychiatric hospitals, where guards wrestled him down so he could be injected with antipsychotics.

Now they were together in Room 117 in a budget hotel overlooking the interstate. The county had allotted $8,400 to house him temporarily, as part of an effort by the state to divert the stream of severely mentally ill people from the criminal justice system. It was enough to keep him in the Red Lion Inn for eight weeks.

Before the money ran out, Andrey had to make a choice: Would he accept that he needed treatment, as his parents hoped, and move into a group home? Or would he go back to living in a tent? Was there another way?

These are questions challenging the whole country. As affordable apartments all but vanished in American cities, a whole tier of people with disabling mental illness were forced onto the street, where they now live in numbers large enough to disrupt civic life. Many of them are shunted into the criminal justice system, only to return to homelessness upon their release.

In an effort to interrupt this cycle, many communities are expanding involuntary treatment, a practice the country repudiated decades ago. Patient rights groups warn that forced treatment alone will never work — that in the absence of a robust social support system, it only feeds people with mental illness back into the circuit of catch-and-release. Better to persuade them to accept treatment. Is this the story’s nut graf? Where do you stand on pulling out of a narrative with some version of a nut? I fight against them, I feel like they slow down the story. For 30 years, I have had great editors who remind me that readers need to know why we’re asking them to read something of this length, and usually they are right. These paragraphs were originally farther down, woven into the plotline, and the opening section was pure action.

So, in this precious window of time, Olga would try.

“What’s next?” she asked her son. You’ve injected foreshadowing of a structure that will follow Andrey and his mother for eight weeks. How did you settle on this approach? The fact that he had a limited time to make a decision gave me the tension I needed. It gave structure to the reporting. At the outset I thought there was a decent chance he would return to living in a tent, which is what he said he wanted to do.

She had offered him clothes, a hot meal, books to read, but he didn’t want those things. All he wanted was to sleep on her couch for a little while.

“I won’t get in the way,” he said, now pleading.

This was the problem, she told him: He scared people. At one point, convinced that she and Sam, his stepfather, were body doubles remote-controlled by the C.I.A., he smashed the rear window of their car with a flagpole, and they called 911.

“You sort of,” she said carefully, “have an idea that your behavior was inappropriate.”

She gulped and just said it: “Some medications do help. You have that condition, that medical condition, that has to be addressed.” Dialogue drives many scenes in the story. How do you capture it? I try to record everything, all the time; earlier in my career I trusted my note-taking more. Fortunately AI makes transcribing much easier.

Andrey knew this was coming, and he had an answer. He did not accept the diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, or that his thoughts were delusions. If it was a choice between taking medication and living outside, he would choose outside.

Still, he wanted to be near her, so he looked for a compromise. “There are a lot of forested areas outside where we live,” he said. “I could set up a tent.”

“Set up a tent,” Olga repeated dully. She was standing by the ironing board, and she began to cry. How much more happened in this scene? Why did you end it here? I thought this set the stakes for the decision that would play out over the next weeks. They both want a way to be together so badly. The illness is separating them, and puts them both in danger.

Into the woods

Up until his mid-20s, Andrey could blend in with the stoner bohemians of the Pacific Northwest.

In high school, he was a bright, if lazy, student, with a tight group of friends who were all avid gamers like him. After he graduated, Sam and Olga hoped he would go on to college for art or music, but didn’t push. They both worked as stage hands, with good union jobs, and he seemed eager to do the same.

Then things unraveled. His roommates kicked him out, and he moved to the couch in Sam and Olga’s one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver. At work, there began to be “incidents,” odd and threatening behavior that upset his co-workers. Sam and Olga made him an appointment with a therapist.

At first, he was open to treatment, his medical records show. “I feel like I’m driving my friends away,” he told a therapist in 2018, when he was 26. What’s your source for this? Andrey’s parents had Power of Attorney and shared his records with me. This was critical, because I wanted to demonstrate that he was repeatedly forcibly medicated against his will, stabilized and then released to homelessness. Andrey knew I had his records because we spoke about what I found in them, and he did not seem disturbed by it. What was important to him was that I make it clear that he did not accept the diagnosis or medication — that he felt that his psychiatric treatment was inhumane. I was careful to include these points. I would also note that Andrey believed my presence helped him get services, like the apartment. So that was a motivation for him.

“I used to be able to talk to people,” he said. “Now they’re not interested.” Did Andrey have to give permission to access his medical records? If so, were there ethical questions raised by his mental competence to make that decision? See above; He knew I had read them because I asked him many questions about what I found, but I did not ask his permission. As far as his competence, he was considered competent to decide whether he needed or wanted medical treatment. He was judged competent to stand trial. Those are pretty important benchmarks. He had lots to say about psychiatric treatment; I thought he deserved the chance to say it.

In that session, he told the therapist about the family tragedy, a reservoir of pain he had walled off for years. When he was 8, he watched his twin sister, Sasha, drown in a duck pond in a neighbor’s yard. The children were alone. He had tried to save her. “I’ve thought about it to exhaustion,” he said. “I’ve incorporated her into these stories I make up.”

No one knows what causes schizoaffective disorder, the diagnosis he eventually received. You introduce the challenge of diagnosis at the exact time that a person without such knowledge might wonder, as I did, whether the tragedy he experienced as a child might be behind his mental illness. Why was it important to do so? Initially I did not address it here. But consistently, when I asked people I respected to read it, they raised the question of whether this trauma contributed to his disease. The idea of trauma activating existing genetic vulnerabilities is very alive right now.

For decades, scientists sought an answer in individual genes, only to conclude that hundreds, if not thousands, of genes are most likely involved, and that genes only set the stage. Other things must happen to trigger the disease; research studies implicate infections, cannabis use and childhood trauma, the kind of stress that leaves an imprint on the brain.

To his parents, there was no mystery. Sasha’s death had changed everything. “It’s obviously the trigger,” said Sam.

In journals, which his family shared, Andrey described “evil thoughts and voices” that accused him of killing his sister. “I’m guessing these voices are meant to drive me insane or kill myself or something I would never do,” he wrote. “I’m writing this to try to convince the people messing with me to stop. So, can you all stop? Pretty please.”

The therapist diagnosed him with schizotypal personality disorder and recommended “intervention to prevent further deterioration.” But, she added in her notes, “client states he is not interested in psychiatric medication at this time.” What method do you use to find a focus that enabled you to decide what to use in your story and what to leave out? I had about 500 pages of medical records from various hospitalizations. I used almost nothing in the end, and I had to fight a bit to preserve what I used from the records. But I think the language of medical records is so revealing, sometimes chilling and depersonalized. It really helped me understand what he was going through when he was confined.

A few months later, Sam and Ola took him to an emergency room, and doctors sent him home with a prescription for Zyprexa, an antipsychotic.

For the next two years, Andrey took the pills, but he hated how they made him feel.

This is not unusual; antipsychotic medications are deeply flawed, with side effects that are themselves disabling. They slow cognition, flatten the experience of pleasure and lower energy. They can cause ravenous hunger, leading to major weight gain. The economy of your prose is impressive. How did you boil down this information into a 61-word paragraph? I did a long interview with a woman who has written very compellingly about taking Zyprexa and other antipsychotics. As outsiders, it’s so easy to say, “You should just take this,” without fully understanding the cost of the treatment to the individual. Yes, there was a ton of compressing, through this whole section. It was like taking a fine tooth comb and combing through the draft, again and again. Removing nits.

Andrey says he stopped taking the medication because it caused erectile dysfunction. No physician determined whether this was the case, and his reasons quickly became beside the point. Things became so chaotic in the small apartment that in December 2020, Sam and Olga asked him to check into a hotel.

When the hotel kicked him out, he set up a tent in a wooded area near Pearson Field Airport, on the north bank of the Columbia River. Video journals that he recorded on his phone show him with tangled hair, surrounded by trash, rambling about underground vaults and sex traffickers. He would perform “shamanic dances” at the end of the runway, and sometimes the pilots would dip their wings at him when they took off. He seemed happy.

He was also sometimes scary. In one video, he tries to force his way into an apartment building, claiming he must rescue a porn star who is being held hostage. When residents call the police, he gets right in a male officer’s face. “Have you ever raped before?” he calls out insistently, filming the officer with his phone. “Sir, are you a rapist?”

The officer, exasperated, writes him a ticket. Still in scrubs from a recent hospitalization, Andrey wanders away, screaming, again and again, “Genocide Hindu Indians!”

‘Locked up like a rat’

 Andrey had entered the circuit. In Washington State, as in most of the country, the choice of whether to accept treatment for psychosis rests substantially in the hands of the individual. A 1975 Supreme Court decision set the bar for involuntary treatment high, ruling that people who pose no danger and are “capable of surviving safely in freedom” cannot be confined to a psychiatric hospital against their will. How much research did you have to do to be able to write with such authority? I spoke to a couple legal experts when I was putting together these sentences —  one law professor and a legal director of a policy think tank. I became very interested in the 1975 Donaldson case, and read Kenneth Donaldson’s biography. It shocked me how easy it was to confine people prior to the Supreme Court decision.

If a person faces serious criminal charges, however, the right to refuse treatment is almost entirely swept away, because, according to a 1960 Supreme Court decision, adjudicating a mentally incompetent person is a violation of constitutional rights. So at this point, people like Andrey can be forcibly medicated, judged and released, after which they are once again free to refuse treatment.

