ferguson

My favorite blog posts of 2015: a look back

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It’s been a heavy year for me.

I did not quite realize that until I scrolled through my blog posts.

This year I wrote about race, stress, and deflected dreams. Many of the most powerful stories I read by others were the ones that tackled grisly topics, from officer-involved shootings to international tragedies.

But I also wrote about the triumph of heart, the value in communication, and the joy of when a beautiful story touches millions of people.

As we wind down the calendar year, I present my favorite posts from 2015, with excerpts, in chronological order:

The lesson I learned telling a story about race (1/28/15)

On most subjects, when I ask people for their thoughts, I get a “Yes” response maybe a third of the time. With a less threatening subject that still breeds opinions — say, the performance of the local football team — my success rate jumps closer to 50%.

With a subject like race? I braced myself for a steady diet of rejection.

I received the exact opposite.

Nearly everyone I approached agreed to an on-camera interview, from a diner in downtown Atlanta to a panini shop in the suburbs. I asked people of different races, ages, and genders, and I heard a lot of yeses.

And those responses paved the way to powerful conversations.

I spoke with more than a dozen people, and I used nearly everyone’s words in the resulting story. I found their thoughts compelling and varied; many remarked how they had rarely discussed such weighty matters — particularly race — in their day-to-day lives.

What made them open up here?

I credit two things: my approach, and my station’s intentions.

Every time I approached someone, I laid out the request in as sincere and thoughtful a manner as possible. I described the hour-long special and pressed the importance of hearing numerous voices; I spoke about our desire as a station to promote conversation, and I never rushed or tried to push anyone who might not be sure. My story required honesty and openness; I needed to display both if I wished to receive it.

But I also felt heartened by the fact that so many people held such deep, poignant thoughts about race. We tend to only see the most polarizing, often offensive, comments in matters like these. This story reminded me how many people remain in the middle.

A storyteller’s trip to Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni (4/22/15)

My journey to one of the world’s most stunning sights began with an innocent click.

Really, it began because of this web site.

I launched the Telling The Story blog in February 2013 to inspire journalists and storytellers, using not just my work but that of others around the world. I included a weekly series called “3 Great Stories” to spotlight the best pieces I watched, heard, or read that week.

I began to relish my regular quest to unearth such gems, and I regularly scanned different outlets to expand my reach.

In January 2014 I discovered Medium.

Advertised initially as a long-form version of Twitter, the site had become — at its best — a beacon of creativity where both young and established writers posted their work. I started scouring its headlines until I stumbled upon this one:

Salar de Uyuni: my trip to see the world’s largest mirror

It was accompanied by this photo:

Salar post photo

My eyes widened, and my index finger raced to the mouse to click on the link.

Interns, Part 2 (or: the time I almost became famous) (8/5/15)

But when you “make it” in your career, something critical happens:

You have to live what you have made.

The process of “making it” encompasses much of one’s 20s and early 30s; one then must spend the bulk of one’s adult life “keeping it”. The initial challenge evaporates, and the day-to-day job remains.

I stumbled upon this thought during my latest car ride with an intern. He was asking for advice about whether he should pursue journalism as a career. As we talked, I thought about the Clemens story and realized I had never really articulated the advice I was about to give.

“Here’s what you should do,” I said, in one form or another. “Take some time and just watch newscasts. Watch as many as you can. Watch them here in Atlanta; watch them in smaller markets. Heck, go online and watch a live-stream of some random newscast in some place you have never visited. While you watch, see what they do. See what types of stories the reporters cover. Combine that with what you have experienced this summer watching the reporters and journalists here. Understand that this is the type of work you most likely will end up doing.

“And when you make your decision about a career in journalism, think about that. Don’t think about whether you can handle living in a small market. Most likely, you can. Don’t worry about whether you will ultimately ‘make it’ to a big market. Because once you do all those things, you will still have the rest of your adult life ahead of you, and you will need to be happy doing the job you have.

