EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth dispatch from the 2024 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University. For previous posts, see deadline narratives by a Wall Street Journal podcast team, the braided structure used by The Atavist for complex stories and practical tips on empathy as a reporting tool.

The approach that guides the journalism of Washington Post reporter John Woodrow Cox might be distilled into three words: “Be human first.”

Cox is the author of the book “Children Under Fire: An American Crisis,” which draws from his years of enterprise reporting on how children are impacted by gun violence, mass shootings and school shootings. Speaking at the 2024 Power of Narrative Conference at Boston University, Cox offered tips for telling stories through the eyes of children. But his advice isn’t apt only for coverage of the most extreme trauma-based stories. It applies more broadly to reporters like me who write about rare diseases and contested illnesses, where patients and their families experience trauma that is less obvious and takes more time to understand and explain.

Here are highlights of his process, lightly edited from his words:

• Be human first. That is where it begins. The first thing I say to anybody is ‘I’m very sorry for what it is you’ve gone through.’ If that is not your first instinct, you should quit doing this work.
• Pre-report. Talk to everybody in their life first — all the adults, mostly so you understand if they have triggers, if there are things you shouldn’t talk about. You need to understand that as completely as possible before you walk in and ask them anything.

• Always go, and always stay. Just show up. We cannot tell these stories from afar. We have to be there — and stay. The difference in the way a child interacts with you on the first day versus the second is enormous. They respond to consistency. Just being there, being a familiar face, for more than a day — they open up in a really different way.
• Be transparent. I explain in great detail what it is that I do. I will show them on my phone, scroll through stories, and I’m very transparent about how the process works. What we do is so opaque to people. We think they understand it. They don’t. It’s very unusual to anybody who doesn’t do this work. So I try to be really clear about my process.
• Give agency. Especially when talking with children, the thing I say all the time is ‘I’m not in charge. You can say ‘no’ to anything I ask you. There is no obligation.’ Children are so used to every adult in their life being an authority figure. So I say those words: ‘I’m not in charge. You’re in charge.’
• Make them comfortable. I always ask kids where they want to talk. I ask parents to be present. I ask parents not to answer for their kids. I also sit on the floor. I want their eye level to be above mine. I want to signal to them all the time that they’re in charge, and I’m not.
• When possible, immerse. If you ask a kid ‘How do you feel?’ — no matter what, their response will be ‘I’m OK’ or ‘Fine.’ The question I ask kids most often is ‘What happened next?’ By existing in their space — and this is true with adults, too — you’re going to learn so much more.
• Verify. You can’t rely entirely on a child’s memory to tell the story. Anything they tell you, you have to seek corroboration.
• Record everything. I have two recorders, always. Children speak in a really unique, unusual way. You have to get their dialogue exactly, because your ear will literally edit in real time. I know this because I’ve taken notes and I’ve recorded and they don’t match up. So right now I record everything.
  • Great tip: Get an Apple Watch and just turn it on to record. Then you don’t need to hold two recorders.
• Find out what questions they’ve been asking. (to get at a child’s anxiety or fears…expressed in their journal, or to a parent or teacher etc.) Quick example: In a story about a boy whose father was shot to death, I asked the boy’ss mom to tell me what he would ask her:
  - “Did my daddy do something to deserve this?”
  - “Did they catch the person?”
  - “Is this person going to try to come and get me?”
  Tyshaun would have never expressed to me that ‘oh I’m having a lot of fear about the person who didn’t get arrested who shot my dad’ or ‘I wonder if my dad did something to deserve this’ or ‘I wonder if this person’s going to come and get me.’ He wouldn’t have just volunteered that. But his questions to his mother revealed his anxiety. It’s a question that I ask literally every time when reporting (through the eyes of children): What questions have they been asking?
• Leave them in a good place. This is a tip I picked up at Dart, the center on journalism and trauma. We take people into dark places in the course of reporting. We cannot leave them there. We have to bring them back out. You yourself, while doing this reporting, are going into a dark place. Sometimes it’s hard to think, how can I lighten this? How can I bring them back out of this? I write questions at the back of my notebook… things I know I can rely on when I want to bring them back out. For example, something they have to look forward to… What are you going to do this summer? What are you doing for Christmas? What’s on your wish list? Things that will put their brain emotionally in a better place.
• Never underestimate. There are things we assume a child isn’t capable of thinking or doing. They have so much more to offer. And the truth is, kids can be a little bit of a Trojan Horse for tough issues. People find ways to blame: Oh, that must be this person’s fault. You can’t blame a 6-year-old. And there are a lot of other issues we can take on and find different ways to engage people if we told them through a different subject.

