Corwin Brown played for close to a decade in college and pro football as a safety — a live-wire position that sees its share of game-saving plays and violent collisions. 

Twenty-five years after Brown’s playing career ended, Kent Babb of The Washington Post has written a thorough and wrenching story about the battles that came afterward for Brown and his family. 

“Dad was a football star — until dad was ‘a monster’” follows Brown’s daughter Jaedan, one of his three children, as she navigates her relationship with her father, who has exhibited symptoms of mental illness, outbursts, and paranoia. 

Family members suspect that Brown’s struggles stem from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain condition linked to repeated head trauma that currently can only be diagnosed posthumously. 

As Jaedan tries to maintain precious links to her father, Babb is able to portray their struggle from a vantage point that feels almost uncomfortably — but valuably — intimate. It’s one readers don’t often get, and one Babb used patience and candor to earn. He moved slowly while reaching out to family members and explained what the reporting and publication of the story might mean for them. It’s an approach he thinks of as a “long-term collaboration.”

“I try hard to be a human being first and a reporter second,” Babb said.

While writing a piece that covered so many years and so much ground, Babb found an image to serve as a sort of recurring signpost: the bubbles that appear in a text-message thread while one of the participants is composing.

Early on, Babb writes:

As long as the texts were about football, Daddy usually texted back. The game had been his profession, his identity, his escape. Jaedan learned it could also be a portal into his mind.

“Do u think Michigan can win,” she sent him last year before the Wolverines played Texas.

“Nah they gonna get killed,” he replied.

“They need you out there lol,” she sent. “Or Me.”

Minutes would pass, but then she would see the bubbles that indicated typing.

The story returns to the image twice more, including once in the final paragraph that leaves the story on a note that is both hopeful and ambiguous:

She sees the text bubbles, reminding herself that she never expected to get this far. So if the time comes, she will propose the drive to Boston as a road trip. Just a daughter and her daddy together, talking and laughing and singing along to the Beatles and Tupac, the miles and hours blurring by as they press toward whatever it is that’s waiting around the next bend.

Babb said of this recurring image: "Considering Corwin's history of poor impulse control and mental illness, I imagine Jaedan sometimes feared the worst. Until she saw those bubbles. It was affirmation of many things, not the least of which was that a daughter's dad was alive, engaged, and writing back.”

As skillful as it was to weave those signposts into the story, Babb faced another test when it came to a sobering revelation. Late in the story, it’s revealed that Brown — then in the throes of paranoia — harbored thoughts of killing colleagues on the New England Patriots coaching staff, including then-head coach Bill Belichick.

“Do u remember when u told me u were a monster,” (Jaedan) asked. “I was trying to tell you you weren’t.”

A moment later, her father texted back.

“One day,” he wrote, “I will tell you the story of when I was gonna kill belichick.”

Jaedan stared at the display, trying to make sense of the words.

“You were actually going to kill him?” she said.

“Yea,” he replied, “him and about eight or nine other people.”

While this revelation is an important part of the story that shows just how acute Brown’s problems had become, it’s not offered up as an early hook for readers. Instead, it’s woven into the narrative, offered to us as it was to Jaedan.

“I … didn't want this to suddenly become a story about a murder plot against Belichick,” said Babb. “That's not what we set out to do, and while we can't control readers' takeaway or what is distilled on social media, we agreed that the construction of this story had to be about something more nuanced and, to me, bigger than just one juicy morsel.”

Babb talked about these details and others in a Q&A with Nieman Storyboard. His answers have been edited for clarity.

How did you come across this story, and what was the reporting process like?

For a few years now, I have communicated fairly regularly with Chris Nowinski, the chief executive of the Concussion Legacy Foundation and the subject of another deeply personal piece of mine, about a group of former Harvard roommates torn apart by CTE. Chris is a former pro wrestler, and he understands story in a way that, in my opinion, most sources and activists do not. He and the group's communications person, Julia Manning, reached out last fall to tell me about Jaedan. 

At first, I assumed that Jaedan's father had died and that CTE had been confirmed post-mortem. But Julia let me know that this situation was different. I reached out to Jaedan, and for a lot of reasons, I was extremely forthright about my process and what a possible story might entail. Including, I told her, that rather than make things better with her family, it very well could make things more strained. I asked her to spend a week thinking about and weighing the pros and cons of continuing. 

It may seem self-defeating to talk a willing participant out of speaking with me for a story, but with pieces like this, I try hard to be a human being first and a reporter second. It's extremely personal, mega-sensitive, and the immersive nature of this kind of story isn't for everyone. 

Thankfully, a week later, Jaedan texted to say she was positive that she wanted to proceed. 

How did you ask members of the Brown family — either together, separately, or both — to participate in this story? Specifically, how did you approach Corwin Brown?

As in the preliminary stages, I moved extremely slowly. Jaedan was my point of contact, and I first asked her to tell her siblings and parents that I was interested in speaking with them. While her brother and sister were initially anxious, they told Jaedan to pass their numbers to me. I began with texts before we scheduled phone calls. As I do in most stories like this, I explained to all three siblings that our lines of communication should remain open — including the fact that, if they had second thoughts about something they had shared with me, we should discuss it. With me, this process doesn't end after an interview. It's a long-term collaboration that I take seriously. 

Meeting up with Corwin was different. Jaedan arranged a meeting in Chicago, and the specific location actually changed several times before we met at the coffee shop on the South Side. Jaedan was nervous for what the meeting might hold, but from my standpoint, it was a friendly and insightful conversation. I wasn't sure what to expect from Corwin in terms of behavior, but I was actually shocked by how aware he seemed to be about his own mental deterioration, along with his willingness to share details about his darkest thoughts and worst moments. 

One person who we don't hear from in the story is Corwin's wife, who through her children declined interview requests. How did her decision shape the way you reported and told this story? 

In part, Melissa Brown's preference to not participate was insightful into the family's dynamic. At no point did she discourage either of the three kids from talking to me, but it was clear that, as the kids described to me, prefers to think of Corwin's illness as something that once happened, instead of something that is still happening. My approach was always going to be to focus on the kids and their perspectives, but as is the case in all families, there are some questions the kids just can't answer. How and where did Melissa and Corwin meet? When and how did Melissa notice changes in her husband's behavior? How did she cope with the aftermath of the standoff? Those questions would've been easier if they'd come directly from her, but when it was made clear that it wouldn't be happening (even when I visited South Bend), I had to ask friends, extended family and associates what they thought Melissa's response was. While I always prefer to speak directly with the person, I understand the turmoil that comes with being part of this family, and respect the fact that she did not discourage anyone from speaking with me or answering these questions on her behalf. 

This story would be moving from any angle, but it's especially powerful to experience it through the eyes of Jaedan, who is resolute about connecting with her father when he seems to be withdrawing. How did you land on her viewpoint as the engine of the story? Was it an idea you grasped immediately or did it emerge during the reporting process?

At first I wasn't sure I wanted to take on another CTE story, but my editor at the Post, Joe Tone, saw the potential immediately. There has been lots of coverage of brain injuries and their long-term effects, but what we haven't read about in any thorough way is the kids' perspective. I have two young daughters myself, so I'm always curious about how they perceive and interpret things that, to adults, may or may not be a big deal. What's frightening to them? What gives them anxiety? What do they just shrug off? And I wanted to fully explore that inevitable moment in the life of every child: When they stop seeing their parent as a superhero and realize that they're a human being, often deeply flawed and prone to mistakes. This was an extreme example of that, but it's one I thought was highly relatable despite the extremity of this family's specific experience. 

You vividly portray Corwin Brown's standoff with law enforcement and the events leading up to it. How did you piece it together in such detail?

I interviewed all three siblings about what they remember, along with Corwin's perspective. I also went back and read most everything I could on the coverage surrounding what, at the time, was a shocking incident. Corwin was a rising star, someone who easily could've become a head coach, so such a public — and potentially violent — incident was covered thoroughly by local and national media. 

The tricky thing was, as Joe and I discussed it, keeping the camera focused on Jaedan. She was very young, and her memory of that day remains hazy. So while I weaved in some detail from Tayla and Little Corwin, along with facts from the news accounts, it was important from a narrative standpoint for us to be experiencing this only through Jaedan's eyes. 

One touch I found effective in the story is a recurring image: Jaedan looking at the bubbles that appear when someone you're texting — in the story, her dad — is texting back. It hits hard as a symbol of Jaeden's fraught relationship with her father. How deliberate were you about including that image within the story?

We've all sent a text to which we anxiously wait for a response. It's only when those bubbles appear that we know the other person has received and read the text, essentially proof of life for a conversation. And, for a long time, it was by no means a given that Corwin would reply to Jaedan's texts. She would often send him something, he wouldn't reply, and days or weeks would pass. Considering Corwin's history of poor impulse control and mental illness, I imagine Jaedan sometimes feared the worst. Until she saw those bubbles. It was affirmation of many things, not the least of which was that a daughter's dad was alive, engaged, and writing back. 

One of the most rending sections of the story is the reveal of Corwin's violent thoughts, which readers learn about fairly late. What did you think about when considering how to reveal that?

I knew all along that I wanted readers to learn the details of this story as Jaedan did. There's the superficial image of her unfailing daddy, and that begins to give way to something far more confusing and sinister. Joe and I talked a lot about the paradox of having the incredible anecdote about Corwin's apparent plan to murder Bill Belichick and others but not leading the story with that. How do you keep something so explosive, so juicy from [the] proverbial nut graf or from the first 5,000 words of a story? It's counterintuitive, but it's something Jaedan hadn't known until last Thanksgiving (after I had already begun reporting the story and conducting interviews). I also didn't want this to suddenly become a story about a murder plot against Belichick. That's not what we set out to do, and while we can't control readers' takeaway or what is distilled on social media, we agreed that the construction of this story had to be about something more nuanced and, to me, bigger than just one juicy morsel. I wanted people to read and feel the story, not just click on something because a clever aggregator had pushed out something salacious. 

The final paragraph describes Jaedan's hopes for the future of the relationship. It's one of the most moving in the story. What do you remember about writing and, if relevant, revisiting it?

The throughline in my conversations with Jaedan, and my interpretation of her role in the family, was a persistent optimism that I came to greatly admire. To be honest, I don't know how she keeps on keeping on. So much about this is discouraging, from other family members' fears to the fact that Corwin still gets nervous about these figments of his imagination. Very late in the process, maybe two weeks before the story published, Jaedan texted to let me know that her father had convinced himself that I actually was working for the FBI. She pushed back on that notion, of course, but her heads-up to me was partly to let me know that I may receive some unusual texts from her dad (I didn't) and a request to go through her if I had remaining questions for my dad (I did). 

The important thing was that she wanted to shine a light on this situation without destroying Corwin's trust in the only person he never suspected of working against him. That's a tough balancing act, but again and again, I was struck by how determined this young woman was to thread this needle and believe that, even if it's invisible to everyone else, some good could come from it. 

What was the editing process like for this story? Did it change much in structure from the beginning of the process until the end?

Joe is the best, most thorough, most sensitive editor I will ever have. He understands what a story can be, almost always from the beginning, and he saw this piece more clearly than I often did. My first draft came in at 9,000 words, because I was trying to tell all three kids' stories almost equally. That's overwhelming and disorienting to the reader, and it was Joe's idea — and insistence — that we remain focused on Jaedan. This wasn't a story about Corwin Brown. It wasn't even the story of a family. It was about one daughter's determination to learn everything she can about her dad's plight, and maybe get him some help. 

The structure didn't dramatically change, but the scope did. It was the right decision, albeit a painful one, when I began chipping away at a second (and third and fourth) draft. 

What has the reaction to the story been, both by members of the Brown family and the Post's readers?

This was the rare piece that was almost universally praised, and not because of anything I did. Jaedan is just such an admirable person to read about, especially in the eyes of something so discouraging and frightening, so the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. 

I can't help but care about what the family thinks about a story like this, and I had held fact-checking and sensitivity-based conversations with each of the three siblings before the story ran. It's a regular part of my process, but it's one I spend extra time on in a case like this. I was pleased and, honestly, relieved a few hours after the story posted to get a text from each of the siblings letting me know that the story was hard to read, but that I had done it right. 

Jaedan even sent a screenshot of a text from her dad that day, letting her know that I had done a good job with it and, he wrote, that "I guess he doesn't work for the fbi." 

***

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

The post How journalist Kent Babb used text messages to write about a daughter struggling to connect with her football star father appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Thomas Curwen is one of those newspaper veterans who has done it all. During his 40-year career at the Los Angeles Times, he’s served as an outdoors editor, a Book Review editor and a features editor. He’s done news stories big and small, and was on the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for coverage of a terrorist attack. He has a literature major’s passion for narrative nonfiction, which shows in bylined work that has been recognized with everything from the 2020 Meyer Berger Award to a being named a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer in feature writing for a reconstruction of a grizzly attack in Montana. He’s worked through the technological and economic ups and downs of the newspaper industry — most of it with the presses of the L.A. Times serving as his soundtrack.

So when contractions in the news industry reached those presses, Curwen made sure that the end of one more chapter in newspaper history didn’t go unnoticed.

Times owners announced in late 2022 that they would be closing the company’s historic Olympic printing plant — a facility that cost $230 million when it opened and had been a state-of-the-art billboard for the then-burgeoning newspaper industry. Two weeks before the plant’s last run in March 2024, Curwen reported beyond a predictable business story to produce a eulogy for a stalwart colleague. “Storied presses print L.A. Times for the last time” celebrated the plant’s history, saluted its proud, exacting workers and elegantly marked a high point in the fading industry of print.

His piece was something of a sequel to a piece he had written six years earlier, when the Times left its offices in downtown Los Angeles. “These historic moves were the result of business decisions made by the previous owner, Tribune Publishing, which, in its misguided and elusive quest to be profitable, sold its real estate holding, making the Times a tenant in the buildings it had once owned,” Curwen told me. “A story chronicling this latest chapter seemed only natural.”

To do that, he followed the press crew through a Friday swing shift — its last. He avoids clichéd nostalgia by building his story on facts: Readers learn, among other things, about how many gallons the facility’s fire-suppression tank held. He draws on terminology such as “ink density,” elicits quotes that reflect the workers’ pride and professionalism (“When you get ink in your veins, there’s nothing like the roar of the presses going at full speed”), and traces the arc of the facility’s history with a verve that could enthrall even casual readers.

But his writing lends it an aching tone that reflects a care for quality of his craft as deep as the press operators for theirs.

“This is what I aspire toward: to find the rhythm and pacing of language that captures the emotion of the moment as well as the facts,” Curwen told me.

He answered Storyboard’s questions about how he conveyed the character of a building and machines, and annotated his piece to describe his reporting and writing decisions. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Before we get to the annotation, can you give us an overview of your reporting and writing for this piece?
My reporting began with an impromptu visit to the plant in early February. Over my years at the Times, I would often drop in to pick up extra copies of various editions of the paper, so I was very familiar with the plant. I had once regularly used its gym and ate occasionally in its cafeteria.

After poking around on my own one afternoon, I began to make a few phone calls and started digging through old company newsletters. Through that, I was able to lay down a chronology of the plant’s early years and pick up memories from the people who worked there. All were eager to reminisce; their connection to this place was palpable.

Eventually I met up with Kal Hamalainen, the pressroom shift supervisor, who was critical in helping me work out how I was going to report the story. My editor and I had decided that we wanted to catch one of the last press runs, and we wanted to make sure it was a busy run. A Friday night — the last Friday night run there for the Times — fit the bill.

But first, I wanted to get the lay of the land. Often in reporting these stories, I feel like a deer in the headlights; with so much information coming at me, I like to try to slow down the reporting so I can see and think and process all that I’m learning. So I went on an escorted tour to get the big picture and help me organize my thoughts for the Friday night reporting.

When that Friday came around, I was ready. I showed up at the start of the swing shift and stayed past its end. With those 10 hours in my notebook, I had the backbone of my story. It was then a question of weaving in the various details: history, memories and general color.

Whom did you work with during the editing process, and how much was the story shaped during that stage?
I worked with my editor on the Metro desk, Cindy Chang, and with Column One editor Steve Padilla. The edits were fairly simple. I had wanted to hold off explaining the reason for the closure in order to capture more of the bittersweetness of the moment in the lede. But they wanted to bring that explanation closer to the top, so we did a little rearranging.

The day-in-the-life format is, in my mind, an easy way to organize the story because it follows a basic chronology. It answers a lot of questions that might otherwise get raised over how to shape the story.

One thing that stands out about the story is an elegiac tone. How cognizant were you, if at all, of setting a particular mood in this piece?
I like that: elegiac. Yes, that certainly was the feeling, and I work pretty hard to try and capture that feeling.

A few years back, I wrote for Storyboard an appreciation of Michael Paterniti’s “Long Fall of 111 Heavy.” That piece — especially its opening— is so powerful for bringing the melody of words into the service of meaning. This is what I aspire toward: to find the rhythm and pacing of language that captures the emotion of the moment as well as the facts. It takes a lot of reading out loud, and a willingness to play around with language in the course of revision.

Is there anything that informed or inspired your writing for this piece, such as other journalism you’ve written or read, or any pieces of fiction?
I read writers who seem to have the same goals and intention. The list is long — and readers of Storyboard will know many of them. Narratives are, in my mind, the gold standard when it comes to drawing in readers and not letting them go until the last word. That’s the real challenge, isn’t it? In this distracted age, getting readers’ attention and ensuring a good payoff at the end.

I also read fiction and poetry, especially poets who have a story to tell.

I like writers who are playful and idiosyncratic in their use of language and story structure. I’m currently reading Richard Powers’ “Playground.” So far, as a fan of his “The Overstory,” I’m not disappointed.

Did you learn anything during any part of creating this story that you’ll carry into future stories, or that may be of use to other journalists?
It’s a good question. I’ve read a lot of writing books, taken a lot of writing classes, spoken to other writers — both journalists and otherwise. I wish there were clear lessons that applied to the next story. But each story is sui generis; each requires its own problem-solving.

I’ll always remember what the wonderful writer and editor for The New Yorker, William Maxwell, said when asked if writing ever got easier. He was, at the time, in his late 70s and explained that every story is new to him, that every story raises questions that he had never considered before, and answering those questions required a different approach. I took heart that so experienced a writer felt that good writing never gets easier.

And of course, that is the joy of this occupation. There are a few tricks that help move the process along — the day-in-the-life approach, for instance— but having done this for a few years, my best advice for other writers is to be patient with the process and understand that frustration (Oh, that shitty first draft!) is normal. You will be discouraged, and you just might want to give up. But you won’t. Good storytelling takes time, and you have to have the faith that with time, you will write the story that you want.

ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Curwen’s answers in blue.

Storied presses print L.A. Times for the last time as production moves to Riverside

By Thomas Curwen
Staff Writer

Photography by Genaro Molina

March 10, 2024

The swing shift is about to start at a plant that is about to close. [annotation q="There’s a pleasing repetition of “about to” in this sentence. Do you recall how you ended up crafting this opening sentence? " a="I think a lot about first sentences. I rehearse them while driving in my car. I rehearse them lying in bed at night. I rehearse them in the shower. I need to feel the music of the words, and when this opening came to me, it sounded just right. It’s a kind of iambic pentameter (“So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” as we’re taught), and yes, I love the repetition of the “about to,” especially as it captures both the start and the close. The alpha and the omega."] Late winter sunlight casts long shadows from workers crossing the parking lot, where stray cats skulk among the cars.

Only two weeks left, and the routine is unchanged: clocking in at 5 p.m., heading to the locker room, trading street clothes for work wear. If anyone feels sadness or loss, no one shows it. They have a newspaper to put out. [annotation q="This lede evokes a sense of stoicism and hard work on the part of the press crew. How did you decide to start the story with that tone?" a="I really enjoy writing color. If I can nail a descriptive passage early on, then I can establish a rhythm that will help me continue with the writing. My first draft is often overwritten, which I will pare down in successive versions.

I’m also mindful of pacing. I want to keep readers off guard by mixing the exposition with both long sentences, which capture a mood or give them something to think about, and short sentences, delivered in fast clip. If I can offer a quick recitation of facts that way, all the better. "] “We’re trying to do this with a little class and dignity,” said shift supervisor Kal Hamalainen.

Sixteen months ago, they were told that the Los Angeles Times, their employer, would outsource the printing of the paper and that the Olympic printing plant, once a crown jewel in a vast media empire, would shut down sometime in 2024.

The decision was set in motion many years earlier when the Chicago-based Tribune Co., then owner of The Times, sold its historic properties, and The Times became a tenant.

Now, six years after Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought The Times in 2018, the lease on the Olympic plant is expiring, and paying rent has become untenable. The paper will be printed in Riverside by the Southern California Newspaper Group, with its circulation numbers remaining the same.

“Technology and economics have changed dramatically, and we’re transitioning to a new era for our business,” Times President and Chief Operating Officer Chris Argentieri said in a statement, citing both the daily newspaper and digital platforms.

March 10 will be the last run of The Times at the Olympic plant. [annotation q="You pack quite a bit of exposition into these few paragraphs: several owners, the information on the new printing location, the key detail on the unchanged circulation. How much thought went into how much to keep and how much to leave out in this portion? " a="It’s always a question of balance, and in this instance, I needed to answer a basic question from readers who might assume that the print edition of the Times was permanently going away. But there was another opportunity here as well. By highlighting the unsentimental, almost bureaucratic details for the closure, I could set up a contrast within the story with the people whose lives were so affected by this decision, the heart and soul of the plant."]

Dressed in blue pants and blue shirts with a Times eagle patch, the workers find their places throughout the sprawling facility. Each is a crucial link in a chain of production often called the daily miracle: that alchemical transformation of words and pictures into a newspaper to be held, sold, mailed or tossed onto any driveway, any doorstep in the city. [annotation q="This may be too specific a question but I can’t resist it: You don’t often run into the word “alchemical” in the newspaper. Do you recall how you chose that adjective to describe the making of the daily paper? " a="I love this question. OK, so yes, I’m an English major, and yes, I’ve read a lot of poetry. Do you remember the T.S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? The opening is unforgettable.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table …

It’s that image in the third line. And it’s that word, “etherized,” that has stayed with me since I first read that poem.

So, if possible, I want to find an unusual image — or an unusual word — that readers might hold onto and remember long after finishing the piece. My goal is to write a story that doesn’t get lost in the incessant churn of daily journalism. I want readers to remember these stories well beyond the moment when they read them."]

What once was so easy to take for granted has never seemed so remarkable.

They have watched as their crews have been cut, three shifts reduced to one. They once printed other papers besides The Times, and those have gone elsewhere. But it’s hard to be nostalgic over what seems inevitable.

Newspapers have suffered many depredations over the years, from the internet to cost-cutting shareholders to skepticism and disinterest in the written word. With print readership declining in most markets, many media outlets are publishing stories online before printing them. The Times is following this trend, though it consistently ranks among the six largest newspapers in the country for print circulation.

But that’s another story. On this Friday night, Feb. 23, what’s more important is a Ukrainian woman’s search for her husband, a jury’s verdict in a hit-and-run, and in sports, a profile of UCLA’s mercurial basketball coach, as well as the obituaries, comics and horoscopes. [annotation q=" At what point did you decide to include a “snapshot” of that particular day’s stories? What purpose does it serve? " a="I like toggling back and forth between the Big Picture (“Newspapers have suffered many depredations…”) and the Little Picture (“obituaries, comics and horoscopes”). I think it’s fun, but it is also a reminder why a newspaper is such a brilliant invention for capturing not only the intensity of everyday life but also the beauty of its more mundane moments."]

Press operators gather to review the run: Tomorrow’s paper will have color on all but one of the 22 pages. They’ll start at 8:30, print a little more than 100,000 copies and be done in less than two hours.

To step inside the Olympic printing plant is to step inside a time capsule enshrining a 19th century product manufactured with 20th century technology and poised for 21st century obsolescence. [annotation q="This may be my favorite sentence, which is both an accurate summation of the newspaper industry in three combinations of adjectives and nouns. What do you recall about writing it? " a="Walking through the plant, I couldn’t help but feel the breadth of time— almost three centuries — that a newspaper covers. You feel it as you walk beneath the huge presses, mindful of not brushing up against the ink-splattered drums, then you hold a freshly printed copy in your hands and see the pallets being loaded on trucks. And to think: those stories that are being delivered in such an antiquated way are also being read on phones.

Whenever I finish reporting in the field, I sit down at my keyboard and I type my notes, scribbled in a reporter’s notebook. As I hammer away— yes, it can be very tedious— I have a blank document on the side and into that, goes the fun stuff: a few sentences at a time, riffs on what I saw and heard and felt. I’m a big fan of free writing for bringing out fresh language and ideas.

That was the origin of that sentence: a little bit of free writing from my notes, letting my imagination play around with what I saw. "]

Within these walls was the future of Los Angeles and Southern California, as once imagined by the owners of The Times. Fueled by a diverse economy — a dividend of the postwar boom years — this building, likened by one manager to the Taj Mahal, was dedicated on March 6, 1990. (The paper had been printed on the company’s aged presses in the basement of its headquarters downtown.)

“This was to be a model for the world, not just Southern California,” said Tom Johnson, 82, publisher from 1980 to 1989. [annotation q="Did you speak to Tom Johnson, or was this quote archival? " a="In 2018 when the Times left Times Mirror Square, I spoke to Tom Johnson for his memories of that building, and when I started this story, I called him back. Six years later, he’s still in Atlanta and still happy to talk about the time when he was the paper’s publisher. "]

It cost $230 million, the lion’s share of a nearly half-billion-dollar expenditure that saw the construction of a printing plant in Chatsworth and the renovation of an existing production facility in Costa Mesa. Those were halcyon days for The Times, whose parent corporation, Times Mirror, posted more than $3.7 billion in revenue in 1991.

“Come visit the 21st century,” Times readers were encouraged in an advertisement inviting them to tour the new Olympic plant. [annotation q="This detail captures the innovation and optimism of that era in newspapers. How did you dig up the advertisement?" a="I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to weaving in historical details, especially if I can use the exact language from the time and moment. So if I see an opportunity, I’ll take it. I don’t quite recall where this came from, and it might have been from a source. That’s the measure of the love and appreciation that employees, past and present, at the Times have felt toward the newspaper. They save everything from past editions of paper to commemorative swag. Plus, the Times has a wonderful historian, Darrell Kunitomi, and librarian, Cary Schneider, both of whom are indispensable in finding keys to our past. This quote, by the way, certainly helped me with that previous sentence (“… a 19th century product manufactured with 20th century technology and poised for 21st century obsolescence”)."]

Its story was told by numbers: a 26-acre site; a 684,491-square-foot building; six presses capable of printing 70,000 96-page papers per hour; a 400,000-gallon underground water tank for fire suppression; six 6,200-gallon tanks of color ink; a warehouse capable of holding a 65-day supply of paper; and a 148-seat cafeteria for nearly 500 employees. [annotation q="One thing I like about this story is how you’re able to smuggle so much background and context into something that really is a wistful feature. What do you think the effect of telling readers straightaway about all the numbers coming at them in this graf? " a=" It’s a good question, and I often debate the value of numbers. Few readers will remember any of this, but what they might walk away with is the feeling — the sense that in aggregate this is one big facility, nothing puny about it. I also remember back in the day when we’d produce graphics that told stories “by the numbers,” so I suspect that was an influence as well. I also really like lists. I like how they manage to tell a big story through a lot of small details, covering a lot of ground in a fairly succinct way and letting readers draw their own conclusion; showing not telling. "]

Beyond the numbers was the Jetsons quality of the place.

Robotic vehicles delivered rolls of paper from the warehouse to machines that fed the presses. Doors opened at the push of a button. Conveyors whisked printed papers to automated bundlers and then to awaiting pallets, hands free. [annotation q="And then you transition into a whiz-bang description of the then-futuristic presses. How deliberate were you in transitioning from the previous grafts — with all the numbers — into these? " a="I’m glad you picked up on this. It is again part of that broader theme (a 19th century product … 21st century obsolescence). I found something both epic and old-world in the building itself, which those numbers convey. But then how can you not be amazed by the futuristic automation of the place? It’s this contrast that I found especially intriguing, and I often find if I can convey my own sense of wonder, then readers will pick up on it as well. "]

At the center of it all were the six presses, three on one side and three on the other, running almost two football fields long, connected by a nearly soundproof room with windows angling overhead, providing press operators with easy line of sight and silent escape from the incessant 100-decibel thrum.

The lobby, as elegant as an art museum, was finished in marble and hardwood and featured a glass wall, three stories tall, overlooking the presses that receded far in the distance. In the floor lay a time capsule, a measure of the owner’s faith in the future, to be opened on the paper’s bicentennial: Dec. 4, 2081. [annotation q="What’s happening with the time capsule? " a="I found the time capsule to be one of the more poignant details, and when I included it, I wondered if it spoke for itself or whether it needed a little interpretation. I decided to let it be, hoping that readers would be struck by the confidence (hubris?) of the paper’s owners at a time when the future seemed so assured: that the paper would be printed in 2081, that the company would remain unchanged, that the building still belonging to the LA Times.

I’m reminded of line from the poem “Ozymandias”: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

I believe the time capsule was recently retrieved by the owner of the Times and will eventually find its place in a museum that is under construction next to the Times’ building in El Segundo."]

Bob Lampher came to work at the Olympic plant in 1989 as the presses were being installed. He had started at the Times 22 years earlier, “a dream job” after working the presses for the Anaheim Bulletin, the Downey Southeast News and the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot.

