Finding the local storytellers who help bring humanity to light

Episode transcript

Amelia Newcomb: It’s a poorly kept secret: Many Americans are not avid readers of international news; those who are can struggle to find substantial reporting. So, if you’re a journalist based abroad with rich stories all around you, say from Gambia or Bolivia, which ones do you target? And then, how do you find the reporters who can tell those stories in a way that will not only inform, but truly engage readers far away? 

This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Amelia Newcomb, the Monitor’s managing editor and your guest host today. Joining me are two Monitor staffers: Whitney Eulich is a return guest on this podcast. She’s been based in Mexico City for 10 years and both writes and edits stories about Latin America as our bureau chief there. Joining her is Ryan [Lenora] Brown, who has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, also for 10 years. She was the Monitor’s Africa correspondent for many of them, and is now our Africa editor.

Welcome, Whitney and Ryan.

Ryan Brown: Thank you.

Whitney Eulich: Thanks for having us.

Newcomb: It’s great to be talking with you. Whitney, I wanted to start by asking about a story from Haiti that you recently worked on. I know it’s hard to get stories from Haiti and, frankly, to spark reader interest in engaging with them. So I thought maybe you could tell us how this story took shape and also how you found the journalist who wrote it.

Eulich: So Haiti’s a really important story in the region, but it can be tough to cover for a lot of reasons. There’s security issues, there’s language barriers, and then there’s also just the fact that there have been a lot of crises over the past ... well, many decades, from dictatorships to deadly earthquakes to a presidential assassination not too long ago.

So, it can kind of feel like a constant cycle of bad news. And that sometimes makes it harder to, I think, pull a reader in or [not] make someone feel like, “Well, I haven’t heard this before.” Or just kind of want to tune it out. But like I said, it’s an important story, and life does go on in Haiti and there are so many people working inside the country to build a future, build solutions to the challenges like recent gang violence, or the fact that Haiti hasn’t had a presidential election in almost eight years. So, I wanted to focus on that and on how average people keep going.

And to me, a logical place to look at all of these questions was in the realm of education, because I think it doesn’t really matter where you are in the world. I think most people agree that education – and, you know, teaching new generations – is really key to the future. So, it can be tough to get coverage in Haiti.

And we really lucked out, because a few years ago a team from WOY Magazine, which is a bilingual online Haitian media project, and Round Earth Media and the International Women’s Media Foundation, all working together, they contacted me to ask if we might be interested in teaming up to cover Haiti beyond just the standard headlines, which is exactly what we’ve been looking to do. 

This time around, I reached out to them with this thought, and together we came up with the idea of finding a school that’s weathered just generations of crises in Haiti to sort of tell the story of resilience, how one institution has adapted and, you know, everything that’s gone into keeping their project alive. So we hammered out our angle and some of the key questions we wanted to ask, and then the team we worked with was made up of a Haitian reporter and photographer based in Haiti who reported and wrote their story in Haitian Creole, which was then translated by a duo of Haitian sisters that work with WOY Magazine, and then sent to me to edit. And lots of back and forth over many weeks, and then it ended up published on our website, and I encourage everyone to go find the final product. Find a link in our show notes. – Editor

Newcomb: Yeah, and it strikes me that education in particular, it’s something really, people around the world can relate to, as you said, especially in the wake of the pandemic when everybody had to figure out how to educate kids when we were all remote or isolated. But also, as the writers say in the story, Haiti is no stranger to crisis, and yet, Haitians are adept at meeting challenges head on, so there was that sense of agency, and I wondered if that was something you talked to the writers about.

Eulich: Yeah, absolutely. We definitely talked before the reporter went and started speaking with the school, [and the] main person they talked to is the second generation principal. His father had founded the school. And we just went through a list of broad questions. Obviously they weren’t limited to these questions, but just sort of, what helps you wake up in the morning and go to work?

Because I think it’s probably pretty easy to have moments of feeling like, “Wow, is there a future?” And in the most recent iteration of challenges in Haiti have been a lot of gang violence, that have really pushed entire neighborhoods out of their homes and out of their schools.

So that was something that this principal talked about too. They get new students [who] just arrive kind of out of nowhere, but they also lose students, whose families realize they need to leave for their own security overnight and they don’t realize they’ve gone until they get a request for school transcripts from another school.