Andrey’s medical records chronicle this nonsensical pattern. He “feels he is being lied to and being kept against his will,” read the intake notes from his first involuntary hospitalization, which began four months after he stopped taking medication. “Why do you guys keep me locked up like a rat?” he asked his doctor on Day 5. Why was it important to be specific about the day of treatment? I thought it was revealing that, repeatedly, his responses seem to change after several days on antipsychotic medication. He is less aggressive, calmer, more self-aware.

With the court-ordered treatment, that changed. “The patient,” the doctor wrote on Day 12, was “agreeable to Zyprexa.” He was also counting the days until his release. “It’s great here,” he told the doctor, “but I’d rather be homeless.”

Within a year, he was back in a psychiatric ward, diverted there after smashing his parents’ windshield and landing in jail. Why did you make that big jump in time here? This section was cut significantly, I had to argue to preserve material from the medical records. It felt most important to demonstrate beyond any doubt the pattern that emerged as he was repeatedly confined, treated and released.

 “After patient was medicated, he then spit on staff face,” wrote a nurse at Cascade Behavioral Health Hospital, where he stayed for about a month.

For a second time, he was medicated against his will and cleared for release, though discharge notes sum up his progress as “no change.” When staff offered him help finding housing, Andrey “expressed that he would like to be homeless when he discharges.” Staff obligingly dropped Andrey at a shelter, and he returned to living in a tent.

Six months later, Andrey was in jail for threatening a grocery store clerk. Tell me about the use of Tell me about the use of time for transitions in this piece? The solutions provided by the system were not durable. Andrey ended up back in the tent; he ended up back in jail. Hospitals kept discharging him, knowing full well that would be the result. I suppose I thought the reader should have to suffer the monotony of repetition, because that is the way our system is designed.

“Mr. Shevelyov was not wearing clothing and not consistently wearing clothing,” wrote the psychologist sent to his cell to assess his competency. “Mr. Shevelyov’s jail-issued clothing was in his toilet, which he explained was because ‘I was protesting war criminals illegally holding me.’” Did the story raise any concerns about invasion of privacy? Yes, we had to weigh the social utility of describing the way this system works against the difficulty for Andrey, Sam and Olga to have all this appear in public.

Deemed incompetent, he was sent to a state psychiatric hospital. “He vehemently denies having a mental illness and adamantly refuses to take medication,” wrote the admitting doctor. This stay was more violent. Once, after grabbing a nurse’s arms, he was bound to a bed with five-point restraints, with straps around his waist, each ankle and each wrist.

After two weeks of forced medication, however, Andrey “presented as calmer,” assuring staff that his theories were just his “active imagination.” When he was discharged, his mental status was given as “W.N.L.,” which stands for “within normal limits.”

He was returned to jail to await trial. The prosecutor, eager to clear this penny-ante case, agreed to release him if he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. He was released and dropped off at the Red Lion, a free man. The story of Andrey, his mother and his stepfather is so sad. How did it affect you? Good question. I think I’m still recovering.

Andrey had always been frank about his intentions. Asked by a doctor to describe his short-term plans, he said, “I am ready to leave and start my new life as a homeless dude.” Asked if he would continue taking medications, he said, “Depends if I have to.”

A visit from a friend

One afternoon, about three weeks after Andrey left jail, a woman with closely shaved blond hair knocked on the window of his room at the Red Lion.

Andrey’s friends had dropped away as he got sicker, his conversation a fire hose of paranoia and fantasy. But not Courtny Ryser Lewis — she stuck like a burr. How did you come up with this analogy? I don’t know. She was just so stubbornly loyal.

 Courtny was a free spirit, her forearms wrapped in tattoos, but she was also the earnest child of evangelical Christian missionaries.

When Sam and Olga told her Andrey was being released, Courtny offered to speak to him about accepting treatment. They had a short time to get through to him, she felt, while he still had traces of medication in his system from jail. “I’ve got the most — I don’t know if this is the right word — the most sway,” she said. By then, Andrey had settled in. Buzzing with ideas, he had resumed recording video diaries, sometimes for hours a day. He had spent $665 on dozens of heavy-duty pencil pouches, which he was fashioning into a suit of body armor. “I’m, like, the happiest dude ever,” he said. How much time did you spend with Andrey to gain enough material for your story? I made three trips to Vancouver, and each time I visited him two or three times, usually for a few hours. How do you decide to stop reporting and start writing? Do you write during the reporting process? I wrote reporting memos to my editor during the process, and those yielded most of the action in the story. They were very useful. We had initially agreed I would just follow Andrey through his time at the Red Lion. When he moved, suddenly, to the new apartment, it felt like a kind of ending, that he would now retreat into his own space. I hung out with him and his mother while he was moving in, and when she slipped out while he was yelling at his laptop I definitely had a feeling of an ending. A friend of mine used to say the ending should “snap shut like a purse.” I had that feeling.

His parents prodded him to think about the future, reminding him that he would have to leave the hotel in a few weeks. Andrey was in no hurry. He had said no to a spot in an “adult family home,” something his case manager offered, and refused visits from a PACT team, which provides intensive services for mentally ill people living independently.

He felt he had options: If the caseworker couldn’t find an apartment that suited him, he could always pick up a tent for $40. “If I have to live outside to avoid pharmaceutical garbage,” he said, “I would do that.”

When Andrey opened the door, Courtny took it all in — the smell, his dazed look. She was so nervous that she had written down her arguments on a piece of paper. Were you presentfor this scene? No, but Courtny made an audio recording.

She tried to explain how he appeared to his friends. How, after he began living in a tent, it was as if he had dropped off the face of the earth. Andrey was stung by this. His response was bitter, sarcastic.

“All I was working on was saving the world,” he said.

“You were not,” Courtny said. “What changed?”

This offended him. One of his videos had prompted the U.S. military to withdraw from Afghanistan, he said.

“No one’s going to listen to you, Andrey,” his friend said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re not sane,” she said.

“What?” he said.

She repeated it. “You’re not sane.”

“I’m trying to be honest with you,” she added, “because I’m your best friend.”

Andrey’s response was icy. They weren’t best friends, or even friends. “We’ve never done anything together,” he said. “There is basically not any memories there.”

Courtny saw him, for a moment, as a stranger would.

She left the room midsentence, without saying goodbye. Could you describe your writing and revision process? I write from beginning to end, very chronologically. I write in chunks, try to do 500-1000 words a day. Every time I sit down to write, I go through all the preceding text, usually making small changes and trims. By the time I finish with a draft, I know it very well.

‘It’s like a bomb went off’

Sam, Andrey’s stepfather, understood. After eight years of trying to get through to Andrey, he, too, had reached some kind of limit.

At the beginning, Sam studied motivational interviewing, a type of counseling that aims to elicit behavior change gently and gradually. He and Andrey went together to meetings of the Hearing Voices Network, a peer support network for people who experience hallucinations.

But the more he coaxed Andrey to acknowledge that he had a mental illness, the more Andrey lashed out. The stress in the household became so intolerable that Sam briefly checked himself into a psychiatric hospital.

Sometimes Sam felt he was wrestling with the disease, trying to haul Andrey back from a remote, dark space. “It’s almost like an entity that defends itself,” he said. “It’s trying to completely take him over.” You paraphrase Sam’s story here, alternating with his comments. Why? Sam wasn’t in my first draft —  only Olga and Courtny. The reason for that is that Sam was not physically present; he had moved back east. So while I had spoken to him for many hours, more than to Olga and Andrey, he was not present. An editor encouraged me to add him, because he is another person who loves Andrey but ultimately needed to distance himself. It made sense to show each of them distancing themselves — first Courtny, then Sam, and at the end, Olga.

Kim Schneiderman, the executive director of Vancouver’s regional chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, urged Sam and Olga to scale back their expectations. If a person is refusing treatment, but poses no immediate danger, she said, “there is no way to get them help at all.” How many people did you interview? Maybe 20 or 25? But I knew most of those interviews would not appear in the final story.

When this sinks in, “parents give up,” she said. “They just quit having any interaction with them.” Sam and Olga would not give up, she thought, but she advised them to get some distance so that Andrey was not at the center of their lives.

Friends had given Sam similar advice. Tom Sangrey, a close friend since middle school, said years had passed before he could say it plainly: You can’t help him if it ruins your mental health, if it ruins your marriage.

“It’s like a virus,” he said. “It affects everyone it touches. It’s like a bomb went off in the family.” This is such a powerful quote, summing up the effect of serious mental illness. How did you get it? Oof, yes. I interviewed several close friends of the family, assuming I would not quote them, but this phrase really stuck to me. I kept trying to cut it and then putting it back. It was haunting.

Finally, in October 2022, Sam drove back east to stay with his mother. He had not really distanced himself; he and Olga spoke on the phone every day, sometimes for hours. He spent his days writing emails about Andrey’s situation to prosecutors, city officials, newspaper reporters, anyone he thought might help.

But he wouldn’t be going to see Andrey in that dark, cluttered room. The only person left to do that was Olga.

Housing or medication?

Sam and Olga had concluded that only involuntary treatment could break the cycle for Andrey — something open-ended, combining long-term injectable medications with intensive therapy and counseling.