“Oly” — as the plant was known — “was the most modern pressroom around,” said Lampher, 82, a retired superintendent. “When I first got here, my jaw dropped. It was simply beautiful, and I thought it would run forever.” [annotation q="You don’t have a lot of quotes in this story, but the ones you have are impactful. How did you decide who to speak to for this story? Did anything surprise you about what was said?" a="It’s an interesting observation. My sources talk to me a lot (motivated no doubt by all my questions). But much of what they tell me is informational and I often find that can be rewritten in a more compelling, quicker manner. Also, as we all know, some sources are very quotable and others not so much. So as I’m taking notes, I’m pretty attuned to the quote that will lift off the page.

Many years ago, I wrote a piece that had no direct quotes, and I really like the effect. "]

The assumption is forgivable. The Times’ weekday circulation — spread among the Olympic plant, as well as Orange County and the San Fernando Valley printing facilities — was 1.2 million; 1.5 million on Sundays. (Today, success is measured by digital subscriptions, currently close to 550,000.)

To meet that printed volume — for a newspaper so filled with advertising that it ranged from 100 to 200 pages daily (on the Sunday after Thanksgiving 1993, the paper was a whopping 592 pages) — managers choreographed a round-the-clock dance that pushed newsprint through the presses at nearly 30 mph, resulting in close to 60,000 papers printed in an hour.

The sound was like a thundering locomotive. Ink mist and paper dust flew through the air. Margins of error were unforgiving.

“When you’re doing it, it boggles the mind,” said Lampher, who left The Times in 2002. “I would go back tomorrow just to hear those presses running again.”

His buddy and former press room manager, Jack Boethling, 77, understands. “When you get ink in your veins, there’s nothing like the roar of the presses going at full speed.”

As the swing shift gets underway, Emmett Jaime pries inked plates off cylinders. A Dead Kennedys song plays on a radio boom box, as a bell rings a brief warning each time a cylinder turns.

Jaime, 56, plans to take a little time off before looking for another job. He’d like to work eight more years, but he followed his father to The Times when he was 19 and knows only this world.

John Martin, 60, sits at an operator’s console, studying a copy of a real estate section, whose advertiser is known to be especially picky. He’s making sure the columns of type and photographs sit squarely on the page with equal margins top and bottom.

“It’s been a great, great, great, great run,” he said, describing his 43 years with The Times. When he started, his seniority number was 380. He had hoped one day to make No. 1 but is satisfied to be No. 22. [annotation q="This is a moving detail; do you recall how it came up in conversation?" a="When reporting a story like this, I try to find opportunities to simply sit with the people I’m writing about. It’s nothing more than the time-tested fly-on-the-wall technique, and it allows me to fall into the rhythm of the momen — to look, to think, to not be hurried. Often in these moments, I’m just shooting the breeze, listening and overhearing other conversations. This quote came from that kind of moment. Martin was just musing about his career, about the end of the run and what the Times has meant to him. I think he nailed it. "]

In the paper warehouse, Marcus Arnwine, 64, takes a quick inventory of the newsprint. Once a thick forest with rolls stacked five high to the ceiling, it is now a small glade as stock runs low.

“I’m going to miss the wealth of knowledge in this place,” said Arnwine, who started here when he was 20. “There was always someone here who knew something you needed to know.” [annotation q="How were you able to get time to find time to speak the crew while they were working?" a="Before I start reporting a story like this, I will take time to explain to sources how I work and how I’d like to proceed. The sooner I get this out there, the easier the reporting is. Either they can say no or yes, and I accept either. In this instance, I made the request to just sit with the press workers during this shift, watch them, talk when they had a moment. And it was green-lighted. "]

Neither Martin nor Arnwine is certain what their next step will be, whether to look for work or retire.

Later that evening, Adam Lee is in the plate room imprinting digital files, produced by editors and page designers, onto aluminum sheets. The air, bathed yellow by safe lights, smells of photographic chemicals and is filled with a rhythmic clicking and a shuttling swoosh.

Lee, 46, is one of the few who has a new job lined up. He started here 18 years ago, joining his stepmother and his uncle, as well his father, who put in 47 years before retiring.

His story is a familiar one: a pressroom of multigenerational employees banking on good benefits, good income and challenging work.

“When we first started,” Hamalainen said, “it was common for an old-timer to take a new hire aside and say, ‘Well, kid, you’ll have a job for life.’ ”

Today in the building’s growing emptiness, they are still a community kept close by their commitment to that work, proud of their craft and eager to dazzle visitors with technical explanations of a job that took years to master: the speed of the paper, the proportions of water and ink, the ability to make a fix on the fly.

They knew there were risks. Some lost fingers in the presses or wrenched knees working on the floor. Some lost marriages to the strain of an unforgiving schedule.

As often as they held history in their hands — the Gulf War, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the death of John Wooden, of Kobe and the pandemic — the work never allowed lingering, and they never missed a deadline.

They lived by the clock and by schedules defined by the vastness of Southern California. They had to know when to finish a run to make a 6 a.m. delivery to Santa Barbara, San Diego, Palm Springs.

“Old news doesn’t sell,” Lampher said. [annotation q="I love the tone of the four grafs or so topped off with Lampher’s quote. There’s a genuine sense of appreciation for the artisty and commitment of workers who don’t often receive it. What do you recall about the conception and writing of this section?" a="Not so long ago, I did a series of stories that focused on craft: I profiled a watch repairman, a farrier, an understudy. I enjoyed writing these stories (perhaps I saw a parallel with my own work), and they sensitized me to the pride that so many people take in jobs, especially if they’re somewhat arcane and challenging and mysterious to most everyone else. This certainly came across in my interviews for this story. These guys could dance circles around me for what they know — and what I don’t — about printing a newspaper."]

By 8:44, the presses are rolling at a modest clip. Crews grab from the conveyor early copies being sidelined as waste. They thumb through pages to make sure the ink density is proper, that the color is in registration, the margins are set, pagination perfect, date accurate. [annotation q="Did you know the phrase “ink density” before working on this story? " a="I certainly did not, but I like using the vernacular of the people I’m writing about. Of course, editors will sometimes question the word or the phrase if it is too esoteric, so I’m careful to pick language that is somewhat understandable, especially in context. I feel this give the piece a sense of authority and confidence that readers are looking for when they commit to reading it."]

They make refinements and by 9:15 set the throttle to a full gallop, 45,000 papers an hour. Overhead, the newsprint whips by in a blur, running through a succession of cylinders inked cyan, magenta, yellow and black, before converging into a central machine that folds and cuts it into individual papers.

They feel that familiar thrum in their chests. They breathe the moist, almost humid air, and still marvel that such brutish machinery can produce such delicate results.

“It’s like an NFL player who can also be a ballerina,” Hamalainen said. “There is so much strength, power, endurance and finesse in this equipment.”

They find it hard to believe that once they are done, the presses will be dismantled and sold for scrap. The building and the property will be turned into movie and television production studios, said a spokesperson for the owner, Atlas Capital Group.

Then at 10:31, the pitch of the whirring presses begins to drop as they slow, soon coming to a stop with 107,481 copies printed.

A few minutes later, a voice comes over a loudspeaker: “No finals.”

And they are done. A conveyor clatters as the last papers are carried to the bundlers. The first delivery truck has already left. The last truck will leave at 12:45 a.m.

The swing shift now scatters. Some of the crew strip plates off the presses. Some sit back and read tomorrow’s news, eschewing The Times’ website for the printed paper. [annotation q="I’m fond of this observation. Do you recall at what point it struck you as something that should be included?" a="This was a terrific moment in the reporting. The presses were running down; the last final copies of the paper were heading to the trucks. I was scribbling in my notebook, capturing these last details — this was after all the money moment, the end of it all — when I looked up. And there were most of the pressmen holding tomorrow’s paper, busy reading the stories, spending time with the reporters’ and photographers’ work beyond the requirements of their jobs. It gave me a sense of solidarity: that we are involved in this daily miracle.

I’d like to think they were doing the same thing the night this particular story was printed."]

A few head to the cafeteria to watch a movie on their phones or to the fitness room for a few reps before heading home.

The witching hour has begun, a disquieting moment for them to have nothing to do. Usually, they’d be cleaning presses and getting ready for another run, but today such diligence doesn’t make much sense.

Hamalainen steps out onto the balcony where some of the crew has gathered.

From this vantage, the Olympic plant has always felt vital to Los Angeles. Two miles away, the skyscrapers of the financial district light up in the night sky, windows glowing against the darkness. City Hall glows blue and yellow in honor of Ukraine on the second anniversary of the war. Distant sirens and horns and the whoosh of the nearby freeway provide the accompanying pulse.

They speak easily among themselves, their emotions masked by familiar banter, old memories and pride.

“It used to be that the quietest time was Sunday morning,” said Hamalainen, once the week’s final run completed at 2:30 a.m.

“Yeah, and in those days, Macy’s was the big advertiser,” said pressman Joaquin Velazquez, 65. He started in 1984. “Remember that? Now, maybe there will be one ad.”

“Used to be a 16-pounder on Black Fridays.”

“Yep, and more than a million papers every day.” [annotation q=" How did you capture this bit of dialogue?" a="This is one of those moments that I live for when reporting a story like this: a chance to let the characters interview one another. Well, in this case, maybe not interview each other, but riff spontaneously with each other as we all tend to do in daily conversation. I especially like how they naturally began to reminisce. And yes, I was standing there not saying a thing, just trying to keep up as I wrote down their conversation. "]

They know they’re running on habit and adrenaline. They know there will be a bit of a freefall once they’re done.

“They’re hiring at the Arizona Republic and the Bay Area News Group and the Las Vegas Review-Journal,” Hamalainen said. “There’s work, but you have to be willing to move away.”

Velazquez draws on his cigarette. Soon, he will no longer be commuting four hours a day from his home in Eastvale.

“It’s sad to see it come to an end like this, but we’re blessed to hit the finish line,” Velazquez said.

“You know, I think I’m going to sneak back in, just to see it all cleared out,” Hamalainen said. “This is going to be one big empty building.” [annotation q="How did you come to end on this line?" a=" At its peak, this printing plant was running almost 20 hours a day, seven days a week. When the presses were going full speed, it must have felt like you were standing next to a locomotive flying down the track. It’s louds, it’s fast, it’s furious. So there we are at the end of the shift, one of the last shifts for these men, and as I listened to them, I heard such disbelief, incredulity that it was all coming to an end for them. And for this building — this magnificent building.

That seemed the story’s natural ending too, coming from Kal. It allowed me to plant the seed in the readers’ mind, to let them do the work and imagine how empty and cavernous this building will be once everything is removed, shipped off and carted away. "]

* * *

Trevor Pyle is a veteran newspaper reporter from the Pacific Northwest who now works as a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.

The post A profile of a newspaper press becomes a requiem for an era appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When Ruby Cramer of The Washington Post drove up to Norfolk, Mass., it was in pursuit of a story that couldn’t be more timely — or timeless. Cramer had seen local news reports about the small town and fractures over an emergency migrant shelter to be opened in a former prison there. She wanted to learn more, and after several weeks of listening, note-taking and reporting, had a story that tapped into both current battles and ancient fears.

While there are anxious, angry outbursts from some town members opposed to the shelter, Cramer doesn’t let that tone dominate “The shelter and the storm,” instead wrapping it around a local — and normally conservative — elected official who takes a more open approach, noting: “People are afraid of change and differences.”

Cramer’s story, published Sept. 7, 2024, as a Washington Post Deep Read, includes opponents and supporters of the shelter, and those who are questioning but not strident. But the reporter didn’t confine herself to the town limits. She traveled to Logan Airport in Boston to speak to some of the migrants themselves, allowing them to tell their own story in their own voice.

All this took time, immersion and patience.

“My editor on this story, David Finkel, who understands the challenges of immersion better than anyone, says that you need to get to the point where you can be in a room with someone you’re writing about long enough so that they can feel comfortable with a long moment of silence without trying to fill it,” Cramer said. “I find it really hard to do.”

In the end, Cramer’s strides toward that state produced a deeply felt, deeply reported story that reified an issue too often painted in extreme political strokes, not nuanced personal ones. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Kurt Streeter of The New York Times took a different but equally successful approach to the same issue in a piece from Eau Claire, Wis.)

Cramer agreed to annotate her story for Nieman Storyboard. Her answers have been edited for length and clarity.

ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Cramer’s answers in blue.

The shelter and the storm

What happened when the nation’s immigration crisis came to a small town in Massachusetts

Story by Ruby Cramer
Photography by Jodi Hilton
The Washington Post
September 7, 2024 at 3:05 a.m.

NORFOLK, Mass. — Here was the town where Kevin Roche grew up: empty sidewalks, a coffee shop, a pharmacy, two pizza parlors, two ambulances, two roundabouts and no grocery store. A small, quiet town, people in Norfolk said. Pleasant. Safe. Nothing much to do, and that meant nothing much changed from one morning to the next or the next, until this morning, when Kevin woke up and knew that the town would be different by the time the day was over. [annotation q="How did Norfolk’s shelter come to your attention? What made you see a story in it?" a="The stories I’m working on this year are all about the idea of anger. Anger can be an expression of so many different emotions and states of change – fear, loneliness, outrage, isolation, loss, connection or lack of connection. My editor and I knew we wanted to do a story about immigration and the anger and fear it’s brought out in cities and towns across the country over the last few years. We thought about a few big cities: Chicago, New York, Denver. Eventually I found a few local news stories about Norfolk, Mass., a small town where the state was about to open an emergency migrant shelter in a vacant prison. At the time, the shelter had yet to open and the town was still pushing for more information. Residents were asking basic questions like when the shelter would open, how many families it would house, how it would affect town services like health care and the school system. But people in Norfolk were also trying to figure out in real time how they really felt about the news and what kind of town this was going to become. It was the most appealing kind of assignment. We didn’t know what was going to happen. The story was still unfolding."] [annotation q="I happen to be reading a book titled “The Science of Storytelling” by Will Storr, and one of its topic is how wired humans are to perceive change. How did you land on this first paragraph to set a similar theme: The Norfolk its residents were used to, on the verge of perceived change?" a="I wanted the lede to be a baseline I could return to at the end of the story: the visual of a small, quiet town. I wanted to establish a familiar sense of stasis that might be associated with any small town, while at the same time suggesting that that stasis was about to be altered and complicated in the mind of the reader, just like it would be for Kevin and the rest of the people in the story."]

He got in his car and drove toward Main Street just before 7 a.m. Main Street ran from one end of Norfolk to the other, four miles in all, and it led to the auto repair shop where Kevin, 60, had worked since he was 12 years old, first for his father, and now alongside his own son. He passed the line of houses he saw every morning, which were the same, except for the ones that had new signs in the yard. “NORFOLK PRISON-SHELTER,” they read. “NOT SAFE FOR ANYONE.”

At the east end of Main Street, razor wire was being removed from a chain-link fence around Bay State Correctional Center, an unused low-security state prison half a mile from Kevin’s shop. At the foot of the fence, rows of thick coil lay in the grass. Security guards stood at the front gates. Cribs and diaper kits sat on the floor of the prison gym. Clean, white sheets lay on the beds.

Later that day, the state would reopen the prison as an emergency shelter for pregnant women and families with children, most of them migrants who had been granted parole at the border to legally enter the country and who were in the process of applying for asylum or temporary protected status. Twenty-four families, or about 75 people, would be the first to arrive. [annotation q="This is elegantly done — observing the visible changes on Kevin’s route, then explaining how they tied into the imminent opening of the emergency shelter. What do you remember about writing this opening, and what you were trying to accomplish with it?" a="There was almost too much to establish in this first section: Kevin; the prison that was about to become a shelter; the migrant crisis in Massachusetts; the auto repair shop; the protest planned for later that evening; the sense of discord in town. I wanted to just keep it as simple as possible and take it step by step, using Kevin’s route to work as a framework I could use to my advantage."]

“There’s only 24 of ’em,” Kevin told his son, Adam, when he got to the shop.

“Today?” Adam asked.

“Two buses, yeah.” [annotation q="You include dialogue throughout. How did you record and transcribe it? How challenging was it to determine what to use and what to leave out?" a="I took notes and was often recording, but not always. I needed this piece of dialogue to get the reader inside the shop, and to establish that in a matter of hours, a bus would be coming down the road and the shelter would open."]

Kevin had heard that the people coming would be Haitian migrants who were living in Terminal E at Logan International Airport, about 30 miles northeast in Boston. They had arrived among record numbers of people crossing the U.S. border since 2022 and had been placed on a wait list to enter the state’s overcrowded shelter system. In Massachusetts, caseloads of families seeking shelter had more than doubled since the year before, and now there were more people waiting at Logan Airport every day and no room for them all. The state had opened new shelters in towns across Massachusetts, but none so big in a town so small as the one planned for Norfolk, population 11,000.

By the fall, Kevin had heard, as many as 405 people could be living at the prison.

The door opened and a man handed Kevin a piece of paper about a protest scheduled for later that day on Main Street. “Signs will be provided,” it read. “Bring anyone you can.”

Kevin folded the paper in half and placed it on the counter. It had been six weeks since the state informed Norfolk about its plans, and he had never seen the town’s residents so angry, either about the shelter or at one another. Three days before the news, he’d been elected to the town’s small governing board, and since then, some of the anger had been coming into his shop. People wanted to know how the shelter would affect their school system, their taxes, their 911 call volume, their sewage, the houses and cars they liked to leave unlocked at night, and now some of them wanted to know if Kevin was going to the protest that evening at the center of town. [annotation q="One thing that jumps out is the story’s use of a “viewpoint character” of sorts in Kevin Roche. You include other people in the story, but Kevin is the clothesline the story hangs on. How did you encounter him, and how did you decide on his role in the story?" a="I love the idea of Kevin as the line the rest of the story hangs on. I hadn’t heard of Kevin before I came to town, and I was still learning what a “select board” was — an old tradition of local town government in Massachusetts. On my first day in Norfolk, someone mentioned that the newest select board member was a guy named Kevin who ran the auto repair shop just down the road from the prison where the shelter was going to open. If all that sounded “perfect” for story-telling purposes, I absolutely did not realize it quickly. But I did think an auto repair shop sounded like a fun place to hang out, so I pulled up, introduced myself and tried to explain the story I wanted to do (not really knowing what the story was yet). The auto repair shop was in fact really fun and jocular. There were always a bunch of guys there, and people in town would stop by on a daily basis not to fix their brakes or whatever, but just to talk to Kevin. After about an hour there, I realized that because Kevin was a member of the town government (and the most conservative member of the town government), there were a lot of people coming into the shop to talk about the shelter. It was, luckily for me, a big topic of discussion in town, so I didn’t really have to prompt anyone to speak about it. Another thing I noticed quickly about Kevin was that even though he’d laugh at other people’s jokes about the shelter, he very rarely offered his own opinion about it. He was such a loud guy, just in terms of volume; if you listen to the audio version of this story, produced by my very talented colleague, Bishop Sand, you can hear this for yourself! But on the subject of the shelter, he seemed reserved and quiet. That was really interesting to me. We kept in touch after meeting and when I came back for a second week in the town, I asked Kevin if I could write about him and use his shop as a home base."]

“Absolutely not,” Kevin told a man stopping by the shop.

“Let’s see how many people they can get,” the man said. “Never ends here.” [annotation q="Did everyone whose dialogue you recorded know they were being recorded? " a="By this time, I was nearing the end of my reporting, so I’d spent about three weeks in the town and already talked with Kevin and the other mechanics about the story I was doing and the methods I was using. I’d also learned a lot about their lives and talked with each of them individually."]

“You think they’re getting some walking-around money when they show up here?” Adam asked.

“Where are they gonna walk to?” a mechanic named Jack said.

“They’re gonna walk up to Dunkin’ Donuts and Walgreens,” Adam said.

Another mechanic who had been listening said, “Imagine if there was a sign saying, ‘Jesus loves you and so do we.’ You think the warm welcome will —” [annotation q="Sometimes you identify speakers; other times you just use brief descriptions but no names. What determined that? " a="There was one mechanic at the shop who didn’t want to be named. Of course, I wanted to respect that, so we used this bit of dialogue anonymously. I wanted to include it because Jack’s quick and sort of waggish response gives you an immediate sense of how the guys are with one another. That was really important."]

“Shut up,” Jack said.

“Norfolk Auto, this is Kevin speaking,” Kevin said when a customer called. In the garage, the car lift screeched, raising a truck toward the ceiling. “The wheels are junk?” Kevin asked, before the door opened and another customer walked inside to talk about a woman who had accused him of spreading paranoia and fear about the shelter. “She said, ‘We don’t need conspiracy —’ and, um, what did she say? ‘Xenophobia.’ Using all the right phrases.”

Kevin laughed but said nothing.

“You gotta go to the tribal model,” the man went on. “You take care of your own first, right?”

Again, Kevin said nothing. He kept his eyes on the window. Here was the town, about to make room for 24 new families. [annotation q="One facet of this story I appreciated as a reader is how the factual information about immigration, the shelter, etc. is parceled out in small doses. There’s no sense of running up against expository paragraphs. How deliberate were you in how you sprinkled the drier — but still important — information throughout the narrative? " a="Thank you! I don’t like nut graphs and find them difficult to write, so I avoided one. Sorry to all my past and future editors."] He watched the cars pass by, scanning the road for signs of a bus.

***

THREE WEEKS EARLIER, Kevin had looked out across an auditorium as people began to yell. He had told himself that as the newest member of the Norfolk “select board,” composed of three elected officials who set the policies for the town, his job at that night’s town meeting was to remain neutral and open. Seated on the stage, he tried to keep a blank expression on his face as a panel of four state officials took questions about the plan to convert the prison into a shelter.

In the aisle, people lined up for a turn at the microphone. “I am angry,” one woman said. Her son, who was disabled, had lost his health insurance, she told the state officials on the stage. “I’m an American citizen. Americans should get help first.”

Shouting filled the room.

Before the panel could respond, the next person approached the microphone and began to speak. “Answer the first question,” the woman who’d just spoken yelled from her seat. “Answer my question!” On the stage, the chair of the select board, Jim Lehan, rose from his seat. “Ma’am. Ma’am, please,” he said. “We’re gonna get nowhere if we act this way.” But the meeting went on just like that, for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, for more than an hour. Now another person was at the microphone, telling the state about her own son, who was 5 years old and allergic to bees. “What happens if Lucas gets stung?” she asked. What if the ambulances in Norfolk were busy at the shelter instead of tending to the town? “What do I say: ‘I’m sorry, Lucas, we tried’?” [annotation q="You capture this scene vividly. What do you want readers to understand — or feel — when they read this recap of the select board meeting? " a="I wasn’t present for this meeting. The local coverage of the meeting was the reason I found Norfolk in the first place. The entire thing was available on YouTube and I later talked with all the characters mentioned to get a sense of what they were feeling at the time. I wanted readers to feel tense as they read it, and to hear the noise and anticipate it building. It was also important to us to present people’s concerns about the shelter as legitimate and to treat those concerns fairly."]

“At this stage in the game, they’re coming in two weeks,” a man said. “And you can’t tell us —”

“— ANYTHING,” someone else shouted.

But there were some things the state officials onstage had been able to tell them: that these were families who “really have nowhere else to go.” That the site would be reserved for pregnant women and families, including children up to age 21. The occupants could include a combination of people seeking asylum and homeless Massachusetts residents. And the shelter being set up for them at Bay State Correctional Center would be temporary — open for six to 12 months.

“It’s a simple yes or no,” a woman at the microphone said now. “Can you, today, guarantee every single person in this room that within 12 months, this site will be closed?”

“Our plan is to close it within six to 12 months,” one of the state officials repeated.

“So that’s a no,” the woman said, and more yelling began.

“That’s a no,” one person shouted. “Well?” another said. “Yes or no?” another said. [annotation q="There’s a lot of yelling, a lot of cross talk, a lot of sheer verbiage from this meeting. How much did you work with an editor, if at all, to capture it?" a="My editor really helped tighten this section. He helped me see that as tense as the meeting was, the scene needed to unfold with a sense of ease. I had originally spent way too much time introducing the other characters in the piece, like Taiese and Ron."]

A few rows back, Taiese Bingham-Hickman, 41, decided to say something. She was a Black resident in a town that was 85 percent White, and she’d been reading more and more racist comments on the town’s community Facebook page. [annotation q="Where did you find the demographic data for Norfolk? " a="The census."]

She wondered what kind of language the kids in town might be hearing from their parents. She thought of her own two sons, and worried that they, along with the children at the shelter, might be bullied at school. [annotation q="You’re able to get an insightful summary of how Taiese was feeling; when were you able to speak with her?" a="Taiese was the first person I reached out to in Norfolk. I had seen her speak up at a bunch of town meetings online and we had many conversations."]

Now she faced the panel on the stage. “I just want to apologize for the disrespect that you’ve received thus far,” she said. Behind her, some people began to clap and nod. Then shouting and booing broke out across the room.

The next woman to speak approached the microphone and turned around to face the town. “I would, as a White person, ask that this majority-White room think before we boo the single Black resident who has said that we have been extremely disrespectful,” she said.

Now there was groaning, and more booing, and a few people stood up to leave.

“I’m truly disgusted,” the woman at the microphone said.

People yelled back at her.

The meeting was nearing the two-hour mark. The select board chair stood again. “If we can’t be more respectful of each other, we’ll call this meeting off,” he told the crowd.

“People are angry,” someone shouted.

From his seat, Ron Tibbetts, 70, an Episcopal deacon, thought he’d heard the words “rapists” and “pedophiles” from somewhere in the crowd. When it was his turn to speak, he told the officials onstage that despite the anger in the room, there was a “quiet group of people” who were ready to welcome the families to the town. “They have decided to stand up and say, ‘These are families like our families, children like our children,’” he said.

“They’re not,” a man in the audience said, cutting him off.

“They are,” Ron said.

He turned to the audience now and asked that quiet group of people to stand up — “if you are courageous enough.”

In the back of the room, another man began to yell. “Anyone who doesn’t agree with what’s going on here, stand up,” the man said, and people across the room rose from their seats.

Through it all, Kevin watched from the stage. Then he felt the eyes in the crowd shift. A man in the audience was talking to him.

“The new selectman?” the man said. “Time to step up and fight.”

Some people started to clap.

“Any comment to that?” the man asked.

“Nope,” Kevin said. “Not one.”

[annotation q="Tell me what the reporting process was for this story — and any challenges that existed specific to it." a="I think my editor and I discussed the Norfolk idea for the first time on a Monday, and on that Wednesday, I drove to Norfolk. From watching a few news clips of local town meetings, I was able to reach out to a few people in town to meet with me. But we left it open-ended. The first week I was there, my only goal was to try to get an understanding of the town and meet as many people as I could. The good thing about a relatively small town (population 11,000) was that I was able to get around easily and establish relationships quickly. Eventually, people who were vocal about the shelter came to know me and even expected to see me around. I think most of them understood that I was trying to capture something in-depth and treat the town humanely. But it took a while to get there. The first week, I had no idea who I would end up writing about. The second week, I had a sense of who the characters in the story might be, but no clue as to what would come of it. By the third week, the shelter was about to open, and we had a good sense of the loose shape of the story and who we wanted to structure the piece around."] [annotation q="Did this story change much from your first conception to what it eventually became?" a="It did, in the sense that we left it so open in the beginning. At first, we thought the story would be set before and after the shelter opened. Eventually we made the decision to limit it to the three weeks leading up to the shelter opening, because it offered a natural structure for the piece and a lot of emotional possibility. I think if we went in with any idea of what the story might be, it was this idea of the “angry town.” Once I met Kevin, and especially once I spent time in Logan Airport, where dozens of migrant families were staying, it became (I hope) something more than that."]

***

A FEW DAYS LATER, at the auto shop, Adam, Kevin’s son, pulled up a video clip about the meeting on his phone. Kevin leaned over the counter to watch, and saw himself seated on the stage, silent.

“Both of the other select men spoke and pissed people off,” he said, talking about his two colleagues on the town’s select board. “I sat there and was quiet the whole meeting.”

When he was at his shop, Kevin was loud. All the mechanics were, but Kevin was the loudest. “Hey, dumbass,” he would say, or “Hey, jackass.” In the garage, the mechanics had to speak over the sound of the radio that was always playing, or the hammering, or the car lift going up and down, or the bells that sounded every time the door opened or the phone rang. Kevin’s father, who’d started the business in 1977, had been even louder. If he had a disagreement, he’d throw people out of the shop, screaming mad, but Kevin didn’t do that.

“There’s a difference,” he said.

“There’s a difference between what?” Adam said.

“Being loud and screaming.” Kevin said.

“I’ve heard him scream,” Jack said.

“But not often.” [annotation q="I like this little bit of dialogue. Why did you choose to include it?" a="I loved this exchange. I heard it from the other room (again, Kevin speaks very loudly, so that helped) and knew it could accomplish something useful. For me, it’s about the difference between being loud and being angry (“screaming”). Or between listening and reacting. I think Kevin was someone who was trying to navigate that line."]

Kevin did not think of himself as an angry person, and he did not share the outrage he’d heard in the auditorium that night, though he knew there were some in town who assumed that he did.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have concerns about the shelter. He worried about how it would affect the already overcrowded school system. He didn’t know how teachers were supposed to accommodate dozens of new students who didn’t speak English. And he didn’t know what might happen to the town’s tax revenue if people decided to move away because of the shelter. Taxes were already high. People who’d lived in Norfolk their whole lives, when it was still a town of dairy and chicken farms, were being priced out.

But the migrant families themselves — “I wouldn’t really say it worries me.”

“I don’t feel they’re gonna be walking down the street with knives,” he said. “There are White people from America that are just as much of s—heads. But people are afraid of change and differences.”