But we really tried to talk through these bigger picture questions of: “What makes you tick?” “What gives you hope?” “When you picture Haiti in five years, in 10 years, what do you see?” And also sort of, what do you need to be doing your job the way you want to be doing it and everything in between?

Newcomb: Yeah, so that partnership with local writers really makes a big difference. And, Ryan, I know that’s something you’ve thought a lot about in your context as well. I wondered if you had any particular stories that you’ve done or worked [on] with a local writer … that stand out to you in terms of how you shared perspectives and how each of you helped each other build a stronger story.

Brown: Yeah, well, first off, before going into a specific story, I was just so struck listening to Whitney. Just this process that readers don’t see when they read a nicely constructed story like this one about education in Haiti, but like the cheesecloth or the coffee filter that information goes through in order to become a story and the different sort of perspectives that that information passes through, right?

So it was sort of initially seen through the eyes of the person who experienced it, who then told it to the reporter, who then recounted it for Whitney, who came back with some follow up questions. The sort of way we cut a path through the huge thicket that is reality to get to: a tight, concise, interesting-to-read story is fascinating, and I think it’s often quite invisible, so I was interested. And in listening to all this, too, because I learned a lot from that as well.

As you say, Amelia, it’s something that I have thought a lot about as well working in Africa: How to sort of tell stories in a way that’s both true to the experiences people are having on the ground in these places, but is also something that’s sort of lively, interesting, and relevant to people on the other side of the world.

So, I mean, there’s endless examples, but I think one that was particularly interesting for me was when Robert Mugabe, [the] very long time president of Zimbabwe, stepped down finally in 2017. I was actually on another reporting trip; I was in Senegal. I was thinking about other stories, and suddenly, this huge news story broke.

And I had to think, “How can we write about this?” First of all, kind of after the fact, by the time I can get there in a week or two, and also in a way that’s gonna be a little bit different than what’s already been said. And so I had seen that a Zimbabwean writer had written on Facebook just sort of speculating, like, “What will life be like for the babies who are born in this post-Mugabe era? How will life be different for them?”

And I thought, well, how cool would it be to find families who had babies the day that Robert Mugabe resigned? OK, let’s do that. That could be an interesting way in. But then, I’m American. I live in South Africa. How am I going to find families with babies in Zimbabwe? So I enlisted an incredible Zimbabwean journalist named Wendy Muperi to work with me on the story, and the two of us would together co-create this story, where I was the one who kind of had this vision for it, [and] she was the one who was able to really find the people and build the trust and help us get the access to tell the story.

So it’s just sort of an example of one where I don’t think either of us could have done it on our own. She wouldn’t have had the sense that that would be an interesting story for an international audience; I wouldn’t have had a way to approach these mothers, and families to talk to them.

It was one that really needed all these different heads together, like much in the same way as the story Whitney is talking about in Haiti. And I think that is happening so much behind the scenes, you know, and especially in the regions that both of us are working in.

Newcomb: I love that sense of partnership where you both help each other see the story in different ways, and especially in that one with Mugabe. Probably a lot of the initial coverage was very much in a straight news kind of way or diplomatic relations – you know, something a little bit more formal.

And yet, relevance can be found in many different ways. You’re both talking about major news events there. In Haiti’s case, the violence and inability to get a leader for quite a while, and then in Zimbabwe, [the] fall of a longtime leader, and yet you tell it through very human stories, and I think that can really help. Do you find that it’s hard to convince … a local reporter that that will work, or is there any issue there? Or has your experience been that finding these somewhat different angles is welcome?

Eulich: I would say it’s very common that I will get a note after I send a story draft on a story that I work on with a local reporter where they say, “oh, now I see,” because I think sometimes we are coming at it with such a like backdoor approach to a story because we are trying to be different from what’s already been done, or from a wire.

There are numerous times [when] I get messages saying, “Oh, wow. Yeah, this is different. I really like it.” And that always kind of makes me chuckle. because I’m like, “We did this hand in hand the whole way.” But even so, I think sort of what Ryan was saying, just coming from a different perspective, having this international audience in mind versus the really granular knowledge and history and observations that a local reporter provides so it is a truly collaborative, sometimes surprising process.

