Colleen Hagerty is a California-based journalist who has been on the disaster beat since covering Hurricane Sandy in New York as a local reporter. Her newsletter about disasters, My World’s on Fire, was shortlisted for a 2022 Covering Climate Now award. You can find her work across BBC News and PBS outputs, as well as in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, Popular Science, Rolling Stone, and High Country News, among other outlets.
I met Colleen in the Exposure Therapy community. She had just published “The Government Set a Fire in New Mexico. It Burned 341 ,735 Acres” in Rolling Stone, and mentioned she was a 2023 Complicating the Narratives fellow with the Solutions Journalism Network I leapt at the chance to speak with her.
I had been fascinated by Solutions Journalism since 2018 when Amanda Ripley published, “Complicating the Narratives,” that asked “ What if journalists covered controversial issues differently — based on how humans actually behave when they are polarized and suspicious?”
AI Summary. Colleen Hagerty, a freelance journalist, discusses her journey from fiction to journalism, the impact of covering Hurricane Sandy, and her current focus on disaster reporting. She explores the role of solutions journalism in providing a more complete, human-centered narrative and the importance of shifting perspectives when approaching complex stories.
I start all these interviews with the question I borrowed from a friend of mine and I love it, and I always over explain it because it hits really hard that you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from?
Yeah, it's funny because like I said, I've listened to a few of these and I know a lot of people talked about the physical places that they come from. But when I heard the question for the first time, for me it was really more the state of mind that I think I approach people from that was my gut reaction. So I'm going with that and I'm going to say I come from a place of curiosity. I have always just been endlessly fascinated by the world around me and people around me, in particular. But when I was younger, I was very shy. So I was not like the stereotypical toddler asking a million questions. A lot of those questions stayed in my head. And I was a big reader. I still am. But now I think I get to make up for lost time with the work I do as a journalist, that I get to actually ask those questions that I've always had.
Do you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Yeah, it's boring because it hasn't changed that much. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to do more fiction when I was younger. I always would go to the library and just look at the shelves and want to see my name up there. And again, I think because I found so much excitement and wonder and safety in books when I was younger. I wanted to create that experience for other people. I wanted to give them the same portal that I felt like I had found to peek into other people's lives and the world around me. So it's evolved a bit over time to end up as journalist. But yeah, the writing has always been a part of it.
Do you remember, was there a book that you fell in love with as a kid that you remember? What did it look like as a child to be a fiction writer?
Yeah, I don't think it was one in particular. I would go through phases in different genres. So I remember having a big historical fiction phase. I remember reading a lot of biographies and autobiographies at one point and then dipping a toe into kind of like the classics. I did it. There was a point when I was like maybe 11 or 12 that I realized maybe I was like punching above my weight class because I had read one of Joan Didion's books on grief and I was not mentally prepared to take those themes in at that time. So I actually, as fantastic as a writer she is, and I know she's inspired so many journalists, like I took a hard break from that. Those were big thoughts for my brain at the time. And I was a bit daunted.
And where did you grow up? Where was your childhood?
I grew up in New Jersey. So in the suburbs of New Jersey and just about two train rides and an hour and change from New York city. So that was always the dream for me. Both of my parents had lived in New York city before they moved out to New Jersey. So I would hear their stories about living there. My dad spent a large portion of his childhood in Greenwich village and it just was very romanticized in my head. So that was always where I wanted to go and having it so close was amazing, but also taunting that this dream destination and this world that was so different to me than the suburbs I was growing up in was so close, but so far.
And where are you now?
So I live in Los Angeles. I'm actually on the East coast now visiting family. So you're catching me out of my normal comfort zone. But yeah I try to make it back here still fairly regularly cause all of my family is still on the East coast.
And how did you end up in LA?
Through work. I was living in New York for a while at the start of my career. I moved down to Washington, D.C. for a bit, and then I got transferred out to Los Angeles. I was working for BBC News at the time, and they had a small team out there but were looking to ramp up their coverage a bit. So I was able to do just some really amazing work within my first year of being there. I had been up in Yosemite, I had traveled across the border in Mexico a few times, just really made my way around and it was a great way to start exploring California and the West in general.