When it came to politics, Kevin considered himself a conservative. He had run for office to keep taxes from going up year after year, and to stop what he saw as unnecessary spending. Now he figured he was probably the most conservative member of the select board. But his idea of government in a town this size wasn’t political. Kevin was attracted to the idea of service. He volunteered at town service clubs and did fundraising walks for breast cancer almost every year, once flying to 10 states to walk 600 miles at different Susan G. Komen events. He didn’t want to be known as “the Republican” on the select board. If he represented one side and not the other, he thought, “you’re not representing all the people,” and that was one reason he’d been so quiet at the public forum.

But now his silence had led to another invitation to speak. He had been asked to meet with the Norfolk Republican Town Committee, and he had agreed to the meeting, so long as they knew there wasn’t much more he wanted to say about the shelter, at least not until he had more information.

“I’m gonna talk about myself and all that. They want to know Kevin Roche.”

***

EXCEPT THAT WASN’T what they wanted to know. Instead, the Norfolk Republicans wanted Kevin to talk about why the state had “railroaded” and “handcuffed” the town. They asked whether the migrant families moving to Norfolk would be able to “just go out and roam the streets and all that,” and they wanted to know what Kevin was going to do about it. “We do not want this going on,” the chair of the Norfolk Republicans told him. “So, I mean, just don’t roll over and die.”

“Well, we’re not,” Kevin replied.

“We want somebody in there fighting for us.”

“Well, we are fighting for you, but we can’t fight out in the street,” he said. [annotation q="Tell me how you got into this meeting, and how you recorded dialogue there. Did you get any resistance?" a="I had heard about the meeting when I first got into town and asked Kevin if I could go with him. Once I got there, I also introduced myself to the committee chairwoman and asked for her permission to be there."] [annotation q="Journalists are often criticized for “parachuting into” a story that’s outside their geographic coverage area, but this story reflects that you took time to immerse yourself in the community. What steps did you take to understand as many facets of it as you did?" a="I think you are always parachuting into a place, to a certain degree, even if it’s on the beat you cover every day. Your presence alone as a reporter affects your surroundings, no matter how much you try to disappear. I tried to immerse myself in the town as much as possible. I talked to plenty of people who never made it into the story, to try to understand the town and how it’s changed over the years. I spent hours at Kevin’s shop, so that he and the other mechanics there got used to me."]

Now Bill Crane, 83, a man Kevin knew, stood up to address the room. He ran a local talk show on the town’s public-access television channel, and before that had been a teacher at a church, where the older students used to complain all the time about Norfolk. “It’s a stupid little town, and there’s nothing to do,” they would say, and he would tell them, “Now just hold your horses. You’re gonna grow up and, God willing, live here in Norfolk again and raise your family here — and you will find that this stupid little town with nothing to do is a safe oasis.” There was no crime here, he said. There were safe, open spaces.

“We want to keep Norfolk the way it is. We don’t want to see it degraded.”

Kevin nodded. “I agree,” he said. “We don’t want crime coming to town and everything else and all that.”

Bill seemed satisfied with the answer, and Kevin walked away from the meeting thinking that maybe all the town needed was another opportunity to air its frustrations. The next day, he drove to the town hall building to see Kate O’Brien, 39, Norfolk’s assistant town administrator.

“Is there any way we can schedule another public forum?” he asked when he got to her office.

Kate looked at him from across her desk.

“I mean, I can always bring it up,” she said.

“I feel we have to,” he said.

Kate, who had been onstage next to Kevin during the first meeting, had seen her job go from balancing budget items for a town of 11,000 to managing a small corner of the nation’s immigration crisis. At the meeting that night, she’d noticed herself shaking, and the physical response had surprised her. She had never thought of Norfolk as a liberal town, but that had never mattered before. It had been 10 years since she’d started to work her way up the ladder of municipal government, attending graduate school at night to get her master’s degree. [annotation q="I like that you included a small, relevant background sketch of Kate to place her reluctance in context; when did you have the opportunity to speak to her? Why did you choose to include the background you did?" a="Similar to Taiese, Kate was someone I spoke to quite a bit. She had an office at the town hall building and I would stop by every few days just to say hi. I liked that she was someone who dealt with the nuts and bolts of running the town. She told me that she was a “West Wing” fan and pursued a career in local government because she really believed in it. I was interested in the way her ideals were being tested by what was happening in town."]

Now the questions she was asking herself surprised her, too. “Why am I so affected by this? Is this worth it for me, mentally? Is this what I want? Do I want to be screamed at?” The morning after the forum, she’d found a voicemail waiting for her at the office. It was another angry voice, but instead of screaming, the man on the tape spoke calmly as he used racist slurs to talk about migrants and described scenes of sexual violence. “My mom always taught me not to wish bad things on people,” Kate heard the man say, “but I hope it comes out to every one of you motherf—ers.”

“I hear you,” she told Kevin now, but Kate did not want to hold another forum yet. It would just be one more opportunity for the people in Norfolk to show how angry they had become.

Across town, other people were getting messages, too.

Taiese Bingham-Hickman was home with her two sons one night when she got a call from an unknown number. When she answered, she heard a man yelling, “Get on your knees,” and then she heard him say the n-word, and then she hung up and called the police. When her kids asked why a squad car was parked outside the house that night, and the next day, and the day after that, Taiese didn’t want to tell them the truth. “Never in my life have I received or experienced anything like that,” she wrote on Facebook afterward. [annotation q="Did you learn about these slurs on Taiese from her Facebook page or from somewhere else? " a="I heard about it while I was at Ron Tibbetts’s house talking with him about something else; he’d just seen her post about it on Facebook, and he told me what happened. I called Taiese as soon as I left Ron’s house."]

The days passed, and across town, more Facebook posts came, followed by fights in the comments sections.

— “This ‘not safe for anyone’ business is a barely disguised anti-immigrant trope.”

— “Don’t lock your doors. It’s up to you.”

— “Thank you for clarifying your real issue is the nationality and skin color of those coming.”

— “Excuse me? Do you know how to read? Where did I say anything about skin color?”

A new feeling of anticipation and tension settled over the town. “If people want to reduce anger, which could lead to hate or crime, be nice,” one woman wrote online, suggesting people start offering one another a conciliatory smile or wave. Ron Tibbetts liked that idea, but when he’d written his own Facebook post about remembering to “see the people in all of this,” someone else accused him of “performance kindness,” a phrase he’d never heard.

Among the most vocal in town, two groups formed.

On one side, the Concerned Citizens of Norfolk began selling “Not Safe for Anyone” yard signs for $10 apiece. On the other, the Norfolk Welcome Wagon decided they should have signs, too, except no one could agree on a design. One person said they should be red, white and blue, because the “Not Safe for Anyone” signs were red, white and blue. Another person said that might appear adversarial. Another said a neutral color might be better. Another suggested that instead of making new signs, they should pull out the other signs in the middle of the night. [annotation q="This graf has a jaunty, the frogurt-is-also-cursed rhythm — this is a Simpsons reference, sorry — and ends with a morbidly funny sentence. What impression did you want readers to get from this paragraph? What do you remember about writing and organizing it? " a="100% on the reference! You’re right that the tone of this graph sort of stands out from the rest of the piece. I didn’t want to be flippant about it, but I also wanted the graph to have a sort of spiraling, tripping-over-itself feel. The shelter is about to open, whether the town is ready for it or not. There’s also the sense that even the “non-angry” people in town, those who were ready to welcome the shelter, had moments of becoming caught up in emotion or resentment."]

Rumors were spreading that the shelter would open soon, but state officials still wouldn’t tell the town a date or time. They told Kate they were worried protesters might try to block the roads.

At the prison, contractors began working overnight. Razor wire began to come down.

More signs went up. Plans formed for a protest in the roundabout on Main Street.

Everyone had their own idea of who was about to come to town, including Kevin.

He imagined “a bunch of pregnant women and children,” mostly from Haiti, a country he didn’t know much about, except to think that it was a dangerous place. He didn’t know what language the families would speak, except to think that it wouldn’t be English. And he had only heard a few things on the news about what was happening at Terminal E in Logan Airport. But he had seen the inside of the prison. He knew it had a gym, a cafeteria and bedrooms that looked like dorm rooms, not cells, so he could at least imagine that, for anyone, it would be a better place to sleep than the floor of the airport.

“You know, it might be just totally fine,” he said.

***

THIRTY MILES AWAY, on the ground floor of Logan Airport, Terminal E, travelers were passing through a long alcove with floor-to-ceiling windows. There was not much in the alcove, except for a bathroom, two hand sanitizer machines, three trash cans and, along the wall, a row of crowd-control stanchion posts with retractable belts. The floors were clean and polished. Flight attendants passed by. An employee pushed a rack of luggage carts through the hall and disappeared through a back door. Everyone who entered was either arriving or departing, until a man, a woman and a boy walked into the alcove and stopped.

They put their luggage on the floor and sat on the radiator against the wall. The boy ran to and from a trash can. A few minutes later, another family entered and stayed. They took two of the stanchions and extended the retractable belts to create a border parallel to the wall. A few minutes after that, another family arrived and did the same. Soon, three families became three dozen. They opened their suitcases. They pulled out blankets and spread them in neat rows on the floor. They unrolled foam pads. They unpacked pillows, sleeping bags and more blankets. They dragged more stanchions into place, until they connected to create an aisle down the center of the space.

These were the people headed to Norfolk, and this was the place where they were living. Every morning, they woke up at the airport, packed everything they owned and were driven to one of the state’s “family welcome centers,” where they spent the day. Every evening, they returned to the airport, unpacked their things and slept. “Welcome to Massachusetts,” the governor’s voice said on a loop through a loudspeaker one level above. [annotation q="The “Welcome to Massachusetts” line is a great environmental detail. Do you recall when you realized it would make a worthwhile inclusion? " a="I heard it on a moving walkway. I wanted it to be a discordant note – and a familiar one. It’s the sort of thing you hear in airports. The rest of what you read is not usually the sort of thing you hear in airports."]

Along the wall, a 16-year-old girl named Nika watched the nightly routine unfold alongside her mother, her father, her younger sister, several suitcases and three layers of blankets spread out on the floor. She had been at the airport for 18 days now, she said. Her family had left Haiti for Brazil, and they had lived there for five years before beginning a journey she described as harrowing — north through the Darién Gap, across the U.S. border and eventually to Boston, where she had no idea what would happen to her next, outside of life in the airport and the cordoned-off living area that was erected each night and put away again each morning.

“Let’s say we are living a monotonous life,” Nika said.

At night, Nika sat against the wall or played cards with the other families at the airport. Or she stared up at the skywalk overhead, where she often saw travelers lean over the railing, taking pictures to post on the internet. Sometimes, she saw the posts on Instagram or TikTok, with “horrible comments” about “dirtying their country” and being “beggars,” she said. She knew that in life, there were people who tried “to make you believe that you’re not normal and you don’t fit into their world,” she said. “And when it happens, you kind of need to walk away.” But there was nowhere to go at the airport, so she found other ways. She liked to read romance novels and listen to music. She wrote her own stories and practiced her English by watching videos online.

When she saw the posts about the airport, she tried to believe that every person was inherently good, and that she was, too. Everyone was good at something, she said — only “maybe we are not in the right place to develop our talent.” Albert Einstein might be considered the most intelligent man of all time, but “think if he went to a city where he needs to fish to survive,” she said. “If he doesn’t know how, will he be considered an idiot for not knowing how to fish in a city where even children know how?”

Nika’s father placed her sister’s head on a pillow. At night, the airport got cold, and many of the kids staying there, including Nika’s sister, were sick, she said. “People are here out of necessity. It wasn’t a choice — ‘Then I woke up one day and I’m going to have an adventure and live in an airport.’” She hoped to get a job to help them. And she had other hopes, too: to go to school and to one day learn nine languages. She already knew Portuguese, Creole, Spanish, and some English and French, and she wanted to learn Italian and Mandarin next. Most of all, she wanted this trip to end, and for her, that meant “when I can finally sleep in peace. [annotation q="I was grateful when I realized you’d included Nika as one of the voices in this story after so much speculation, fearmongering and assumptions about the people on their way to Norfolk. How did you report this section? What do you remember most vividly about writing and editing it?" a="I went to Logan a few times to try to understand the rhythms of the day for the people staying there. Every night, this remarkable transformation occurred every day from an empty terminal to a vast array of people and blankets and suitcases. It was difficult to find someone who spoke some English. A few other kids directed me to Nika, and she agreed to talk. We spoke for several hours. At points, when she had something longer she wanted to say, she would write down her thoughts in Portuguese. She was incredibly wise. The editing of this section was a big lesson for me. My editor understood, again, that the section and Nika’s story needed to unfold gradually."]

“A house where I know I’ll rest after the rush of the day, you know?

“But I don’t think about it too much.”

Now it was dark outside, but the lights in the airport stayed on. Nika’s sister was asleep.

People walked to and from the bathroom to wash up. Flip-flops and sandals lay scattered on the floor. Pizza boxes were passed around. It was almost 9 p.m. Amid the sprawl of suitcases and backpacks, there was a boy holding a balloon. A girl lying on her stomach, her feet dangling in the air. A toddler rolling on the ground, trying to crawl. A man with pages of documents spread out in front of him. A mother and father lying down, a child between them. All around, there were families trying to get to sleep, and in the midst of them, a 16-year-old girl sat alone against the wall. “Some call me lonely,” Nika said, “but I feel more lonely when I’m in a place where I don’t fit in, so I prefer to be left alone, because true loneliness is when you’re surrounded by people who don’t value you.” [annotation q="Did this quote jump out immediately?" a="Yes. Originally I had it higher. My editor suggested we end the section with it to give it time and space to make a deeper impact. He was right."]

***

“HEY, JACKASS,” Kevin said.

“There’s only one jackass in this room, and it’s you,” a mechanic said back.

“Oh yeah,” Kevin laughed.

The phone rang. The car lift went up. The radio was on, as usual, as a bus pulled up at the prison.

Kevin didn’t see it, and if anyone else did, no one called or came by to let him know. Too far to be seen from the road, the bus came to a stop, and the families stepped off and looked around. No one could say for sure how long they would be in Norfolk. The families’ stays would be determined case by case, with families leaving and new families arriving on a rolling basis. The one certainty: The first of the migrants were here.

At the shop, Kevin kept working. He glanced out the window now and then, until it was late afternoon, and two miles away, at the center of town, people opposed to the shelter began to gather for their protest.

Some held “Not Safe for Anyone” signs. Others held new signs that read “No K!ds in Prison.” The plan was to stay until rush hour was over, then drive to the shelter to finish the protest there. People honked as they drove by. Local news cameras arrived.

There were several dozen people now, and across the street, on a hill overlooking the roundabout, Kevin stood, watching. He had decided to come after all. Some of the people in the roundabout he recognized. Some he didn’t. Some he heard yelling. Others stood quietly, waving to cars as they passed. There was a woman driving by, holding up her middle finger. “Bye, moron,” a protester said. There was a young man, waving through his open car window. “Love it! Love it!” he shouted. There was Taiese Bingham-Hickman, walking toward a police sergeant she spotted on the lawn to ask him for an update about the anonymous call. There was Ron Tibbetts, driving by with his wife, taking it all in. There was Kate O’Brien, driving away from town in the other direction, hoping to avoid the protest altogether.

On it went, and Kevin kept watching, reminding himself once more that however the town might change, it might be totally fine.

Now he turned away from the protest and looked up. He saw dark clouds gathering.

The rain fell lightly at first. Then harder. Heavy rain washed over the town.

It came down on the protesters’ signs, which they held above their heads for protection.

It covered the roundabout, Kevin’s shop and the prison down the road.

It pounded down on the roofs of cars parked nearby, where people at the roundabout were retreating. Some walked. Others ran. Cars drove off. The honking stopped. The protest never made it to the prison. As the migrants were settling in for their first night, the roundabout was empty. There was only rain now, and a few abandoned signs on the ground in a small, quiet town, where everyone was seeking shelter. [annotation q="What do you remember about developing this last line? What impression do you hope it leaves readers with?" a="I knew I wanted to return to the image of the small, quiet town from the beginning of the story. I also wanted the pacing of the line to force readers to slow down, almost to a standstill, until it ends with something basic: the idea of shelter."]

* * *

Trevor Pyle is a veteran newspaper reporter from the Pacific Northwest who now works as a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.

The post Finding a quiet voice in the center of America’s screaming immigration debate appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

For almost a year, George Packer — a writer for The Atlantic and winner of the National Book Award — told people he was working on a long-form story about Phoenix, Arizona. The response he got didn’t inspire the kind of confidence journalists seek.

“If I were too susceptible to the expressions on people’s faces I might have given up because it didn’t inspire excitement,” Packer said. “It was more a kind of bafflement.”

Serious readers are fortunate he persevered. “What Will Become of American Civilization?”  is a 25,000-word epic that casts Phoenix as a crystal ball of a city, defined in the story’s subhed: “Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city.” Phoneix is where the battlefields of America’s future — blast-furnace heatwaves, bloody political violence, churning attitudes toward immigration and mean-dog partisanship that all but ignores the human toll — are already engaged.

Packer’s piece, which combines shoe-leather reporting and with essay-like insights, was published online this past June; it runs in the August/September 2024 print edition as “The Valley.” Packer reported and completed his assignment as seismic events continued to play out in the U.S. Before an assassin’s bullet grazed a former president, he wrote of a high-profile politician who weathered threats for standing up for his beliefs. Before the Supreme Court upended laws protecting unhoused people, he wrote of a homeless woman who suffered a second-degree burn from falling on hot pavement during a medical emergency. Beginning, ending and threading throughout his piece is water, a crucial survival resource that is both source and target of the region’s extremist politics — politics likely coming to a community near you.

Packer portrays a number of people who live at the edge of the future, such as Rusty Bowers, formerly a powerful state legislator concerned about the real-world effects of the region’s politics, and Fernando Quiroz, who helps asylum-seekers navigate the quotidian details of crossing the border. Along the way there are appearances by experts and scientists, elected officials and would-be elected officials, and one-time TV star Roseanne Barr.

The piece makes an invocation that Packer calls “bold.” He opens with a tight description of the sophisticated engineering of the Hohokam Indians, who built a thriving culture in the Sonoran Desert a millenium ago, then — for reasons still unknown — vanished. He quickly connects the dots between that past disappearance to the meteoric rise, and possible demise, of modern-day Phoenix. Here’s his opening:

No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.

It grew around water. In 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the steps of the Tempe Normal School, which, half a century later, would become Arizona State University, and declared that the soaring dam just completed in the Superstition Mountains upstream, established during his presidency and named after him, would provide enough water to allow 100,000 people to live in the Valley. There are now 5 million.

He soon follows that with a tight and pointed summary nut :

Growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought, and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence. Democracy is also a fragile artifice. It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls—belief, virtue, restraint. Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.

I was taken with the boldness and complexity of that story frame, so reached out to Packer to talk about his story. His comments were as considered as his magazine piece. This comment stood out: “If it makes the stakes of the confluence of issues seem high, that’s because they are.”

He explained what brought him to that point: “People in Phoenix wonder if Phoenix will be there in 50 years. There’s a threat of extinction hovering over it, which is not something you’d normally write in a more grounded and conventional piece of reporting about a city. But it felt true. I’d heard it. I’d felt it myself: the heat, the unnaturalness of a place in the desert that contributes to it. I wanted to capture that feeling at the start and have it hover over the whole piece, so you’re never entirely at ease. You’re always feeling like this could vanish.”

To capture that mood, Packer and photographer Ashley Gilbertson walk readers section by section, chapter by chapter through the issues and characters boiling away in the Arizona heat: the border, where asylum seekers decide what precious objects to throw away before officials do it for them; a homeless encampment in a county where heat killed hundreds of people last summer; a community where the presence of water is as expensive as it is precarious.

While Packer spent a huge chunk of time on the project, he was sure to note it wasn’t a one-person production: “In addition to Jeff Goldberg and Scott Stossel, the Atlantic’s editors, copy editors, and checkers did a typically amazing job bringing this behemoth to the page.”

Packer agreed to spend some time talking to Storyboard about how “The Valley” came to be. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you settle on Phoenix as emblematic of the future?
Jeff Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor, came to me two years ago and said “I want you to fill an issue of the magazine with a story about some place in America that allows us to ask the question, ‘Is this country a viable concern?’” Which was a rather intimidating assignment.

I’d written a book called “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” which looked back at 40 years of American history from 2012-13. I knew you could take individual lives and extrapolate. So I had an idea: How would that work if it was one place?

As I was pondering this, my editor, Scott Stossel, said, “You should go to Phoenix.” Not the Rust Belt. That was my first thought — Pittsburgh, Milwaukee. But those are well-known stories. They’re the stories of the past more than the future. Phoenix is the story of the future. (Storyboard Note: Read more about Scott Stossel’s editing approach in our series “What makes an effective editor?”)

It wasn’t something I particular relished. I’m not a fan of high heat or urban sprawl and Phoenix has both in amplitude. I feared sitting in a hotel room not knowing how to begin — a kind of dread setting in as I try to figure out how to find my way around this place geographically as well as socially and culturally.

Reporters depend on the kindness of strangers. You’re looking for someone who seems to welcome your presence.

The first two trips, in the summer of 2023, were pretty disappointing. I had the full blast of the desert heat. I didn’t know anybody. I had a few names and hung on to them for dear life. It’s such a big, sprawling place you feel lost, very easily lost. There’s no sense of ‘Here’s where the core of the story is. Here’s the neighborhood you can build out from.’ Or ‘Here’s the community organization that will allow you to make connections between different kinds of people.’ It doesn’t feel that way in Phoenix.

Things got better on subsequent trips. I’m just remembering how much unease there was for me in the first two trips.

When you say things got better, was there one thing that helped you turn the corner? Or was there an accumulation — meeting the right people, going to the right places?
In my experience as a reporter, you begin to know you’re getting somewhere when you pull on a string and it turns out to be connected to more than one thing. Those things lead you to other things. Then you notice a pattern. You start hearing the same names, keep hearing about the same issues and events. You sense the structure of the place, the things that matter to people.

One of them was water. That came up not in a single event or interview but over and over again — first with two experts I went back to again and again to understand this incredibly complicated subject of water, and groundwater especially, but then in finding people whose lives were in crisis because of disappearing water. Like this woman who ran a donkey rescue ranch in the hills of unincorporated Maricopa County; they had their water cut off by the city of Scottsdale. She told me how she got through the summer and kept her donkeys alive, and it turned out she did it without a reliable well. She depended on hauled water. Well, who hauled it? A man who had a business hauling water. I ran him down and we drove around in his truck.

Reporters depend on the kindness of strangers. You’re looking for someone who seems to welcome your presence. That was true of the donkey-rescue lady and hauled-water guy, and it was true of Rusty Bowers. He was one of the names I kept hearing. “You should talk to Rusty Bowers if you’re interested in politics.”

I didn’t know enough about him and Arizona to know how important he was. So I texted him along with 600 other people and the answer came back almost instantly. He was in Washington D.C. painting a fountain outside the White House — because he’s a painter — and he said he’d be glad to see me when he got back. So right away there’s readiness to spend time with me.

When I met him, he was impressive to the point of almost intimidating, with a deep faith in both his Latter-day Saints religion but also in public service. He’d been Speaker of the House of Arizona until he refused to do Donald Trump’s bidding and throw the election to him 2020. After that, he became a pariah, ostracized from the Republican Party, his career was destroyed.

By the second or third visit I was able to articulate a question…“Can a political culture so divided and prone to extremism solve a problem as big and complicated as water?”

He was also just wonderful to spend time with. We spent many hours together during several visits. By then, I knew I was getting somewhere. I was getting into the politics of Arizona through Rusty Bowers and that led me to other people. I was understanding water and seeing the human face of water through others. And on and on.

In December I went to the Turning Point USA convention at the Phoenix Convention Center. That gave me a set piece that allowed me to capture something of the extremist, right-wing politics of Phoenix and the country.

Finally, in my last trip in February, I went to the border. Even though the border is not exactly Phoenix, it’s so important to politics and life I had to see for myself what it was like.

So … five trips. By the last one, I felt like I’d like to keep coming back. I liked it there, partly because I was meeting people and learning things. But it was time to start writing.

Did you go to Phoenix knowing, ‘OK, I’m going to write about extremism. I’m going to write about heat. I’m going to write about water?’ Or did you let the topic come to you?
I’d say a mix of those. I knew Arizona had the threat of election violence every time there was an election. It happened in 2020: Armed people outside the counting center chanting, “Stop the steal!” In 2022: Every defeated statewide Republican claiming they’d been cheated of victory; armed guys sitting outside drop boxes, watching who came and went. That was certainly something I wanted to write about.

And I knew Phoenix was hot. I knew climate change was causing a drought that was threatening the water supply, not of the city so much but of surrounding areas.

What I didn’t know was the connection between those two stories. By the second or third visit I was able to articulate a question, which is how I like to see it — not as an answer, but as a question. And the question was, “Can a political culture so divided and prone to extremism solve a problem as big and complicated as water?”

Once I hit on that I knew that would be the throughline. It’s a real question, and it’s an interesting question, and I hadn’t seen much written about it before. When I phrase it that way to people they would say, “Yeah! That’s the question. Can we do this?’

And a lot depends on the answer.

You made five visits. How many people do you think you talked to?
Actually talked to for more than five or ten minutes? Probably 50 or 60. I had both notebooks and recordings to transcribe, and I’m hopelessly a Luddite about these things; I don’t like to send them out to have another human being or AI do it for me. It ended up being something like 350 single-spaced pages. At this point, I’m approaching the level of research a short book would have. And of course, most of it ends up not being used. I have to overreport to get what I need.

So you have 350 pages of notes. How did you begin to organize the piece?
This is the hardest moment because it’s a radical shift in spirit. Rather than being a curiosity machine and hoovering up as much information and observation as I can, now I have to tell a story. The amount of information I have is almost the enemy of telling the story. But it’s essential to it. If I don’t get lost and don’t feel like I’m drowning, I will not have the authority to write it the way I need to write it.

The amount of information I have is almost the enemy of telling the story. But it’s essential to it.

There’s a temptation to turn the piece into the sum total of all the research: ‘Well hell, I did that, that was hard. i spent hours on that. I had to write 10 e-mails to get that interview.’ But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is, can you write a good story? Will people want to read it? Will it move them? Will they want to stick with you for 25,000 words, which is what I was given?

For that, you really need to get away from the burden of your own reporting and think more like a novelist or short-story writer. In that phase I’m always reading or listening, while on my dog-walks, to fiction in order to have the rhythm, the imagery, the feel of narrative.

I also need an outline. In this case, the outline was not obvious because the story was so kaleidoscopic. It was a little book, and the thing that united it was Phoenix. But there was so much pulling it in different directions: Politics. Climate. Immigration. We haven’t even mentioned education. All these categories: How do they fit together, and in what order?

Storyboard Note: The outline of Packer’s story played out in ten chapters, bookended by a prologue and epilog. The chapters vary in length, though most are the length of a substantive magazine piece.  While the chapters inform each other, each has a clear focus that almost lets it stand alone.

1. The Conscience of Rusty Bowers profiles a former state legislator who has experienced the full range of issues threatening Phoenix
2. The Heat Zone faces the reality of climate change, often through the experience of Phoenix’s growing homeless population
3. Democracy and Water gets to heart of a dwindling resource that affects everything else, including survival
4. Sunshine Patriots profiles far-right conservatives and some of the conspiracies that define their views
5. The Aspirationalist squints at an innovative future through the eyes of a university president
6. The Things They Carried gets to the gritty reality of border crossings
7. America Dreams profiles the challenges and triumphs of an immigrant family
8. Campaigners follows select people who hope to provide a voice of leadership
9. The Good Trump Voter is a short profile of one man who has lost trust in the system
10. Dry Wells returns to water and the political and policy decisions that rule it

Usually, the order has a logic that unfolds according to the demands of the story. But in this case, the pieces were disparate enough that my editor, Scott Stossel, and I went through the piece, asking: Well, what if you put heat before the first water story? You’d miss a few things because there are references in the first water story that then come up in heat. But heat is so basic to people’s sense of Phoenix, and it’s so vivid maybe you want to go to heat before water.” Those are calculations based on what will keep people reading. They’re always ready to throw the magazine across the room, so how do you keep them reading?

There’s a little prologue to the piece that set the mood. It’s very short and sort of poetic, and I wanted that literary style to inform the whole piece. But from there I had to get to the stories I’d found. The first one is of Rusty Bowers, partly because it sets up politics as the crucial pillar of this whole thing, but it’s also a compelling human story of one person, with (former President Donald) Trump and (Trump lawyer Rudy) Giuliani hovering in the background.

All sorts of questions about the order kept popping up:

Water’s so complicated, maybe it can’t be too early; you might lose people.

It also can’t be too long.

It has to have human faces. It can’t get technical.

It has to be simplified.

All these considerations went into writing of individual sections, and the organization of the whole thing.

Then there are throughlines. One is politics. Rusty Bowers is at the beginning, and he’s at the end. Extremism is there in several chapters.

But the other is water. There are two specific water chapters, but it’s there in other ways, maybe mentioned in a sentence or two in almost all of them.

To back up what you said, this might be a facile way to think of it, but if I’d started the piece and it started with water policy, I might think, ‘Oh, is this about issues?’ It’s less visceral than the scene of Rusty confronting protesters outside his home while his daughter is dying inside. Once you read that scene, you have to keep reading and see what happens. You have to see how this affects and winds through everything else.
I’m always looking for and holding on to moments of tension, of vividness.