They are part of a much larger ideological shift taking place, as communities grope for ways to manage ballooning homeless populations. California, one of the first states to turn away from involuntary treatment, has passed new laws expanding it. New York has made a billion-dollar investment in residential housing, psychiatric beds and wraparound services. The story shifts from dramatic narrative to summaries of background information. What is your intent when you alternate between these sections? This is the heart of the policy dilemma, but I didn’t want to lard up the action at the beginning of the story, so I’m trying to slip it in here, when the reader is already plunging forward.

Sam had staked his hopes on Washington’s new involuntary treatment law, and found it maddening that this fall, when Andrey was released, the new system was not yet active. His frustration was often directed toward civil rights advocates who oppose forced treatment.

“They have an agenda, but the agenda is not to help him,” he said. “Their agenda is to let him just be crazy. Whether that includes violence, assaults, living in degradation, living in his own filth, starving, eating moldy food. That is his right.”

One day, as he made his rounds of phone calls, Sam found himself debating Kimberly Mosolf, director of the treatment facilities program at the nonprofit organization Disability Rights Washington.

She laid out her case: Forcing someone like Andrey to take medication again would backfire, leaving him more resistant to treatment, not less.

She pointed to data from the Seattle area, which showed that almost a quarter of people compelled to take medication had been forced to do so more than three times before. Seven percent of them had been forced 10 times or more.

“We are looking at a churning effect,” she said. “These periods of brief incarceration, brief civil commitment, they are destabilizing. That is what the data tells us.” How do you know these details of the conversation Sam had with her? Both she and Sam described the conversation.

She advised a gentler, slower way forward. If Andrey got permanent housing, with no strings attached, outreach workers could build a rapport and gradually broach the subject of medication. This approach, known in the policy world as “housing first,” has emerged as the primary strategy for addressing homelessness in American cities, allowing officials to chip away at tent encampments without encroaching on civil liberties.

This was the path that opened to Andrey.

He got the call on a chilly, gray day at the end of November. He was in his room, recording a torrent of new ideas — that his mother had been inseminated with Joseph Stalin’s sperm, that the government had planted a bomb in his brain and detonated it. The front desk called to say his caseworker had come to visit. She had great news. Were you present? Yes. But she asked me to go away while they talked.

The local housing authority was offering him a one-bedroom at Central Park Place, a low-income apartment building on the grounds of Vancouver’s Veterans Affairs hospital. The residents there were mostly veterans, but rooms were also set aside for people with mental illnesses. The rent was $590 a month, and could be covered by his disability check.

This placement solved several problems at once. He would no longer be at risk of freezing to death, or jamming up the courts, or frightening pedestrians. For the caseworkers, it was a rare triumph. And for Andrey, it meant that the pressure was off: He had a safe place to live that was not contingent on taking medication.

On the December morning when she arrived at the hotel to help him move, Olga was surprised to find him awake, his possessions packed away in six bags, itching to go. All that morning, he seemed like a different person — alert, motivated, funny. He charmed the manager at the apartment building, which was clean and bright, festooned with Christmas decorations. How did you manage to be present for such pivotal moments? When I found out he was moving I immediately went to Vancouver, since I knew I wanted to capture that scene. I just dropped everything.

He signed forms promising not to punch the walls, start fires, or smoke in the unit. The building manager asked him, apologetically, to indicate what should be done with his belongings “if something should happen.”

He blinked. “You mean, if I’m dead?”

She nodded. There was a small, awkward silence.

“Damn, dude!” he said, and everyone in the room cracked up.

“Bury me with my stuff!” he cried jubilantly.

They laughed again. Then the building manager, with a ceremonial flourish, presented him with a set of keys on a blue fob.

Beside the other residents, men in their 60s and 70s, Andrey seemed vigorous and charismatic, overloaded with the natural gifts of youth. His apartment was tiny but pristine, with a window looking out on a roadway drenched in sunshine. He walked his caseworker to the elevator bank and posed for a commemorative photo.

Then the door closed, and he was in the small room with his mother.

Behind the door

Cross-legged on his twin bed, Andrey began to talk. Switching on the camera on his laptop, he spoke about Nazis, George Bush, lunar men, Sandy Hook, Jeffrey Epstein, rape slaves, war crimes, lobotomies, LSD, the Yakuza, nanobots, the spirit world, underground vaults, genocide, the C.I.A.

“My plan for myself is, as fast as possible, be a world leader,” he said.

He understood that people might see him as lonely, here in this tiny room, but it wasn’t like that. “It feels like my sister’s soul is still in my body,” he said. “Like our souls fused, basically.” He felt less and less need for outside relationships. “I’m basically hunting the most dangerous men in the world,” he said. “And that isn’t the best time to have civilian friendships.” Who is he talking to? Me.

Olga had been uneasy all day. She had seen Andrey withdraw before, disappearing into psychosis. The windfall of the apartment, she worried, might be setting them all up for another failure — even, possibly, putting them in danger. As Andrey spoke for 15 minutes, then an hour, Olga futzed around, folding clothes and unwrapping cleaning products. Anxiety radiated off her in waves.

When she interrupted, trying to get him to focus on practical matters, he turned on her.

“Mom, listen to me,” he roared. “Stop thinking you’re in charge of me! I’m a tactical genius who saved the world!”

The outburst was loud enough to disturb his new neighbors, she warned him, but it was as if he didn’t hear her.

“OK,” Olga said. “I’m leaving now.”

“Stop talking to me, I aren’t talking to you,” he yelled. “I’m a 31-year-old man who saved the world a dozen times!”

Then he turned his attention back to the camera on his laptop. She wondered whether to say goodbye, but he seemed unaware of her presence. She slipped out the door, and he didn’t even look up. What’s the approach that let’s you capture such intimate moments? I hung out for long periods. A lot of it I didn’t use. But regularly, when they were together, Andrey and Olga would get into some kind of argument, just as I do with my mom. So I began to understand that this was the spine of the story, and I had to listen for it.

He had been in the apartment for almost a month when the building manager spoke to Sam and Olga: Andrey was screaming during quiet hours, and some of the other men were afraid of him. When the manager knocked on the door, he didn’t answer.

It was evident, in his videos, that he was rapidly losing weight; his collarbones and cheekbones angled out. “I don’t feel hunger and I barely eat food whatsoever” is the way he put it. Sometimes, in the past, Andrey had feared his food was poisoned. So Olga stopped by, and the first thing she saw was the food she had brought him in a trash can.

“What is this?” she asked. He lunged at her, screaming. She tried to leave, and he blocked the door. She managed to get around him, and then she was in the hallway, shaking.

This marked a limit for Olga — she who had delivered his laundry, neatly folded, to his tent in the woods. On the phone with Sam, she finally made the promise: She would not visit Andrey alone again.

The two of them talked about buying a house in upstate New York, resuming their married life, leaving behind the scene of all that pain.

Andrey remained in the fortress of his apartment. Over the intercom, he answered the questions of caseworkers and crisis response teams who had been called to the scene, but he refused their requests to enter.

If an eviction was in his future, it was weeks or months away, so he could carry on with his work, reviewing plans to arrest the leadership of the C.I.A. and oversee a war crimes tribunal. “Did you see that spirit in the background?” he asked the camera. A team of brave men was coming to join him, he said. All he had to do was wait.

One thing, though — he missed his mother. He spoke about her, his “truest love,” in his video journals that night, after he lunged at her. The message he wanted to get through was that she needed protection.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “We weren’t there to save her. We did everything we could.” This is so wrenching. Of all the places you probably could have ended this story, how did you decide on this one? It broke my heart. He’s saying, my mother needs protection. Unspoken is that she may need protection from him. I think this is one of the saddest stories I’ve ever written.

* * *

Chip Scanlan is an award-winning writer who taught at the Poynter Institute and now coaches writers around the world. He is the author of several books on writing and the newsletter Chip’s Writing Lessons.

By Trevor Pyle

She whispered a quiet blessing and left Elayna in the pediatric intensive care unit, cocooned under the glow of a warming lamp.

That story, published by ProPublica in March 2023, followed the life of Mayron Michelle Hollis after Tennessee doctors declined to provide an abortion, fearing the implications of the new Dobbs v. Jackson ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. It stayed with Hollis through the premature birth of a daughter, who weighed under 2 pounds at birth, and her eventual release from the hospital. It ended with the infant back in the hospital with a possible lung infection, and with Hollis struggling to keep a job, stay off drugs, restore a marriage, care for another child at home and pay the bills.

But that’s not where Hollis’ story ended. She now faced a jagged patchwork of resources available — or not — to support an expanded and increasingly fragile family. Surana and Kranitz knew the mother and baby now faced a lifetime of uncertainties as fraught as those that haunted the pregnancy. In light of that, and the continued fallout of the Dobbs ruling, the ProPublica team did did what journalists too seldom do: They kept reporting.

Last month —  thanks to support and teamwork at ProPublica, a thoughtful and candid approach from Kranitz and Surana and incredible trust on behalf of Hollis and her husband — published the first story’s searing sequel. “The Year After A Denied Abortion” takes readers into some of the most intimate moments of the Hollises’ lives: unpaid bills, arrests, alcohol and drug relapses, fights, despair. It also reveals two parents who, despite their own trials, are devoted to their daughters, chasing multiple jobs to support them and keep the family together.