“So don’t think about the short term. Think about the long term. Think about your life, and think about whether you are willing to commit so much of it to this line of work.”

It is a lesson so many of us fail to truly grasp until much later.

The balancing act: journalism and stress (10/14/15)

I accepted long ago that I receive, as a journalist, an extraordinary amount of access unavailable to most. That access is often a treasure: I have traveled to the Olympics, interviewed countless celebrities and public figures, and enjoyed fascinating and probing conversations with people I otherwise never would have met.

In other cases, that access is a burden, a necessary evil in the journey to inform.

In my dozen years as a journalist, I have witnessed the wreckage of floods and tornadoes. I have interviewed people in their most vulnerable, anguished states. I have sat with children during times of extreme sickness; in some cases, I have even attended their funerals.

Even when I covered the Sochi Olympics, we received beforehand severe internal warnings about the potential for terrorism, which left several of my co-workers questioning their decisions to take the assignment.

Witnessing an execution is an extreme example; Hullinger described to me his need, early on in the process, to simply close his eyes for 20 seconds and brace himself for the horror he was about to witness. I often feel similarly on a smaller scale; I report countless stories where I must first steel my heart before heading into the field.

And yet, I cannot steel myself too much. I need to remain able to be moved by my story, to absorb its emotions and importance. I must stay attuned to the larger societal questions surrounding virtually every assignment I receive, even as those issues bring a level of stress that is sometimes overwhelming.

Being a journalist requires me to know about the issues. Being a good journalist requires me to care about them.

And I want to be a good journalist.

So I must often allow myself to absorb the stress that comes with access.

Logan’s big play: watching one story reach millions (10/21/15)

One million people.

I could not believe it.

Several days of posting Logan’s story to Facebook, I looked at the numbers and found it had been seen by a million users. It had been liked and shared thousands of times, and it had received attention and comments from north Georgia to southeast Asia.

My stories — and my Facebook posts about them — rarely get much attention. They usually, according to Facebook’s insights, reach a few hundred people, sometimes a few thousand.

But a million? That just didn’t happen … until it did.

People seemed particularly touched by the celebration of Logan’s touchdown. They loved that both teams got in the act, and they strongly cheered on the messages of sportsmanship and empathy. Many spoke about getting tears in their eyes.

I was overwhelmed by how quickly the video spread. New likes, shares, and comments arrived literally every second. People wrote comments in which they simply tagged a friend, so that the friend could watch the video. The numbers surprised even the 11Alive digital team, which monitors a Facebook account with hundreds of thousands of followers.

To watch it all unfold felt both shocking and gratifying.

We talk all the time about the power of social media, and we often view it in more personal matters: the ability to keep in touch with friends, to share the moments of our lives, or to rally communities around causes. This was something different. This was watching a single story — and a beautiful video of Logan — reach a global audience and affect a number of people I could rarely otherwise reach. This was realizing a singular strength of life on earth in 2015: the potential for one person’s action — anyone, not just Logan and certainly not just me — to spread communally and organically in ways that bust traditional boundaries.

Matt Pearl is the author of the Telling the Story blog and podcast. Feel free to comment below or e-mail Matt at matt@tellingthestoryblog.com. You can also follow Matt on Facebook and Twitter.

3 GREAT STORIES: Best of 2015, written edition

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Every week, I will shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

This is one of my favorite moments of the year.

Every December, I look back at my “3 Great Stories” posts from the past year and decide on which stories, I feel, rose above the rest.

It always reminds me of how much magnificent work gets done every year.

I will post my three favorite audio/video stories of the year next week. This week, without further ado, I present my three favorite written pieces of 2015 — and an honorable mention — along with what I wrote about them back then, with minor edits for clarity:

HM) Ferguson: the other young black lives laid to rest in Michael Brown’s cemetery (8/7/15, BBC): What an inventive, informative way to commemorate the one-year mark of the killing of Michael Brown.

