The Art of Trauma Reporting: Pulitzer Prize Winners Reflect

Pulitzer Prize Winners Share Best Practices for Covering Trauma

By Elana Newman, Ph.D

In the summer of 2016, Dart Center researchers Elana Newman and Alex Hannaford conducted interviews with 10 Pulitzer Prize winners from 2006-2016 who were honored for their coverage of traumatic events or investigative reporting on trauma-related issues. These interviews are the start of an ongoing project examining best practices in trauma reporting gleaned from Pulitzer honorees.

The Dart Center team - Newman, Hannaford and Joe Hight - created a spreadsheet of all relevant Pulitzer-winning stories and began locating and contacting reporters, editors and photographers from that list, originally planning to include one winner from each year. But in order to be available for a Pulitzer centennial conference on trauma reporting, we limited interviews to the following journalists, who were available to schedule an interview in June, July and early August.

2016     Ken Armstrong, Marshall Project, An Unbelievable Story of Rape

2016     Jessica Rinaldi, Boston Globe, The Life and Times of Strider Wolf

2007     Heidi Evans, New York Daily News, 9/11: The Forgotten Victims

2003     Barry Gutierrez, Rocky Mountain News, Colorado on Fire

2003     Walter “Robby” Robinson, Boston Globe, Coverage of Sexual Abuse by Priests            

2002     Ruth Fremson, New York Times, A Nation Challenged

2000     Janet Reeves, Rocky Mountain News, Coverage of Columbine

1998     Liz Fedor, Grand Forks (ND) Herald, Coverage in the wake of citywide disaster

1997     Miriam Pawel, Newsday, Coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800

1996     Charles Porter IV, Coverage of Oklahoma City Bombing

Below are common themes and recommendations, as well as illustrative quotes that emerged during the interviews.

I. GETTING THE STORY

First things first, build rapport as a human being. Be honest. Except in breaking news situations, every prize-winning reporter discussed the importance of building trust with those you are covering, and explaining how the process will work. Empathy and compassion were more than a strategy: a fundamental philosophical tenet of establishing a contract with those who are experiencing horrific life changing experiences. Here are four illustrative quotes:

Robinson: After doing the first few interviews we recognized that we were dealing with people who in most cases were very weary of the press, and we needed to gingerly gain their trust. We said to people: we want to tell your story because we think it will prevent this from happening to other kids. If they said no, we said, “We respect your decision, we won't call you again, but if you change your mind, call us.”

Rinaldi: It's almost like dating. You put your best foot forward and you kind of hope they like you, and you do a lot of listening. At a certain point, we said to them, “You know we really feel like you guys have a story that needs to be told and we'd like to make a commitment to telling it the right way. Would you let us go through this journey with you?” By that point they were amenable.

Gutierrez: When things are not urgent, you can set your cameras down, put them in the bag, put them in the trunk and go talk to people first. You can get a sense for what's going on, have a conversation, hug them, figure out what's going on in their lives. Oftentimes you start by just being interested in them. They're alone, you know, someone who's been evacuated from their home who doesn't know if their home has burned down to the ground or not, and they’re in the back, they've been sitting in a parking lot for 15 hours, they just want someone to talk to! They want to know any information you have. They want to just share the moment, and you’ve got to do that sometimes. You’ve got to just accept the situation for what it is, and then you say, after when you feel it's appropriate, you can say, "Hey, do you mind if I just take a few pictures? Can I hang out with you guys for awhile?"

Armstrong: What Marie wanted to know more than anything – and this was communicated to me by her attorney  – was that if she agreed to talk, because this was going to be a difficult ordeal for her, right, to revisit all that had happened and to answer questions about such a painful experience in her life, she wanted to know that good could come from it. She wanted to know about my own background, she wanted to know about the impact that my work had had, she wanted to know about The Marshall Project, she wanted to know about This American Life. I told Marie about the work that I had done at the Chicago Tribune, that had had an impact in the field of criminal justice, and I told her about the Marshall Project: what our mission was, what we were setting out to do, and you know I just wanted her to be as grounded as she could be in who we were, what we were, where we were coming from and what we really wanted to do with the story. Marie was able to just ask questions and get information, before she was ever asked the first question. I waited until Marie agreed.

Think about the community and the victim.  Be respectful.  Maintain trust over time. Everyone interviewed discussed the importance of considering the needs of the individual, and the community and the importance of respecting the needs of sources.

It seems like you made a nice balance of "here's what we know” and “here's what we don't know"?

Armstrong: I don't think there's any tension between the two, I don't think that there's anything about being respectful of people who have been hurt that in any way undermines the journalistic mission. You want to be accurate, you want to be fair – none of those things are in tension with being open and transparent and respectful with people who have been hurt. 