When did you know that you could make a living doing what you do, doing journalism?
It's a good question because journalism is notoriously underpaid. So even as I started doing it as a job, I wasn't sure I was going to make a living on it. But yeah, it was always what - not always because clearly I had those early dreams of fiction - but once I was in high school, I knew that I wanted to do it. I wasn't sure exactly what form, so I actually started my career more in television. So I was working for a local news station there right out of college and I'd done some internships before that. So I had a bit of grounding. But I still remember the first day that I was sent out with a camera and like I had to do it and I was alone. And it was incredibly daunting.
It took a while for me to feel like, not even that I was good at it, but that I knew what I was doing. Like I had some serious imposter syndrome. But I think during that job, it really was working in local news, the scope of what you do is incredible. You could go from a crime scene to - working in New York, I would go from a crime scene to fashion week to having all sorts of political figures in town. So I learned so much and I was exposed to so many different types of news. And just doing that, working the long hours it took, and again, doing so much of it being out on my own, I think within a few months I was okay, I can do this, and if I can do this, in this city, in this role, I think I can stick with it. It was really a dream job for me to have out of college. So I'm very grateful for my time there.
What do you feel like you learned in that phase? I just had this picture of you going out there, being terrified, identifying with that, but then figuring things out. What do you figure out as a young journalist in the big city?
That's a good question. I think the very basic of it was I was terrified just to drive in New York City. So I was driving all over the city. I was specifically covering two boroughs - I was in Queens and Staten Island. So it was two boroughs that I hadn't spent very much time in before in the first place. So I realized first that I'd been living in New York as a college student, but I quickly realized I knew nothing about the city really as it was.
So that was a part of it, finding the confidence to get on the road next to taxi cabs was part of it. I think confidence overall was a large part of it, because it was, I was feeling like I could step into all of these different spaces and have the ability to ask questions, ask hard questions sometimes. We did man on the street interviews a lot, which is when you stop people and just get their reactions to something that's going on. Those were so much fun. It was so difficult for me in the beginning because the idea of stopping a New Yorker like on their commute to ask them a question, that was terrifying. And I still remember some of the very brutal rejections that I got doing that.
So you have to find that within yourself to say, okay, I deserve to be in these spaces. I can be in these spaces. I can ask these questions. And it was very fast paced too. So I would have to really be able to take in a lot of information quickly to have some understanding of the situations I was walking into.
I think the most formative story for me that I covered in that role was Hurricane Sandy, when that hit the city. I was wildly unprepared, as I think many of us were, because we just didn't know something like that could happen in New York, or it hadn't really reached cultural consciousness that something like that could happen. And that experience really had stayed with me throughout my career, and certainly today where I focus more on disasters as my beat. So much of the way I approach stories comes from the amount of time I got to spend as a local journalist really sticking with these stories.
Can you tell me a story of being a journalist, of your experience of Sandy as a journalist? I'm just curious, what was that like?
Yes. So I remember in the days leading up to it, we had some newsroom meetings and there was the understanding that this was going to be a bigger storm, a bigger weather event. And while I'd been there, I think we'd had some heat waves and some very actually not even cold days. I hadn't been there very long when it happened. So I'd really only been there for the summer and then that would have been in the fall.
So we had a newsroom wide meeting, and I had the understanding that I was going to be stationed on Staten Island. I was going to stay overnight and it was just like we had shifts built in. So I was working with an on air reporter and a camera person, and then I was the other camera person who was going to, he had the really big one to do the live shots, and then I was going to run around, talk to people, grab politicians, just be like the third hand in all of this.
My shift started, I remember waking up around two in the morning or something. I was the early morning and then it was I think about 12 hours. I went until two in the afternoon. So I was there before the worst of the storm hit because it was particularly bad overnight. And I remember we were standing on the boardwalk. That's where we did our live shots that day. And just like the wind picking up and you like see the signs of things, but it's also, I am not a meteorologist, like it was like, it seemed bad, but I didn't know what that meant exactly. I knew it was difficult at a certain point to like really stand up straight, especially with a camera. And especially how big the cameras were even like 10 years ago compared to what we have today.