Brown: Yeah, and I think it’s also like all of us – international reporters and local reporters – we’re really conditioned to feel like news is about important people. “Important” in air quotes, right? Like people in power, huge, sweeping forces, and that that’s the level at which we want to talk about what’s going on in the world, or that it makes sense to talk about what’s going on in the world.

So it’s actually not just for local reporters, but I think for international reporters, maybe who have come from writing for more newsy outlets, where they’re doing kind of breaking stories and stuff, and then come and do a story for the Monitor. It’s a little bit of a change of pace and a change of perspective, the kind of way that we approach the news and who we tend to focus on, and the more sort of anecdotal, the more “how has this big picture thing, this political crisis in Haiti, affected this particular small group of people – you know, this particular group of students, whatever.”

It’s just sort of a different way of thinking about the news that I think for a lot of us, me included when I started out, takes a bit of adjustment

Newcomb: That makes sense. And I was going to say, you know, you both homed in on things that most people can relate to, the need for education or your own kids that you want to educate or your own experience getting an education and the next generation, the continuation of new life.

Both those stories connected to big events. What do you do when you’ve got other stories around you and you’re trying to think, which stories do I target? How do you think about choosing stories when there’s not immediate news in front of you?

Brown: Oh, I’m interested to hear what Whitney’s going to say about this because I think I have a lot to learn myself on this front. Because we’re not a paper of record, you know, meaning we’re not trying to cover every single news story; we’re not trying to be a news wire that picks up information about every single thing of importance that happens in every single place.

I tend to look for stories that surprise me in some way. You know, there’s something going on in this place that’s unusual and different from what’s going on in other places, or just something kind of delightful, or I just haven’t heard or seen much in the news about this particular country, and so it might just sort of intrigue people, something different, something new for me, honestly. 

Because there are more than 50 countries in Africa, I am one person working with a few freelancers. I don’t in any way try to be systematic. I just kind of move by my gut in a sense. Like, what interests me and what surprises me as someone who’s read and seen a lot from this region in the past decade.

Eulich: Yeah, I totally agree. It’s kind of funny, I mean, for example when I think any of us are planning reporting trips, we often go in for a specific story – probably a somewhat newsy story, but there’s always this desire to report on a few things while we’re in a different country. There’s a sort of informal category that I feel like we refer to at least on the international team of these “surprise and delight” stories, but they were, like Ryan said, they are surprising and they, because of that, inform us or engage us in a different way. And, you know, I joke sometimes that those are often the stories that I come back with that, they were maybe a last second add on, and are sometimes the best one to come out of a trip – just because they are so unique, and colorful, and really take you to a place.

But, you know, I think in terms of finding stories that are not immediately on the news, what’s really helpful is actually talking to friends or family back in the U.S. And I’ve – a number of times – just had casual conversations about something that feels so obvious here, and I will just get this sort of, “What? Wait, what is that?” kind of response that then oftentimes will lead to me writing a story about a topic that I thought was kind of … not even just common knowledge, just sort of no-big-deal kind of thing.

Brown: It’s interesting that you say that because, obviously, outsiders miss a lot when they look at a place, but also they ask these really basic, fundamental questions about what’s going on there that you can sometimes forget to ask when you’ve been there for a long time and things seem ordinary. And you know when you’re not from a place when you’re looking at it from the outside in a way, like everything is kind of extraordinary, strange, different, unusual, and so there are these things like these questions that can come from that perspective that can be really helpful.

Eulich: And I think something else that’s actually helpful is sometimes it’s news that’s not happening in our region that informs coverage in our region. I’m remembering a conversation after January 6 in the U.S. about trust in elections, and things like that. And I just was sort of like, “Oh, you know, it’s kind of funny.”

In Mexico, the Electoral Institute’s like the second-most-trusted institute in the whole country. And I don’t think I would have even paused to think about that had I not been hearing about something going on in the U. S. I was able to kind of look into the parallels and look into how that came to be in Mexico, and I think that that’s something that the international team is pretty good at doing is trying to see if there are actually lessons learned from other parts of the world for things that are going on, in the U.S. or in our region.

Newcomb: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And it reminds us too [of] the variety of sources and perspectives that feed into choosing a story, or seeing something in a new light or connecting over a phase of life or whatever it happens to be. But the local, the international journalist and then friends who ask what might sound like really basic questions to you or prompt you to think, “Oh yeah, why is it that way?”