The guy who took me along the border was handing out water and snacks and advice to migrants who had just literally crossed to the wall. At nighttime, with the wall behind us — the whole thing had this ominous and chilling feeling because we are in this little area with a handful of people who look exhausted and afraid. In that corner of Arizona, I’d found a way to portray an issue that’s a giant abstraction most of the time, one that’s driving politics everywhere.

But really, the opening was so important to get right. It’s written in a looser and more poetic style than most of my work. The sentences are longer than usual for me. It makes claims that are a bit bold. Like people in Phoenix wonder if Phoenix will be there in 50 years. I know our country won’t vanish off the map. But there are things that seem fragile about it right now and Phoenix embodies that.

How did you find out about the disappearance of the Hohokam tribe and then land on it as your opening?
I read about the Hohokam in one of the books I was reading about water in Arizona. It was fairly technical but it began with the story of the Hohokam Indians, who had a 1,000-year civilization in the Sonoran Desert and had built canals and turned the desert into farmland before mysteriously vanishing in the middle of the 15th century. To this day archeologists and anthropologists don’t know what happened to their civilization, whether it was climate change or social upheaval. You can see traces in different part of the Phoenix Valley — ruins of canals and structures.

I’m always looking for and holding on to moments of tension, of vividness.

I spent time at an Indian reservation south of Phoenix with the Gila River Indian Community leader Stephen Roe Lewis and he told me, “Hohokam means ‘Those who came before.’” His tribe feels it is descended from Hohokam and inherited a lot of their culture, so it’s not extinct. But in some ways, it has vanished because there was a physical civilization that’s no longer there.

All of this fired my imagination. There’s a vibration that tells you this is something powerful and, from a literary point of view, useful. So the first sentence occurred to me all at once: “No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished.” That sets a tone and mood I hope are potent throughout the piece.

You said you turn to fiction to inform and inspire your writing. Do you tailor what you listen to or read based on what you’re writing?Yes. For “The Valley,” I was reading a lot of American fiction, my favorite writers: Faulkner, Ellison, Fitzgerald. I was reading some of Didion’s essays — not fiction, but informed by the same sensibility as her fiction. I love Dickens but don’t think he would have been the right voice to have in my head. These were different American dialects and certain American rhythms of the sentences I wanted to get into my bloodstream.

Tell me about the response to the piece.
The response has been almost uniformly positive, which isn’t always the case with my work. I was grateful The Atlantic put so much behind it. They put it on the cover, they gave it promotional muscle.

My more polemical work gets potshots and criticism from the right and the left. This did not. It isn’t polemical; it’s more an attempt to encompass something large rather than take a narrow view.  I think people were glad to have that.

I did hear that some found it depressing — terrifying with little bits of hope. I didn’t realize it was so terrifying. I didn’t intend for it to be. But maybe it’s the only way it could be.

* * *

Trevor Pyle is a veteran newspaper reporter from the Pacific Northwest who now works as a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.

The post How a reporter glimpsed the future of America in a crystal-ball city appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

When reporter Kavitha Surana and photographer Stacy Kranitz profiled a Tennessee mother forced to endure a life-threatening pregnancy shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned, they could have let the story end on its bittersweet final sentence:

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.

The post Following an unfinished story: A year in the life of a post-Roe family appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

The world of online influencers — especially those who trade in sexual content — is an economic behemoth that’s often-murky and often-mocked. But Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell used his remarkable story on a pair of OnlyFans content producers to treat the subject as worthwhile as any other economic engine — one that demands strict discipline, a grueling schedule and attention to detail as exacting as a statistics final.

“Inside an OnlyFans empire: Sex, Influence and the new American Dream” is part of series of stories about the creator economy. Harwell profiles Bryce Adams and Brian Adam, a Florida couple who produce sexual content for an army of online fans. Overseeing employees on a central Florida compound known as “the farm,” the couple has a keen grasp of the business’s relentless demands. Bryce Adams’ scantily clad bottom may be featured on a banner at the property, but behind the scenes it’s the financial bottom line that’s the real star of the show.

“This was, at its core, a labor story,” Harwell told me.

Harwell is a former business reporter who put his background in real-estate reporting to use for the OnlyFans story. He told me that the orbit of online influencers deserves serious attention:

“I’m a huge proponent of applying all the classic old-school techniques of journalism — immersive, investigative, data-driven reporting and narrative storytelling — to this new age of social media and the internet. Just because these stories are playing out online doesn’t make them any less important or illuminating.”

Harwell’s story probes OnlyFans not as a salacious sex site, but as a business. While Harwell doesn’t skirt around the online account’s sexual content, he’s more interested in the site’s calculated nature, grueling pace and ambitious staff of owners and employees.

“Don’t be afraid of stories involving sex, porn or other topics of legitimate inquiry we often pretend, out of journalistic comfort or convenience, don’t exist,” Harwell said. “These are real people and they deserve to be understood, just like anyone.”

His story on OnlyFans also holds lessons in how to use jargon to immerse readers in the story’s world, where to find thriving and useful subcultures online, and a nod to the swoop-in reality of reporters as vampires.

Harwell answered questions for Storyboard about the genesis and development of the OnlyFans story, and annotated the text. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me a little bit about your background at the Post, and your current role there.
I joined The Post in 2014 after half a decade at my hometown paper, the Tampa Bay Times. It was a writer’s paper, and I got to play around with lots of different story forms in a local-journalism environment in Florida, where the records are very public and the news is always weird. I covered cops, courts, city government and then, around the time of the housing crash, real estate, where I did news and investigations.

When I joined The Washington Post, I wrote about business, then Trump’s businesses, and then in 2018 pitched a new beat for the financial desk covering artificial intelligence. I’ve been lucky to have a very wide-open beat that allows me to chase all the things I find especially fascinating or creepy or weird: social media, AI fakes, digital surveillance, etc.

This is part of a larger series at The Post; what are the aims of that series?
Our main goal of the series (“The Creator Economy”) was to get people to take seriously the fact that creating content for all of us on social media is a real, legitimate job, even if adults think it’s silly kid stuff and regulators and lawmakers don’t regard it as valid work. This is one of the most popular aspirational industries for American kids. The big influencers are creating jobs and changing towns. Yet the industry is still totally unregulated and the job protections are basically zero.

What was your goal for reporting on a sex-content site like OnlyFans?
There were two big topics I wanted to get into. One was the gender dynamics of this business. A lot of the people I talked to noted how porn had historically been exploitative of the “talent,” mostly women, who performed in it, and that those women rarely benefited from the work, and that OnlyFans and the creator economy had helped shift that power balance in a way where the women were more in control. It didn’t create this utopia and it still has many problems, but I knew I wanted to spotlight that side of it: that the women who once would’ve been totally disenfranchised by this work were now gaining or regaining their influence, and they were taking it very seriously, and the result was this new kind of business that most people know nothing about.

The other was that this was, at its core, a labor story. I try to make that the centerpiece of all the creator stories I do: the tension of trying to make a living on the internet, between lots of anonymous customers and a big tech company that can change your rules and wages on a whim, without the basic safety net and support infrastructure that most workers can count on, in an industry where the competition can sometimes seem infinite.

Despite pornography’s significant financial footprint, it can be difficult to report on because of creators’ privacy concerns. How did you gain the impressive access you got for this story? What did you agree to leave vague for privacy, safety or sensitivity reasons?
I didn’t use their real names or location for their protection, but basically everything else was fair game. I always tell sources that their privacy and safety is way more important than any story and that nothing will appear in print that comes to them as a surprise — and I mean it. To report something like this, you have to build a mini-relationship, and that starts with trust. I try to be very clear that I’m a journalist, not a friend, and that I’ll be asking a lot of weird, dumb and uncomfortable questions, but that I’m also going to be totally honest with them because I care about their lives and want the story to be as rich and truthful as it can possibly be.

Was there any aspect of this story that was uniquely challenging? If so, how did you approach that challenge?
Just the balance. I knew it was a topic that would be hard to speak plainly about, because so much of it is raunchy. I wanted to be candid and honest, but not prurient. I wanted to treat their work like a regular business and take them as seriously as they take themselves. I knew some readers would want us to be moralistic and intervene with how sick and depraved it all was, but that’s not our place as journalists. We’re capturing real people in America doing something totally legal. It’s a phenomenon totally worthy of journalistic exploration. We’ll tell you what we learned so you can think about it and come to your own conclusion. Even if you don’t like what they’re doing, isn’t it better to understand how they got here, and how it all works?

What has the reaction from readers and subjects of the story been like?
I was really encouraged by the reactions. There were a few people who thought we were basically just peddling smut or that the story was frivolous. But a lot of readers told me this was a kind of story they’d never read before, about people building an unconventional life out of our weird internet era in a novel way, doing it on their own terms, and that however they felt about the subject matter they were glad to have learned more. That’s the best part — telling a story that surprises people, wakes them up a little, but is still human and relatable and real.

THE ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Harwell’s answers in blue.

Inside an OnlyFans empire: Sex, influence and the new American Dream

The fast-growing platform represents the creator economy at its most bluntly transactional, where sex is just another unit of content to monetize

By Drew Harwell

SOMEWHERE IN FLORIDA — In the mornings, the workers of Bryce Adams’s OnlyFans empire buzz in through a camera-wired security gate, roll up the winding driveway that cost $120,000 to pave and park outside Adam’ss $2.5 million home-office-studio complex. I like that you open with financial details in a story largely concerned with business. Why did you choose to include the cost of the paving and overall complex?As a business reporter, I covered real estate, and people loved mansion stories — all the ostentation and big numbers. But I also hoped these details would very quickly affirm some important points without overt exposition: that these characters make good money, that their business is more sophisticated than most people would expect from an OnlyFans model; and that they’ve invested in building their own little empire. A large American flag waves from a pole above their office door. So does a banner depicting Adams, in tight shorts, from behind.

On OnlyFans, subscribers pay for monthly access to feeds of creators’ videos — many of them sex videos, known as “collabs” — as well as pay-to-watch clips the “fans” can buy a la carte. “Collab” is just the first of several times you define industry-specific terms for readers; how much thought did you give to providing that kind of context as you guide them through this unfamiliar world?I try to write simply but never want to dumb stories down; I want to talk up to readers and reflect how smart and curious most of them are. Part of that involves introducing a few select new words to define the central concepts so the reader can leave feeling more familiar with a weird new world. Journalism 101 says not to use jargon, which I mostly agree with, but sometimes a piece of jargon tells a story all by itself – like ‘collab.’ In this case, it means sex, maybe the most intimate thing there is. But ‘collab’ renders it into the lingo of online content, obscuring that intimacy, making it feel like just another commodity. Any time I can pack the background theme of the story into a single word, I go for it. And as one of the platform’s most popular creators, Adams runs her business like a machine.

Inside, a storyboard designer opens the day’s publishing plans for not just OnlyFans but all of their customer feeder sites — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. Editors start splicing video into short looping clips, optimized for virality. Collabs are sent to paying fans.

Brian Adam, Bryce’s longtime boyfriend (who, like Bryce, uses a stage name for privacy), stops at each employee’s desk to review the day’s assignments, vetoing any posts or captions that seem “cringe” or “off brand.” In an office loft, four young women start texting with Adams’s paid subscribers, who talk about sex and their personal lives in conversations that often exceed a thousand messages a day.

This being a sex business, their workdays are filled with what others might see as debauchery, but which they see as just work: Two (or three) people will slip into a bedroom next to the kitchen or the gym with a cameraman, or just their cellphones, to record a collab or start live-streaming themselves exercising in the nude. Turning sex into business is, of course, not new. That said, it’s not often covered by journalists as a business. How did the idea develop to devote this story to that idea?Porn is one of these businesses that most of the world experiences and very few know anything about. People don’t talk about it or seek out stories about it, but they’re fascinated by it. It’s the core of an unregulated industry that’s full of problematic and complicated people — and, now, with OnlyFans, it’s basically being created everywhere. So it has all the elements of a great business story. I also just think it’s not worth being squeamish about stories like these; it’s real life. I hadn’t really done any digging on it until earlier this year, when we did a story on some investors linked to former President Trump’s social media company that led me to reading through old back editions of this trade publication for the live webcam model industry. (You have to read that story to understand the connection.) This magazine was like a portal to this giant unseen world, with all of these people and side businesses and technical components you’d never even think about, all in this impressively polished product that suggested there was a lot of money and time involved. It was all just so professionalized. I figured there had to be a story there.How did this story get off the ground, and what was the reporting and writing process like?I’ve been wanting to do more stories on the business of online influencers for a long time. So much tech journalism is about the companies, but the most interesting stories are really about the everyday people who use these tools – and who shape our culture; who work in this very competitive environment, where there’s no real guidebook; and who stand to become incredibly rich and successful from their work, or have their lives ruined, or both. My editor, Mark Seibel, who’s amazing, also edits Taylor Lorenz, who's like a robot designed in a lab to report out the best internet-culture stories: She’s very fast and thoughtful and knows everyone. Mark said the two of us should draft up a project that would get into this issue: the rise of this massive online-influencer industry. So we started jotting down ideas for what a series could look like: a main story to introduce the idea; some big-picture stories about themes: creators’ effect on children, on the news, etc.; and some side-dish stories that were more clearly targeted to specific people or places, to give the project color and life.I’d done a story on a Twitch streamer in 2021, staying up all night with him in his house in Missouri while he played video games and screamed and made a lot of money. After that I met a bunch of other influencers and creators who liked that we’d taken their work seriously and wanted to share more about their life. A few of them streamed adult content on OnlyFans and other places. They weren’t “porn stars;” they just needed to pay off student loans or had graduated in a pandemic and couldn’t get a job. They faced all the same challenges as other influencers, with an added layer of social stigma. But I didn’t really know how we could get it into a family newspaper, until we got approval to push this series along.

Then they’ll head back to their desks to resume chatting or drive to the beach to make TikToks. After a few days, the video editors will upload the files to the OnlyFans servers with names like “Bryce & Holly Shower” or “Sex on a Jungle Trail,” retailing for $25 a scene. What was the reporting and writing process like?To report this piece of it, I called up all of the adult-content creators I’d met, plus some new ones I met from Googling around, and did pre-interviews with them so I could assess what a story would look like with them at the center. I like to do stories where there’s a big idea as the backbone — an industry, a problem, a societal shift — but with a real person as the face. I want to get across big ideas but not have it read like a term paper. Readers want emotion, personality, stakes. From my first video call with them, Bryce and Brian seemed like a great fit: They were candid and unguarded; their business was incontrovertibly huge, and they were knowledgeable about every step of their operation. They were a business with spreadsheets and whiteboards and invoices and customer retention strategies. At the end of that first call, Brian said I was welcome to come by anytime, and I think he was surprised at how quickly I said yes. Reporters are like vampires; once you invite us in … I spent a long day on their “farm” in Florida. They gave me a tour of the house and offices, and I spent some hours with the advertising and chat teams, getting full walkthroughs of their workflow. I did lots of walk-and-talks with Bryce and Brian, but I also spent a long time just talking to the employees without them present. One of the best parts was after lunch, when I was just chatting with the employees on the picnic tables outside about what it was like being in the business, what their high-school friends thought, etc. I stayed into the evening and left sometime during Bryce’s nighttime workout, around the time of that closing scene, after I’d become part of the wallpaper and figured I needed some time to process. I did lots of post-interviews over phone and video calls with Bryce, Brian, their employees, their family members, researchers, OnlyFans employees, industry analysts, etc. With the younger employees, there were a  lots of texts for fact-checks and catch-ups. (I hate texting for reporting — the answers are too lifeless and austere. But sometimes you have to meet sources where they are.)

Adams’s employees call their headquarters in central Florida “the farm.” Bought last year with OnlyFans money, the 10 acres of pastureland once held a grove of pecan trees. I liked this detail. How did you learn about the pasture’s former use as a farm?Here, again, my real estate background paid off. I looked up the property records, the site’s old real-estate listings and the land maps. I love colorful details like these because they’re golden nuggets that keep people moving and engaged. And I also just loved the juxtaposition of this bucolic Florida nature scene with these merchants of online porn. If only those old farmers knew how this land would end up …

Its only cash crop now is attention, and Adams’s business out-earns most American farms. “Its only cash crop now is attention” is my favorite phrase in the story, and seems like one that could be deployed often in a wired world where attention is so powerful. Do you remember how you landed on this phrasing?In the early drafts, I was more circumspect and was stumbling a bit on how to succinctly make the case that this is a real business that readers should take seriously. I’d already introduced that Bryce & Co. called their compound ‘the farm,” and Mark Seibel, my editor (who deserves about 95% of the credit for anything good I’ve done in the last five years), suggested: Why not connect the two? He said I should find out how much money American farms make and see how they compare. It was genius, because it helped connect these two wildly different businesses in a way that shows they’re maybe more similar than we think. I wrote that specific phrase because I always try to think of these stories as being about our attention. In the internet business that’s the only way you can make money, stay relevant, survive. The company brings in roughly $10 million annually in revenue, and many of her two dozen workers get paid more than the average farmer; her total corporate payroll exceeds $1 million a year.

“People don’t understand the scale of the opportunity. I mean, really: You can make your own world,” said Adams, 30, as she walked the grounds in jean shorts and a tank top. “This is our business. This is our life.”

In the American creator economy, no platform is quite as direct or effective as OnlyFans. Since launching in 2016, the subscription site known primarily for its explicit videos has become one of the most methodical, cash-rich and least known layers of the online-influencer industry, touching every social platform and, for some creators, unlocking a once-unimaginable level of wealth.

More than 3 million creators now post around the world on OnlyFans, which has 230 million subscribing “fans” — a global audience two-thirds the size of the United States itself, a company filing in August said.

And with help from a pandemic that isolated people at home, fans’ total payouts to creators soared last year to $5.5 billion — more than every online influencer in the United States earned from advertisers that year, according to an analysis into the creator economy this spring by Goldman Sachs Research. Brian Adam and Bryce Adams are the focus of this story, but you do a thorough job pushing out wider for context about OnlyFans’ reach. How did you think about how much to include about the company overall?By this point in the story, I wanted readers to know that if you stick with the story you’ll learn not just about these two strangers but about this giant business with a monumental impact. That’s the zoom-out moment where I want to establish the scope and scale of the issue, so people know it’s not just any old profile, but there’s some financial rigor and authority here, too. I didn’t want to make it an OnlyFans profile, though, either, so I tried to select the details that built out the financial and social ramifications or connected in some way to the Bryce story.

If OnlyFans’s creator earnings were taken as a whole, the company would rank around No. 90 on Forbes’s list of the biggest private companies in America by revenue, ahead of Twitter (now called X), Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International and Hallmark Cards.

On the surface, OnlyFans is a simple business: Fans (mostly men) pay to scroll through feeds of photos and videos (mostly of women), with a few perks offered at additional cost, like direct chats with the creator or custom-made videos by fan request. Most, though not all, of its content is risqué, or “spicy,” and company executives joke that they are often misconstrued as “sexy Facebook.”

But as OnlyFans’s pool of influencers has grown, it has also professionalized. Many creators now operate like independent media companies, with support staffs, growth strategies and promotional budgets, and work to apply the cold quantification and data analytics of online marketing to the creation of a fantasy life.

The subscription site has often been laughed off as a tabloid punchline, a bawdy corner of the internet where young, underpaid women (teachers, nurses, cops) sell nude photos, get found out and lose their jobs.

But OnlyFans increasingly has become the model for how a new generation of online creators gets paid. Influencers popular on mainstream sites use it to capitalize on the audiences they’ve spent years building. And OnlyFans creators have turned going viral on the big social networks into a marketing strategy, using Facebook, Twitter and TikTok as sales funnels for getting new viewers to subscribe.

America’s social media giants for years have held up online virality as the ultimate goal, doling out measurements of followers, reactions and hearts with an unspoken promise: that internet love can translate into sponsorships and endorsement deals. But OnlyFans represents the creator economy at its most blatantly transactional — a place where viewers pay upfront for creators’ labor, and intimacy is just another unit of content to monetize. These three paragraphs are striking because they lay out a straightforward premise — one that portrays OnlyFans’ mode as a platonic version of so much of influencer culture. Can you tell me anything about how you decided to make the statement this clearly and directly? Also, how much work went into crafting it?This is the “nut graf,” where we have to get to the point about why we’re telling this story, so I wanted it to feel very authoritative and persuade people that this story wasn’t going to be this salacious pulpy thing, and would be worth their time.Iknew from the jump that these three points were important ones for the kind of story I wanted to tell: 1) that the people who do OnlyFans are not caricatures, they’re real people, and it’s worth understanding why they do it; 2) that this is not just a sideline little porn story, but says a lot about how the incentives of the internet have changed how we interact with people and experience the world; 3) that OnlyFans is this potent microcosm for all of the issues we talk about in the creator economy, in which people get paid to share the most intimate parts of their lives.Here, I also had lots of help from my Post colleague, Nitasha Tiku, who’s an amazing writer and journalist. I’ve asked her now on a lot of stories to read through my drafts, and she always comes back with these incredibly thoughtful notes that are so clarifying. A writer’s dream.

The fast ascent of OnlyFans further spotlights how the internet has helped foster a new style of modern gig work that creators see as safe, remote and self-directed, said Pani Farvid, an associate professor and the director of the SexTech Lab at the New School, a New York-based university, who has made interviews with digital sex workers a major topic of her research. How did you find Farvid?I always end up talking to more smart people than I can quote, and I think I ended up interviewing about a dozen expert-y types, some from industry but a lot from academia. I stumbled across Professor Farvid’s research during reporting and found it pretty enlightening. She didn’t just spend the time to interview workers at length; she treated the topics as worthy of deeper analysis, trying to understand the sociological and psychological factors that had shaped their decisions.

Creators’ nonchalance about the digital sex trade has fueled a broader debate about whether the site’s promotion of feminist autonomy is a facade: just a new class of techno-capitalism, selling the same patriarchal dream. And even some OnlyFans veterans have urged aspiring creators to understand what they’re getting into: pressures to perform for a global audience; an internet that never forgets. “There is simply no room for naivety,” one said in a guide posted to Reddit’s r/CreatorsAdvice.

Farvid acknowledges that the job can be financially precarious and mentally taxing, demanding not just the technical labor of recording, editing, managing and marketing but also the physical and emotional labor of adopting a persona to keep clients feeling special and eager to spend.I was impressed with how the story established the OnlyFans' operation as grueling, complete with content that must be created at a ruthless pace. Was that idea in your head as something to look for, or did it emerge with the reporting?Thank you! That’s something that just becomes very apparent when you’re reporting on people working at this level in social media. It’s something I try to drive home in every story for anyone who just thinks, ‘Oh, these whiny young people talk into their phones and computers all day; how hard can it be?’ They all work extremely hard. They get no time off; they compete with the entire internet; they’re all anxious about sinking in the algorithmic rankings or getting replaced. I find that anxiety really relatable, because a lot of us in the internet era feel that to some degree — the pressure of all this connectedness, how always-on we have to be.

But many creators, she added, still find it uniquely alluring — a rational choice in an often-irrational environment for gender, work and power. “Why would I spend my day doing dirty, degrading, minimum-wage labor when I can do something that brings more money in and that I have a lot more control over?” she recounted some telling her. “Does an accountant always enjoy their work? No. All work has pleasure and pain, and a lot of it is boring and annoying. Does that mean they’re being exploited?”

The attraction of financial freedom and the challenge of standing out have led many OnlyFans creators to run themselves like tech start-ups. Adams’s operation is registered in state business records as a limited liability company and offers quarterly employee performance reviews and catered lunch. It also runs with factory-like efficiency, thanks largely to a system designed in-house to track millions of data points on customers and content and ensure every video is rigorously planned and optimized.

The strategy is working: Adams and her employees, who spoke with The Washington Post on the condition that their real names and location be concealed and stage names be used to reduce the risk of harassment, have ascended to OnlyFans’s highest echelon of earners, which the platform calls its “top 0.01 percent.”

Since sending her first photo in 2021, Adams’s OnlyFans accounts have earned $16.5 million in sales, more than 1.4 million fans and more than 11 million “likes.” She now makes about $30,000 a day — more than most American small businesses — from subscriptions, video sales, messages and tips, half of which is pure profit. I was surprised by how much financial information regarding the Adams’ business was made available to you. Did they require any persuading to share it?I told them in our first reporting call and every interview after: I want to see everything you can show me and to understand every part of the business. I said they should basically try to bury me in paper and that I would be grateful for it. I’m like this on every story, dating back to the first big investigative projects I did on real estate, where I’d have thousands of property records in a giant Excel spreadsheet. I want the whole cache. You just never know what you’ll end up finding. Most sources, when I tell them this, pat me on the head and ignore it, but Bryce and Brian lit up, because they’d devoted a lot of their time to optimizing this business and no one had really asked them for that level of detail before.

Adams’s team sees its business as one of harmless, destigmatized gratification, in which both sides get what they want. The buyers are swiped over in dating apps, widowed, divorced or bored, eager to pay for the illusion of intimacy with an otherwise unattainable match. And the sellers see themselves as not all that different from the influencers they watched growing up on YouTube, charging for parts of their lives they’d otherwise share for free.

“This is normal for my generation, you know?” said Avery Leigh, the 20-year-old head of Adams’s advertising team, who made $150,000 in two months from her work with Adams and her own OnlyFans account. “I can go on TikTok right now and see ten girls wearing the bare minimum of clothing just to get people to join their page. Why not go the extra step to make money off it?” You speak not only to Brian and Bryce, but several of their employees. How much time did you spend interviewing the employees? Can you describe how you prepared for those interviews?I did a couple pre-interview calls with Bryce and Brian before going over for a full day on the farm, where they let me walk around and talk to everyone and ask everything. It was overwhelming, because there were a couple dozen people, and they were working, so I asked everyone for phone numbers and called some of them back later for longer interviews. I ended up including only a couple employees in the story, though there were others with fascinating backstories and motivations of their own, because I didn’t want the story to feel too flabby or unfocused. So all told it ended up being hours of interviews, not including what ended up being a 10-to-12-hour day on the farm.I always read everything I can to prepare for interviews, but the most helpful piece for this, funnily enough, was that I listened to hours of (unofficial) OnlyFans-related business podcasts, where models and creators talk about how they run their companies, what upsell strategies they’ve tried, marketing and promotion techniques, etc. Those taught me the lingo and helped drive home how legitimate this was as a business — that there was this whole consulting and educational layer most people would never think about.

‘Cry in a Ferrari’

When Tim Stokely, a London-based operator of live-cam sex sites, founded OnlyFans with his brother in 2016, he framed it as a simple way to monetize the creators who were becoming the world’s new celebrities — the same online influencers, just with a payment button. In 2019, Stokely told Wired magazine that his site was like “a bolt-on to your existing social media,” in the same way “Uber is a bolt-on to your car.”

Since then, OnlyFans’s popularity has skyrocketed. In financial filings in the United Kingdom, where its owner, Fenix International Limited, is based, the company said its sales grew from $238 million in 2019 to more than $5.5 billion last year. Its international army of creators has also grown from 348,000 in 2019 to more than 3 million today — a tenfold increase. (And its leadership has made a fortune: The company paid its owner, the Ukrainian American venture capitalist Leonid Radvinsky, $338 million in dividends last year.)

The United States is OnlyFans’s biggest market, accounting for a large portion of its creator base and 70 percent of its annual revenue. The site has fans in 187 countries, the filings show, and a company executive said recently that it is targeting major “growth regions” in Latin America, Europe and Australia. (The Mexican diver Diego Balleza said he is using his $15-a-month account to save up for next year’s Paris Olympics.)

Before OnlyFans, pornography on the internet had been largely a top-down enterprise, with agents, producers, studios and other middlemen hoarding the profits of performers’ work. OnlyFans democratized that business model, letting the workers run the show: recording their own content, deciding their prices, selling it however they’d like and reaping the full reward.

The platform bans real-world prostitution, as well as extreme or illegal content, and requires everyone who shows up on camera to verify they’re 18 or older by sending in a video selfie showing them holding a government-issued ID. Beyond that, OnlyFans operates as a neutral marketplace, with no ads, trending topics or recommendation algorithms, placing few limitations on what creators can sell but also making it necessary for them to market themselves or fade away.

Many OnlyFans creators don’t offer anything explicit, and the site has pushed to spotlight its stable of chefs, comedians and mountain bikers on a streaming channel, OFTV. But erotic content on the platform is inescapable; even some outwardly conventional creators shed their clothes behind the paywall. The company plugs itself as the only social network that is “openly inclusive of all creator genres.”

OnlyFans creators are categorized as independent contractors of the platform, which offers basic tools for content publishing and customer acquisition and keeps 20 percent of creators’ revenue. OnlyFans sends 1099 forms to the IRS and all U.S. creators who earn more than $600 a year to confirm they are paying taxes on all income. (Adams said her business paid roughly $1.3 million in taxes last year.)

Enticed by the promise of wealth, an influx of new creators has begun paying for OnlyFans mentors and coaching programs that teach marketing strategies and techniques of the trade. For those overwhelmed by the logistics, agencies and account managers offer to handle administrative tasks, write captions and manage social accounts in exchange for a cut of the proceeds.

On Reddit’s r/onlyfansadvice, an unofficial “educational space” with more than 300,000 members, creators share tips on how to secure a bank loan with OnlyFans income, handle fan disputes or cope with dramatic swings in pay. “I took one week off social media and have never recovered,” one creator there recently said. I love that you thought to include information from the larger OnlyFans-creator community, most of whom are presumably trying to be more efficient, like the Adams are. What made you think to visit that particular subreddit as part of your research?Reddit is maybe the best-kept secret of modern reporting, and certainly of internet reporting. It’s amazing the breadth and diversity of conversations that are happening there. I’ve found a lot of sources from going into different subreddits, finding people talking about things I’m interested in, direct-messaging them, interviewing them, asking who else they could point me to. So I always poke around there when I have the time on a story.I spent a while going through this subreddit, looking at the things people were asking about. It’s basically a giant support group for the very unusual challenges of trying to make money on OnlyFans. And what became pretty obvious, beyond just how complicated the work can be, was that these people had no one really to turn to; they’re independent contractors in a wild-west industry. That’s a big point of our creator stories: how precarious and lonely the work can be. So when they have a major problem to work through, their safety net is strangers on Reddit.