But I still didn't have that understanding of where things could go. But when I, my shift ended and I left, the journalist who came and did my role after me, she parked in the same parking spot that I had been in, and we would drive these little white Ford Focuses around, they were super old, but her car ended up washing away because of the storm surge that came. And it took a week, I think, for them to even find it. So that just speaks to how it progressed over the course of those hours.
And I remember sitting in my hotel room and just like hearing everything happening outside and just being really scared. Like, when I woke up, there was no power and I was driving, and everything was dark, and like I said, it was maybe early, early morning hours, and there were branches and trees that were uprooted along the road. I couldn't really see houses but it was just like, you could tell that there had just been such a monumental change.
And when I went to relieve the girl who had been doing my role she just had seen some really horrifying things, and they had such a difficult time, and it was, yeah, there were a few days later when I finally left because I ended up staying much longer than just one night, I remember finally like pulling over my car and just realizing I thought I was going there to cover this storm. So that was it, that was the event. But what I realized was like, this was just the beginning of something that had happened, that this wasn't, I went, I filed my story, and it was the end of the day, and I was done. This was something that was going to be unfolding for so long. And again, I lived in New York, so it also hit close to home. My own apartment didn't have power when I got back to it. My family living on the East Coast was, they were dealing with their own impacts from it. Yeah, it was just a very formative experience for me as a journalist.
What's, I'm curious about that distinction you're making at the end, like that the expectation is that it's this discrete event. I'm going to do the storm and then after the storm is something else, but you experience it as something totally different. What's the distinction you're making between what you thought it was going to be and what it ended up being?
I think most people, I had seen major storms or even wildfires on the news, and you really just see that moment of impact. And that's what I thought about when I was going to do this coverage. I was like, okay, so we're going to go and we're going to be those journalists standing outside in the rain, getting hit by water, that's what we're going to do. And of course, that's part of it and an important part of it because you want people to understand what is happening, but I hadn't really thought too much at that point about what the recovery looks like beyond like anniversary stories on a one year anniversary or maybe stories about nonprofits or communities coming together to do some rebuilding, but I just hadn't realized what kind of like a chapter closed. A disaster can be and how quickly it happens, right? Like I was parked in that spot and then a few hours later that car was gone. It's like these life changing events happen and it really does shift everything for some people, and while that's more obvious maybe for people who lose their homes or even loved ones, it's, the whole community was in a new place now, this was something that they were going to have to contend with, and in the case of Hurricane Sandy people are still contending with it today, there is, the legacy of it is so long. And I just don't think I had that understanding of what a recovery process really looks like.
And that evolved for me as I continued covering it. And again, certainly shapes the way that I approach stories today. And I think working in local news, especially, you get to see that kind of like really those incremental steps. Because now that I've been on the national side, you just aren't able to pay the same attention to communities because there were so many stories you have to cover. So it's just a very different approach to that story. So I'm, again, grateful to have had that experience. But yeah it was really difficult. And I have a lot of respect for local journalists who are in areas that continued to have events like this regularly.
And tell me a little bit about what you're doing now, like that was a word in the past a little bit, but what's your current disaster is your beat, but what's your current role and what are you working on?
Sure, so I'm a freelance journalist now. I focus a bit more on writing these days. Then, like I said, I started in television. I've tried all sorts of different formats. But I realized in 2019 that I just really wanted to dig into stories more relating to disasters. And that was again, coming off of covering a specific one that was the 2018 campfire in Northern California.
So I went up there for my role with BBC and it was just it was such a different disaster than the one I had experienced with Hurricane Sandy, but then as I was speaking with people, you noticed some of these similarities in terms of dealing with the systems in place to help disaster survivors. And just that, that sort of like new chapter moment, and I realized I had so many questions about what that looked like from a wildfire. And I wasn't able to answer them in the role I was in then, and I had, didn't feel like I was really seeing the answers to them. I feel like that's evolved in the years since, as we've had more extreme weather events where a lot of outlets are putting significantly more resources into fuller coverage of disasters.