Kranitz is a visual freelancer who has made an art of challenging stereotypes, including those of life in Tennessee’s Appalachia region, where she lives. Her images of the Hollis family are deeply personal in ways that might shock some: Hollis sleeping in her car at the hospital, in handcuffs after an arrest, in tears outside of work, in the bathroom as she tries to eat, clean and bathe her child at the same time. In the year-later sequel, images drive a narrative in which photos take the lead; Kranitz, appropriately, gets the lead byline. Text by ProPublica reporter Surana, formerly of the Tampa Bay Times, draws readers along in brief passages of scene and detail based on deep, long-term reporting. The story is told in four chapters and include four drop-in boxes of quick context underscoring the policy, law and budgets specific to Tennessee, which has one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws and least supportive family public support systems.

Surana and Kranitz answered questions from Storyboard about how the story was conceived, photographed and reported. They emphasized the importance of close collaboration between photographer and reporter, and between journalists and story subjects.

“Whenever there’s an opportunity, try to involve the person you are reporting on in the reporting process itself,” Surana said. “Once Mayron and (her partner) Chris understood why we were trying to gather documents, they were proactively sending us any letter or bill they received, taking pictures of things going on in their life, and calling to update us regularly. They almost became reporters of their own lives.”

Kranitz said, “During downtime, when Mayron was folding laundry or driving in the car while she was running errands, we would talk about our lives, and I felt it was helpful for her to understand why photography is important to me.”

Our emailed conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You both worked on a wrenching prior story about Mayron Hollis, who made it through a dangerous pregnancy and the delivery of her daughter, Elayna, in the wake of Tennessee’s strict abortion ban. Not quite a year later, ProPublica published a follow-up that showed how Mayron and her family have fared with few resources in the wake of Elayna’s birth. How did the second story come about, and why did you feel it was important to pursue?

KAVITHA SURANA: After the first story ran, we felt like we weren’t done. We had ended it at a really uncertain moment, when Elayna was back at the hospital on a breathing machine. We actually had to add that to the first story at the last minute because it was happening just days before our deadline. After it published, we heard from so many readers who were desperate to know what would happen to this fragile baby and her family. They were asking me, “Why did you let the story end so abruptly?” But that was the family’s real life.

Led by Andrea Wise, a visual strategy editor at ProPublica, we decided to keep following the Hollises to see how their family would cope during the year. We wanted to examine a core issue: Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Republican lawmakers who identify as pro-life have banned abortion and celebrated the expectation that more children will be born. But what have they done to ensure those children, who often are born into difficult circumstances, have the best possible futures once they are here? And what does the safety net really look like for the people in precarious situations who are often most affected by abortion bans? To investigate those questions, we knew we would need to dig in for an extended period of time, and this was a rare opportunity to do that in a deeply personal way.

You gained an impressive level of access to Mayron — everything from her medical records to candid conversation with her doctors — in the first story. This one seems to go even deeper and allows you to witness wrenching and intimate moments across a year. How did you manage to maintain that relationship?

KAVITHA SURANA: From Day 1, Mayron made it clear she had a strong desire to share her story and experience with the world. She understood that our role as journalists was to do that. It’s rare to find someone like that. The access and trust, I think, also came from the privilege of having time to be flexible and present and patient. Mayron never sat still. She was so busy trying to get on her feet and deal with new challenges in her life — there was never a moment we could just sit down and talk and get a full picture of what had happened. We met her at the hospital days after the baby’s birth, went home with them when she was discharged, and were nearby to meet Mayron after she first got arrested and the aftermath that followed.

For about three months I basically moved to Tennessee I gathered needed information by being in her presence and slipping in questions over time. Once she knew we weren’t going anywhere and that we were committed to telling the story, she got in the habit of sharing any record she received and any development going on for her and Elayna, so I was informed as things unfolded.

During such a period of turmoil, I think she saw that having people witness and document what was happening could be powerful. It couldn’t solve things, but perhaps it gave a coherence to the challenges she faced because we were invested in understanding the context, asking questions and eventually sharing what we found with the world.

From a practical perspective — geography, communication, the rest of your life — how did you manage spending so much time with Mayron and her family?

KAVITHA SURANA: To get so embedded in one family’s life can be really unpredictable and your own life takes a backseat for a time. We were very fortunate that ProPublica supports that kind of investment, because to capture what is going on you need to be available to spend long stretches of time with someone, to pick up the phone late at night etc.

For the first story, I was the main point of contact and spent most of three months nearby, mainly shadowing her — running errands, hanging around while she prepared dinner or listening to her at 2 a.m. when she had an emergency. Stacy was also there from the beginning and there was so much going on — I kept begging her editor to send her back as much as possible, so she wouldn’t miss anything. We spent the Christmas holiday with the family. One time I slept over with Mayron at the hospital to see for myself what it was like sitting at her daughter’s bedside and helping with feedings into the late hours, then waking up at 4 a.m. to go to a grueling job.

For the second story, the relationship shifted. We had decided to do it as a photo essay. Stacy lives in Tennessee, so she became the main point of contact and began to spend time each month on the ground with the family. I would mostly follow up on the phone, gathering observations and details from both of them and other people in their life.

STACY KRANITZ: As a photographer, I am usually brought in after the story is mostly reported. Being there from the beginning helped me develop a relationship with Mayron and Kavitha simultaneously. During the first few months, Kavitha and I were often together with the family, which allowed us to build a cohesive relationship with her. When we decided to continue the story, I worked more independently with Mayron, spending anywhere between 2 to 10 days a month at her home. This was an unprecedented amount of time for me to photograph a story, and it allowed me to build a consistent relationship with Mayron, her husband, Chris, and their extended family and neighbors. When I was not with Mayron in person, I would check in a couple of times a week to get a sense of her schedule so I could determine what things were happening in her life that were important for me to be there to photograph: doctor visits, court proceedings, birthdays, work and also regular days where nothing, in particular, is planned but life unfolds in unexpected ways.

I was struck by the style of the story, which briefly but thoroughly summarizes developments in the year after Elayna’s birth. There are few quotes, but between the details and intimate photos, you feel as if you’ve spent a year with the family at the center of this story. How did you land on that approach?

KAVITHA SURANA: This took a lot of workshopping and an amazing team of editors. So much happened to this one family over the year that by the end we had an overwhelming amount of material; we really could have written a book. We wrote through drafts that were a bit more traditionally narrative and ended up sprawling all over the place, trying to capture each development and explain its context. We worried it was becoming hard to follow and weighing readers down.

But at its heart, this was always conceived of as a visual-first project. Stacy’s photos are so intimate, so dynamic and so humanizing, that we eventually realized we could strip back the words to serve as an anchor and connective tissue to the storytelling and the policy issues we were interested in pointing out, giving the photos the space to bring you into their world in an even more powerful way.

STACY KRANITZ: This was the first time ProPublica had done this kind of visually driven project. We were in unchartered territory as we tried to develop a relationship between the visuals and the investigative aspects of the story that ProPublica is known for. We experimented with different ways of putting these elements together. Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about working with ProPublica is that they are not afraid to completely abandon a story structure that is not working. We always knew that the design would play an important role. The designers, Anna Donlan and Allen Tan, were brought on early to develop an immersive and interactive style. My editor, Andrea Wise, invited me to be part of internal story development meetings. As a freelancer, this was a unique opportunity to have a say during each stage of the process. During most of my assignment work for publications, I work closely with my visuals editor, but I do not play a role in the development of the story beyond the delivery of images.

Stacy, I was bowled over by the intimacy of the photos you were able to take. You have photos of arguments and heartbreak, but also joy, such as the photo of Mayron crouched with her back to the door, playing with Zooey. How did you interact with Mayron and her family during such powerful moments,? Are there any photos you think particularly tell this story? And Kavitha, did any photos strike you as especially powerful?

STACY KRANITZ: Andrea Wise hired me for this story because she knew I had experience working closely with subjects over long periods of time and do not shy away from complex interpersonal situations. I thought a lot about how a photographic version of investigative journalism might look. The more intimate the photographs, the more likely they would support the rigorous and heartbreaking reporting.

It has always felt disingenuous to not be present with subjects as a dimensional human being. I am asking a lot of Mayron. Spending days and days with her pretending I was not there did not feel like an ideal approach. During downtime, when Mayron was folding laundry or driving in the car while she was running errands, we would talk about our lives, and I felt it was helpful for her to understand why photography is important to me.

One image that I feel is key to this story is a picture of Chris recovering from a drug relapse in bed. It was Thanksgiving day, and whenever he got up, he felt dizzy and had to lie back down. He spent most of the day in bed, I sat in the room while he slept and made sure to wait until he woke up and knew I was there with my camera before photographing him. I was careful not to be sneaky about the photographs I was taking.

I’m always conscious of subject agency, and while power dynamics are always tricky, I actively work to cultivate relationships where subjects feel they can set boundaries with me. I never approach a situation with the arrogance that I have the right to photograph an intimate moment. Instead, I move slowly into the intimate moments while simultaneously looking for clues that indicate I am crossing a line. At this point, I had spent almost a year with the family and developed enough of a relationship with Chris to believe he knew he could tell me to leave if he was uncomfortable. At first, Zooey and Elayna were taking naps next to him, and when they woke up, I captured this moment where they watched him sleep off the effects of the relapse.