Like most platforms, OnlyFans suffers from a problem of incredible pay inequality, with the bulk of the profits concentrated in the bank accounts of the lucky few. In 2020, the independent researcher Tom Hollands scraped the website’s payment data and concluded that the top 1 percent of accounts made 33 percent of the money, and that most accounts took home less than $145 a month. (OnlyFans declined to provide its own analysis, and Hollands said the company has since made it harder to access this data or conduct new research.) This seems like a crucial bit of context to make clear to readers that OnlyFans hasn’t necessarily been a path to large-scale financial success for everyone.Any story on creators making it rich must include the reality that it’s a huge 1% game. It’s journalism malpractice to leave that out. It’s just such a challenging industry to break into, and yet so many people go for it anyway. I don’t think that’s a disqualifier for doing these stories – look how many actors fail out there, and we still write about Hollywood – but it’s an important reminder because it highlights that the stakes are very high and that the glamour can be a trap. For most people the grind will not pay off. I’d come across Holland’s work while scouting around for economic analyses of the industry and ended up talking to him a bit, just to make sure I understood the findings. I wish OnlyFans, and every platform, would be more open about their pay breakdowns so people know what they’re getting into.

For those who do make it, however, the rewards can be life-changing. When the OnlyFans creator Elle Brooke was pushed during a TV interview in June to explain how a future child of hers might feel about her work, her response — “They can cry in a Ferrari” — became an OnlyFans rallying cry. Stella Sol, a dominatrix, tweeted, “It’s always so funny how mad people get at beautiful Women happily winning the game of life.”

‘Dream girlfriend’

Bryce and Brian first met 13 years ago in high school, in a class on career development, and the two were an instant match: driven, competitive, a little obsessive. He played baseball for eight hours a day, and she attended every practice and game, sitting in the bleachers with a logbook to record every ball and strike. How open were Bryce and Brian about their personal history?Very open. In the first draft I went into their upbringing and love story in a lot more detail. I asked a lot of questions and they basically ended up as a single paragraph, but I don’t regret it because it helped me be a little more authoritative about who they were. As I started going through it with my editor, he and I would be trimming it and the profile bits just began to seem like the least important, especially so high in the story.Besides, what made Bryce and Brian special was not these relatable romance bits, but the business they’ve built, so I tried to be much more strict on what I used. I preserved that baseball anecdote because you can visualize it and it conveys a lot of amount of information in a sentence: their devotion to each other, their obsessiveness, this sabermetric way they’ve worked to optimize their lives.

 Adams had spent her teen years selling her old clothes on eBay and became thrilled by making imaginary money become real. So after she dropped out of college, the couple devoted themselves to a small internet business, buying baseball bats and gloves from local mom-and-pop shops and reselling them online. They hired their friends, and the company expanded until it became self-sustaining, and they got bored.

One Sunday night in January 2021, as the couple halfheartedly watched a movie on the couch, Adams created an OnlyFans account with a fake name and posted a photo of her butt. The couple had an open relationship; it was, she said, kind of a joke. Then a guy who found her account messaged her, and they started texting, and he asked for more. She had no clue how to price the photos, but the guy just kept paying. After two hours and five photos, she had made $62.

Her boyfriend saw a major business opportunity. Other creators’ OnlyFans accounts looked underproduced, he recalled, and the market of paying schmoes seemed limitless. I must ask if it was you or Brian who landed on the word “schmoes,” which is, I assume, a rarity in The Washington Post.Bryce and Brian didn’t explicitly call them schmoes, at least with me; they were always, y’know, fans, customers. But they did talk about their excitement to take candy from babies and that the demand was so huge. I just loved the scene of the two of them doing this mental market analysis and thinking about just how many guys there were out there who would pay for this sort of thing, and so I felt like, in that moment, it’d make sense to have a little lighthearted moment and call these gentlemen schmoes. It’s not that they’re dummies; a schmo is just an ordinary guy – a Joe Schmo. The porn business would be nowhere without schmoes.

“There is a huge demand, and the vendors’ ability to meet that demand is awful,” he said. “It’s like taking candy from babies.”

For Adams, the experience was also energizing. She could snap a selfie in two seconds and some stranger would give her cash. She felt wanted, maybe even a bit powerful. A few nights later, her boyfriend walked into the bathroom around 3 a.m. and Adams was sitting next to the bathtub, sexting.

“She was like, ‘I made $400 so far,’” he said. “And I was like, ‘That’s actually really cool.’ Then I peed and went back to bed.”

They began studying OnlyFans like a puzzle, tracking what fans wanted, what they’d pay to get it and what to say to keep them hooked. They started logging a collection of data, from video sell-through rates to subscriber conversions. And they conducted what they called “micro-tests” on everything in hopes of gaining maximum engagement: the most lucrative seductive poses, the perfectly sized video-title length.

Every week, they competed with themselves to beat last week’s revenue, gradually pushing the boundaries in hopes of standing out in a porn-filled internet. They moved from selling individual photos to “picture packs” to full videos. They started recording in new places, involving each other and bringing on new partners. And their fan count continued to grow.

Watching their partner have sex with someone else sometimes sparked what they called “classic little jealousy issues,” which Adams said they resolved with “more communication, more growing up.” The money was just too good. And over time, they adopted a self-affirming ideology that framed everything as just business. Things that were tough to do but got easier with practice, like shooting a sex scene, they called, in gym terms, “reps.” Things one may not want to do at first, but require some mental work to approach, became “self-limiting beliefs.” This is one of my favorite paragraphs in the story, because it seems to home in on Brian and Bryce’s skill for using language to change how they thought about what they were doing. Do you remember how you came to observe that, and how you wrote the graf devoted to it?I remember perking up hearing those phrases while I was spending time with them. A lot of the employees used them, and they flowed so naturally, like everyone was saying them all the time. I’m always on the lookout for stuff like that — little quips and eccentricities that give you a portal into someone’s thinking.In any organization, the leaders encourage these euphemistic phrases that are designed to help the worker bees turn their brains off and just do the thing. You see this in cults but also in companies (and newsrooms!). So it just felt like another great connector for this story back to the main theme: You have this business that, to oversimplify, sells sex videos, but they’re doing it with help from these aspirational, business-ified, semi-cheesy self-help phrases, as if they were just selling car insurance. Which goes to show how established it’s all become.

As Adams’s popularity exploded, so, too, did the workload for her and Brian, who became her “chief executive”; each worked about 90 hours a week. There was always a new sext to respond to, a new piece of social content to publish, a new collab to record. In the evenings, the couple would take long walks, strategizing about content, how to “take Bryce up a level.” Afterward, they’d pick up Starbucks to have caffeine through the night.

They started hiring workers through friends and family, and what was once just Adams became a team effort, in which everyone was expected to workshop caption and video ideas. The group evaluated content under what Brian, who is 31, called a “triangulation method” that factored their comfort level with a piece of content alongside its engagement potential and “brand match.” Bryce the person gave way to Bryce the brand, a commercialized persona drafted by committee and refined for maximum marketability.

“One of the things we do communicate is: ‘Hey, this is your dream girlfriend. She’s down to go to all your baseball games, you know?’ The fans like that,” he said. The “Bryce” character that Adams presents to her fans, “We’ve all always looked at it as if it’s an amalgam of all of us here. It’s not actually her.”

‘What the hell are we looking at?’

The sprawling main house on “the farm,” which they bought with a mortgage last year, is still mostly unfurnished, largely due to their all-consuming schedules. There is a guest room with tripods and ring lights for shooting sex scenes and an office where Adams chats with her “VIPs,” who pay $30 a month. One unused room has been claimed by their cats.

The house is sprinkled with mementos of the couple growing up and falling in love in Florida, including thousands of chunks of sea glass they’d gathered over hours-long walks on the sand. They also own 15 guns, including a .22-caliber long rifle and a pink pistol they keep in the mudroom and take on late-night walks; wild hogs are common here and legal to hunt year-round.

Adams’s mom, a former substitute teacher, comes over twice a week to tidy up the house and fix up the flower beds for $25 an hour. In a story about monetization, I was tickled that you included Adams’s mom’s hourly salary.Crisp details are always the seasoning in long stories like these. But more than that, the idea that Bryce had not only included her mom in this business but also become her employer — it just drove home both how unconventional and utterly traditional it all was. And on a more basic level, if I’m noting that the mom is doing work, I have to say she’s getting paid. This is a story about capitalism, after all.

Last Father’s Day, Adams told her parents and younger sister, a doctor who just had her first child, that the “new business in the content space” she’d told them about was actually OnlyFans. She’d intended to tell them at breakfast but got too nervous, then called them all later that day.

Her sister was supportive but didn’t say much, she said. Her parents, who had expected she would grow up to be an architect, nevertheless encouraged her to do whatever makes her happy.

“The world has changed so much … but she’s an adult. She has to do what makes her wheels move, what she finds fulfilling,” Adams’s mom said. “When you’re a parent, you want to support your child. And that’s what I do.”

The heart of the company is in the backyard, a cavernous office and gym space they built in a barn once used for storing boats. Most of their employees work in this building, including their video editors, social media managers, chatters and advertising staff; an accountant and a few others work remotely.

The team is trained in the basic software of the modern office: Slack for workplace communication, Google Docs for spreadsheets, Trello for managing team projects. Every Monday at 4:15 p.m., Bryce and Brian lead a company meeting where they review all of the content, captions and publishing plans for the week on a big-screen TV. At lunchtime, an assistant brings everyone Chick-fil-A.

The farm is wired with a server closet, two parallel internet connections, a whole-house generator and a battery backup to ensure they’re never offline. They hired an IT guy who moved from Missouri with his wife, an OnlyFans creator herself.

One of the operation’s most subtly critical components is a piece of software known as “the Tool,” which they developed and maintain in-house. The Tool scrapes and compiles every “like” and view on all of Adams’s social network accounts, every OnlyFans “fan action” and transaction, and every text, sext and chat message — more than 20 million lines of text so far.

It houses reams of customer data and a library of preset messages that Adams and her chatters can send to fans, helping to automate their reactions and flirtations — “an 80 percent template for a personalized response,” she said.

And it’s linked to a searchable database, in which hundreds of sex scenes are described in detail — by price, total sales, participants and general theme — and given a unique “stock keeping unit,” or SKU, much like the scannable codes on a grocery store shelf. If a fan says they like a certain sexual scenario, a team member can instantly surface any relevant scenes for an easy upsell. “Classic inventory chain,” Adams said.

The systemized database is especially handy for the young women of Adams’s chat team, known as the “girlfriends,” who work at a bench of laptops in the gym’s upper loft. The Tool helped “supercharge her messaging, which ended up, like, 3X-ing her output,” Brian said, meaning it tripled.

For efficiency, the chatters use keyboard shortcuts to quickly send common phrases (“I want to know the real you”) and a feature that displays, across a fan’s profile picture, how much he has paid in tips. On a recent day, one girlfriend was talking with “Ryan” (lifetime tip value: $321.60) about a trip he took to Texas while “Kev” ($46.40) was saying he’d travel “any distance” to find his “right person.” One of their longest-paying subscribers has given $10,000 over the years, Adams said. None of this is identifying, but did it take any extra discussion to get the OK to include customer information?Not really. They’re so vague as to be basically anonymous, and I like reminding the reader that these are real people. I also just found the dollar amount label so perfectly revealing for our era. We’re all some dollar amount in a database somewhere.

Keeping men talking is especially important because the chat window is where Adams’s team sends out their mass-message sales promotions, and the girlfriends never really know what to expect. One girlfriend said she’s had as many as four different sexting sessions going at once.

“There’s not 10 minutes that go by that we’re not like: ‘What the hell are we looking at right now?’” said Zoey Hill, a chatter on the team. “But for the most part, it’s kind of just like you’re having a regular conversation with someone until they’re like, ‘Hey, I’m horny.’ And then you give them what they want.”

Adams employs a small team that helps her pay other OnlyFans creators to give away codes fans can use for free short-term trials. The team tracks redemption rates and promotional effectiveness in a voluminous spreadsheet, looking for guys who double up on discount codes, known as “stackers,” as well as bad bets and outright fraud. Another instance where you let readers in on industry-specific language. How much thought did you give to how much to include?My feeling is every new introduction of a term — every sentence, really — has to strengthen the thesis. Here, we’re showing that a corner of the business that seems simple and that no one ever thinks about, like discount codes, is actually just one small facet of a complicated system that requires investment analyses and anti-fraud measures. So, again, this isn’t just someone with a phone; it’s an intricate machine.

After sending other creators’ agents their money over PayPal, Adams’s ad workers send suggestions over the messaging app Telegram on how Bryce should be marketed, depending on the clientele. OnlyFans models whose fans tend to prefer the “girlfriend experience,” for instance, are told to talk up her authenticity: “Bryce is a real, fit girl who wants to get to know you”; “If you’re looking for real, deep and personal connections ….” Creators with a more hardcore fan base, meanwhile, are told to cut to the chase: “300+ sex tapes & counting”; “Bryce doesn’t say no, she’s the most wild, authentic girl you will ever find.”

Avery Leigh, who runs advertising, was working as a server at a local pizza place, saving up for college in hopes of becoming an obstetrician, when a high school friend told her last year that Adams was hiring chatters. Leigh was later promoted to the ads team and, though she’d never touched a spreadsheet before, she now spends 40 hours a week coordinating with agents and managing an ad budget of more than $900,000 a year.

The $18 an hour she makes on the ad team, however, is increasingly dwarfed by the money Leigh makes from her personal OnlyFans account, where she sells sex scenes with her boyfriend for $10 a month. Leigh made $92,000 in gross sales in July, thanks largely to revenue from new fans who found her through Adams or the bikini videos Leigh posts to her 170,000-follower TikTok account. Adams takes 20 percent.

“This is a real job. You dedicate your time to it every single day. You’re always learning, you’re always doing new things,” she said. “I’d never thought I’d be good at business, but learning all these business tactics really empowers you. I have my own LLC; I don’t know any other 20-year-old right now that has their own LLC.”

‘Cult of you’

By most measures, the Bryce Adams content machine is running at extreme efficiency.

The team is meeting all traffic goals, per their internal dashboard, which showed that through the day on a recent Thursday they’d gained 2,221,835 video plays, 19,707 landing-page clicks, 6,372 new OnlyFans subscribers and 9,024 new social-network followers. And to keep in shape, Adams and her boyfriend are abiding by a rigorous daily diet and workout plan: They eat the same Chick-fil-A salad at every lunch, track every calorie and pay a gym assistant to record data on every rep and weight of their exercise. This is a vivid detail, particularly the brand name of the salad.The reason you spend time with people during reporting is you see all the little things they wouldn’t think or want to offer up on a phone call. I ate with them and walked around with them and saw them tapping away at their phones, so I’d just be my annoying self and ask what they were doing, and they seemed happy to answer because this stuff is always on their mind, and people love being asked about themselves.

But the OnlyFans business is competitive, and it does not always feel to the couple like they’ve done enough. Their new personal challenge, they said, is to go viral on the other platforms as often as possible, largely through jokey TikTok clips and bikini videos that don’t give away too much.

In a podcast last year on OnlyFans sales strategies — titled “How to Get More Simps,” using the internet slang for someone who does too much for someone they like — the host told creators this sales-funnel technique was key to helping build the “cult of you”: “Someone’s fascination will become infatuation, which will make you a lot of money.”

Adams’s company has worked to reverse engineer the often-inscrutable art of virality, and Brian now estimates Adams makes about $5,000 in revenue for every million short-form video views she gets on TikTok. Her team has begun ranking each platform by the amount of money they expect they can get from each viewer there, a metric they call “fan lifetime value.” (Subscribers who click through to her from Facebook tend to spend the most, the data show. Facebook declined to comment.)

The younger workers said they see the couple as mentors, and the two are constantly reminding them that the job of a creator is not a “lottery ticket” and requires a persistent grind. Whenever one complains about their lack of engagement, Brian said he responds, “When’s the last time you posted 60 different videos, 60 days in a row, on your Instagram Reels?” One of the facets of this story that was so striking is how relentless and exhausting the creation of explicit content can be.We often talk about things going viral as if it’s this magical one-step process, and it can be, but a lot of it is hard work and experimentation and failure. It looks easy— They’re just wearing bikinis! They’re just playing video games! — and that’s partly why this work is treated as frivolous. But many of the creators at this level grind themselves into a pulp, never taking weekends for fear some other creator will rise up and take their place. A lot of readers will never try to make it as social media influencers, and even fewer, I assume, will try to do OnlyFans. So I want to help them understand just how much labor goes into these little video files we scroll past mindlessly on our screens.

But some have taken to it quite naturally. Rayna Rose, 19, was working last year at a hair salon, sweeping floors for $12 an hour, when an old high school classmate who worked with Adams asked whether she wanted to try OnlyFans and make $500 a video.

Rose started making videos and working as a chatter for $18 an hour but recently renegotiated her contract with Adams to focus more on her personal OnlyFans account, where she has nearly 30,000 fans, many of whom pay $10 a month.

One recent evening this summer, Adams was in the farm’s gym when her boyfriend told her he was headed to their guest room to record a collab with Rose, who was wearing a blue bikini top and braided pigtails.

“Go have fun,” Adams told them as they walked away. “Make good content.” There aren’t many on-the-scene quotes, but the ones you choose to include — such as this one — are vivid. Why did you include this particular comment by Adams in the story?In my first draft, this was the opening scene, but it needed too much setup, which slowed it down. So eventually we ended up trying this as something resembling a pre-kicker. I love using candid scene quotes because that’s how people really talk to each other, but there were so many systems to get into and people to introduce and concepts to discuss in this story that I wanted to be extra discerning about what we used. We talked about cutting this passage a few times but I kept protecting it because it’s so evocative, and I wanted to make sure the reader got to stand inside this environment, even for just a quick exchange. The quote was eye-opening to me for obvious reasons — that’s her boyfriend! —but it’s the “content” part that really stood out. You see the word “content” everywhere now, which makes sense, because we need a grab bag for all of the pictures and videos and news articles and podcasts we give our money and attention to on the internet. But it’s also just such a lifeless, commodity word that obscures everything it describes. And yet that’s how they think of what they do: It’s not sex, it’s content.

The 15-minute video has so far sold more than 1,400 copies and accounted for more than $30,000 in sales.

The women in Adams’s business voice some uncertainty over how long this all can continue. They’ve seen how other creators have struggled and know that, on the internet, nothing lasts: audiences shrink, bodies change, people burn out and move on.

Adams said there may come a time when she wants to spend fewer hours on the work but that she has no plans to change anytime soon. “For as long as OnlyFans is around, Bryce Adams will be there,” she said. “But there may be some point where I have a family and that becomes more of a primary focus than my pages, at least for a little while.”

She and the others worry, too, about how friends and family might react, even though they feel they’ve done nothing worthy of being judged. Rose said she has lost friends due to her “lifestyle,” with one messaging her recently, “Can you imagine how successful you would be if you studied regularly and spent your time wisely?”

The message stung but, in Rose’s eyes, they didn’t understand her at all. She feels, for the first time, like she has a sense of purpose: She wants to be a full-time influencer. She expects to clear $200,000 in earnings this year and is now planning to move out of her parents’ house.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And now I know,” she said. “I want to be big. I want to be, like, mainstream.” What do you think is said by ending the story with this wish that Rose expresses?I didn’t want this story to end in this perfect moment, with everything resolved. I wanted it to feel a little unsettled. At this point, we’ve said a lot about Bryce, who’s established, so I wanted to gesture toward this next generation that is following Bryce’s path and learning to adapt their lives to this economy that’s grown around them. Rayna felt like a way to get at the uncertainty and uncomfortable logic of everything we’ve laid out. She’s young, she’s making these decisions people might disagree with, and yet they’re her decisions. And, in this system, they’re not irrational ones, considering all the money she’s making before she even leaves home. Her dream is to just keep doing it on a bigger and bigger scale, because that’s what a lot of young people want now. She was doing all of this to achieve a standing most people take for granted — to be mainstream. With this story ending the larger series, I wanted it to serve as a poignant little finishing note, given everything people have learned about the industry up to this point. It’s risky, it’s life-shaping, it’s a huge experiment. And yet here she is, thinking about this dream.

* * *

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

The post How a business reporter approached a story about sex-content influencers appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

She may not have faced dragons, but to tell the story of how Dungeons & Dragons has come to serve as an emotional release for death-row prisoners, Keri Blakinger embarked on another kind of epic journey.

“When Wizards and Orcs Came to Death Row,” which was jointly published this past August by The Marshall Project and The New York Times, details prisoners’ underground games of the fantasy game, a role-playing staple whose players embody self-created characters such as clerics, wizards and bards. As Blakinger writes:

To cope with the isolation they face daily, the men on death row spend a lot of their time in search of escape — something to ease the racing thoughts or the crushing regrets. Some read books or find religion. Some play games like Scrabble or jailhouse chess. Others turn to D&D, where they can feel a small sense of the freedom they have left behind.

Prison restrictions forced D&D-playing inmates to improvise: Lacking official maps, they draw their own; without dice, they craft spinners from paper and repurposed typewriter parts.

Blakinger was free of those limitations, but still needed creativity, persistence and patience to report and write her piece. To travel from idea and publication, she identified some possible sources based only on their prison nicknames and then had to coax details from them. COVID interrupted her work, as did job changes and various challenges working through the bureaucracies of the prison system.

Such persistence isn’t a surprise from Blakinger. She spent time in prison herself, an experience covered in her acclaimed memoir “Corrections in Ink” which, according to her website, follows “her path from figure skating to heroin addiction to prison and, finally, to life as an investigative reporter.” She’s now fierce in her coverage of the prison system. Her 2018 Houston Chronicle story on dental care in Texas prisons sparked reforms; in another Marshall Project story published in January 2023, she wrote about the varied and surprising ways prisoners use cell phones. In a sharp irony, her own book was banned in Florida prisons. (Her response is worth the click.)

Blakinger, who was on staff at The Marshall Project for most of the D&D project’s reporting, now works for The Los Angeles Times. She agreed to an interview about how it was reported and written. Her answers have been edited for length and clarity.

In the story, you allude to several years spent exchanging letters with prisoners. How did you first learn of Dungeons & Dragons being played on death row in Texas, and how long did it take to report the story from that first glimmer until publication?
It was somewhere around 2017, just after I’d started covering the death penalty for the Houston Chronicle. I was interviewing a man on the row, and he mentioned that they played “Magic: The Gathering,” and that they had to make their own cards to do so. I was intrigued, and then he volunteered that there was another game more popular than Magic — Dungeons & Dragons. But since he’d stopped playing D&D, he didn’t know much about who was still playing. So for the next few years, every time I interviewed someone, I’d ask them if they played and who they played with.

It turned out to be really tough to nail that down because a lot of the men were nervous about the idea of talking about their friends to the media. On top of that, a lot of the guys went by prison nicknames, so sometimes I’d speak to someone and find out that they didn’t actually know the real names of people they’d been gaming with for years.

By mid-2019 I at least knew enough about the mechanics of gaming on the row to do something with it, and in its first iteration this was a stage piece for Pop Up Magazine tour. Then in 2020, when I joined The Marshall Project, we started a conversation with The New York Times about what stories I had that could make for good magazine pieces — and we landed on this. For the next three years, off and on, I worked on this in the background alongside my other reporting. There were visiting restrictions, and COVID delays and I switched jobs in the middle before we finally got the piece in print this year.

How did you approach the incarcerated people you interviewed for this story?
One of the many tricky things about interviewing people on death row in Texas is that if you put in a formal request for an interview and the person says no, you can’t ask them again unless they have a “status change”— that is, if an execution date is set or cancelled. So any time I heard that someone was involved in the game, I had to make sure I wrote them first. If I didn’t hear back I needed to get their friends to reach out to them for me because I had to be sure that they would say yes before I put in a formal request.

Fortunately, I think it’s a lot easier to approach people asking about something like D&D instead of asking about something as fraught as their conviction or even the conditions on death row. I think it was a relief for some to finally have someone come along and ask questions related to someone other than the crime that landed them there.

Covering prisons and people who are incarcerated seems like one of the most impenetrable beats for a journalist. You’ve been able to pierce that veil before — I’m thinking of your excellent investigation of inadequate dental care for Texas prisoners, but there are other examples. But did this story offer new lessons about circumventing the particular challenges of reporting on prisons?
I was already pretty familiar with a lot of the inherent challenges. But I did have to wrestle with a different problem that was very specific to doing a long-term feature involving men on death row: Death. Aside from Billy, a few other players got executed during the time I was working on this. Of course it’s a given that that could happen when you’re doing any death row reporting, but I’d never had to put myself so much in the position of thinking through what it’s actually like to live with that — to live surrounded by people who are all going to be executed by the state. During one of my early interviews I asked a man if he played D&D and he said no, because the state had executed all of the friends he played with. That really stuck with me.

It sounds as if much of your communications with prisoners were by letter. Can you share a little more about that? How often would you would write? What topics were touched on other than D&D? Any advantages or disadvantages to sending letters?
Until 2022, the primary method by which reporters could interact with Texas prisoners was partially through snail mail. I say partially because I could email them and then the prison would print the email out and hand  them the printed page — eventually. Then they could write me back via snail mail, either by hand or using their typewriters, though the prison commissaries were often out of ribbons for months on end. It was a hugely inefficient method of communication, taking days or weeks for letters to arrive. I would transcribe those into my notes and respond via email.

Then in 2022 death row got tablets. They don’t connect to the App Store or anything, and there is almost nothing they can do on them. But they CAN respond to messages through the monitored email system. So now it’s finally two-way email, although phone calls are still not an option for reporters.

But even though the email option is more convenient, it precludes having any privacy. With snail mail, inmates could mark things as designated media mail and if it was addressed to the physical address of a news room (i.e., not a reporter’s home address) the guards wouldn’t open and read it. There’s no equivalent to that in emailed communications.

With Dungeons & Dragons, that is usually not particularly problematic but there are still times when they can’t tell me certain things that may have influenced their gaming world — like a particular interpersonal drama or piece of backstory or act of abuse by guard. In-person visits don’t offer much more chance for unmonitored conversation. Like I said in the story, reporters can only visit any given death row inmate every 90 days, and the visits are through glass. All the conversation is through a recorded phone.

One decision that stood out to me was the inclusion of so much of Billy Wardlow’s D&D character and games; it feels as if the reader is sitting at the table with him as he weaves and and experiences Arthaxx’s story. How deliberate were you in giving that aspect enough room to stretch out?
I actually wanted to give that more space! There is so much more to the narrative in his game world that I never got to spell out. I was very intentional about getting in the important part — the resonances between Billy and his character — because I think the fact that these parallels exist says so much about how these men use the game.

A former colleague who’s a national-level investigative reporter messaged me about the story and wrote, ‘The description of Wardlow’s character and then contrasting it with him and what his future could have been — it set me to tears.’ Do you remember how you came to draw that contrast between Wardlow’s D&D character and the man he could have been?
I actually didn’t realize this parallel until after Billy had died, so I don’t know how intentional it was on his part. I remember the day I realized it, though. I’d actually become more familiar with his game life at that point than his real life. It was only when I was going through his court records that I suddenly realized the story of his life sounded just like a more tragic version of his character’s life. The parallels blew me away, and I wished I’d been able to ask him about it.

When I reread the story, I was struck by how it quietly touches on so many prison-condition “issues” without slowing down the narrative: the use of solitary confinement, arbitrary-seeming restrictions on reading materials, sentencing reform for those who committed crimes as juveniles. Was it intentional to touch on those, or did they just spin out naturally from the story you wanted to tell?
To me, that was always part of the value of this narrative — the ability to approach some of these issues from a completely different angle. For instance, instead of explaining at length the reality of long-term solitary confinement, I approached it by explaining at length the extent to which people have to go to survive it. I never wanted to tell the story just to tell the story; I always wanted to illustrate something about the system.

You rarely see stories about prisoners that touch on their creative interests, their ambitions, their lives beyond violence and addiction. I can’t imagine you would have spent years reporting this story unless you feel fiercely there’s a place for those aspects. Why should journalists pursue them, even if faced with institutional roadblocks or other obstacles to their reporting?
I think these stories can help us understand prisoners as complex people who are, fundamentally, people — not faceless prison ID numbers. But I also think that focusing on the “lighter” aspects of prison life and seizing on unexpected angles can offer a different way in to an impenetrable world that it is sometimes difficult to get readers to care about. And when that angle is something with such a distinct fanbase as D&D, you’re able to reach a broad demographic of readers who otherwise may not read about people on death row.

Have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons? If so, describe your character.
I’ve watched games, but I’ve actually never played! But last year the guys on the row created a character named after me. I am told that she is very powerful and I understand that she’s been quite a menace.

* * *

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

The post Chasing the emotional escape of Dungeons & Dragons on death row appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

[dc]A[/dc] reader’s comment, a trove of first-hand documentation and a patient, collaborative approach. Those were three elements among many that helped Washington Post reporter Peter Jamison report and write a powerful profile of a family that turned away from their community’s deep commitment to home schooling.