A closing thought from Woodrow Cox. How we tell stories through children’s eyes goes back to what I said at the start. Seek to understand their perspective, their loss, their fears, their interests, their aspirations — because they have all of those things. And too often we assume that they don’t. And that’s what it means to report with empathy.

To me, that is where our work begins and where it ends.

* * *

Esther Landhuis is a freelance science and health journalist based in California.

The post 2024 Power of Narrative: “Be human first” when covering trauma and children appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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

As a science and health journalist, I often write about contested illnesses — conditions that elude mainstream medicine because they lack clear symptoms and lab findings. That means I spend a lot of time talking with families who feel unseen. Empathy is a key motivator for my reporting. I found solace and inspiration from this advice shared by journalist and author Evan Ratliff at the 2019 Power of Narrative session and covered on Storyboard: “Report your way to empathy. If you can’t see the world through your subject’s eyes, the answer is more reporting.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some tips and reminders:

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

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

* * * 

Esther Landhuis is a freelance science and health journalist based in California.

The post 2024 Power of Narrative: How to bring empathy to your reporting appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts on the intimate interview with tennis stars Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert by Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post. You can also read our analysis of what made the story so special.

I barely follow women’s tennis. Yet I fell spellbound, like many of you, reading the July 3 Washington Post feature about two of the sport’s greatest icons, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. Amid a fierce rivalry spanning decades, the athletes forged a friendship off the court that has grown deeper still, as the two recently battled cancer.

Beyond the crisp, cinematic writing, I marveled at the story’s extraordinary honesty. Evert and Navratilova have spent years talking with reporters about their sports and their games, yet now — in an 8,000-plus-word piece with 1,500-plus reader comments — divulge details of stifling childhoods, stinging rejection, divorce, loneliness and, though it all, a loyalty in life as fierce as their rivalry on the court.

I wondered how Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins drew it all out. I asked if she’d be willing to be interviewed about, well, interviewing. In my reach-out to Jenkins, I wrote that I wanted to know:

… how you built trust, elicited candor, balanced your own deep knowledge of these women with a needed fresh mind, determined story structure before the interview. And whatever else made the magic happen.

What follows is a conversation, edited for length and clarity, about all of this, but mostly about the magic.

You’ve been covering tennis for almost 40 years. How clearly did you know and communicate the intention and scope of this piece before requesting interviews?
I had no sense of the scope. It just grew and grew. I didn’t even start out thinking about a story at all.

On February 22, I took Martina to lunch as a friend. She was getting treated for throat and breast cancer in New York. We were just talking about cancer as people going through it. (EDITOR’S NOTE: At the time, Jenkins’ long-time partner was going through intensive surgery and chemotherapy for lung cancer.) We talked about Chrissie and how gritty she was, going through her treatment. Martina’s respect and affection for Chrissie were really clear.

After lunch, I got home and called another great mutual friend of ours, Mary Carillo — longtime broadcaster and former professional tennis player who had interviewed Chris Evert about her battle with ovarian cancer for a June 2022 segment on HBO’s Real Sports. Mary knew I was having lunch and wanted to know how Martina was doing. We were talking about both of them, and Mary said, “You know, Sally, they’ve never been closer.” That set the bell off. So I texted Martina a few weeks later and asked if I could write something. I texted Chrissie with the same idea, that I’d I’d like to maybe write something about her and Martina going through cancer, and their friendship. Martina was in favor but asked me to wait until she was done with treatment. Chrissie said she’d love to talk to me about it.

I thought this would be a nice column about Chrissie and Martina’s relationship and how they’ve helped sustain each other through cancer.

I got on the phone with Chris on April 23, and we ended up talking for over an hour. She was still at home in Florida recuperating from a double mastectomy. We talked another time by phone, and would text and email a little bit. Then Martina was ready to talk after finishing her radiation on May 1. She talked for an hour on the phone. The conversation just kept going.