But it was just a space where I felt like there was so much more could be said, and that the people in these situations deserve to have more of a voice throughout the process, and that hearing those voices would be helpful for the rest of us if we ever encounter similar situations. So I went into a freelance role. I have been writing for a bunch of different outlets since, of course, choosing to make that jump in 2019. I did not know what was ahead of all of us the next year and how the definition of disaster would change, how some of these agencies that we've looked at, like FEMA, in terms of coming in after hurricanes or wildfires, now they were leading some of that pandemic response.
So it was a lot to take all of that in and then try to understand what role I could play in covering this situation. And that's what I've been trying to figure out ever since.
What do you love about it? Where's the joy for you and what you do?
The joy for me is the reporting process. And I think that's why I've been able to jump around through different mediums, because at the end of the day, just that process is fairly similar. And I just love getting to meet with all sorts of different people, to get to see all sorts of different ways of living, to have all these different experiences, to see so many different places. Like it's wild sometimes, as I am planning a reporting trip that I'll look at what I'm writing down and it's okay, so you're going up here, renting a car, driving into the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere, going to this guy's house, talking to him. It's just, it feels crazy to me sometimes that is a job that I get to do because, like I said, I've always had that curiosity and it feels like a kind of hack to get to ask those questions to so many different people as a job. So that's always it for me.
I think like the putting it together process is by far the hardest whether it is editing or writing because you take so much in and then trying to condense that and compress it into something. It's just like always a challenge for me and you want to be able to take the experience you had and share it with other people and there's when you go somewhere it's a sensory experience and that has to be flattened in some way so it's always trying to find a way to bring that in for people through words or through images. And that's always the hardest part for me.
How do you prepare for an interview? You just described driving into the forest to meet some guy, meet some person. And I'm just wondering how you ask questions. What does it mean for you to ask a question? How do you think about what a question is and what it does as a journalist in your work?
It depends for me who I'm talking to at the time. So if it is between Hurricane Sandy and the work I did today, I did some political reporting. So in those cases it was really studying up on the politician maybe I was going to be interviewing, or if I was doing election coverage getting that grounding of, okay, what state am I going to, and what are voters here looking for, what can I talk about that is going to be interesting for this demographic.
Today if I'm interviewing someone in an area who is impacted by a disaster, my approach has certainly shifted in that I try to be very trauma informed. So I don't want to put someone in a position where, especially in the early days after a disaster, a lot of people are in a place of shock. And what they share with you in that moment might not be something that they actually want to stay on the internet forever. So I try to really go at those conversations in a way that people can be really aware of where's the story going to live, of the fact that it is going to probably live on the internet forever to give people space to respond to those questions. And really approach it with some of that sensitivity of understanding where they're coming from at that moment.
I also, I always like to prepare ahead of time of course, and have that understanding, but I think there's something to not being entirely planned. I'll have questions in mind and subjects that I certainly want to touch on. But if someone throws me a curveball, like I want to catch it. I don't want to ignore that. So I really try to be very present in interviews and understand what is important to that person and make sure that I'm not projecting my own wants as a journalist or biases on what they're saying. If this is where they want to go and they're going this way, I want to go there with them. I don't want to drag them with me.
I appreciate that description. I feel that myself. I'm curious, trauma informed, are there other ways that you, what does it mean to interview somebody in a way that's trauma informed?
Yeah, I have covered along with disasters, I've covered mass shootings as part of my career and these other events where you can see for people how raw the situation is and how unprocessed it is for them. And again, the last thing I want to do is have talking to me become a part of that larger trauma that they're experiencing.
I think a lot of it is approaching people as a human, like not shoving a microphone in someone's face as they are leaving a very difficult situation. Even when I was working in television or in digital video I would try to talk to people, and again different for a politician or something, necessarily, but I would try to talk to people before I put a camera on them, not just rush up to them as maybe they're leaving a hospital or away from their burning home and say tell me how you feel about this.
