covid-19

PODCAST EPISODE #85: Reshma Kirpalani, documentarian, “Inside the COVID Unit”

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Last spring, when so many of us were frightened and nervous at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world of journalism and the world as a whole felt chaotic and upended, Reshma Kirpalani leaned in. She cold-emailed a hospital group in south Florida to see if she could obtain access to its COVID unit, through videos shot by its employees. She received that access and embarked on a half-hour documentary … that ultimately turned into five half-hours of an episodic series. She convinced her bosses at the Miami Herald and its parent company, McClatchy, to enable her to focus entirely on this project.

And just as she was about to start putting it together, Kirpalani learned she had been laid off.

McClatchy decided to eliminate Kirpalani’s video team. For Kirpalani, it meant the end of not only regular paychecks but also the documentary she had poured nine months into producing.

Or, at least, it would have meant the end … if she hadn’t fought to finish it.

Kirpalani convinced her bosses to let her stay on for three more months. In that time, she produced an unforgettable and necessary document of the early stages of the pandemic – and how those grueling weeks impacted the lives of the health care workers who couldn’t avoid it. The project, titled “Inside the COVID Unit,” can now be seen on miamiherald.com. And it’s riveting.

I’ve watched – and produced – numerous stories on the pandemic, but few if any moved me like this series. It puts on full display the initial chaos of those early months, which weighs over every impossible decision faced by the health care workers profiled here. Kirpalani’s commitment shows throughout. She captures moments that are equally brutal, frustrating, raw, and heartbreaking. She has an intuitive sense of narrative and context.

More importantly, she does it all with extraordinary empathy – the quality that most enables this series to stand out.

Kirpalani is my guest on Episode 85 of the Telling the Story podcast.

When I listened back to this interview, I immediately wanted to hoist my camera and tell a meaningful story. I’m in awe of storytellers like Kirpalani who embrace their work with such devotion. It’s what I seek in my own stories, and it’s what I appreciate in the journalists I admire most.

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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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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 #76: Chris Hansen, senior photojournalist, KUSA-TV

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For five months, the Telling the Story podcast has been delayed by current events – both external in the world (COVID-19) and internal in my life (the arrival of my second daughter!).

But it returns now – and with an all-star guest.

Chris Hansen is a senior photojournalist at KUSA-TV. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, he was a standard-setter in finding beautiful, innovative, and thoughtful ways of shooting and editing stories. Since the pandemic – with numerous restrictions on where he can shoot video and how he can conduct interviews – Hansen has found new ways to persevere. Take this story, where he interviewed neighborhood residents on their front lawns with the help of their cell phones. Or this one, where he used the drone to capture and illustrate the emptiness of Denver’s streets during a stay-at-home order:

Hansen is my guest on Episode 76 of the Telling the Story podcast.

He is also a speaker at the upcoming NPPA Virtual Video Storytelling Workshop, taking place August 7 & 8 online. I’m directing the workshop and am thrilled to bring on two dozen talented journalists to present about topics from COVID-19 to digital dominance. Sign up now, and get ready to be inspired.

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It’s like emotional whiplash: my juggle as a reporter and father during the COVID-19 pandemic

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I click the play button to log an interview I just recorded. I hear a nurse in New York describe a sight from a recent shift.

“I remember I was sitting at my desk,” she tells me, “and the body rolled by on the stretcher to go to the morgue. And I’m thinking, ‘That’s just joining all the other bodies down there.’”

As my fingers type fast to keep up, a voice in the background interrupts.

“SEE YOU SOON, HOPSIEEEEEEEEE!”

That’s my daughter. She’s two years old. She’s in her playpen, one room over from my office. And she’s putting her toy bear, Hopsie, down for a nap.

For the next few minutes, her high-pitched squeals pierce the sentences and sighs of an exhausted nurse: “They have a tent outside the hospital where they take all the dead bodies” – I LOVE YOU, HOPSIEEEEEEE! – “They don’t have enough room in the morgue” – SEE YOU SOOOOOOON! – “It’s not normal for people to be dropping like flies like that.”

It’s certainly not normal. It’s also not normal for me to process upsetting details of a pandemic – and internalize them enough to write a story – while hearing my toddler blissful in the living room. It’s not normal to keep my phone on mute during the morning editorial meetings, so I can cradle my newborn daughter – just seven weeks old – and soothe her cries long enough to pitch a story.

None of this is normal. We are all making sacrifices and adjusting our lives. Many of us know someone who’s caught COVID-19 – or, worse, lost a life from it – if we haven’t faced it ourselves. Many work in fields where they confront the pandemic first-hand every day, from the grocery store cashiers wearing masks and gloves to the nurse I interviewed, witnessing a body get rolled to the morgue.

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The COVID-19 pandemic struck as my daughter arrived. I knew I needed to stay on the sidelines.

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March 13th, 2020 was our baby girl’s due date. We didn’t realize how fortunate we were when she arrived two weeks early, two weeks before the coronavirus pandemic fully overtook most Americans’ lives.

By the time March 13th arrived, the NCAA had cancelled the Final Four, the NBA, NHL, and MLB had postponed or suspended their seasons, and the stock market had plummeted. A day earlier, my state of Georgia announced the first death related to COVID-19. That afternoon the United States officially entered a national state of emergency.

This was clearly, also, a journalistic emergency – the kind where anyone who can pick up a camera or write a script is expected to report. I didn’t. On March 13th, I fed and swaddled my newborn, then picked up my older daughter from day care with the knowledge she likely wouldn’t return anytime soon.

I wanted to work. But I wouldn’t cut short this critical period to do so.

A storyteller’s instinct is to rush to the biggest stories. We romanticize it. I’ve heard reporters boast about cutting short weekends, vacations, and honeymoons to cover the latest breaking story. To some degree – and depending on where you work – that’s part of the job. I’ve spent snowstorms on windy, whitecapped bridges. I’ve missed friends’ weddings to cover the World Series and Olympics. I struggle with these sacrifices, but I understand why they’re necessary, and I hope my friends and family do too.

But I wouldn’t sacrifice this. Months before my daughter arrived, I informed my bosses I planned to take four weeks off: two for paternity leave, and two as paid time off. I resolved as many commitments as I could beforehand, and I cleared those weeks to focus solely on family. No story, I pledged to myself, would reel me back.

Then a worldwide pandemic struck American cities, and I felt torn.

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