There is one additional image I would like to talk about. It is a photograph of Mayron standing in the bathroom, eating dinner and cleaning the bathroom while her daughter bathes. Motherhood is an intense flurry of multi-tasking, and Mayron excels at this. I spent months trying to get a photograph that showed how she managed to compress numerous actions into a singular moment. The exhaustion on her face, the cleaning solution in one hand and the meal in the other. This image really illustrates Mayron for me.

KAVITHA SURANA: For me, there are so many striking images. There’s the photo Stacy captured of tiny Elayna opening her eyes in her mother’s arms just about a week after birth, which just stops you in your tracks. I find the photos of Mayron taking a break from work about a month after the birth — to call the hospital and record Elayna’s health info — really powerful. In two images you get a clear sense of how physically demanding the job is and of a mother striving against the odds to fit everything into her day and provide what her family needs.

The “safety net” vignette boxes seem especially important; they place the Hollises’ struggles in the larger context of policy, bureaucratic hurdles and the debated meaning of “pro-life.” How was it decided to include these interludes, and how were they researched and written?

KAVITHA SURANA: The team was very clear that the mission of the project was not just to document a portrait of a family’s year, but to do an accountability investigation. (We are ProPublica after all!) It was an intimidating prospect, especially at first. We didn’t know what would unfold in the family’s life, and anytime you put a magnifying glass up to an individual’s experience in this way, you can’t cleanly separate their personal choices from policy. People are human and their stories are rarely clear-cut.

But as the year went on, we noticed and kept track of themes and roadblocks that arose and looked for larger issues to connect them to. The research was supported by our colleague, research reporter Mariam Elba, who helped me narrow down the issues and draw on a wide range of sources to look more closely at Tennessee’s policies. We tried weaving that context into the story itself, but it felt like it was interrupting the story. Once the vignette idea was suggested, I wrote long sections based on the research, but that also felt too long — so we edited them down to be brief interludes. They still interrupted the pure flow of the story, but in a more effective way. One editor said whenever they popped up in the story, it felt like a bracing “slap” that magnified the larger context of their struggles.

You end with a tough sentence to read:

Mayron sat up all night behind bars, on a hard bench, begging for an extra phone call home to wish her daughter a happy birthday.

When — and why — did you realize this was the right ending?

KAVITHA SURANA: There were so many people involved in making editorial decisions and shaping the final story — two visual editors, three text editors, two designers, a research reporter and us. It was a really collaborative process to decide the flow and certain beats the story hit, and the ending was no different.

From the start, we planned to end on Elayna’s birthday, coming full circle on a year in her life. None of us were prepared for what a dramatic day it turned out to be. Once we sat down to review the pictures, it became clear to everyone we had to end with the photo of Elayna with her birthday cake, looking straight at the camera, and really bring it back to the child at the center of this reporting endeavor. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, as we were reviewing the pacing and the flow of the story, that the editor Alexandra Zayas — who has a brilliant instinct for narrative — suggested bringing the viewpoint back for one more beat to Mayron’s perspective. Mayron had driven the story from the beginning, and in the very last scene she was separated from the baby she had been forced to risk her life for.

Is there anything you learned in the course of photographing and reporting this story that will inform your future stories or may be useful to fellow journalists?

KAVITHA SURANA: One suggestion to fellow journalists is that whenever there’s an opportunity, try to involve the person you are reporting on in the reporting process itself. Once Mayron and Chris understood why we were trying to gather documents, they were proactively sending us any letter or bill they received, taking pictures of things going on in their life, and calling to update us regularly. They almost became reporters of their own lives.

I would also remind text reporters to invest in developing relationships with photographers and invite them to be partners in the reporting whenever possible. That was already extremely valuable in how we approached the first story, not only to get the kinds of photos that move readers, but also to have a second set of eyes observing and gathering information in different contexts. It helped both of us to be able to compare notes throughout.

With the second story, it was fascinating to see how things evolved with an editor from a different discipline taking the helm and directing things. The opportunity to work on a visual-first project is a rare one. I learned a lot by taking a backseat and watching how Stacy and the visual and design editors approached the work; I tried as much as possible to be a support to the vision that they had, in kind of a flip from the usual process where a photographer comes in to support a text reporter’s vision. I would suggest more newsrooms try an approach where they let the visual and reporting elements hold equal weight throughout the process. We heard from so many readers who felt the depth and intimacy the photos brought were key. Some said that if they had just read the story, they might have judged the family differently, but seeing the photos was intensely humanizing.

STACY KRANITZ: The process of sending in a photographer towards the end of a story is outmoded. I’m lucky to get more than three days to visualize a reporter’s carefully constructed words; often the shallowness of the images does not serve the story or the audience.

There is something special about allowing the photographs and text to develop together. It was a gamble for ProPublica to do this, and I think the response we received demonstrates an appetite for visually invested reporting. We are in a dying industry and this has made us less willing to take risks with how we report stories. I hope the success of this story leads other editors to believe in trying new ways of combining images and text to draw the reader in.

What kind of reaction have you had from readers?

KAVITHA SURANA: The reaction has been really overwhelming. The story on Instagram got the most likes and re-shares of any story ever posted on ProPublica’s account, and the comments showed us that the story — both its presentation and the themes that it touched — struck a nerve. It inspired a lot of discussions in the comments. Many readers wrote that they had cried, but it also made them outraged. Some said it connected with challenges they faced in their own lives; others said they hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the family since they read the story. Many people also donated to the Hollis family and wrote them encouraging messages of hope.

STACY KRANITZ: The reaction to this story moved me. So often, you work on a large project like this, publish it, and the next day it feels like it barely registered in the larger news cycle. The day before this story was published my editor and I spoke about how it can be depressing to see a project you work so hard on dissipate into the ether so quickly; she reminded me to brace myself for that. Both of us were truly surprised when feedback about the story continued for weeks from both readers and colleagues.

ANDREA WISE (visuals editor): Senior editor Ziva Branstetter, my partner editor on this project, said from the beginning that we should trust our readers, but I will be honest that I was a bit more skeptical. I couldn’t sleep the night before the story published. Abortion is such a divisive and emotionally charged issue for so many, and people (especially on social media) can be quick to judge. To my surprise, Ziva was right. Of course there will always be a range of responses to a story like this but the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. From the comments on social media, we could see that a lot of people related to this family’s struggles. Readers saw how much Mayron and Chris loved their children, how hard they were fighting to build a better life for their family, and how little support the state provided them to care for this baby after denying them an abortion for such a high risk pregnancy. This experience has really taught me that we can tell complicated stories about complicated people facing complicated challenges and, if we do our jobs right, we can trust our readers to get it.

* * *

Trevor Pyle was a newspaper reporter in the Pacific Northwest for several years, and is a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.

By Jacqui Banaszynski

Classic news narratives tend to follow a single primary character through a story. There are other characters, of course, including people connected to the main character or more official or expert sources to provide context and perspective.

Such classic narratives are rare in journalism — as they should be. To make one work, the central character or subject has to represent a much larger social issue or situation. They have to be truly central to a story and, ideally, relatable in some way. They have to carry the weight of the full issue, without gaps or hidden agendas that make a story incomplete or easy to dismiss as biased.

With fast-turn stories or those that contain layers of complexities, it can be near impossible to find such a person. So what’s a reporter to do?

Consider a triad or triptych lede: Find three people who, taken together, tell a fuller story while also reinforcing that the bigger social issue plays out in intimate ways, person-by-person. Introducing those three representative people in brief paragraph profiles or scenes at the start of the story can draw readers in with example, action and emotion while also signaling that the story is about a shared experience.

The representative power of three

That’s what The New York Times did in a recent story from Gaza. “Gaza’s Shadow Death Toll: Bodies Buried Beneath the Rubble,” published March 23, 2024, was about the myriad and desperate ways family, friends and rescuers search for victims of what has become a killing field in Middle East. Here are the first three grafs:

A curly-haired young man shakes as he bends over the mound of smashed concrete that used to be his friend’s home. He clutches his rain-spotted iPhone in his trembling hands, but there is no answer. “Please God, Ahmed,” he sobs in a video posted on social media. “Please God.”

A father crawls over a mountain of gray concrete shards, his right ear pressed to the dust. “I can’t hear you, love,” he tells his absent children in a different video shared on Instagram and verified by The New York Times. He scrabbles over a few yards to try again. “Salma! Said!” he yells, hitting his dusty hammer against the mute concrete over and over, before breaking down. “Said,” he cries, “didn’t I tell you to take care of your sister?”

Another man on another rubble heap is looking for his wife and his children, Rahaf, 6, and Aboud, 4. “Rahaf,” he cries, leaning forward to scan the twisted pile of gray before him. “What has she done to deserve this?”

The story then pulls out to a tight, focused nut graf:

Gaza has become a 140-square-mile graveyard, each destroyed building another jagged tomb for those still buried within.

And that is followed by three grafs of summary context:

The most recent health ministry estimate for the number of people missing in Gaza is about 7,000. But that figure has not been updated since November. Gaza and aid officials say thousands more have most likely been added to that toll in the weeks and months since then.

Some were buried too hastily to be counted. Others lie decomposing in the open, in places too dangerous to be reached, or have simply disappeared amid the fighting, the chaos and ongoing Israeli detentions.

The rest, in all likelihood, remain trapped under the rubble.