So it's, I think, taking that beat to establish that human connection, making sure they understand who I am, where I'm coming from, what the story is that I'm working on and taking it from there. It's an ongoing process. I don't know if I always do it perfectly, but I just always try to bring that with me when I'm doing those stories nowadays.
But yeah it's been a process of figuring out what that looks like for me and how I'm comfortable approaching people in those moments.
And I'm curious, you mentioned earlier that maybe disaster has changed, we had a pandemic. And disaster is your beat. I guess I am curious, what does it mean to cover a disaster and how has it changed or what does it mean to cover a disaster?
That's something that has really changed for me as I stay on this beat. I think from the story I was telling about Hurricane Sandy and having that realization that a disaster wasn't this neat tidy event that had a beginning and an end to the work I do today and having had the ability to speak with so many people who research disasters and really have this deeper understanding of what the impacts of a hazard can be on a community and also the fact that disasters don't happen out of nowhere.
There are so many physical and social factors that can prime an area to have a disaster. So that has been a huge learning for me, that disasters don't happen out of nowhere. If you go to an area, you can look back and see, okay had they had fires before? What sort of zoning and building codes exist here?
There's this whole history written in an area before the disaster, and then a whole new story that comes after in terms of what do you do from here? Are you going to build back what you had before? Are you going to pay attention to some of these factors and try to address them?
Going back to the campfire that I spoke about, I was just speaking with one of my sources this week, and she was talking about an art show that she's putting on, and it's about mental health, and she said part of what she wanted to show through it was not only the mental health journey of living through the wildfire, of living through the pandemic, but the mental health issues that existed in this area before that. It's an area that has had different rates of poverty and homelessness, and so there were these problems that existed before the fire. They were certainly exacerbated by it, but having that understanding that it's not like everything occurred because this one fire came through, that these were all sort of ingredients that created the situation that people are dealing with today.
I think having that more holistic view has been really important to me in terms of how I approach my reporting and trying to tell a story that really gets to the root of some of these issues.
I read the piece on the fire in New Mexico, which was an amazing piece. And digging around on the stuff that you had sent me, I was reminded, I guess you referenced this Disasters by Design book, right?
Yes.
This idea that the conditions for the disaster are in place and they're man made, at least in some way. I had a similar experience here in Hudson as a cliche dad worried about pedestrian safety. It reminds me of Jessie Singer. Do you know her book? “There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster.”
I guess I'm getting to a question about language because we call disasters a "natural disaster," but maybe it's not actually natural. And we call car crashes that kill people, we call them "accidents," but maybe they're not actually accidents. So I'm just curious if you run into that problem of language in telling the story of a "natural" disaster.
Yes, I have shifted in my work that I don't like to use the word "natural disaster." It still pops up sometimes because I do work with so many different outlets that some of them have "natural disaster" categories on their site. So my work will end up in there. But personally, for those reasons, it just doesn't feel correct to me to say "natural disaster." So I will use "natural hazard" and certainly the terminology of "wildfires" or "hurricanes," but I don't use "natural disaster" anymore just because it feels like it strips away some of the agency.
I think that's important journalistically for a few reasons, first being that, part of the work as a journalist is you want to look at what policies are in place and to hold people accountable who are in positions of power. So calling something a "natural disaster" sometimes can strip away the fact that maybe there were decisions made that contributed to loss of life or loss of property.
I think it's also in understanding that there is a role we can play in shaping the way that these events happen, and I think that is both daunting but also can be hopeful because it's recognizing that - I think earthquakes are a great example. We've seen some really significant earthquakes this year in Japan and Taiwan, and unfortunately, there has been damage from those and there has been loss of life. But when you look at the size of the earthquakes and the way that some of the infrastructure was able to withstand that shaking, that's so different than it was decades ago and that comes from looking at previous earthquakes, learning from them and then instituting different types of building codes.
Also having the social understanding of if the shaking begins, people can take certain actions to make themselves safer. Teaching people what to do when an earthquake happens, where to go if there's a tsunami risk - there are significant differences that we do see when we take those steps.
