I really appreciated Raphi’s question about how to determine whether embedding is necessary. My instinct in my very short reporting life is that it is always, always better. It may not be strictly necessary — many stories you can do a perfectly fine job from afar — but the color and depth it adds is so, so important for an in-depth story. While Raphi and I’s trip to Gummersbach, for example, was just a day, we both came away with scenes and detail that would have been nearly impossible to reconstruct otherwise. Video does not capture the smell of a stripped-out movie theater or the sheer amount of dust in the air. Being there physically is also huge for trust. In Gummersbach, I connected with sources by eating lunch with them and helping them rip fence debris out of the ground, building far more meaningful relationships in just a few hours than I could have done virtually. You can just talk to so many more people when you’re physically there. I find the phone deeply frustrating in that sense; you are constrained by annoying things like schedules and your international cell connection.
As a counterpoint, a couple years ago I spent more than six months reporting a story about a Princeton-run research center in Kenya, examining the center’s colonial history and the living conditions of the locals employed there. I had visual descriptions and photos of their huts, which didn’t have running water or electricity, and plenty of in-depth descriptions of the property’s colonial-era ranch house, still with some of the old British Empire trappings. My editors contemplated sending me there and we even went so far as to draw up travel plans. We ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the expense. My story turned out well, but it was missing the texture and feeling of just being there. I think that’s especially relevant to visiting a site of trauma, whether recent or historical. There is something about seeing it for yourself that is the ultimate gut-check to any reporting done virtually: yes, it really was that bad. Embedding for a lower-stakes story does not have the same payoff, even if it does make the reporting richer in the ways I’ve outlined.
I would also say that embedding is especially necessary for a so-called top-down pitch: you have a sense of a trend, but do not yet have characters and scenes to fill it out. This is what Caitlin Dickerson so masterfully does in her own reporting, for instance, but that also works on smaller scales. If you’re writing about contentious school board meetings, obviously you should go to the meetings, see it for yourself, and meet the widest array of people involved. Reporting virtually relies far more on person-to-person networks, which can be tricky when trying to get the full story.
For Deb, I’d be interested in the story of how the Jonestown documentary came about. Did you think about going there while you were working on it? If you’ve been, did it enrich your understanding in a useful way?