The result is to pull readers in to the heart of this piece — all range of people clawing through heaps of concrete and steel and glass because the death toll in Gaza has outstripped the reach of trained rescue/recovery crews. That allows the reporting team — Vivian Yee, Iyad Abuheweila, Abu Bakr Bashir, Ameera Harouda and Nada Rashwa — to bring the emotion to a story that is largely about numbers. It might have been effective to follow the efforts of one person — let’s say one father searching for his family — but that wouldn’t have signaled the scope of the situation.

It also allows for fast work. The triad scenes mostly likely came from Yee, who is based in Cairo to cover North Africa and the Middle East; her byline sits atop many of the on-the-ground stories from Gaza. But colleagues from Istanbul, London, Qatar and Cairo can provide essential reporting that leaves the field reporter free to find characters, scene and description.

The technique doesn’t require a team. An individual reporter who has a notebook filled with examples that, taken together, demonstrate the facets of a situation can use the technique with equal effect.

Making it work

Key to this approach is to zero in as tightly as possible on those opening scene/character grafs. Only information relevant to the bigger issue is included. In some stories, the representative individuals are returned later in the story, one by one, to more fully explore their part of an issue. In others, as The New York Times’ Gaza piece, the three first scenes aren’t returned to specifically, but the emotion of those moments echo throughout the rest of the story.

Final point: Why three? That’s far more a guideline than any rule. But two people can be seen as more of a comparison or contrast. Four or more can feel too long. Three can signal a larger whole. Roy Peter Clark, in his must-have book “Writing Tools,” ascribes a magical quality to combinations of three in Tool #3: “Choose the number of elements with a purpose in mind.” He cites many examples of threesomes, from Moe, Larry and Curly of the Three Stooges to the Beginning, Middle and End of a classic story structure. And the theory of three can easily be found in other parts of life, including design, photo composition and nature. Remember the Golden mean? Watch a whorls of a rose blossom or the emergence of a fern.

Don’t get hung up on numbers. Just consider the value of a character-drive lede that doesn’t rely on a singular character to hold an entire, complex piece, but also doesn’t reduce the humans in our stories to the superficiality of quotes and names.

By Madeline Bodin

But consider The Journal., a podcast that tells “the most important stories, explained through the lens of business,” by The Wall Street Journal in partnership with Spotify. The show has aired a narrative every weekday for five years. Even allowing for a bit of time off, that’s roughly 250 stories delivered at a very fast clip. So it’s hard imagine two people with more experience telling stories on a tight deadline than Katherine Brewer, a senior editor at The Journal podcast, and Sarah Platt, the program’s executive producer. The two offered tips for fast-turn stories in a talk at the 2024 Boston University Power of Narrative conference.

First, a caveat: The Journal. team includes several producers and works on multiple stories at a time. But they have created episodes in mere hours and rarely spend more than a few days on a single story from start to finish. The narratives are always built from a strong news hook and rooted in a keen knowledge of narrative structure. Here’s the core process:

• Find a character. In news-driven stories like the ones told on The Journal., you are really telling two stories, or two focused parts of the same story, Brewer said. The first is the traditional news story, such as echnical and business reasons that iPhones and Android phones are incompatible. The second is the story of your character. In one episode of The Journal., for example, the main character was a man couldn’t join his in-laws’ family group chats because he is an Android user and they use iPhones. In other shows, the character may be competing sides of a lawsuit, or a high-level company official or a well-known person in the business world, such as Elon Musk or Sam Altman.
• Create a timeline. “Chronology is the fastest way to narrative,” Brewer said. That doesn’t mean you have to tell your story chronologically, but a timeline helps you determine where to start, and where find the beginning, middle and end of your story.
• Use a three-act structure. Act one is the set up. Act two is confrontation. Act three is the resolution. “You can scramble those,” Brewer said, “but if you don’t have those pieces somewhere, then you probably need to re-think your narrative.”
• Know your driving question. “Reality TV is good at ‘driving questions,’” Platt said. (Example: Who will be voted off the island tonight?) Platt played a clip from an episode of The Journal. featuring a woman whose car keeps getting stolen. The driving question of that story: Why are Kias and Hyundais being stolen in record numbers? “It sets up the stakes for the character, but also for the car companies,” Platt said. While some journalists think of this as the thesis, The Journal. team likes to build stories around a strong, driving question, which then threads through the three-act structure. In the first act, a question is raised; in act two, the question is explored; and in act three, it is answered. Platt warns against building a story around a driving question that is not answerable: “That is almost always a mistake.”
• It has to mean something. While a news story can end with what’s happening next, a good narrative needs to reveal something about the world, Platt said. The answer to your driving question is what provides that meaning. This can be difficult, but small moments can be profound. The pair used an example from a story about gambling addiction. When the main character walked into her first Gamblers Anonymous meeting, the room was full and she realized that what had happened to her could happen to anybody. That small moment contained a profound realization.
• Stay focused. Keeping focused on the story in progress and the process of producing it helps The Journal team work efficiently. The editor and producers ask direct, specific questions of rpeorters and don’t allow tangents. “Know your driving question, know what you want your timeline to be, and stay within the walls of that,” Brewer said. That discipline of focus allowed The Journal. to post an episode on the day-long January 6, 2021, Capitol attack that same evening. It remains one of The Journal’s most-downloaded episodes.

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist who is based in Vermont.

I was contacted by an admired journalist who now also teaches at a respected university j-school. She reached out for some suggestions about how to weave narrative — what I simply think of as effective storytelling — into investigative, explanatory and issues-based projects. We got a bit sidetracked with shared tales from the realities of academic bureaucracy, distressed students and grading rubrics. But mostly we talked about how to teach the tools of a trade we have both devoted our lives to, but that newcomers often find as baffling as they do frustrating.

What this journalist/professor told me about her coursework was more than impressive. She created a class in info-gathering; students go to various places, from courthouses to cop shops to licensing offices to legislative websites to Google, where they discover a wondrous world of raw material that belongs to the public. Over the 17 years I taught at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, it became clear that a core challenge of teaching journalism was the need to teach basic civics: How our courts and other public systems work. It thrilled me to hear how much students loved this teacher’s course. I imagine them on joyous scavenge hunts that engage their curiosities — but don’t require them to then have to do that next confounding thing: Turn it into a relevant and readable story.

Which is why the journalist/professor called. Her students would get so far, then hit the brick wall of story structure. Unwelcome grades were not uncommon; nor were tears.

No magic — but many models

I have no magic answer. My students always reached the same hurdle. There is no one way to get them over it.

But my way was to back up, simplify and, most important, deconstruct. Thus, my thoughts about construction and the tools we need to master to build something sound.

My father had a wood-working shop; he built the small house I grew up in. My mother sewed, knitted, crocheted, could get all the dishes of Thanksgiving dinner on our crowded table at the same time, hand-sanded wood floors and, when needed, could fix the plumbing. I grew up in a world of patterns and menus and blueprints and schematics — a world of construction. But it didn’t occur to me until I was far into my own reporting/writing career that I had been surrounded by much of what I needed to know about writing a story. I was constructing. The only difference was that I worked with the less tangible materials of words and images, rather than the solids of wood, fabric, yarn and spice. But my stories were built, as surely as a table or coat or even Sunday dinner were built.

When that realization dawned, I changed my approach to my writing, then to editing and finally to teaching. I did what I suppose is a version of reverse engineering. You have a cool end product in front of you — let’s say a stand-out story. But to really learn from it, you have to take it apart and understand the various pieces, what their purposes are, where to find them, how they are put together and why they work.

Reverse engineering a story

The journalist/professor I spoke with this week was already doing that in her info-gathering class. Students weren’t asked to deliver a massive and cohesive investigative project. Instead, they were gathering and assessing the raw material that serves as the foundation of those projects.

So, too, with story structure. We start with a story vision and purpose in mind. Then we have to back up and think about the pieces-parts we need: X sources, Y observation, Z context. From there, we build forward, a story section at a time. Some sections are traditional journalism (information): some are more narrative, if you will (character, scene, description). But each is its own part of a bigger story, and each calls on using different tools.

I have many cherished and talented journalist friends who consider their work some sort of mysterious art — and often produce artful work. If that works for them, grand. But I have found it more effective and far less stressful to step back, figure out the pieces-parts I need, reach for the tools I need to secure them, then assemble them in proper order. All without an Allen wrench.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of ourdispatches from the 2024 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University. For the first post, see deadline narratives by a Wall Street Journal podcast team.

By Madeline Bodin

Darby used a story from The Atavist by Scott Eden, “The Gilded Age,” is a 25,000 word investigative story about the international gold trade. (Our summary includes mild spoilers, but that doesn’t take away from what you can learn by reading it.)

Step one: Count your threads and identify the resonance. Resonance is the key, and I confess that I looked up the definition to understand how it applies here. It means an echo or reverberation that enriches or intensifies. Darby wants us to ask: If you thread these things together, will the story elevate to a place it otherwise would not? How are these stories going to speak to each other? Where will they meet?

In “The Gilded Age,” one thread, or the A Plot, follows two men from Miami and how they grow rich by ignoring the corruption of the gold trade. The other thread, or B Plot, follows Don Alfredo, a land owner and logger in the Peruvean rainforest, whose land is being destroyed by illegal gold mining.

A hint of the resonance between the two plots comes in the first transition between them, Darby said. Eden writes that Miami men did not know that the place the “gold came from had been transformed into a hell on earth.” Lack of curiosity plays a big role in the story.