Jamison’s “The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers” profiles the Bealls, a young Virginia family. Parents Aaron and Christina had been home-schooled in an evangelical environment that adhered to a strict patriarchy, distrusted secular education and advocated corporal punishment. When they fell in love and married, the Bealls fully intended to follow that path. As the story summarizes the beliefs of their community:

Public schools were places where children are bullied, or raped in the bathroom, or taught to hate Jesus.

But as they raised their four children, the Bealls were beset by misgivings — first nagging, then powerful. Their 6-year-old daughter, Aimee, was struggling with kitchen-table lessons, so they decided to enroll her in a neighborhood public school — a decision met with everything from confusion to pity to suspicion from members of their family and community.

The story touches on broader topics: the surging national interest in home schooling, which intensified during the COVID pandemic; the commitment to home schooling among conservative Christians, some of whom see it as a way to raise a “Joshua Generation” of leaders who will gain political and cultural influence; and the trends in home schooling in recent decades.

But most of all, the piece is an intimate profile of the Bealls, who grew to question, grapple with and oppose the environment in which they were raised.

The story was sparked by a reader comment about an earlier piece Jamison did, which focused on a little-known political candidate in Maryland. He pursued it as part of The Post’s occasional series “Home School Nation.” But the resulting story, which was featured as a Post “Deep Read,” wouldn’t have happened without the Bealls’ thoughtfulness and candor. That kind of cooperation is something journalists must be patient enough to earn.

“A huge part of my job is demonstrating to people like Aaron and Christina that I want to understand their story as well as I can and that I’m willing to take as much time as necessary to do that,” he told me in an interview for Storyboard. “I like to think that by putting in the work — showing up for those early mornings when school starts, or nights when there are family events on campus; attending a child’s musical on the weekend; sitting and talking for as long as they are willing to talk — I’m ‘anteing up,’ so to speak, showing that I’m committed to the process.”

He also had access to years’ worth of documentation, ranging from notes Aaron and Christina wrote each other during a parenting-seminar workshop, to emails, social-media posts and text messages as their quiet rebellion led to a rift with other family members. Access to such materials, Jamison said, also is earned through a candid and straightforward approach.

“One way to encourage candor is by showing it,” he said. “There’s no way we can expect people to disclose the most painful details of their lives unless we’re honest at the beginning, middle and end of the reporting and writing process about what we’re up to,”

In a Q&A followed by an annotation of the story, Jamison explained how it was conceived, reported and written; how he navigates the challenges of a story that touches on so many larger topics; and about reader reaction that “was like unlike any I’ve received before.” The exchange has been edited for length and clarity. 

[dc]T[/dc]he story of the Bealls is part of a Washington Post continuing series about home schooling. How did this particular story come about?
It began, as good stories so often do, with another line of reporting. Last fall I was assigned to profile Dan Cox, an obscure state delegate who had improbably cinched the Republican nomination in the Maryland governor’s race. Cox, a MAGA candidate who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, lost the general election in a landslide. But his candidacy was interesting, especially the extent to which his life and worldview had been shaped by home schooling. His father, an evangelical Christian pastor, was a pioneer in the early days of the home-schooling movement.

Two things became clear while I was reporting that story. First was that home-schooling parents have tremendous latitude in what and how they teach their children. The Cox family’s home-schooling network, for example, teaches that a married woman should “desire to be under submission” to her husband and promotes a history book stating that American government should “acknowledge the Lord of Scripture and be reconstructed according to His demands.” Second was that interest in home schooling has positively exploded over the last several years.

Knowledgeable and well-meaning people have different views of what this means. Home-schooling offers an almost limitless opportunity for parents — many who feel their kids have been let down by more traditional academic settings— to tailor an educational program to their children’s needs. But for the same reason, it can lead to educational neglect and to physical or emotional abuse. Little to no regulation is exercised over home-schooling in much of the country. The entire topic seemed like a rich vein to mine.

At the outset, I got lucky: Among the commenters on my story about Dan Cox was a person claiming firsthand knowledge of the Coxes’ religious community of home-schoolers. I sent a message to the email this commenter had used to register on the Post’s website — I wasn’t sure who I was writing to — and about 90 minutes later heard back from Aaron Beall.

What was the reporting, writing and editing process like?
After an initial phone call, Aaron and Christina agreed to meet me at a public library in Northern Virginia. They showed up with their 2-year-old daughter, Aurelia, and took turns watching her as we spoke for a couple hours in a conference room. The idea was to get to know them a little bit, and let them get to know me, and let them talk in an unstructured way about what was on their minds. For me this is an essential part of the process: When I’m talking to people I suspect might have an interesting story to tell, I try not to be too intent at the outset on what exactly that story might be or how it will shape up in the writing.

While Aaron and Christina could point to positive aspects of their own experiences as home-schooled children, the overriding impression they conveyed was a negative one. A lot of this had to do with the faction of the home-schooling movement in which they were raised: Their parents were conservative Christians who saw home education as an antidote to the secularization of public and many private schools. As I hope comes across in the story, Christina and Aaron are a very bright pair. But Aaron had never found a way to pursue his passion for the sciences; he had never attended college. Christina had been taught throughout her life that a woman shouldn’t seek a career outside the home, so she didn’t.

All this was compelling, as was the firsthand knowledge the Bealls had of the Coxes’ home-schooling network. But what immediately stood out to me as we talked was that three of their four children were not with us at the library that day. They were attending a public school. Aaron and Christina had essentially embraced what they were raised to believe was one of society’s greatest evils: the public education system. How and why did that happen?

The reporting involved many interviews with Christina and Aaron and repeated trips to their home and their kids’ school. (Public school officials in Loudoun County allowed me extensive access to the Beall family’s elementary school.) The writing was difficult, simply because the Bealls’ story touches on so many profound topics, any one of which risked derailing the central narrative if examined disproportionately. Where do parents’ rights end and children’s rights begin? Where is the line dividing education from indoctrination? What does it mean to turn your back on the community and belief system in which you were raised? All of these issues are present in what Christina and Aaron experienced. The challenge was to let these themes emerge as organically as possible, hewing to the narrative of what their family had been through. 

The story is accompanied by striking photos by Matt McClain, and was edited by Lynda Robinson. Tell me more about how much they contributed to the final result.
I’m lucky to work with extraordinarily high-caliber photojournalists at The Washington Post, and Matt is no exception. His pictures are essential to the final product, and not just because they enable a visually appealing design for the story. The images he captured convey so much about the sometimes conflicting moods and emotions of the Bealls: the excitement of the school day, which for them is bound up in the excitement of discovering a new way of life; the closeness of their immediate family, but also their loneliness and ambivalence after severing themselves from the world in which they were raised. These photos aren't just adornment. Alongside the text, they portray a reality that the reader is meant to see and feel.

My editor, Lynda Robinson, plays a big role in everything I write. We talk almost every day, and sometimes multiple times a day, during the reporting and writing of a story like this. Lynda has many strengths, but one of the ways in which she’s most helpful to me is in intuiting the shape of a complicated story built on lots of material. I mentioned above how important it is to let a story’s weightier themes emerge organically through a central narrative. This I learned from Lynda. In early drafts of this piece, I was tempted to get too discursive on subjects such as the dearth of regulation for American home-schooling or the psychological dynamics of evangelical Christians who “deconstruct” their faith. But for the story to have any hope of reading as a cohesive whole, this temptation had to be resisted. Lynda made sure I resisted it.

Are there any lessons you took away from this story that may help other journalists?
It’s a cliché that reporters should try to zig while others zag (or is it zag while others zig?), but I think the response to this story underlines the cliché's basic truth. So many stories have been written about the not-very-edifyingly-named “culture wars” in education and about families’ post-pandemic flight from the public school system. Many of those stories have been quite good and necessary. But I believe that one reason the Bealls’ story resonated is that it’s something that approaches similar themes from a totally different direction. Here are two people who grew up in very insular environments, with their parents exercising nearly complete control over the ideas they encountered. And ultimately, for them, the public schools meant broader horizons and a form of liberation. The Bealls live in Loudoun County, which has been an epicenter for the debates over topics such as Covid mask mandates and school policies toward transgender children. But as Aaron put it with characteristic eloquence, “People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated... It’s not even comparable.”

The Revolt of the Christian Home-Schoolers

They were taught that public schools are evil. Then a Virginia couple defied their families and enrolled their kids.

By Peter Jamison

May 30, 2023

ROUND HILL, Va. — They said goodbye to Aimee outside her elementary school, watching nervously as she joined the other children streaming into a low brick building framed by the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Christina and Aaron Beall stood among many families resuming an emotional but familiar routine: the first day of full-time, in-person classes since public schools closed at the beginning of the pandemic.

But for the Bealls, that morning in late August 2021 carried a weight incomprehensible to the parents around them. Their 6-year-old daughter, wearing a sequined blue dress and a pink backpack that almost obscured her small body, hesitated as she reached the doors. Although Aaron had told her again and again how brave she was, he knew it would be years before she understood how much he meant it — understood that for her mother and father, the decision to send her to school was nothing less than a revolt.

Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.

At a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern home-schooling movement. That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.

Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.

Like all rebellions, this one had come with consequences. Their decision to send Aimee to the neighborhood elementary school — a test run to see how it might work for their other kids — had contributed to a bitter rift with their own parents, who couldn’t understand their embrace of an education system they had been raised to abhor. And it had led Christina, who until that summer day had home-schooled all of their children, into an existential crisis. I was struck by how carefully structured these first four grafs seemed to be. You provide readers with a visceral scene in the first sentence — referring to the Bealls in the first sentence with “they” — then add more context in each successive paragraph. How much did you work on the opening, both in your initial writing and later with an editor?I tend to work a lot on tops, and this one took more work than usual. My editor and I knew this scene — Aaron and Christina taking the decisive turn away from their upbringing by sending their daughter into a public school — was the natural beginning for the story. The trick was in introducing the elements that give that decision its emotional weight (their background in conservative Christian home-schooling, their families’ beliefs about public schools, and so on) without overwhelming the reader.

“I never imagined sending you to the local elementary school instead of learning and growing together at home,” she wrote later that day in an Instagram post addressed to her daughter. “But life has a way of undoing our best laid plans and throwing us curveballs.”

Christina did not describe on Instagram how perplexed she and Aaron had been by a ritual that the other parents seemed to understand; how she had tried, in unwitting defiance of school rules, to accompany Aimee inside, earning a gentle rebuke from the principal.

And she did not describe what happened after their daughter vanished into a building they had been taught no child should ever enter. On that first day of school — first not just for one girl but for two generations of a family — the Bealls walked back to their SUV, and as Aaron started the car, Christina began to cry. This is an elegant transition: From the public details of Christina’s post to what she didn’t include. Do you recall anything specific about how these paragraphs were written, or what you wanted them to accomplish?In my mind this moment sets an important tone for everything that follows. The Bealls’ story is not one of triumphant self-realization. Yes, they are taking a step they hope will lead to a better life for their daughter, but they are also rejecting principles that were once central to their identities and risking estrangement from their parents. Christina’s tears when they reach the privacy of their car show more about this messy emotional reality than anything I could say.

Across the country, interest in home schooling has never been greater. The Bealls could see the surge in Virginia, where nearly 57,000 children were being home-schooled in the fall of 2022 — a 28 percent jump from three years earlier. The rise of home education, initially unleashed by parents’ frustrations with pandemic-related campus closures and remote learning, has endured as one of the lasting social transformations wrought by covid-19.

But if the coronavirus was a catalyst for the explosion in home schooling, the stage was set through decades of painstaking work by true believers like those who had raised Aaron and Christina. Aided by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) — a Christian nonprofit that has been dubbed “the most influential homeschool organization in the world,” and is based less than five miles from the Bealls’ house in Northern Virginia — those activists had fought to establish the legality of home schooling in the 1980s and early 1990s, conquering the skepticism of public school administrators and state lawmakers across the country.

Through their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA founder Michael Farris called a “Joshua Generation” that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles. Much of this story is focused on the Bealls, but it also includes a primer of sorts on the rise of and backlash to homeschooling. How did you do research into homeschooling? Were there any particular challenges to overcome with that research, and/or resources you found helpful?I began researching the history of home schooling late last year in preparation for launching this series. From a quantitative perspective, the topic can be frustrating: Home-schoolers are, almost by definition, a difficult population to study, and credible research is hard to come by. Fortunately, there are some terrific scholars who match an encyclopedic knowledge of home-schooling with an acknowledgment of what can’t presently be known. Two in particular I have found helpful are Milton Gaither and Robert Kunzman. (Gaither’s book, “Homeschool: An American History,” is a great place to start for those looking to learn more about this subject.) The backlash against conservative Christian home-schooling — led first and foremost by people who were raised inside the movement — has been chronicled by groups such as Homeschoolers Anonymous and the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

Home schooling today is more diverse, demographically and ideologically, than it was in the heyday of conservative Christian activism. Yet those activists remain extraordinarily influential.

Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”

But what should be a moment of triumph for conservative Christian home-schoolers has been undermined by an unmistakable backlash: the desertion and denunciations of the very children they said they were saving.

Former home-schoolers have been at the forefront of those arguing for greater oversight of home schooling, forming the nonprofit Coalition for Responsible Home Education to make their case.

“As an adult I can say, ‘No. What happened to me as a child was wrong,’” said Samantha Field, the coalition’s government relations director.

Earlier this year, Jinger Duggar Vuolo — familiar to millions of TV viewers from the reality show “19 Kids and Counting” — published a memoir in which she harshly criticized Bill Gothard, a pivotal but now disgraced figure in conservative Christian home schooling whose teachings her parents followed. Beginning a decade ago, Gothard was accused of sexual abuse and harassment by dozens of women — allegations the minister vehemently denied.

Farris said it is not uncommon for children who grow up in oppressively patriarchal households to reject or at least moderate their parents’ beliefs. However, he said such families are a minority in the home-schooling movement and are often considered extreme even by other conservative Christians.

“I view this as the fringe of the fringe,” Farris said. “And every kid that I know that has lashed out at home schooling came out of this.”

Christina, 34, and Aaron, 37, had joined no coalitions. They had published no memoirs. Their rebellion played out in angry text messages and emails with their parents, in tense conversations conducted at the edges of birthday parties and Easter gatherings. Their own children — four of them, including Aimee — knew little of their reasons for abandoning home schooling: the physical and emotional trauma of the “biblical discipline” to which they had been subjected, the regrets over what Aaron called “a life robbed” by strictures on what and how they learned.

The Bealls offered a wealth of documentation — emails and handwritten notes — as well as their own thoughts. How did you approach them, and what kind of interactions did you have to facilitate such candor and thoughtfulness?Christina and Aaron are unusually reflective, and the documentation they provided — most of it preserved over time by Christina — was invaluable. Absent audio or video recordings, the kind of contemporaneous emails, text messages and other records they shared with me are as close as a reporter can come to reliably reconstructing exchanges and emotional states from years ago. In the beginning I had no idea any of those materials existed, but Christina prepared for one of my early visits by digging up some old photos and journal entries. As they shared more and more with me, Christina and Aaron proved very willing to illustrate or verify their accounts with these materials when possible — for example, the notes they wrote to each other during a 2012 parenting seminar that cited the Bible in support of hitting your kids.

How did you facilitate that cooperation from them? You've mentioned being candid about your reporting process, but can you say more about that?I can never fully explain why subjects choose to share or withhold certain things about themselves. Subjects like Christina and Aaron, who had been completely private people before I approached them, frequently have questions about how the reporting process works. Unless doing so would violate an ethical obligation, I answer those questions as straightforwardly as I can. This could concern anything from our publication timeline to how certain material might be used to how my perception of their story is evolving. At every step, those honest conversations are important.

Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded aboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift. Sometimes they still flinched when they remembered their parents’ literal adherence to the words of the Old Testament: “Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.” This is a powerful detail. Did you see Aaron or Chistina flinch while recalling this edict? How did you record this detail?It took a while for Aaron and Christina to become comfortable speaking with me about the corporal punishment they had experienced as kids, and ultimately, only Aaron did so in detail. His memories, recounted more fully later in the story, are harrowing, but he relayed them calmly and with precision. This is one of the harder parts of my job. Journalistic rigor and fairness demand that we ask people to describe what are obviously traumatic experiences in as much detail as possible and then, later, that we return to double-check and verify those details. If there is any smooth or comfortable way to do this, I haven’t discovered it.

The Bealls knew that many home-schooling families didn’t share the religious doctrines that had so warped their own lives. But they also knew that the same laws that had failed to protect them would continue to fail other children.

“It’s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse, to make them invisible, to strip them of any capability of getting help. And not just in a physical way,” Christina said. “At some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don’t even realize you need help.”

Christina had felt no urge to escape when, at the age of 15, she listed her “Requirements for my husband” in neat, looping script on a ruled sheet of notebook paper. One aspect of this story that stands out throughout is how well-executed the transitions were. It’s not the flashiest subject, but in a story with so many layers, it’s essential to guide readers through the Bealls’ changing beliefs. For example, the sentence that begins, “Christina had felt no urge to escape …”, which moves the story from Christina’s present beliefs to her earlier ones. How much work did you put into writing transitions?Thank you for noticing! I think a lot about transitions, especially in longer or more complex stories. My goal is for the copy to always have some degree of momentum — propelling the reader toward what comes next — even as the pace varies from passage to passage and section to section. We all know that sinking feeling when you’re reading a longer piece of journalism that slows to a crawl or to a standstill, and I try at all costs to avoid that. It’s natural for a story to slow down in places, but those are also the places where I try to be particularly vigilant about not losing readers. Transitions are a useful device for preserving momentum, but they have to make sense. No amount of artfulness can mask the fact that the pieces of a story don’t fit well together; a sound structure must come first.

“Must want me to be a full-time homemaker & only have an outside job if required or instructed by my Potter,” she wrote, referring to biblical verses that liken humans to clay in the hands of God. “Must believe in ‘full & unconditional’ surrender of our # of children to God Almighty.” And: “Must desire to homeschool our children.” How did you learn about this list and get to view it?The list was among the documents Christina unearthed during one of our early interviews to show me how she looked at the world as a home-schooled teen. To her great credit, she seemed to instinctively grasp very early in the process that this type of supporting documentation would be helpful for my story, which of course it was.

The list is a blueprint of what she had been taught about the proper ambitions of a woman: to bear and raise children while shielding them from what those around her called “government schools.” She felt both hopeful and nervous when, several years later, her father, Derrick Comfort, came home with news: He had just met with a young man who had been raised with those same ideals — and who wanted Christina to be his wife.

Aaron was shy and cerebral, a self-taught web developer who had grown up in Fairfax County, Va., had never attended college and, at age 26, still lived with his parents. He barely knew Christina Comfort, the oldest of eight children on her family’s 10-acre farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A graduate of Patrick Henry College — founded by Farris in Virginia to cater to Christian home-schoolers — she taught math and writing to her siblings and did chores around the farm. She prayed while riding a lawn mower for God to send her a husband. The lawn mower is such a specific detail, the kind that sticks in readers’ minds. Do you recall how it was revealed?This story, like any other, involved exhaustive fact-checking at the tail end of the process, before publication. Christina and Aaron were very patient with me on this front and, as often happens, I caught a number of things that I hadn’t gotten quite right. One had something to do with the stage in Christina’s life when she was living as a young adult on the family farm. In fact-checking, I asked Christina if she had any other concrete memories of this period, something that evoked her general mood and outlook, and this is what she shared: riding the mower, praying for a husband.

 The Comfort and Beall families were both active in a religious community led by Gary Cox, an evangelical pastor and pioneer of Maryland’s home-schooling movement. Christina was a graduate of Cox’s home education network, Walkersville Christian Family Schools, while Aaron began attending Cox’s church in rural northern Maryland as a teenager. The minister exerted a powerful influence over his congregation and students, teaching that children live in divinely ordained subjection to the rule of their parents.

Cox — who still operates a home-schooling organization, now called Wellspring Christian Family Schools — declined repeated interview requests.

Last year his son, Dan Cox, a home-schooled Maryland state delegate who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, won the Republican gubernatorial primary. He went on to lose in a landslide to Democrat Wes Moore.

During Aaron and Christina’s “courtship” — a period of chaperoned contact that served as a prelude to formal engagement — they seemed ready to fulfill their parents’ hopes. Eating calamari in Annapolis or touring Colonial Williamsburg, they talked about what their future would include (home schooling) and what it would not (music with a beat that can be danced to). But signs soon emerged of the unimaginable rupture that lay ahead.

On a spring afternoon in 2012, the couple sat in a small church in Queenstown, Md. In preparation for marriage, they were attending a three-day seminar on “Gospel-Driven Parenting” run by Chris Peeler, a minister whose family was part of Gary Cox’s home-schooling group. The workshop covered a range of topics, including the one they were now studying: “Chastisement.”

“The use of the rod is for the purpose of breaking the child’s will,” stated the handout that they bent over together in the church. “One way to tell if this has happened is to see if they can look you in the eyes after being disciplined and ask for forgiveness.”

Bible verses were cited in support of corporal punishment. But Christina had misgivings.

“I really don’t think I can be a parent,” she wrote to Aaron in the margins of the handout. “It just feels like you have to be, like, hardened.”

“YES! YOU! CAN!” Aaron wrote back. This document from a decade ago is a powerful snapshot into the Bealls’ growing disquiet with the environment they were raised in. How did you learn about it and come to see it?Christina had kept a binder with worksheets and handouts from this parenting seminar, which took place 11 years ago. They initially shared it with me, I believe, to illustrate the parenting philosophy that was passed down to them, specifically the emphasis on what was interpreted to be a Biblical decree that one should hit disobedient children. But those handwritten notes are what make it a truly fascinating document. It is essentially a live conversation about their misgivings, preserved on the page.

The use of the “rod” — interpreted by different people as a wooden spoon, dowel, belt, rubber hose or other implement — was a common practice among the conservative Christian home-schoolers Aaron and Christina knew, and one they had both experienced regularly in their own families.

The elder Bealls and Comforts did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the discipline they used with their children and the decision by Aaron and Christina to embrace public education. Aaron’s older brother, Joshua — who Aaron said still home-schools his children — did not return calls. Aaron’s other siblings could not be reached for comment. Christina’s siblings, some of whom have also left her parents’ home, either declined to comment or could not be reached. You’re transparent about which potential sources didn’t respond to interview requests. Why is it important for that to be included for readers?We must acknowledge what we don’t know, and a big part of that is acknowledging who we weren’t able to talk to. That is especially the case in a story like this, which describes scenes whose veracity can only be confirmed or disputed by those who were present. I wish Christina's and Aaron’s parents had spoken to me, and I tried repeatedly to persuade them to do so — by phone, email and through visits to their homes. I very much wanted to hear them explain why they made the parenting decisions they did, and how they had been affected by Aaron’s and Christina’s rejection of conservative Christian home schooling. But it was their choice, not mine, and they ultimately chose not to talk.

Aaron actually shared Christina’s qualms. He knew that the term parents in the movement casually used for discipline, “spankings,” did not capture the childhood terror of being struck several times a week — sometimes more, sometimes less — with what he describes as a shortened broomstick for disobeying commands or failing to pay attention to his schoolwork.

The memory of waiting as a small child outside his parents’ bedroom for his mother to summon him in; the fear that his transgressions might be enough to incur what he called “killer bee” spankings, when the rod was used against his bare skin; his efforts to obey the order to remain immobile as he was hit — all these sensations and emotions seeped into his bones, creating a deep conviction that those who fail to obey authority pay an awful price.

“For a long time, I’ve wondered why I was so unable to think for myself in this environment,” he says today, attributing the shortcoming to “learning that even starting to think, or disagree with authorities, leads to pain — leads to physical and real pain that you cannot escape.”

Now, on the threshold of parenthood — Christina would become pregnant within two weeks of their wedding on Sept. 29, 2012 — the couple’s reservations about “chastisement” could no longer be ignored. As a wedding gift, they said, Aaron’s brother and sister-in-law had given them “To Train Up a Child,” by the popular Christian home-schooling authors Michael and Debi Pearl.

The Pearls advocate hitting children with tree branches, belts and other “instruments of love” to instill obedience, and recommend that toddlers who take slowly to potty training be washed outdoors with cold water from a garden hose. Their book advocates “training sessions” in which infants, as soon as they are old enough to crawl, are placed near a desired object and repeatedly struck with a switch if they disobey commands not to touch it.

The Pearls have defended their methods, saying they are not meant to encourage brutality and, when properly applied, reduce the frequency with which parents must later discipline their kids.

Aaron and Christina did not follow the Pearls’ advice when their first child, Ezra, was born. Nor did they take on authoritarian roles with their second, Aimee, or third, Oliver. All were home-schooled, albeit in less isolation than their parents: Christina joined co-ops with other Christian mothers in Northern Virginia.

But by the time the Bealls had Aurelia, their fourth child, Aaron — now a successful software engineer whose job had enabled the family to buy a four-bedroom house in Loudoun County — had begun to question far more than corporal punishment.

“When it came time for me to hit my kids, that was the first independent thought I remember having: ‘This can’t be right. I think I’ll just skip this part,’” he says.

But if that seemingly inviolable dogma was false, what else might be? Aaron gradually began to feel adrift and depressed.

“It’s like having the rug pulled out from under your feet,” he says. “All of reality is kind of up for grabs.”

He scoured Amazon for books about evolution and cosmology. Eventually, he found his way to blog posts and books by former Christian fundamentalists who had abandoned their religious beliefs. He watched an interview with Tara Westover, whose best-selling memoir, “Educated,” detailed the severe educational neglect and physical abuse she endured as a child of survivalist Mormon home-schoolers in Idaho.

And in the spring of 2021, as he and Christina were struggling to engage Aimee in her at-home lessons, he suggested a radical solution: Why not try sending their daughter to the reputable public elementary school less than a mile from their house?

Christina could think of many reasons. They were the same ones Aaron had learned as a child: Public schools were places where children are bullied, or raped in the bathroom, or taught to hate Jesus.

But she also suspected that Aimee could use the help of professional educators. Just as important, she had learned all her life that it was her duty to obey her husband. She was confounded and angry, at both Aaron and the seeming contradiction his suggestion had exposed.

“I guess I’m just honestly confused and wonder what you think,” she wrote in an email to her father in May 2021. “I’m supposed to submit to Aaron, he wants the kids to go to public school. … You think that’s a sin but it’s also a sin to not listen to your husband so which is it?”

At first, Christina’s and Aaron’s parents reacted to the news that they were considering public school for Aimee with dazed incomprehension. Did Christina feel overwhelmed, they asked? Did she need more help with work around the house? As long as Aimee was learning to read, she would be fine, Aaron’s mother assured them. Christina’s father sent a YouTube video of John Taylor Gatto, a famous critic of America’s public education system.

The dialogue took on a darker tone as Aimee, with Christina’s hesitant agreement, began school that fall. By then, Aaron had told his parents he no longer considered himself a believer.

“This is absolutely devastating,” his mother, Linda Beall, wrote in a long email to Christina. “I hurt so much for you Christina!!!”

“I don’t think Aaron is going to be wrestled into heaven with good arguments,” Linda added. “I think this is likely about his response to hard things in his life. I think he needs to come face to face with God himself, and bow before Him in recognition of his own sin, and need for a Savior.”

Despite the sympathy expressed in the email, Christina bristled at the suggestion that her husband’s crisis of faith stemmed from his reluctance to face “hard things” in his life. She knew that reexamining his religious convictions and traumatic memories had perhaps been the hardest thing Aaron had ever done.

Aimee, meanwhile, was thriving at Round Hill Elementary. By the third quarter, her report card said she was “a pleasure to teach,” was “slowly becoming more social and more willing to participate in class” and showed “tremendous growth” in her reading skills, which had lagged below grade level at the beginning of the year.

For several months after that first week of classes — when she had come home wearing a paper hat, colored with blue crayon and printed with the words “My First Day of First Grade” — Aimee had had a stock response when her parents asked her how she liked school: She would suppress a grin, say she “hated it,” and then start laughing at her own joke. I like the detail of the hat. Did you see it, or were you told about it later?The hat was in a photo taken of Aimee during that first week of school.

“You should have asked to go to school,” Aimee, who knew her mom had been educated at home, would eventually tell Christina. “It affects your whole life.”

Now it was Christina’s turn to question her belief — not in Christianity, but in the conservative Christian approach to home schooling. She began to research spiritual abuse and the history of Christian nationalism. Ideas she had never questioned — such as the statement, in a book given to her by her dad, that it “would be a waste of her time and her life” for a woman to work outside the house — no longer made sense.

Her loss of faith in the biblical literalism and patriarchal values of her childhood was coming in the way the movement’s adherents had always warned it would: through exposure to people with different experiences and points of view.

Those people just happened to be her daughter and her husband. This seems like a keen observation, that the different viewpoints came from those in Christina’s immediate family. Do you remember when you were struck by that insight, or when you decided to include it in the story?I can’t recall a specific moment when it occurred to me. I think this description evolved out of thinking about Christina’s words immediately below this — that she is unable to simply dismiss Aaron in the way she had been taught to dismiss anybody else who questioned her beliefs. At some point it just struck me that this was a remarkable twist on a threat she had always been warned about. The ones who challenge her ideas about child-rearing and education are not some interloping strangers. They are two of the people she loves most and knows best.

“This is the guy I’ve been married to for eight years,” she recalls thinking. “I know him. I know his heart. I know what kind of parent he wants to be to our kids. These easy answers of ‘Oh, you’re just not a Christian anymore, you just want to sin’ … didn’t work anymore.”

As Aimee’s first year at Round Hill Elementary came to an end, Aaron and Christina were more convinced than ever that they had made the right decision. But they were also at a loss for how to heal the tensions with their parents.