I called my editor and told him this isn’t just a column; this is a story, and a pretty rich one. He asked how long I was thinking, like maybe 4,000 words? I thought that sounded right, like a pretty good magazine story. Then he asked if I thought they would sit for photos, and maybe a little video? I thought probably not but I texted them and they both said yes. Chrissie said she would go to Martina’s in Miami since she was still tired from the radiation. That’s the kind of care they take of each other.

So I asked that if I came down for the photoshoot, could I spend some time with you guys together? Martina found a very quiet place for the three of us to go for lunch after the photo shoot. We spent the day together.

Then I started writing, and 4,000 words turned into 10,000.

It strikes me that you moved seamlessly from texting and conversation as a friend with shared experiences, to thinking about a story and proposing formal interviews. Could you have done that as a young reporter just a few years into covering tennis?
Chrissie and Martina were always very good to female journalists. In 1984, I was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, a 24-year-old not long out of college. Martina had come to the Bay Area for the Virginia Slims of California, riding a national story-type winning streak that would end up in the record book — and she granted an interview to the young reporter for the local paper. Both were always accommodating to the press. They understood it wasn’t enough to just play the game; they had to promote the game as well — a lesson from Billie Jean King.

Right before Wimbledon, Martina always had dinner with me and Robin Finn from The New York Times, so we could get a sense for how she was feeling, what she thought about the tournament, what she thought her chances were, how she was playing. One year Chrissie had to default from the U.S. Open semifinals because she’d gotten violently ill the night before. While sick in her hotel room, she got on the phone with me and a handful of other tennis writers. That shows just how accommodating they were.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought of an interview as transactional.

So was it hard to go from off-record friend conversation to on-record interview request? No, because quite honestly, that’s how I had dealt with them pretty much throughout. When they retired and went into broadcasting, we became press colleagues and friends.

Some journalists view an interview as a conversation; others primarily as a transaction. To me, it’s the difference between going in thinking what can I learn, I wonder what they’ll tell me, how will they surprise me, versus going in with a pretty good idea of what I want to write and then asking questions to elicit good material. The latter seems more transactional, the former more open-ended. How did you approach the interview?
I don’t think I’ve ever thought of an interview as transactional. I mean, I just never would use that word. I think all the interviews I’ve done over the years are inquisitive. I think that’s your job, right, to just inquire? I’m not a gotcha investigative reporter. As a journalist, I just think you’re supposed to ask questions and write good stories with nice pictures.

How do you balance the need to cultivate long-term trust with the more immediate desire to ask personal questions, which might piss them off, for the story at hand?That’s a difficult question, because I don’t regard them as sources. When you say “source,” I think of off-the-record, background-y sources. Sure, they’re sources in the sense that I could call them up and say, Chrissie, could you talk to me about Serena Williams’ forehand? They’re expert sources in that regard. But I don’t think I was concerned about losing a source here if they didn’t like the story.

You’ve covered them for almost 40 years, so they obviously trust you, right?
Yes. I think they would both tell you that I and Robin Finn (now retired) are the only reporters they would have done this sort of thing with. The fact that they knew me and I had written about them a number of times over the years and they hadn’t had bad experiences with me… I’m sure all of that helped. So I understand what you’re asking, but I don’t think it’s applicable in this situation. It’s maybe more of a question for beat writers.

But regardless what situation you’re in, straightforwardness wins every time. A straightforward, polite question is better than beating around the bush. People interpret the latter as evasive or duplicitous, or they start worrying about your motive and what you’re really going to write — whereas if you ask a question straight out, they know where you’re coming from, and they can answer it or not.

… regardless what situation you’re in, straightforwardness wins every time.

Sincere curiosity is disarming. When you genuinely want to know or write about something, people trust it, rather than resent it. I was pretty surprised when Chrissie and Martina agreed to be interviewed for this piece. But I think they knew I was truly curious about their friendship. When I first got on the phone with Chrissie, I said, “Thanks for doing this.” And she said, “You asked. Nobody else has asked us.”

Who did you have in mind as a reader? Were you thinking about the tennis aficionado, or writing more for a general audience?
I wrote this one for me. That might sound like a crazy answer. …

I don’t even know why I’m getting emotional about it. Excuse me.