Fedor: I think the journalist's first rule is to listen intently to what people are saying, as evidence of that active listening, you are asking questions where somebody really is able to tell their story. And when you report that story you are giving voice to people, so again I think it's validation psychologically of the story. When your story is in print, it is the time to get your house in order. I also think of journalism as a vehicle to move forward, because when I was reporting on any given citizens you may have been encountering X issues of getting permanent permits or something or the city not reacting quickly enough. If it was in the paper, clearly those officials would try and respond more quickly because they are being held to account for their performance. They are feeling, this reporter cares about the people in the community and is trying to get information on our behalf.  

Rinaldi: Know sometimes when to back away and give people space. And that's a hard thing; I think that's the thing that takes maybe the longest amount of time to learn. As a journalist you want to be there, you want to be present for every moment. I think that sometimes you have to sacrifice a little bit in order to gain, you know? Because just giving them that little bit of space, let them know that we were human, and that we were plugged into how they were feeling and we were trying to be respectful.

Reeves: We really were thinking about community the whole way through. I think one of the first things [Rocky Mountain News Editor] John Temple did was have an assistant manager and an editor go and call I think the Jonesboro, Arkansas, paper because they had had school shooting. What did they learn from that? What about their community? And so in the first couple hours everybody was thinking about community.  Another thing John Temple did right away which I think was quite amazing was he reached out to the community. He certainly reached out to all the victims’ families of Columbine but also anyone within the Columbine area, and gave them all of his contact information. I thought that was important.  actually relationships still to this day grew out of being very open like that at the beginning, until like we're part of this community.

Be Patient

Armstrong: I viewed this as a story where patience would be a virtue. The fact that Marie had been victimized twice over, and the fact that she had filed a law suit against Lynnwood that had been settled, all of that had already been reported. So what I wanted, I could wait for. It took me seven months of talking with Marie's attorney and sending Marie emails, and talking with her on the phone before she agreed to be interviewed, and that didn't cause any problems at all. I wasn't in a rush.

Rinaldi: That's a big part of documentary photography is just wading through all the boring stuff. And there's so much boring stuff.

Pawel: You can't say this enough: the importance of not rushing to judgment. That’s ultimately what I think distinguished our coverage.

During breaking news and crisis, stay present in the moment and trust your skills. More and more journalists are discussing the importance of being present in the moment and relying on your skills, something often referred to as mindfulness or being in the zone or flow.  

Gutierrez: When there's so much pressure coming from so many different places, you have to slow down. So there’re fire trucks zooming, there's police cars, sirens, gunshots, whatever it is: you have to slow down. Don't get caught up in the franticness. Your adrenaline doesn't have to be as high as the policeman shooting back, you just have to calm down, be safe, make the picture. Calm down, do your job, make the picture. Over time, with all the events I've covered and fires I've covered, the number one thing is they get slower. It’s like a professional athlete. To the regular person, an NFL runner is going ninety miles an hour and it's just insane – the speed and watching them catch this flying ball – that's impossible! But to them it's like slow motion. If you've ever heard Jerry Rice talk about catching a ball in the end zone, its slow motion. Because they have been preparing, preparing, preparing, it becomes slow motion. And that's what I mean by preparation. You know, I started by chasing fire trucks with a police scanner in junior college. I would chase them all over Los Angeles, all over Bowling Green, Kentucky, and every experience was an addition to my knowledge about how firefighters work, about how police work, how paramedics work, and over time it slows down.

Fremson: I had been doing a lot of yoga at the time of 9/11, four or five times a week. So I was very conscious of my breath and I remember thinking, “Ok, it's not pleasant” – it felt like you were dragging sandpaper through your mouth, and I tried opening my eyes for a second but it felt like somebody was dragging sandpaper across my eyeballs so I closed them again, but I was very aware of my breathing,  I guess I was just very much in the present moment, enough to recognize, “I'm OK.” I have lapsed in my yoga lately, but every time I do it I'm reminded just how incredibly grounding it is. Well I think I would share the advice of Bob Daugherty, my AP editor, who said that to me you know, at the end of the day the person who can keep their cool when everything else is falling apart around them is the one who will perform, who will win the day. I think that's great advice. I think that however you manage to keep your cool, whether it's because you're able to be in the present, because you do yoga, or you have some other method. I think that is a real key. But I think that goes for any kind of crisis. All I can tell you is that I know that the fact that I could recognize that I was breathing and focusing on my friend helped me realize that I didn’t have to panic in that moment.