So I think again, calling something a "natural disaster" kind of strips away the fact that we do have some ability to respond to it. And it's not to say the hubris of us being gods who can overcome all wildfires or earthquakes, but just that is a reality and that's part of that full story.
It's funny that you talk about the hubris and the god, that story in New Mexico is very much, it feels like a little bit like hubris anyway, that we can control fire, that sort of prescribed fire and all that stuff is really, it's very - it's an amazing story and terrifying.
Yeah, it's - I've been working on a grant over the past year through the Solutions Journalism Network to cover prescribed fire, and that was certainly the first story I wanted to report on with that grant, and it is about the 2022 Calf Canyon Hermits Peak fire in New Mexico, which started from purposely set ignitions by the Forest Service that were in hopes of actually reducing fire risk.
But the conditions on the ground when it happened, and there have been a lot of reviews looking back on it, it ended up turning into a wildfire that destroyed a number of historic communities and I - the biggest wildfire in New Mexico's history. And I was looking really at where those communities stand today and the relationship that now exists between the federal government and those communities.
And it's another example of what I was saying before about the need to look back on history because part of this is these were some of the oldest settlements in the state, and there was long standing tensions between a lot of these families historically and the Forest Service.
So when this happened today, it wasn't just a unique event. It built on that, and there's this history of the agency and the residents not being able to see eye to eye. And it's really - it was a really interesting experience to have conversations with both parties, and then try to put that all together in an article.
And a part of the fellowship I'm on, it's called the Complicating the Narratives Fellowship, and it uses these ideals of conflict negotiation and mediation to try to help really entrench - to help journalists cover very entrenched topics. It was a fantastic exercise in using those tools for me because it was really trying to understand where that miscommunication existed and see if there is a potential for reconciliation down the road. It was very fascinating to report.
That's amazing. I want to talk about solutions journalism, which was the thing that really jumped out at me because I had encountered it in 2018, when Amanda Ripley wrote , “Complicating the Narrative.” And, I saw it as this way of - I live in a small town. We have no local news, really, and I experienced all the division that we've all experienced in our communities. And I saw solutions journalism as this really beautiful idea to - and I'm going to butcher the concept first, and then you can correct it for me.
But as a marketing person, I was often in the room with journalists and a marketer and a journalist have a very different idea about the person that they're communicating with. And it felt like solutions journalism was embracing a different way of communicating that might invite us into more of a shared understanding of the world. There's a lot of evidence that journalism, as practiced, it's not always as productive as we might want it to be in helping us come together around a shared understanding.
So with that, probably wildly polluted definition of solutions journalism and the work that you do, when did you first encounter it? And what is it? How do you explain it to people?
It's so interesting because, of course, I've talked about it mostly to other journalists, so it's very cool to hear how someone else has encountered it and that experience of it.
How far off am I?
I don't think you're far off. I think it's a bit interpretive to how you approach it. My understanding of it was I learned about it through another journalist and it was about 2019, I think, when I was introduced to the concept of it. And the idea is - I think the name, people can hear it and say oh, so you are only talking about good things. And it's not necessarily that as much as it's looking, if you're looking at a situation overall, there's going to be good and there's going to be bad. That is the human condition. So it's maybe looking more at the good to start with, but then having the journalistic rigor of interrogating that deeply and saying okay, so if this feels like it is promising, let's make sure that we are talking to the people who are actually impacted by this thing or dealing with this thing. Let's try to understand what conditions are around it that make it successful. Is there something that can be replicated somewhere else? Should it be replicated somewhere else? So it's still taking those steps to report deeply on something. But again, instead of just going somewhere and saying, okay, so here's what's wrong, let's get into it, saying if this is right, let's also get into that. So trying to just, again, tell that more complete story of things.
And I think for me in 2020, trying to navigate the journalism space during a pandemic as a new freelancer, it was very daunting. And I had come into it saying okay I'm going to report on disasters, but now it's like we had this baseline disaster that we were all living in. And while it was still very important to do that work of talking about - we had some really terrible wildfires that year, like every, that was all still happening, but I think it was also really difficult for people to check the news. It just felt like such a tough - it was difficult for me to check the news, right? It was not positive what we were usually seeing at that point, so I wanted to keep covering these stories about natural hazards because I thought that was important especially as it was a compounding disaster often at that times, but I also realized maybe I needed a different approach to it to make sure that it was something that people felt like they could read at that moment.