Step two: Timeline or outline your threads. When you see the key scenes in the order they happened, you can see how the pieces might fit together. For example, because most of “The Gilded Age” A Plot takes place in Miami, when someone from the Miami men’s team goes to the Peruvean rainforest, it’s a place where the pieces fit together. Another place they fit is when an A Plot character falls asleep during a presentation about the dangers of illegal mining:

In late 2014,Renato and several coworkers attended a mining conference at a hotel in Lima. They sat in on a panel about illegal mining, but no one paid much attention. “It was kind of like the ASPCA commercial on late-night television where they show dogs with one leg,” said an NTR employee.

For his part, Renato found the panel “ungodly boring.” As the presenters droned on about environmental destruction, he fell asleep.

Step three: Find the possible breaks where you can switch between plot lines. Using your timelines, look for the places where questions are raised or answered. Look for cliffhangers. The break should be in a place that subtly links to the next thread, but also leaves the reader eager for the first thread to pick back up.

Darby pointed to a section of the story where the Miami team is in peril after their supplier cheats them, leaving readers in suspense to go to another scene of fracturing, where someone is murdered in the rainforest:

With a group of Don Alfredo’s neighbors, Randy went back to the house. By then more than three hours had elapsed since the shooting. Puby, Don Alfredo’s estranged brother, showed up soon after. No one had contacted the police yet, though from Lima, Freddy had called an ambulance. Investigators finally arrived the next morning. A murder inquest was opened. Statements were taken. Because Randy was the only witness, he was simultaneously a suspect and presumed to be in grave danger. The killers might come back for him. Don Alfredo’s neighbors said they’d protect him.

Freddy mourned, he ruminated, he raged. His thoughts turned to Puby. “I saw my brother dead. It seems like they put three bullets in the head and death was instantaneous,” Puby had told a local reporter.

Puby was a gold miner. He’d tried to attack Don Alfredo with a machete. Was it possible, Freddy wondered, that his uncle was behind his father’s murder?

Step four: Play with the puzzle pieces. “I think of my work as a writer and editor as being a quilter who is figuring out how the pieces fit best together,” Darby said. Tools for this work include notecards or a whiteboard to list and rearrange scenes.

Step five: Tie everything together at the end. Leaning into the braiding metaphor, Darby said that just as a hair braid will only stay together if there is an elastic at the end, story threads should tie together at some point — although it doesn’t always have to be at the end. That can be as simple as characters meeting, or it can be a bigger revelation or epiphany. “It doesn’t have to blow your mind,” she said. “It just has to show that the time you spent with these threads is worth it.”

An early draft of “The Gilded Age” didn’t have that intersection, Darby said. But Eden did additional reporting and heard one of the Miami men’s (A Plot) reaction to Don Alfredo’s story (B Plot). It brought the two threads together literally and thematically. The piece ends with a child’s story that beautifully illuminates the story’s central conflict:

WHEN FREDDY VRACKO was a child—about eight years old—he wrote a story for school. He told me this toward the end of my first visit with him, at his mother’s house in Puerto Maldonado. He’d shown me old family photos of the home his father had built in the jungle—like something out of Robinson Crusoe—and of Don Alfredo in his thirties, standing in his sawmill amid stacks of boards planed smooth and ready for the carpenter. Young Freddy’s story was meant to be like a fairy tale. “El Asseradero de Oro” is the title he gave it. The golden sawmill.

“It is about a man like my father who knows the jungle,” Freddy explained. The man is leaving on a trip, and before he goes he tells his brother: You must protect this enormous ancient tree, “because it is the spirit of the forest.” But the brother forgets what he has been told. He cuts down the tree so he can sell the wood. And when he cuts down the tree, the whole forest—“everything, absolutely everything”—turns to gold. The man eventually returns from his trip and sees what his brother has done. He takes his son on a long journey “all over Madre de Dios.” They seek out other spirits of the forest in order to ask for forgiveness. At last they find a “brother spirit” of the lost tree, which grants them their request. Bit by bit, the forest regenerates from solid dead gold “back to how it was.”

But that’s the child’s ending. In this other ending—the real ending—the father is murdered, the guilty walk free, and as long as the rivers of money keep flowing, the forest can only be made of gold.

A braided or dual narrative means taking two stories that could almost stand alone and weaving them together, Darby said. Meaning comes from those two stories and the resonance between them.

* * *

Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist who is based in Vermont.

By Line Vaaben

* * *

The rocky hulk of Ramberget rises 282 feet (87 meters) from the island of Hisingen in Sweden, providing a stunning view of the town of Gothenburg below. On a September day in 2023 I was seated on a bench atop Ramberget, doing an interview. It was a chilly, windy day; the drizzle smeared my notes. But I hardly noticed. Nor did the man sitting next to me.

Rozbeh Aslanian was 44 when we talked last fall. But in the story he told, he was 19. That’s when he survived a devastating fire at a teenage disco in Gothenburg, only a mile from where we were sitting. Four hundred young people were at the party, and 63 of them died in the fire. One of them was Aslanian’s best friend.

All these years later, Aslanian remained tormented by survivor’s guilt. Only minutes before the dance floor exploded in flames, his friend had said he wanted to leave — but Rozbeh convinced him to stay. “It was my secret,” he told me. “But it became a poison eating me up from within.”

After years of trying to drown his guilt in alcohol, women and work, Rozbeh Asalanian decided to end his life. First, he had to one last thing: Tell his best friends’ parents the truth about that night.

Now he described how he was standing in the parents’ kitchen, telling them that he was responsible for their son’s death. He braced for shouts and screams in response. Instead, the mother embraced him and whispered in his ear: You didn’t start the fire. Remember that. You didn’t start the fire. It wasn’t you who killed him. You didn’t start the fire.

As Aslanian remembered that moment, he broke down. So did I. For a while I just held his hand. We sat, crying, in silence. Then he gathered himself and told the rest of his story.

‘… not about you.’

I have been a reporter for decades, and this is the first time I cried during an interview. Crying is something I always tell younger reporters not to do, reminding them: It is about the story, not about you. You can cry when you get home. Or after the interview when you transcribe your notes. It’s not that I don’t get moved by the stories I hear and the people I meet. But I pride myself on acting professionally, which always had meant keeping my own emotions in check.

Not this time. The tears ran down my cheeks and kept coming. I felt ashamed and apologized. But Aslanian just said, “I understand. You were there, too.”

He was right. Because 25 years ago I was there — not inside the gutted disco, but right outside.

It was the fall of 1998, I was an intern at the Danish national newspaper Berlingske. Late one night I was jolted awake by a phone call from a senior editor: “Get on a plane to Göteborg in Sweden, immediately.” I was told to report directly from the site. A few hours later I stood in front of the still-smoking building. The lights of firetrucks and police cars flashed around me. Dead bodies were piling up and distraught teens were gathering at the edge of the parking lot, trying to find out if their friends were dead or alive. I watched the ambulances leaving, some with survivors and some with dead bodies. The scent of the fire lingered in my hair for days.

The investigation determined that the fire was set by four teenage boys who hadn’t been admitted to the party. The young offenders were sentenced to three, six and eight years in prison. Four months later, I returned to Gothenberg and spoke with families, friends and first responders, interviews I captured in a longform narrative that families, a community and a country still smoldering with grief.

Exposure to trauma

In many ways the event set the path to my work as a journalist. I learned how important it is to report not only on tragic events, but also on the aftermath — on the human anguish and sometimes clarity that arise as people work through unthinkable levels of pain. Returning to the epicenter of tragedy gives one the opportunity to tell stories crucial both to victims and readers.

Fast forward to last summer, when I was lucky to be appointed as an Ochberg Fellow at The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University. Each summer The Dart Center brings together a group of journalists for an intensive fellowship about how to report on traumatic events.

Many of us may think that only journalists in the field to cover war or major natural disasters are exposed to trauma. But research by Elena Newman, Ph.D. and professor of Psychology at University of Tulsa and Research Director of The Dart Center, suggest, that between 80 and 100% of journalists have been exposed to trauma through their work.

In my own career, I have immersed myself in stories about death and dying; I have witnessed a homicide autopsy, written a book about femicide and talked to people about suicide, rape and terminal diseases. Yet I never thought of myself as journalist who covered trauma, and certainly not as one who was affected by it.

At The Dart Center, I came to a much broader understanding of the field and learned a long list of new tools about approaching and interviewing sources who experienced trauma. I also came away with important knowledge about taking care of myself, before, during and after such reporting. I learned that self-care is a necessary part of your daily routine if you want to do this work without burning out.

Listening to and caring for yourself

After my fellowship, I returned to Sweden where I reconnected with some of the people I had met 25 years earlier: a mother who lost her daughter, a priest who opened his church to the grieving public, a fireman who tried to rescue youngsters from the fire — and the survivor, Rozbeh Aslanian. This time, I applied the lessons I had learned at Dart. The resulting story was published in Politiken on October 29, 2023 – exactly 25 years after the fire broke out. It is an immersion into how those involved dealt with the trauma back then, and how it has shaped their lives since. (Editor’s note: The link is to an English translation.)