II. PREPARING THE STORY

Consider which trauma-related details, facts and images are necessary to present and what information is gratuitous.  Every journalist emphasized this was the key issue that they wrestled with to get the right balance for the story. Here are some examples:

Armstrong: One of the things that we really debated was how to write about Marie being sexually assaulted, about what happened inside of her apartment. It was important that the reader understood what really happened, but it was also important that we weren’t gratuitous. We also debated the use of audio in this story. There's one audio clip from Marie describing what had happened. That was something that we talked about at great length but I also played it to Marie and asked for her thoughts on it. And she said something that was somewhat surprising. She said not only did she think that we could use it but that we should use it. She thought it was important that people hear her voice.

Reeves:  I would tell photo editors to be very strong and to push tough images and have the tough conversations. Not to cower away from this or that but to articulate why you think this picture over that picture, or why the photo has to be included in the story. If we were faced with people with cell phones [in the Columbine High School library] you know, where would we be with that? I tend to think we definitely would have put something out there. There just isn't any way that an organization should decide to sit on these images. I think it's important for people to understand what happened out there; all of the students were shot and [parents] didn't know it was going on and they're laying there and I didn't feel it was, you know – and this is coming from a photo editor –  I didn't feel like [showing images of bodies] crossed a line. A lot of people probably disagree. I didn't think it crossed the line of taste or gore. It wasn't voyeuristic. But it is what it is and it really told the story. One of the things we had talked about right up until midnight is that for the children that were still missing, parents had been gathering. But you know all these bodies were still in this place and they deserved to know. I have to stay sharp and try to be ethical, not sensational.

Stay away from clichés and assumptions, and try to present the complexities as best you can. Repeatedly, award winners discussed following the story without preconceived notions to tell a more nuanced narrative. A few discussed the need to skip the easy story, and wait for another altogether.

Armstrong: That's something that's important to me as a reporter, to embrace nuance, and to recognize that everyone makes mistakes, and that when people make mistakes we can learn from them. The greatest service here was just to explain as best we could what happened and to show what the personal consequences were. And as I've gotten older and as I become more experienced as a reporter I think I’ve become more understanding of how fallible we all are.

Evans: On stories of human suffering and trauma,  the craft of what you write and how you approach the writing is pretty straight forward I think. You don't need to embellish pain with flowery words.  A person's simple recounting of what haunts them, what has changed or crushed their world, is most often powerful enough. The stories write themselves if you as a journalist are listening properly and have done your homework about the news event that triggered their trauma.  When New York's ailing 9-11 responders began to come up against absurd and exhausting bureaucratic walls in their efforts to get medical and mental health coverage for their illnesses, or workers comp coverage, or help for their children, you do what you always do in public interest journalism, and that is, you shine the light on those in power who need to be called into account, find where your sense of outrage is. You tell  people’s stories through their words and you frame the story in a way that you believe reflects the truth.

Rinaldi: I wanted to be respectful and keep Strider’s best interests at heart, right, so, there were moments when I could've shot stuff that I didn't shoot because it just didn't feel right to me. For instance, there's no photo of him crying in that story, because it didn't feel fair to me to single out a kid, to take this photo. I really didn't want to like be another adult in his life that was doing the wrong thing, you know? And that's how it would've felt in that moment. I ended up being able to get a photo of him where he was trying to reconcile with Lanette. That to me in some ways was so much more powerful, it spoke so much more about who he was, not just a child that had been injured again, but you know a child that was resilient and sort of working and wanting to, to get love from these people. 

Reeves: Photo editors should trust their instincts during crisis, and guide their staff to really go after the story instead of looking for cliché images or searching for something they think should be happening. Follow the news and follow the emotion and follow the real people that matter.

Think about the craft issues first and foremost. The writing and imagery matters.

Pawel: The last piece of it would just be the execution, the storytelling aspect of it. It’s easy for people to sort of become immune to tragedy and to not want to read about it anymore. And so just find ways to tell the stories that are different and compelling and that really stem from the richness of the reporting, but also the quality of the writing. 

Evans: Anna Quindlen once put that very well: You have to fall in love with your subjects and listen with great empathy.  Then when you're back at your desk, you must fall out of love and write objectively. You are there in the moment listening with two sets of ears: you're documenting their story as they tell it and you're also listening with your other set of ears asking, “Does this have the ring of truth? What else needs to be checked out?”

Porter: You can’t be afraid to shoot the hard stuff. You have to be willing to shoot the things that are difficult to look at, that make you turn away and say, "I don't know if I can look at that again."

