The stories we didn’t tell: reflections after one year of the COVID-19 pandemic

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Lately I’ve been thinking about the Olympics.

This time last year, I was interviewing athletes, covering U.S. trials, preparing for the spotlight of the world to hit the 2020 Summer Games. I was spending days of my workweek. They had devoted years of their lives.

And then, the Games were gone. An afterthought, really, as the world became something none of us had ever seen.

Lately I’ve been thinking about all the stories these past 12 months we didn’t get to tell … and not just Olympic dreams. How many trips didn’t we take? How many family gatherings didn’t we attend? How many life moments didn’t we experience to the fullest degree?

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‘Emotional whiplash’, ‘pandemic grind’: How I’ve written about reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic

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My final workday in February 2020 was the last time I reported a story before our world was upended.

It was a Saturday. I was in downtown Atlanta, covering the U.S. marathon trials for the 2020 Olympics. I stood amidst a crowd of hundreds, not realizing that option wouldn’t exist in a few weeks. I spoke with anticipation about that summer’s Olympics, not realizing they wouldn’t take place.

Two days later, our second daughter arrived. Two weeks later, while I sat home on paternity leave, the president declared a national state of emergency because of the widening COVID-19 pandemic.

That pandemic has altered our lives ever since.

I plan to offer more expansive reflections on the past year in the weeks ahead, but I first wanted to look back. One of the many personal benefits of this blog is the snapshots it provides of the various moments of my professional – and often personal – life. I share these entries with you now in the hopes they’ll trigger your own reflections on how you’ve changed during this challenging, maddening, extraordinary time in our lives.

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PODCAST EPISODE #82: Lynsey Weatherspoon, photojournalist, on capturing heritage and history

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Quick confession: I honestly don’t remember when I first heard about Lynsey Weatherspoon.

It might have been last spring, when one of her photos of the George Floyd protests in Atlanta went viral. It might have been in the fall, when she popped up taking portraits of major political candidates across Georgia.

I’m not sure how she came into my orbit, but I’m glad she did. I’ve been inspired ever since.

In this past year, Weatherspoon has documented some of the most important moments and people in Atlanta and America. She took what the Guardian called one of “the best photographs of 2020,” and she contributed to some of the most esteemed media outlets in the country.

All the while, she has remained someone who in her words is “called upon to capture heritage and history in real time.” The third word of her bio is the hashtag #queerblackgirl, and she makes sure to amplify voices of each of those communities. She operates with intention, both in her assignments and with the impact she looks to make on the world.

Weatherspoon is my guest on Episode 82 of the Telling the Story podcast.

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Tom Brady, Super Bowl LV, and the stories we could’ve done but didn’t before the pandemic

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Remember the days when we used to scoff at a Skype interview?

They really weren’t too long ago. Less than a year, if we’re being specific. And we can be specific, because any video storyteller knows exactly when the rules changed and dictated new ways we’d all be required to do our jobs.

These days, when I turn on my station’s evening newscasts, the majority of interviews are done over Zoom. When I watch some of the most innovative storytellers at stations across the country, I often see a new definition of a two-camera interview. One camera focuses on the reporter facing a computer monitor. The other isn’t even a camera; it’s a screen recorder.

In most cases, these look like limits. I have refused to stow away my camera during the COVID-19 pandemic, preferring to shoot stories and interviews whenever possible, but I recognize the difficulties in doing so. I can’t put a lavaliere mic on my interview subjects, and I can’t get within six feet of another human being. I’m not allowed to shoot stories indoors, which means I’m especially grateful to work where winter temperatures rarely dip below freezing. But rain and wind can hinder a shoot, and I can’t control it.

Yes, there’s plenty we still can’t do.

But I’m constantly reminded, including during Super Bowl coverage this past week, of what we can do – and what we could have done before the pandemic but never did.

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Kevin Hart, Jerry Seinfeld, and the interview advice I didn’t know I needed

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In my first post of 2021, I spoke about a quote from fictional character George Costanza that helps ground me when I stress too much.

In my second post, I cited NPR great Ira Glass and one of my favorite authors, Anthony Doerr, and discussed their ruminations on chasing perfection.

Now comes Post #3, and I’m again inspired by a kernel of wisdom in an unexpected place.

Kevin Hart, the ridiculously accomplished standup comedian/actor/content creator, now hosts a podcast. It’s called Inside Jokes, and it follows a familiar format: comic superstar interviews another comic superstar for nearly an hour.  The first episode dropped Monday. Hart’s guest? Jerry Seinfeld.

I couldn’t help but click, and within five minutes, I heard an observation from Seinfeld that gave me a jolt about my own line of work.

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PODCAST EPISODE #81: Tomas Hoppough, solo video journalist, Scripps National

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After conducting this interview – and then listening back to it – I felt fired up to go out and tell a story.

I wanted to pick up my camera, put on an N95, get in my car, and do something great.

That’s the result of 45 minutes chatting with Tomas Hoppough.

He’s a solo video journalist with Scripps National, but that hardly describes the variety and quality of his work. He travels roughly every other week, mostly alone, with mirrorless cameras and lenses and the goal of two longform stories per trip.