I don’t think most people know that my partner Nicole went through cancer. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Jenkins’ partner of 30 years is photojournalist Nicole Bengiveno, now retired from The New York Times.) Nikki was going through chemo at about the same time as Chrissie. I texted Chrissie for a little bit of advice. It’s an experience that other people don’t really understand that much. But I felt like I had some insight there.

When you’re going through it, friendship is just so hugely important. If you have cancer, you don’t want to worry other people. You spend a lot of time almost taking care of them more than yourself. It’s an interesting sort of counterintuitive thing. The thing that gives you relief is friendship because you’re not taking care of anybody when you’re a friend.

Friendship is the least freighted relationship in life in some ways. There’s a paragraph at the start of the final section about how friendship is this wholly voluntary relationship:

Friendship is arguably the most wholly voluntary relationship. It reflects a mutual decision to keep pasting something back together, no matter how far it gets pulled apart, even when there is no obligatory reason, no justice-of-the-peace vow or chromosomal tie.

It’s the thing that I like best in the whole story. It’s a paragraph I talked out with one of my best friends in the business, David Von Drehle, who’s a columnist and editor at the Washington Post.

I have a lot of regard for Chris and Martina. I like them very much personally. I’ve always viewed them as good examples for me. When I was a young woman sportswriter and professional, I felt influenced by them, so the story meant a lot to me — also because I’ve been through cancer with my partner and know what it does to a family.

How did that influence the reporting and writing?
I didn’t want to insert myself in the piece. I actually don’t like those stories. Even as a columnist, I don’t write in the first person a great deal.

I’m old fashioned in the sense that I don’t think readers care about reporters’ lives.

I talked with my editor, Dan Steinberg, about whether to contextualize with outside sources — should I be talking to Billie Jean King and Serena Williams? We decided no, because we wanted the piece to be a conversation between Chris and Martina. The piece is built as a back and forth between them, and I’m the interlocutor making that explicit for the reader. We wanted the piece to be about them and their exchange and their relationship. Even a quote from Billie Jean King would have felt interruptive, and certainly, my deal would have felt interruptive. I’m old fashioned in the sense that I don’t think readers care about reporters’ lives.

I’ve always felt that what a reporter goes through personally motivates what they’re curious about and what they bring out in a story.
I think you’re right about that. I tell younger writers that what you’re feeling when you write a piece will come up off the page almost like perfume. Your feelings for the story will emanate.

As you were drafting the piece, were there moments where you elaborated on something based on your own experience, but it got cut during editing?It was the dead opposite. I actually withheld myself from the piece so much. When you’re in a piece that long, you lose all sense of whether it’s any good. Before giving it to my editor, I showed it to David Von Drehle. He said, You’ve really held back. I know why you’re doing that, but you’re going to have to get your voice into it a little more.

What did he mean by that?
He just meant that it was too flat — that I hadn’t written it with a great deal of expression or creativity, that I had turned it over to their voices too much. It needed more vividness, more description, more of the writer’s voice.

I knew I wanted my surprise to be part of the piece — the extent to which I was surprised by two people I’ve known a long time and thought I knew so much about. I wanted to take the reader along with me. I needed to describe for the reader who they are, what they mean, how revolutionary they both really were. I went back and rewrote the first 15 inches of the piece to be more narratively strong.

How important is it for reporters to reach out to fellow journalists to bounce ideas and get their take on a project? Is that something you do intentionally?
I do it because I don’t think I’m smart enough on my own. I consult my colleagues quite a lot for advice and also for companionship, because it’s kind of a lonely gig.

The story generated an overwhelming response. Is there anything that could be replicated?
I asked David Maraniss, another good friend in the business, and he immediately said you can’t.

It is a unicorn of a story. It wasn’t like asking a stranger for an interview cold. On the flip side, it wasn’t uncomfortable having a semi-friendship with them. There are only two people in it, which kind of violates everything you’ve ever been taught. These are veteran public figures who have been interviewed a million times and know the rules.

That said, maybe the one part you can replicate is finding something you really want to write, that you really feel impelled to write — and, as an editor, asking reporters what’s got a hold of you? I was lucky. I had the liberty to go do it. I mean, how often does a newspaper writer get two and a half months to work on a piece?

* * *

Esther Landhuis is a California-based science journalist and a senior contributor to Undark. She covers biomedicine and its intersections with law and business.

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