Jessica Lussenhop, senior writer for BBC News Magazine, visits St. Peter’s Cemetery in north St. Louis County, where “there is still no headstone in the place where 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr is buried”. But, Lussenhop discovers, the cemetery is home to many with similar stories:

If one walks in any direction away from grave number four, there are many more pictures of black men and women who died in their teens or early 20s. Some are grinning in school portraits, or giving the camera their most serious expression. Some stones include a baby picture, or a composite photo of the deceased with their children. One marker is etched with a photo of the young man’s beloved truck.

Within a roughly 30-metre radius of Michael’s grave there are at least 15 homicide victims. The youngest was a 15-year-old. Most of them were shot. There are also deaths by suicide, cancer, car accidents, but for those under the age of 30, the predominant cause of death is homicide.

The difficulty of telling a story like Michael Brown’s comes from the temptation to immediately intertwine the individual incident with the massive context and history surrounding it. Lussenhop succeeds by seeking out the numerous incidents that provide such context; she turns in a appropriately rich story as a result.

#3) These are the families left to reclaim Garissa’s dead (4/9/15, Buzzfeed): Tucked away behind lists about animals and ‘NSYNC, Buzzfeed dedicates resources to a team that regularly produces long-form gems.

Here, global news correspondent Jina Moore presents one of the most heart-rending stories I have read in a long time.

A week earlier, gunmen stormed the campus of Garissa University in Kenya and killed 144 people, mostly students, in ways both horrifying and humiliating. Moore steps in the following week by describing, not the attack, but the search by parents to claim their dead children.

This is a devastating read, and Moore writes with such descriptive power that each sentence feels like a stomach punch. She puts a captivating spotlight on the aftermath of this incidence of international terrorism.

#2) The new science of sentencing (8/4/15, The Marshall Project): One of the most fascinating subjects I have covered recently is criminal justice reform.

It seems to be one of the few issues both political parties can support: finding ways to shrink the jail population and reduce recidivism once ex-offenders return to society.

This story — a dual effort from The Marshall Project and FiveThirtyEight — does a dazzling job of spotlighting one of the issue’s more advanced and controversial innovations. As written by Anna Maria Barry-Jester, Ben Casselman, and Dana Goldstein, “Pennsylvania is on the verge of becoming one of the first states in the country to base criminal sentences not only on what crimes people have been convicted of, but also on whether they are deemed likely to commit additional crimes.”

So many ethical questions come into play in this story, and its writers spell each one out with depth and nuance. This is a long read but an informative, excellent read.

#1) A father’s initiative (5/16/15, Washington Post): I can tell when I have read a truly powerful story because of my physical response when it ends.

I get so absorbed in the world of the story that I must actually take a few seconds afterwards to re-acclimate to mine.

I had that reaction after completing “A father’s initiative”, Eli Saslow’s wrenching feature about a single dad taking President Obama’s 16-class fatherhood course. In many ways, this article is a Rorschach test for how one views poverty, race, and other matters. Mostly, though, it is a poignant tale of human struggle — and whether or not that struggle can be soothed through bureaucratic means. Each paragraph ripples with conflicting emotions, such as this one early in the piece:

Now it was his 15th class, nearing the end, and despite the hopeful language in a course guide — “End the cycle of intergenerational poverty!” “Help turn your child turn into a success story in 16 lessons.” — so much about his life remained unstable. He had moved nine times in seven months. He had been offered two jobs but failed the drug tests. It had been several days since he had seen the baby’s mother, a former longtime girlfriend who was no longer living with them. “Sapphire misses you. Are you coming over to see her??” he had texted once, and the silence that followed made him think Sapphire might become another black child whose long odds depended on a single parent, and that parent was him.

3 GREAT STORIES: Starring Ferguson, Dr. Dre, and the Perseid meteor shower

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

Ferguson: the other young black lives laid to rest in Michael Brown’s cemetery (8/7/15, BBC): What an inventive, informative way to commemorate the one-year mark of the killing of Michael Brown.