It also taught me to pay attention to my own emotions. Bearing witness to catastrophe, fear, pain and loss lingers in your body. And after my experience with Rozbeh Asalanian, breaking down in tears at the top of that mountain above Gothenburg, I remembered the words of one of the professionals teaching at the fellowship. Dr. Kate Porterfield is a consulting psychologist at the Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture. She told us how our body is wired to respond physically, psychologically and socially when we are under threat. And she also told us to stop and listen to it: “Your body will communicate with you. It will tell you what you need or needed to survive.”

So I listened to my body. And I realized that my reaction when interviewing Aslanian was not unprofessional or humiliating. I cried because I felt empathy with him for having carried a quarter-century of guilt. And for finally letting it go. But because, for once, I was part of the story. I was there that night, and the experience was lodged in my body.

I wish the same self-care for you. Here are some take-aways from my time at The Dart Center:

• Trauma journalism is not limited to wars and natural disaster. Being a journalist involves being exposed to numerous traumatic events, even on a daily beat covering local news: interviewing people who have lost relatives, covering a shooting or a car crash and talking to victims of violent assault. Journalists are craftsmen and trauma is part of the raw material we work with.
• Stop and listen. If you react during or after covering something traumatic or listening to account of trauma, pay attention and attend to it. Your body keeps a score, as the psychologist and author Dr. Bessel van der Kolk puts it. Reactions to reporting a difficult story can be physical, psychological and social. Notice whether you feel unusually tired, forgetful, irritable, are avoiding working on your story or avoiding the company of others.
• Don’t try to toughen up. The hardliner reporter who possesses a special psychological immunity is a cliché. We are human; exposure to trauma has an impact. Research shows that we undergo many of the same working conditions as other first responders: Doctors, emergency workers, police and firefighters. We should treat ourselves accordingly and learn from them.
• Practice self-care. After covering a stressful event you might feel like winding down with Netflix, comfort food and a glass of wine. But you may also consider other types of self-care on a daily basis that will help you keep you fit for the next event. List of suggestions: Yoga, mindfulness, climbing, running, biking or any other kind of physical activity; keeping an appreciation diary; spending time in nature, spending time with friends and family, or simply just taking time off after difficult assignments.
• There is no fixed guideline. Alhough there is research to lead the way, no fixed map shows you exactly how to report and react when covering trauma. We are all human and all different; our experiences and boundaries differ, too.

* * *

Line Vaaben is a writer and editor for Politiken, the largest newspaper in Denmark. Her work has been published in several Danish textbooks, and she teaches narrative and longform journalism to students and professionals.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third dispatch from the 2024 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University. For the others, see deadline narratives by a Wall Street Journal podcast team, and the braided structure used by The Atavist for complex stories.

By Esther Landhuis

After a source discloses their struggles, I often sense a shift in our relationship. They become more candid, confessing worries about public disclosure. Some have acknowledged me in their organization’s newsletter or invited me to contribute toward related political efforts. One mother, after emailing lengthy replies to follow-up queries after a 90-minute interview, told me: “I really have to apologize for talking too much. When someone is genuinely curious and willing to listen, everything sort of pours out.”

“When someone is genuinely curious and willing to listen, everything sort of pours out.” ~ A story source to reporter Esther Landhuis

Interactions like this tug at my heartstrings. I remind myself that I am a reporter and try to enforce appropriate boundaries, even as some sources start treating me as an advocate.

In a sense, I am an advocate — simply by taking time to hear and understand what they’ve gone through and then to convey those experiences to a dominant culture in which they feel neglected or misunderstood.

So when I attended the 2024 Power of Narrative Conference at Boston University last month, I gravitated toward a session titled “The Power of Empathy: How Putting Yourself in Your Subject’s Shoes Can Better Your Reporting.”

“We have been trained systematically that objective journalism is the standard we live by. But there is no part of objectivity that says you cannot also be empathetic,” said Denise Clay-Murray, a Philadelphia-based journalist who covers politics.

Clay-Murray defined empathy as “the ability to understand how people feel emotionally and see things from their point of view.”

Some tips and reminders:

• Ask good questions. “That is 99.9 percent of storytelling — asking really good questions and using the answers to tell the story.”
• Pay attention. “Look people in the eye. Pay attention to them. You may not agree with what they’re saying, you may be thinking in your own head, as you’re listening to them, ‘this person is nuts,’ but in the end, people just want you to pay attention. If you pay attention, there’s probably something that you’re going to learn that you can turn into a good story.”
• Earn their trust. Sources are “not under any obligation to talk to you. You have to make them feel like if they do talk to you, what they say is what’s going to go in your story,” Clay-Murray said. Often when sources are misquoted in previous publications, “they’re not going to talk to you — and in some neighborhoods, that could mean the entire neighborhood is not going to talk to you.”
• Do no harm. As with the Hippocratic Oath in medicine, “it’s the same thing for practicing empathy in journalism. You’re already dealing with folks who have had a traumatic experience. You don’t want to make it worse.
• Acknowledge your own bias and know what you don’t know. Report “exactly what’s in front of you, not what you think it is.”
  Clay-Murray shared an example from a training on gun violence reporting. “This kid had been shot. There was no indication that he had done anything wrong. But because the principal at his school saw that he had been shot, she assumed that he had done something wrong and this kid was kept from his graduation, his senior trip and his senior prom because the principal refused to let him come back to school. That was her stereotype.”
• Trauma comes in many flavors. “When we talk about trauma in journalism, we often talk about things like terrorism and war and gun violence. We don’t necessarily talk about chronic illness or life-threatening illness. It is just as traumatic knowing that you have a disease that can kill you. And these kinds of trauma probably require more of your listening skills than the stuff that’s more obvious.”

• Prioritize self-care. If you’re uncomfortable listening to the story that’s being told to you, good. Recognize your discomfort. If you can relate so much that you’re not uncomfortable, then you might be a little too close to the story. “Empathy allows you to get close, but don’t get too close because in the end, you still have a job to do. And that job is telling the story.”
• Don’t be afraid to say no. Empathy allows you to recognize where your limitations are. If you go into a situation where you’re trying to push through, and you’re covering certain things, that’s not going to help the communities that really need you to be all there to tell their stories. If anything, it’s going to cause harm.
  Clay-Murray gave a personal example. “One of my first assignments when I got out of college was covering HIV and AIDS. Now, these days if you’re covering HIV and AIDS, it’s bad but it’s not really harsh. I was doing this in the early 90s when the drug cocktails were not nearly what they are now, and getting HIV, especially if you were poor, was basically a death sentence. Almost everybody I interviewed died either a week after I talked to them or two weeks after I talked to them, or not so long after. I was constantly going to memorial services for people that I had just had interviews with, and in many cases, really liked as people because they were interesting. After doing this for, like, six months, I went to my editor and said, you’re gonna have to find somebody else to take this beat. Because I can’t do it. Mentally, it’s weighing me down. So somebody else is going to have to take this beat.”
• Don’t confuse empathy with sympathy. “Sympathy is a shared emotional bond. you don’t necessarily need that bond to be empathetic. All you have to do is being willing to let the story come to you, or let the person who is talking tell you what happened.”
  
  * * * Esther Landhuis is a freelance science and health journalist based in California.

By Jacqui Banaszynski

This brought to mind my own career-long effort to understand interviewing as its own skill set, no less essential than knowing how to find records or verify information. I consider it the foundational skill of any journalist, whether the journalist is an investigative reporter tracking the trail of money or a narrative writer paying witness to tragedy.

Yet interviewing isn’t something specifically taught in most journalism programs — at least not in the U.S. Maybe the assumption is that interviewing is baked into reporting classes. Or maybe the assumption was that people spend their lives in conversation — asking and answering questions — so interviewing isn’t something that needs to be taught or learned as its own skill set. Most reporters of my generation learned as I did — by trial and error, instinct, osmosis and mimicry.

Perhaps I grew fascinated with interviewing skills because I wasn’t a naturally strong writer. I couldn’t write around things I didn’t know or understand, so I wanted to make sure my notebook was crammed with enough of the right stuff to make it to to deadline. I, like most reporters, hated making mistakes, so I wanted the thin confidence that only comes with having truly heard what I was being told. I also loved to learn, and realized early in my career that interviewing — opening the door to someone else’s knowledge and experience — was a free education every day.

I carried my passion for interviewing into editing and then teaching. As an editor, I spent as much time talking with reporters not about how they planned to write their stories, but how they planned to report them. Knowing how to find, read and verify records was an essential part of that. But even more, I spent time brainstorming who they would interview, why and how. As a journalism professor, I spent as much time exploring interviewing challenges and skills as I did on story structure. I eventually created an entire course that focused on nothing but interviewing, with assignments designed to practice specific types of interviewing, from detailed observation to technical description to sensitive situations.

I started that class by having students answer a simple question: Why do we do interviews? They would look at me as if DUH! But then, with just a few little nudges, they would come up with 18-25 different reasons. That’s right: 18 to 25. That allowed us to have a productive talk about source selection, source relationships, transparency, ethics, the most effective way to frame questions, how to anticipate obstacles, how to work around stumbles and more.

Perhaps the next time you go into an interview, back up a short step and ask yourself a similar set of questions: Why are you doing this particular interview with this particular source? What do you need to know going into it and what do you need to accomplish coming out of it? What agreements are implicit and what do you need to state explicitly? What will you do if you need to interrupt or challenge? How will you handle your own emotions or reaction?

Remember your mother’s advice: Think before you speak? Here’s an editor’s tweak: Think before you ask.