The Filak Furlough Tour’s spring stops kind of ended up all over the place. That said, I managed to catch up with all the folks who still wanted me to make a stop by before the end of the term. Thus, as promised, we’re finishing out the year with a post for each stop.

(And yes, to answer the question I got the other day, you’re still getting your bats. I just need to hit a few rummage sales to do some scrounging, as apparently, my bat supply was depleted by you all being awesome people.)

Onward to greatness…

McPherson College — McPHERSON, KS

THE TOPIC: The request here was pretty simple: Talk about journalists as investigators and how journalists handle trauma. “Both super-light topics, I know,” professor Julia Kuttler said in her request email. I think both are great topics, so we’ll give them both kind of a shot here.

THE BASICS OF INVESTIGATION: I love students who are inherently nosy and the opportunity to shape that nosiness into something that can lead to improved journalism. I was meeting with a prospective student and her mother recently and I found myself telling them about the program and various other things. The mother mentioned several schools they were considering, and I often praised a lot of what they had going for them. Then, she mentioned one school with which I had significant experience and I noted that I probably wouldn’t recommend it.

Both the kid and the mom immediately asked, “Why?” with the enthusiasm of my dog seeing the UPS truck pulling into the driveway.

I tried to back away from that a bit, as I didn’t want to come across as crap-talking a program, even if I was being totally honest. The kid stayed  on me, with more, “Why” questions until I gave her a decent answer. (Or at least one that satisfied her curiosity.) I then looked at her and said, “You’re going to be a hell of a journalist, no matter where you go. You’ve got that nosy gene in you that will lead to some great investigative stuff.”

This was kind of the core of what I was trying to convey to the kids at McPherson about investigative work: If you can be engaged and interested, while being undeterred by people who clearly are looking to dodge your questions, you’ll be great at it.

To further explain it, I went back a bit to what I learned from investigative journalist (and former student) Jaimi Dowdell’s work on the FAA and the “Secrets In The Sky” pieces that earned her and co-author Kelly Carr the 2018 TRACE award for investigative reporting. You have to be nosy, you have to be interested and you have to be willing to keep pecking away at a topic until eventually “if we figure something out” becomes “when we figure something out.”

 

THE BASICS OF TRAUMA: I don’t think I’m alone in that I don’t like thinking about the concept of “trauma” in terms of what journalism has shown me. Or, in some cases, maybe done to me. The truth of the matter is, however, when you see enough of something that is outside of what normal people experience, it is going to mess with how you view the world.

That could be watching a ton of  local news coverage that paints your town as a violent, scary place, which leads you to overestimate your area’s lack of safety. It could be watching a ton of biased political coverage, which leads you to think the world is going to be a lawless hellscape if the “other side” wins the election. It could also be watching a ton of porn, which erroneously convinces you that every pizza delivery guy or plumber is likely to score with a lonely housewife on every house call.

It wasn’t until I started working at various universities, where I was asked to review other people’s classes, that I realized I was some sort of traumatized outlier when it came to my journalism experiences. Guest speakers and veteran journalists were talking about interviewing political figures or reviewing budgets or digging through data sets to find stories. They talked about how they incorporated their profile-style interviewing techniques into their daily journalistic stories to add depth and feel to pieces.

And I’m there thinking, “OK… so why do about 80% of my stories start off with something like, ‘So there was this drunk guy driving a car who ran over a kid on a bicycle and dragged him about half a block…’ instead of having something like those experiences?”

Also, why was I able to pretty reliably remember the name, age and cause of death of every dead kid I ever helped cover?

And why is it, I can still see the body of a 73-year-old woman, who had been set on fire, lying on a lawn, clutching a stranger’s hand as she fought for life and waited for an ambulance?

I’d like to say I just have a good memory and a penchant for war stories, but if I’m being honest, it’s probably because my job scrambled my mind a bit and left me with some ugly brain scars.

The best thing I could tell these kids about trauma is that we now recognize it. The Dart Center is a great resource for journalists who find themselves covering some messed up things. Editors are more attuned to this kind of thing today as opposed to even 25 years ago. The idea of “have a drink to take the edge off” isn’t viewed these days as preferable to talk therapy and other forms of self-care, something that wasn’t the case in previous generations.

In the end, you can’t really avoid it if you spend enough time in journalism. You will eventually run into something that messes with you. However, we have a lot more tools in the toolbox to deal with it once it happens and we’re better at preparing people for it before they see it.

NEXT STOP: Wichita State University.