Jessica Lussenhop, senior writer for BBC News Magazine, visits St. Peter’s Cemetery in north St. Louis County, where “there is still no headstone in the place where 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr is buried”. But, Lussenhop discovers, the cemetery is home to many with similar stories:

If one walks in any direction away from grave number four, there are many more pictures of black men and women who died in their teens or early 20s. Some are grinning in school portraits, or giving the camera their most serious expression. Some stones include a baby picture, or a composite photo of the deceased with their children. One marker is etched with a photo of the young man’s beloved truck.

Within a roughly 30-metre radius of Michael’s grave there are at least 15 homicide victims. The youngest was a 15-year-old. Most of them were shot. There are also deaths by suicide, cancer, car accidents, but for those under the age of 30, the predominant cause of death is homicide.

The difficulty of telling a story like Michael Brown’s comes from the temptation to immediately intertwine the individual incident with the massive context and history surrounding it. Lussenhop succeeds by seeking out the numerous incidents that provide such context; she turns in a appropriately rich story as a result.

(more…)

5 lessons from the NPPA’s best video stories of 2014

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Effort.

It’s the one through-line of every great story I see.

Television news constantly forces the hands of the people who bring it. At various points throughout the evolution of a story, a reporter, photographer, or multimedia journalist must decide when they have done enough:

Did I do every interview I can do for this story, or do I need to find another?

Do I have enough footage for this story, or do I need to shoot more?

Is this script exactly as I want it, or should I read over it again?

How much time do I have to keep editing, or do I need to submit my story for air?

These are the questions that daily confront TV news journalists, and they are often answered by the ticking clock of the deadline. But more than that, they come down to effort.

I thought about this frequently as I watched this year’s video winners for the NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism awards.

In each one, I saw numerous moments that only succeeded because the winning photographer made an extra piece of effort, be it during the gathering or editing process.

This year, I was one of those winning photographers; as I mentioned last week, I received 1st place in the category of Solo Video Journalism: General News. I won for the story of a Madison County, Ga. man who rescued a baby on the side of the road; the piece went viral and aired, in slightly edited form, on NBC Nightly News. As I wrote then, that story is a quintessential example of the value of effort.

Here are four other winning entries that I found particularly powerful — and the lessons I took from them: (more…)

The lesson I learned telling a story about race

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I was expecting 25%.

Typically I try to avoid person-on-the-street assignments — the kind that involve humble reporters like yourself asking “regular” people to opine on a certain issue. I prefer to hear from experts or the newsmakers themselves; I dislike the concept of 2-3 random interviewees somehow speaking for a whole community.

I also despise the rejection.

People are often, understandably, reluctant to speak on-camera about a potentially controversial issue. Look at the situation from their eyes: a reporter, who you likely have never met or even seen on TV, approaches you with a camera and microphone. You don’t know where your words — with your face attached — will wind up. Will you be edited? Almost certainly. Taken out of context? Possibly. And even if the reporter represents your words perfectly, can you trust yourself to say exactly what you think without somehow garbling the message? Think of how many conversations or arguments where you thought afterward, “If only I had said …” Do you want to stand by recorded answers to questions you have not yet heard?

It’s a tough sell.

Throw in the potential land mine of race, and you have my recent assignment. (more…)

3 GREAT STORIES: Best of 2014, audio/video edition

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Every week, I will shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

Having done the “3 Great Stories” segment all year long, I now face the challenge of picking my favorites.

But I have picked them, and here they are.

I posted my three favorite written stories of the year last week. This week, without further ado, I present my three favorite audio/video pieces of 2014, along with what I wrote about them back then, with minor edits for clarity:

#3) Knox County man builds backyard roller-coaster — again (10/29/14, WTHR-TV): I will say it simply: this story is one of the finest TV features I have seen in a long time.