He succeeds in that goal, and then some. He produces docu-style pieces that are vivid in both characters and aesthetics.

Tomas is my guest on Episode 81 of the Telling the Story podcast.

In the podcast, I mention several of Tomas’ stories. Check them out here:

  • Rising in Minneapolis: a powerful series of pieces with photojournalist Drew Snadecki in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd
  • Guns Down, Gloves Up: a half-hour special turned in less than two weeks after a powerful program in Virginia

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Nobody’s perfect, especially journalists. It’s OK for us to admit it.

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Maybe you’ve seen it scroll across your Instagram feed. Maybe you’ve heard it on a YouTube clip. But more than likely, if you’re in a field that involves creativity and craft – and journalism is absolutely such a field – you’ve become familiar with Ira Glass’ famous quote about the “taste gap.”

“For the first couple of years you make stuff,” Glass once said, “what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s trying to be good. It has ambition to be good. But it’s not quite that good. … A lot of people never get past that phase. … They quit. … It’s totally normal, and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work – do a huge volume of work. … It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that.”

It’s a critical message for creators, a light beam of faith from those who have clawed through the darkness. Keep working and creating, Glass tells us, and we’ll get to a place where our taste matches our ambition.

But I’m not sure if that place truly exists.

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Finding the power of the big picture in the pandemic grind

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There’s a line I sometimes recite when I feel I’ve reached a professional roadblock.

It’s a punchline from an eighth-season episode of Seinfeld, where George Costanza is trying to spin his meager life triumphs amid countless failures into a grand success story.

“You know,” he says, “if you take everything I’ve accomplished in my entire life and condense it down into one day … it looks decent!”

When I watched two decades ago, I laughed with everyone else. We’re supposed to laugh at George. The line is meant to mock him.

But these days, it’s become somewhat of a mantra, a reminder of the power of the big picture. When I feel stagnant in my career, I reflect on what I’ve accomplished and discover a lengthier list than I realized. When I’m shooting a story and don’t feel like I’m capturing what I need, I aim to stay focused and remember I might feel differently by day’s end. In the moment, I often dwell on mistakes and failures. In the aggregate, I see a career that, condensed into a few paragraphs, looks decent.

And in 2020, when limitations and frustrations loomed over every day, I leaned on George’s line – or, at least, the optimism within it – to push through.

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PODCAST EPISODE #79: Tiffany Liou, solo video journalist, WFAA-TV

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The “origin story” is a superhero movie staple: how one everyday individual discovered extraordinary powers and realized her or his destiny of defending the city, country, world, or galaxy.

In the journalism world, Tiffany Liou has one of the most inspiring origin stories you’ll hear.

She didn’t go in J-school. She took a job in marketing. But she felt a pull towards news. She picked up an internship at a local affiliate but never quit her day job. She did both, overnighting as an assignment editor on the other side of the Bay Area. Eventually, she left the West Coast for a producer/MMJ position in West Monroe, Louisiana.

That’s how she started. Now she’s an accomplished storyteller at one of the top storytelling stations in the country, WFAA-TV in Dallas.

Liou is my guest on Episode 79 of the Telling the Story podcast.

In this episode, we discuss Liou’s origins in the field, but we mostly dive into her life today: as a solo video journalist during a global pandemic. It’s changed and challenged all of us. Liou’s perspective is one many will understand.

She is also one of 16 interviews for The Solo Video Journalist, 2nd Edition, my updated how-to book for MMJs that was just published and is available for purchase. I finished the book just before COVID-19 took over our lives, but its core techniques and lessons remain relevant and even critical in our current world. Being a solo video journalist means living in a continual state of adaptation, and this is no different.

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PODCAST EPISODE #78: Neima Abdulahi, culture reporter, WXIA-TV & more

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The first time I met Neima Abdulahi, it was her first week at our station, WXIA-TV in Atlanta, and I was asked if she could shadow me for a day.

But I quickly learned: Abdulahi is nobody’s shadow.

She grew up in Atlanta and returned professionally three years out of school. As a one-woman crew, she turned daily stories like everyone else, but she kept her eye on a grander goal: becoming a voice for the city she loved, the music she embraced, and the many cultures she represented. She produced a half-hour special about the Atlanta hip-hop scene. She did a longform story about Migos. She looked back with relentless reports on the infamous Atlanta child murders of 1979-81. This summer, she provided some of the most thoughtful and textured coverage of the death of civil rights icon John Lewis.

Abdulahi is an example on how to develop and amplify your voice. But she hasn’t just done so on-air. She has used that momentum to build up an online following, specifically on Instagram, that has allowed her to go part-time at WXIA while freelancing at places like VIBE Magazine. She approaches social media with a marketer’s mentality and a willingness to experiment and adapt to the demands of her audience.

She is my guest on Episode 78 of the Telling the Story podcast.

I’ve been a huge fan of Abdulahi for a long time, and I appreciated her taking the time to share her story. I’m also excited that she’s among the MMJs I interviewed for my new book, The Solo Video Journalist, 2nd Edition, which is now available for purchase. Both the podcast and the book are worth your time.

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