In a 2022 email intended for a pastor at her church but sent by accident to Christina, Linda Beall blamed her daughter-in-law for their deepening rift, saying she had taken undue offense at good-faith efforts to advise and support the family through Aaron’s loss of faith.

“So she is again flipping the script from the reality that we love them and her, want to support them, and have only tried to do that again and again, but have been assaulted every time we engage. And I have given up trying [because] it all gets flipped and used against us,” Linda wrote. “I really can not remember one conversations we have had since this unfolded that has not escalated things. So when she beats up ‘everything’ I say, never offers forgiveness, why would we want to engage again?”

Around the same time, Christina sent Aaron’s parents a series of text messages lamenting what she said was their unwillingness to reconcile and explaining that she had changed her opinions about the way she and Aaron had been raised.

“There has been so much pain but I am so excited to now understand and see past the ways that people control and manipulate me,” she wrote. “And you may not believe it but I still love Jesus.”

Aaron and Christina had decided that, in the fall of 2022, all three of their school-age children — not just Aimee but 5-year-old Oliver and 9-year-old Ezra — would attend public school. Aurelia, then 2, would remain at home.

Despite Aimee’s positive experience, Aaron and Christina were anxious, both for their children and about how their parents would react. One afternoon in June, Christina sent a text message to her mother.

“I need to tell you that all three kids are going to school in the fall. I’m sorry, because I know this will be upsetting and disappointing to you and dad,” Christina wrote. “I figured you should hear it from me first.”

Three hours later, her mother texted back.

“Dearest Christina, it is not at all upsetting or disappointing to me,” Catherine Comfort wrote. “You and Aaron are outstanding parents and I’m sure you made the decision best for your family.”

Even Aaron’s parents finally signaled a grudging degree of acceptance. What has the reaction to the story from general readers been like? Have you heard any reaction from the Beall family?The reaction from general readers was unlike any I’ve seen before, at least to my own stuff. The story was among the most read on The Post’s website for several days, and I got hundreds of emails, many of them long and thoughtful. Some of the most heartbreaking were from adults who had grown up in households similar to those in which the Bealls were raised. These readers said they recognized for the first time that they weren’t alone in trying to live with the tangled emotional legacy of this type of upbringing. There were many, many messages expressing admiration for the courage Christina and Aaron had shown in rejecting the approach to home schooling that had defined so much of their lives. There was also a strong response from home-schoolers who said the story did not capture the ideological breadth of the movement — basically that we had ignored the secular and less doctrinaire world of home-schooling families, which seem to account for a substantial amount of the movement’s growth over the last several years. Subsequent stories in The Post’s Home-School Nation series have examined those types of home-schoolers, and future pieces will as well. But I firmly believe that understanding the world of conservative Christian home schooling is indispensable for understanding the modern home-schooling movement. These are the parents who, while they did not originate the concept of home education, developed the movement’s political infrastructure and fought some of its most important legal battles. Home-schooling simply would not exist in its current form, and with its current popularity, without them. Christina and Aaron hoped their story could help illuminate this world, and I think they were both gratified by the enormous and mostly positive response. But I also think that it’s more than a little strange and unnerving to be the subjects of a widely read piece of journalism. It’s an experience most of us, myself included, have never had and likely will never have. I try never to forget or underestimate the risks people take and the costs they incur— in time, mental bandwidth, exposure of their lives’ most intimate details to strangers — by participating in something like this.

In February, Linda and Bernard Beall walked into the gym at Round Hill Elementary one cold Saturday afternoon to watch a school performance of “The Lion King.” Ezra had a part in the chorus as a wildebeest.

Sitting on plastic chairs in the dark and crowded room, the pair gave no outward sign of the remarkable nature of their visit. When the performance was over, they hugged their grandkids in front of the stage and exchanged halting small talk with Aaron and Christina. Then they drove off, with no discussion of a visit to their son’s house a few blocks away.

About 10 minutes remained before the Bealls would have to pile into their minivan, and the children needed to get dressed — in their pajamas.

It was Groundhog Day, a damp night in February, and a low fire glowed in the hearth of the Bealls’ living room. Aaron and Christina sat on the floor playing card and board games with their kids, while Ezra sat on the couch, wearing headphones and absorbed in a game on his laptop. You spend some time describing the family here. What made this a scene you wanted to capture and share with readers?I think this scene and the one that follows, at Round Hill Elementary, reveal a lot about how far the Bealls have come. Reading to kids in pajamas has such intimate connotations. It's usually something you do with your immediate family or close relatives. Yet in this instance, the kids are wearing their PJs to school, and being read “bedtime stories” by their teachers. I just thought that was a remarkable example of how much trust Christina and Aaron had come to place in public schools — institutions they had been taught to fear. Many parents in the movement they came out of would think the whole idea of a “family reading night” inside a public school is nuts, but as you watch it unfold you can see that it’s not, and that the Bealls have assumed their place in the school community. The scene beforehand at their home as they’re getting ready to leave is the first in which the entire family is brought together and shown interacting. It comes near the end of the story, but this seemed like an important moment to pause and “introduce” them all as a group.

Soon they would be leaving to attend their elementary school’s “For the Love of Reading Family Night,” held in the school library, where students were encouraged to come dressed for bedtime.

As Oliver rose to change (Ezra, the oldest, would not deign to put on his jammies), Aimee told her parents how her second-grade class had learned that day about Punxsutawney Phil.

Aaron looked at her in bewilderment.

“Phil?” he asked. “Am I out of the loop?”

His daughter stared back at him in disbelief.

“He’s famous!” Aimee said. She explained Phil’s role in predicting the length of winter.

“I knew about groundhogs,” Aaron said. “I just didn’t know about Phil.”

“He’s really famous,” Aimee said.

Christina smiled at her husband.

“Home-schooler,” she said. I love how much is captured by this exchange of dialogue, specifically about Aimee’s grasp of the secular world. How conscious are you of “hunting” for dialogue while reporting?“Hunting” implies a degree of single-mindedness — searching for one type of thing — that I don’t think we should bring to the reporting process. But in some ways it’s an apt metaphor, because most of a hunter’s time is spent waiting. And that’s exactly what happens on a story like this. There were entire days of reporting, in Loudoun County and elsewhere, that didn't yield details I ultimately included in the story. You keep showing up, you keep watching and listening, and you hope that you observe something interesting. Good dialogue is always the prize. Stories like this can’t live without it.

These were the gaps Aaron and Christina had become accustomed to finding as they learned about a world whose boundaries extended far beyond the one in which they had been raised. There were so many things they had not learned, and perhaps would never learn.

Stacks of books on the living room’s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as “Raising Critical Thinkers” by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups. Aaron and Christina were still young, but they knew enough about the demands of life, work and family to understand that they could not recover or reconstruct the lost opportunities of their childhoods.

But they could provide new and different opportunities for their own kids. They were doing so in Loudoun County, one of the hotbeds of America’s culture wars over public instruction about race and gender. To the Bealls, who truly knew what it was like to learn through the lens of ideology, concerns about kids being brainwashed in public schools were laughable.

“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron says. “It’s not even comparable.”

There were still moments when they were condemned by an inner voice telling them that they were doing the wrong thing, that both they and their children would go to hell for abandoning the rod and embracing public schools. But the voice was usually silenced by their wonder and gratitude at the breadth of their children’s education.

That breadth was on display as the Bealls jostled into the school library with other families. It was the second day of Black History Month, and the shelves were set up with displays of books about the Underground Railroad, soprano Ella Sheppard and Vice President Harris. Where the walls reached the ceiling a mural was painted, with Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh.

Aaron and Christina stood shoulder-to-shoulder, surveying the room. This was the belly of the beast, the environment their parents had worked to save them from.

But they weren’t scared to be inside this school, and were now familiar with it. On Tuesday mornings, Christina volunteered here, helping Aimee’s class with reading lessons.

“Let’s go out this way, guys,” she said, leading the way through an exit when it was time to disperse from the library to listen to the teachers read stories aloud.

The hallways were long and wide, with plenty of room for small legs to gather speed. Soon Aaron and Christina were watching as their children, who knew the way to their classrooms, ran far in front of them. As you wrote this final paragraph, what impression did you want to leave readers with?There is a naturally occurring motif in this moment: Aaron and Christina are, in both a figurative and a literal sense, being led by their children. They both grew up in homes that placed an enormous premium on obedience and parental authority. And of course they haven’t completely jettisoned those concepts— no responsible parent can— but they have recalibrated their interpretation of them. They are not necessarily seeking to dictate their kids’ course in life, or shield them from challenging ideas, and they are allowing them a degree of autonomy that they didn’t enjoy themselves. Through this process of watching their kids learn and grow, Aaron and Christina are learning and growing. They are re-evaluating their ideas about the world. I don’t know that all this is conveyed to the reader in this last paragraph, or even that I want all this to be conveyed. But that’s what I think about when I hold this image of them: the kids running down the school hallway, Christina and Aaron following.

* * *

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

The post A revealing profile of a family that defied their faith’s edict on home schooling appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

By Trevor Pyle

[dc]W[/dc]hen a former student killed 19 students and two teachers in a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school last year, the ache spread worldwide. One who felt the pain keenly was Kim Garza, a professor and novelist who grew up in Uvalde.

The author of "The Last Karankawas" and a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas San Antonio, Garza had agreed early in 2022 to write an essay for Texas Highways. Then the shooting at Robb Elementary School happened.

“It was shattering,” she said. “Like everyone, I was wrecked, reeling from that event. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed impossible to write an essay about anywhere but home.”

[caption id="attachment_176605" align="alignright" width="400"] Kim Garza[/caption]

Garza wasn’t interested in an essay as focused on trauma as many that emerged in the wake of the shooting. Instead, she thought about the rivers near her hometown; the ones that are gathering spots; are places of healing, are settings where memories as vivid and bracing as the waters themselves are made.

“I pitched a pretty nebulous idea to Mike (Hoinski, deputy editor at Texas Highways) about an essay on the rivers Uvalde is famous for — was once famous for — and the concepts of water and healing. I didn’t know quite where it would lead. I didn’t know what the structure or the scope would be,” she said. “But he told me to go for it. I did some research, and on a weekend home I took time to drive to some of those river spots I knew well to sit there, soak them in. I had some brief sketches I had started, but after that trip, when I sat down to write, the words just spilled out of me.”

The resulting piece is “We Were Known for Our Rivers.” Dropping the reader into a river — “so cold and shocking it’s nearly nuclear” — right away, it then winds and bends and rushes and slows down, all to give readers an essay that is baleful and celebratory in equal measure.

Garza is a teacher of writing, and several of her lessons can be gleaned from this essay.

Go small to go big. Garza’s piece feels universal, but also intimate. That was no mistake; it was a survival mechanism. Whenever Garza felt intimidated by a story so in the public eye and so freighted with grief, she made herself narrow it to moments and meaning in her own ambit.

“There were moments where I nearly quit writing because it felt impossible. But ultimately, I tried to do what I always do: focus on my own personal story rather than trying to represent everyone, which I could never do anyway. I centered on my family and my life in Uvalde, on what grief and loss meant to me, on the rivers and their connection to me. The expectation was to go big with this essay, but I tried to go small when I felt that pressure, focus on me and my grief, not anyone else’s. It was the only way I could write this.”

Do research, then leave (some of) it out. Once Garza had found the theme of Uvalde’s rivers, it was time for research. Aided greatly by research assistant Roxanna Rodriguez, Garza read everything from facts on the biology of water to literary touchstones such as Ernest Hemingway’s  “Big Two-Hearted River.”

Some of this material made it into the essay; much of it didn’t. But that doesn’t make a single moment of it a waste. Garza emphasized that even research that doesn’t make it into the final story can be valuable.

“Reading through all that research was necessary. Keeping them in my mind was crucial and it gave me so much to say as I wrote the essay, so I never stalled out. I was taught as a college journalist to research more than you end up writing — to know more than you include on the page. I still hold to that as a writer.”

Put down roots. A tinny sketch of Uvalde can be drawn from facts easily found online. For some stories churned out on deadline, that’s OK; not so much with a story where the writer wants to reach for a deeply etched sense of place.

One of Garza’s hopes for her piece was to bring her hometown to life for those who may be reading the piece from thousands of miles away. So she turned to details that express the spirit of the place, from its small-town flavor to its respectful treatments of its towering oaks. She writes: “A few years ago, we got a Starbucks; it’s next to the Tractor Supply. We call ourselves "Tree City, U.S.A.” — you can drive down Nopal or Wood streets, for example, to see the ancient oaks that sit in the middle of our roads. We don’t tear them down. We paint their trunks white, install reflectors, and drive around them. Our high school football stadium is called the Honey Bowl.”

Garza has the advantage of growing up in Uvalde, but also picked up keen lessons from narratives about place, which she describes herself as a “ravenous reader” of.

“For me, the very best ones are the ones that focus on the small details as well as the big census-data ones,” she said.

Garza spoke to Storyboard about the conception, writing and editing of her essay. Her answers have been edited for length and clarity.

[caption id="attachment_176599" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A rosary at a memorial for victims of the May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.[/caption]

[dc small]P[/dc]lease describe, either as generally or detailed as you'd like, how this piece was conceived, written and edited.
I was contacted by Mike Hoinski about writing a Texas-related essay for the magazine early last year. I promised to take a few months to put some pitches together and send them to him that summer. I was rolling a couple of ideas through my head — about traveling to my father’s home in the Rio Grande Valley, or maybe the drives I made constantly from San Antonio to visit my loved ones’ graves, like my mother’s in Houston and my grandfather’s in Corpus Christi. But then in May, my hometown of Uvalde was devastated by the mass shooting at Robb.

There was so much pain, so much weariness and anger in how we were talking about Uvalde (for a lot of good reasons). I didn’t want to continue that, and I didn’t want to write something exploitative when people were suffering. So I considered another angle — the rivers Uvalde is famous for and the concepts of water and healing. I didn’t know quite where it would lead; I didn’t know what the structure or the scope would be. I had some brief sketches I had started, but after that trip (back to Uvalde), when I sat down to write, the words just spilled out of me. Mike and his team had just a few small edits, so the version that ran is essentially the one I turned in. I’m very proud of that.

This piece uses rivers to knit together thoughts on community, on loss, on the passage of time. How did you land on the theme to carry readers through the essay?
The theme found me — that happens a lot. I don’t like beginning with a capital-T Theme in mind when I write, since the writing can get preachy that way. I had the grounding element —  the rivers — and I had the vague concepts of healing, grief and home in mind. I just began writing things I had read, things I could remember, and things I recently had experienced related to home and water. When I felt the writing or my own thoughts meander away, I tried to bring the narrative back to the rivers. In that way, the river becomes the central thread of the essay — it carries and binds all of these disparate, heavy themes. It can represent grief and loss, healing and hope, time and change. And for people in a place like Uvalde, it represents home, too. So much of who we are is bound up in the rivers.

The story joins together several vignettes, from a family trip to healing waters in France to powerful myths from ancient Greece; yet it never feels distracted. How did you order the part of the story? Is the essay in more or less the same order as the first draft, or did it change with editing by you or others?
The final order is pretty close to the first draft I wrote. In the first go, I just let my thoughts flow. The only consideration I had was trying to stagger between topics, time, and voice: vignettes that were personal and those that were external research, ones that took place in the past and ones that were present, and those related to the shooting and those related to my mother and my family. I ended up cutting a few things, mostly nuggets of that external research on river therapy, water healing, the science of water, that just felt superfluous or repetitive. And I moved a few pieces around as I edited. An essay made up of many vignettes and segments can feel jarring, so I rearranged a few pieces or broke up or combined others to help the narrative feel more fluid. And there were a few places where I wanted to turn the concept from one theme to another. For example, after the section on how Uvalde has changed since the shooting — the fences around our schools, the slogan “Uvalde Strong” cropping up everywhere — I wanted that next moment to introduce healing. So I moved the section about my family’s trip to France and the shrine waters right after. It felt like a good transition, since I’m talking about how my mother eventually did pass away, but we still had some time, still had some healing.

One thing that stayed throughout every draft was the beginning and the end sections. I knew I wanted to start and end with the present moment, my trip to the Nueces in April. It felt cyclical, but also like something in me — or in the way I’m viewing the river in that moment — has changed by the time we return to the river at the end. In an essay about things unresolved, this was as close as I could get to resolution.

Particularly striking were the details that summon Uvalde as a real place for readers, not just as shorthand for tragedy. Readers learn which streets to drive down to view the town's oak trees; they learn which store, exactly, the Starbucks is located next to. (I used to live near a Tractor Supply and could immediately picture its logo.) How mindful were you of creating a sense of place for readers?
Thank you so much for that — it’s absolutely what I was going for and was the most important thing in my mind, to bring this place to life for people who have never been there, or have only heard about us on the news. That in itself is so strange; before May 2022 we always had to describe where Uvalde was to other people (an hour west of San Antonio, close to the border, hometown of Matthew McConaughey, etc.). I’m a ravenous reader when it comes to narratives about place and I love writing them. The very best ones are the ones that focus on the small details as well as the big census-data ones. So yes, we’re 90 miles west of San Antonio, but we also leave oak trees in the middle of our streets that we drive around. We’re the hometown of Matthew McConaughey and have a population of 15,000 people, but those people are immigrants from many countries as well as families who have been there for generations, working the land or building businesses or raising their kids. These are the ways I tried to make it feel real for people who don’t know us as anything other than a name on the news. And for those of us from there who know it and its complexities, I wanted those moments to be shout-outs, things we all share.

You could have limited yourself to the rivers near Uvalde, but you widen your scope, pulling in the rivers of Greek myth and a short Latin lesson about the origin of the word spa. How did you find those facets to draw them into the essay?
I love using research and external facts in personal essays; there’s something about juxtaposing very intimate issues and memories with broad, universal ones that feels so striking. In the early research stages, I went with the keywords river, water, healing, and then just gathered everything I could, honestly. I’m a professor, and I was fortunate to have a graduate research assistant, Roxanna Rodriguez, who helped me gather info and sources — river therapy, the biology of water, literary works that mentioned rivers, like Hemingway’s famous two-part story “Big Two-Hearted River.” (Thank you, Roxanna!) In the end, I didn’t use many of those elements. Either they didn’t introduce anything new, or they just didn’t seem to click with the other pieces. I had a brief mention of the Hemingway story that my editor Mike suggested we cut, since unlike the Didion quote, it didn’t have a personal stake in the essay; it was just there to introduce rivers as a literary element. He was right, so we cut it, and we did that for a few other elements. But reading through all that research was necessary.

I was moved by the essay's final paragraph, particularly how it feels like, sentence by sentence, it's winnowing its way down to something elemental — a two-word sentence. What do you remember, if anything, about the writing and editing of this paragraph? What effect do you hope it has on readers?
I love that read on it. Personally, I wanted the ending to look ahead. I had that in mind as I wrote, and those final sentences essentially stayed the same throughout every round of editing. The last two sentences were always those two, short and punchy, almost a command as well as an observation. This is an essay dealing with heavy things like grief, loss and changes we didn’t ask for. It’s easy to wonder: How can anyone look to the future after experiencing such sorrow? How can anyone move forward under all that weight? But it’s what we all do eventually, and what we have to do. It’s hard to have hope in bleak moments, but I personally try to return to hope. The rivers dry up or they deepen, depending on the season. They move fast or trickle in stretches. Change is constant, not always good. But they keep moving in spite of the changes. I wanted to show that, for better or worse, we do, too.

Is there anything you learned writing this piece that you may carry forward into a lesson for future writing?
This was the first time I wrote something that felt incredibly public. I felt such pressure not just to represent the place and its people, but to address the horror of the shooting without getting exploitative or manipulative, and to look at other aspects of being from Uvalde without ignoring or dismissing the tragedy. It really felt incumbent on me to do all of these things. I’ve grappled with representation before — I have a Mexican-American father and a Filipina immigrant mother, and I write about those communities and many others that I’m part of in my fiction. But this was different.

Is there anything I didn't ask about you'd like to mention about the writing or editing of this piece?
I feel very fortunate that Mike Hoinski and the TH team gave me free rein over this essay from the very beginning, and that it ran almost down to the word in the way I envisioned it. Although that definitely put the pressure on as to how it would be received, I’d have no one to blame but myself! I hoped this would be regarded well by outside readers, but I kind of agonized over how Uvaldeans would take it. I’ve been bowled over by the beautiful feedback I’ve gotten and my family has gotten, from friends and neighbors to complete strangers, that it feels like us, feels like home. I can’t imagine higher praise.

* * *

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

The post A meditation on violence, grief and healing in Uvalde, Texas appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

For state legislator Karen Berg of Kentucky, the fight against anti-trans legislation was entwined with the memory of her transgender son, Henry. For reporter Willian Wan of The Washington Post, telling both halves of that story was an opportunity, a challenge and an honor.

The resulting story was published this past March: “She lost her trans son to suicide. Can a Kentucky make her colleagues care?” It traces both the personal and political struggles in Berg’s lonely stance against her colleagues’ legislation. The story opens with a wrenching scene of Berg entering her son’s bedroom after his death. The first simple but wrenching line:

She wanted to hear Henry’s voice again.

It briefly dips into backstory of Henry’s own testimony own testimony, at age 16, before Kentucky legislators. It makes a deft move to foreshadow of Berg’s own impending testimony before her colleagues. And it stays with Berg as she moves further into the bedroom, until she discovers the note in which Henry had listed the pros and cons of committing suicide — “I didn’t expect this, I’m not ready,” Berg says. From there, the story moves to Berg’s legislative crusade, placed in the contest of a larger anti-LGBTQ+ movement nationwide. Along the way, it serves as a vivid profile of Henry Berg-Brousseau.

Wan’s answers to Storyboard questions and his annotation of the story provide several lessons for reporters looking to approach sensitive, nuanced, multi-layered stories with clarity and tact:

• Listen to editors. Wan said he was initially unsure of the story, especially since it diverged from the original idea. But he’s glad he listened to projects editor Lynda Robinson as she prodded him to tell the Bergs’ story.

“To be honest, I wasn’t sure if it was the right story to pursue,” Wan said. “I had envisioned writing about a trans teen and family still recovering from an attempt, because I wanted to be able to understand and give voice to their experience. But Lynda Robinson saw right from the start how the story could unfold and be powerful.”

• Pursue clarity of purpose. When approaching potential sources for difficult stories, Wan makes sure he knows why the story should be told — not just so he knows, but so he can explain it to others.

“There was a period in my career when my job was covering mass shootings almost nonstop for 2-3 years. I would often sit outside a family’s house in the wake of a shooting and think about why I’m knocking on their door,” Wan said. “I found those minutes in the car soul-searching really helpful. Once I figure out for myself why I’m asking people to talk — what the bigger and higher purpose is — I’m more likely to get them to open up, because I know I’m not trying to be a parasitic reporter. I’ve really thought through the story and believe both in my approach and in the story’s purpose. Once I see it, I have a better chance of helping others see it.”

• Find the right voices. “It felt important to get Henry’s voice and other trans people into this piece,” Wan told me. “It’s often easy when writing about mental health to rely too much on experts or even family members rather than the people who are actually experiencing depression and suicidal thoughts. But they are the only ones who can truly describe their pain and struggle and challenges.”

Wan discusses these and other topics relating to his story in this annotation. His answers have been edited for length and clarity. 

Covering transgender issues seems particularly fraught. Is there any advice you can offer fellow journalists?
I’d only written about transgender issues once before, and it was something I was worried about because it’s a complicated, sensitive issue. I consulted several colleagues who are LGBTQ or write full-time on gender issues. I asked them what the worst form of this story would be: How it might do harm? And what would be the best form: What would actually do some good?

I also consulted with suicide researchers I trust about the potential for suicide contagion. There were many interviews with experts that never made it into the piece, but really informed our approach. I’ve been writing about suicide for three or four years and it’s sometimes a complicated calculation of minimizing harm while maximizing impact.

Who were some of the colleagues (the photographer, editors) you worked with on this story? Was there any assistance or guidance from one or more of them that proved valuable in shaping the final product?
The most important person was unquestionably my editor, Lynda Robinson – who is brilliant, gentle, supportive but also pushy when needed. She is, for my money, the best narrative editor in the country. When I’m on the road reporting, we talk almost daily— at the end of the night or in the early morning— about what I’m seeing. So by the time I’m coming home, we both know what I have and we can already talk structure and outline.

I also, in a stroke of good fortune, got to work on this one with photographer Bonnie Jo Mount, who is one of the best in the business. She’s extremely empathetic and has a really calm energy about her, which really helped in this case.

Is there anything you learned — either about covering these issues, or about reporting and writing in general — you think may help you with future stories?
I’m often really hard on myself, and frustrated about how long I take on these kinds of stories. But I think you have to care about getting it right. So I’ve learned to budget for more time and energy than expected for the work.

I also sometimes feel weighed down by the duty and weight of someone’s story, especially when it comes to suicide. I’ve learned to sit with that, because it’s a good thing to care. But I also try deliberately to put that aside once it’s time to write. It’s not about you and the pressures you feel; it’s about this person and their story. That’s what matters most.

Annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Wan’s answers in blue.

She lost her trans son to suicide. Can a Kentucky lawmaker make her colleagues care?

Eight weeks after the death of Karen Berg’s son, Henry, she’s fighting a flood of anti-transgender bills in the Kentucky Senate

By William Wan

March 25, 2023

LOUISVILLE — She wanted to hear Henry’s voice again. So she went to her son’s room on an overcast February day and started digging through the boxes he left behind, looking for something he’d written to give her guidance.

Henry Berg-Brousseau always knew what to say.

Eight years had passed since he’d told Kentucky lawmakers how it felt, at 16, to be the only transgender student at his high school. Eight weeks had passed since he’d killed himself, at 24, at his Northern Virginia apartment.

It was Henry who’d inspired his mother, Karen Berg, to run for Kentucky’s state Senate, helping her win a seat in an overwhelmingly Republican legislature now contemplating a pile of anti-trans bills. [annotation q="You do something interesting to begin this story, waiting four paragraphs before identifying Karen Berg. Why?" a="I wanted the story to be universal. And there’s nothing more universal than a mother’s love for her son. Or the grief anyone feels for someone they loved. I also wanted to start first with Henry’s name -- his life and death are what lead to Karen becoming state senator and a fighter for trans rights."]

All morning long, the doctor turned Democratic lawmaker had been pacing around her Louisville house, trying to figure out what she could say to stop them.

“Don’t shake. Don’t cry. Don’t let your voice waver,” Karen, 61, muttered to herself as she did the laundry. “Short and sweet is better.” [annotation q="I like the punchy rhythm of this dialogue and, despite my usual dislike of synonyms for “said,” the use of “muttered.” How did you come to observe and record this bit of talk from Karen?" a="On my first day in Kentucky, Karen told me she’d been talking to herself a lot since Henry died in an absent-minded way. So I asked her what exactly she’d been telling herself that morning."]

Henry, who’d worked as a press secretary for a major LGBTQ advocacy group, often reminded her to speak in sound bites, to repeat phrases so listeners could absorb the message.

But would the people with power in Frankfort pay attention? [annotation q="A lot of writing coaches I admire advocate for planting, when appropriate, a question to be the engine of a story. In this case you have a striking one. What do you think it does for the story to hitch it to this question?" a="It’s always helpful to have a question or central tension driving the piece, but I usually try to avoid stating it so explicitly. But in this case, the story was so complicated, and we were juggling a lot in trying to cram two stories into one. So this idea came from my editor. It felt helpful to just come right out and spell out the driving question."]

It was an election year in Kentucky, and amid America’s widening cultural rifts, Republicans were pouncing on gender identity issues. Already, almost a dozen new anti-trans laws had been proposed in Kentucky: censoring books on gender, barring doctors from providing hormone therapy to trans teens, banning them from certain restrooms and locker rooms.

Five days earlier, a senator running for lieutenant governor had stood a few feet from Karen and introduced legislation to allow teachers to use students’ birth names and pronouns against their wishes. He was greeted with thunderous applause from colleagues.

Karen, one of just six Democrats in the Senate, couldn’t believe it. [annotation q="I noticed how this paragraph puts the Kentucky legislation in context with other, similarly themed bills nationwide, then immediately snaps back to Kentucky’s legislation and Karen’s battle against it. How much research did you do to provide readers with the larger context?" a="I did a lot of research, then chose not to include most of it. But I think a lot of writers would say that’s how it often goes with narrative. The wider you make a story, the less power it has. Better to leave it narrow and focused."]

Now she headed down to the basement and sat among the 30 boxes that had arrived from Henry’s apartment in Arlington. [annotation q="I have to ask, because this detail is so specific: Did you count the boxes?" a="The first day of reporting, I just followed Karen all around the house. Every time she mentioned something we’d go look at it together. So when she mentioned the 30 boxes, I said, “Wow that’s a lot. Can you show them to me?”"]

“I keep searching for his smell, but I can’t find it,” she said, rooting through his old shirts.

She found herself returning to his childhood bedroom.

“God, I could use his advice right now,” she said quietly, as she leafed through his high school yearbooks.

It was in ninth grade — when Henry came out as transgender to his classmates — that the cruelty and isolation peaked. Parents Karen had known for more than a decade called to say they didn’t want Henry talking to their kids anymore. Bullies hacked his Tumblr blog and repeatedly sent him messages telling him to kill himself. The first of several suicide attempts followed soon after.

From one crate, she pulled a thick stack of binders from Henry’s time at George Washington University in D.C.

“These must’ve been from his classes when he came home during covid,” she said. As she flipped through them, the neatly penciled handwriting on one college-ruled page jumped out at her.

“Oh my God,” she whispered as she made out the first words on the page.

“What am I living for?” it read. “Why? What is keeping me?”

Underneath, her son had written out in tidy columns across two pages the apparent pros and cons of killing himself.