We all take things for granted in our own experience and once it becomes familiar, it’s easy to forget that others might wonder what exactly informs certain practices and so forth. 

I wanted to circle back. You both talked about some of the challenges in, you know, either you’re not in a particular place when something happens, or there are language barriers, or whatever. I wondered if you could speak to some of the barriers or things you have to overcome in order to make a story happen.

Eulich: I’m just thinking, OK, if news were to break right now, if some big story were to happen, in a country where I don’t know anyone, what would I do first? And, I think I would probably first go through email and WhatsApp and see if actually I do know someone there that I’m not thinking of, go to places like social media and see who’s writing about it and what they’ve written in the past, that kind of thing. 

But, you know, in Latin America, it’s often [that] there are so many amazingly talented reporters in the region, many of whom don’t speak or write in English. Which is, you know, no problem, because they’re covering events that are happening in their country and in their region, but so what sometimes will happen if I am able to find a journalist – this is, actually, a case we had recently that with the attempted coup in Bolivia – I was able to find a local reporter, but he didn’t speak or write in English, that was fine. I asked him to do some reporting on what the reaction was on some of the historical context because Bolivia has had military coups in its past, and send me a feed. So that’s basically writing out the reporting in Spanish, and then I can use that and work it into the final story that I’ve reported through talking to other people in the region, analysts, that kind of thing.

So, I mean, that’s one thing that maybe isn’t super obvious in the final product that it could be a bilingual collaboration going on between two reporters who have never met, and are in different time zones and thousands of miles apart.

Brown: Yeah, I mean, it is really challenging. Like, I don’t want to sort of shy away from that point. There’s quite a big degree of trust that’s required for this kind of reporting, and therefore, you also just have to develop an instinct for when you feel like you can trust someone and build a rapport with them ... because you are basically asking them to go talk to people. 

You’re probably not going to listen to a recording of them talking to the people, so you just trust that they’ve done it. You trust that they wrote down the quotes correctly, you know, and so that you can then translate them and write them into a story, and your readers can trust that this is a story that accurately reflects what’s going on and happening. This is kind of a wishy-washy answer, but it’s because it’s something that you can’t really like be taught in journalism school or something.

You have to just kind of learn by doing, to sort of find reporters who you feel like you have a certain rapport with and can build a story together, and you think it will be something that does reflect what’s going on in the world.

Newcomb: You’ve both mentioned trust – trust in the people you work with, and Whitney, you mentioned trust in the electoral system in Mexico bouncing off [the] events of January 6th in the United States. Trust is something actually that the Monitor just did a big project on, looking at the importance of trust in everything from politics to local institutions or town councils or what have you.

Values are something the Monitor thinks a lot about, trust being an easy one to express. We also think about resilience, which is another one you mentioned earlier. How do you convey that interest to local reporters who haven’t had all the discussion that we at the Monitor talk about as we look for these qualities in stories?

Eulich: I think for me, it usually starts off with a conversation with the reporter where it’s mostly me asking them to tell me what they see and what’s going on. And sometimes that naturally goes into sort of “What are you feeling as someone from this place and experiencing this firsthand or your family?” or whatever it might be. 

And I think I feel like not always, but often organically, a Monitor value will emerge in conversations like that, and then it sort of becomes just explaining “how,” instead of just the “who, what, where, when, why.” We really like to lean into some of these bigger, more cosmic kind of questions of, you know, longterm, how does this one event shape a community or a society, or how do people come together to move ahead?

And I think that this idea of values, I think that it’s a pretty natural part of news stories sometimes that are just maybe not always focused in on what Ryan was saying: the news of record, getting the events of every day down. And that’s definitely a privilege, I think, that we have as Monitor journalists to get to sort of dig a little bit deeper to find those stories.

Brown: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think for me, the Monitor value that I grasp onto the easiest and that I find the easiest to sort of convey to other people and for them to grasp onto – this is other journalists I work with, or readers – is hope. So, for instance, I, from my region, get a lot of pitches or am responding to a lot of news that is bad news that is a war, a refugee crisis, a natural disaster, something like that. And the normal way – the straight-news way – to cover that is just, you know, this terrible thing happened, this many people died, maybe if you want to go click further, like, this is why it’s as bad as it is.

