Trauma Reporting

A Journalist's Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories

Jo Healey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138482098
• eBook ISBN: 9781351059091
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations

Trauma Reporting provides vital information on developing a healthy, professional and respectful relationship with those who choose to tell their stories during times of trauma, distress or grief.

Amid a growing demand and need for guidance, this fascinating book is refreshingly simple, engaging and readable, providing a wealth of original insight. As an aspiring or working journalist, how should you work with a grieving parent, a survivor of sexual violence, a witness at the scene of a traumatic event? How should you approach people, interview them and film with them sensitively? Trauma Reporting features guidance from some of the industry's most successful news correspondents and documentary makers, including Louis Theroux, Lucy Williamson, Tulip Mazumdar, Richard Bilton, Jina Moore and many more, all sharing their experience and expertise. It also features people who chose to tell their sensitive stories to journalists, giving readers invaluable insight into what helped and what harmed.

The book also includes:

• What your interviewees may be going through and how best to respond, by trauma expert Professor Stephen Regel.
• A discussion on ethics, rules and regulations by Dr Sallyanne Duncan of the University of Strathclyde.
• Making sure you look after yourself, by Dr Cait McMahon of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

Insightful and innovative, this book is essential for new and established journalists across all media, students of journalism and broadcasting, and anyone who wishes to share the stories of those affected by trauma.

1

The introduction

Do your job, do it well, do no harm.

‘It is absolutely fundamental that journalists treat vulnerable contributors sensitively and with respect,’ Louis Theroux tells me, and the aim of this book is to give you the confidence to do just that. Try to keep an open mind because the way sensitivity may look to your interviewees and how they say they wish to be treated may, at times, surprise you.

At the heart of the book are the many ordinary people to whom something extraordinarily bad or difficult happens and who choose to speak to journalists about it. Also, the many ordinary journalists who regularly approach them, build relationships with them, interview them, film with them, write about them and follow up their sensitive stories.

As a journalist, you may spend hours filming with vulnerable people at different locations for a documentary or news feature, talking to them at length on the phone or face to face for a print or online piece, recording with them for a radio package, doing live studio or location interviews, or approaching them at the scene of a traumatic event.

No matter what your beat – news, health, education, crime, social affairs, even politics or sport – the chances are you will spend time working closely with people who may be bereaved, shocked, injured, hurting, or trying to handle a tough time.

Sometimes it can be sudden and unexpected. Mark Shardlow, who is now a BBC sports editor covering events from the Olympics to the Commonwealth Games, was working as a young sports reporter when he was thrust into the scene of a disaster. It was the FA Cup semi-final between Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest and Liverpool and the date was 15 April 1989. ‘We all know what happened at Hillsborough that day. Our sports coverage became a breaking tragedy in the days before rolling news,’ he tells me. ‘Unprepared, we had to deal with emotional and distraught interviewees and eye-witnesses.’

Ninety-six people died in the Hillsborough disaster and it became the worst stadium-related disaster in English sports history. Journalists would be covering the loss and outrage felt by their families for decades to come.

From disasters to disease, attacks to abuse, lost livelihoods to lost lives, the way you work with the people at the heart of your stories matters. It matters personally, as one human being responding to another, but it also matters professionally. By treating people decently, you are more likely to get a stronger story, better access and shots, more insightful interviews, and they are more likely to come back to you as their story unfolds. Tragic stories can run and run, sometimes for years, as we have seen with Hillsborough.

Dr Mary Self is a psychiatrist who had terminal cancer and her book From Medicine to Miracle: How My Faith Overcame Cancer¹ charts her recovery. Her story made international headlines in the late 1990s, and having given nearly forty media interviews, she is well placed to give her take on what was helpful and what was not. ‘Approximately half of the journalists who conducted these interviews acted professionally and with incredible empathy and understanding. It worked both ways and I gave them a much better story,’ she says, adding that she had a lot of bad interviews which in every case greatly distressed her through ‘loss of trust and loss of control.’²

How it all started

As a journalist, I have covered hundreds of sensitive stories across three decades. It struck me that our traditional approach of practising on the hurting public and sending reporters routinely to knock on the doors of the newly and tragically bereaved, without any formal training in what that may mean to them or to us, is at best outdated and at worst risky and potentially harmful. Health professionals can undergo years of training before asking emotionally vulnerable people the probing questions reporters can be tempted to ask them in an interview.

Some practices are clearly bad: sticking cameras in the faces of people who are grieving, breaking the news of a death, or bullying and bribing people to talk. These levels of intrusion are becoming potentially more exposed, with journalists being held to account through such means as Leveson,³ Kerslake⁴ and through social media.

However, there are more subtle ways in which you can hurt your interviewees in the way you interact with them. Dr Self describes how a loss of trust and control harmed her, but what did she mean by control? What do we actually do to our contributors which can be harmful, and why? How may good and bad practice look to them?

In 2012, Faith’s teenage son Joshua was knocked off his bike by a car as he cycled to school. He died eleven days later in intensive care. Faith was at his bedside. She chose to speak to several reporters about his death, to help raise thousands of pounds to build a skate park in Josh’s memory. ‘It’s often the little things. They don’t realise how hurtful it is, not knowing my son’s age or name when they get here,’ she explains. The effect was that she would clam up, so it was counterproductive on all levels.