That's when I really got interested in it. And, yeah, it's, I've taken that approach now to wildfires in particular, because there's so much work going on these days to try to mitigate the risk and to take really scientific practices and practices that have existed since time immemorial from indigenous communities and to implement those in areas with high wildfire risk. I think, as we saw in New Mexico, it is not perfect by any means. But I think it's important for those stories to be told too because - what can we do then in those situations? How should we be responding to that if we are going to be doing something like prescribed fire? What should exist around it to make sure that we are doing it in a way that is safer if possible, in a way that communities feel like they understand what's going on and they have a say in what's going on.
So that's a lot of the work I've been doing for the past year on that fellowship.
And tell me a little bit about what - how would you help me understand how you practice the - how you practice journalism differently when you have a solutions journalism hat on? Like, how would you have covered that prescribed fire if you weren't doing solution journalism? I'm just wondering, how does it look different for you? Or what does it ask of you as a journalist to do that you wouldn't have done without this solutions journalism approach?
That's a good question. I think practicing solutions journalism and the complicating the narratives techniques has changed my overall approach to journalism, even if I'm still looking at something through the lens of an issue or a challenge, I still employ a lot of those same techniques just because I think they're a really successful way to do my job. A huge component of it is just deep listening. And that's the point I made earlier of following people in the conversation, not just imposing what I think they should be saying or what would work best with my article, but saying okay, if this is going to be more complex, it's more complex, and we gotta go with it, and maybe it doesn't have that satisfying drama that we sometimes want,of they're on this side, and they're on this side, and what's going to happen next? But it's okay maybe if they're on this side, but they do agree on this point, and then this person's over here, but they are willing to make a concession. Does that result in anything? And it's murkier but it also feels more true in a lot of situations that it's not black and white.
And a lot of things can be tough, but maybe there is a silver lining to a situation. So I think it has overall made me more tuned to looking for those silver linings and making sure that I'm not dismissing them if they do pop up along the way.
What is the role of silver linings in journalism?
I think it's all just in service of telling the real story, and the real story being one that's complex. I think there also is - it's often a tendency to look more at what is going wrong. It's certainly when I get tips sent to me, it's rarely "Hey, this really great thing is happening. You should report on it." So it's, it happens often as a job where people say, "Hey, I have this going on. Can you look into that?" And that's across beats. It's of course not just disasters.
That's so much of journalism is having whistleblowers or people on a neighborhood scale who are willing to speak up. And that's important, but it's also making sure that the people who have maybe stumbled on something that's working, that their voices are also heard.
What's the problem that it's trying to solve? Do you have a feeling about it or is it more subtle than that? You know what I mean?
Yeah, I know the Solutions Journalism Network - part of the problem they're trying to solve is the challenge that a lot of people are disenchanted with media. And maybe that's even putting it nicely to say disenchanted. Whether it's they're tired of it or - we live in such a different media environment than even when I started off and that was, you - I mean, it was a while ago, but it wasn't that long ago.
So it's, I think it's just trying to make sure that this is - it's a different way of trying to reach audiences and also there's studies that I know the network sites where people are more open to reading stories that at least consider some more positive news. So I think we've seen a lot of news outlets shift to including more of that coverage, because it is, again, just part of the whole story. There's always going to be something that we can look at from a more positive angle than all negative. And maybe in the case of disasters, it's not related to the disaster itself, but to how people are responding to it. It's can be tricky to find, but I think those silver linings do tend to exist.
How does it feel for you? How do you, as a - how do you feel practicing solutions journalism versus another way?