And so I’m forever saying to people that, you know, when we do a story on a topic like that for the Monitor, we want to do something, come at it with a slightly different lens. And it’s not to say that I want us to try to manufacture optimism about situations that don’t warrant optimism, about terrible things happening in the world – I’m not saying that, but I think there’s always somewhere in a dark situation that you can find reasons for hope even if it’s just watching some people extend a hand, to others. You know, it’s watching someone’s resilience in the face of very terrible circumstances, the ways that they find to go on, the way that ordinary life continues to exist in the margins of terrible things happening. For instance, like in Haiti, people are continuing to try and try to get an education, sometimes it can be culture, it can be sports, it can be all kinds of things.

So, I’m always just myself looking for and asking other people to look for who are those people, those events, those situations that within this broader thing that might seem just like a bad situation where we can find a bit of hope? Because I also think it’s something that keeps people reading, right?

I mean, maybe it’s just me personally, but it’s really a drag to just read a “bad news” news story that doesn’t give you any reason to feel like there’s going to be any light at the end of the tunnel because you’re just one person on the other side of the world, far away from that. It makes you feel hopeless, it makes you feel helpless, so it’s something we can do for our readers as well, I think, to just give people something like that to grasp onto.

And then it also allows people to see … it’s a bit trite, but the humanity in a situation, because if you see that lots of people are dying or fleeing or whatever, those people become numbers, the situation becomes too vast to understand. But hope is a value that kind of forces you to get to the person to person level, and then it gives readers a way to interact with the situation that is also much more personal and immediate and feels more relatable, I think.

Eulich: I really agree with all of that, Ryan. And I think that sometimes, it’s like you get a pitch about, or there’s news going on about an event that in and of itself might come off as a little scary, like widespread protests that maybe are violent in some places or could turn violent or who knows what. And sometimes it’s even just like shifting the lens, you know, it’s maybe not actually about the protests, the protests might actually be an expression of hope in some ways. Hope of gathering together, of finding a path forward from whatever it was that sparked those protests. 

I’m thinking back to almost a decade ago now in Brazil, there were these widespread historic protests and a lot of the first reactions were just kind of like, “oh no, scary, yikes, this isn’t good,” and shifting that lens a little bit to look at it through a value like hope, or resilience, or things like that, can actually change how we report the story and what questions we’re asking that then make it not just the “negative, negative, negative,” like you were saying, Ryan. And, yeah, not forcing optimism, but just looking at a different layer of what’s happening to kind of flesh these other themes that are also there out.

Brown: Totally, or it’s like what sort of hopes for the future that someone wasn’t able to realize force them instead to be in a riot and loot a store or something like that, you know? Because sometimes this positive emotion value – whatever you want to call it – hope could drive negative things, but then when you sort of rewind a little bit, you see that kernel still there of people trying to make the world better, dreaming of a better future, things like that. So, yeah, a useful lens and not one that’s as kind of sweet and sappy and simple as I think it can sometimes sound when you just say, “oh, we want stories about hope,” you know.

Newcomb: I think that’s true and yet, as you point out, it’s a point of connection for people because they can recognize those kind of inclinations or aspirations or, in this case, hopes that they have for their own future or their own lives and the things they do often in very pressured situations, to try to make a situation at least a little bit better. So, you see that in another person, and as you say, it brings out the humanity, and I think helps readers engage more with international news than they otherwise might. 

I want to thank you both for sharing your thoughts on your reporting that you do, and for your practiced eye and thoughtful lens and really powerful heart that you bring to the reporting in your respective very large regions. So, thank you both.

Brown: Thanks for having us. I always learn a lot by talking to Whitney, and bouncing ideas and stuff like this. So it’s very interesting and useful for me, too. 

Eulich: Yes, thank you. Thank you so much. And well, right back at you, Ryan, because people listening don’t know Ryan is, like, the master at finding these amazing, “no one would ever find this story” kind of stories that just do amazing things. I’m hoping some of that rubs off on me after this conversation, too.

Newcomb: I think you do your bit, too, but I would just encourage anyone who’s listening to read all stories by these two journalists because they really bring the world home to you in ways that are memorable. 

Thanks for listening. You can find our show notes, with links to the stories we just discussed and to Ryan and Whitney’s work, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Amelia Newcomb, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Jingnan Peng is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineer was Alyssa Britton. Original music is by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.