“I can’t,” Karen said, struggling to breathe. “I didn’t expect this. I’m not ready.” [annotation q="In a story full of wrenching scenes, this is one of the most difficult to read. What do you remember about observing it and interacting with Karen at that time?" a="It surprised us both. I remember both of us standing in shock and silence at first as she held the piece of paper. I had to actively force myself from saying anything or interfering with the scene, because there’s a natural impulse to console or to ask her about it. Instead, I tried hard to let the moment unfold as if I wasn’t there."]

She laid the pages down.

She thought about the hour-long drive to Frankfort the next morning and the eight-week legislative session still ahead. She thought about the fellow state senators she planned to plead with in private. And about the floor speech she was still composing to persuade them to back away from more anti-transgender laws — for her sake, for the sake of her son, for the sake of others like him. [annotation q="At what point did you ask Karen about her thoughts in these moments?" a="We talked about it later in the day, what she read on the page. She cried as she described it and I hugged her. In one sense this graph is about what she was thinking about in that moment. But it was also what she had been thinking about that entire week: How do I put off the grief so I can do this other thing? It encapsulated the difficult weeks ahead for her."]

“If they’re going to pass these bills,” she said, “I want them to see me and my dead child and know that they are killing other Henrys out there.” [annotation q="You get a remarkable level of access to Karen leading up to her fight against a “pronoun bill,” spending time with her in her home and sometimes sharing with readers intimate details. How did you initially approach Karen, and what was the reporting process to learn more about her, Henry and the other loved ones in their orbit?" a="I spent all last year writing narratives about mental health – about suicides at Ivy League schools, deadly ER wait times, bridge suicides, policies that force parents to give up their mentally-ill children. I’ve learned to put a lot of prep work into my initial calls/emails/text messages to people. I try to show profound interest without freaking them out. I explain to them that I think there’s something really important happening here in their life. And I want to help people to understand what they’re going through, because I don’t think they’re alone in their struggle. It’s never easy – at least for me – and it shouldn’t be. In this case, I wrote a really sincere email to Karen, explaining who I was and why I wanted to talk to her.  She ignored my initial email, which is understandable given the grief she was going through. (Later, she told me that as a state senator she gets hundreds of emails a day.) So I talked to others around her. I asked them to tell me about Henry. I explained how important I thought his story was and the kind of piece I wanted to do. And those people introduced me to Karen."]

‘Bullied every day’

Before he came to see himself as a boy, before he settled on the name Henry, he was just a kid who wanted friends.

But he never fit in. While girls around him played dress-up, Henry wanted trains and Hot Wheels cars. “He was so different than his sister, who wore tutus and pretended to be Cinderella,” Karen recalled.

When Karen took Henry to their synagogue for preschool, the director had girls stand to the left and boys to the right. Henry, then 2, kept trying to join the boys, even after the exasperated director took him by the hand and walked him back to the girls.

The private school Henry attended from kindergarten to 12th grade was even more regimented, with strict dress codes: Plaid jumper dresses for girls. Navy slacks and white polo shirts for boys.

“We started using Sharpies in middle school to dye our hair,” remembered Lane Levitch, one of Henry’s only friends there. “I helped him fill in the gaps with red Sharpies. He’d help me with blue.” [annotation q="This is such a vivid anecdote. Tell me a little bit about how you found and interviewed Lane." a="Karen showed me a stack of condolence cards she’d received. I asked her which ones had meant the most, and she mentioned Lane’s incredible letter. He immediately became a top reporting priority for me. Because he not only knew Henry during this turning point of his life, but he’d experienced first-hand the same bullying and isolation. It was so valuable to have another young trans person’s voice who could speak for Henry."]

They’d met in first grade when a teacher noticed the other girls ignoring them and pushed the two together. When Henry was excluded from birthday parties or left out of Valentine’s Day card exchanges, he still had Lane.

The summer after eighth grade in 2012, Lane confided something to Henry he’d never told anyone before: He felt like he’d been born in the wrong body. “A boy,” he texted Henry, “but in a girl’s body.”

Henry texted back immediately, “I feel the same way.”

Lane told Henry he’d discovered a word online for what they were feeling: “trans.”

At 14, Henry would later say, he felt like he’d discovered his true self.

He and Lane made a pact to come out together as boys that fall. They would wait until a few weeks into ninth grade, and abandon their plaid skirts for boys’ slacks.

But Henry came out a week earlier than they’d planned — and did it on his own.

“He told everyone, ‘I’d prefer if you call me Henry. My pronouns are he/him,’” Lane said. Some teachers refused, continuing to call him by his birth name. One pulled him out of class to lecture him in the hallway.

“It led students to believe they could do the same,” Lane said. There were constant sneers and mockery. Boys treated him like a freak. Girls wanted nothing to do with him.

When Lane saw the vitriol, he abandoned all plans of coming out. It would be another five years before Lane told anyone else he was trans.

“Even as he was getting bullied every day, Henry never threw me under the bus. He never made me feel ashamed for not following through on our plan and doing what he did,” said Lane, 25, who still lives in Louisville. “I’ll forever be grateful to him for keeping my secret.”

A few nights after Henry came out at school, he did the same with his parents at their kitchen table.

At first, his father, Bob Brousseau, had trouble accepting it. “I thought it was a phase,” he said. “It took me a few months to come around.”

Karen mourned the daughter she’d raised for 14 years and worried about Henry’s mental health.

A year earlier, a teacher had discovered that Henry was cutting his arms and legs. Karen, an emergency room radiologist, knew what it meant — her child was hurting so much inside that it made him feel better to hurt himself on the outside. She found Henry a therapist.

At the time, bathrooms for transgender kids were just starting to emerge as a political issue around the country. Henry’s school administrators initially ordered him to keep using the girls bathrooms, then designated a single-stall toilet in the school basement for his use.

“It was in this abandoned area where the older kids would often go to make out. They would tease him whenever he used it,” Karen said. So Henry tried not to go at all.

The first suicide attempt occurred just three months after he came out.

In the months that followed, his parents got him more help. Inpatient and outpatient psychiatric programs. Family therapy. They couldn’t find a psychologist in Louisville who’d worked with a transgender teen before, so they chose someone who said he was willing to try.

His parents, who later divorced, also helped Henry get an internship with the Fairness Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group in Kentucky. [annotation q="I’m impressed with how thorough a portrait of Henry emerges in this piece. How much did you consider the amount of space you could give his story in the piece’s overall structure?" a="Henry led such an interesting life, which was both a challenge and a gift for the writing. I reported Henry’s side of the story as thoroughly as if I was writing an entire standalone profile on him. That allowed us to cherry-pick the best details for weaving structure."]

Even the name of the organization spoke to Henry. “Fairness, the concept of people being equal, is all-important and essentially a driving force for me,” he later told a Louisville magazine. “It’s like love.”

Just days into his internship in 2015, Kentucky Republicans filed a bill to ban trans kids from choosing which bathrooms to use at school. The Fairness Campaign needed parents and students to explain the harm it would do at a Senate hearing.

Chris Hartman, the group’s director, turned to Henry and asked the 16-year-old: “Are you up for it? Are you ready to testify?”

‘You know me, Henry’

Henry had never worn a suit before. So he and his mom went to J.C. Penney to buy one — a dark-gray jacket and pants with a blue striped tie. Then he sat in his room, surrounded by Marvel movie posters, and rehearsed what he’d say. [annotation q="The mention of the movie posters jumped out to me as a telling detail to reinforce how young Henry was when he stepped into the lion’s den of a state Senate hearing. Do you remember how it occurred to you to include it?" a="After reading my first draft, Lynda asked me specifically to describe his room. Because it didn’t feel like the reader was getting a good enough sense of Henry as a teen."]

“It’s not the easiest thing in the world for me to be here talking to you about where I go to the bathroom,” he told the Senate Education Committee on Feb. 19, 2015.

He explained how difficult it had been to live in a body that didn’t match what he felt inside. He recounted how school officials forced him to keep using the girls bathroom. “The kids thought that because the administration didn’t support my gender identity, they didn’t have to either,” he said.

He described how the school later relegated him to a toilet in the basement. “When somebody tells us that we’re so different that the only way to accommodate is to create a special restroom, the message is clear that we don’t belong.”

He finished by flashing a soft smile at the senators. “If you don’t know a transgender kid already, you do now. You know me, Henry. And I’d be honored to continue to work with you,” he said. “I’d even be more honored to call you all friends.”

The Republican senators gushed over him afterward.

“Henry, thank you,” said Sen. Max Wise. “I educated myself a lot today.”

“Henry, I love you man,” said then-Sen. Alice Forgy Kerr. “I can’t really imagine that anyone else in this room has the kind of courage that it took for you to come and testify.”

“You should be proud of yourself,” said Sen. Jared Carpenter.

Then, one by one they voted for the bill anyway.

Sitting beside her son, Karen felt a fury welling up inside her.

As a doctor, Karen had pored over research about transgender teens. She’d read about the terrifying rates of anxiety, depression and PTSD because of the hostility they encountered. She knew that almost half of trans teens experienced suicidal thoughts, that more than a third try to kill themselves. [annotation q="At a time when anti-trans legislation is surging, Karen Berg seems to occupy a unique position: A doctor and legislator who lost her transgender son, Henry — an eloquent advocate who had shared his story with lawmakers before Karen took office — to suicide. How did you become aware of Karen, and why did you want to tell her story?" a="For years now, I’ve made it my goal to write about people on the margins of society, often related to mental health. This past winter, my editor and I started talking about finding some way to write about suicide among trans youth. The rates are terrifyingly high, and the environment trans teens face is only getting more hostile as Republicans seized on this as an election-year, culture-war issue. It took a long time to find the right family. It’s a hard thing to ask anyone to let you in in the wake of a suicide attempt or a traumatic death. I spent weeks talking to advocacy groups and pursuing leads. A few days before Christmas, I saw an obit about Henry Berg-Brousseau’s death, and I bookmarked it for the new year. I think it helped that we gave it time. I didn’t approach Karen about the story until a few weeks after Henry died. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if it was the right story to pursue. I had envisioned writing about a trans teen and family still recovering from an attempt, because I wanted to be able to understand and give voice to their experience. But with guidance from my editor, Lynda Robinson, this became two stories in one: one about a trans youth’s struggle with suicide and the other about his mother’s struggle in the state legislature to prevent more people like her son from dying."]

“It’s not that there is something inherently suicidal about anyone’s identity, including being transgender,” said Christine Moutier, chief medical officer for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “If you look at everything we know about what increases suicide risk — trauma, discrimination, violence, harassment — that’s what so many transgender youth are facing.” [annotation q="I always like to see larger context added to stories such as this one. Did you speak to Christine yourself or find this quote elsewhere?" a="Yep, I talked to Christine and several other experts for the story. Not just for context but because I wanted guidance on how to write about trans suicides in a way that doesn’t cause trauma/harm to readers who might already be suicidal. I also talked to experts at the Trevor Project, PFLAAG, ACLU, and a few academic researchers. This is the only quote from any of them, but their expertise was infused throughout."]

A newly released Washington Post-KFF poll of trans adults found suicidal thoughts are more common among younger adults, and that the age at which they came out correlated with higher levels of suicidal thoughts, incidents of self-harm and mental health problems later on. Among trans people who did not come out until adults, 37 percent had suicidal thoughts in the past year. Among those who came out earlier, before the age of 18, 58 percent struggled with suicidal thoughts.

During Henry’s testimony in Frankfort, which went viral after being featured on “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” the teen didn’t mention his suicide attempt or the ugliness that fueled it. But his mother couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d been through at school as she gazed at the senators on the dais above them.

“Why do these a-holes,” she wondered, “get to decide where my child pees?”

The bill didn’t wind up passing the full legislature, but Henry’s three-minute speech threw both of them headlong into politics.

Henry was a kid who never did anything halfheartedly. He swam competitively until he tore a rotator cuff. He kept playing on the girls’ softball team throughout high school, even after he came out, even when the coach made his life miserable.

After the Senate hearing, Henry started binge-watching “The West Wing” and followed Hartman, the Fairness Campaign director, everywhere he could.

“I’d have a monthly organizing meeting on the other side of the state. Utterly boring. Six people sitting around the table talking about municipal ordinances. Henry would insist on tagging along,” Hartman said. “The whole drive there, he’d pepper me with questions.”

Hartman tried to temper Henry’s expectations. “A lot of folks think if I can just talk to the right lawmaker, use the right logic or personal experience, I can change everything,” Hartman said. “But there’s a lot of disappointment, struggle and sadness in the work we do.” [annotation q="Hartman’s input seems crucial in building a fuller portrait of Henry. Tell me a little bit about how you approached and interviewed him." a="I wanted to talk with someone from every era of Henry’s life. Hartman was there for the seminal 2-3 years when Henry transformed from teenager/victim to activist. I had several phone interviews with him and spent half a day with him in state legislature. Like with Henry, Hartman’s life was so interesting, I could have done a whole story on him. I was only in Kentucky for 4-5 days total, so it was stressful to be honest trying to gather everything I needed in that short space. I work pretty intensely around the clock during these trips."]

At Henry’s urging, Karen signed up for a six-month course to teach women how to run for office. She learned to fundraise, door-knock and connect with voters.

In 2018, she ran against a Republican state senator who’d held his seat for 24 years — and lost.

Two years later, after the incumbent retired, she tried again. This time Henry, home from college because of the pandemic, served as her campaign treasurer and adviser. By then, he had interned in the state legislature and volunteered on other campaigns.

“He wrote such beautiful speeches for me,” said Karen, though Henry could also be brutally blunt. “He told me when I disappointed him. He called me out for going off-message.”

With Henry’s help, Karen won. In 2020, she entered the Kentucky legislature as its first Jewish female physician — and the only state senator with a transgender son.

‘Why can’t I quit crying?’

A year after his mother became a lawmaker, Henry landed a job in Washington at the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ civil rights advocacy group. The work was thrilling and urgent.

State legislatures were being inundated with anti-LGBTQ bills — 315 in 2022 alone, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Transgender teens, in particular, had become a favorite conservative target. In Texas, state leaders ordered child protective services to investigate parents of transgender kids. Florida passed legislation restricting what elementary school teachers could say about gender identity and sexual orientation. Arkansas made it illegal for doctors to provide gender-affirming care to kids.

Henry’s job was to respond to such attacks with press releases and news conferences.

“He was immersed in the most horrible stuff,” said Delphine Luneau, who was Henry’s boss and worked in a desk next to his.

Gay teachers were being portrayed as pedophiles trying to groom kids. Schools acknowledging the existence of trans people were accused of encouraging kids to have sex-reassignment surgery.

Henry spent weeks knocking down a bizarre false claim that schools were installing litter boxes for students to pee in because they wanted to be identified as cats.

“We’d sit there in the office and struggle. How do you disprove something insane like that without giving it more fuel,” said Luneau, a transgender woman who became Henry’s mentor and close friend.

Henry believed in the fight.

“He talked about how when done right, politics can make the world a better place,” she said. “He talked about running for office. We joked about him becoming the country’s first transgender president.”

But Luneau could tell the work — and the rise in LGBTQ hatred around the country — were taking a toll.

“It feels like there hasn’t been a break in the emotional intensity or pace of the work,” Henry noted in his last self-evaluation. [annotation q="This is another important piece in the portrait you’re building. How did you come to be able to draw on Henry’s self-evaluation?" a="This came from Henry’s coworkers and supervisors at Human Rights Campaign. Word often spreads as people learn that you’re genuinely interested and can be trusted. By the time I talked with them, Karen, Hartman and others had already told them what I was trying to do."]

Henry had spent a decade trying to arrive at a place of acceptance with others and his own body. He never had surgery, and only underwent a short round of testosterone hormone therapy — just enough to grow facial hair. All he wanted was to have a waiter or doorman address him as “sir,” he told his mom.

By leaving Kentucky, he’d finally found the sense of belonging he yearned for his whole life. He joined an LGBTQ kickball league in Washington that became a second family. His team, named “Cirque du SoGay,” spent every Tuesday competing in trivia night, with Henry as their ringer for politics and current events.

Henry was the only trans man on his team, but he was the one everyone went to when they needed someone to confide in.

“He was good at listening with no judgment, just love,” said Michael Creason, co-captain of the team.

But even 600 miles and years removed from Kentucky, Henry struggled to love himself.

In his six years in Washington, he had at least four close calls with suicide, landing repeatedly in the emergency room, his mother said.

One of the most serious occurred on his 20th birthday. After being left out of many parties as a child, Henry was surprised by his friends with a big one.

“Afterward when everyone broke off to go to bars and stuff, apparently he didn’t hear anyone say come with us,” Karen said. “He couldn’t shake that feeling of being rejected.”

He saw a trauma-informed therapist, a psychiatrist and attended an intensive treatment program in California. But the suicidal thoughts always came back.

He called Karen one day sobbing. “He said, ‘Mom, Why can’t I quit crying? Why am I so sad?’” [annotation q="There are vivid details throughout this story. What was your technical process for taking and organizing all the information you gathered?" a="My process is…slow, awful, messy, but ultimately, it works for me. This story was challenging because I had so much material spread across different mediums: Notebooks from my reporting trip, recordings because I was shadowing Karen, hours of public video from senate committee hearings. I also take a lot of photos during these reporting trips because it transports me back to what it felt and looked like. I consolidate it all as much as possible in one place — a master document. Then I take the outline I’ve created, and I cut and paste the master document up into buckets for each section of that outline. Lastly, I create a new blank document and start writing each section drawing from those individual buckets. It makes it easier to have at hand only the material needed for each section."]

In spring of 2022, he went to the hospital after his body began convulsing. The doctors ran neurological tests and told him he was experiencing psychogenic seizures — convulsions that looked like epilepsy but were caused by distress and trauma.

In December, he told his mom about the mounting number of anti-trans bills he was fighting at work. He was dreading the approaching legislative season.

“He could see how many more bills would be coming this year,” she said. “He said, ‘Mom, I’m tired and scared.’”

On Dec. 15, Henry went out with his kickball friends for a night of karaoke. Like everyone else, Henry had a lot to drink, so he went to Creason’s apartment to sober up.

There, Henry told his friend that he’d recently been struggling with suicide again.

Creason persuaded Henry to check himself into the hospital and called an Uber to take him. A few hours later, at 5:30 a.m., Henry sent a text: “You’re going to hate me, but I’m going home. Sorry.”

Concerned, Creason wrote back, “Hit me up tomorrow.”

“I won’t be able to…I’m about to do something really stupid,” Henry replied. Then came a photo of empty pill bottles.

Creason called 911 and rushed over to Henry’s apartment. But by the time he and the police got inside, Henry was dead. [annotation q="It seems crucial to include these details — they’re powerful, and they help readers understand Karen’s fierce struggle as the story goes on. But that said, how much did you consider what to include and what not to include of the events leading up to Henry’s death?" a="There are a lot of helpful guidelines by prevention groups on how to report on suicide. I often re-read them as I write a story and debate what to include and why. In this case, it felt important to communicate the impulsive nature of suicide. That it can be something you struggle with for years but can also depend on immediate circumstances. In Henry’s case, there was the long-term trauma and hostility he faced growing up in Kentucky, but also the more immediate dread he was feeling about the trans rights fights looming in the year ahead. I wanted to show all the things he was facing up until the final days of his life."]

‘Marginalizing my child’

Karen couldn’t eat and struggled most days to crawl out of bed. Henry’s white SUV sat in her driveway. His dog Bibi, a Pekingese Shih Tzu mutt, now slept in bed with her.

The grief was so overwhelming that Karen stopped working in the ER, not trusting herself to make split-second diagnostic decisions.

She thought about sitting out the legislative session too. “Everything in my body is telling me not to go back there,” she said.

Everyone in Frankfort knew what had happened to her son. She’d announced his death in a statement shared widely on Twitter.

“I gave my whole heart trying to protect my child from a world w[h]ere some people and especially some politicians intentionally continued to believe that marginalizing my child was OK,” she wrote.

“If I have one ask,” she said, “it would be this: practice tolerance and grace. Work on loving your neighbor.”

Kentucky’s LGBTQ activists believed Henry’s story might be their best chance at turning back the tide of anti-trans bills.

So Karen dumped her coffee into a thermos, climbed into her gray Honda SUV and drove to the state capital.

For days, she’d been making calls to her Republican colleagues, gently lobbying them.

When one lawmaker asked why trans children were suddenly popping up everywhere, Karen compared it to left-handed kids.

“You look at the data in the 1950s and ’60s when we stopped forcing kids to be right-handed. The number of left-handed children exploded exponentially, then plateaued,” she said. “They were always there but never were allowed to exist.” [annotation q="This is a powerful and well-said point. Did you hear Karen say it out loud?" a="Yes, by that point we had spent so much time together that I was just hanging out for long stretches as she was making calls to other legislators. It can be delicate and overwhelming sometimes to spend that much time invading someone else’s space. Whenever I sensed either of us needed some space, I’d go get lunch or retreat to a separate room and look through photo albums, do phone interviews or other work."]

She tried not to scold or seem angry to conservative colleagues.

She kept condolence cards from Republicans on her dining table to remind herself they cared.

“I cannot imagine the sense of loss and suffering you must feel,” read one.

“Our hearts are broken for you,” read another from the powerful Senate president pro tempore, David Givens.

But the sympathy seemed to disappear on Feb. 8, when Wise rose on the Senate floor to introduce the latest bill targeting trans teens.

In 2015, Wise had been one of the Republicans praising Henry’s testimony. Now, as a GOP candidate for lieutenant governor, he wanted to allow teachers to call trans teens by their birth names and pronouns even if they were asked not to. His measure would become known as the pronoun bill.

Wise, who declined requests for an interview, attacked state education materials suggesting teachers use trans students’ declared pronouns.

“This is absolute nonsense that has no place within our educational system,” he said, deriding “the new pronouns that seem to land in Webster’s Dictionary daily” and “woke ideologies” emanating from Washington.

Wise invoked the “litter box” myth that Henry had spent weeks debunking. [annotation q="It’s frankly staggering that Wise raised the very myth Henry had fought in his previous work. Do you recall your reaction when you recognized that awful symmetry?" a="I didn’t realize this connection until I sat down to organize and relistened to Wise’s speech. I was pretty surprised. There was another moment like this when I got a hold of Henry’s senate testimony at age 16. I realized that Wise was one of the Republicans who praised Henry, then went on to vote against him."] He warned of teachers being fired for not calling supposed “furry” students by their “pet names.”

From three seats away, Karen sat in shock as the chamber erupted in applause.

She rose to give a short response: “I’m going to make an open plea to the members of this body that we avoid politicizing issues that are literally killing our children, that are literally putting them into the grave.”

No one clapped.

‘Don’t give up’

A week later, she was headed back to Frankfort, dreading an LGBTQ rights rally planned by the Fairness Campaign.

The most persuasive voices at such rallies were often LGBTQ youths. But Karen knew how hard it would be this year to see vulnerable kids arguing, as Henry had, for the right to exist.

“It’s heartbreaking to watch them shaking hands, telling their life story, pleading for help. Only to be voted against again and again,” she said.

She wondered if she’d made a mistake letting Henry testify at 16.

Now, an even younger trans child, 13-year-old Fischer Wells, was the one championing the cause.

In 2022, as a middle schooler, she and her parents had waged a high-profile battle against a bill to ban transgender women and girls from playing on female sports teams.

Like Henry, Fischer had testified before the Senate Education Committee, explaining how the bill would prevent her from playing on a field hockey team she’d helped create.

But Sen. Robby Mills, the Republican sponsor of the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, argued it was needed to protect female athletes and suggested that some people might transition just to gain a competitive advantage.

The bill passed, and Fischer was off the team. [annotation q="Why was it important to include Fischer Wells?" a="It was important to include as many other trans voices as possible in the story – like Henry’s friend Lane and his boss Delphine.  Fischer seemed important as a stand-in for the next Henry; she is the kind of trans teen Karen was trying to save from suffering the same fate as her son."]

Now she and her parents had come back to the capital to fight this year’s pronoun bill and a slew of other anti-trans legislation.

“Thank you so much for supporting our family,” Fischer’s mother, Jenifer Alonzo, told Karen when they met in her office on the day of the rally.

Fischer’s father, Brian Wells, said they’d been turned away all morning by Republican lawmakers.

One bill that would forbid doctors from providing hormone therapy and other medical care to transgender teens was especially scary.

“That’s like a bright red line for us,” he said. They’d started talking about moving out of Kentucky.

“How are you doing though?” Alonzo asked Karen. “You tell us if we can help you, too.”

Before they left, they gave Karen a hug, and Karen had trouble letting go. She wanted to tell them, she said later, to take their daughter and run as far away as they could. Don’t fail her like I did Henry.

Instead, she reminded them and herself: “Don’t give up. Don’t stop fighting.”

‘Not throwing away my shot’

When Karen got home from the rally on Feb. 15, a GOP friend called to warn her that the pronoun bill would be put to a vote the next day.

Karen had been pushing to add an amendment requiring teachers to call trans teens by their pronouns if their parents requested it — using Republicans’ own arguments that this was a parental rights bill.

After one of Henry’s suicide attempts, he’d gotten a tattoo on his arm – “I’m not throwing away my shot,” a line from the Broadway show “Hamilton” — as a reminder that his life could make a difference.

Karen thought of that as she wrote her speech to persuade Republicans to support her amendment.

The bill would have one final hearing before the education committee before a vote by the entire Senate. It was the same committee Henry had spoken to at 16 — the one that had sent them down this political path she was now walking alone.

Karen watched the next morning as one LGBTQ advocate after another begged the committee to reject the bill.

The last to speak was Hartman, the Fairness Campaign director who mentored Henry through high school.

“The suicide rates are outrageous. You know it,” Hartman shouted. “To do this now in front of Karen Berg is a sin and a shame!”

The testimony had little effect. Within hours, Republican leaders rushed the bill to the floor for vote by the full Senate.

From her seat at the front of the chamber, Karen could tell her colleagues were lining up against her. That morning, Republican leaders had used a procedural maneuver to prevent a vote on her amendment.

“I’m no longer speaking for my child," she said when it was her turn to talk. "You know my child is dead. I am speaking for every mother and father who has held my hand with tears running down their face, saying, ‘What do we do?’”

She pointed out the ramps schools build for children in wheelchairs and the peanut bans for children allergic to nuts. So why not call trans kids by their rightful pronouns, she demanded, “an accommodation that costs you nothing? Zero!”

“Your vote ‘yes’ on this bill means one of two things. Either you believe that trans children do not exist or you believe that trans children do not deserve to exist.”

The chamber was quiet as the clerk called out the senators’ names to vote. Some almost whispered their response, but Karen could see their names turning green as yes votes were recorded on a screen above.

Then it was over, 29 to 6. Not a single Republican voted against the pronoun bill.

In the coming days, senators would add more provisions banning gender-affirming care and prohibiting schools from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity — measures that would prompt a veto by the governor and the prospect of a vote to override him.

But this first betrayal by her colleagues was the hardest. Karen collapsed in her seat. The grief she’d been trying to hold back for weeks came pouring out. She wailed as she walked out of the chamber.

In the hallway, there was nothing now except the sound of her voice, crying, “I just want my baby back.” [annotation q="The passage of the bill over Karen’s objections makes a natural stopping point, but how did you land on this particular line as the hardest-hitting way to end it?" a="One of the first things my editor and I talked about before I started writing was the ending. Throughout the legislative session, Karen was really trying to put her grief on hold and put all her energy into opposing these anti-trans bills. So my editor’s idea was to save showing Karen fully sobbing and crying until the very end. It was true to what happened in that moment but also reflected the cruelty of that legislative session. The Republican agenda meant she was so busy trying to prevent other trans suicides that she wasn’t allowed to grieve. It’s only when she realized she’s failed that she’s hit by the full force of what she’s lost."][annotation q="What was the reaction from readers to this piece? From Karen?" a="I got inundated with emails, DMs and messages, including from many parents, trans and LGBTQ people who wanted to share their own stories and struggles. A former Republican state senator in Kentucky told me the story was being circulated among her former colleagues. “They may not say it openly, but they’re reading. It’s making waves.” Several outlets like CNN followed with stories of their own about Karen and Henry. I struggled a bit to respond to the number of heartfelt messages the first few days. And Karen, who got hundreds of emails from around the country, said the same was true for her. “Thank you for telling my son’s story,” she told me a few days later. “For listening, for being there as I went through the most difficult period of my life. If it lessens the hatred trans people are facing, even a little, I know he would have been so proud.”"]

* * *

If you are transgender and need help, or know someone who does, call the Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860. You can also reach crisis counselors at The Trevor Project for LGBTQ youth by calling 866-488-7386 or texting “START” to 678678, and by calling the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.

The Washington Post-KFF Trans Survey was conducted in English and Spanish from Nov. 10-Dec. 1, 2022, among 515 U.S. adults who identify as trans and 823 cisgender U.S. adults. Sampling, data collection, weighting and tabulation were managed by SSRS. Trans adults were reached via three survey panels recruited using random sampling methods: The Gallup Panel, NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel and the SSRS Opinion Panel. Additional trans respondents were recontacted from previous randomized telephone interviews. Cisgender adults were recruited through the SSRS Opinion Panel. Results among the sample of trans adults have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus seven percentage points and the margin of sampling error is plus or minus four percentage points among the sample of cisgender adults.

Story editing by Lynda Robinson; photo editing by Dudley Brooks and Mark Miller; video editing by Amber Ferguson; copy editing by Thomas Heleba and Shay Quillen; project editing by Wendy Gallietta; design by Natalie Vineberg. Scott Clement and Emily Guskin also contributed to this story.

* * *

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