Investigative reporter John Diedrich has pulled off the journalistic equivalent of a country-pop crossover hit. His series on guns for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has won awards from places like the National Press Foundation and the Society of Professional Journalists — and also made him a regular guest with podcasters who celebrate the Second Amendment.
In “Behind the Gun,” Diedrich tackled gun suicide and accidental shootings. The project checks all the boxes of our multimedia expectations. It has revealing interactive data, video and policy deep dives. But at its core, Diedrich built the project around personal stories. Stories that fit into no easy box, no predictable slot in our polarized framework of gun rights vs gun control.
The series launched in August 2023 with a gunsmith who reveres firearms and agonizes over the weapon his shop sold to a young man who used it to take his own life.
Another story featured a transwoman who is keenly aware that LGBTQ+ people are four times more likely to be victims of violence. In certain parts of Wisconsin, she told Diedrich, “I am never without a gun.”
There’s a former gun importer who now does the gun show circuit with a booth about guns and mental health. There’s a gun-owning Democratic coroner who opposes assault weapon bans and backs red flag laws that can strip someone of their firearms.
Like a hit Netflix series, the project continued, morphing to explore accidental shootings.
Its success raises the question: Is there a special sauce here that could apply to other polarizing issues? Can we tease out the ingredients that could get us talking about common concerns on the topics that divide us, like race, religion and sexuality? How about immigration, schools and climate change?
The answer is mixed.
We can name the building blocks in Diedrich’s series. Successfully applying them elsewhere might be the toughest challenge we journalists face, mainly because success hinges on factors beyond our control.
Our best shot lies in knowing what to look for and fine-tuning our antennae to spot our opportunities.
For Venn diagram fans
Part of the power of “Behind the Gun” is its scope. With over 25 articles, it knits together so many stories and ways of slicing up the problem of suicides and accidental shootings that sooner or later, a number of Wisconsin readers would come across it. And when they did, they would see the whole 360-degree picture — at least on the web.
Greg Borowski, executive editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, said one of the puzzles they had to solve was how to let print readers know that whatever installment they were reading was part of something much bigger.
The point is, while you could imagine that a single story or two might reverberate widely, the odds get better when the mass of coverage exerts a gravitational pull.
Size isn’t everything, but it’s a factor in terms of form, and it shouldn’t be ignored.
But content is king and for that, I see four elements and how they overlap.
(Jon Greenberg/Poynter)
Gun suicide is a compelling topic. It’s a tragedy that everyone can feel. A headline about it will catch us. Some of us will begin to read. The subject needs no explanation or justification; it speaks for itself.
Closely related but not identical, suicide evokes a shared concern that transcends ideology and politics. We all would want to prevent suicides if we could. We are interested in steps that might help.
Which brings us to responses that hold promise. The series evokes the sense that we are not powerless. Several of the stories feature people in the gun-owning community who work on suicide prevention. The gunsmith who sold a gun used in a suicide spearheaded a program for gun shops to offer storage at their businesses to anyone who might pose a risk to themselves. An Army veteran who served in Iraq is on-call to counsel anyone who feels they might take their own life.
Mike Aschinger, a retired Army Reserve command sergeant major, gets emotional in September 2023 while talking at his Green Bay home about helping someone who was considering suicide. (Mike De Sisti / The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
“I was surprised that the very first piece in the series was built around a solution,” Diedrich said. “I just didn’t expect it. But it opened the gate to the gun-owning community.”
Diedrich’s articles in this vein aren’t strictly feel-good stories. It’s difficult to measure impact, but these efforts tend to be small and the results are spotty. Financial interests get in the way. The former gun importer who now talks about guns and mental health got pushback from gun makers who feared this was a backdoor to gun control. While many of them later came around and now help spread his message, Diedrich said the industry is uneasy with anything that undercuts the celebration of firearms.
People — the pivotal ingredient
The individual profiles are where the other three elements take shape and become tangible. No easy task, Diedrich spent months finding these people and the payoff came when the series got into what his editor Borowski calls the gray area.
Finding a representative person is standard operating practice for big takeouts. Borowski said the plan always included people stories. What evolved was the space devoted to showing how none of them were perfect examples of anything.
“As we started to hear some of the individuals open up and really tell their stories in depth and detail, we realized we just had to let it be,” Borowski said. “It’s not like, we walk this person onto the stage to highlight one fact, and then we walk them off.”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter John Diedrich interviews Michael Sodini, who used to run a gun importer and started an organization to discuss mental health concerns among gun owners, in Milwaukee in September 2023. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Critically, Diedrich shared complicated stories from gun owners.
“My audience was pleased to hear a mainstream media journalist talk about gun ownership as a fact of life, not a problem to be solved,” said Cam Edwards, host of the “Bearing Arms” podcast.
Edwards has had Diedrich on his program several times and invited him to Shot Show in Las Vegas, one of the firearm industry’s leading trade shows. He continues to promote the series, partly because it stands in contrast to the approach he sees in other newsrooms.
“There’s an almost anthropological perspective from the reporter,” Edwards said. “As if these gun owners are strange and unusual creatures to be studied, instead of normal Americans exercising a fundamental civil right.”
Will it work elsewhere?
Having a framework is helpful, but it’s simply a starting point. It suggests where you can look.
It doesn’t promise that you will find.
Still, the recipe in the Venn diagram resonates with those who see journalism as a way to help people escape the boxes built by our polarized politics.
Joy Mayer, director of Trusting News, said the shared concern element is key, and perhaps the biggest hurdle. There has to be something that everyone agrees upon.
“That’s what makes abortion different from guns,” Mayer said. “There’s plenty of room for more nuance with abortion coverage, but the fundamental goal of different stakeholders will always be at odds.”
The right blend of factors, she said, might lie in issues of public safety, education and, potentially, immigration, “if you focus on the humans, not the politics.”
There’s a close overlap with Amanda Ripley’s Complicating the Narratives approach. Ripley’s recipe starts with conflict, often locked in place by a false A/B choice of beliefs and actions. The aim is to introduce the audience to people who break those molds, very much like Borowski’s exploration of the gray area.
Complicating the narrative is great stuff. So are the Four Pillars at the Solutions Journalism Network, a roadmap for reporters to find the information and the people with stories to move us away from oversimplified dichotomies.
The bad news is that the daily drumbeat of politics is honed to reinforce polarization. The good news is that there are models to guide us as we look to craft our own country-pop crossover hits.
