Being a journalist means being human
By Laurie Toupin
Special to Poynter Online
Dear Friend,
Judging from the number of people attending Isabel Wilkerson’s talk, “The Journalism of Empathy: How to be caring and factual at the same time,” that was the place to be on Saturday afternoon from 2:00 – 3:15 p.m.
In fact, there were so many people trying to cram into the room, that I felt empathy for anyone coming in late!
Wilkerson defined empathy as a sensitive show of concern …of seeing through the eyes of another.
“I believe empathy and good journalism are co-dependent,” Wilkerson started, and gave three reasons why. It is practical, humane, and it works for her. Who could argue with that?
“It is critical in my reporting life that I step back and think like a human being to get the story,” she said.
Wilkerson used her Pulitzer Prize winning story of Nicholas, a 10-year-old child living in inner Chicago, to illustrate her point. She painstakingly set up the scene.
She was one of 10 reporters assigned by The New York Times to go beneath the surface of juvenile violence by “getting inside” the life of a child.
Wilkerson went to GED classes, unemployment classes, and other venues trying to find the right mother and children to interview. After most of her other colleagues had found their subject — and some had even found the lead of their stories — she was still looking. “I was beginning to think that it was easier to find a husband than this child!” she said.
Finally she found Nicholas, the oldest in a family of five.
To get into her story, Wilkerson began by folding socks with the boy. “I was being a participant observer,” she said, “breathing the air of my subject, doing the thing that they would normally do.”
This kind of interaction allows you to get the details that separates good writing from great writing and helps build trust.
For a month, she practically lived with the family, coming early, staying late, going to school with Nicholas, and offering to drive the family whenever they wanted to go somewhere.
She got into a habit of taking Nicholas and his eight-year-old brother Willy to McDonald’s after school every day so they could talk. One time, the Happy Meals promotion was dinosaurs.
Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t have been a big deal. But these children had no toys. Only a single Nintendo cartridge that made its way through the building where they lived. They didn’t have a TV, so they couldn’t use the cartridge. But the children pretended that the girl on the cover was a princess who needed to be rescued.
Thinking she was being nice, Wilkerson bought hamburgers and French fries for the whole family. But there were only two dinosaurs for five children. As soon as the youngest ones saw the toys, they began to cry, wanting one of their own. But Nicholas and Willy didn’t want to share. The mother forced Nicholas, as the oldest, to give his dinosaur to his three-year-old brother. Nicholas started to cry and stomped off to his room. The mother wouldn’t stand for such behavior and hit him on the head.
All this time Wilkerson is standing there, trying to decide what to do. Does she go and buy more Happy Meals? Does she try to comfort Nicholas? Does she leave? Does she take the dinosaur from the youngest and give it back to Nicholas?
In the end, she does nothing.
“It was the hardest thing that I had to do,” she said. “I was in another’s world. I could have gone to McDonald’s but I felt that it would have been a reminder to the mother that I could do more for her family than she could. It would have created a distortion in their family.”
Wilkerson’s primary goal at that point was to maintain the relationship. At any point in time, the mother could have said, “Look what you are doing to this family. Get out. We don’t want you to do our story.”
“Then where would I be?” asked Wilkerson. She was dependent upon this source. But that was where empathy saved her.
Wilkerson says she had to be aware of the mother’s position. They weren’t equal. Wilkerson and the mother were the same race and gender, but they were as different as night and day. Wilkerson tried to blend in, but the car she drove, her cell phone, the fact that she was married, all served as not-so-subtle reminders that they were worlds apart.
So she tried to bridge that difference by seeing this family on its own level and hoping they perceived that she was trying to do this.
This approached worked. Wilkerson continued visiting the family for a month and in the end, got the minute details that allowed her to show this child’s life rather than telling it in stereotypical phrases.
Not only did Wilkerson win awards for her article, but readers responded to this family’s story, sending them money, clothes, food.
“I couldn’t have written this story without empathy,” she ended.
Laurie Toupin attended the conference as a freelance writer from Spirituality.com.