Prepare your source for publication. With the exception of breaking news reporters and photographers, many journalists explained that they went over the story in advance with their sources. Armstrong describes his reasoning below

Armstrong: We didn't want Marie to go online and read the story and see something there that surprised her that she wasn't ready for, that she had not had the opportunity to talk to us about. That was critical. We wanted to make sure that we were as transparent as possible and that if she had any concerns we heard them before we published. It was also important for us, that we were not only accurate and fair, but that we weren't being insensitive in some way that we simply hadn't anticipated. There are all kinds of benefits that come from letting someone know what's in a story beforehand. And the benefits go in both directions., I firmly believe that the news organization benefits from that as much as the person being written about.   

III:  SELF-CARE BEFORE, DURING & AFTER

Although journalists were reticent to talk about themselves, each one discussed the emotional toll of a story, the need to rest and recover, and the importance of implementing strategies to keep emotionally and technically engaged and alert.

Before: Preparation is key.  Preparation comes in all forms, whether it’s having your equipment ready, wearing the right shoes, taking a firefighting course or having a strong team ready to work.  Much harder to distill is the knowledge gathered over a career, the credibility earned in a region,  or the advantages of covering a specific beat when a crisis or change occurred. 

Gutierrez: First and foremost, begin preparing now. So whether it's a tornado, a fire, a flood, a terrorism event, a sniper in a clock tower, whether it's a hurricane or a tsunami or a meteor from outer space, whatever it is, you start preparing now. And that means things like getting proper footwear. During an earthquake in California, I ran out the door with my cameras and I forgot my belt. And I spent the entire day shooting around Los Angeles, pulling up my pants. Being prepared is really important, and you never know when that earthquake is going to come.

During: Set boundaries and take breaks. Reporters discussed the need for setting boundaries and taking occasional breaks. Editors also emphasized the need to force team members to take breaks from emotional scenes and to respect a colleague’s need to do the same.

Gutierrez: As a journalist, I think there's a light there in me that I'm exuding toward someone else, I'm being humble, I'm accepting whatever they give me. And after a while you just run out of light. You start to run out of the compassion and you get a little bit jaded. And I think when you're working 12-20 hours a day, day after day, in 100-degree weather, inhaling smoke and fighting the elements and trying to be compassionate you do think, "Hey, I haven't lost my home it could always be worse" but it also just really wears you out and you wake up some days and you really don’t want to face the day.

Rinaldi: You can't just do this kind of work and internalize what you're seeing. You have to find someone who's willing to be a sounding board so you can vent and get it out a little bit, because you're human and you have opinions about what's going on, and you certainly can't put that into your work. I also had a friend who gave me really funny but good advice, which was, "Find one healthy outlet and one unhealthy outlet and alternate." Because this type of work it takes a little something from you every time, you know?

[My colleague] Sarah [Schweitzer] and I, we held a little “therapy session” after every visit. We would leave and we'd go have dinner, and we would just talk about it. It was so great to be able to unload and have someone going through it too because on stories like this, you're really kind of living it. And even though it's not your life it becomes your life in a weird way. I mean my parents would ask me, "How's the little boy in Maine?" So these kinds of projects, they just take over.

Reeves: It wasn't very pretty sometimes for the staff or for anybody really, but I just kept saying, "This is our story. Let's stay on this, let's own it.” For at least two to three weeks it was nonstop, it was morning till night. And a photographer would come in and say, "I'll do anything you want me to do, but if I could just not have to maybe go down to the memorial site today." They needed a little space.

And they felt comfortable being able to say to you, this is my boundary?

Reeves: Yes. Photographers would come back and tell me what it was like that day and the emotions they were feeling. A lot of it is also self-reflection: when you're an editor, you're going to have people who not only report to you, but who you can ask to go do things. You have to stop and think a moment about what that is going to be like. You’ve got to make a decision. That's what you do.

Pawel: A lot of editing is social work to begin with, so this sort of became an extension of that. Knowing when to give people breaks – that is a big thing. Sometimes people just don't even want to take a day off and you can just see that they are exhausted and that they need it.

After: When the story is over, give yourself some time. And reflect on what you’ve accomplished.

Reeves: A few months after Columbine, one thing I told everyone is not to quit their jobs, not to make any drastic changes in their lives over the next 6 months. They needed that time.

Looking back, we had a sense of pride that this group was able to accomplish this – to be able to say that the work is so strong, so iconic – it's a place marker in history now and they did it. After you win a Pulitzer you start hearing from everybody: Senators, governors...  They hear it from their friends all across the country too. It begins to resonate with the reporters, that [the story] was the right thing to do. And if we are actually sincere about why we went into journalism in the first place, well this is when you have the chance to stand up and say yes, we did the right thing.