Yet a reporter, arriving under-prepared, under pressure and dispatched at the last minute, may not grasp the importance of knowing these details or the impact of other harmful behaviour: Why do families react with such fury to seemingly small inaccuracies in their accounts? Why did one woman, who spoke to reporters about the deaths of her children, describe the experience as akin to being raped because they did not contact her after the interview? Why did a survivor at the scene of a terrorist attack struggle to answer technical questions and object to being called a hero? Why was a father incensed by the reporter who hurried him, a mother by the reporter whose phone kept beeping in her bag, and a survivor of sexual abuse whose interviewer appeared sceptical?

When covering sensitive stories, there are key things you need to be aware of. With this in mind, I banged the drum in the BBC and got backing to research, craft, develop and deliver training for reporters in working with people who are emotionally vulnerable or distressed. I linked up with Gavin Rees, director Europe of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, who became a rich seam of information and support.

How sensitivity and respect may ‘look’ to our interviewees

I believe we tell our stories best through the people they affect, so I applied the same approach when crafting the training. Survivors of sexual abuse, parents whose children had been killed, and children whose parents had died, each of whom had chosen to be interviewed by journalists, went on film to spell out what they liked and disliked about the experience of working with them; what helped and what harmed. Their testimony is powerful for reporters to hear, offers constructive guidance and has quite an impact.

Hundreds of working reporters, correspondents, documentary makers, editors, producers, camera operators and researchers have chosen to attend the sessions and the appetite and the feedback have been overwhelming. This was the response from one senior editor who attended:

‘While we still spend a lot of time teaching people how to write and use kit – how to deal with people and get the most out of them in difficult circumstances has been lost as a core skill. Without cracking interviews we’ve got nothing to work with – everyone in the newsroom who did the course was raving about it.’

The response from a senior lecturer, when I delivered the session to his investigative journalism students, was that it was mind-blowing. He told me they felt empowered by the training and there is a growing call for these skills to be embedded within student learning.

Reporters say they value hearing back from their interviewees, they appreciate clear dos and don’ts and guidance, they like that the course is delivered by someone who does the job so understands some of the pressures we can be up against. They also value being able to share their experiences and expertise with each other.

This book has evolved out of those responses. Many journalists from various news organisations have offered the benefit of their experience. Many survivors and families have also contributed in a spirit of generosity and a willingness to help us improve how we work with them.

During an early roll-out of my training, Faith contacted me with a strong follow-up to Josh’s story. We sent a reporter, who had attended my course in the morning, to interview and film with Faith in the afternoon. Unsolicited, she sent me this email:

‘Jo, I wanted to say thank you. It made me smile. He rang me and it was obvious to me he’d been in your training session. He made sure he had the information correct about my Josh and if he wasn’t sure he said so and we clarified things. The simple “sorry” that makes it so much easier for me to move forward with the report you’re doing. By the time we did the piece live, I felt he understood me, my story, my Josh.’

No one-size-fits-all

There cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to how we work with people whose emotions are in turmoil. Each will have varied responses to what has happened to them and it is important to treat each person as an individual.

However, you can add to people’s distress in the way you behave. It is, therefore, important to understand what they may be going through and glean good practice. This can be adapted to the different situations you find yourself in, so that you do your job, do it well and do no harm.

The charity Disaster Action has members who have been involved in, or bereaved through, nearly thirty disasters around the globe. Their book Collective Conviction explains how some people, in the wake of a tragedy, described feeling abused by reporters whereas others found the media useful. The authors, Anne Eyre, who is a survivor of Hillsborough, and Pam Dix, whose brother Peter died in 1988 when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie killing 270 people, say, ‘the difference often comes down to the extent to which our engagement with journalists includes acknowledgement, compassion, honesty, accuracy, consent and control.’⁵

Covering sensitive stories is not about allowing your emotions to cloud your impartiality. As a journalist, it is your job to give all sides to the story, but treating your subjects respectfully does not compromise this.

In 2016 US journalist Ken Armstrong was the joint winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for a long-form trauma journalism piece called An Unbelievable Story of Rape. In an article about the art of trauma reporting, he offers this advice to journalists:

‘I don’t think that there’s anything about being respectful of people who have been hurt that in anyway undermines the journalistic mission. You want to know what happened, you want to be accurate, fair – none of those things is in tension with being open and transparent and respectful with people who have been hurt.’⁶

How to use this book

This book follows the process of what you may do when covering a sensitive story and applies good practice at each step of the way. The idea is not to teach the nuts and bolts of researching, interviewing, filming or writing but to explain why and how you may need to adapt your practice when the person you are working with is emotionally vulnerable. Sometimes this can involve turning traditional journalistic teaching on its head. Overly interrogative, challenging or incisive interview techniques, for instance, can be wholly inappropriate with people who are feeling disempowered by a traumatic experience.

Each chapter follows a format and each section will enhance your understanding. By the end of the chapter, you should have a clear idea of how to proceed when approaching, preparing, establishing relationships, working with children, interviewing, filming, writing about and following up people’s sensitive stories.

The format for the chapters is as follows:

• The guidance: some clear dos and don’ts.
• Extras: added tips about areas such as cultural considerations, safeguarding children, approaching people through social media, and anonymous filming.
• Focus: how experienced journalists tackled assignments relevant to the theme of the chapter.
• Insight: constructive observations from our interviewees – what helped and what harmed them at each stage of the process.
• Overview: how a hig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The introduction
• 2 The approach
• 3 The preparation
• 4 The relationship
• 5 The children
• 6 The interview
• 7 The filming
• 8 The writing
• 9 The follow-ups
• 10 The self-care
• 11 The ethics
• 12 The tips
• Index