The “plot” is simple, summed up in the above headline. A rural Indiana man has gained worldwide fame for a roller-coaster he built in his own backyard. Most stations might assign a reporting crew to tell the story in 90 seconds; it might make a nice feature but then fade from memory quickly afterwards.

Not this station, and not this story.

Reporter Kevin Rader and photographer Steve Rhodes put an extraordinary amount of care into this piece, and it shows in every loving touch. They reveal a new layer of the story every minute, and they present their subject, named John Ivers, in the context of both his creation (the roller-coaster) and his community.

I challenge you to watch this and not crack a smile. (more…)

Embracing the unpredictable, and producing better stories

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The pitch was a slam dunk.

We had been seeking potential stories for our November ratings period — promotable pieces that would provide those moments everyone shares and discusses the following day. Since I specialize in those emotional epics, I had been tabbed with securing them.

And then the e-mail came in.

A 92-year-old World War II Veteran, who happened to be the e-mailer’s father, would soon receive the chance to fly in the very type of plane he flew during the war. The man, named John Tarabula, was celebrating 69 years of marriage to his wife, Jo.

The e-mail caught the attention of many in the 11Alive newsroom, and I volunteered to do the story. No matter what happened on the actual flight, we assumed, the piece would practically write itself.

It didn’t.

I arrived at the Tarabula household the morning of the flight, planning to interview John and Jo and shoot some footage of the couple before heading out to the airfield.

Within minutes, I learned John had no intention of going up in that plane. (more…)

3 GREAT STORIES: Starring Ferguson, Ferguson, & Ferguson

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

Black death in the era of Ferguson (11/24/14, Ebony): I approached the aftermath of the Ferguson verdict wanting to listen, not talk.

I wanted to listen to perspectives that were not my own, backgrounds that I had not experienced.

This week, I offer three great first-person reflections following the verdict, starting with Jamilah Lemieux of Ebony Magazine:

If this isn’t our collective “Black wake-up call,” then it will never come. The whole damn system is guilty as hell, and if we fail to challenge it, then we are too. There is not one more moment for complacency; our silence is consent. The people of St. Louis are roaring; will the rest of us join in? When the only thing standing between imminent death and us is the fear, nervousness and ineptitude of the police, will we continue to act as if we can pray, earn or achieve our way out of struggle?

(more…)

3 GREAT STORIES: Starring November sweeps (Part 2)

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

Ferguson business keeps windows clear as others board up (11/20/14, KARE-TV): We begin this week with where we left off last week: with a powerful piece about Ferguson, Mo. from the storytelling team of Boyd Huppert and Jeff Christian.

This piece is deceptively straightforward, focusing on a husband and wife who opened a burger bar one day before the shooting of Michael Brown … and have since kept it open, while other businesses have boarded up all around them.

The best TV pieces often thrive on moments — those uninterrupted glimpses that the viewer seemingly experiences right along with the subject of the story. Huppert and Christian find several of those here, helping to bring three-dimensional humanity to the coverage of Ferguson.

(more…)

3 GREAT STORIES: Starring November sweeps

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Every week, I shine the spotlight on some of the best storytelling in the business and offer my comments. “3 Great Stories of the Week” will post every Monday at 8 AM.

Bay Area photographer uses kite to capture bird’s-eye view (11/11/14, KGO-TV): November, in TV terms, is a giant ratings month.

Naturally, numerous local TV stations use the month to unleash some of their strongest work.

Such is the case with this clever visual piece from KGO-TV multimedia journalist Wayne Freedman. The industry veteran has received enough awards and done enough powerful stories to fill a book.

The good news is: he can practice what he preaches. Freedman tells the story of a local photographer who has published his own book, featuring photos from a camera the author attaches to a kite. Freedman uses the kite as a photographic device; he combines it with some heartfelt storytelling to produce a smile-worthy piece. (more…)