It's definitely been a positive force for me. It almost feels - especially reporting on the subject that I do, it's still difficult reporting. Like the story I did in New Mexico was certainly one of the most challenging stories I've ever reported just because there is so much history there, it is such a specific community that was impacted and there's so much tension. So that, that was hard, but at the same time some of the feedback I've received from people in the community - I spoke with one of my sources after the piece was published, and he said "We - I talked so much with my neighbors about the challenges that we're dealing with and the issues that we're dealing with as they continue to try to get aid from the federal government and recover their lands and the economy was certainly impacted by this." There's just so many - you could keep talking about that.
But he said in your piece, I talked about one positive interaction he had with a government official and how they listened to what he said and ended up changing some of the plans that they had in place for the way that they were going to do some flood mitigation. And he was like, "My neighbors didn't know that. I guess I hadn't talked to them about that." And it was - he said they felt hopeful because it was an example that this can happen. And maybe it's not - he's still dealing with his FEMA paperwork, right? It's not like he fixed the issue that people have with the federal government, but he was listened to and he was listened to and respected and a change happened because of the conversation he had and that just was something that he said he hadn't realized he didn't talk to people about but hadn't been a part of the conversation there.
So I think that for me was just really an example of how this can be transformative in its own right because maybe now more people will speak up, more people will feel like they have the ability to make those statements and that can shape the way the community recovers.
Beautiful. So I have one random tangential anecdote. Have you ever heard of - so I always, I love this story, but there's a - what is it? It's an organizational transformation. There's an approach to transformation of organizations called appreciative inquiry, and it came out of - have you ever heard of this?
No.
There's something similar with solutions journalism and it was - the short version is that the guy, David Cooperrider who has a quote that says, "We live in the world our questions create." Isn't that beautiful?
Oh, that's great. I love that.
And he said most when organizations try to change, they use a problem-solution mindset. They find a problem and then they solve it. But what that has the tendency to do is just move the problem around. So you just end up putting - it's a fire analogy, my apologies, but you end up putting out fires. And it says appreciative inquiry is we identify the peak experience and then try to recreate the conditions of the peak experience. So that it's a positive, so it's almost a totally affirmative kind of inquiry into a positive frame of an experience or organization. That's so interesting. Does that connect at all, or does that sound like gobbledygook?
No, I think it's - yeah, I think it's really incredible how different, just changing your perspective can make a situation. There's certainly so much power in that, and yeah, I - in the landscape of media today, where there's so many questions about bias, one thing that has been important for me to recognize is we all come at situations through our own perspective, right?
I think having the ability to shift perspective in that way, whether it's in an office or in journalism, and also just recognize that your perspective has an influence on what you do. That the questions you're asking can create the story. I think that's really important because I think when you look at it that way, it's - I try to always be aware of that and be aware of where I'm coming from. Because it's, we, I think just the word "unbiased," that's not something that's necessarily possible to do as a person. We are choosing the stories as journalists that are put out in the world, and that in itself is a challenge - a choice.
Awesome. I want to thank you so much. This is a lovely moment to end the conversation. We've very quickly filled up our time.
Yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the chance to get to know you a little bit and learn more about your work. Thank you so much for the conversation. I really enjoyed it. You got me thinking a lot. So you gave me a good quote there at the end to think about.
Oh, nice. And also, I'm curious. How did you end up in the Exposure Therapy community?
Yes. So I have known Jasmine since 2020. I was on her podcast. She'd reached out to me about an article I wrote about disaster kits and how they'd been like rebranded for the Instagram age.
And that was actually pre-pandemic that I wrote that. It came out in February of 2020.
There was one brand that had a great-
Yes. It was Judy. And it was like on the Kardashians' Instagram and it was just - I was doing disaster reporting and to suddenly see these huge celebrities talking disaster kits was such a bizarre experience.
So I had written about that for Vox, and Jasmine reached out to me, and we've just stayed in touch in the years since. So very grateful to her for inviting me into this community. I, like I said, I am endlessly curious. So being in a space with people who have so many questions and so many unique ways of approaching the world we live in, I've found it fascinating.
So cool. Anyway, I could keep yakking forever. I want to thank you so much.
Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much again for reaching out and yeah, we'll have to continue our conversations at Exposure Therapy.
Yeah, definitely. Bye
